BLACK WIDOW

Natasha Romanoff first knew James “Bucky” Barnes as an instructor: during her Red Room training, the brainwashed Winter Soldier helped teach her, and the two Soviet assets fell into a forbidden romance their handlers shut down by refreezing him and wiping what they could. Decades later, both free of their programmers, they found each other again and rebuilt the relationship as partners in the field as well as in life.

The Soviet sleeper Leo Novokov, himself damaged by a premature awakening, set out to punish Barnes by taking that history away at the source. He captured Natasha and had Red Room neuroscientist Professor Rodchenko recondition her in layers: first regressed to a loyal Cold War operative, then rebuilt with full memories but the conviction that she had secretly served Russia all along. She shot her way out of S.H.I.E.L.D. custody, killing Jasper Sitwell in the attempt to assassinate Nick Fury, before Barnes and his allies finally stopped the pair of them.

S.H.I.E.L.D.'s psy-ops specialists slowly repaired Natasha's synaptic pathways — with one permanent exception, revealed at the close of Winter Soldier Vol. 1 #6–14 (2012). Everything Natasha knew about James Buchanan Barnes had been permanently deleted. She recovered as herself in every other respect, looked at the man she had loved in two separate lifetimes, and did not know him at all: her rescuer's first question was, in effect, who Bucky was. Barnes was left holding the whole shared past alone, the only person alive who remembered both halves of it.