#the government ain’t smart enough or well organized enough to hide something that big that convincingly for this long

[cinematicbookworm]

Man the average right leaning person really is just the most gullable people like shit some times I forget how stupid some people can be and then they open their mouths and start talking about aliens and demons on planes after watching some video online of some lady going crazy on a plane talking bout a passenger being not real like the woman was probably haveing a mental break and y’all are really out here talking bout demonic fucking possession of the person who is being screamed at by someone clearly having a break from reality shits crazy

[imaginetonyandbucky]

The Buy In

Chapter 3: Puzzle Wrapped in an Enigma 

by @dracusfyre

On the way back home after the brothel closed, Bucky logged into Discord and dropped into a channel labeled only with random numbers and letters. First day of work was :thumbs up:  but there were two dudebros who tried to jam up my shit. Wish they would back off, he wrote. The channel was monitored 24/7 in case of emergency or actionable intel.

He waited as the dots danced, then his police handler wrote, that sucks. who are they?

Bucky typed the last four of Rumlow and Rollins’ badge numbers and put his phone back in his pocket. This operation was way more important than those two swinging dicks; between the video from tonight, which was going to be a PR nightmare for the department, and his request, Rumlow and Rollins better be manning a desk for the foreseeable future.

He was pulling out his keys to his apartment building when he heard a car door opening nearby. His head whipped around and his other hand was already on the pistol in the holster at the small of his back when he heard, “Whoa there Blue Eyes,” in a familiar voice. The figure that stepped out of the car held his hands up and stepped into the light.  “Hard day at the office?”

“I’ve had worse,” Bucky said warily.

“How’d everything go today?” Stark shoved his hands in his pocket and leaned against his car, the streetlight casting harsh shadows on his face.

“Fine. Didn’t KT give you a debrief?”

“Yeah, I heard his side. I wanna hear your side.”

Bucky thought about it, wondering if he should put a shine on it or be honest. “KT and Hawkeye’s play tonight was clever and would have worked perfectly against a different set of cops. But I think those two won’t give up until they get back at the person who embarrassed them. Might have made more problems than they solved.”

“Yeah?” Stark tilted his head to the side thoughtfully. “You sure about that? KT's been on the job for a few years now and thought it was a good call. It's your first day and you saw the cops for all of fifteen minutes.”

Bucky shrugged. “I’ve met guys like them before. Don't strike me as the type to know when they're beat. Best thing would be for them to be encouraged to take a long walk off a short pier.”

Stark made a thoughtful noise. “But KT explained office policy on that?”

“Yeah. Only as a last resort.” Bucky tried to sound neutral, but something of his skepticism must have bled through.

“You don’t agree?”

The note in Stark’s voice put Bucky on high alert. Higher alert, since his heart was still racing from before. “I get the logic, it’s just…different,” Bucky said. “Makes sense though. Bodies attract attention.”

“Is that the only reason you think it's a good policy?” Stark asked neutrally.

Bucky hesitated. He got the feeling there was a right and wrong answer to this and wished this conversation had happened six hours ago when he was less tired. “Killing people changes things,” he said finally - honestly - hoping he wasn’t about to touchy-feely himself out of this operation. Between the military, the police, and then undercover work with organized crime, he had been so steeped in machismo that it had become second nature – to those guys, life was one big dick measuring contest - but Stark didn’t seem to work like that. Or at least, he didn't want people to think he worked like that. “Not just changes people, but like…it sends a message to everyone else. ‘This is what a life is worth.’” Bucky took a deep breath and let it out slowly, forcing himself to maintain eye contact with Stark.  “People respond to that. Makes them…mean. Hard. So if you can avoid that...” He ran a hand over the back of his neck, feeling like an idiot. He probably sounded ridiculous. “So, yeah. Anyway. Guess if it ain’t broke don’t fix it, right? Seems to be working for you.”

“We do alright,” Stark said slowly, and Bucky figured he must have said the right thing because he straightened and held out a hand for Bucky to shake. Bucky looked at it with surprise and took it, feeling acutely aware of the strength of Stark’s grip and the callouses on his palms. “Welcome aboard.”

                                               ***

Tony got back in his car as Blue Eyes continued into his building, cranking it and pulling away from the curb on autopilot. If Blue Eyes hadn’t been a cop, Tony would have told himself that he was too good to be true; as it was, Tony wondered if it was possible that the police or feds or whoever had profiled him well enough to give “Brooks” a gold plated script to work from. But it hadn’t felt like the new guy was playing him tonight; his comments had been too rambling and inarticulate to have been prepared in advance. Rhodey was going to think he was an idiot, but he really though Brooks was being honest with him tonight, which had the potential to change things.

At the first stoplight, he pulled out his phone and texted Rhodey.

I like him.

Rhodey sent a rolling eyes emoji almost immediately. Blue Eyes?

Yeah I want to keep him. he’s wasted as a cop.

The three dots must have started and stopped a dozen times; Tony was almost back to his own place when he finally got a response. You’re playing with fire.

Tony smirked. I know, he wrote back. It’s what I do.

Yeah, but this time, if you get burnt, we all do. Tony pulled into his private garage and turned off the car, listening to the engine tick as it cooled. Rhodey was right. As much as he was intrigued by Blue Eyes, he couldn’t put his people at risk by tugging on that thread. “Dammit,” he said out loud, scowling as he got out of the car. “Ten years ago I wouldn't have thought twice.”

                                             ***

A few weeks into the operation Bucky and KT were making the rounds, checking in with the businesses and people on their beat, and Bucky was suddenly struck by two things: one, just how much this gig felt like being a street cop, walking the sidewalks just observing the neighborhood; and two, how no one was ever this happy to see him when he was a street cop. People saw KT and more often than not, they were smiling, chatty about business and local gossip. Most of them greeted Bucky (“Oh, this must be Blue Eyes,” which had yet to stop making Bucky’s ears burn) and were happy to introduce themselves. The ones that weren’t smiling were the ones that had something to complain about: permit not going through, shipment delayed, broken equipment that insurance wasn’t paying out for. KT took notes, nodded and commiserated, and when they left almost everyone looked at least mollified, if not cheered.

“You know, for us playing the bag men today, we sure aren’t picking up any money,” Bucky commented. A couple of times KT had taken a store owner to the side and Bucky, straining his ears, heard something about loans; these people always had the look of someone explaining why they couldn’t pay but it wasn’t their fault, honest. Like everything else, KT made notes and listened politely.

“That’s not what we’re doing,” KT said. “This is check in. We do it every two weeks or so. Money stuff is all handled online.”

“Yeah?” Bucky knew for a fact that the FBI had been working with the Treasury to trace Stark’s money, and, failing to find any signs of dirty money or money laundering, had concluded he must be operating with cash only.

“Yeah. Boss didn’t want to tempt anyone or make them a target.” That was smart, Bucky reflected. Ripping off other gangs was an art form in organized crime. Still, he had to wonder how Stark kept the money transfers so well hidden from the best financial analysts in the US government.

“No targets except his accountant,” Bucky joked, fishing for info. “Like with Al Capone.”

KT just shrugged at that, like he didn’t know and didn’t care, so Bucky left it alone. “So what do we do with that stuff?” Bucky said, gesturing at the notebook KT had been writing in all morning.

“We take care of it.” He took the notebook out and flipped through it. “Not too much stuff this time.”

Bucky turned that over in his head. “So under the Mechanic, fixers actually…fix things,” he said. “You’re really going to call a shipping company and an insurance office and everything?”

“Yep. Well, we are.”

Made sense; if businesses were paying Stark for protection, he could also throw in other services to sweeten the pot and keep people from rolling on him. Bucky shoved his hands in his pockets and was lost in thought while he mostly followed KT around the neighborhood. Granted he’d only been here for less than a week, but so far nothing was adding up to what he’d read in the case files on Stark and his organization. It was making him uneasy. He’d come here with a picture in his head, and a goal of filling in the holes so they could make a case against an organized crime boss; but now he was increasingly realizing that something was wrong with the picture. So when KT told him one night that they had the next two days off, Bucky sent another message on the Discord channel and when he got a confirmation, he went to the New York Library, the big one with the stone lions and millions of tourists. He went to the adult services desk and asked for a laptop. The librarian studied his ID, went to a safe, and handed him a laptop from inside. Bucky found a study carrell in a quiet spot and logged on with an 8 character name and 16 character password, established and memorized before he’d started this operation, and opened up the case files on Stark.

Scrolling through, Bucky felt some of his disquiet ease as he re-read the laundry list of crimes Stark was reportedly involved in: racketeering, tax fraud, illegal gambling, high-end car theft. Armed obberies; he opened up the file on robberies and realized with morbid amusement that even while Stark protected his own people from being targeted, he had no problem targeting bagmen from other gangs, making off with hundreds of thousands of dollars at a time. Tax fraud, obviously; if Tony was hiding all of his income from the FBI, he was definitely hiding it from the IRS. Though as he opened up Stark’s tax statements, gotten from a subpoena to the IRS, and noticed that the document for just one year was hundreds of pages long, Bucky reflected that a good accountant could hide a lot of money in his legitimate businesses and all the assets that Stark had inherited from his parents.

At the back of the file was sex trafficking, which was based on a handful of reports that said that prostitutes were disappearing from other parts of the city and showing up working for Stark. Bucky put a note next to that one recommending the line of investigation be dropped. After spending hours and hours at the brothel chatting to the Widow and the ladies there, waiting to see if Rumlow returned, he knew none of the men or women there were being forced to stay, not even for lack of other work. Widow recruited from all around the city, helping people get out of the business if they wanted to and offering others a chance to work for her. Turns out, most of that building was devoted to the people who worked in the brothel: everyone got their own apartment, which was separate from the suites they entertained clients, and there was an in-house doctor and even childcare in the basement. All the money went straight back to the sex workers, except for this mysterious buy-in that no one had explained yet, and they were using it for a bewildering array of side projects that the women were more than happy to talk about during their down time.

After a few hours, which included writing up his reports from the past few weeks of working for Stark, Bucky sat back and closed the laptop. It was his first month, he reminded himself. No one was going to let him close to the real work of the organization after just a few weeks. He sent another message to his handler on Discord, and when he got a confirmation back, he stood up and walked away from the carrell; when he was about twenty feet away, he saw his police contact, dressed like a soccer mom, come by and spirit the laptop away.

His next stop was the gym; by the time he was done, shirt soaked wet with sweat and muscles aching, his head felt clearer.  He didn’t know why Stark was trying so hard to seem like a good guy, but if Bucky was patient enough he’d scrape past all the pseudo-philanthropy and get to the real man underneath. Stark wasn’t the first guy to be handsome and charming and charismatic while hiding a dark side.

[benbarnesescape]

2, 44 and 48 with billy russo? (from your new prompt list) maybe with the reader being a cia agent or something like that and going 'bad' for billy? But that's up to you (:

This was really fun to write! 

“Thisisn’t a game and you shouldn’t treat this like one.”

You pulledyour jacket closer to you as you walked down the busy streets of New York, asteaming cup of coffee in one of your hands and your bag held closely in theother as those words ran through your head. You turned a corner only to begreeted by a stranger running into you, dumping your large black coffee allover the New York street along with the contents in your work bag.

“Really?”you say to no one as the guy curses at you, not stopping to help you as youbend down to pick up the contents. You sigh, noticing a couple of files thathad become victim in the accident and begin to organize the files, pushing themback into your leather satchel.

Itwas your fault, running into the guy. You were distracted. Billy had been inyour head again. Had been for a while now. It annoyed the shit out of youbecause if he was in your head that meant that you were taking his warning witha grain of salt.

“You got a lot to lose if youfind Frank Castle.” Billy watched you as you threw your head back against hiscouch, strategically placing your feet on the table.

“What do you mean Billy. I don’thave kids. I don’t have a mom or dad – meth and gang violence took care of thata long time ago. Move too much to have to many close friends. I, of all thepeople involved in this tango, have nothing to lose.”

Billy’s back is to you, pouringyou both drinks before he turns around and strides toward you, taking a seattoo close to you as you grab the glass.

“You know what I mean. You likeyour job. Always been good at getting people to tell you your secrets by anymeans,” You roll your eyes as his hand moves to your thigh and you sit up,looking at him as his voice drops, an octave more serious. “I know that you’veworked your whole life Y/N to be a part of the CIA. You were a good soldier,you’re a better intelligence gatherer and you’re a natural killer. Don’t letMadani getting in that pretty little head of yours and make you forget that –get in the way of your dream.”

You take a swig of your drinkbefore you swat his hand away, your face inching closer to his as you whisper,

“Shouldn’t that be my lineRusso. You were always the kind of guy who liked to get your taste and move on.But you haven’t with Madani. I think she really likes you. And you like her.Obviously.”

You stand up and walk toward thewindow, trying to ignore the ache in your heart. You and Billy had had metwhile you both served – him as a marine and you in the army. You were anintelligence gathered assigned to his team because you were the best and theyneeded it. You had stayed in contact over the years and, when Stein had slidthe file across your desk about the possibility of Frank Castle being alive,had contacted Billy immediately about it. The same Frank that had garnered yourrespect while you served together. You knew how much he meant to Billy andcouldn’t hold it back, even if it was a breach of policy.

You hear Billy sigh as he setshis glass down, before walking to the window behind you.

“You know, I never denied how muchI liked you,” he whispers, reaching for your glass and turning you around. “Youwere the one always talking about boundaries. And Madani is a means to an endfor now.”

You shake your head, placingyour hands on his chest.

“Billy that’s beside the point. IFFrank is alive, he’s waist deep in some shit. The government is in some stinkyunkosher shit. I don’t know what to do anymore. Don’t know what I am ifeverything I believe in is a lie…”

Billy sighs, looking out at thecity skyline and you both stand there in silence. Minutes later, he looks downat you, seriousness dripping from his voice,

“I know you like to play gamesand be a tease and all that. Its half the reason I’ve always liked you. Youknow how to find the balance in keeping your sanity and getting shit done. ButY/N, this isn’t a game and you shouldn’t treat this like one. Remember thatwhatever path you decide to take.”

Thathad happened two weeks ago and after you left his place you both had been radiosilent. Wasn’t usual for either of you but you know, somewhere in the back of yourmind, it was probably best that way. You sigh, placing the last paper in yourbag before you hear a voice say,

“Ifyou want, I got a good look of the guys face. I can kick his ass for not beinga gentleman.”

You tryto hide your smile as you look up to see Billy smiling down at you, two cups ofsteaming coffee in his hands.

“Youplant that guy to have an excuse to talk to me?” You ask, extending your handup for existence as Billy easily pulls you up, balancing the large coffee’sperfectly in his other hand.

“If Iknew it was that easy I would have.”

Yousmile, taking the coffee, he offers and give a contented sigh as you take along sip.

“So,you’re tailing me?” you finally say and Billy chuckles, sticking his free handin his pocket and shaking his head.

“JesusY/N you really are a pusher. I saw you when I was getting a coffee and wasgoing to come over and apologize. Then I saw that asshole knock you off yourgame and had to check on you.”

Younod, moving aside to a less busy part of the sidewalk and Billy follows you asyou say,

“Heardyou and Madani ain’t a thing anymore.”

“She’sbeen pushing me about some things and I’m over it you know. Its fine to have anice fuck but not if she’s going to keep prying.”

Youshake your head, trying not to be annoyed as you ask,

“Thenwhy talk to me. I’m no different.”

Hewatches you carefully, before taking a step closer to you and ignore thepounding in your heart as you look up at his tall stature.

“I can’t stop thinking about you… I can’t.”

“Billy…” you begin and he raises his hand.

“Listen, outside of frank you were one of the few people in my lifethat always had my back. Always went out of your way to make sure I was alive –ok. And…. despite all my fucked up attachment issues, I care for you. I likeyou. And stubborn or not – I know you like me too. So, let me…. help you withyour work thing.”

You’re silent, taking long sips of your coffee before you exhale andsay,

“If you help me then you’re helping Madani.”

Billy shakes his head, an amused smile on his face before gettingcloser and whispering.

“I don’t give a fuck about Madani. I care about you. And the fact thatmaybe, through a little investigative work, I got a hit on frank.”

You stare at him, feeling the way, your breathing has hitched as yourbrain tries to focus on him. Frank Castle really was alive?”

“Are you sure?” you finally let out and Billy nods, his eyes no longerwith that twinkle of amusement.

“Had a beer with him not but two days ago.”

You bite your lip, looking down, trying to ignore the way your handsshake, causing your coffee to bleed over the cup onto your frigid hands. Billynotices. He gently holds your hand and you look back up at him, shaking your head.

“Hoping he wasn’t alive you know. That just seriously complicates…. Idon’t……I don’t want to give him to Madani but I don’t also understand why Frankwould go into hiding either unless he had something to hide.”

Billy nods before smiling, taking your work bag and looping his armwith yours.

“You have a few minutes for breakfast?”

You arch an eyebrow. You didn’t. You had a thousand case files to gothrough, on top of investigating who had killed one of your service men. Yourlife was one big tornado waiting to be released.

“Why not?” you shrug and you both start heading down the street.Getting caught in the sound of the city. Silent and stuck in your head.Finally, Billy whispers low enough for you to catch,

“I have a proposal for you.”

“A proposal?”

“It has to deal with all this shit but if things play out well, we cankeep Frank’s identity safe and ensure that you and fellow CIA agents don’t getcaught in the cross hairs.”

“Sounds like the kind of work I used to do back when I was a naïve littlearmy woman.” You stop and look back at him and he’s avoiding you. His eyessearching anywhere but your face.

“Sounds like a job a certain policy man in DC used to want us to do.”

His jaw flexes and you give a soft nod.

“He help you with Anvil?”

Billy clears his throat and nods.

“Government track. That’s smart. Helps take care of that itch – that feelingof being in control.”

You turn back in front of you sighing. You didn’t know what Billywanted from you but whenever you got involved with William, you always ended upbeing more an assassin than an intelligence gatherer. That side of you, thatcrazy animalistic side, scared the shit out of you.

“You don’t have to do it. We pretend I ever bought it up.”

He’s trying to offer you an olive branch you know. Know that he’s puthimself on the line for being honest with you because he cared. Cared beyondthe sexual tension and teasing. There was a bond you had with him. With frank. Witha lot of men and women you served with. Strongest with him. You debate it asyou cross the street as he takes you closer to the dive diner that had been afavorite for years before you stop him, looking up at him and saying

“I am who I am because of you. If you need help with Frank Castle,then who better to help you get him than me.”

He smiles, before he bends down to kiss you softly. When he pulls awayhe whispers,

“You don’t know how happy you just made me.”