He's My Man
Rust Cohle x Reader
Word Count: 927
Notes: 3rd person pov, female pronouns, no usage of (y/n) because I hate it :)
I wrote this while listening to He's My Man (The Anniversary) by Luvcat and John Cooper Clarke, the song is very Rust coded in my opinion and I would highly recommend listening to it while reading this. This can be read as either younger Rust or 2012 Rust but I did have older Rust in mind when writing it.
Late September in Louisiana. The air hangs heavy, thick with humidity and the faint scent of rain that never comes. The bayou hums outside. The soft whine of insects, the occasional croak of a frog, the world sluggish under the weight of heat. Inside, she sits by the window, the hem of her sundress clinging to her thighs, watching the slow turn of the ceiling fan. She listens to Rust moving somewhere behind her. The clink of a bottle, the quiet drag of a match striking.
He’s been restless again. The long, empty stretches of silence between them filled only by the sound of his cigarette crackling. The worst days are when he doesn’t talk at all, when he stares at the river as if it’s about to swallow him whole. She’s learned to let him have those days. Learned that love, for a man like him, is often a quiet endurance.
When he finally speaks, his voice is rough. “You shouldn’t stick around here all day, kid. Not much to do but rot.”
She turns her head slightly, her eyes tracing the tired slope of his shoulders. “Maybe I don’t mind rotting with you.”
He huffs out something that could almost be a laugh, shaking his head. “You’re too young to be sayin’ things like that.” But he doesn’t tell her to leave. He never does.
She starts staying more often. Washing the dishes that pile up, sweeping dust from corners he never notices. She even tries cooking sometimes, though he never eats much — half a meal, a few bites, then back to the whiskey. He’s thinner than when she met him, the hollows of his cheeks deepening, eyes sunken and shadowed. She watches him from across the table one night, her fork untouched.
“You don’t eat anymore,” she murmurs.
Rust shrugs. “Ain’t much point. It all tastes like ash anyway.”
Still, she tries. She brings him coffee in the morning, watches the smoke curl around his fingers as he stares out toward the foggy river. He says little, but when she leans against the doorframe, he looks at her like she’s something he doesn’t know how to hold. Something fragile. Something alive.
He’s slipping further into himself, she can feel it. Most nights he sits on the deck, bottle in hand, eyes on the horizon like he’s searching for ghosts. She joins him without a word, making her way onto his lap like second nature. They sit together, her head on his chest, his fingers absently combing through her hair. The world outside is nothing but the whisper of cicadas and the creak of the boards beneath them. He smells of smoke and rain-soaked wood, of something human and fleeting. For a little while, the ghosts leave him alone. For a little while, he’s quiet. He’s hers. “You’re too good to me,” he says once, voice low, as if the words themselves might break him.
She presses her face against his throat. “Someone should be.”
He lets out a rough breath, half a laugh, half a sigh. “You shouldn’t waste it here.”
“Where else would I go?”
That ends the conversation, like most things between them do. He just wraps his arm a little tighter around her waist, and she takes it for what it is, his way of saying stay.
At night, he dreams, drunken into a not quite sleep stupor. She hears him muttering in his sleep, words she can’t make out. Sometimes he wakes gasping, sweat slick on his skin, eyes wide and unfocused. She’s there before he can say anything, her hands on his chest, grounding him.
“Rust,” she whispers. “It’s just me. You’re safe.”
He looks at her like he’s not sure that’s true. Like he’s never been safe anywhere.
Some nights, he sits outside until dawn, staring at the water like he’s searching for answers in its reflection. She’s there, draping a blanket over his shoulders. The silence between them is a living thing, weighted but tender. She’s learned that needing her costs him too much to admit, so he shows it in the only way he can, by not letting her go.
“I wish you’d stop trying to fix me,” he says one night, voice barely above a murmur.
“I’m not,” she answers. “I just want you to stay.”
He glances down at her, eyes tired and endless. “You shouldn’t want that.”
But she does. More than anything.
When he finally reaches for her, it’s with a hesitation that feels like reverence. His hands tremble as they find her skin, as if he’s afraid she might vanish. The touch is slow, unhurried, steeped in the quiet grief of two people who know the world will keep breaking. And she knows, in that fragile, breathless space between them, that this is the closest he’ll ever come to peace.
Later, she lies against him, listening to the hum of the bayou, the slow rhythm of his heartbeat against her ear. His hand rests at the base of her spine, and for the first time in what feels like forever, he sleeps without dreaming.
She studies his face in the pale wash of moonlight, the lines, the exhaustion, the faint trace of something almost gentle and thinks, I’ve been damned too.
No one would understand what binds them, what strange current keeps pulling them together despite everything. But she knows what it is.
It’s ruin. It’s refuge. It’s the soft, impossible mercy of staying beside a man who’s already halfway gone. It’s love, the kind that burns until nothing else remains.
