Part I: She's Been Everybody Else's Girl, Maybe Someday She'll Be Her Own

And, In the Shadows, She Finds a Way

A/N: Thanks for all the speedy feedback!  Enjoy this chapter, and assume everyone is speaking Spanish :)

SHIELD had always kept a good supply of safe houses well-stocked and spread around the world. After joining them and starting to make some money of her own, Natasha Romanoff started doing the same. Clint had taken to calling it her "web," and the name stuck. Less than twenty-four hours after she'd been found in Scotland, she was resting comfortably in one of her more luxurious apartments, in Brazil. Some of her safe houses were sparse and contained a better cache of weaponry than quality furniture, but this one had been one of her favorites. Why Brazil she wasn't really sure. The market had been good at the time, and perhaps she'd been in a more frivolous mood than usual.

In any case, she was reclining on her couch, the television on in the background while she perused available jobs. Not that it was anything so ordinary as the classifieds in the newspaper, but certainly less exciting than films on the subject might have you believe. When she'd worked for SHIELD, she had generally been given assignments with the option of accepting them or not. Often these were presented with minimal information and she had to agree to do the job before she found out any details.

Before that, in the Red Room... Well, she didn't like to think of that place, but certainly no one had been particularly interested in what kind of work she preferred. She was sent out and, if she was successful, she was rewarded. If the mission was not successful, well, then there was no point in returning. After it had been made clear to her that this was not a place she wished to spend her the rest of her days, she had escaped and tried working independently. It was a culture shock to be away from her handlers, and covertly finding jobs for her skillset proved much harder than she'd imagined it would be.

Now, much later, she was far more adept at finding contacts and determining if a job was safe enough to pursue. There had been a lot of mistakes back then – no wonder Clint had found her so easily. It was a relief to join SHIELD, to have oversight again. Plus, it was much easier to assuage guilt when you had the plausible deniability granted when someone else was calling the shots. After what happened to SHIELD, she hated herself for that selfishness. Who knew how much of what she'd done, never questioning, had been to help HYDRA?

Shaking her head to clear it, she focused again on the list and picked an easy job – a bodyguard was needed for a Senora Rosalinda Alvarez in Argentina. It was close by, and the woman was more paranoid than in any actual danger. Her wealth had increased substantially after the death of her husband, and she worried about someone wanting to get a portion of it while she attended his funeral. It would be a long weekend kind of gig, before she left the country for good.

Natasha noted that Senor Alvarez's death was somewhat suspicious and was aware that the wife was likely the culprit. But she needed a job. And would she really turn in a prospective employer when cash was running as low as it was? Well, maybe. Probably, if Senora Alvarez was a murderer. Dmitri was right – she had gone soft. But that wasn't supposed to be a problem – she wasn't supposed to go back to her old life.

Friday morning found Natasha in the Buenos Aires airport, dressed professionally. Male bodyguards often wore clothing that indicated their purpose, but she chose to wear heels and a nice dress. There was sufficient room to conceal her most useful weapons, and she was well-aware that she could incapacitate most people hand-to-hand regardless of what she was wearing. By looking like a businesswoman instead of a bodyguard, she would be underestimated if not dismissed entirely.

Near the baggage claim was a driver holding a sign with her name on it. Well, not her name, obviously. With Isabel Ruiz's name on it. Isabel was a dynamic personality, much more so than Catriona had been. She was an MMA fighter in her younger days until the lifestyle of working hard and partying harder resulted in a loss of supporters. So she'd turned to another way of using her skills to save for retirement, for when her body failed her. She enjoyed the work, getting to know interesting and powerful people, and was good at spotting threats before they became an issue. Many of her previous employers provided glowing reviews – not all fictional. Natasha had been Isabel on a few other occasions, but not for a long time.