Work Text:
It's January 3, 1995.
Detective Cohle stands on a field outside Erath. At his back the forensic team begins to catalog the carefully arranged tableau somebody wanted them to see. He recognizes the ritual in the way you can know something is being spoken without understanding what. In the way he recognizes the world.
He has been here before at the center of things.
It's July 7, 1993.
Patient 9,233 in the Northshore Psychiatric Hospital will be released shortly. He can read with clarity between the lines of the doctors' reports yet there's nothing there he doesn't know. His body has fully recovered. Some part of his mind never will. On the balance he's deemed safe to the outside world and there isn't much more it can do to him.
His few visitors during his four month's stay had been law enforcement on official business. The last ones don't break the pattern. They offer him a psychiatric pension: it is the job's way of saying that it has chewed your soul out of everything it has it values and now it's easier to spit you out. He sees no difference between where he was, where is, and anywhere he might be. It's the same world, and the only meaningful way to leave it eludes the grasp of his will.
He asks instead to be transferred to somewhere in Homicide. It doesn't matter where. The whole world is a killing field. Behind every closed door and bend on the road there's hell.
It's March 9, 1995.
Rust stands up in Ledoux' yard after being thrown by the blast from the grenade that just dissolved the man. It's a speeded up version of what happens to everybody sooner or later. The people are a body and the body is flesh and the flesh becomes reddish air he can almost smell.
He sends Marty to look after the kids as much to get him out his way as for anything he can do for them. Rust suspects it's little and death might overall be the best case scenario for them, but it's something he knows instead of feeling and Marty does neither. Best for his partner to be with them and him to remain outside doing the exact opposite of detective work. He's equally good at both.
It's September 17, 1991.
Crash is sitting on Ginger's passenger seat on a deep desert road. That time of night and on the sorts of drugs they've been hitting they might as well be alone in the universe while the stars are whispering obscenities under their skin. There's a third guy in the car, but the chances of him coming back from where they are going ain't very high. There's a couple of showels sharing the truck with him.
Now, most cops would be at least mildly concerned in that setup, but Crash isn't a cop. He's been doing what he does for as long as he can remember, which is more than he needs to. It doesn't mean he's not keeping an eye on Ginger the way Ginger keeps an eye on him. It's a slippery thing. They are brothers — if there's a vice or violence they haven't committed together they are working up to it — but Ginger had a brother before Crash, flesh and blood, and he gutted him with a broken tequila bottle over something he never talked about.
Crash throws his cigarette out of his window and lights another. Ginger's half-watching the road, half-watching him. He never seems to blink, not when they are together. He's seen Crash move on more than one motherfucker, snakelike and terminal, and it's like he's waiting for him to do it again and not particularly worried if it's a move against him or somebody else.
Feels like they've been forever, the both of them, on that car and that night road with the guy in the truck. Crash wouldn't say he feels safe, or at peace, or anything like that — neither one of them has slept for three days between one thing and another — but there's a simplicity to the angles there he has grown to appreciate.
It's May 19th, 2012.
Rust and Marty are at his office. There's a new familiarity between them born of the mutual awareness of how little has or could change between them. They don't expect to survive this case, not really, nor talk about that. The case is the backbone of their careers, sprawls rhizomatically through the State, perhaps it's a synecdoche of the world. They are working the case because they have always been working the case.
Marty sleeps in the office. Every time he wakes up Rust is looking through some papers or looking at the drawings on the wall.
It's January 3, 1987.
Claire and Rust Cohle wake up to the warmth of their room and the cold light coming through a window. He's not immensely happy at that moment — despite it being a Saturday he will have to go to work to fill some paperwork — but it's the best he will ever feel. He doesn't know this yet.
He rushes work and comes back to their home in time for lunch. That afternoon he fixes Lucy's tricycle wheel.
Before the sun falls that wheel will lie flat on the pavement far away from everything else. He won't remember this but will never forget it.
It's May 12th, 2012
Rust has been relatively sober for two hellish years. The carefully managed drunkenness of Alaska had been a false escape into the bardo, a no-place of non-existence or an approximation he had intended to sustain until his death. But ten years of night sky had burned into his brain the sideways spiral of the Milky Way through the haze of alcohol and cold. He hadn't forgotten what he owed.
In Louisiana he had found not just the familiar insanity but something infinitely worse: proof of lucidity. The worst of his mind was part of but not the worst of the world. (He had, he truly had, hoped he was insane.)
Two years of careful research had almost hit a wall when the body in Lake Charles forces the law to pretend to wake up. It doesn't surprise Rust when they "talk" with him, but he hadn't expected their photos. He's a suspect. Makes sense. Even the monstrous has antibodies.
They talk with Marty too. Not as a suspect but as a wedge to get to him. Rust isn't sure who is more wrong about what. The costs of reality go beyond sobriety and damnation.
He follows Marty after he leaves the station and signals him to park. As Marty lowers his window he reads a weary resignation on his face that doesn't mean ease. It's neither a continuation nor a new beginning.
It's May 26th, 2012.
Rust sees the vortex that is Carcosa and the gate to Carcosa and a shape of the world. Everything orbits around the vortex thinking it's moving on a straight line. The vortex eats everything and doesn't change.
He knows it's a hallucination and knows with no less certainty that it's true.
The tall man rushes from nowhere. His insanity seeps from him into the walls of the place and from them back into the fabric of space. Rust feels like he's fighting against a cold dark river. The tall man raises him up as if he were weightless and stabs him on a side. Rust thinks of Longinus and pain and nothing else. Then the tall man lets him fall to the ground, no prophetic powers gained.
It's February 8th, 1993
Crash feels the sudden warmth on his side and leans against Ginger, who yells and fires at whoever just shot him. With his head against Ginger's chest he can see a cartel enforcer coming behind them so he tries to raise his arm and when he can't he just shoots at him almost from the hip. A red button appears on the guy's forehead and he falls.
So the fucking cartel chose to screw up the Iron Crusaders the same day the DEA was using the gang as bait, which was either everybody's usual shitty luck or the whole fucking port is full of moles shooting each other. Crash snickers at the idea and he can feel Ginger look at him. His face then the wound on his side then his face again. His expression isn't the same the second time.
Crash knows he's dying one way or another. Grabs Ginger's shirt with one hand (when did he fall to the ground?) and he's still strong enough to almost pull himself up. "Go" he snarls, and lets himself fall on the ground again. Hurts worse than the bullets, but he turns around to prop his gun in the general direction of where more cartel people might come.
He doesn't hear what Ginger says before he leaves, if he said anything. Which pretty much means Ginger thinks he's already dead. Crash isn't sure he's wrong. Either way it's his way out.
"Into what?" he thinks. Between the blood loss, the residual drugs, and the fundamental nature of the universe, he blacks out before finishing the thought.
It's January 3th, 1995.
Detective Cohle stands on a field outside Erath. At his back the forensic team begins to catalog the carefully arranged tableau somebody wanted them to see. He recognizes the ritual in the way you can know something is being spoken without understanding what. In the way he recognizes the world.
He has been here before at the center of things.