DID YOU DO IT BILLY?

exploring . . . a shattered mirror, gore and porcelain, beauty marred and rotting, maggots spilling out everyone that touches you, the weight of a thousand masks, the eyes of too many watchers, never-ending war, a kingdom built in a sand castle, the god of war weeps behind the drapes, the machine does not & will not love you, violence as currency, a face is just another weapon, disposable ghosts in the battlefield of the mind, the slow decay of self, identities carved out of survival, rewritten memories in blood, the puppeteer and the marionette, a house of glass and knives, looking into the abyss and seeing your own reflection grin, the pinocchio complex. are you real?

𝚃𝙷𝙴𝙼𝙴𝚂: 𝚄𝙻𝚃𝚁𝙰𝚅𝙸𝙾𝙻𝙴𝙽𝙲𝙴, 𝙽𝚂𝙵𝚆, 𝙳𝚁𝚄𝙶 𝙰𝙱𝚄𝚂𝙴, 𝙰𝙳𝙳𝙸𝙲𝚃𝙸𝙾𝙽, 𝙿𝚂𝚈𝙲𝙷𝙾𝙻𝙾𝙶𝙸𝙲𝙰𝙻 𝙱𝚁𝙴𝙰𝙺𝙳𝙾𝚆𝙽, 𝚄𝙽𝙴𝚃𝙷𝙸𝙲𝙰𝙻 𝙴𝚇𝙿𝙴𝚁𝙸𝙼𝙴𝙽𝚃𝙰𝚃𝙸𝙾𝙽, 𝚆𝙰𝚁 𝚃𝚁𝙰𝚄𝙼𝙰, 𝙿𝚃𝚂𝙳, 𝙳𝙸𝚂𝚂𝙾𝙲𝙸𝙰𝚃𝙸𝙾𝙽, 𝙳𝙴𝙴𝙿 𝙲𝙾𝙳𝙴𝙳 𝙽𝙰𝚁𝙲𝙸𝚂𝙎𝙸𝚂𝚃𝙸𝙲 𝙸𝙽𝙹𝚄𝚁𝚈, 𝙲𝙾𝚁𝚁𝚄𝙿𝚃𝙸𝙾𝙽, 𝙴𝚇𝙿𝙻𝙾𝙸𝚃𝙰𝚃𝙸𝙾𝙽, 𝚂𝚄𝙸𝙲𝙸𝙳𝙰𝙻 𝙸𝙳𝙴𝙰𝚃𝙸𝙾𝙽, 𝙼𝙸𝙻𝙸𝚃𝙰𝚁𝚈-𝙸𝙽𝙳𝚄𝚂𝚃𝚁𝙸𝙰𝙻 𝙲𝙾𝙼𝙿𝙻𝙴𝚇, 𝙾𝙱𝚂𝙴𝚂𝚂𝙸𝚅𝙴 𝙲𝙾𝙽𝚃𝚁𝙾𝙻, 𝙳𝙸𝚂𝚃𝙾𝚁𝚃𝙴𝙳 𝙸𝙼𝙰𝙶𝙴𝚁𝚈 𝙾𝙵 𝙻𝙾𝚅𝙴, 𝚂𝙴𝙻𝙵-𝙳𝙴𝚂𝚃𝚁𝚄𝙲𝚃𝙸𝙾𝙽 𝙳𝙸𝚂𝙶𝚄𝙸𝚂𝙴𝙳 𝙰𝚂 𝚂𝚄𝚁𝚅𝙸𝚅𝙰𝙻, 𝙿𝙾𝙻𝙸𝚃𝙸𝙲𝙰𝙻 𝙿𝙰𝚆𝙽𝚂, 𝙲𝙾𝙽𝚂𝚄𝙼𝙴𝙳 𝙱𝚈 𝙷𝙸𝚂 𝙾𝚆𝙽 𝙼𝙰𝙲𝙷𝙸𝙽𝙴.

please be advised: muse is a csa survivor and a war criminal. triggering themes will be tagged, but understand metas/hc will be expanding upon this.

𝚆𝙾𝚁𝙻𝙳𝙱𝚄𝙸𝙻𝙳𝙸𝙽𝙶 𝙸𝙽𝚂𝙿𝙸𝚁𝙰𝚃𝙸𝙾𝙽:

a world of black ops and discarded soldiers. where the battlefield follows you home and shapes your dreams, nightmares, and reality. jacob's ladder, the killer, the ghost in the shell, taxi driver, the machinist, american psycho, shutter island, a clockwork orange, tetsuo: the iron man, night comes for us, and old boy.

since i discussed it with @rescuefield I may as well copy+paste it here. it's subject to change, but this is the skeleton of what i'm working with thus far.

billy is someone who was directly tied to umbrella’s paramilitary side— a recruiter for the umbrella security service. specifically, he would’ve been the one who personally built out u.s.s. delta team / wolfpack. handpicked recruits. soldiers he understood, molded for the job, and trusted to operate in that kind of environment.

and then following that ending—where wolfpack lets leon and claire walk because umbrella left them to die—that’s the fracture point that separates billy from umbrella. billy defects with them vector and the rest of wolfpack. goes completely radio dark. disappears into the underworld with a unit that already knows what it means to be used and discarded, all the while plotting out their vendetta.

from there, it’s intentionally ambiguous who they answer to, if anyone. maybe they take contracts from umbrella competitors like the corporation, maybe not. but on the surface, they re-emerge as ANVIL. a private military group with a very specific reputation—containment, extraction, suppression. not heroes. not clean-up in the public sense. they handle what’s left when things are already beyond saving.

and because of RE9 establishing that parts of the bsaa are compromised, ANVIL ends up getting contracted to deal with that internal rot. not out of loyalty to the system—but because it aligns with their revenge.

umbrella betrayed them.

the system that replaced it is starting to look the same. so now it’s personal. their work isn’t about stopping outbreaks at the source. if anything, they arrive after the fact. billy isn’t running in to save a city—he’s deciding what evidence survives, what gets extracted, and what gets buried so it can be used later to dismantle whoever’s responsible.

leaning into my jigsaw interpretation: he doesn’t see monsters first. he sees the process of what it means to transcend your mortal coil. taking soldiers, altering them, conditioning them, and turning them into weapons. that’s something he recognizes because it’s what was done to him. wolfpack, in a way, becomes a precursor to what the bsaa is starting to do with their own people. so there’s no moral shock there. no spiral. he makes very deliberate choices to either dismantle it or repurpose it.

in the field, he’s not leon or chris. and he's not wesker. he’s not loud, not heroic, not bent on supremacy as a uber mensch. with billy, if a situation can be avoided, he avoids it. if it can’t, he resolves it quickly and moves on. his priorities are: conserving energy, maintaining control of the space they're in and controlling the outcomes of the circumstances they find themselves in, contracted or otherwise.

psychologically, he doesn’t break under that environment. he’s already built for compartmentalization. the only place where that starts to falter is with infected children. that’s where his logic begins to falter. it's not enough to stop him from acting, but enough that he’ll look away for a second longer than he should.

author note: i haven't talked about this much, but this stems from the information here.

the way i look at billy as jigsaw—especially when you factor in those therapy files—is that this isn’t just him “snapping” or becoming more violent. it’s actually his mind trying to reorganize itself after everything that’s been destabilized. because what stands out in those notes is his aggression through navigating the fragmentation and body horror. he has memory loss, scattered recall, and no real cohesive sense of self anymore. cognitively, he's still sharp; thinking, planning, conducting operations. but he can't integrate who he was with who he is now. there's a gap there that never properly closes. instead of processing that gap, he tries to work around in.

that’s where the jigsaw identity really comes in. krista introduces the idea of piecing yourself back together—using the metaphor of a puzzle to rebuild identity, reconnect memory, and create something whole again. billy doesn’t reject that idea outright. he actually accepts the framework, but he changes what it means. instead of using it to heal, he uses it to construct something functional. he’s not trying to become the man he used to be. he’s trying to assemble a version of himself that makes sense in the present, without needing the past to line up cleanly.

he suffers from denial, repression, and often projects more than he did prior to becoming jigsaw because it's uncomfortable sitting with his own inconsistencies. he starts to externalize all of it. he looks at other people and sees the same things he can't reconcile in himself. so he's noticeably avoidant. when he talks to himself, there's self-deception. he finds himself dependent and emotionally weak. he refuses to acknowledge that as a reflection of his own state, instead treats it like a problem that needs to be corrected.

so his behavior as jigsaw, ends up replicating stratagems from his therapy sessions, but in a distorted way. he orchestrates situations that are controlled. in them he forces people to confront uncomfortable truths about themselves, but without any safety nets or guidance that actual therapy would provide them. his methods don't rely on taking people through the process gradually. there's no room to fail safely. in his mind, that's the raw honesty of life. it gives clarity because pain was the only thing that ever gave him clarity, so he naturally assumes that's universal.

his day day means that he's not functioning in the chaos. he's actually very structured because he methodically builds situations around people who catches his interest and determines who "qualifies" in the long haul. so instead of rebuilding his self-worth through healing, as he should, he redefines it through authorship. therapy is dead. nobody is evaluating or treating him. billy sets the terms, designs the test, and decides on who and what passes and fails.

his files mention that he uses humor deflect, that he resists applying coping mechanisms, but still he engages with his former therapist's ideas on a conceptual level. so he comprehends what his healing would require. but since it requires him to confront his shadow-self, he's not willing to do the work.

@w4rwhispers

( text →  agt madani ) training again soon, agent? ;-) [DELETED AFTER] @w4rwhispers

( text →  matt murdock ) good morning, mr. murdock. this is billy russo. the ceo of anvil, a private security firm operating across the five boroughs. I attempted to call you several times, but to no avail, so I hope you don't mind a quick text. I have a couple of men that needs a good devil's advocate. the best, actually. I understood you're a busy man, but, might you have room to fit us in? money is a non-issue for me, rest assured. I thank you for your time, and look forward to hearing your response. @sangiusd3vil

( text →  erik ) I received confirmation linda will be in attendance for this thursday's meeting. I've yet to receive confirmation from you. I don't want to ask your girlfriend to drag you ass over here. what's the word, brother? @falsedk1ng

( text →  mrs. russo lizzy shelby ) hey, while I'm out and about in the city, before I swing on by, I wanted to pick up something for the rugrats. what'll they be eating? [DELETED AFTER] @wedstrife

@metroeden

honestly? the streets.

younger billy tried to stay away from his foster environment as much as he could. if the weather didn't make it too cold, he slept in the open—on stoops, benches, roofs, and bleachers in the parks. and even when the temperature made his flesh ache enough that he knew he shouldn't have come out of the house, there were enough nights when you might have found billy sleeping on the pavement, cradled within a box, if he weren't staying over at one of his homeboy's place, rather than in the apartment.

because arthur was there.

and arthur was a danger. the sort of man who thought that punishment and inappropriate violations on a teenaged boys bodies was the same thing as love, and that holding back was merely a excuse for a lesson in submission. billy knew how far he could go before he might as well have tried to kill the man.

so he liked to stay moving.

sometimes you’d see him pumping iron in the park late at night, doing reps of pull-ups or rehabilitating a bad shoulder by exercising a torn ligament that he’d never be able to get right again. this was not about appearance. this was about preparedness. giving himself something to let loose so that his rage didn’t engulf everything else.

he knew how to navigate in the gaps of this city—urban explorations was an unintentional hobby of his. he knew how to hide in places where the sunlight didn’t penetrate and people would never go. unless they're lost. billy liked to slink away in areas where no one asked any questions.

I mean, part of that was practicality. part of it was darker. it would be a lie to say there wasn’t a passive death‑wish threaded through those years. a familiarity with disappearance. dead on train tracks. dead in a gutter. dead somewhere anonymous enough that no one bothered to learn his name or could even recognize they were perceiving a human corpse. not a plan—just an option that stayed on the table.

canonically, when the doctor left billy's bleeding in the dumpster, when death came close enough to smell, his terror wasn't the pain of madani's bullets. it was the dirty solitude he didn't ask for. dying unseen under a starless sky. the idea of dying alone was one of the worse things that could happen to him. the contradiction never resolved itself—wanting to vanish, but not wanting to be abandoned.

that aside, the instincts of knowing the lay of the land never left him. he could buy out an entire floor of the towers in midtown and still know the location of every bolt hole and every exit within a 5-mile radius. luxury didn’t erase the need to know where to run. the city’s underground—tunnels, crawlspaces, forgotten infrastructure—was always there, all grossly layered beneath the illusion of order. the synagogue tunnel discovery in january 2024 was only a surface glimpse of what’s been there all along.

billy invested in that hidden geography quietly. methodically. paranoia, maybe. but it's always about preparation. comfort used to be an issue for him, but it's the simple math of surviving.

no we (america) don't.

just last year, the u.s. saw its biggest spike in homelessness in over a decade. & veterans—especially post-9/11 enlisted—remain statistically overrepresented among those facing depression, addiction, suicidal ideation, and alienation after service. navigating military orientation to civilian life is a challenging readjustment period, and many aren't able to make it. the va doesn't afford them quality care and better programs so that there wouldn't be such a high prevalence of unemployment and homelessness.

civilians are conditioned to say “thank you for your service,” but the state shows its real gratitude with underfunded VA clinics, long waitlists, and bureaucratic abandonment.

some veterans buy into the myth that their enlistment was a matter of personal choice or patriotic “voluntary service.” but that’s a fantasy the military-industrial complex cultivates to obscure the truth: many were conscripted by poverty. others joined to avoid prison time. some were homeless before they could even sign up. the "career opportunity" sold to them was just state-sanctioned bait—gold-painted shit used to extract labor from the nation’s internal colonies. their desperation to escape the gutter is preyed on.

even the promise of stability through "gainful employment" collapses once you take into account some of the long-term outcomes:

veteran homelessness

parole and recidivism

skyrocketing suicide rates

unaddressed trauma and disability

social abandonment

anyhone who's walked a block in manhattan or LA or Philly and seen a paraplegic vet in torn camos, cardboard sign in hand, knows this isn't just anecdotal—it’s a normalized epidemic.

so when billy russo builds a channel where discarded vets can earn, feel useful, and be reminded that their suffering meant something—even if it’s a manipulation—it’s a kind of moral realism that frank castle and curtis struggle with. his modus operandi is irrefutably selfish and predatory, but it's effective. because he invests—emotionally and financially—in the psychological aftermath of war in a way the state never has.

in s1, curtis tells billy:

“your money pays the rent. keeps the homeless guys in coffee and soup. and occasionally, we talk about being a vet. it helps. some of them, I think. they keep coming back, so that must mean something, right?”

curtis believes in therapy. frank believes in vengeance. billy believes in infrastructure—even if he builds it in the shape of a trap.

@wedstrife | a peak inside their...

the top drawer - quick access, left slightly ajar - tactical.

a loaded sig sauer p365 or walther ppk

a bible tucked under the weapon. he’s not religious, but the stories help him sleep—or stay awake.

a bag of condoms — mixed selection. lambskin (for sensation). ultra-thin (for closeness). ribbed (for her). flavored (for fun). he accommodates. always has. many reasons they have not to leave.

prescription bottles (painkillers, sleep aids)

a burner phone, stashed behind a half-smoked bag of weed.

the bottom drawer - less touched, carries a sentimental weight.

an old photo of him and tommy o’neal, surrounded by other boys from the group home. never reconnected. always forgets to. maybe he doesn’t want to.

a stack of veteran pamphlets and business cards. they have curtis hoyle’s name, number, and an address for a new york vet support group.

@wedstrife | meta question. always accepting!

if he's in a position where he has to worry about food and how he'd afford it, then something's gone wrong. that's a problem.

for billy, food used to mean survival. as a child, meals were conditional: offered as reward, withheld as punishment. arthur made sure of that. he made kids who pushed back work twice as hard to earn a crumb of kindness.

billy hated playing those games. if it wasn’t secondhand off someone else’s plate, it came from the streets. that’s where he first learned how depraved survival could get. he watched what people—people like him—had to do to eat. nobody liked the poor. and food? food was just another way to flex power. you either had enough to waste or you didn’t.

now, as an adult, it’s about control. what he eats, how much, when. clean plating. ample portions. sometimes expensive, always intentional. there’s power in that performance—the refusal to wolf it down, the quiet, calculated savoring.

never again that starving kid. no giving anyone the impression that he’s missed too many meals. no signs of lack.

and food as ritual? sure. there’s intimacy in it, depending on who’s across the table. maybe a dark, pricey bottle. maybe a steak. depends on the woman. she could be a meat-eater, vegan, pescatarian—it doesn’t matter. billy adapts. he keeps a mental library of the best spots in the city, from luxury rooftops to hole-in-the-wall joints. he can flex both ways. mcdonald’s and chinese takeout filled his belly plenty of nights growing up. he hasn’t forgotten.