Romeo and Juliet: one a Capulet, one a Montague. Their family members enemies, their houses waging a war of words and hate... brought together in an unlikely manner, an unexpected meeting causing true love to bloom.

Christina Barton threw down her pencil and slammed the thin volume of Shakespeare's famous play shut. In real life, that didn't happen. Things didn't play out like that. Enemies did not fall in love. Enemies were enemies, and friends were friends. Enemies were not to be trusted or loved. They were a thing to hate. Of all people, she should know, even at nine years of age.

Her mother and father worked for the SHIELD agency. SHIELD was committed to keeping Earth safe from potential threats. Throughout her early years, she had seen her fair share of enemies to her planet. Her parents worked tirelessly to defeat them and to keep, not only their children, but the entire world safe. Anytime an ally of SHIELD made peace with an enemy, or believed them to be changed in their ways, it ended badly. Christina wasn't supposed to know; sometimes at night, she overheard her parents talking.

When they were home, that is. Christina grew up with her parents away from the house half the time doing "classified work".

No, love between enemies was not something that happened. Wishful thinking on Shakespeare's part, she thought. She grew up in world where you needed to know which side you were on... or pay the price.

One problem caused by her logical approach to problem solving and such, was the fact that she was very set in her thoughts, and not easily swayed by the opinions of others. This was good and bad, and she sometimes paid the price for thinking that she knew the right way. Her brother, Clint, would tease her when she got in trouble. He was more easygoing and friendly than she was... more trusting. They teased each other mercilessly and fought like cats and dogs, but, when the situation warranted it, Clint rose to the challenge to protect his younger sister... no matter the cost. Even if it meant a black eye from a playground bully who had teased Christina.

There can be no such thing as a love that goes "behind enemy lines", so to speak, she thought. She kept this approach at the back of her mind as she grew up.

She was faced with a slew of private tutors and advanced courses for college preparatory work. With her parents busy with work, she'd spent her school years learning through her tutors as a home-schooled student. After much begging and pleading on her part, her parents allowed her to enter the local high school for her senior year of high school, finally dropping the tutors and mountains of work.

This new experience brought her to her first crush. Here was everything she had dreamed of, all those imaginings that had entered her thoughts, no matter her practical perspective. Here was, what she was convinced, true love. They dated for three months, before her "true love" dumped her and moved on to the next girl. After this experience, she was all the more set in her stance of "true love never happens" and her little-girl dreams faded, as she went off to the best technological institute in the states to learn the nuances of science and technology. An internship at Stark Industries, where she occasionally crossed paths with Howard Stark's snarky, arrogant son, Tony, was only the cherry on the top of her illustrious resume

For a while, she even entertained the thought that she was in love with Tony Stark. After all, he was about her brother's age, if only a few years older. But that faded as well, and ended without any big splash, and Tony none the wiser. Probably a good thing, she later thought, reading about Tony in newspapers and magazines. It would seem that he's taken college partying to a whole new level.

She had just recently moved in to a new apartment, all her own, in New York, at the age of only twenty. Happily settled, with a glorious job at the NYC headquarters of Stark Industries, she felt that she was living the dream and nothing could derail her...

Until the dreaded phone call that shattered that dream.

After the news of her parents' death, she sold her penthouse, quit her job with Stark Industries, and moved back to Connecticut, where she and Clint tried to pick up the pieces of their broken life.

 She began to think in new terms. Her parents had lived and died doing SHIELD work. Clint had been training for the agency his whole childhood and had become an agent as soon as the SHIELD bigwigs had given him the go-ahead. If it had been what her parents loved, could she not be closer to them by doing it? She now pulled a dusty childhood fantasy from the closet of her mind and worked towards making it a reality. She would become a SHIELD agent, along with her brother. They would work together to avenge her parents death at the hands of earth's enemies.

They would right the wrongs that had been done them.