Work Text:
i.
He drinks, therefore he is.
No, wait.
He is, therefore he drinks.
Closer, but.
iv.
“You ain’t a nice boy,” said the first girl he ever loved, in his own way, and yeah, okay, point?
He grows up, sort of, and he doesn’t get better. He feels live flesh under his hands and thinks of the ventricles of their heart, that pump to keep their skin so fresh. He feels dead flesh under his hands and he doesn’t think of anything. He feels his own skin and his pulse is sluggish, slow. It could have been the barbiturates, or the ice-cold shower, or how he never quite feels alive, no matter what he does. He supposes a better man might care. He’s got a gun on his belt, and a star. His obligations are all long gone. Long dead.
“You ain’t--” says Martin Hart, and he doesn’t finish. It doesn’t matter. Cohle knew what he was going to say anyway. If he was the sort of man shit meant something to, it might have meant something, that he didn’t finish saying it. He is not the sort of man, and he smells something on Hart, something wrong. Not that it’s really wrong, exactly. Just wrong to him. Right is wrong and wrong is right and his world is closing in at the corners. Keep up. He’s got a gun. You’re not asking the right questions. But he is. He is.
So, no. Rust Cohle ain’t a nice boy. He ain’t a very nice boy at all.
xi.
He hates Louisiana.
It’s not a value judgement, for all it is. He hated Texas, has hated every state he’s ever had to drive through, every town and and every road, because hating keeps him alive. Hate sucks everything out of him until he’s empty, left lit up and raving, on fire because all he he’s ever known how to do is burn.
Rust Cohle was a man born hating. A man born hated. The secret of the nihilist: that hatred is better than nothing. That being hated is better than having them ignore you, forget you, brush you under their feet again.
Cohle hates nothing so much as the open road. It’s been seven years, ten, five seconds, three minutes. He’s trapped in that moment, and he’s never getting free. Hating’s all he’s got. He puts the keys in the ignition, rolls the window down, and--
He’s not dead, he guesses. Least there’s that. (Or not.)
iii.
“If you don’t even fuckin’ know who the goddamn Governor is, maybe you oughta think about gettin’ a television,” says Hart, and he might have a point, because many people do, it’s just that their points are never anything that Cohle is even remotely interested in entertaining.
(What’s the point, what’s their point, he’s the sharpened weapon around here, he’s the fuckin’ needle, he’s the one with the words that cut to the bone, he’s whipsmart, knifesmart, flesh hanging off him in strips and screaming and no one’s listening, right right right? He’s the godforsaken, goddamn, non-godfearing point. He doesn’t need another one.)
“Or,” says Hart, after a moment’s reflection, “A fuckin’ life.”
He doesn’t get a television. He goes home and reads his twenty-ninth book about the investigation of Ted Bundy. He doesn’t want a television. He doesn’t need a life.
v.
He makes a mistake, a month into their partnership, falls asleep where Hart can see.
It was dumb, in that way he’s dumb sometimes, hands shaking with withdrawal or exhaustion or that other thing, the thing that leaves his walls bare and his insides hollow and his eyes a weapon all by their lonesome, and it was dumb, and he knows it, but he can’t take it back.
“Didn’t think you slept,” says Hart, when Cohle wakes up, hair left all stuck-up and dumb from where his head was shoved against the car window, because he’s a whole litany of dumb today, and Cohle doesn’t move a muscle on his face, not a single one.
“I don’t,” he says, and it isn’t even a lie, not really. It’ll be days before he does it again. It’ll be a lifetime before he does it where someone else can see.
(God-he-doesn’t-believe-in-help-him, no it won’t.)
viii.
“Put your hands above your head or I’m gonna put a fuckin’ bullet right between your eyes,” he does not say.
He pulls the trigger anyway.
vi.
Louisiana means baptist, catholic, all kinds of shit, crosses and crucifixes, hellfire and brimstone and rosaries and dog collars stretched tight around all kinds of throats.
Sometimes, he shakes in church. He can’t help it. His body betrays him like this like it betrays him all the time, with dreaming and thinking and being so fucking alive when all he wants to do is lie down in the ground and for it all to stop.
The second church he goes in with Hart is Catholic, all Jesus hanging from the ceiling and the Virgin watching him from corners, her eyes kind and gentle and damning him to hell.
There’s mud caked under his left ring fingernail, the legacy of another crime scene. (The only place he ever feels safe.)
He dips his fingers in the holy water next to the door, watches the black grave dirt swirl, leave the water filthy, profane.
He wipes his hand on his suit, catches Hart watching him, a mixture of revulsion and surprise plain on his face.
“What,” says Cohle levelly, “Thinkin’ it woulda burned me?”
(He did. A little.)
ii.
He reads a minimum of three books a week. It would be a game he played with himself, if he played games, other than this one he’s got going always, the one called survival and it’s Russian Roulette with every goddamn bullet left in the gun. So, he reads, and he goes nowhere and he talks to no one. He drinks cough medicine until he passes out and he puts the books in the garbage when he’s done, unless he’s sure he’ll need them later, and truth be told, he’s never all that sure of anything, not anymore.
“What do you even do in there, man,” says Hart, and it’s not really a question, not even really something Cohle was supposed to have heard.
He wishes he knew the answer, though.
vii.
“Don’t call here anymore,” she says. She could be one of a dozen shes. It could be one of only a handful of calls. He doesn’t say anything, hangs up.
He pulls the phone line out of the wall. He does not speak her name. He never calls.
x.
He can smell fear on the air, that part was never a lie.
It’s a lie of omission, because some of it’s coming from Hart, and only some of it is about their killer, this much he knows. Hart’s not scared of him, exactly, but he’s wary, that’s for sure. He talks to Cohle like a man only half the time, the rest like he’s a cat he found hiding in his garbage, mangy and hissing and claws half-sheathed. Wild. Nasty. Feral. Like he’s feral as fuck.
Cohle knows he should care, because he’s not quite detached enough not to know, his knowledge of such things a finger that’s being held onto a hand by the skinflap, like the hair he’s ripped out in barfights, hanging on by the root in bloody clumps, like the tendrils of almost-feeling he gets in his chest in the early morning, before he wakes up, remembers. But knowing you ought to do something doesn’t make you do it. Cohle knows lots of things. He just cares about so little.
“Murderer don’t even care if we catch him,” he says, just to watch Hart squirm.
Not feeling. Not caring until it hurts you. Killing. The trifecta of things he knows well. Hart won’t look at him, and there’s bruises under the collar of his shirt. It doesn’t matter. He has the only holy trinity he’ll ever need.