#rust cohle — texas.

[wilgrhm]

[waxxxwork]

I know we all love MM as Rust Cohle but McConaughey as Vilmer Slaughter is another role of his that I adore. Unrestrained, flying off the hinges, fitting seamlessly into a nonsensical Texas Chainsaw Massacre sequel. I love when they let that guy go wild. There’s something so intriguingly unpolished about him as a much younger actor. Vilmer has Crash-energy but cringeworthy and I just love unchecked Southern-accented wrecks of men. (Next time we’ll discuss Viggo Mortensen in TCM III)

[mae-cohl3]

Texas nights from my grandmother’s couch.

[madsmilfelsen]

so anyways Rust met Claire when she proctored his GED exam

[fragilesadgirl]

he’d call me the serene queen<3

[downs1de]

RUST COHLE: TAG DROP (1/2).

[lost-chaparral]

in a dream (job interview going well) you saw a way to survive (their health insurance covers gender affirming surgeries) and you were full of joy

[shotbyafool]

True Detective season 1 is so funny. instead of the new detective assigned to the case in an insular, rural town being a city slicker from the North, he is instead… a guy who was born in Texas. who lived in Alaska.

[temeryte]

Rust tag dump (1/2).

[reds-writings]

bird in a cage

(pairing: crash!rust cohle x f!reader)

word count: 1.5k

a/n: a bit of a concept fic surrounding rust in his crash era i've had in the drafts. if you would like more let me know 🫣. y'know i love me some feedback

warnings: men being gross, ginger, hints at prostitution, ginger, language, sexism, etc (let me know if i missed anything!)

There was something almost eerie about Crash whenever you got the chance to be in actual proximity to him. Something lost. 

Something broken. 

It made you want to hide away anytime those tortured eyes met yours. Like you were in the wrong, an intruder of some extreme fortitude of privacy. Heavy and asphyxiating.

Despite your trepidation around Ginger’s righthand man, there was always an underlying thirst to know more. 

He was a handsome fella. You’d be stupid to deny it. All the other girls around knew it too and had no shame in chittering every chance they got ever since he manifested into your lives in the extreme bore that was East Texas.  

Ginger wouldn’t let you speak much to him. Although, that wasn’t entirely uncommon since the fucker wouldn’t let you speak to anyone much at all.

Just sit there and look pretty, doll. You’re ass ain’t good for much the fuck else. He’d say. Damning you to be some cheap whore in an even cheaper cage til the day you got ugly or died.

You’d never anticipated this is where you would end up in life. You’re sure not many girls do but thanks to your pathetic shit-heel of a brother who got himself tied up in some irreversible mess you’re now indebted to a gang leader who thought doing you a mercy was enslaving you to work for him for the rest of your days. 

Some nights you dreamed of putting one right between his bloodshot baby blues. God knows the world could do with one less of a son of a bitch like him. Gruesome consequences that’d be sure to follow be damned. 

The night air was cooler than usual, offering a small reprieve to your sun-tightened skin. You’re sure by age 40 you’d look no better than some beat-up leather couch left on the side of the road. Any money you did get to keep wasn’t prioritized for shit like sunscreen or maybe even fancy aloe like those girly cosmetic magazines you’d sneak mentioned. 

The bonfire tonight was a busy affair. Ginger made some big steal so that granted cause for some hearty celebration. Most of the men seemed to be in a nicer mood than usual, but you made no effort to leave your post on an old bourbon crate in the background. Any peace to oneself around here was a blessing and you were gonna take as much of it in as you could. 

Tired fingers fumbled with your lighter, you’d been meaning to get a new one but finding a moment to step away from the Crusaders was harder to come by than one probably thought.

By the look of your chipped nails, you could do with swiping that new shade of OPI that caught your eye in the corner store some weeks ago too.

“Didn’t peg you as a wallflower.” Your solitude was shattered by the presence of a rumbled drawl. Nearly having your poor soul shooting out your body. Whipping your head in the direction of the unfamiliar timbre you almost did a double take. 

There Crash stood, looking almost indifferent despite being the one to walk up to you in the first place. He wore some weathered-looking muscle tank repping a band you had no knowledge of and a pair of jeans that had definitely seen better days. Up close you got to take in just how well-built he was. Sure, Ginger was a hefty man, but Crash had definition to him. Like something out of a poster blushing teens would have of some heartthrob idol shamelessly plastered on their bedroom wall. 

His face was a whole other story, one you wouldn’t bother getting all wax poetic about. As pretty as it was. 

Snapping out of your short-lived reverie you huffed something resembling a scoff, 

“Didn’t know you could speak. Let alone leave Ginger’s side for more than a few minutes.”

In the dim lighting, you couldn’t initially make out whether or not that had amused him, but the glowing orange hue from the tip of his own cigarette highlighted the ghost of a smirk adorning the corner of his thin lips. It had you picking at the frayed edge of your shorts to not look so childishly in awe. 

“You got a light?” You pushed forward and asked. He shook his head no but instead offered his cigarette wordlessly. The act stilled you, but you took the small offering nonetheless, inexplicably entranced after only a few words from the man. 

Those eyes of his tracked your every move as you brought the cigarette to your lips. You tried with every fiber of your being not to be affected by this strangely intimate ripple of time you’ve just stepped into. To not let your thoughts drift to the fact that those same lips were just where yours are currently as you inhale acrid smoke.

You don’t feel all that successful.

“Camels. That’s surprising.” You exhale, flicking the ash as casually as one could in this scenario. You prayed Ginger wouldn’t notice his absence any time soon. Something resembling greed regarding Crash’s attention sinking its claws into you.

“Hm…how so.” He took it back from your grasp, the action strikingly gentle. 

“All you rough boys out here smoke Reds. Hell, you even look like one of those Marlboro cowboys in the ads.” 

“Should I be flattered?”

“Don’t pretend like you don’t know about all the girls around here just positively gushing over you. You don’t strike me as the naive type.” 

“You know cause you one of em’?”

That shut you right up. Though only for a second. If he could feel the growing heat radiating from your cheeks he made no sign of it.

“Careful now, wouldn’t wanna sound too cocky.” You sassed, looking past him at the partygoers. His gaze felt penetrating and you couldn’t figure out for the life of you where this sudden interest to talk to you came from. There was no chance in hell of entertaining a single thing with Crash. Ginger would skin you alive for even catching you like this, as plain of an encounter as it was. This was more trouble than it’d ever be worth. 

But there was not a fathomable force that could seem to pull you away. 

“You’re different. Than the others I mean. You stand out.” Was what clambered from your mouth as you looked back at him. 

It was true despite its clumsy admittance. Even though you’d never said so much as a hello to each other Crash was different. He never bothered you. Never jumped at the chance to use you like some piece of meat. You wouldn’t say he went as far to outright show blatant respect, but he gave you space to exist unlike anyone else had. 

He didn’t so much as flinch at the statement. 

“Could say the same about you.” That alone had a cold shock similar to that of an ice bath encasing your entire being. It was a casual reply, but between the lines, you knew what he was saying. 

He saw you. 

No one ever saw you. You were a nobody. Just a warm vessel to sacrifice to the selfish woes of pigs disguised as men. You weren’t meant to have thoughts or feelings. Likes or dislikes. You were just there. 

Yet he noticed you regardless and you hadn’t ever brought attention to the possibility that he could in the first place.

You didn’t know something so small and noncommittal could make the sting of saline burn at the backs of your eyes. You felt like every existing nerve within you had been exposed but when continuing to stare at him, he held no judgment. That brokenness that took home in his stare was replaced by something else. A curiosity. 

Much akin to the same type you let fester for him over these past several months. 

The smoldering cigarette dangled from his lips, though you didn’t dare let yourself catch a glimpse, as a large hand hesitantly reached towards your face. The rough pad of his thumb scarcely graced the fragile skin beneath your eye to brace a blooming tear. 

The simple touch was indescribable. Something you never thought you could know for yourself. 

All you could think about was how warm he was.

“Birdy! Where the hell are you, girl? Get over here!” Came Ginger’s sudden drunken hollering, the moment doused in the shroud of reality as you all but jumped away. Crash’s arm stayed frozen in mid-air, his once prodding stare almost muted in agitation at the Crusader’s crude interruption. 

You shakily wiped at any reminisce of emotion, fiddling with your hair as if you’d been caught doing something more than just simply talking. Guilt and fear bore onto your shoulders like a burdensome cloak in record time. You needed to go before Ginger got too antsy. 

Looking back up at Crash, you were met with that same indifference as if the moment was just some figment of your imagination. Stewing in the sudden change would only lead to unnecessary embarrassment so all you could do was utter a quick ‘bye’ as you stumbled off towards the bonfire, heart racing something worrisome. Off to where you’d be reduced back to feeling like the piece of nothing you always were. 

It took all the willpower in you to ignore the lingering burn of the lost man’s stare and keep on toward everything you’d come to detest in your life. 

[pessimisticsarc]

absolutely he did

woke up thinking about that headcanon of Rust picking his own name when he moved back to Texas at 18

[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.

[saint-severian]

The first season of True Detective is a folk horror in the same vein as Deliverance, the Hills Have Eyes, etc. I'm surprised it hasn't been decried as being fascistic or at least classist before. Louisiana itself, and almost every main character, is degenerate, creepy, off, tasteless, gauche, stinking, in some way. The exception is the protagonist Rust Cohle, and one of the first things we know about him is that he is from (richer and more dignified) Texas and ultimately Alaska, perhaps the farthest point from Louisiana in the US besides Hawaii. In every way he is aloof and apart, not just because that's his personality but specifically in contrast to the environment in which he finds himself. He is, in the earlier period of the show, thin, of athletic build, clean-shaven, with a haircut and hairline that would look in place in an old Harvard yearbook. His home is starkly clean and empty in contrast to the filth and all too familiar lower class pattern of American hoarding that marks the disgusting trailer homes and shacks of the low people the detective pair come across throughout the show. A huge amount of the screentime is devoted to a circus freak show interviewing one physically and mentally crippled and malformed member of the Louisiana peasantry after another. These people - this social situation of rural degeneracy, poverty, backwardness, "God-bothering", insanity, prostitution, drug addiction, etc. - are not just the victims of the Satanic psychopathy of the Childress monster and his 'elite' patrons like the Tuttles, but they are a vile concoction which produces these horrors. Childress is the apotheosis of the degenerate swamp people rather than just a predator let loose among them. He says "my family has been here a long time", as sinister music plays. The implication is that his sickness is a result of the sociological consequences of peasant immobility. Consequences like child abuse, inbreeding, religious insanity, etc. The horror of this show is the ugly poor people themselves, their evil is a result of their ugliness and poverty and indistinguishable from it.

[heavenboy09]

Happy Birthday 🎂 🥳 🎉 🎈 🎁 🎊 To You

The Most Iconic Charming & Smooth Talking Natural Born Blonde 👱‍♂️ Haired Texan Actor In Hollywood, That All The Ladies Know😍 & Drool for 🤤

Born On November 4th, 1969 In Uvalde, Texas

He is an American actor. He achieved his breakthrough with a supporting performance in the coming-of-age comedy Dazed and Confused (1993). After a number of supporting roles, his first success as a leading man came in the legal drama A Time to Kill (1996). His career progressed with lead roles in the science fiction film Contact (1997), the historical drama Amistad (1997), and the war film U-571 (2000).

In the 2000s, McConaughey became known for starring in romantic comedies, including The Wedding Planner (2001), How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days (2003), Failure to Launch (2006), Fool's Gold (2008), and Ghosts of Girlfriends Past (2009), establishing him as a sex symbol. In 2011, after a two-year hiatus from film acting, McConaughey began to appear in more dramatic roles, beginning with the legal drama The Lincoln Lawyer. In 2012, he gained wider praise for his roles as a stripper in Magic Mike and a fugitive in Mud.

McConaughey's portrayal of Ron Woodroof, a cowboy diagnosed with AIDS, in the biopic Dallas Buyers Club (2013) earned him widespread critical acclaim and numerous accolades, including the Academy Award for Best Actor. He followed it with a supporting role in The Wolf of Wall Street (2013), and a starring role as Rust Cohle in the first season of HBO's crime anthology series True Detective (2014), for which he was nominated for the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series. His subsequent film roles include starring in Interstellar (2014) and The Gentlemen (2019), as well as voice work in Kubo and the Two Strings (2016), Sing (2016), Sing 2 (2021), and Deadpool & Wolverine (2024).

Please Wish This Iconic Legendary Charming & Smooth Talking Natural Born Blonde 👱‍♂️ Haired Texan Actor In Hollywood

A Very Happy Birthday 🎂 🥳 🎉 🎈 🎁 🎊

YOU KNOW HIM

THE LADIES KNOW HIM & CANT HELP BUT DROOL OVER HIM 🤤

YOU SEE HIS MOVIES 🎥

& YOU CANT HELP BUT LOVE HIS CHARISMA 😉

THE 1 & ONLY

MR. MATTHEW DAVID MCCONAUGHEY 👱‍♂️

HAPPY 55TH BIRTHDAY 🎂 🥳 🎉 🎈 🎁 🎊 TO YOU MR . MCCONAUGHEY👱‍♂️ & HERE'S TO MANY MORE YEARS TO COME

#MatthewMcconaughey

[frozenfiances]

i like to think new years 96 is the closest rust comes to really enjoying himself in, and for a long time. marty at least is still riding real high on the press from the dora lange case. maggie has let him move back in, he throws a big party. does not invite her parents, but does invite rust. 

marty gets drunk enough that rust has to carry him to bed. he helps maggie put the girls down and the two of them share one last drink in the kitchen, chatting quietly. there were burgers grilled and sparklers lit and a fireworks show somewhere else in the neighborhood that could be seen from the hart’s back yard. 

rust tastes every color that explodes in the sky, and some of them match the lone star in his hand and he manages to stay sober enough to drive home. 

when everything falls apart in 2002, he knows immediately what the trepidation he’d still felt the whole night was about. 

if it’s too good to be true...

[youreincarcosanow]

the other night i got absolutely baked and dreamt I was Rust cohle investigating a bizarre murder in rural texas, and for a brief moment, my life was complete