Natasha Romanoff (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
outstandingbalance) wrote2017-08-27 02:34 pm
outstandingbalance) wrote2017-08-27 02:34 pm
Entrance Way Application
Name: Saro
DW username: N/A
E-Mail: saro.lynne at gmail dot com
IM: Discord - saro#0930
Plurk:![[plurk.com profile]](https://plurk.com/favicon.ico)
sarosaron
Other Characters: N/A
Character Name: Natasha Romanoff
Series: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Timeline: Post Captain America: Civil War
Canon Resource Link: MCU Wiki
Character History: Little is known about Natasha Romanoff’s early life, but it’s clear that from early childhood, she was groomed by the KGB to be a killer. Training was brutally hard, with young girls forced past the limits of normal endurance, fighting, killing, sometimes even pitted against each other to the death. It was hard, but Natasha excelled at the work and stood out among her peers.
In the Red Room, where Natasha trained, there was a graduation ceremony. Graduates were sterilized. This, it was believed, made for better killers. The ultimate goal of the training was to create weapons, not soldiers—not people. Faced with this final step toward fulfilling Russia's vision for superior operatives, Natasha intentionally failed her final test in an act of rebellion that the Red Room’s head mistress saw through. Natasha was passed, in the end, and did graduate, but both the act of trying to retain her agency and the way she lost it, followed Natasha into the present, as seen in the flashbacks that haunt her in Avengers: Age of Ultron.
Just how long Natasha worked as a spy and assassin isn’t known, but Natasha admits that she made a reputation for herself. There are allusions throughout her movie appearances to a ruthless and bloody career. To Loki, she admits that she didn’t care who she used her skills for, or on.
That career lasted until Clint Barton, the man who would become Natasha’s best friend, was sent to kill her. Exactly how that meeting went is not revealed by canon, but we do know that rather than finish the job he was given, Clint decided instead to give Natasha the chance to turn her life around, and we know that Natasha, given another path, chose to take it. She came back with Clint, and she joined SHIELD.
By her first appearance in Iron Man 2, Natasha has earned a place of trust within the organization. She uses the skill set honed through her previous career to infiltrate Stark Industries, where she is tasked with assessing Tony Stark’s suitability for the Avengers Initiative. She goes undercover as Natalie Rushman, presenting a persona that intrigues Stark and inspires him to let her close enough to not only judge his behavior, but subtly test him. Natasha gauges his responses to stress and his ability to work on a team. In particular before Tony’s birthday party, her advice nudges him toward doing whatever he wants to do, with whoever he wants to do it with, and her subtle direction leads to him an extravagant meltdown. And when that happens, we get to see just how fast her reflexes are, prepared for a fight the moment Tony comes crashing through the ceiling.
While Tony isn’t entirely unsuspicious of her cagey behavior and redirect, she goes unidentified up until after the party when Nick Fury decides that it’s time to reveal their operation. Even beyond that, she remains in Stark Industries, maintaining her cover.
Natasha proves useful to Tony in Iron Man 2’s final conflict, but understandably, there are still some trust issues moving into The Avengers. A fact Natasha herself admits the first time we see her in that movie. In her introduction, she is not exactly undercover again, but she is playing a part. It appears that she’s being interrogated by Russian arms dealers, but when she’s contacted in the middle of questioning, it’s revealed that she’s actually the one looking for information. It’s the news that Agent Barton has been compromised that motivates Natasha to go off mission, ending the confrontation with the Russians in a short, efficient fight, after which, it’s revealed that that Natasha is needed to bring in “the big guy,” which she takes to mean Stark. Natasha comments on how little use she’ll be in that, only to discover that it’s not Tony she’s intended to meet with.
Instead, Natasha is expected to meet with Bruce Banner, the Hulk, and convince him to work with SHIELD.
Natasha’s meeting with Bruce is tense. Compared with her previous interactions with Tony and the Russian arms dealers, Natasha is more cautious. While she puts on a good face, smiling and being as convincing as possible, she’s quick to pull a gun, eyes shiny when Bruce's temper appears to slip. Perhaps because she does break, however briefly, before recovering and ordering her backup to stand down, Bruce agrees to come back with them.
Natasha’s skills in communication prove useful again later when Loki is captured and held prisoner. She comes then to speak with him, to find out what he’s after. As a ploy to draw him out, she speaks about her past, admitting that she was in a bad way before she came to SHIELD and that she owed Barton a debt for it. This strategically deployed truth entices Loki into belittling and taunting her—eventually tipping his hand to reveal that he plans to unleash the Hulk on the team.
Despite the fact she exposed herself intentionally, in the wake of Loki’s goading and the successful blow he strikes against the team, Natasha is rattled. It’s at this point she shifts from a supporting role to a member of the team proper and joins the fight to protect New York. On the team, she works well with others, and eventually takes the initiative to tell Steve Rogers to catapult onto an alien speeder to proactively make an attack on the portal the aliens use to come to earth. In the end, it’s Natasha who closes the portal.
The next time Natasha makes an appearance, it’s in Captain America: the Winter Soldier. She and Steve Rogers have continued working together since the battle in New York and have developed a sort of professional relationship. Natasha shows signs of being friendly, teasing Steve and playing matchmaker with him. However Steve resists this, and why becomes apparent when the pair of them take on a mission together to retake a ship from mercenaries. While Steve’s mission is to rescue the hostages, Natasha’s is to recover information from the ship’s computers. Steve loses his temper when the pair’s missions conflict, viewing Natasha’s deviation from his orders as endangering lives.
However, when Nick Fury appears to have been killed following the mission and Captain America becomes SHIELD’s most wanted, Natasha is quick to invite herself in on the mission. The assassin, she reveals, is known to her. She’s faced him years before, a meeting that led to her being shot. She’s gone after him before, and she knows it’s a dead end, however she also knows that she can help Steve find out what’s really going on here. With her guidance, the pair slip past SHIELD agents and find a direction to follow.
As they pursue their lead in a stolen truck, Natasha and Steve begin to open up to one another. Natasha asks if he’s found anyone special. Steve tells her that it’s hard to find people with shared life experience, which Natasha makes light of, advising to just make something up. “The truth isn’t all things to all people, all the time. And neither am I,” she tells him.
“That’s a hard way to live,” Steve responds.
To which Natasha’s answer is, “It’s a good way not to die though.”
When Natasha asks what Steve wants her to be, he tells her, “How about a friend.”
She advises him that he might be in the wrong business.
It’s an exchange that is echoed in a later conversation when, after their lead leads to them nearly dying when SHIELD fires a missile on them and Steve saves her life. The two learned that Hydra had infiltrated SHIELD from the beginning, operating within the organization and bending it to their ideology.
This time, Steve starts the conversation, observing that she’s uncomfortable after their discoveries. At this point, Natasha reveals to him that she thought she was going straight when she joined SHIELD. She thought she knew whose lies she was telling, but now she was afraid she didn’t know the difference anymore. Revealing this leaves her vulnerable, and Steve repeats her own words back to her—he tells her she may be in the wrong business.
She asks him then if it was the other way around, if it was up to her to save his life, would he trust her to do it?
Steve tells her that he would now.
When it’s revealed that Nick Fury is still alive, Natasha is visibly shaken by the fact that he hadn’t trusted her with the information. The shift is small but important, and when the time to plan their final strike against Hydra and SHIELD comes, Natasha steps back, tacitly taking Steve’s side in the argument and agreeing that all of it has to go, that she won’t protect SHIELD after it has been so deeply corrupted.
The group make their move and are able to foil Hydra’s plans.
Time passes, and Natasha makes her place with the Avengers. By the time they reach Avengers: Age of Ultron, Natasha and the others seem to have found a sort of balance as a team. They are working together to clear out Hydra bases, and the dynamic is now that of a team. They work together, complementing each other’s fighting more. Most importantly, Natasha and Bruce Banner’s relationship has changed. When it’s time for the team to leave the field, Natasha approaches the Hulk and, through a sort of ritualized de-escalation, she’s able to bring Bruce back.
That isn’t the only change in their relationship. When, after their victory, the team hosts a party in Avenger’s tower, Natasha flirts with Bruce. Bruce is hesitant, but the tension from before has been replaced with a different kind of awkwardness.
Things go sideways when Ultron appears and recruits the twins, Pietro and Wanda Maximoff. Wanda’s powers allow her to force visions on the team, horrors drawn from their respective subconsciouses. Natasha’s is a twisted vision of her time in the Red Room, a sort of composite memory with warped details, little girls with no mouths, ballet practice juxtaposed with target practice and flashes of a gynecological procedure—the graduation. The whole team takes a hard hit, and Natasha perhaps among the worst of them in the aftermath.
They retreat to Clint’s family farm house, where they try to regroup and plan their next steps. There, Natasha and Bruce speak again and after an initial attempt on Natasha’s part to keep the tone light and flirty, the conversation turns to the fact that Bruce would not be able to have a family. In that setting, Natasha reveals her own infertility and, further, her insecurity about what was done to her making her a “monster.” But that doesn’t preclude them from running off together and trying to be happy. In that moment, Natasha expresses to him that being an Avenger was like a dream that seemed real at the time, but now she felt as though she were waking up.
Despite her shaken confidence, Natasha still participates in their next move, taking great personal risk to prevent Ultron from moving forward with his plans and being captured in the process. As his prisoner, she’s able to message Barton from the inside so they know that she’s safe and where she can be found. And when Bruce arrives to save her, suggesting that they could leave rather than join the final fight against Ultron, Natasha chooses responsibility over her own happiness, going so far as to push Bruce over a ledge and forcing him to become the Hulk and join the fight as well. Over the course of the battle, she even expresses a willingness to die if it means saving the world.
Her decisions lead to the Hulk refusing to let her bring him back to his Bruce Banner state and running away after the fight, rejecting her in the process. The last we see of Natasha in Age of Ultron, she is committing herself to training new Avengers recruits, “beating them into shape.”
It’s probably fitting, that being the case, that the first time we see Natasha in Captain America: Civil War, she is giving Wanda Maximoff (one of those new recruits) a lesson on situational awareness, advising that looking over her shoulder has to be second nature. At this point Natasha seems to have committed herself fully to the Avengers, not just as a cause, but as a group of people. When faced with the possibility of the Sokovia accords preventing her from being able to take action, Natasha’s choice is the one which, as explains initially “let’s them keep one hand on the wheel.” Later in a private conversation with Steve, Natasha expresses that “Staying together is more important than how we stay together.” While the pair’s friendship remains clear, the two disagree on this and it’s Natasha who is driven to stay with the Avengers, siding with Tony Stark in the process.
She stays with Tony, despite misgivings about escalating pressure to apprehend Steve or take him down, even if it means shooting him in the process, up until the point where the two factions meet in Leipzig. There, what she had hoped to be a intervention and expected to be a contained conflict spirals out of control to do major damage to an airport, including destroying several planes, support vehicles and the control tower. At this point, seeing that neither Steve nor Tony will pull back, Natasha makes the call to let Steve go, covering his escape while he steals the team’s quinjet.
The last we see of Natasha, she is fleeing law enforcement after a brief argument with Tony where she expresses to him that they made the wrong call in judging how to handle the conflict because if no one backed down, the situation was only going to get worse.
Abilities/Special Powers: Natasha has no superhuman abilities, though she’s in peak physical condition and has thorough training as an assassin and spy. She’s a skilled gymnast, well-versed in multiple styles of martial arts, an expert marksman, and fluent in at least six languages.
Third-Person Sample: There’s a trick to moving through a crowd without being noticed. It’s not just a matter of dressing the part, though that helps, and it’s not a matter of keeping your head down and staying quiet. It’s knowing how to move with the flow of people, knowing when bumping into someone will draw less attention than sidestepping would have, and it’s knowing when not to make eye contact and when to stand with your chin high. Walk with purpose, but don’t rush. Hold yourself with confidence, but not arrogance. Most importantly, look like you belong wherever you are.
It comes down to knowing what people expect and playing to those expectations, because almost no one expects to catch Black Widow on their street, going to their coffee shop, an ex-superhero and wanted fugitive right under their noses.
Natasha walks in with her hands in her pockets, her stride long and clopping faintly when the stacked heels of her boots hit the floor. The heels are another strategic choice, a quick and dirty way to change her silhouette. At the counter, she pushes her sunglasses up to her hairline. The corner of her mouth lifts in a crooked smile and pitches her voice a little higher than comes natural to her, though it doesn’t entirely disguise the huskiness. It’s distinct, but not strange. Not something that would make her stand out in a long line of customers as she orders her Americano and pays with a ten, telling the barista to keep the change. She collects her coffee without getting a second glance, not from the girl who delivers it and not from the businessman who stands impatiently behind her.
She takes her cup and walks to a table, pulling her sunglasses back down as she sits across the table from her contact. The tightness in her chest doesn’t show on her face or in her shoulders as she pops the lid off her coffee. A glance around the dining room, at the door, at the narrow hall leading to the restroom, a sweep across the other customers, picking out who’s on their computers or reading books, who’s killing time, her eyes open for anyone who doesn’t belong, anyone who looks up at the wrong time or looks away when her gaze skates past.
It’s only when she’s satisfied that she turns her attention on person across from her and speaks. “What do you have for me?”
First-Person Sample:
[The woman who appears on screen seems calm, her expression neutrally professional. She sits at a desk or a table facing the camera, leaning back in her chair. It’s a carefully curated first appearance on the network.
Then her lip twitches, her head tipping forward just slightly. Natasha wasn’t sure how she was going to start this. Not until she found herself facing her unseen audience.]
Curiouser and curiouser. [Her tone is dry. She knows it’s not funny, and probably she’s not the first person to make that joke, but it cuts the tension.] I’ve been going back through the network posts, so I think we can skip the full welcoming committee. I’d be lying if I said I don’t still have questions, though. Maybe more now than when I started.
[She leans forward, her arms crossing in front of her on the table.]
I don’t expect anyone to have answers, but if anyone wants to talk, let’s say I’m willing to listen.
DW username: N/A
E-Mail: saro.lynne at gmail dot com
IM: Discord - saro#0930
Plurk:
Other Characters: N/A
Character Name: Natasha Romanoff
Series: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Timeline: Post Captain America: Civil War
Canon Resource Link: MCU Wiki
Character History: Little is known about Natasha Romanoff’s early life, but it’s clear that from early childhood, she was groomed by the KGB to be a killer. Training was brutally hard, with young girls forced past the limits of normal endurance, fighting, killing, sometimes even pitted against each other to the death. It was hard, but Natasha excelled at the work and stood out among her peers.
In the Red Room, where Natasha trained, there was a graduation ceremony. Graduates were sterilized. This, it was believed, made for better killers. The ultimate goal of the training was to create weapons, not soldiers—not people. Faced with this final step toward fulfilling Russia's vision for superior operatives, Natasha intentionally failed her final test in an act of rebellion that the Red Room’s head mistress saw through. Natasha was passed, in the end, and did graduate, but both the act of trying to retain her agency and the way she lost it, followed Natasha into the present, as seen in the flashbacks that haunt her in Avengers: Age of Ultron.
Just how long Natasha worked as a spy and assassin isn’t known, but Natasha admits that she made a reputation for herself. There are allusions throughout her movie appearances to a ruthless and bloody career. To Loki, she admits that she didn’t care who she used her skills for, or on.
That career lasted until Clint Barton, the man who would become Natasha’s best friend, was sent to kill her. Exactly how that meeting went is not revealed by canon, but we do know that rather than finish the job he was given, Clint decided instead to give Natasha the chance to turn her life around, and we know that Natasha, given another path, chose to take it. She came back with Clint, and she joined SHIELD.
By her first appearance in Iron Man 2, Natasha has earned a place of trust within the organization. She uses the skill set honed through her previous career to infiltrate Stark Industries, where she is tasked with assessing Tony Stark’s suitability for the Avengers Initiative. She goes undercover as Natalie Rushman, presenting a persona that intrigues Stark and inspires him to let her close enough to not only judge his behavior, but subtly test him. Natasha gauges his responses to stress and his ability to work on a team. In particular before Tony’s birthday party, her advice nudges him toward doing whatever he wants to do, with whoever he wants to do it with, and her subtle direction leads to him an extravagant meltdown. And when that happens, we get to see just how fast her reflexes are, prepared for a fight the moment Tony comes crashing through the ceiling.
While Tony isn’t entirely unsuspicious of her cagey behavior and redirect, she goes unidentified up until after the party when Nick Fury decides that it’s time to reveal their operation. Even beyond that, she remains in Stark Industries, maintaining her cover.
Natasha proves useful to Tony in Iron Man 2’s final conflict, but understandably, there are still some trust issues moving into The Avengers. A fact Natasha herself admits the first time we see her in that movie. In her introduction, she is not exactly undercover again, but she is playing a part. It appears that she’s being interrogated by Russian arms dealers, but when she’s contacted in the middle of questioning, it’s revealed that she’s actually the one looking for information. It’s the news that Agent Barton has been compromised that motivates Natasha to go off mission, ending the confrontation with the Russians in a short, efficient fight, after which, it’s revealed that that Natasha is needed to bring in “the big guy,” which she takes to mean Stark. Natasha comments on how little use she’ll be in that, only to discover that it’s not Tony she’s intended to meet with.
Instead, Natasha is expected to meet with Bruce Banner, the Hulk, and convince him to work with SHIELD.
Natasha’s meeting with Bruce is tense. Compared with her previous interactions with Tony and the Russian arms dealers, Natasha is more cautious. While she puts on a good face, smiling and being as convincing as possible, she’s quick to pull a gun, eyes shiny when Bruce's temper appears to slip. Perhaps because she does break, however briefly, before recovering and ordering her backup to stand down, Bruce agrees to come back with them.
Natasha’s skills in communication prove useful again later when Loki is captured and held prisoner. She comes then to speak with him, to find out what he’s after. As a ploy to draw him out, she speaks about her past, admitting that she was in a bad way before she came to SHIELD and that she owed Barton a debt for it. This strategically deployed truth entices Loki into belittling and taunting her—eventually tipping his hand to reveal that he plans to unleash the Hulk on the team.
Despite the fact she exposed herself intentionally, in the wake of Loki’s goading and the successful blow he strikes against the team, Natasha is rattled. It’s at this point she shifts from a supporting role to a member of the team proper and joins the fight to protect New York. On the team, she works well with others, and eventually takes the initiative to tell Steve Rogers to catapult onto an alien speeder to proactively make an attack on the portal the aliens use to come to earth. In the end, it’s Natasha who closes the portal.
The next time Natasha makes an appearance, it’s in Captain America: the Winter Soldier. She and Steve Rogers have continued working together since the battle in New York and have developed a sort of professional relationship. Natasha shows signs of being friendly, teasing Steve and playing matchmaker with him. However Steve resists this, and why becomes apparent when the pair of them take on a mission together to retake a ship from mercenaries. While Steve’s mission is to rescue the hostages, Natasha’s is to recover information from the ship’s computers. Steve loses his temper when the pair’s missions conflict, viewing Natasha’s deviation from his orders as endangering lives.
However, when Nick Fury appears to have been killed following the mission and Captain America becomes SHIELD’s most wanted, Natasha is quick to invite herself in on the mission. The assassin, she reveals, is known to her. She’s faced him years before, a meeting that led to her being shot. She’s gone after him before, and she knows it’s a dead end, however she also knows that she can help Steve find out what’s really going on here. With her guidance, the pair slip past SHIELD agents and find a direction to follow.
As they pursue their lead in a stolen truck, Natasha and Steve begin to open up to one another. Natasha asks if he’s found anyone special. Steve tells her that it’s hard to find people with shared life experience, which Natasha makes light of, advising to just make something up. “The truth isn’t all things to all people, all the time. And neither am I,” she tells him.
“That’s a hard way to live,” Steve responds.
To which Natasha’s answer is, “It’s a good way not to die though.”
When Natasha asks what Steve wants her to be, he tells her, “How about a friend.”
She advises him that he might be in the wrong business.
It’s an exchange that is echoed in a later conversation when, after their lead leads to them nearly dying when SHIELD fires a missile on them and Steve saves her life. The two learned that Hydra had infiltrated SHIELD from the beginning, operating within the organization and bending it to their ideology.
This time, Steve starts the conversation, observing that she’s uncomfortable after their discoveries. At this point, Natasha reveals to him that she thought she was going straight when she joined SHIELD. She thought she knew whose lies she was telling, but now she was afraid she didn’t know the difference anymore. Revealing this leaves her vulnerable, and Steve repeats her own words back to her—he tells her she may be in the wrong business.
She asks him then if it was the other way around, if it was up to her to save his life, would he trust her to do it?
Steve tells her that he would now.
When it’s revealed that Nick Fury is still alive, Natasha is visibly shaken by the fact that he hadn’t trusted her with the information. The shift is small but important, and when the time to plan their final strike against Hydra and SHIELD comes, Natasha steps back, tacitly taking Steve’s side in the argument and agreeing that all of it has to go, that she won’t protect SHIELD after it has been so deeply corrupted.
The group make their move and are able to foil Hydra’s plans.
Time passes, and Natasha makes her place with the Avengers. By the time they reach Avengers: Age of Ultron, Natasha and the others seem to have found a sort of balance as a team. They are working together to clear out Hydra bases, and the dynamic is now that of a team. They work together, complementing each other’s fighting more. Most importantly, Natasha and Bruce Banner’s relationship has changed. When it’s time for the team to leave the field, Natasha approaches the Hulk and, through a sort of ritualized de-escalation, she’s able to bring Bruce back.
That isn’t the only change in their relationship. When, after their victory, the team hosts a party in Avenger’s tower, Natasha flirts with Bruce. Bruce is hesitant, but the tension from before has been replaced with a different kind of awkwardness.
Things go sideways when Ultron appears and recruits the twins, Pietro and Wanda Maximoff. Wanda’s powers allow her to force visions on the team, horrors drawn from their respective subconsciouses. Natasha’s is a twisted vision of her time in the Red Room, a sort of composite memory with warped details, little girls with no mouths, ballet practice juxtaposed with target practice and flashes of a gynecological procedure—the graduation. The whole team takes a hard hit, and Natasha perhaps among the worst of them in the aftermath.
They retreat to Clint’s family farm house, where they try to regroup and plan their next steps. There, Natasha and Bruce speak again and after an initial attempt on Natasha’s part to keep the tone light and flirty, the conversation turns to the fact that Bruce would not be able to have a family. In that setting, Natasha reveals her own infertility and, further, her insecurity about what was done to her making her a “monster.” But that doesn’t preclude them from running off together and trying to be happy. In that moment, Natasha expresses to him that being an Avenger was like a dream that seemed real at the time, but now she felt as though she were waking up.
Despite her shaken confidence, Natasha still participates in their next move, taking great personal risk to prevent Ultron from moving forward with his plans and being captured in the process. As his prisoner, she’s able to message Barton from the inside so they know that she’s safe and where she can be found. And when Bruce arrives to save her, suggesting that they could leave rather than join the final fight against Ultron, Natasha chooses responsibility over her own happiness, going so far as to push Bruce over a ledge and forcing him to become the Hulk and join the fight as well. Over the course of the battle, she even expresses a willingness to die if it means saving the world.
Her decisions lead to the Hulk refusing to let her bring him back to his Bruce Banner state and running away after the fight, rejecting her in the process. The last we see of Natasha in Age of Ultron, she is committing herself to training new Avengers recruits, “beating them into shape.”
It’s probably fitting, that being the case, that the first time we see Natasha in Captain America: Civil War, she is giving Wanda Maximoff (one of those new recruits) a lesson on situational awareness, advising that looking over her shoulder has to be second nature. At this point Natasha seems to have committed herself fully to the Avengers, not just as a cause, but as a group of people. When faced with the possibility of the Sokovia accords preventing her from being able to take action, Natasha’s choice is the one which, as explains initially “let’s them keep one hand on the wheel.” Later in a private conversation with Steve, Natasha expresses that “Staying together is more important than how we stay together.” While the pair’s friendship remains clear, the two disagree on this and it’s Natasha who is driven to stay with the Avengers, siding with Tony Stark in the process.
She stays with Tony, despite misgivings about escalating pressure to apprehend Steve or take him down, even if it means shooting him in the process, up until the point where the two factions meet in Leipzig. There, what she had hoped to be a intervention and expected to be a contained conflict spirals out of control to do major damage to an airport, including destroying several planes, support vehicles and the control tower. At this point, seeing that neither Steve nor Tony will pull back, Natasha makes the call to let Steve go, covering his escape while he steals the team’s quinjet.
The last we see of Natasha, she is fleeing law enforcement after a brief argument with Tony where she expresses to him that they made the wrong call in judging how to handle the conflict because if no one backed down, the situation was only going to get worse.
Abilities/Special Powers: Natasha has no superhuman abilities, though she’s in peak physical condition and has thorough training as an assassin and spy. She’s a skilled gymnast, well-versed in multiple styles of martial arts, an expert marksman, and fluent in at least six languages.
Third-Person Sample: There’s a trick to moving through a crowd without being noticed. It’s not just a matter of dressing the part, though that helps, and it’s not a matter of keeping your head down and staying quiet. It’s knowing how to move with the flow of people, knowing when bumping into someone will draw less attention than sidestepping would have, and it’s knowing when not to make eye contact and when to stand with your chin high. Walk with purpose, but don’t rush. Hold yourself with confidence, but not arrogance. Most importantly, look like you belong wherever you are.
It comes down to knowing what people expect and playing to those expectations, because almost no one expects to catch Black Widow on their street, going to their coffee shop, an ex-superhero and wanted fugitive right under their noses.
Natasha walks in with her hands in her pockets, her stride long and clopping faintly when the stacked heels of her boots hit the floor. The heels are another strategic choice, a quick and dirty way to change her silhouette. At the counter, she pushes her sunglasses up to her hairline. The corner of her mouth lifts in a crooked smile and pitches her voice a little higher than comes natural to her, though it doesn’t entirely disguise the huskiness. It’s distinct, but not strange. Not something that would make her stand out in a long line of customers as she orders her Americano and pays with a ten, telling the barista to keep the change. She collects her coffee without getting a second glance, not from the girl who delivers it and not from the businessman who stands impatiently behind her.
She takes her cup and walks to a table, pulling her sunglasses back down as she sits across the table from her contact. The tightness in her chest doesn’t show on her face or in her shoulders as she pops the lid off her coffee. A glance around the dining room, at the door, at the narrow hall leading to the restroom, a sweep across the other customers, picking out who’s on their computers or reading books, who’s killing time, her eyes open for anyone who doesn’t belong, anyone who looks up at the wrong time or looks away when her gaze skates past.
It’s only when she’s satisfied that she turns her attention on person across from her and speaks. “What do you have for me?”
First-Person Sample:
[The woman who appears on screen seems calm, her expression neutrally professional. She sits at a desk or a table facing the camera, leaning back in her chair. It’s a carefully curated first appearance on the network.
Then her lip twitches, her head tipping forward just slightly. Natasha wasn’t sure how she was going to start this. Not until she found herself facing her unseen audience.]
Curiouser and curiouser. [Her tone is dry. She knows it’s not funny, and probably she’s not the first person to make that joke, but it cuts the tension.] I’ve been going back through the network posts, so I think we can skip the full welcoming committee. I’d be lying if I said I don’t still have questions, though. Maybe more now than when I started.
[She leans forward, her arms crossing in front of her on the table.]
I don’t expect anyone to have answers, but if anyone wants to talk, let’s say I’m willing to listen.