Carol/Nat
It's all safe. I promised I'd tell you the truth.
So childhood, okay. I didn't have one of those. I never knew my parents. I was raised in a subsect of the KGB, in a training program called the Red Room. They gave me a name when I was six, because that was the point at which it seemed like I might not scrub out entirely. Little bit of overlap with Hydra, I don't know if anyone's filled you in on that. Anyway - they were homegrowing spies, assassins. We weren't people so much as we were weapons, really, it took a long time for me to learn that I belonged to myself. Not a lot of nice stuff, or good memories. Mostly I didn't care.
And I was very good at what we did. I might have been the best, which - is a weird flex, but I think it was true. When I ended up on Fury's radar, Clint was the one he sent to put me down, and Clint, for whatever reason, decided that I had only ever been a person and had never been given a chance to be one. There were a lot of reasons why I decided to believe him. I stayed because once you start becoming a person, the unfortunate side affect is that you begin to learn the weight of the things you've done. And I realized I wanted to be something better. More, maybe.
I think the large majority of SHIELD never actually trusted me, but Clint did. Fury did, to some degree: as much as I think he was capable of trusting anyone, I think I was maybe a few rungs beneath it, and that wasn't a terrible place to be. Steve does.