Relationship Spotlight: Steve Rogers & Natasha Romanoff (The Avengers)

Hands down, my favorite friendship among the main Avengers.  I was excited to see Natasha in The Winter Soldier just because I love Black Widow so much, but I came away really liking the great relationship between her and Cap.  Although Natasha is a little too shunted into her plot with Bruce in Age of Ultron for there to be much Natasha-Steve, the duo resurfaces in Civil War and makes up for it nicely (some spoilers, including Civil War.)

The Avengers is very much a “throw different characters together and see what sticks” sort of movie, still figuring out where the best dynamics are, and it’s pretty light on the Cap-Natasha front.  At a time when Steve is still feeling like a misplaced museum piece, she’s casual with him, not viewing him as a relic of SHIELD history but not skirting around his past, either.  The scene in which she tells him about Coulson’s Captain America trading cards in fun, and they do some good work together at the street level during the final battle.

It’s not until The Winter Soldier that we really see their relationship.  At this point, they’ve been working alongside one another at SHIELD for a while, and they’ve gotten to know each other well enough that they joke around and play well off of each other on missions.  Steve, having trouble with the transition from soldier to agent, struggles a bit with Natasha’s spy sensibilities – he doesn’t like her having undeclared agendas, and he sometimes feels he can’t get a read on who she actually is beneath all her assorted covers.  However, when everything hits the fan at SHIELD and there’s no one to trust, Steve (somewhat reluctantly) lets Natasha in on what Fury’s shared with him, and they set off together to uncover the dark truth at the center of SHIELD.

Oh yeah, and they’re awesome.  Since Steve’s new to the spy game, Natasha’s skillset comes in handy for sneaking around and acquiring intel while they’re being hunted by shady people.  She helps Steve blend in/adopt covers, and she traces an important location they need.  When it comes to combat, they work seamlessly together, each lending the other an assist when needed but completely trusting that the other can handle themselves.  It’s an excellent equal-footing partnership, because even though the serum gives Cap abilities that Natasha doesn’t have, she knows how to do plenty of things that he can’t.  All in all, not a pair you want to mess with.

It’s also during this on-the-run team-up that each learns to understand the other so much better.  In between avoiding capture and learning shocking secrets, they talk about their lives and histories, the similarities and differences between the paths they’ve taken.  Steve admits his discomfort with the idea of deep-cover missions like Natasha has done, and despite her matter-of-factness about it on the surface, it troubles her not to know if he really trusts her, and she admits as much to him.  For his part, Steve confesses that he might have answered that question differently in the past, but due to what he’s seen on the mission, he’s absolutely confident that she has his back.  This is the relationship we see, albeit briefly, in Civil War.  Cap and Natasha are two of the few people that remain pretty cordial to each other throughout the film.  Though she signs the Accords and he doesn’t, each understands why the other makes the decision they do, and when the chips are really down, Natasha listens to what Steve has to say and helps him out.  Finally, in the midst of everything going down, I love that she takes the time to fly to London for Peggy’s funeral, just because she knows what a hard time it is for Steve and doesn’t want him to be alone.  Now that’s friendship.