Spoiler Warning for Black Widow #5 below!
Black Widow is betraying the tight-knit Avengers to protect her new family. Cobbled together like the strangest and most dysfunctional of families, they are a team that consistently falls back on each other and finds support in one another, which makes Black Widow’s big secret sting that much more.
The newest Black Widow series shows a gentler side of Natasha Romanoff. To decommission the super spy, the big bad provide her a perfect life with a good, kind man and a charming baby boy that makes it all the easier for the mental manipulation to take hold. After all, who wouldn’t want the perfect life? Even with her memories returned, her feelings for her new, beautiful family don’t change. What’s a superhero/spy to do, but convince all your friends that you just witnessed your family’s gruesome deaths?
In Black Widow #5 by Kelly Thompson, Elena Casagrande, and Rafael de Latorre, it’s not just Black Widow who must lie to her teammates, but the Winter Soldier as well. Unable to fake her family’s deaths alone, she recruits James “Bucky” Barnes to assist in secreting the two out of harm’s way and far away from the dangers of an Avengers-adjacent life.
It’s a loss that many of the Avengers can empathize with. Hawkeye offers a listening her, and a promise to be there for his grieving friend. And while the comic doesn’t touch on it, it’s important to remember that Wolverine had his pregnant wife murdered by the Winter Soldier, while Cap’s life is littered with losses - from the sudden loss of everyone he was close when he arrived in the modern era, to loved ones and even an adopted son in 2012’s Castaway in Dimension Z. It would be easy to share the burden of grief with friends, but instead, she allows them to think her family is dead and keeps her secret, joining her friends in, largely, grieving alone.
Asking Barnes to participate in such an elaborate ruse against the Avengers seems especially cruel, considering the will they-won’t they history between the two assassins, the closeness of the Avengers team, and their familiar losses. In Natasha’s constructed life, small reminders of her former life remained, right down to the names of her husband and child - James and Stevie, respectively. Even the cat was named after the popular X-Men member, Wolverine. However, superhero work doesn’t come without its dangers, and keeping the heavy secret between the two is not only a personal choice but a tactical one.
As Avengers, characters are often under threat, and sometimes have their own minds tinkered with by the baddie-of-the-week. Spider-Woman was switched with a Skrull, who had free access to her mind and memories. Secret Empire sees Cap’s mind twisted from a patriotic hero into a goose-stepping Hydra agent, while the previously mentioned Castaway in Dimension Z, has plenty of pulp sci-fi mind control. Even Wolverine’s physic connections present a threat to Natasha's secret. As much as those men would want to keep the secret, it’s not a promise they can make. Black Widow, as much as anyone, knows the minds of superheroes aren’t exactly Fort Knox.