the patterns are simple, the rules are complex

YOU
NAME: Aubrey
AGE: 23
JOURNAL: mortalcity
RESERVE: Yes!

YOUR CHARACTER
NAME: Natasha Romanoff
JOURNAL: tendnottoweep
FANDOM: Marvel Cinematic Universe
AGE: Late 20s or early 30s
APPEARANCE: Here!
CANON POINT: Post-Avengers (and shawarma)
MEMORY LOSS: None
WIKI/HISTORY: Link!
PERSONALITY:

"You're a triple imposter; I've never seen anything like it. Is there anything real about you?"

To most people, Natasha is the perfect spy: inscrutable, perfectly adaptable, perfectly competent, fearless, emotionless, and capable of almost anything. She has a sort of quiet, low-level paranoia of the kind that involves knowing where all the people, exits, and possible weapons are in a room at all times, and doesn't seem to really trust anyone. She's very... intense, giving the impression that there's little else to her but her job, like she's weighing and judging every little thing about you, and every move she makes is calculated to achieve a specific goal.

The fact is that there's little room in her life for anything that's not calculated one way or another - with her training and conditioning, she barely has unconscious reactions anymore, not in her expressions or body language, and certainly not in her words or actions toward others. She is, however, very good at faking it, and all of those carefully calculated reactions can seem perfectly natural when she wants them to. Natasha's something of a social chameleon, becoming an entirely different person at a moment's notice, and even when she's being "Natasha Romanoff", that's a sort of performance in and of itself: due to what was done to her as a child and in her work as a spy, she's had to construct the person she is out of what's left behind when you take away the Black Widow.

If you're one of the rare few she's actually willing to be something approaching herself around, rather than some cover personality (which includes the distant, cold "SHIELD agent" personality she's cultivated for most people who supposedly meet "Natasha Romanoff"), she's still not a very emotive person. She's generally very laidback, calm about almost everything and often the voice of reason in a group - but with a certain deadpan sarcasm you don't usually see when she's working.

Natasha is confident and self-assured, but never arrogant - she's simply perfectly aware of her abilities and limits, of what she's good at and where she needs help, and so there's no need for doubt or hesitation in her world. Even when tied to a chair presumably being interrogated by Russian thugs, or being violently threatened by a psychotic god, she is entirely in control of the situation and obviously knows it. She feels no real need to prove herself or take offence when people underestimate her; she'll use their error in judgement to her advantage when it will be most useful, and she isn't particularly emotionally affected by what they think of her in the meantime.

Then again, it's rare to see her really genuinely emotional about anything - and even when she is, she seems to have the ability to switch her feelings on and off at will, or at least to bury her true feelings deeply enough that you'd never dig them up unless she wanted you to see them. There is, of course, a very good reason for that. In Natasha's world, for her entire life, feelings of any kind are dangerous, a lever for other people to use against you no matter if they're positive or negative... and so she plays them close to the chest, and shuts them down or ignores them if they become too dangerous.

If you asked her, she doesn't have friends, she has people she works with and people she owes a debt. That's simple and safe; that's something a spy can understand, and nothing that can be used to hurt her. "Love is for children" is the way she put it when speaking to Loki, and while she is playing him, she's also not lying - she believes it, wholeheartedly. In loving, you give a part of yourself away; not only do you have to trust the other person not to hurt you, there's now a part of you out in the open, a part of you that can't be protected completely.

When speaking about her affection for Clint, at her most honest, she describes it as being compromised, the same way she speaks about Clint being brainwashed, because that kind of emotion is a liability a spy can't afford. However, when people make it past her armor and into that "compromised" zone - the way Clint and Coulson have - she will go to the ends of the earth for them. For Clint, certainly the person closest to her, she walks out of a mission, faces the Hulk, gets up to fight on what's almost certainly a sprained ankle and bruised ribs, and walks into a warzone when she openly acknowledges she is not a soldier and doesn't particularly belong there. At this point, she would probably do the same for any of the Avengers as well, if necessary.

Probably the biggest thing that bothers her about feeling that much about anyone is that it's fundamentally a loss of control - and her entire life has been about control in one way or another, either being in control or having a total lack of it. She didn't choose to be a spy or an assassin - she had that chosen for her, when she was just a little girl, and by the time it was even remotely possible for her to make that choice, she was broken and twisted into this thing that wasn't good for much of anything else. She didn't choose to join SHIELD - it was that, or being killed for being too much of a threat to be allowed to live. She doesn't choose her missions or her objectives - she's a tool to be used by others, and she's well aware of that fact.

Given that, it's hardly surprising that she is almost obsessive about whatever control she can have - the control she finds in manipulating the people around her through words and emotions, or in knowing she could take out every person in the room without them laying a hand on her, in having a thousand and one plans and backup plans, exit strategies and bolt holes. It's obvious the Hulk scares her more than anything else, because here is something she can't possibly reason with or fight, something that's entirely out of her control and that there's no way to stop - in a way, the Hulk is all her issues with control personified, and all she can do when faced with it is run and hope it doesn't destroy her.

Almost as important as grasping what control she can is paying back her debts, one way or another. Part of it is that she honestly does feel remorse for the things she's done, but she also deeply doesn't like to owe people things, doesn't like that little bit of power it gives them over her. Sometimes she pays back that debt in a direct fashion - for instance, Clint saved her life, and Fury and SHIELD spared it, and she sees working for them as a way to pay them back for that - and sometimes more indirectly. Loki tries to hurt her by hurling all the terrible thing she's done back in her face, and while she acts shaken by it, she's not particularly. She recognizes that she's spilled innocent blood, done terrible things that she would take back if she could... but it doesn't do anyone any good for her to dwell on the past feeling guilty about it. What she can do is try to find a way to balance it out, do enough good for the world to make up for it in some way, and she's determined to do that.

However, there's something of a paradox in the way she goes about that: you don't work for a covert organization as a spy and an assassin and expect to come out of it with clean hands, and making up for the deaths you've caused by shedding more blood is a tricky business. But that's the thing about Natasha: she's been doing this for so long, and from such a young age, that she truly believes a weapon is all she can be, and there's only one thing a weapon is good for. She gets her hands dirty and does the terrible things the heroes never could because someone has to, and because she's damn good at it - but there's a reason she's so good at being other people, and that's because at her core, she doesn't particularly like being herself... and maybe she's not even certain who that person is, in the end.

POWERS: Natasha is an ordinary human, just with enough training and practice at what she does that she makes it seem superhuman. She's a master at hand-to-hand combat, both armed and unarmed, skilled with just about any weapon you could put in her hands, an Olympic-class gymnast and acrobat, and a master spy and assassin with all the rather alarming skills those professions entail. However, she is only as strong, fast, and durable as any other highly trained human, and has no actual superhuman abilities to speak of.

RP SAMPLE:

By the time Natasha heads back to her apartment, the adrenaline's more than worn off. She hasn't slept since Coulson called her in; she's tired and aching, every minor and not-so-minor injury she's sustained in the past few days is screaming for her to pay attention to it, and she's wrung out from days of sustained fear and worry and stress. Protocol says she should call in to Fury, get transport to the helicarrier and stay there to be debriefed, but all she wants to do is curl up in a dark bolthole and lick her wounds where no one can see her; Coulson always used to understand that, and without him to make that call, Natasha's perfectly happy to assume his approval in lieu of other orders. She has never been more happy she keeps an apartment in the city, even if she's hardly ever here to use it.

No matter how exhausted she is, she can't sleep until she's cleared the place - she's got security here you can't get without a lot of money and serious military connections, but she hasn't been here in a while, and no system's perfect. She goes through the apartment room by room, moving silently with gun in hand, and only once everything's checked out does she doublecheck the locks, set her gun on the nightstand, and collapse into bed without even bothering to do more than kick off her shoes.

No sooner does she hit the bed than the world twists around her and she's falling into darkness and pain and all she can think for the instant before the pain becomes to intense to allow thought is an almost disgusted, What now?

ANYTHING ELSE?: Uhh... yeah, so she's basically guaranteed to attack the NPCs on arrival. There's really no way around it. She'll be going for strictly nonlethal attacks and aiming to disable just enough that she removes the threat and can get some answers about what just happened, and she's obviously bound to be not at her best given the effects of the Bridge, but... fair warning, and is this/can this be something that can be played out on her arrival?