![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
IN-CHARACTER:
Character name: Natasha Romanoff
Character journal:![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
tothefly
Series name: Marvel comics/MCU
Canon notes: Movieverse (with liberal dosage of backstory from 616 comics)
Species: Human (genetically modified)
History:
I'm mostly sticking with the cinematic universe canon, but we get like nothing pre-2005 for Tasha in the MCU so I'm borrowing heavily from her comic history. If you just want the bullet points about the character, feel free to check out the wikis here and here. Otherwise, read on for so very much tl;dr.
Natasha Romanoff was born in November 1984, but Natalya Alianova Romanova was born much earlier than that, in the late 1920s. Orphaned at birth, she was adopted and raised by Ivan Petrovich, a Russian ex-soldier. Petrovich raised her as his own, beginning her education, encouraging her to pursue a career in ballet as she trained and performed at the Bolshoi Theatre.
The ballet, however, was only a cover for her other education; quietly, Ivan had begun the process of turning his adopted daughter into one of her country's greatest assets. After the war, in 1943, Ivan took Natalya to join nearly thirty other girls to be trained by what was known as the Red Room Academy, a top-secret program dedicated to creating and conditioning a group of elite spies and covert assassins. The Red Room taught Natalya everything necessary for a sleeper agent: by the time she completed the program, she was fluent in seven languages (Italian, French, German, English, Latin, and Chinese along with her native Russian), trained in multiple forms of martial arts, and taught to withstand torture and interrogation techniques, alongside learning her own set of information-gathering skills. Seduction, interrogation, psychological manipulation, all were part and parcel of the job, and she excelled at all of these, earning the nickname "Black Widow."
Along with training and conditioning, Natalya and the other girls were also subjected to scientific experimentation. The world knew of the Super Soldier Serum and its success in Captain America; Russia's first breakthrough with the technology came with the creation of the Winter Soldier. But while the Winter Soldier was good for many things, they required more subtle agents. As a result of the experimentation, Natalya ended up with several benefits: enhanced strength and agility, improved healing and resilience, and an acute decceleration of the aging process.
The KGB wasted no time in utilizing the new graduates from the Red Room Academy; the Cold War had already begun, even if it hadn't yet been named, and these covert ops agents played a large part in the USSR's power play. It was while working during the mid-1950s when she first met Alexei Shostakov, a well-known Soviet test pilot. Their meeting was arranged by higher-ups in the Soviet government, but despite the artificial start the pair hit it off, and quickly married. This time period was perhaps one of the best in her life; she took pleasure in her career, showing a fierce dedication to her work if not her homeland, and her personal life with Alexei was everything one could hope for. This all ended several brief years later, when Alexei died testing a new rocket prototype for the Soviet Space Program. His death was fuel for the Soviet propaganda machine, blaming it on American sabotage.
Seeking revenge for her husband's death, Natalya sought more missions in America; it was during one of these trips to sabotage the launch of Apollo 1 that she learned the truth about Alexei. His death wasn't caused by US saboteurs, but by her own country's carelessness--lax workmanship and rushed construction. It was the beginning of a wake-up call she sorely needed. Over the next fifteen years, growing dissatisfaction with her superiors and the slow decay of the Soviet Union caused Natasha to start looking at her options for an increasingly inevitable future. She continued to do her job with a ruthless efficiency, growing even more emotionally detached as she collected intel and prepared for the day she'd no longer be employed.
After the fall of the Soviet Union, Natalya continued her work as a freelance spy, Westernizing her name as Natasha Romanoff and utilizing a variety of aliases and covers to make herself available to the highest bidder. She had nothing else to do, nowhere else to go. It was during this time that she came to the attention of Nick Fury and SHIELD, who judged her too dangerous to be allowed to operate. Clint Barton, a freelance SHIELD operative, was sent to take her down and eliminate the threat, but defied his orders and let Natasha live. She didn't understand why. In fact, maybe she wanted to die, just a little. She was lost. But Barton made her think about the things she'd done, the reason for doing them. The effect she'd had on the world as it was.
Instead of trying to get back at SHIELD, Natasha came to work for them, using her very specific set of skills for the country she'd often opposed in the past. Fury gave her a way to do what she did best in the name of protecting innocent lives, instead of ruining them. She was still a spy, but this time she could at least tell herself it was for a better cause. Her own cause, trying to save as many lives as she'd taken or destroyed. SHIELD got her not-inconsiderable talents; she got the start she needed to make some changes.
It was more or less business as usual, working for Fury. The same kinds of jobs in the same kinds of places. She tried harder to keep civilians out of the line of fire. Tried to leave things in better shape than she found them. She worked more missions with Barton--Abidjan, Budapest, Sao Paulo, Iran--and while she wasn't exactly good at being a team player, it wasn't awful, having the resources of an organization to back her up, having a partner to pull her out of the fire if she needed it. But things changed when Tony Stark made his announcement to the world. Iron Man changed everything. She asked Fury for the assignment.
Six months later, she got it, tasked with assessing Stark's condition and the value of the Iron Man suit to Fury's new Avengers Initiative task force while undercover as Stark's new personal assistant. Tony himself she found appalling, narcissistic, charming with a genius level of intelligence but with latent self-interest and disregard for the cost in lives around him. Like the scientists she'd known in the past. In truth, Stark made her nervous. She remembered very faintly the last time technology had made this kind of leap, and what resulted. But the Iron Man suit was useful, and she couldn't deny the capabilities of it, or Stark himself. When Vanko sprung his trap at Stark Expo, Natasha was the one who forced Justin Hammer into giving up Vanko's location and headed there to try and stop his drones. Taking down nearly a full complement of security guards, she managed to reboot James Rhodes' compromised War Machine armor, remodeled from one of Stark's earlier designs, but it was Stark and Rhodes who took out Vanko himself and the rest of his battalion of combat drones.
Returning what remained of Vanko's data to Nick Fury, Natasha was immediately sent to Virginia to keep eyes on Bruce Banner, but arrived just in time to see him turn into the Hulk, and was nearly killed in the chaos that ensued. Following the doctor back to New York, to a college in the Bronx, Natasha was once again nearly killed, buried under rubble by the destructive presence of the Abomination Emil Blonsky. She survived, as she tended to do, thanks to her resilience and quick thinking, but all of this was proving to be too much. Things were escalating, and she had her doubts as to anyone's ability to control the situation. Stark, Vanko, Banner, Blonsky, the thing that destroyed a town in New Mexico, and the alien beings who both sent it and fought it; things were spiraling madly out of control. These were powers no one had ever thought possible, forces no one was prepared to contend with. Despite her voiced objections, she stayed with SHIELD, and with Fury, seeing more sense in staying near the eye of the storm.
She continued her own covert ops work after the madness began to settle. It was no more than six months later, however, while she was working a job in Russia, that she received the call from Agent Coulson. The Tesseract, a powerful object kept in SHIELD R&D lockdown, had been stolen. Barton was compromised. Situation was grim. She was needed again, to face a figure that unsettled her immensely. Scared her, if she could be honest. She found him in India, caring for the sick. Catching Banner alone, armed and ready to do what was necessary if she could, she convinced him despite his own uncertainty to join her, Fury, and several other consultants aboard the Helicarrier in their attempt to find the Tesseract before he could do anything with it.
They found the culprit Loki, along with his brother Thor, and both ended up on the Helicarrier, Loki in chains in a prison cell. Of all the crew available, the muscle and the threats he could choose from, Fury sent Natasha to grill their charge. Faking human weakness, sympathy, emotion, she coerced from him his plan to destroy them--unleash the Hulk from within Banner, use him to bring the Helicarrier down. With help from the brainwashed Hawkeye and his strike team, this nearly succeeded. A bomb went off in Banner's lab. Natasha was trapped with him when the Hulk emerged, fighting, running, and nearly dying. One good thing came out of that attack. Managing to catch up with Barton after her run-in with the Hulk, Natasha fought her former partner and took him out with a serious blow to the head, ending Loki's hold over Barton's mind and regaining them a teammate.
She couldn't run, after that. She couldn't just stick to the sidelines and watch, not with what they knew was coming. She went to New York, with the rest of them, went to Stark Tower to stop an invasion already too late to prevent. There were too many of the alien army, the Chitauri; she and the rest of the group, Hawkeye, Captain America, Hulk, Iron Man, all worked together to try and stop them, but no matter how many they took out, more were left. When they finally managed to close the wormhole opened by the Tesseract, it wasn't clear if that was going to be enough.
The fallout was massive. A huge chunk of Manhattan was destroyed. The world was changed by the indisputable knowledge that there were other beings amongst humanity now. Gods and monsters and machines of war, as she'd said to Fury not too many months ago. It was no place for a spy. She went back to the sidelines, to the quiet spaces behind the scenes, and kept working. It was only going to get worse. Fury often partnered Natasha on missions with Steve Rogers during this time, the two of them developing a rapport over two years of almost-camaraderie, until a mission came with a secret objective for Natasha, contradictory to Steve's: get back SHIELD files for Fury, regardless of the cost in lives.
There might have been a serious disturbance between the two of them, Rogers' very clear morals contrasting sharply with Natasha's much more ambiguous set, but for the news of Nick Fury's apparent death. Attacked by a man Natasha had met before, a Russian agent known as the Winter Soldier, Fury barely made it back to the hospital for Natasha and Rogers to watch him die. They wanted more information on why Fury had been attacked, what the Soldier was doing here. What they found was unbelievable: SHIELD was almost completely controlled by HYDRA, thought long-disbanded after WWII. HYDRA grew inside SHIELD like a parasite, using them to get as close to the centers of power in the world as they could.
Narrowly escaping an assault, the pair sought refuge with Sam Wilson, a retired Air Force vet, who helped the pair to capture and interrogate a HYDRA agent within SHIELD, learning about a new top-secret SHIELD op: Project Insight. The Project was a way for SHIELD--and HYDRA--to eliminate threats to global security from a distance immediately, using brand-new helicarriers. On their way to attempt a break-in at the SHIELD institute the Triskelion, the group was ambushed by the Winter Soldier. The HYDRA agent was killed. Natasha was shot through the shoulder by the Winter Soldier, and all three managed to hold off the Soldier til his identity (James 'Bucky' Barnes, Rogers' best friend thought to be long dead) was revealed, and he fled. The trio were taken into custody by SHIELD agents, but were freed by Maria Hill who took them to see Nick Fury, actually still alive and healing from his own encounter with the Winter Soldier. Natasha was almost as surprised as the others.
With the help of Fury and Hill, Rogers and Wilson were sent off to try and stop the helicarriers that were the main attack force of Project Insight. Natasha herself had her own job: infiltrate the Triskelion, disguised as a member of the World Security Council, and hold them off from approving the Project for as long as possible. HYDRA's sudden coup attempt made that harder. Natasha managed to take the agents down, and did the only thing left to them, leaking all of SHIELD's most top-secret files into the public domain. Even her own files. Everything personal about her, her history, her misdeeds.
The world was saved. No charges were pressed, at least not in public. And Natasha was left exposed to the world, without anywhere to retreat to. Now, she's just trying to build her cover back up, find a new identity or three, and finally maybe stay away from all these gods and monsters. Somehow, though, she's pretty sure it's just a matter of time before she gets sucked back in.
Personality:
Positives: Loyal, witty, intelligent, discreet, determined, confident
Negatives: Dissociative, manipulative, near-compulsive liar
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. She needs to do some good for the world, to balance out the bad she's done. Her loyalty, once earned, is unwavering. She's got a lightning-quick sense of humor, even if it tends to rear its head in subtle ways. What she can barely admit even to herself 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.
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. 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 almost be willing to make that trade, were it necessary. Rogers she's comfortable around for a different reason. Not only are they closer in age, and both have a very respectable sense of professionalism--get the job done, don't ask too many questions, try not to get anyone else killed--but he takes all of her poking and teasing with a good-natured spirit, and doesn't ask anything in return. In many ways, he reminds her of Alexei.
Despite her apparent age of late twenties, Natasha is over 80 years old. Her eyes sometimes carry the weight of that, and much of her early life she regards as a dream. Things only really begin to seem real after the mid-eighties, in her mind, 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.
Abilities:
Physical-enhanced strength and agility/reflexes, accelerated healing, slowed aging, professional ballerina, Olympic-level acrobatic abilities
Combat-trained in multiple forms of martial arts and hand-to-hand combat, multiple types of weaponry use, expert markswoman, assassination and infiltration techniques, proficient with technology and able to hack modern-Earth-level computer systems, skilled tactician and capable of rapid multi-threat assessment, can pilot basic aircraft
Social/Mental-Very skilled liar, advanced psychological manipulation techniques as well as seduction and subversion/infiltration, resistance to torture/interrogation techniques, highly intelligent, quick learner
Thanks to Russian Science, Natasha ages much slower than a normal human, for all intents and purposes the process being halted entirely. She also heals faster than a normal human, and has increased agility and strength, though not superhuman levels--just enough to make her seem surprisingly strong/fast for her height/build. She's trained 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 both human and alien, she's capable of piloting multiple vehicles, and is well-versed in arts of subterfuge, psychological manipulation, and seduction. She's also fluent in multiple languages, and capable of hacking modern-Earth-level computer systems.
Augment Skillset: Personnel Support- ship's counselor. Like Hannibal Lecter, only she won't eat you. Probably.
Sample: third person bad ideas
log of moral debate that will be 20 comments soon
Character name: Natasha Romanoff
Character journal:
totheflySeries name: Marvel comics/MCU
Canon notes: Movieverse (with liberal dosage of backstory from 616 comics)
Species: Human (genetically modified)
History:
I'm mostly sticking with the cinematic universe canon, but we get like nothing pre-2005 for Tasha in the MCU so I'm borrowing heavily from her comic history. If you just want the bullet points about the character, feel free to check out the wikis here and here. Otherwise, read on for so very much tl;dr.
Natasha Romanoff was born in November 1984, but Natalya Alianova Romanova was born much earlier than that, in the late 1920s. Orphaned at birth, she was adopted and raised by Ivan Petrovich, a Russian ex-soldier. Petrovich raised her as his own, beginning her education, encouraging her to pursue a career in ballet as she trained and performed at the Bolshoi Theatre.
The ballet, however, was only a cover for her other education; quietly, Ivan had begun the process of turning his adopted daughter into one of her country's greatest assets. After the war, in 1943, Ivan took Natalya to join nearly thirty other girls to be trained by what was known as the Red Room Academy, a top-secret program dedicated to creating and conditioning a group of elite spies and covert assassins. The Red Room taught Natalya everything necessary for a sleeper agent: by the time she completed the program, she was fluent in seven languages (Italian, French, German, English, Latin, and Chinese along with her native Russian), trained in multiple forms of martial arts, and taught to withstand torture and interrogation techniques, alongside learning her own set of information-gathering skills. Seduction, interrogation, psychological manipulation, all were part and parcel of the job, and she excelled at all of these, earning the nickname "Black Widow."
Along with training and conditioning, Natalya and the other girls were also subjected to scientific experimentation. The world knew of the Super Soldier Serum and its success in Captain America; Russia's first breakthrough with the technology came with the creation of the Winter Soldier. But while the Winter Soldier was good for many things, they required more subtle agents. As a result of the experimentation, Natalya ended up with several benefits: enhanced strength and agility, improved healing and resilience, and an acute decceleration of the aging process.
The KGB wasted no time in utilizing the new graduates from the Red Room Academy; the Cold War had already begun, even if it hadn't yet been named, and these covert ops agents played a large part in the USSR's power play. It was while working during the mid-1950s when she first met Alexei Shostakov, a well-known Soviet test pilot. Their meeting was arranged by higher-ups in the Soviet government, but despite the artificial start the pair hit it off, and quickly married. This time period was perhaps one of the best in her life; she took pleasure in her career, showing a fierce dedication to her work if not her homeland, and her personal life with Alexei was everything one could hope for. This all ended several brief years later, when Alexei died testing a new rocket prototype for the Soviet Space Program. His death was fuel for the Soviet propaganda machine, blaming it on American sabotage.
Seeking revenge for her husband's death, Natalya sought more missions in America; it was during one of these trips to sabotage the launch of Apollo 1 that she learned the truth about Alexei. His death wasn't caused by US saboteurs, but by her own country's carelessness--lax workmanship and rushed construction. It was the beginning of a wake-up call she sorely needed. Over the next fifteen years, growing dissatisfaction with her superiors and the slow decay of the Soviet Union caused Natasha to start looking at her options for an increasingly inevitable future. She continued to do her job with a ruthless efficiency, growing even more emotionally detached as she collected intel and prepared for the day she'd no longer be employed.
After the fall of the Soviet Union, Natalya continued her work as a freelance spy, Westernizing her name as Natasha Romanoff and utilizing a variety of aliases and covers to make herself available to the highest bidder. She had nothing else to do, nowhere else to go. It was during this time that she came to the attention of Nick Fury and SHIELD, who judged her too dangerous to be allowed to operate. Clint Barton, a freelance SHIELD operative, was sent to take her down and eliminate the threat, but defied his orders and let Natasha live. She didn't understand why. In fact, maybe she wanted to die, just a little. She was lost. But Barton made her think about the things she'd done, the reason for doing them. The effect she'd had on the world as it was.
Instead of trying to get back at SHIELD, Natasha came to work for them, using her very specific set of skills for the country she'd often opposed in the past. Fury gave her a way to do what she did best in the name of protecting innocent lives, instead of ruining them. She was still a spy, but this time she could at least tell herself it was for a better cause. Her own cause, trying to save as many lives as she'd taken or destroyed. SHIELD got her not-inconsiderable talents; she got the start she needed to make some changes.
It was more or less business as usual, working for Fury. The same kinds of jobs in the same kinds of places. She tried harder to keep civilians out of the line of fire. Tried to leave things in better shape than she found them. She worked more missions with Barton--Abidjan, Budapest, Sao Paulo, Iran--and while she wasn't exactly good at being a team player, it wasn't awful, having the resources of an organization to back her up, having a partner to pull her out of the fire if she needed it. But things changed when Tony Stark made his announcement to the world. Iron Man changed everything. She asked Fury for the assignment.
Six months later, she got it, tasked with assessing Stark's condition and the value of the Iron Man suit to Fury's new Avengers Initiative task force while undercover as Stark's new personal assistant. Tony himself she found appalling, narcissistic, charming with a genius level of intelligence but with latent self-interest and disregard for the cost in lives around him. Like the scientists she'd known in the past. In truth, Stark made her nervous. She remembered very faintly the last time technology had made this kind of leap, and what resulted. But the Iron Man suit was useful, and she couldn't deny the capabilities of it, or Stark himself. When Vanko sprung his trap at Stark Expo, Natasha was the one who forced Justin Hammer into giving up Vanko's location and headed there to try and stop his drones. Taking down nearly a full complement of security guards, she managed to reboot James Rhodes' compromised War Machine armor, remodeled from one of Stark's earlier designs, but it was Stark and Rhodes who took out Vanko himself and the rest of his battalion of combat drones.
Returning what remained of Vanko's data to Nick Fury, Natasha was immediately sent to Virginia to keep eyes on Bruce Banner, but arrived just in time to see him turn into the Hulk, and was nearly killed in the chaos that ensued. Following the doctor back to New York, to a college in the Bronx, Natasha was once again nearly killed, buried under rubble by the destructive presence of the Abomination Emil Blonsky. She survived, as she tended to do, thanks to her resilience and quick thinking, but all of this was proving to be too much. Things were escalating, and she had her doubts as to anyone's ability to control the situation. Stark, Vanko, Banner, Blonsky, the thing that destroyed a town in New Mexico, and the alien beings who both sent it and fought it; things were spiraling madly out of control. These were powers no one had ever thought possible, forces no one was prepared to contend with. Despite her voiced objections, she stayed with SHIELD, and with Fury, seeing more sense in staying near the eye of the storm.
She continued her own covert ops work after the madness began to settle. It was no more than six months later, however, while she was working a job in Russia, that she received the call from Agent Coulson. The Tesseract, a powerful object kept in SHIELD R&D lockdown, had been stolen. Barton was compromised. Situation was grim. She was needed again, to face a figure that unsettled her immensely. Scared her, if she could be honest. She found him in India, caring for the sick. Catching Banner alone, armed and ready to do what was necessary if she could, she convinced him despite his own uncertainty to join her, Fury, and several other consultants aboard the Helicarrier in their attempt to find the Tesseract before he could do anything with it.
They found the culprit Loki, along with his brother Thor, and both ended up on the Helicarrier, Loki in chains in a prison cell. Of all the crew available, the muscle and the threats he could choose from, Fury sent Natasha to grill their charge. Faking human weakness, sympathy, emotion, she coerced from him his plan to destroy them--unleash the Hulk from within Banner, use him to bring the Helicarrier down. With help from the brainwashed Hawkeye and his strike team, this nearly succeeded. A bomb went off in Banner's lab. Natasha was trapped with him when the Hulk emerged, fighting, running, and nearly dying. One good thing came out of that attack. Managing to catch up with Barton after her run-in with the Hulk, Natasha fought her former partner and took him out with a serious blow to the head, ending Loki's hold over Barton's mind and regaining them a teammate.
She couldn't run, after that. She couldn't just stick to the sidelines and watch, not with what they knew was coming. She went to New York, with the rest of them, went to Stark Tower to stop an invasion already too late to prevent. There were too many of the alien army, the Chitauri; she and the rest of the group, Hawkeye, Captain America, Hulk, Iron Man, all worked together to try and stop them, but no matter how many they took out, more were left. When they finally managed to close the wormhole opened by the Tesseract, it wasn't clear if that was going to be enough.
The fallout was massive. A huge chunk of Manhattan was destroyed. The world was changed by the indisputable knowledge that there were other beings amongst humanity now. Gods and monsters and machines of war, as she'd said to Fury not too many months ago. It was no place for a spy. She went back to the sidelines, to the quiet spaces behind the scenes, and kept working. It was only going to get worse. Fury often partnered Natasha on missions with Steve Rogers during this time, the two of them developing a rapport over two years of almost-camaraderie, until a mission came with a secret objective for Natasha, contradictory to Steve's: get back SHIELD files for Fury, regardless of the cost in lives.
There might have been a serious disturbance between the two of them, Rogers' very clear morals contrasting sharply with Natasha's much more ambiguous set, but for the news of Nick Fury's apparent death. Attacked by a man Natasha had met before, a Russian agent known as the Winter Soldier, Fury barely made it back to the hospital for Natasha and Rogers to watch him die. They wanted more information on why Fury had been attacked, what the Soldier was doing here. What they found was unbelievable: SHIELD was almost completely controlled by HYDRA, thought long-disbanded after WWII. HYDRA grew inside SHIELD like a parasite, using them to get as close to the centers of power in the world as they could.
Narrowly escaping an assault, the pair sought refuge with Sam Wilson, a retired Air Force vet, who helped the pair to capture and interrogate a HYDRA agent within SHIELD, learning about a new top-secret SHIELD op: Project Insight. The Project was a way for SHIELD--and HYDRA--to eliminate threats to global security from a distance immediately, using brand-new helicarriers. On their way to attempt a break-in at the SHIELD institute the Triskelion, the group was ambushed by the Winter Soldier. The HYDRA agent was killed. Natasha was shot through the shoulder by the Winter Soldier, and all three managed to hold off the Soldier til his identity (James 'Bucky' Barnes, Rogers' best friend thought to be long dead) was revealed, and he fled. The trio were taken into custody by SHIELD agents, but were freed by Maria Hill who took them to see Nick Fury, actually still alive and healing from his own encounter with the Winter Soldier. Natasha was almost as surprised as the others.
With the help of Fury and Hill, Rogers and Wilson were sent off to try and stop the helicarriers that were the main attack force of Project Insight. Natasha herself had her own job: infiltrate the Triskelion, disguised as a member of the World Security Council, and hold them off from approving the Project for as long as possible. HYDRA's sudden coup attempt made that harder. Natasha managed to take the agents down, and did the only thing left to them, leaking all of SHIELD's most top-secret files into the public domain. Even her own files. Everything personal about her, her history, her misdeeds.
The world was saved. No charges were pressed, at least not in public. And Natasha was left exposed to the world, without anywhere to retreat to. Now, she's just trying to build her cover back up, find a new identity or three, and finally maybe stay away from all these gods and monsters. Somehow, though, she's pretty sure it's just a matter of time before she gets sucked back in.
Personality:
Positives: Loyal, witty, intelligent, discreet, determined, confident
Negatives: Dissociative, manipulative, near-compulsive liar
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. She needs to do some good for the world, to balance out the bad she's done. Her loyalty, once earned, is unwavering. She's got a lightning-quick sense of humor, even if it tends to rear its head in subtle ways. What she can barely admit even to herself 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.
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. 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 almost be willing to make that trade, were it necessary. Rogers she's comfortable around for a different reason. Not only are they closer in age, and both have a very respectable sense of professionalism--get the job done, don't ask too many questions, try not to get anyone else killed--but he takes all of her poking and teasing with a good-natured spirit, and doesn't ask anything in return. In many ways, he reminds her of Alexei.
Despite her apparent age of late twenties, Natasha is over 80 years old. Her eyes sometimes carry the weight of that, and much of her early life she regards as a dream. Things only really begin to seem real after the mid-eighties, in her mind, 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.
Abilities:
Physical-enhanced strength and agility/reflexes, accelerated healing, slowed aging, professional ballerina, Olympic-level acrobatic abilities
Combat-trained in multiple forms of martial arts and hand-to-hand combat, multiple types of weaponry use, expert markswoman, assassination and infiltration techniques, proficient with technology and able to hack modern-Earth-level computer systems, skilled tactician and capable of rapid multi-threat assessment, can pilot basic aircraft
Social/Mental-Very skilled liar, advanced psychological manipulation techniques as well as seduction and subversion/infiltration, resistance to torture/interrogation techniques, highly intelligent, quick learner
Thanks to Russian Science, Natasha ages much slower than a normal human, for all intents and purposes the process being halted entirely. She also heals faster than a normal human, and has increased agility and strength, though not superhuman levels--just enough to make her seem surprisingly strong/fast for her height/build. She's trained 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 both human and alien, she's capable of piloting multiple vehicles, and is well-versed in arts of subterfuge, psychological manipulation, and seduction. She's also fluent in multiple languages, and capable of hacking modern-Earth-level computer systems.
Augment Skillset: Personnel Support- ship's counselor. Like Hannibal Lecter, only she won't eat you. Probably.
Sample: third person bad ideas
log of moral debate that will be 20 comments soon
