mismarvell:

black widow: origins

natalia romanova (scarlett johansson) is a child when it happens. there is nothing before that, nothing that she could ever remember. she dances to applause, sometimes it sounds like gunfire. it is not beautiful. 

(”this is the right thing, and none of us is miserable,” yelena whispers to natalia one night. they sleep in a dormitory with twenty six other girls. they aren’t allowed to talk; sometimes they forget their names, that they are separate beings. they will never leave this place without each other, this is a promise that they say once each morning when they wake up and once each night when they go to sleep.)

together, natalia and yelena (rosamund pike) hide away stories under their tongues, they don’t dare write them down. they train together, they’re always cleaning off their hands. 

one october, the red room receives a new trainer (sebastian stan). he has cold eyes, but they can be kind. sometimes, he speaks in english and he does not know what comes over him. they call him the winter soldier, but only natalia can call him james. 

(they fall in love, but the feeling is stolen from them. they are wrenched apart by the forces of the red room, and when they meet again, it is like the first time. this was never their choice.)

(odessa, 2009: his bullet shoots though her abdomen, he does not know how to say her name.)

across the world, in america, the winter soldier kills a man that he once knew. when the news howard stark’s death reaches his old friend peggy carter (hayley atwell), she leaves the newly founded intelligence agency, s.h.i.e.l.d. to investigate and solve his murder. however, her girlfriend, angie martinelli (lyndsy fonseca), refuses to let her enact her revenge alone. peggy knows better than to stop her (she knows what it’s like to love someone who dies alone when she could have prevented it). of course, peggy never expected to find a dead man, and this is not a story with a peaceful ending.

years later, once the winter soldier has been frozen and his mind has been wiped, natalia romanova is instructed to kidnap a diplomat’s daughter from a hospital and burn the building down. clint barton (jeremy renner) is told to stop her and end her life. he makes a different call.

(and once all of natalia’s covers have been blown, her face emerges on a television screen in a russian bar. a blonde woman pushes a bulky man off a barstool, her eyes completely focused on the screen. there was a promise, once, between them. perhaps, yelena thinks, it is time to revisit it.)

coming to theaters near you, july 2017