#rust cohle — sophia cohle.

[gabriestat]

rust cohle, true detective (2014) / volition from disco elysium (2019)

[kirnet]

ok. ok

[dragawayyourbones]

You are as far from me as memory

With fixtures fracture varyingly

Everything eats and is eaten

Time is fed.

If I think about Rustin and Sophia Cohle for too long I start to feel really ill

[rjgraves]

happy father’s day Rust Cohle

[reds-writings]

hi!  I really like your writing and would totally love more stuff featuring Sunny. I mean, I love JJ, but the dynamic of an optimist and a pessimist is super cute! I wonder if you're willing to extend your thoughts on Rusty as a father (to Sophia or in general) if you wanna

i'd love to write more rust x sunny! if anyone has specific requests themselves or from a prompt i'd love to explore their dynamic some more!

as for some thoughts about rust and sophia i can imagine him at his lightest when she was alive. the most open/free you could've ever experienced him with the little girl who was his absolute heart.

i still think with his upbringing he'd be aloof or unsure when she was first born but it wouldn't take him long to be consumed by such a life-changing love for such a tiny being.

being raised to go about life with such grit and masculinity it would be trial and error figuring out how to raise a girl. all he knew was that he wouldn't be like travis and that was the basis of figuring out the rest as time went on. plus claire was his north star when it came to navigating a lot of it.

he'd take her anywhere he could with him. she'd be his little toddling shadow. playing in the grass while he worked on his truck, dozing on their porch bench while he read, helping (but being way too small to really help) around with house chores, and so on.

he is a girl dad through and through idk how to quite elaborate but he just is :'(

[downs1de]

RUST COHLE: TAG DROP (1/2).

[temeryte]

Rust tag dump (1/2).

[sil-te-plait-tue-moi]

rust cohle with a controversially young girlfriend anyone? not but seriously what would he be like..... would marty judge ( he cant )......

this is so awful but im going to bring up Freud here

like i feel like the line between daughter and not daughter would get blurry as hell 😭 like the man lost a baby girl and does not like to think too long about the way this has maybe fucked with him because it would hurt too much 😛😛

Rust is haunted by women, by the mother he never knew, by Claire, SOPHIA, dora lange, so I think his attraction/desire would just be ODD in general, not even with a younger woman specifically, just like full of weird pining that physically hurts and makes him feel sick

Tbh, with how painfully pragmatic he is, i feel like rust just needs someone to take care of and im not saying a younger woman would be a substitute daughter but im also not not saying that

like satisfying the “needs” of this younger woman would satisfy his own needs that he’s suppressed for so long and will not/maybe never will address.

I do think that, once he’s with you/younger woman, he would never fucking leave, because rust doesn’t hit me as someone to backtrack on his word, and once he’s made his mind up it will take getting fucking stabbed in carcosa to change it

honestly depends which rust we’re talking about though, i think 2012 rust would get with a younger woman if she interested him, i think 2002 rust would be weirder about it (2002 rust is the strangest tragedy i ever saw), and i think 1995 would be weirdest

all versions of him are resistant but all could be broken into because i guess he’s human

marty would be jealous let’s be honest and he would definitely maybe try to be a “morally upstanding guy” and try and judge and make disapproving faces whatever but, inside, he kind of would just hate him cause he ain’t him if yknow what i mean

controversially younger woman personally i can’t write because ive holed myself up in a little world and let me tell you my Pinterest screen time has gone CRAYZY in the past 2/3 months HOWEVER there are writers out there who explore it super interestingly

anyway i hope this answered your Q, idk if smut headcanons were what you were looking for instead ToT

[twobrokenwyngs]

Jackie I'm still saving the last ep but. I need to hear your thoughts about TD. Is there a tag where you've screamed about it? Or feel free to do it again!! What do you love about it. Tell meeee

screaming and crying over this ask tbhhh

firstly - I do have a true detective tag! and a rust cohle tag! and a rust x marty tag! and although I don't have a distinct tag for meta & such, I infuse most of my reblogs with an insane amount of unhinged raving in the tags, so, lmao. it's def there if you want it! XD

secondly - there is actually a lot I can't say without you having seen the last episode, in particular the way the show ends. one of the things I love is the fullness of their arc(s) and the way they're changed by the end, for which you gotta see how it wraps up!!!

all that aside though... man. why I love this show is almost too big and amorphous to answer lol, but I'll give it a shot!

lmao whoops this got long

I mean... one obvious variable is Rust himself. I am so endlessly compelled by both the tragedy and the potential of him. by thinking about who he used to be - when he had Sophia, when he had Claire. he tells Papania and Gilbough that the job didn't make him that way but that being that way made him right for the job, but was he always that way? was he always a lonely jaded cynic, a product of growing up in the Alaskan wilderness with nothing but his imagination and his synesthesia to keep him occupied? is his nihilism baked into his DNA or was it carefully constructed after a lifetime of being abandoned and disappointed, used and discarded? the thing about him is that he wears that nihilism on the surface, almost like a badge of honor, but there is always this pervasive sense that he is in a state of grief for the things he no longer allows himself - love, desire, softness, comfort, hope. he has made himself into this target for other peoples' pain and bullshit because it slides right off him, so he might as well, right?

like, the whole thing with Crash... that REALLY fucks me up. episode 4 is actually my favorite, and Crash is definitely a huge part of that. he accesses a whole different part of himself to inhabit that person. you can tell that during his time with the Iron Crusaders, he was like... their pet. fed drugs and passed around, used and abused, all for the sake of "the job," but it so clearly was a way to exercise self-punishment, an excuse to remove himself from polite society and just give in to his baser nature. when it came time to put Crash back on, he donned him like a second skin, confident to the point of mania, in a way that breaks my fucking heart. I could go on and on about Crash tbh, it almost warrants its own post lol.

and then there's like, the way he has somehow both no relationship with his body and yet a strict routine for its upkeep. he keeps the engine running (or at least he did, for a while) but he doesn't allow that body so much as the dignity of sleeping with a bedframe. he doesn't use it for pleasure, he barely knows how to control it when he's not using it for his job. and yet, every single thing about his physicality compels me. his slouch. his gait. his little mouth noises. matt mcc I can take or leave, but I think Rust specifically is one of the most beautiful creatures I have ever seen or ever will see.

okay... let me move on to Marty. Marty is fucking fascinating to me. he's a bastard and an asshole and a hypocrite and I think so much about the way insecurity rules his life. he makes all of his choices based on what he thinks he should want, what kind of man he thinks he should be, and he will delude himself to the point of absurdity in order to realize that vision. (it's why, in my headcanon, comphet plays a huge role in his relationship with Rust and with himself, but that's another story.) like, Marty doesn't actually want to be a family man lmao, but, he has to want to be one. where Rust has given up all illusions of being any sort of person at all, Marty has made pointed decisions about what kind of person - what sort of Man - he is, and that's that. so, nothing slides off him, because everything challenges his fragile sense of self. he overcompensates, he's a product of generational toxic masculinity - by all accounts he's a total stereotype. but like... that's what makes his relationship with Rust so goddamn irresistible.

there's just so much going on there, constantly. Marty claims not to want to get to know Rust, but he can't stop digging and prying, and his protests about what he finds are so... performative. he can barely show up for his own family in the most basic of ways but he's constantly bringing Rust food & coffee, voicing concern about the way Rust lives, trusting him, vouching for him - he cares. so much. and because there's no road map of Expectations to dictate that care, he never becomes suffocated by it. and Rust, despite himself, can feel all of that. it is no small thing for Rust, the eternal lone wolf, to have a partner. he most definitely knows Marty thoroughly - knows when he's lying to himself, knows when to call him on it and when not to. for Marty, he makes a space. carves a notch into the solid rock of his soul and reserves it for Marty alone. after their split, he never really recovers. neither of them do. Rust never fixes his taillight, Marty lets everything dissolve once and for all and spends years alone with his microwave dinners, because what's the point? what they felt when they were together, what they had, was incredibly profound and deeply beyond articulation (they're not willing to do it, even if they could.) and it is truly in the finale that you see the veracity of that change, what means to unexpectedly reclaim the thing that changed you.

anyway, this was just sorta a stream of consciousness, not particularly considered and very off the cuff, and therefore barely skims the surface of why I love this show. I'm sure I'm leaving out so, so much. and of course, it doesn't even touch on the baser reasons I love it/them - I love stories about bitter washed-up old men!!! I love the idea of what they could mean to each other! theirs is some of the only fic I've ever cried at or reread. their happiness, their future, is so ridiculously important to me. and I love the music! and the southern gothic vibes! and Rust's scraggly long hair and his insane mustache and how good he looks in that black shirt when he takes Marty to the storage locker!!! I love that from that first episode, the moment Rust showed up at Marty's door plastered and crying, I knew I was done-for. I mean. y'know?!?!?!

welp lmao. I don't think all THIS is what you asked for but it's what came outta me, so, hey. thank you for giving me a reason to think about them tonight!!!

[gabriestat]

true detective: 1x02 'seeing things' / children of god by mary doria russell

[kirnet]

1.4k words. read on ao3

Rust Cohle lies in the dark and dreams of women.

He has since his wife, since his daughter, since the drugs and shell casings turned his neurochemistry into a nuclear holocaust. He sees things - the soft curve of Sophia’s flushed cheek, her lips stained purple by juice - in oncoming traffic, the headlights burning his eyes to the point of tears. Strands of hair dancing in the field of his vision against neon signs, soft laughter hidden in the beat of bird wings. Always intangible, always romanticized.

He doesn’t need to tell himself they’re not real. He knows.

He lies in the dark and thinks about women, the mattress springs digging into his bare back, watching the shadows under the crucifix nailed to the wall morph until he’s had enough. He’s not getting to sleep tonight, not anything deeper than a fluttering of his eyelids and the lucid dreams waiting in every corner. Pulls himself out of bed, lights a cigarette and sucks it down like oxygen as he stumbles through the blue light that fogs his hallway.

Catching a movement out of the corner of his eye, he pauses, but it’s just the small mirror nailed to the wall holding his askew reflection. He stops, leans forward, falls deep into the pit of his own gaze until he can feel the bottom. Good, there’s still a bottom to feel.

Realizing the cigarette between his lips has burned to nothing but a stub, he pulls back for another one, vertigo stretching his nerves to their thinnest as the air around him repressurizes. Fields of wheat sway in his vision, and for a moment he’s back in Texas, Claire’s fingernails tracing shapes in his arm as the truck stumbles down that dirt road-

He whips around. There is something there, not wheat, but a woman, her blonde hair tumbling down her front. A faux modesty, covering her breasts as she stands nude only a few steps from his mattress. The blindfold is still wrapped around her eyes, though he knows they’re an overcast blue, and the thorns and antlers are still tangled up in her scalp. They stand in silence, Rust trying to blink her away, but the murdered woman remains, the stab wounds in her stomach weeping congealed blood that drips to his floor. Her lips part - half smile and half scream - before they move, sounding out three silent syllables.

Rust narrows his eyes, steps closer, can feel the ice of her stare dripping down his spine when he can’t return it. “What?” he wants to ask, to grab hold of a ghost and get her to speak. But she just raises her arm to the side, burned dirt still trapped under her fingernails, her wrists bruised a midnight purple, and points to the wall.

When he turns to follow her gesture, all he finds is the simple wooden crucifix, the only adornment in a plane of impersonality. He knows she’s gone before he even looks, the smell of ozone lingering, but he still drops his gaze to the carpet, tries and fails to find dotted wine stains.

He checks his pulse. Doesn’t like what he feels.

-

She follows him around, a funeral procession for the living, always in late hours. Fluorescent bulbs at the station catching moths and buzzing at a frequency that makes him taste copper. He washes it away with coffee and another cigarette. She usually doesn’t pass the threshold through the front doors, doesn’t like all the noise or all the cops, Rust isn’t sure. But she enters when people begin to trickle out, keeps him company when Marty leaves to see his secretary. Or maybe it really is Maggie this time.

He knows her name now, Dora Lange, knows how she looked on her prom night, knows the gap-toothed smile she had when she was Sophia’s age. Right now she’s blue, bloated, her blood stuck in her legs when she was made to kneel. Her wounds have turned black, the once calligraphy-thin rivulets of blood staining wide marks down the length of her naked body. Sometimes he feels like a haruspex, studying the gore oozing from her gut as if it holds any answer, or sometimes he watches that strange swirl in between her shoulder blades long enough to make it move. It could hypnotize a lesser man.

Still can’t see her eyes through that blindfold, still doesn’t know what her voice sounds like. And maybe that’s a blessing, an interruption to whatever chains her to his side, something that stops her from haunting him completely. But Rust doesn’t believe in God or ghosts, so he ignores her, focus turned to the statements in front of him. Canvasing photos, her husband, her friend Carla. “Yesterday upon the stair, I met a man who wasn’t there… He wasn’t there again today.”

He can hear her antlers scrape against the window blinds like a bird trapped inside. He has to remind himself that they are an addition, a defilement, not a thing naturally growing out of her skull. She’s a hallucination, an unreality to file away with the rest of the women he knows the names of. Nothing more than neurons misfiring.

“I wish, I wish he’d go away.”

Her father wouldn’t bathe her.

The temperature drops as she nears. She smells like pine and salt, an Alaskan chill fogging his breath, but it’s really just a cloud of cigarette smoke curling lazily in the air. Twists, bends until it's a jagged spiral. A rudimentary shape. Primal. Something a child would draw in crayon. A pictogram etched into a cave wall.

There’s breath on his ear, three short bursts - and then she’s gone.

-

He knows it’s the right church the moment he steps out from the car.

Even with his back turned towards the structure, his hair catching the breeze off the lakes, he knows. The blackbirds erupt up together, flock, whirl in turn into a spiral that he sees every time he blinks..

It’s Lange’s body sketched in his ledger, her wounds and marks. It’s her history printed out in color and taped up in his apartment where she first appeared. He stares at her and thinks, eyes darting from the two dimensional copies to the decaying corpse a few feet away, a beer in one hand and a bottle of pills in the other. Flies buzz and land on her antlers, but she doesn’t bat them away, she just waits.

Sometimes he forgets the shape of Sophia’s nose. He can draw Lange’s lips from memory.

“Devil nets” is what that pastor had called the bundles of sticks they found Lange with. “Bird nets.” Catch the Devil before he gets too close. Trap a girl while she can still sing. Something to tie together to keep the hands busy. A cross. A cage.

She’s in the back of the car, leaking out all over the interior, not that Marty notices as he slams the door closed and strides to the husk of the church’s foundation. It would almost be funny, the way this woman made of smoke and vapor has to stoop to fit her antlers in this physical space, but Rust is too filled with electricity to care. He follows behind Marty, his ledger buzzing underneath his palm, the very fabric of the universe opening to welcome him in.

An owl waits in the charred rafters, watching the men below with half lidded eyes, some sort of angel above the sad mortality of men. Rust can feel Lange’s burning interest in the creature, jealousy maybe, before it spooks and flutters away, utterly silent. Marty doesn’t notice as he toes away at some debris, can’t smell the thunder-crack static in her hair even after she’s been tailing Rust for weeks. Lange pulls her blind but seeing eyes away, her bare feet gliding over splinters and nails, and points. Her jaw works, a fish gasping in oxygen.

She’s not real. They don’t talk; he won’t and she can’t. But there’s a trust there, a knowing in his ancient hindbrain that this is intuition, that this must be the religion that Marty and the other cops yap about. A truth that burns away any darkness.

She can’t talk so Rust does it for her, calls Marty over before he’s even started to move towards the mess of vines. She can’t touch, so he pulls the foliage away, revealing a crude charcoal figure drawn in the exact way she was found in; kneeling, naked, hands bound. But it’s faceless, no mouth given shape on the worn concrete.

Dora Lange’s mouth opens, and Rust cannot tell if she is laughing or screaming.

[pessimisticsarc]

NAVIGATION

RUST COHLE

Aesthetics Art Backstory Desires Headcanons Introspection Physique Isms Soundtrack Visage Wardrobe

TIMELINE

18–23 24–26 32 33–38 40–48 49 Present Day Undercover

PLACES

Alaska Carcosa Louisiana Texas

RELATIONSHIPS

Claire Morgan Martin Hart Sophia Cohle Travis Cohle

DYNAMICS

Family Friendships Relationships

UNIVERSES

Main Berserk Fatherhood Soulless Supernatural Lost Boys The Walking Dead

ACTIVITY

Answered Closed Starter Crack Dashboard Commentary Dashboard Games Interactions Open Starter Prompts

OUT OF CHARACTER

Character Spam Edits Funny OOC Pinned Promotions Saved Self Promotions Wishlist

[the-east-hunter]

you dared not look. A human voice/you thought by inkandcayenne

At North Shore they called it repetition compulsion: the desire to throw himself into a ravine because at least he recognized the landscape. They warned him that he would do this again, and again, and again if he wasn’t careful. “It’s like you’re always bracing for a fight,” Laurie said once, “and if it doesn’t happen, you create one.” Sophia’s blood on the driveway, Marty’s blood in the parking lot, Psyche with her goddamn lamp, poking at a good thing until it’s scorched and screaming. There’s only one story, the oldest: “You climb a tree too high for you,” his pop said, as he passed Rust a bottle of whiskey and began to splint his arm, “you best be prepared to fall and get hurt.”

All the daughters of the year shall dance by inkandcayenne

“So they invent this holiday in a misguided attempt to access fear in a safe way, by covering it with plastic bats and cotton spiderwebs, dye it orange and dip it in sugar and pretend what they’re feeling is a real emotion and not a piss-poor facsimile of one--”

“I wish there was a razor blade in that apple.”

This, too, was myself by inkandcayenne

“When in Rome, brother. But I do clean up real fuckin' pretty.”

& they lived by scioscribe

“You gonna stop clucking over my wardrobe and ask the sixty thousand dollar question?”

“How you found me? You’re a private investigator. That ain’t worth sixty thousand dollars.”

“You know what you do?” Marty said. “You just suck all the fun out of my life.”

The Circle Loom by ballantine

Time is a flat circle, and Rust Cohle traverses it like the ragged thread in a kid’s art project. Marty supposes that makes him the spokes.

[east: I’m actually not a big fan of rust/Marty but this fic is such good writing and concept]

Cornflower Blue by blackeyedblonde

Rust can feel Macie's eyes like a songbird’s wingtips along the side of his face as she slides back onto the seat next to him, curling one bare foot up under her like she might need it for leverage to leap up and spring away.

“Can I play with your hair?” she asks, and at first Rust thinks he heard her wrong, wonders if his ears are going to start pulling the rug out from under him now in cohorts with his eyes, whispering things in a toddler’s voice that he’d have to bash clean from his skull to escape. But neither the fine sheen of sweat that breaks out on his forehead or the shyness in her small voice belies the fact, and he blinks at her once and again before he can force the half-hoarse word out of his throat in a gentle rasp.

“What?”

[east: anyway these are my current faves! If you read any and like em lmk! There’s other good ones too jsut didn’t wanna add ALL of em haha]

hey !! saw ur a true detective fan and wanted 2 ask if u have any rust fanfic recs ?? i can’t find any 😭 i mean … asking 4 a friend ofc

asking for a friend of COURSE (if u find any tell me too because sadly enough i know NONE) (i also haven’t looked though lol)

[hieroglyphicsqiosang]

my friend saw Manchester by the sea and she had a suspicion that Rust might be responsible for Sophia's accident, so he bears the guilt and keeps punishing himself for so many years...That's too sad and I really don't want to think about this possibility.

[akhaste]

Chapters: 1/1 Fandom: True Detective Rating: General Audiences Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Relationships: Rustin "Rust" Cohle/Martin "Marty" Hart Characters: Rustin "Rust" Cohle, Martin "Marty" Hart, Sophia Cohle (mentioned) Additional Tags: Christmas fic, Post-Finale, Coping, Recovery, slight angst, Fluff??? I think??????, Unexpected Emotions in midst of Banter, They're doing their best to deal with it, cheesy af

Summary:

"You dressed up as Santa?"

A Christmas fic, just because

[placewint]

Rust cohle

It's also implied that his abuse of drugs and alcohol has caused him to have insomnia and visual hallucinations. Due to the loss of his daughter and alcohol and drug abuse, Rust has become a pessimistic individual and has a negative view on society in general. Being transferred to the homicide division in Louisiana, Rust moved there and become somewhat a recluse, living in a barren apartment that only had a bed and books on criminology. After being released, he was offered retirement by his superiors, but he refused and wanted to be transferred to the homicide division. While going undercover of several years, Rust survived gunshots wounds and was transferred to a mental hospital in Texas. Afterward, Cohle was given the chance to go to jail or go deep undercover for narcotics by a state attorney, and he chose the latter. His substance abuse led to him turning to drugs after transferring from robbery to narcotics, and he later killed a meth head who injected crystal meth into his child. After his daughter was tragically killed in a car accident, Rust turned to alcohol, which led to his divorce from Claire. Rust later returned to Texas presumably due to not liking the cold temperatures, and became a police officer at the Houston Police Department.Īround this time, Rust met a woman named Claire, and the two eventually married and had a daughter together, Sophia. Rustin Spencer "Rust" Cohle was born around the 1960s to an unnamed father in Texas, but lived the majority of his childhood in Alaska. He is portrayed by Matthew McConaughey, who also voiced Buster Moon in Sing, and Beetle in Kubo and the Two Strings. However Cohle's hardened personality has made him almost the perfect detective as he is able to get into the mind set of even the most evil and depraved criminals that his job pits him against. Cohle serves as on of the two main protagonists of the HBO crime drama True Detective alongside his partner, Martin Hart of season one.Īfter losing his young daughter in a tragic car accident, his became a broken man that dedicated every part of himself to his job, at the same time making him a hard and cold person, losing all faith in everything and everyone around him. We are things that labor under the illusion of having a self an accretion of sensory, experience and feeling, programmed with total assurance that we are each somebody, when in fact everybody is nobody.ĭetective Rustin "Rust" Spencer Cohle is a brilliant but disturbed Detective serving in the Louisiana State Police. ~ Rust Cohle to detectives Gilbough and Papania. And like a lot of dreams, there's a monster at the end of it. It was all the same dream, a dream that you had inside a locked room, a dream about being a person. To realize that all your life-you know, all your love, all your hate, all your memories, all your pain-it was all the same thing. To finally know that you didn't have to hold on so tight. You, yourself, this whole big drama, it was never more than a jerry-rig of presumption and dumb will, and you could just let go.