Natasha had a place to live but she didn't have a home. Of course, "home" wasn't all that a familiar concept to the assassin who, ironically, dedicated her life to saving others, but her lifestyle choice wasn't exactly stress-free or comforting either. With the fall of S.H.I.E.L.D. the widow had been left unemployed for the running time of about five seconds before Tony (through the coaxing and ideas of Pepper) swept in and offered her residence and employment at the new Avengers Tower in New York. It surprised Natasha at first that the genius, billionaire, playboy, philanthropist willingly shared the spotlight with other people with the renaming of his precious monument in the city skyline. It almost made her feel... out of place. The Russian spy was comfortable with pretty much anything thrown at her, but adapting to the new environment and having her secrets spilled out for the world to see made adjusting a tad bit difficult for her.
Despite the newborn critics and, surprisingly, fans of the female avenger that arose after she helped take down Hydra, Natasha still managed to remain one of the most mysterious members of the group. She definitely didn't sunbathe beneath the public eye like Tony did. She was rather pale actually. So she spent most of her time doing what was familiar to her: going on missions and kicking ass. It was slightly different this time, however, as she returned back to her apartment in the Avengers Tower with all of her teammates. She supposed that she was able to call them all "friends" now, as they saw each other nearly everyday and enjoyed each others company outside of work. Clint and Natasha even got into an ongoing prank war with Tony. The two spies would crawl through the vents and sabotage Stark's business meetings with whatever harmless gases or computer viruses they could think of. It became almost like a recreation for the two.
But then life started to change again for Natasha. She found herself alone in the tower more and more often than not. After all, Clint did have a wife and kids he longed to spend time with and Thor wasn't exactly a permanent resident of Earth so to speak. Tony got to get away with Pepper every now and then, and even Steve had ended up calling that nurse. Bruce stayed at home for days at a time, but specifically for research in the labs, so he wasn't exactly in the same situation as Natasha.
She would never admit to anybody that she was lonely though; it just wasn't in her nature. Clint began to catch on, though. He noticed how she spent more hours training than anything else. Even when she wasn't on missions she could be found in the training rooms shooting at targets or kicking the ass of whatever poor agent either volunteered or was forced to get beat up by her. She was addicted entirely to training and she didn't know how to stop.
"Maybe she just needs a hobby," Tony suggested one day when Clint brought up the subject. "Oooohh, like knitting. Spiders are usually good at that right?"
"One problem," Natasha's voice came from the doorway where she stood with her arms crossed and glaring at Clint. "I don't knit."
Clint sighed before getting up from his chair to jog after her. "Nat," he called as she began to march down the hallway. "Nat, you can't walk away from this."
"You think I'm burying myself in work because I don't have a life," she turned suddenly to face him, catching him off guard for a second.
"Well," the archer thought about which words he was going to choose as he saw her staring him down with her intensely green eyes. "Yes, but Natasha I think it's important that you try to-"
"I know exactly what you're trying to do, Barton. So I'm going to tell you right here and right now. Don't. I don't need you to sign me up for some pottery classes, or book club, or-"
"How about dog sitting?" Tony piped up from behind the two.
Both of the assassins turned to look at Stark. He was holding a cellphone in his hand and appeared to be watching something very amusing, though Natasha was sure it wasn't supposed to be.
"Stark, what the hell are you-"
"No, I'm serious. Here, watch this video Fury just sent me," he replied trying to sound as innocent as possible. "Personally, I think its hilarious. Hey! He should post this to YouTube. I hear that puppy videos are trending right now. Honestly, I'm more a kitten eating watermelon video type of guy, but this puppy stuff is golden."
Natasha snatched the phone out of Tony's hands and pressed the play button on the screen. It was a video of at least three-dozen agents in a semi-circle trying to surround this giant creature backed up in a corner. The animal crouched low to the ground and bore its teeth aggressively at the heavily armed wall of men surrounding it. It was a wolf. There was no sound to the video, but Natasha was sure that the wild canine was growling at the agents as it looked like it was ready to pounce onto them. The wolf was rather large and had unnatural coating. It was a deep black color with bronze stripes running down its back. The beast suddenly broke away from Natasha's focus as it leaped onto an agent and dug its teeth into his throat with such precision that one of the man's carotid arteries must have been hit and he died instantly. It then continued to butcher another ten or so soldiers in a matter of merely five seconds through a series of complex tackles, claws, and bites targeting and hitting specific areas of the body that all caused them to drop out cold. Never before had Natasha seen a wild creature use such human techniques to massacre heavily armed and trained agents. There was a lot of blood everywhere as the wolf finished off the last standing man. He had tried to shoot at the creature, but somehow it was immune to the bullets or either absorbed them, which surprised Natasha. Either way, the wolf was extremely pissed off and immediately beheaded the poor man with its already-bloody fangs. As the video slowed down and the wolf began to casually clean its bloody paws off, Natasha could only stare in horror and awe. There was something unnatural and disturbing about what she had just seen and she had a feeling that Tony was kidding about this dog sitting thing.
"I guess now would be a bad time to tell you that I'm allergic to dogs," Romanoff sarcastically sighed.
It was exactly a week later and Fury was giving the agent a debriefing on her new assignment, as suggested by Tony, for "dog sitting" as he had put it.
"You and I both know that your health records say otherwise," Fury rebutted clearly unamused. Technically he was no longer the director of anything and he was also "dead", but Nicholas Joseph Fury was still very much one of the most influential men in the world and he had connections. And when he came to Stark with an idea in mind for a new "project", he couldn't turn the challenge down. His response was actually rather sadistic and involved something about "finding Banner a new playmate". And if he was then able to get some misery out of Natasha at the same time? Tony was definitely in. It was the perfect plot for revenge after months and months of her and Barton's little pranks.
"Didn't know spiders were afraid of dogs," Clint teased Natasha. She had forced him to come with her as he had been the one with the idea of finding Natasha a hobby.
Fury almost gave a crooked smile as he stopped in front of a glass viewing window and crossed his arms. "Lucky for you, Romanoff, you'll find this mutt to be rather human."
Natasha's eyes wavered over what Fury was speaking of. It was a girl. Strapped down in a hospital bed and quite unconscious was a human girl with no wolf-like features to be seen. Her face laid at a slight angle so that most of her profile could be studied. She supposed that the girl would be classified as petite, as her feet poked through the bedsheets leaving a foot of space between the end of her body and the back of the bed. Natasha thought she was no more than eighteen. Her face was also rather small and seemed to be swallowed up by the massive amount of thick, brownish-black hair spreading itself on her pillow freely. Her nose was small and angular and curved slightly upward from what she could tell. She had a light medium complexion, but it didn't appear to be her natural skin tone. Natasha guessed that it was an acquired tan or perhaps something else. She had small eyelids hidden by the shadows of her thick eyebrows that really framed her face. Her jaw and chin were chiseled and pointed, but not in an overly masculine way, and she had rather high cheekbones that seemed to lift her face up, making her look calmer than she actually was. Natasha could tell her sleep was restless. The girl's body shook as if she were trying to wake herself up. Her nostrils even flared every few seconds to take in deep, desperate breaths of air.
"Milena Telivola," Fury began to introduce the girl and he handed both Natasha and Clint two papers. "Twenty-two-years-old, born in rural Ohio, orphaned at age six, adopted at age thirteen by Gerard and Mary Burns. The couple, along with their newly adopted daughter, moved to Ukraine only two weeks after the adoption. The happy couple were two scientists who specialized in genetic mutations and cloning. They were wanted in Australia for inhumane experimentation on their household pets."
"Well it doesn't sound like a happy ending for this one," Clint muttered to the red head as they flipped through the papers. Most of them offered very little information: mainly blurry, homemade pictures of a giant black wolf hunting through the forest. There were even some news articles of wolf attacks where whole families were slaughtered.
"The couple presumed a new identity in the United States before adopting Telivola," Fury continued and Natasha looked back up at the sleeping girl. Her hand patted at her nose as if it was itching and her eyes furrowed making her look like a confused little puppy. The assassin's head tilted slightly to the side as she studied the young wolf girl. "For two years, Gerard and Mary Burns performed extreme experiments on her with the nucleic acids of Canis lupus that should have put them all in critical conditions. The experimentation took place not too far outside of Chernobyl, where a radioactive reactor core exploded back in 1986, but there was still nuclear radiation present."
"So the Burns's wolf DNA they introduced to her body along with the longterm exposure to the radiation created the disaster that we have here," the spy concluded and she held up a picture that forensics had taken of forty mauled agents' bodies laid out on a blanket of the forest floor. She had one eyebrow raised at Fury and Clint let out a barely audible chuckle.
"Our intelligence is quite certain that Milena Telivola underwent a transformation similar to Banner's that changed her into her 'alter ego form' and she used that to escape captivity. She's been living in the wild for nearly seven years in her other form before we stepped in. The civilian casualty death rate got too high to ignore, and as you could already tell, she's not exactly your normal howling pup."
Natasha had to nod her head in agreement at that. The intel provided enough information for her to conclude that the girl possessed some human instincts and intelligence in her other form. That's why she was able to take down forty armed agents with the precision that took her years to perfect in the Red Room. And yet, she didn't know if she felt more intrigued or intimidated by this.
"How did you take her out?" Clint finally questioned the eyepatched man who's one eye studied the tossing girl.
He chuckled a bit at this before answering, "We sent in Rogers and 250 tranquilizer darts filled with specially treated azaperone. According to Banner, it takes a whole lot more than a few bullets to take out this bitch. Her mutation makes her skin almost impervious to any weaponry we have, but after Rogers beat her around a bit with his shield he was able to pass the darts through a more... susceptible area on the body."
"I won't ask..."
"So she's human again for the first time in seven years," Natasha's mind raced with what she was dealing with. It was easy to say that she had never dealt with a situation quite like this before, and she still wasn't completely sure what Fury wanted her to do.
The director nodded. "'We're not even sure if she can comprehend English or even simple human tasks."
"But you want her on the Avengers," Clint threw out the statement that caused even the widow to turn and look at him in mild surprise. "We're already a sour combination of monsters and mutants, so what's one more? You clearly see her as an asset, or else you wouldn't go through so much trouble and put so many agents on the line. What else would you want her for? Our mascot?"
Natasha's hands balled into fists instinctively. She had worked under Fury for years and cried for the man when she thought he was dead. The relationship between the two was something she could never see coming, but she had eventually come to a deep respect and care for the man behind the eyepatch. Yeah, she was used to him and his secrets, as they were inevitable, but this one got her adrenaline running through her warm, pumping veins. She was on high alert now but stood still.
Fury simply shrugged and nodded with his lips pressed together. "Well, like you said, Barton. What's one more?"