Plurk paste

Natasha is a spy, not a soldier, crafted in the heart of Russia to have a very specific skill set. It’s hard to see that looking at her. She is, after all, the legendary Black Widow.

Her job requires her to constantly be on the move, one step ahead of everyone else, planning and pretending. As a shadow-slash-spy-slash-assassin for SHIELD, she's required to be someone she's not on a regular basis, the most notable being a gold-digging, eye candy secretary for Tony Stark. As a result, most of the people she comes across only get to see what she puts out, which is that mysterious aura of ‘who is this woman?’.

Natasha laughs. She loves, she gets angry, she gets upset and sad. She just doesn't show it (most of the time). She can't. Her job is her life, and her job is deep undercover, stalking the people Nick Fury tells her to, from genius billionaire playboy philanthropists in Malibu to giant green monsters hiding all the way out in south-east Asia. Her life depends on not being found out, and so she's gotten very good at hiding Natasha Romanoff under the various veneers she's grown accustomed to using over the years.

She tends to compartmentalize her emotions, because of this. It's easy for her to box up how she feels about something and ignore it for the sake of her sanity or the mission. It's not always foolproof, though; if you had two tons of giant green rage monster barrelling down on you, you'd probably wet your pants and scream. Natasha doesn't. Oh, she's frightened, and it very clearly shows. But she doesn't let that fear consume her. She stands back up and gets the job done because that’s what needs to be done. Nevermind the fact that she’s just been terrified out of her mind by The Hulk. Someone needs to stop Agent Barton, and Natasha is the only one at the moment who can. Nevermind the fact she can’t really stand to be groped and prodded by the misogynists working at Stark Industries. Someone needs to get close to Tony Stark, to keep an eye on him and his palladium infection. Loki even tries to upset her, using past deeds revealed to him by Clint. It works, sort of. Natasha allows him to see her get upset to the point of tears, but it’s only a ruse (or so Loki thinks). She shuts off that pain and guilt, smiling sweetly at Loki and thanking him for his cooperation. Mining her vulnerability is a weapon Natasha uses as much as the Widow Stings on her wrists.

It’s only later, when she’s around partner and best friend Clint Barton, that she lets that wall down, and shows that, yes, what Loki said hurt her. Natasha knows she has blood on her hands. She’s not happy about the ‘debt’ she’s incurred, mind. That doesn’t mean she lets it simmer and eat away at her. The past happened. Now she tries to make up for it. She earned the name Black Widow over the years, lending her skill set to the highest bidder. Lies, murder and betrayal were just part of the job, and for a while, Natasha herself though she was unsavable. These are past sins that she wishes to atone for. She keeps a ledger, a system of checks and balances, and it’s bleeding red, and Natasha would probably be the first to say that her hands are covered in blood as well. Her sins of the past are constantly weighing on her mind, and Natasha is the kind of person who, while she does not regret the choices she has made, because they have brought her to where she is today, she knows that in making those choices she has wronged people. Maybe she can’t set it right with them, exactly. But she can do other things to regain that sort of karmic balance. (Although she herself would not use the word karma, likely. If brought up at all, Natasha uses the ledger analogy, for the universal symbolism of it.) To be brought into SHIELD and raised so high within it’s ranks in such a short amount of time meant that she worked very hard to prove herself to Fury, and likely to herself as well. Getting away from the KGB meant getting away from the darker side of the morally grey spectrum. But she didn’t get away at all, and the worst part was she didn’t even know it until it was too late.

Getting away from the KGB also meant getting away from where the KGB operated. Natasha no longer considers herself Russian, having anglicized her name fro Natalia Alianovna Romanova to Natasha Romanoff, and eschewing her Russian heritage for Loki. She knows she’s probably considered a traitor to the country, and for all intents and purposes considers herself an expat. She’s not quite American, not quite Russian. Natasha doesn’t belong anywhere, which suits her just fine as a spy. There’s nothing left in Russia for her, anyway. She’ll return there for missions, but while Natasha retains her fluency in her native language, she doesn’t retain any sort of fond feeling for the country she once called home.

Trust is a major part of Natasha’s need to clear her debt. Her life consists of checks and balances, now. It’s not something she’s willing to let go of lightly; so when SHIELD is revealed to be corrupted by Hydra, Natasha takes it the hardest out of everyone. After all, she’d thought she’d changed sides and gone straight only for it to turn out that she was just selling a different set of lies for a different set of evil people. She flat out asks her current partner, Steve Rogers, if he’d trust her to save his life, and when he responds in the positive, she’s visibly shocked. For Natasha, Hydra’s betrayal was deep and personal. Natasha worked hard to cultivate a sense of self that did good, and it was ripped away from her.

She does, however, prove herself in the end, like all heroes do (even if Natasha doesn’t consider herself one; a spy’s work is not hero’s work). Natasha’s secrets are entwined with that of SHIELD and Hydra, and in order to take down the big bad, Natasha pulls a wikileaks without hesitation, dropping all of their and her secrets onto the internet. Every single cover, every hiding place, every face she’s ever worn (both good and bad) have now been revealed to be her.

She's spent a lot of her life hiding who she is. Even people who seem to think they know the Black Widow don't really know her, passing her off as just another pretty face when that's what she's wanted all along. Her reputation precedes her, but that’s all it is. ‘The infamous Black Widow’, she’s called by a Russian black market arms dealer. He expresses disappointment when she’s not up to snuff. He’s proven wrong (rather violently) later. She likes it this way. It means no one knows what to expect from her, and she’s able to use the greatest weapon in her arsenal: herself. Not many people can say they outsmarted the God of Lies, after all. Loki had no idea that Natasha was playing him until she showed her hand. The Russian mobsters didn’t, either. She’s very good at being duplicitous. Natalie Rushman was a sexy prize for Tony Stark, a beautiful, smart woman who spoke four languages and modeled in Tokyo. Presenting more than one face to the world is easy, for Natasha.

The mission always, always, comes first. Natasha will absolutely break cover when the shit hits the fan, like the time she slammed Justin Hammer’s face into a table, or the time she systematically took out a group of Russian thugs armed only with herself and a chair. It’s difficult to say if she loves her job. She certainly doesn’t dislike it, considering the amount of effort she puts into it. Natasha is one of the Agents Fury can trust to get the job done no matter what, and Natasha would probably agree with this. She’ll even kick her own partner’s ass without holding back if that’s what it takes to get him free of Loki’s control. Her pragmatism doesn’t allow her to hold back on things like that. Natasha’s pretty sure that if she’d held back, made sure not to hurt Clint in any manner, she’d have lost that fight, and thus the Helicarrier and the hundreds of people on it.

Loyalty, as a concept for Natasha, is an interesting thing. She’s a spy, and so she has to live in a world where she must be duplicitous at all times. This results in people not being certain of her, when she herself is certain of them. This works out fine when on an undercover mission, but when it comes to her personal life, it’s a little trickier to navigate. Natasha has very few people she considers friends, and even fewer she trusts with her life. She trusts Clint Barton because he gave her a second chance. She trusts Steve Rogers because he has twice now proven his worthiness to her, once when punching aliens in the face and again when taking down HYDRA. In essence, the quickest way to earn Natasha’s trust and loyalty is to trust her yourself. She doesn’t have that many people who do, and she knows this. She also knows that maybe she’s not worthy of it, and so she clings to those who trust her, which is why it hurts so much when she finds out they don’t. With that said, Natasha doesn’t expect your trust and loyalty. She knows how the spy game is played. She doesn’t have some naive ideal that everyone will be friends and holds hands. She knows backstabbing, literal and figurative, is a part of it. It’s as ingrained and as natural to her as breathing.

When she's not on a mission, Natasha is sensible, down to earth and unafraid of banter (although she’s not exactly afraid of banter on a mission, either). She's a voice of reason among her teammates in SHIELD, and more often than not, she's the one keeping a cool head under pressure. She's quite observant, too, able to deduce even minute personality quirks after spending a short amount of time with someone, and file those away for further study. Her loyalty to her team, and to the man she feels helped her when no one else would, comes before all. The moment she finds out her partner has been ‘compromised’, she drops the act she’s using with the Russian mobsters and kicks their asses with ease. She’ll take the risk of going to Loki to find out what his game is, all to save Clint. She claims that it’s because she owes him a debt, but it’s more than that. They’re partners, friends, and she may be shaken up by having to face him in a fight, but she won’t hesitate to literally knock sense into him if she has to. She has her own way of doing things, a moral compass that might seem a little bit skewed to observers. She lives among shades of grey, and that’s how she views the world.

Natasha's a brilliant woman. Her native language is Russian, but you wouldn't know it with her solid American accent and perfect English. She speaks fluent Latin, Japanese and Italian, too, and probably other languages as well in varying degrees. She's a fairly decent psychoanalyst as well, and her skills in hand-to-hand combat and on the fly battle tactics are second to none. Natasha is also a skilled hacker, and has been shown to be able to crack firewalls and security systems of even the most elite computer experts. She has a sarcastic witty side, and she can be quite stubborn when pressed to do something that she doesn't want to do. Natasha’s not afraid to express her displeasure, whether vocally or through expression, when she hears or sees something she doesn’t like. She listens to orders from her superiors, of course, and rarely questions them. Her relationship with her colleagues means that she can, however, speak up when something’s bothering her with little fear of repercussion. Natasha is never afraid to do the right thing, even if the right thing isn’t very nice. In Fury’s own words, “Romanoff is okay with everything.” Obviously, this is proven not quite true, but out of everyone Natasha’s worked with, she’s got the most morally dubious compass. Kicking someone off a building may not be Steve’s style -- but it is Natasha’s. She has no problem doing the things that other people won’t do, because she knows they need to be done. After all, if anyone is going to do it, it might as well be her. She’s been getting her hands dirty since she was a child, and while she’s on a mission to atone, she’s sure of one thing: if she does the dirty jobs that no one else will do in the name of good then she’s working towards that atonement.

The spy world may not be the most comfortable of jobs, and it’s kind of lonely, if you really sit down and think about it. Becoming an assassin-slash-spy for hire probably wasn’t the best life choice, but it was hers. Choice and control are huge for Natasha, and she is adamant about keeping it that way. The unknown is her greatest fear. If she can’t analyze it, use her weapons (physical and mental) against it or kill it, then she doesn’t know what to do. Her skill set is what she has and what she knows, and she’s alright with that. Because she’s chose that. Yes, she may have chosen it during a tumultuous period in her life. But even now she doesn’t regret the fact she made that decision, even if she regrets the things she did after she made it.