Chapter Text
If you’d asked Marty a month ago whether he believed in shapeshifting, you’d have gotten a no. Hell no. Maybe a scoff to go with the no.
But as he sped along the interstate at many hours past midnight, hands only saved from trembling by the nervous beer he’d drunk as he waited by the biker bar, he figured there was no other explanation for the demon currently possessing the rear seat of his car. The - well, the creature was not anything really resembling Rust.
And no, surprisingly, Marty wasn’t thinking about the bloodied and moaning biker, who was doing his best to struggle in the demon’s grip and get grime all over the seats. Who stank, by the way. He was thinking about Crash. This was a new entity entirely. Shapeshifting was the only explanation there.
He’d attempted, after he’d floored it out of the projects, to ask a couple questions. Who, why, y’know, what, the fuck. But the Rust-Crash entity, who perhaps in a moment of pure coked adrenaline had sounded like a functioning human being over the phone, was not giving him a whole lot to work with beyond an absolute certainty that he despised the guy with the ginger beard. The level of vitriol and hatred being unleashed in the backseat was borderline unsettling. Crash was seething. Spitting mad. And Rust didn’t get emotional like that.
Marty stopped checking the rear view after the first few punches landed.
The sickly pale lights of the interstate flew by. There was hardly another car on the road. Nothing to distract him from the scene going on less than a foot from his head. Crash - Rust - would simply not shut the fuck up. In between gritted-teeth strung-out insults to the ginger man Marty now figured was called Ginger (God, how inventive), Crash’s words devolved into muttering, and it chilled Marty’s spine to hear the bitter intelligence he thought he recognised mixed in with complete junkie insanity. A sentence would start with an insult, panted out, and end with furious murmurs. Like a street addict.
The words just kept pouring out of him, and Marty watched his own fingers begin to twitch on the wheel with anxiety. He started searching for road signs that didn’t actually exist.
Slowly, over the past few months, without him even realising it, Marty had become almost utterly comfortable with the way Rust was. The philosophical musings, the latent nihilism, the Spartan apartment, the harsh curve in the hollows of his cheeks, all of it. Rust’s bullshit had grown into a little nook called a constant in his life - and no more so than in the past two months, where structure had very suddenly fallen away to post-structure. But the way Rust was, was not entirely the way Crash was. Marty kept opening his mouth and shutting it again.
“I’m done talking to you like a man.” Suddenly from the back. The crunch of bone to meat. Marty winced. He took a deep, sucking breath.
“Rust, what in the fuck. You gotta plan or are you completely high out of your fuckin mind right now?”
He didn’t turn and look but he could feel them on him, those glittering, too-big eyes watching him from the back seat. The creature was focused on him now. Twitchy. Sweating out amphetamines. A truck swept past them, buffeting the car.
“Take the next side road and pull over.” Rust’s voice was a confusing mix of drunken-sounding drawl and his own. Words tripped up in odd places. Cadences blurred into one another.
“Are you crazy?”
“Just fucking do as I say.” That was all Rust.
“You better hope the road stays this quiet.” Marty muttered, eyes flickering up to read road signs that had suddenly rematerialised.
The side road they ended up taking was desolate, single lane, silent cornfields on either side. The car rolled to a stop at a grassy verge, and a wave of nausea decided to spiral upwards as it dawned on Marty that some of the girls’ stuff was still in this car. There was a ballet bag in the boot. He could see one of Maggie’s lip balms or whatever it was in the side door compartment. He said a small prayer that the Rust-Crash demon was not muttering at him from the passenger seat. It would have been too cruel an imitation of normal life.
As the engine died, Crash flung the door open and spilled all greasy, twitching 5’10” of Ginger onto the muddy ground outside. Before Marty could even open his mouth to say Hey, Crash was on him like a whirlwind, laying into the body with black-clad limbs that in the dim light were barely contained to physical form. Ginger’s grunts started and stopped almost instantly.
“Hey, hey- fucking ouch.” Marty reached into this maelstrom. He seized an arm in which the muscles were pulled so taught it was like gripping metal. Crash staggered back, trying one last swing with the free arm. Mean left hook.
“Get the fuck off me. He deserves it. He needs ...s'putting downnnn. Gon' do it… soon’s e’s no longer useful. Fuckin vermin.” Rust spat, dancing again on that curious vocal knife-edge between familiar anger and completely alien slow syllables, tripping over the concept of each word. In the past few weeks, Marty had seen Rust high more times than he’d ever wanted to (the amount of times being zero), but never this incapacitated or out of control. He looked from Crash’s bruised, hollowed face to the still form of Ginger, and a spark of connection formed in his head. Rust wasn’t trying to get this high. They gave him more than he already took.
Releasing the leather-clad arm, which Rust lowered slowly, Marty got his first proper look at him. It was Rust’s slack face, but seen through an odd veil of degeneracy. His pupils were blown to the edge of the map. He couldn’t seem to close his eyes even a millimetre; they stretched out into Marty’s soul, seeking, hungry, strung out. And usually it was his own search for truth in Rust’s eyes, but now it was the milky veins of substances - God, what fucking kind, how fucking many, Marty didn’t want to know. A heartbeat of concern flickered into being.
The familiarly gaunt lines of Rust’s face hadn’t changed, but they suddenly seemed impossibly more defined. Like his nihilistic old skeleton was trying its hardest to break through the skin. And the druggy sweat (although the violence and panic of the evening justified it) coated that skin, and Marty now noticed more injuries, a larger bruise blossoming along the jawline, dark, foreign. So raw.
Why could he see that? Why could he see the set of the jaw, the tension in it?
Rust kept staring at him. He had wild tremors, almost imperceptibly, in his fingers. Marty frowned and leaned back slightly against the car.
“Well… are you Rust, or are you Crash right now? Cut the shit.” Slowly.
“That’s not an easy question to answer.” Low. Gravelly. All Rust.
Marty rolled his eyes. He watched Crash’s shoulders flex beneath the jacket as he rolled them, too strung out to stay still. And from months of passive, beleaguered observation, he knew that Rust generally preferred to be as still and meditative as the fucking Thinker. The demon was far from exorcised. He took another step back against the car. Pulse jumping.
“I… I ain’t sure I like you like this, Rust.” He meant it as a cue, to say come on now, you’ve had your moment, let’s fucking go, you’re freaking me out. But he felt it in another sense, the sense in which he was figuratively alone on a fucking backroad with something wild inhabiting the lean skin of a man he thought he knew.
“You wan’ make a decision on that? Ffffind out?” Slurred words. Crash took half a step closer, and Marty’s chest was pounding again the same as it had done way back in the primal, marital fury of the locker room, blazing with machismo and freneticism. His wrists ached for a moment at the thought, the phantom of his bones being ground together in Rust’s hand.
Denim hit denim as Rust-Crash had Marty’s back pinned like lightning, pushed uncomfortably against the curve of the car, body forcefully moving against body, straddling Marty’s left leg. It was a move of domination, but there was something desperate about it. Their legs twisted together, the denim frictioning. Crash’s neck touched Marty’s shoulder as his gaze floated imperceptibly beyond him, to the empty tarmac of the road. He could almost feel, as though it came in shockwaves through the air, the uppers-induced pulse racing in Rust’s neck. Or maybe it was his own.
“You’d find Crash a lot more likeable than Rust. In some ways. People tend to do that.” Panted out, with a tremor to it. With experience to it.
It would take weeks for Marty to stop questioning why he did nothing, why he focused on the creak of the leather jacket and the smell of old adrenaline and whisky coursing off Rust right then and there. Why he was gripped imperceptibly by a desire to stay pinned against cold sheet metal by a body that shook with chemicals and pain. And most of all when, despite the unhinged and unknowable instability of Rust’s body putting thoughts of shapeshifting and folk mythology into his head, his jeans began to tighten around the crotch when Rust’s head lazily swung back round to fix him with an unholy stare.
“I- fuck, uh-” Marty’s body was a supercomputer, a throbbing missile seaking heat from the man whose boney hips pressed themselves against the age-thickened paunch of his own stomach. Through two shirts and two jackets he still felt everything. Warm rush. Friction. Breath.
The moment was suddenly tense and pulsating, and Marty felt a rush of lightheadedness, external to his own half-aroused body. It was just as his arm twitched, of its own accord, to reach up to the back of the leather jacket, to stroke the worn stitches of the patch, that the heady madness was struck by an achingly bright headlight flash of a car speeding past. Illuminating everything in stunning truth for one moment. One moment was all it took for the erotic spell to break.
“Fuck, Rust.” It was half a yell as he shoved and rolled from beneath his partner’s form. A rope felt cut. “I am not getting into this while you’re- while you’re this goddamn high. I don’t even wanna talk to you.” The headlights swum in the back of his eyes, and hot rush turned to hot shame as he staggered back, still feeling his own arousal.
Rust whipped round with his head snapped back, all the tendons in his throat presenting themselves to Marty, like a cowed dog. There was pain and a cruel smile on his face.
“Everyone wants to get into... something, Marty. You’re just a vessel for your truths. And boy, you got truths. Be a good detective ‘bout ‘em.”
“Fuck you.” But he didn’t feel it. Nothing felt like truth. The headrush was back and thoughts of driving onwards were scattered by Rust’s - Crash’s - words, words that didn’t have the measured weight to them as usual but instead felt like nonsensical incantations floated into the air between them. Because this was Crash, right? He’d lost Rust the second this plan was hatched two weeks ago. And now there was just a demon. A goddamn creature using Rust’s body. And the hot shame crept up his neck when he realised that all it had taken was a bit of proximity for the creature to start fucking around with his grip on his own desire.
“Take one too many drugs and immediately start acting a queer. Yeah, well, thought nothing could surprise me ‘bout you, Rust, but you always gotta pull it outta the bag.”
He watched as a particularly violent tremor shook his partner’s body and he bent over slightly, as though unable to support his own weight. Watched the way his fingers jumped to twitching and scratching at the sides of his thighs, worrying at the denim. Rust - yeah, maybe it wasn’t Crash - just stared at him like a bird watches a family at a picnic table. Marty felt the familiar twist of curdled desire, but, utterly incapable of interrogating it in that moment, decided to substitute it for bone-tiredness instead. He was impossibly glad when Rust decided to just mechanically heave Ginger’s body back into the car, sit in the back, and shut up.
But he couldn’t help but feel like it was one of those times when he actually wanted Rust to say something, and he wouldn’t, just wouldn’t. And it always felt like a volcanic eruption in reverse; something raw and dangerous flowing back into the ground, never to be seen again.