Displayed: A Black Widow Adventure

Again, my sincere apologies for the delay. This week just decided to kick my ass and I just really struggled trying to complete the originally intended caption I had picked out. It's halfway done so assuming there's no GENIE'D! comic for Monday...I'll try to get that or another caption out for you guys.

But luckily Midjourney gave me a pretty decent looking image and the story for it fell into place pretty quickly and easily. Hope you guys enjoy it.

TEXT

Natasha Romanoff, also known as the Black Widow, was determined to find her best friend, Hawkeye, the perfect retirement gift as the marksman was finally getting out of the superhero game. Clint was typically not one to give himself over to being what one might call a 'nerd' or a 'geek', but the two spies had shared such an intense bond in their friendship that Natasha had discovered that Hawkeye did, in fact, have a hobby that wasn't just about shooting arrows or endless home repair and renovations. Clint had a soft spot for an old Western show that he had watched as a child and she, being an ever-resourceful spy, had found one of the rare handful of props that still existed from the show. It was a authentic quiver used by the show's main character and was full of prop arrows, and it was located in a rather obscure but successful 'nerd shop' in the state of Indiana. So after logging into one of her fake 'civilian' online accounts, Natasha had contacted the store's owner, who went by the (totally not creepy) online name of 'Th3_C0llect0r'. He was actually just some old fat guy in his late 60s who had mostly gone bald, with the rather unassuming name of Mike. But this Mike, or rather Th3_C0llect0r, was a bit more tech savvy than Natasha had expected, and shortly into their conversation about the prop...He revealed that he knew EXACTLY who Natasha was.

"I'll only sell them to you if you come to my store in person, wearing your suit and let me take a few pictures. It'll do wonders for my shop!" He'd demanded, though Nat had expected him to jack up the price as well, since the Black Widow was publically associated with genius billionaire playboy philanthropist Tony Stark. But Th3_C0llect0r never once raised the price, and it seemed like all he really wanted was some actual face time with a world famous hero that had saved said world several times. Not a bad deal, all things considered. Definitely a little higher on the 'creep' scale than she preferred, but still, not bad.

"Okay, done" She'd sent back. Natasha had logged off, cleaned her history and any trace of her online footprint (She didn't want anyone, especially Clint, learning about her plan), and had gone to bed. The next day she woke up, snuck out of Avenger's Tower and had discreetly made her way to medium-town Indiana by way of remote piloted Quinjet in stealth mode.

The store wasn't hard to find, after all 'nerd' stores in the Midwest tended to standout, but after making sure it was NOT a trap, Natasha slipped into her suit and made her way inside.

"Ohmygod! It's you!" Th3_C0llect0r had gushed, waddling out from behind the store's sales counter, a strange and old looking camera in his pudgy hands, "Oh, oh, can you stand still for me while I take you?" Natasha rolled her eyes and resigned herself to a couple of hours of making this guy's day as she stood there, a slight, fake smile on her lips as Th3_C0llect0r raised the odd looking camera and then -FLASH-. In that one instant moment, a strange sensation washed over Natasha, like being pulled into a whirlpool. black Widow herself being compressed and flattened, her body becoming lighter and fragile like she was being squeezed from front to back by two massive hands! And she couldn't speak! She was screaming at the top of her lungs, but there was no sound escaping from full lips that would no longer move from the false smile she'd put on them! Eventually her vision began to return and she was staring up at the rounded bulk of Th3_C0llect0r, a unsettling grin plastered across his chubby face.

"Oh wow, it worked! I can't believe it! Here's let's get you off the filthy, filthy floor!" The man said with a giggle, and Natasha saw his hands reach down, grab her by the sides, and effortlessly bring her back to a standing position...Directly across from a mirror. If she'd been able to, she would have screamed, performed a scissor-kick on the man and ran for the exit. But instead she could only stare at herself, a perfect cardboard cutout of her body, less than an inch thick and glossy, with her body held upright with nothing more than a small wedge of cardboard that attached her feet to the cardboard base beneath them. But the amount of detail was incredible, and every last life-like aspect of her body was presented. "Oh you have NO idea how great this is going to be for the shop! I've got an ORIGINAL Black Widow! Oh the guys will be SO jealous! This'll bring in so much cash for the shop, you'll see! People will pay to take selfies with you! I can use you on social media and..." Th3_C0llect0r rambled on as he positioned Natasha near a stand of Avengers merchandise, including plastic figures of herself that seemed to stare up at her frozen, cardboard form in pity. She was nothing more than an object now! Natasha tried to force herself to calm down and remind herself that eventually, the other Avengers would come looking for her. But it would take a while with the work she'd put in to hide her tracks...All for a bunch of stupid balsawood arrows for a retirement party. But the missing Quinjet would cause them to start looking, and surely word of such a perfect cardboard copy of Black Widow nearby would get them to show up...But they never did. 

Natasha spent hours and days, which turned into weeks and months, being nothing more than just another display in the store. And true to his word, she was a draw, and, with nothing else she could do but watch, Natasha did notice that as word of her got out, the overall stream of customers to the store DID increase. And much like her captor said, almost every day there was someone that wanted to pull out their phone and snap a picture of themselves with her. For a price. But as months turned into years...The draw of her perfect depiction fell away. Th3_C0llect0r didn't even speak to her anymore! He just shuffled her fading body around the store, typically near Avengers merchandise...But when they stopped making merch that depicted her and instead some girl called the 'White Widow'. She'd been replaced! That meant the Avengers had stopped looking for her! Eventually, as the years passed by, no more Avengers merchandise was sold at the store, and Natasha barely ever saw her owner anymore, the man's health having deteriorated with age. And with no merchandise to promote and her heroic legacy forgotten...Eventually Natasha just ended up in storage. Time lost all meaning in the darkness. Years passed in silence and stillness. Natasha, or rather, the cardboard cutout began to even forget what it had been like to be alive, and that maybe all those thoughts of adventures were just the random dreams of cardboard, yearning to actually be human. Or at the very least, put back on display. Until one day a strange man in a suit had dragged her out into the sunlight. The old cardboard cutout realized that she was still in a the real world, and it wasn't just some dream! It...no, SHE! She was a person! Maybe she could be saved! Maybe-

"What is this? It's not worth putting in the estate sale. Throw it in the dumpster with all that other cardboard trash" The man said, and Natasha, the cardboard cutout of some long forgotten hero named 'Black Widow', was bent, folded and irreparably destroyed as she was thrown into a nearby dumpester as the foreclosure of the long abandoned and closed comic book store continued. Soon she was buried under other garbage, and the dumpster was emptied, with her final, ultimate home in the dump soon to follow. She wanted to be sad, but, after so many years...She just accepted her fate. She was just cardboard, after all. And dissolving away in a landfill was the ultimate fate for cardboard. Maybe she'd dream about those silly make-believe friends and adventures she'd gone on again before she eventually decayed away into nothing?