headcanons I made about Rust’s childhood in Alaska in the late 70s/early 80s. The quotes are from my Rust x fem!reader work in progress (set mostly when he is 18-19 years old) that should be up in the next few weeks
I tried to approach the difficult topics as seriously as I could, please do not feel like I invalidated something on purpose. Rust is compound, multidimensional, and a representation of trauma many people partially experienced. Nothing graphic or explicit here, but please, make sure you look at the trigger warnings.
tw: child abuse, abandonment, emotionally unavailable parent, drinking, mention of prostitution, cold household, travis cohle (he deserves a tw), bad language, possible mistakes – English is not my first language.
wc: 2,6k
ao3 link
We all know this guy is a damn complex character, but I feel like people are sleeping on the aspect of his upbringing. Sure, he’s mostly influenced by what happened to his daughter and by his work, addiction, what he saw and did in his narco days, but young years are what truly define people in most cases. I think Rust is not immune to that, and the way he takes the things that happen to him, how he processes them, is dictated by how he grew up.
Rust was raised on his own. He played with beer cans and rocks. He spent one summer watching a building company work on a bridge close to his house, and that was the greatest fun of the year. He was that kind of kid everyone says is trouble but is actually very unproblematic when left in peace. He could occupy himself in all circumstances.
I imagine Rust’s parents would have a significant age gap. Travis wouldn’t be the youngest of fathers. By the time Rust gets to his teenage years, he would already be in his 50s. The mother – well, I think of her as a young plaything, who cared only about fun in her live. Let’s be honest, a quickly aging, cold husband and a child raised on fear ain’t exactly a definition of fun.
The woman is sort of a forbidden topic in their household. Rust has very few memories of her, all leaving him with a feeling of being torn between wrath, disgust and jealousy. Something in his heart didn’t allow him to fully hate her for leaving. He could understand why. Despite all the things he’s been through, he never imagined he would prefer to go with her. Here he at least had some sort of stability, a routine he needed so much as a child. And with the young Mrs. Cohle on the run? That would be pure chaos. Most days he was full of acceptance and bore with his abandonment like the strong person he was raised to be. He allowed himself to think about her once in a while.
Rust hated diner places like this. To his eye, they all looked the same, and over the years he avoided them like they could stain his dignity or something worse.
The truth was, they reminded him of a young, skinny woman sitting on the other side of a dirty table, and winking to him funnily. He remembered the feeling of the cushion, equally dirty but soft, like it could swallow him if he stayed still for too long. He could be around four years old, not more. For most of his childhood he considered this memory a false one, and forbid himself from dwelling on it.
His mother was distracted. She kept looking around, staring at people and sending them charming smiles. Her long, thin hair swayed, when she moved her head, and Rustin could remember how mesmerized he was. Her tired, empty eyes and bitten nails remained unseen to him. It seemed like his presence was bothering her, imprisoning in one place, but he didn’t feel like it back then. When she spared him a look with a soft smile on her face, all he felt was proud and a bit of confusion.
She could be somewhere far in her thoughts, but when here eyes landed on her boy… She was truly there. Her boy. Sweet child she had no idea how to care for.
Crowds and loud noise scared him when he was a child, so he tried to focus on his dessert with too much of whipped cream. His mother laughed wholeheartedly when he asked numerous times if he really can pick anything he wants from the menu. He was just not used to it. Acts of kindness were never suspicious to him, like to any child this age. It made him uneasy, yes, but happy at the same time. He would never think this nice occasion, the little party, as his mother called it, would be his last memory of her.
Finally, her sight landed on someone far away, and all sweetness disappeared from her smile. Suddenly she looked like a hunting animal lured by a drop of blood. She patted his head, getting his hair even more in his forehead and eyes. Lovingly, she told him to wait here and be a good boy. ‘She will be right back.’
She wasn’t.
He didn’t dare move his head, hearing his mother’s name being whispered. He stared at his food even more, despite the tears he could no longer fight.
“What the fuck? Why’d you drag a child with you?”
“Don’t you even dare look at my son, hear me?” she snapped. “Now let’s go…”
She was not back in the next few minutes, nor that night at all. He was lucky the diner’s owner knew his father and gave him a call. At the end of a day, it wasn’t that bad – at least he was full of free french fries the owner gave him as a gesture of pity. Travis was pissed, but Rust liked it because, for ones, it wasn’t directed at him. He could even feel something warm from his father, when he squeezed his son’s hand with too much force, leading him to the cared.
Smart but lazy? Hell nah. His teachers would hate him as much as they would love him. Overly ambitious, but with no patience. He wants everything NOW, done HIS way. He would roll his eyes at the mention of group work. During, he either stays silent the whole time, or turns a simple task into a third world war of dominance. And if he fails, he has no one to blame for the fuck-up… that's the real show. At a younger age, I can certainly imagine him smashing a desk and bursting out of class. He stops caring when he's older, but there's still a sting, somehow. Maybe he was as useless as Travis told him.
He would listen to a hell of a vocabulary from his dad, I imagine, especially when it came to women. His father hated his mother, and he certainly let his son know what he thought of other females. He was unaware for a long time; he used sluts and bitches like nothing and only realized something was off in his 20s. It was Claire who properly taught him not to.
Oh, and about women. I feel like young Rust would be a magnet for damn weirdos, and there’s no reason to hope that his dad would protect him from them. I also think Travis would always manage to find the worst company he possibly could, and even though he could feel that subconsciously, he always dragged Rust into it. In fact, I believe the old Cohle to be as troubled as his son, he was just never smart enough to acknowledge that.
(...) Rust had no intention of getting out. The heater barely work, but he appreciated it a lot. No way he would step out in the cold now. He quickly changed his mind when he heard the knock on the driver's window, where he sat, but it was too late.
The skinny woman was pale as a ghost, but the wicked smile made her look more like the devil. She could be thirty… maybe younger, but it was hard to say with the smudged make-up and dopey eyes. She was certainly was younger than his father’s friend. He lowered his window just a bit, with heart in his throat. He would swear she was ready to shove her nose inside, if she could. It was uncomfortable to even look at her.
“Hey, handsome. No need to be so grumpy, yeah? Smile a bit, it won’t hurt you,” she chattered straight into his ear, and he winced even more.
He wanted to wait for his father in silence, but then he saw the woman lean in, trying to rest on the back of the car suggestively.
“Just piss off,” he snapped, surprising not only the woman but himself as well.
She scoffed, and stepped back, rolling her eyes.
The second everything was done, and Travis rolled into the passenger seat, Rust knew that was not the end of troubles this afternoon.
“You embarrassed me, boy. Know who that was? The guy’s a hunter, we sometimes work together,” he explained, but his voice lacked of the mentioned embarrassment. Travis was usually nicer to be around, when he wasn’t sober or dead drunk. Rust in fact knew, he was hanging out with the huntsmen. “And that was his wife. Don’t want to know what you said to her, but she looked offended.”
He choked on a quiet laugh. A wife, sure. Wives didn’t look like that around these parts. Cheap hooker, maybe.
“Charlie’s a one cold son of a bitch. You don’t cross paths with people like that too much if you don’t have to. Hear, Rust?”
He was not made for hard work, but he could manage. He was always painfully skinny, so his strength was limited, but he'd rather die than admit that back then. Dizzy or no, on the edge of passing out, he worked without the smallest groan.
Travis hated laziness, so Rust got used to always having his shoes close, jacket and keys within reach of his hand, in case his father barked out some new orders. He heard over and over again that he’s the most ungrateful child ever born.
When he was taught how to hunt, at the beginning the mere thought scared him. His hands were shaky when he held the rifle, and Travis looked at him with disfavor. Sharp looks and sharp commands weren’t enough to pierce through Rust’s queasiness about pulling the trigger. His father tried to take the weapon from him, too irritated to keep waiting. Rust didn’t let him. He held it closely, groaning like the wild animal himself, and almost fell to his back under Travis’ strength. That angered him enough. He allowed his son to take a shot. He did, a few minutes later, and wounded the animal terribly, but not killing it. Travis spat out a curse, took his hunting knife, and left Rust behind. He waited, too scared to move. He understood his father went to finish what he started so clumsily. When he was back, Rust was met with a sharp smack on his face with the knife’s handle. He could feel his teeth ring when he looked up to his father. He never again shot without being absolutely sure he had a good aim.
Rust had a childhood terrible enough to make the teenage years… pretty tolerable. His pops hated children, his own son in particular. Rust was an observer ever since. He knew that the more mature he acted, the more attention his dad spared on him, so at the age of eleven, he forbade himself from everything that could remind Travis that he was just a kid.
The older Rust got, the more appreciated he was by his father. At some point after seventeen, he even almost liked him. It was hard for Rust to forget old wounds, just because the new ones were shallow. He was too smart, even as a teenager, to look at his abuser and not also see a broken man.
I think of Travis as an awfully lonely guy. He'd love to yap his sons ears off when drunk.
Rust was a picky eater. Living with Travis, he was pretty much forced to eat most things, but some gross him out too much. He wasn't sure if it was the smell, structure, or something else, but he couldn’t. He'd simply stare at it, like it would make the thing disappear.
“Looking at it with hate won't make the thing gone, sorry to disappoint you,” you said, already in the middle of trying to get all the pomegranate out of Rust’s cheesecake. “Happy now?”
“Very much.”
Another sin of Travis Cohle would be depriving his son of access to education. No useless books allowed in the house and school? The only thing school will make of you is an obedient henchman of the government.
“Probably won’t make it to school,” he mentioned when they already sat in the car. “Not like that’s something new.”
Actually, he would be out of school, if he didn’t fail last year, due to ‘unacceptable number of absences’.
“Son, you really think they will teach you something useful in there?”
“Hell nah, sir.”
“Correct.”
When he was younger, he’d sneak out to the library and sit there for hours. When the years went on, Travis made sure he had less time for things like that, but Rust also cared less about pretending and covering it up. He started to gather books whenever he could and bring them to his room. Only one time Travis barged in, pissed off about some underpaid work or something else that Rust had nothing to do with. The carefully made small collection of books became the object of his fury. The fire in front of the garage burned long, and no one cleaned the ash for the next two weeks. Rust was sixteen at the time, already a tall boy – if he wasn’t so skinny, he’d almost have an advantage over his father. It was the first time he truly had to clench his fist to not throw himself at Travis. He imagined, over and over again, that he pushed his head into the flame when Travis kneeled over the fire.
Rust was capable enough in labor work, but he wasn’t made for those kinds of things. You saw that right from the start. He was smart, academically even. He avoided any mentions of inviting you to his house, but you really wanted to imagine his room as a place full of books. It probably wasn’t. You saw how his father treated him. It was doubtful, to think he even had time for reading, and meaningless shit – because you’d bet that’s what books were to Travis – had no place in their house.
You were a reader yourself, but Rust? Every single time he clung to your bookshelf and sat in the corner when you were doing something in the living room, it was hard to focus. You could've spent hours just observing him, when he turned pages at impressive speed. It really made you want to get him more and more things to read.
Older Rust's relationship with his father is Cold War. They hate one another, but rarely argue. Sometimes it seems like they found a common tongue over some thought. They even manage to snort a joke to the other and give a piece of their mind. Yet they are still resentful. Rust is not willing to forget his childhood and forgive Travis. Even if the old man with age gets more and more sentimental.
I can imagine him drunk, asleep with memories of little Rust sprawled around him. A photo, drawing, school diploma, an old pair of shoes. There were things Rust expected him to get rid of long ago. But there it was, bleak from the years, baby pacifier on the table, next to the unfinished glass of whisky. Remains of dried tears were still visible on the old Cohle's face. It wasn’t just that Travis was afraid of not handling all the work alone. He was getting old, sure, and Rust helped him a lot, but it was loneliness that scared him. And he would be lonely, no question of that.
Family Matters - A True Detective s1 fanfiction, but like. barely.
“Travis.”
“Hello, Agatha.”
“Just a sec.” The door closes, the chain unlatches. A moment of quiet. Then she opens the door fully. Ptolemai drapes over her neck and arms like a shawl. The sunlight makes rainbows of his scales.
“Come on in,” Agatha tells him, walks away into the cool dark of the apartment.
Agent leads the way, Travis closes the door quietly.
“Lock it,” Ptolemai murmurs, just loud enough to be heard. “Rustin and Marlowe like to get out.”
“Rustin and Marlowe,” Travis says. Not for the first time, but for the first time since he’s touched down in the states.
read in full on ao3 here! read the rest of the series here!
EDIT: forgot to put the links in so pls check out the first reblog with the links in it lmao
