App for lastvoyages

[tothefly]

User Name/Nick: Ty
User DW: ersatzdivinity
AIM/IM: AIM: mmspicybrains, Plurk: autumnleaving
E-mail: xccutecustom@gmail.com
Other Characters: Shiro (wrecked_egg), Deadman Wonderland

Character Name: Natasha Romanoff
Series: MCU
Age: 30, pending Dramatic Marvel Reveals
From When?: Just prior to Age of Ultron.

Inmate/Warden: Warden.

Natasha's spent her entire life doing some awful things. Even now, she's perfectly aware that she's still doing the same awful things, just for a different side, a better ideology. But that's really the difference between the two, isn't it? She recognizes the things she's done. She regrets some, if not all of them, but also accepts that you can't undo the past, you can only do what you can to make better choices in the future, and to use what you have to try and balance the books a little. As a spy/assassin, she understands the darker side of the world, and doesn't shy from death or atrocities. She's seen it all, and she's participated in more than a few of both herself. This is part of what makes her well-suited to be a warden. It doesn't matter what her inmate has done, she won't have trouble looking them in the eye and accepting it. She knows what it's like to come from a place where you feel like you have no choice but to keep going the way you are, and she knows that sometimes all it takes is someone telling you, yeah, you've been a shitty person, but maybe that's not all there is to you. Sometimes all you need is a way out. Not to completely leave behind who you are and who you've been, but to take the things that you've done, own them, and use them to make different choices.

Natasha is also very skilled at psychological manipulation. This can definitely be a double-edged sword; it's tempting to want to take the more efficient route of manipulating someone into outward change, rather than really getting to the root of the problem. As long as the result is the same, what should the actual cause matter? It's only recently, the last few years even, that she's beginning to understand that the cause matters infinitely more than she'd previously believed. While she's not necessarily above playing mind games for short-term goals, with her own inmate she's bound to choose a different path, and to use her skills to climb inside their head, understand where they've come from and what their reasoning is, and then help them to understand it themselves. She's definitely not the kind of person who can be easily manipulated herself, which would make her good for the more slippery inmates, and thanks to her understanding of the human psyche she has a pretty good idea of when to be bluntly honest and when to subtly bend the truth. All in all, she'd definitely be a warden who understands shades of grey and complicated situations, and even if she doesn't necessarily believe in redemption, she believes in justice, and in second chances.

Item: A gold arrow necklace, as shown here.

Abilities/Powers: Natasha is still just human, for all that she's a ridiculously talented one that can find a dozen ways to kill you faster than most people sneeze. She has surprising agility and strength, though not superhuman levels--she's just very strong/fast for her height/build. She's well-practiced in multiple forms of hand-to-hand combat and is an Olympic-level gymnast as well as a trained ballerina; a skilled markswoman with a variety of weapons and able to use pretty much anything that fires projectiles, she's capable of piloting multiple vehicles, and is well-versed in arts of subterfuge, psychological manipulation, and seduction. She's also fluent in at least seven languages (French, Italian, Russian, Latin, English, Mandarin, Arabic, and conversational in several more), and capable of hacking modern-Earth-level computer systems. So you know, pretty much what any truly excellent superspy who's earned a nickname like Black Widow is capable of.

Personality: Natasha is, in a nutshell, ambiguous. Her work as a spy has made her secretive, cool, unlikely to open up to anyone at any given time. Her behavior seems malleable, adopting itself to the people and situations surrounding her, usually falling somewhere in between disinterested and mildly amused. She's a very confident woman, bordering on arrogant, at ease with herself and in command of her surroundings, showing no compunctions about using her wit and her looks to dominate any given situation. By that same token, she's also very good at blending into her surroundings, and will often enter and exit locations by the most discreet possible methods, seeming to appear and vanish almost like a ghost.

Internally, Natasha is a creature created more than born. Her original sense of identity has long since been stripped away, thanks to the psychological conditioning of her youth. She's occasionally found herself in danger of getting lost among her various identities; when you maintain so many different lies for so long, it's sometimes tempting to let them become the truth. It's perhaps all these lies that make her so very good at seeing the truth in other people. She recognizes lies, and has no illusions about the world. Love is for children, regimes change, people die and people leave. The choices you make are all that matter. Natasha possesses a sense of obligation bordering on duty, though she wouldn't call it morality. She needs to do some good for the world, to balance out the bad she's done. Her loyalty, once truly earned, is unwavering until the situation proves it a necessity. She's got a lightning-quick sense of humor, even if it tends to rear its head in subtle ways. Often, she'll use seeming honesty as a diversion from more complicated truths. There's more than a few reasons for this, but the core of it is her nearly desperate need for control of her situation. It's the real reason for her fear surrounding people like Banner, beings like Thor: with people like that in the world, there's only so much people like her can do. Everything could go wrong so quickly, and she could find herself trapped or helpless at a moment's notice. There's nothing she hates more than that feeling. Even people like Steve can bring up these feelings, with his insistence that people be better than they think they are. It's terrifying, to realize someone trusts you, or even that they understand part of you. If they know nothing, you control the situation, the dynamic, and once they start to understand, some transference of that control is inevitable. Emotional control is just as necessary to her in ways as physical control, and both were drilled into her at an early age.

Natasha may only be in her early 30s, but she spent the first 15 years of her life in intense training and psychological conditioning, being shaped into a weapon for the KGB's use. She began missions while still a child, and due to the life she's led she seems much older than she is. Much of her early life she regards as a dream, because it's easier that way, though she carries the weight of all of her actions prior to joining SHIELD, and quite a few since. She's gotten very good over the years at compartmentalizing, and feels there's no place for sentimentality in her life. There's been a lot of bad she's done in this world, and while she believed she was doing the right thing at the time, she considers there to be no excuse for what she's done. There's a lot of blood on her hands, red in her ledger, and she wants to correct that. To balance the books. That is her current driving force, and the reason why she's worked for Fury without real complaint, the reason why she stood by the Avengers during the assault on New York, the reason she sacrificed her fallback plans and exposed SHIELD's secret files, baring things about herself to the world that she'd never shared with anyone. Why she's kept going, working with the Avengers, doing what's necessary. She doesn't believe in heaven or hell, but she believes there's things she's done that were inexcusable, and now she's got to make up for it.

There are softer sides to her; just because her emotions aren't often displayed doesn't mean she doesn't feel them. She can feel pain, joy, regret, horror, just like anyone. She's just been trained to hide the truth of her feelings for so long that it's second nature at this point. She's got an especial soft spot for children, though that doesn't mean she underestimates them; she remembers some of the things she'd done as a child, and bears a healthy respect for the viciousness of youth. Emotions do influence parts of her decisions, but Natasha is above all ruthlessly practical. The world she grew up in, the world she's lived in since, neither of them are very kind to dreamers and idealists. She sees the world for what it is, sees people for what they are, but there is a slowly growing fragment of her that can also see the way they could be, thanks to the stabilizing influence of her friends--or what pass for friends.

Natasha almost always maintains a clear emotional distance between herself and others, cultivating an aura that drives people away. People are liabilities, complications or tools. The exceptions are few and far between. Of her fellow Avengers, most of them are easily dismissed; Thor, while interesting to look at, she treats with a wary dismissal. He's powerful, but his approach is straightforward enough for her to easily avoid the fallout. Banner makes her nervous. Very nervous. The thing that lives inside him isn't a joke, and it's something she can't forget. It's also one of the reasons she finds him fascinating--the difference between the man and the monster. Stark she finds by turns amusing and irritating, a definite wild card in many situations, but easily played if you have the right hand. She knows Fury keeps secrets. She trusts him as much as he trusts her, and for good reason. The people she feels most comfortable with are Barton and Rogers; Barton was the person who gave her the chance to change her life, to be someone different, to change things. He saved her life, and she owes him enough to be willing to make that trade, were it necessary. Rogers she's comfortable around for a different reason. As disparate as they are at times, he's the closest thing to a real friendship she's developed in a very long time, if ever. They work together well, play together well, and both have a very focused sense of professionalism--get the job done, don't ask too many questions, try not to get anyone else killed, even if their motivations are different. She's constantly poking fun at him, jokes and teasing as she tries to climb inside his head, see how a "boy from Brooklyn" becomes someone like Captain America, but he takes all of her poking and teasing with a good-natured spirit, and doesn't ask anything in return but friendship. Which, as she tells him, may be asking a bit much--especially in their line of work.

These people are the first people she's really had a chance to form these kind of bonds with. Sure, she's plenty capable of making superficial friendships. It's a necessary part of espionage; you have to be able to quickly build a rapport with someone, develop relationships for cover if nothing else. She knows how to make those little connections and make them fast. Sex is even easier, especially when there's no need to actually involve feelings in the matter. That's perhaps why she regards these types of relationships with such cynicism; it's easy to make and easy to break, and what's really the point? It's safer to not let people get beyond that superficial level, and less complicated if things go wrong. Her friendship with Clint was accidental, gradual, and took a lot of effort on both ends, originally stemming from a sense of debt before slowly becoming something more. Clint was the first person who met Natasha and understood, pushing her boundaries without ever crossing those lines. He just...stood on the other side of them, and let her decide to step over. Clint was an exception, and the Avengers have become the real mark of how SHIELD has changed her, though she's still not sure if it's for the better. It's impossible to work with the same people for years and not develop some sort of rapport; impossible to fight together in life-threatening situations and not trust them to a certain extent, even if that extent is only "kill the bad guys before you try to kill me." Slowly, and with some surprise, Natasha's realized that she doesn't exactly mind being part of a team, even if she's not really much of a team player; she's realized through Steve that she can have friendships, and how to move past the rocky points that come with learning how to do just that. She knows how to appreciate Tony's sense of showmanship while still disapproving of his style, how to respect and like Bruce without underestimating the Hulk. Friendship is about balance, and a certain amount of vulnerability, and while she's always had an incredibly hard time with any sort of vulnerability, it's gotten a little easier to differentiate vulnerability from weakness. They don't always have to be synonymous, and being part of the Avengers has shown her at least a little of that.

Oddly enough, so has the release of her files into the public domain. She's spent quite a bit of her life creating new identities, safeguards, hiding the things she doesn't want anyone to see, basically living one huge act of misdirection. Now, she has none of that left. All those identities are out there, all those deeds are exposed for the world to see if they look in the right places. All that's left is who she is right this moment, who she's spent the last couple years building. Not even necessarily who she was with SHIELD; who she's become as part of this team, and who she wants to be going forward. She's always going to be the spy, she's always going to enter a room knowing her angles and seating herself with a clear view of the exits. She's always going to feel the urge to play games, and it's not going to be easy to build true friendships or relationships. But she knows she's capable of it, she knows there are people who haven't given up on her, and she knows she has the chance to make something new, something better. She can be Natasha Romanoff. There's a kind of freedom in that, and a kind of security as well.

Barge Reactions: Natasha is somewhat used to weird occurrences and humans with enhanced abilities. She knows that these things are possible; she knows the Hulk, for crying out loud, and fought flying alien centipedes, so honestly, a lot of the more creative and unusual inhabitants won't necessarily bother her all that much. She'll just be extra wary until she learns the place better than anyone and will probably obsessively stalk the network for information on powers and abilities. The less-humanoid inhabitants of the barge like Axel might give her pause, but aside from brief surprise she's much less likely than most to show that anything has gotten to her. She's very adaptive and will make an effort to blend with the entire crowd, including these types of characters, though. The impermanence of death is probably going to have an interesting effect on her, but honestly I'm not sure what that'll be, exactly. She'll probably eventually look at it as a good thing, and potentially adapt it as a teaching tool. Maybe that's not the healthiest approach, but hey. Use the tools you're given.

Ports won't bother her too much; what is it, really, but an especially weird away mission? She's capable and confident in her ability to handle herself. Floods may be a little strange, especially ones that alter some component of her, but as long as she's still herself in some way she can handle that, too. It's breaches that are really going to throw her, and not in a good way. She's had too many people crawling inside her head before as it is. She's been made into different people. She's made herself into different people, but this sort of change, throwing her into a different world, replacing her memories, changing her personality in subtle, insidious ways? It's an extreme violation of who and what she is and she will not handle that well. Her actual reactions will probably depend upon the nature of that first breach and what sort of life she leads inside it, but I'm thinking rampant insomnia, instigating fights, and probably destruction of any relationships she'd have formed thus far.

Deal: Despite the apparent death of Loki, Natasha is still suspicious. Drag the bastard out of hiding and make him mortal. That'll be good enough for her.

History: Link, but I'm happy to write out things and expand on headcanon of her early life if asked.

Sample Journal Entry:Assorted TDM threads

Sample RP: Ironic, she reflects, that it's easier to sleep inside the shell of a burned-out building while being hunted by insurgents than it is to sleep on what's essentially a luxury space cruise. Maybe it's the difference in gravity, some subtle sense of motion. Maybe it's the quiet. Or maybe it's just the fact that she's still not entirely sure why she accepted the Admiral's offer in the first place. She's not even sure she believes in redemption, at least not by that specific name. There's no fixing the things she's done, there's only balancing the scales. Doing something to pay off her debts.

Maybe that's why she's here. A debt to society. Give someone the same chance Clint gave her, tell someone without hope that there's a way out, even if it's terrifying as hell and that old life will be with you every step of the new. She's both the best person for the job, and the worst. Maybe they should have made Clint the offer instead, but he'd never leave Laura and the kids for that long, not without assurances. She doesn't know how long she's going to be here, either. It's only been a month so far, and she's spent most of her time exploring. The deck's a nice view, if a little unnerving, and she can do plenty of people-watching in the dining hall; there's a few familiar faces already from routine gym visits, and she's definitely exploring the potential of the Enclosure.

But mostly, what she does is memorize faces. Attaches names when and where she can, scrolls back as far as she can in the comm history, devouring facts. Building her own dossiers on everyone here, warden and inmate, and with every face she sees, she wonders: are you going to be the one they give me? How can I make you what you need to be? Is it even right that I try? She adds more information; favorite foods, relationships, tells. And slowly, her thoughts turn from the Barge's inhabitants to the one running it all. The Admiral. What makes someone, something like that tick? Why do this? Why bring these people here, an act that's got to involve a not-inconsiderable amount of energy? How does it all work, and what's the end game?

Maybe that's why she decides to stay. To find answers. Her curiosity may get her killed, but at least in a place like this, she doesn't need to count on satisfaction to bring her back. The thought makes her smile, as she sits up in bed in a room that exists an infinite number of miles from here, looking out a window on farmland that can't really be there. Maybe she'll have to change her code name while she's here. Is Black Cat already taken?

Special Notes: N/A