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He is alright, he tells Maggie on the phone. He’s doing fine.
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The first year goes by in a flash.
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The first few nights Marty remembers what it was like to have a newborn in the house.
He doesn’t sleep; he stays up doing paperwork in the kitchen, client files and whatnot. Technically not his job, but he’d have started shining the silverware if it meant keeping himself busy. He pencils in names and addresses and ticks boxes until the sun comes up and then some, and whenever the noise in his head gets too loud for sitting still, he tiptoes up the stairs and peeks through the open bedroom door, watches Rust’s chest rising and falling steadily.
It had been the exact same fear when they’d brought Audrey back from the hospital, tiny, red and colicky, twenty-odd years ago. That feeling of having taken a fragile thing away from professional care far too soon, right into his incompetent hands. After the first sleepless night, they’d carried their mattress into the baby room, slept there for the first week.
He won’t start sleeping on the floor next to the bed, if only because his back would never forgive him for it- but he’s seriously considering buying a baby monitor. He’d hide it, he thinks, stuff it under the bed, and he’d go lie down across the hall, in the guest bedroom and press the speaker to his ear, listen to Rust breathing and swearing in his sleep.
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He never buys a baby monitor, but he thinks back on the idea fondly.
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“You got good hands,” Rust says, eyes drifting to the ceiling. For a guy who wouldn’t let someone else push his wheelchair for him when he could barely stand, he’s perfectly content to lie back and let Marty change the dressing on his injuries. Marty’s glad for it, he doesn’t trust Rust to do it himself. These days, he doesn’t trust Rust to chew his food on his own.
He has developed an obsession over the drainage, even though the doctor at the emergency room said a pink hue is completely normal, no he doesn’t need to get admitted, what you both seem to need is some sleep.
“I’m sorry,” Rust mumbles, after Marty has taped the last piece of gauze in place.
“What for?”
Rust scoots up, drops back down on the heap of pillows, and waves a lazy hand around. “For taking up your bedroom. For all the shared showers, I know you live for scrubbing my back.”
Marty stares down at his hands on his laps and chuckles. He pats Rust on the knee getting up.
“Don’t worry about it. There’s a TV in the guest bedroom, I’m happy.”
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The TV is another matter. Even after the stitches are out, and he’s pretty much as recovered as he’s gonna be, Rust doesn’t sleep every night, that hasn’t changed. Not that Marty expected it to.
He roams the house, those nights, in a bathrobe and bare feet and his redneck ponytail loose, mumbling to himself. Marty bangs on the wall whenever he hears him pacing in the hallway, “fuck’s sake, write it in your journal, Rust”. He doesn’t like feeling like he’s living with someone’s senile grandpa.
Some nights, Rust relents, and he retreats to the living room. That’s where the flatscreen is. He turns it on too loud for 1 A.M, but it’s miles better than the mumbling, and Marty doesn’t really mind enough to tell him off. He’s usually up in the middle of the night for a piss anyway.
He’s made a habit of shuffling into the living room the times when a late-night infomercial wakes him up. There’s always a spot for him on the couch, next to Rust in his shorts and nothing else, scars out and proud and terrifying. Marty kicks his feet up on the coffee table and watches ladies making mashed potatoes in just seconds with the new SuperMasherPro. Sometimes he even makes it to the Clever Carrot Peeler. He can never stay awake long enough for the Sentient Tupperware, even though he’s sure that’s what comes next.
If Marty doesn’t crawl back to bed in the early hours, the sun usually wakes him up with a bitch of a stiff neck, next to Rust, dozing lightly with the TV still on.
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Sometimes Marty remembers where he was a year ago, and he has to stop the car and count his blessings.
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Takes around two years and a minor heart attack for Marty to accept that Rust isn’t going to walk into the kitchen one night, shake his hand over mac and cheese, say thanks for everything, then walk out the door and fuck off to the North Pole to watch the stars.
There’s piles of Rust’s stuff in what used to be Marty’s bedroom, and there’s the shared cases. Rust’s truck next to Marty’s car in the garage, and crates of Rust’s books still littering the hallway and the living room floor, Marty means to make room in the bookcase but he keeps forgetting.
Rust will still disappear for a day or two, following leads on his own, and Marty lets him, gladly, because they are not joined at the hip, they both need breathing space, and the house is nice when it’s quiet for a while, empty of Rust’s smoke and theories about how the human soul is a paper thin self-indulgent illusion.
He comes back. Consistently. A roar in the driveway and the slam of a car door, and he’s bolting into the house, tossing the keys to wherever they may land, and before he starts on whatever he dug up (Marty knows he wants to, eyes bright like fever) he reels himself in and honest to God asks Marty how he’s been doing. How you been, you okay? And he waits around for the answer too, hovering like he really wants to know.
Small miracles, Marty thinks. He should call Maggie and let her know that people change. She’d say they don’t, it’s just him that never cared enough to see through Rust’s façade. Marty can do a pretty good Maggie in his head most days, he thinks.
So, there’s that. And there’s the heart attack.
They don’t talk about it much, they both know a little too much about being scared and there’s no use reliving things, but the point is, the heart attack is the main reason Marty’s convinced Rust’s not going to bolt. It’s too close to begging, thinking a person won’t leave you just because they won’t let you die, but that night Marty dropped down on the top of the stairs, holding his arm tight and said, carefully, Rust call an ambulance- that night, after, in the car (because a fucking ambulance wouldn’t get there fast enough, Rust said, piling Marty into the passenger seat, and Rust knows everything, past, present and future, up to and including ETAs for Louisiana ambulances) Rust talked so slow about his life back in Alaska and drove so fast, red-lighting all the way, that Marty was back under that tent again, and he will make straight your paths, with the preacher yammering about good hearts, and he remembered what Rust sounded like when he was panicked.
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Rust offers, only once. They’re driving to a client’s house, he’s leaning against the window with fingers pressing into his temple and he says, in his droning monotone, maybe I should move out. Marty nearly slams on the breaks in the middle of the street.
“Why?” he asks. He could just say, sure man, move out, but honest communication is key to a working relationship. He’s been reading.
“No sane woman is going to consider something more serious with a man in his fifties, still living with his buddy,” Rust says, crouching now and rifling through the glove compartment for something that can’t be his cigarettes because he swore he was off, a month ago.
Rust doesn’t date. Marty does. Around once or twice a month, he takes a lady out to dinner. Back when he started on those websites, years after the divorce, he used to speed through everything so he could get to the five minutes of bad sex he’d signed up for. That, to his surprise, got old. Now he enjoys the procedure. He enjoys making plans, getting ready. He appreciates the notion of showing up at someone’s doorstep looking your best, being your best. And he’s always been good with conversation. Sometimes it reminds him of date nights with Maggie, and that’s good. Sometimes it doesn’t remind him of anything, and that’s even better. There are nights when he can fool himself into believing that he really is this man pulling chairs out, laughing over cheesecake. Charming, warm, light as a feather. There are nights when he doesn’t even follow through, he doesn’t take them home, doesn’t come up to theirs if they offer. He bids them goodnight at the door and buys a pack of beers, drives to the office, to Rust and his insomnia. Rust always wants to know how the date went. Marty tells him, it was okay, you know, and Rust nods, like he actually does, though Marty remembers acutely that Rust’s idea of a date meant silence, and impassioned talk about his synapses and smelling colors, or whatever it was.
“I had serious,” Marty tells him, eyes on the road. “With Maggie and the girls. Ain’t looking to replicate that. Don’t think I could if I tried. It’s just nice to go out once in a while, meet someone.” Rust grunts, still searching in the glove compartment. He comes up with a single cigarette. Marty glares.
“If you want though, Rust, you can move out any time. Don’t wanna keep you from your big life of bear-huntin’, chain-smoking, and lung cancer in Alaska.”
“Alright,” Rust says, turning around to stare out the window. He keeps the smoke between his lips, but doesn’t light it.
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Year three is the year Marty drops ten pounds on doctor’s orders and Rust loses the moustache and cuts his hair short again.
It’s like catching ghosts in the mirrors, how Marty catches glimpses of him from the corner of his vision, in jeans and a dirty tank top. For a few seconds he’s sucked back to ’95, shooing the man away from his yard for trespassing. It pisses him off that Rust gets to look like that, still the handsome gentleman even if you have to squint a little (and definitely not know him at all), but then he blinks and he sees him for real, softer eyes and graying hair, doing the dishes or brushing his teeth in one of Marty’s old sweatpants, drawstring pulled too tight, some impossible combination of beer gut and malnutrition, and all he’s left with is 2015, and the guy who took over his bedroom and never gave it back.
Year three is the year they get a joint medicine cabinet in the bathroom, Marty’s stuff on the left, Rust’s on the right. Marty figures he has little use of his desk drawer with the combination lock anymore. Now that Rust has made a life purpose out of reminding Marty to take his pills every evening, it doesn’t seem likely he’s going to decide to OD on painkillers.
They sort out the back yard that year, too. Marty has neglected it for years, never had the time or the patience for it. Work is slow in the summer, so they have whole days to waste. Marty plants trees. Rust sits on the porch and reads notes, and occasionally tries to tell him how to do his job.
Marty replaces their broken lawn mower and parks the new one in the shed. Rust doesn’t notice until around a week later, and then he just picks it up and gets to work.
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Slow July evening, Marty’s pulling out the weeds near the fence and he’s shouting at Rust to go get him a garbage bag to stuff them in, this one’s ripped. The sound of the mower clicks off, and Marty straightens up from his crouch. His knees pop. His back is killing him. His t-shirt is soaked through. The radio on their porch steps is singing, you’ve lost that lovin’ feeling, and Marty tries to hum along but he’s too short of breath. Fuckin’ old age.
Behind him, there’s the swishing sound of Rust’s feet cutting through the short grass.
“Remember that scene in Top Gun,” Marty starts, and there’s Rust in front of him, black garbage bag in his hand that he lets drop to their feet, floating like a giant, deflated morbid balloon. He looks strange, all of a sudden, tense, too much like ’95 gone bad, with the red afternoon sun on his face, and Marty goes to ask what’s wrong but Rust’s reaching over, placing two fingers under Marty’s jaw, where his pulse is ticking fast, and Marty gets it.
“I’m fine, Rust,” he sighs, but he doesn’t back away or push him off, he lets him have his confirmation. They both know a little too much about being scared, and there’s no use fighting if you can do something about it.
Rust stares at him, focused, owl-like, the look Marty remembers from too many interrogation rooms and other afternoons like this, with people stuttering alibis. He knows Rust is counting. Marty waits it out and contemplates the tragedy of Martin Hart; ask him about his ex-wife, the love of his life, and he’ll say, Maggie’s a good woman. Ask him about Rust Cohle, and he’ll start pulling words out of his ass. Owl-like. Sparrow-boned. Picks a fight with the sky if he don’t like its shade. Ten minutes into their first beer in ten years and Marty was calling him brittle. He’d felt it, back then at the station with the new guys smiling at him real nice, how he was pulling words like weeds out of the dead land of his vocabulary, to make a shape for Rustin Cohle.
“Satisfied?” he asks, after a while.
Rust stares at him, still frowning, for a beat or two, then he nods. Marty nods too, and tries a smile for size. He doesn’t like those silences.
Rust doesn’t move away. He stands there, with shadows on his face making him look older, like back when he was young. Fingers on Marty’s jugular, pressing down on the skin then dragging upwards, to the bone. He applies the slightest pressure to his jaw, tilts Marty’s face a little to the side. Marty allows it, goes with it.
Rust kisses him. It’s just a mouth on a mouth, at first, warm breath, but then he gets Marty’s bottom lip between his. Makes it unmistakable.
He steps back and Marty does too. Marty’s not breathing. Rust doesn’t say a thing. He just turns and walks back to the house, slowly and carefully, like his every step has been choreographed, stepping into footprints. He’s holding himself so tight it looks like he’s moving through pain. He’s flexing his left hand.
Marty turns away. He blinks into the setting sun. His eyes are burning.
That, is another thing that happens, year three.
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The thing that happens next in year three is, Marty shoves the weeds he’s been pulling into the garbage bag that Rust brought. He goes round back to toss it into the trash, and doesn’t go through the house to keep from trailing mud all over.
When he’s done, the sun’s nearly gone. The street is quiet, only a dog barking in the distance, and then a man’s gruff voice yelling at it to shut up. Marty stands by the bins and stares at the house. The white paint is chipping in places. The front lawn needs some mowing. Their screen door is open.
Marty takes off his gloves and shoves them into the back pocket of his jeans. He thinks about bolting, but he finds he doesn’t particularly want to. He searches inside him for panic, usually so easy to find- a thought of growing old without his girls, his lonely TV dinners, the feeling of human intestines shifting and hot under his hand- but there’s nothing there, this time. He searches for anger, tries to read what happened as ridicule, belittlement. He knows Rust too well by now for any of that to make sense.
He goes up the steps and in through the front door. He takes his boots off. He pads to the kitchen in socked feet, and finds Rust sitting at the table, smoking. He’s got one of Marty’s mugs out to tip the ashes into, because he’s an asshole.
Marty tries to look at him different, but he can’t.
“Where do you keep hiding these, I’ll never know,” Marty says, gesturing vaguely at the cigarette pack on the table.
“Great mysteries of the universe, Marty,” Rust says, blowing out smoke, and Marty shouldn’t be surprised that Rust is looking at him straight in the eye. Rust was never one to shy away from things, and perhaps that’s what this is all about in the end.
“You’re telling me,” Marty sighs, going to the fridge to get a bottle of water. He leans against the counter and drinks it all, in greedy gulps. Rust keeps single mindedly filling the room with smoke.
“You gonna tell me what you were thinking?” Marty asks. “And crack open the fucking window, damn, Rust.”
Rust takes one last drag and drops the cigarette into the mug. He drums his fingers on the table and then pushes away, dragging his chair on the tiles.
“Evolution,” he says.
He gets up, turns around and opens the window over the sink. He opens it all the way.
“The idea that things need to change to survive the passing of time,” he continues, resting back against the sink, crossing his arms over his chest. They’re now on equal level. “Christening,” he continues, inexplicably.
Marty looks at him, frowning, waiting for the rest of that sentence, but Rust just takes a sharp breath like he’s remembered himself and shakes his head. “I swing both ways,” he explains, his s’s dragging. “Or don’t swing at all, sometimes.” Marty gets a mental image of Rust like a pendulum suspended in midair, unmoving over a checkered floor, and he thinks that’s strangely apt.
Rust reaches over for his Camels on the table, pulls one out and his lighter from his front pocket. The flame flickers in front of his face in a way that’s too familiar.
He talks with the smoke between his teeth, and it makes him look like an old dog growling. “I wanted to provide that information, since it has become your business too, despite my better judgment. Keeping it from you seemed. Dishonest. There is a path, should you choose to go down that way. It’s been there for a while.”
Marty breathes in deep, and pushes the air out through his nose. He wipes a hand over his mouth. How am I gonna explain this, he thinks. And then he wonders, to whom. To the girls, is what comes up first, but that’s pointless. Things are better between them, phonecalls and the occasional dinner, and he’s met their men, but if he wanted to keep something from them, if he wanted something for his own, nothing would be easier. Maggie, then- but that’s also an empty excuse, he hasn’t seen Maggie in around a year. They talk on the phone, they don’t hate each other, but she won’t ask about his dating life.
Other men, he supposes, and that’s the truth. How am I going to explain this to other men, and Marty’s always cared too much about what other men thought of him, of his work, of his string of women, of his giant dick. He wonders if it’s time to let go of that, now.
He relives Rust’s breath against his lips with a hot clench of his stomach. He wipes his mouth with the back of his hand.
Rust’s blue eyes have moved to the ceiling.
“Way to keep me from having another heart attack,” Marty says, and Rust chuckles under his breath. “If I wanted to kill you, Marty, I’d have done it by now.” He takes a puff from his smoke and blows it out slowly, towards the kitchen light. There are two tiny moths circling the bulb. “Not to mention I must have overestimated your constitution, if after everything you’ve seen and done it is a kiss from a man that does you in.”
Marty frowns. Something in his gut tells him that if he lets Rust open his mouth one more time, what’s gonna come out if it next is gonna be, I can be out of your hair by morning.
“I knew it would happen sometime,” Marty blurts out, just to run his mouth, but the moment he says it, he knows it’s the truth.
“With me?” Rust asks, with a hint of amusement, as if the prospect alone of someone reading Rust Cohle is hilarious. His eyes are still nailed to the ceiling like he’s finding god.
“With a man,” Marty tells him, voice coming out thin. He clears his throat and pats his chest with his hand. He drags his thumb over the shirt, tracing the white scar under his clavicle.
“Alright then.”
Rust’s gaze floats down to him like he’s got all the time in the world, but when their eyes meet, it’s clear he got the message. His face is hard, a thousand years old and carved out of granite, and Marty feels something warm settle inside him under that scrutiny. He wants to laugh. The mystery of Rustin Cohle.
Rust is, Marty thinks, a small benevolent god in a convenience store, staring at the soup can display. Rust is disappointed in us all, but still sticking around, if only because he can’t help it. He is a patient in a passenger seat, eyes at half mast with streetlights chasing across his face. He is a pain in the ass and he pulls his stitches out at night, and then I have to drive him to the emergency room. He is an asshole. He is mine. My friend, my man, my privilege. He is what I got out of the dark. He is my spoils of war.
And I will kiss him, if I choose to.
The tragedy of Martin Hart. He wants to trace Rust’s cheekbones with the back of his knuckles, but he doesn’t go with that impulse, not that soon, doesn’t trust Rust not to mistrust it.
Instead he shrugs, smiles a little. “What,” he says. “I said, alright.”
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