glencola app

[aluminumandash]

OOC INFO
Name/Handle: Carolyn
Pronouns: She/her
Contact: PM or smugfrog
Reserve?: no

IC INFO
Name: Rustin Cohle
Journal: aluminumandash
Canon: True Detective (season one)
Age: Time is a flat circle. 34.
Species: Human

CW for suicidal ideation, alcoholism, drug abuse, child murder and sexual abuse

Canon Point: 1x4 Who Goes There, right after stealing cocaine from the evidence locker
Condition: Healthy and physically fit, although he's an alcoholic who recently fell off the wagon. He also literally just snorted a pretty decent amount of coke.

He's a chronic insomniac and hallucinates off and on as well—it's unclear why (he speculates that it might be the aftershocks of drug abuse and/or PTSD) but canonically he's seen streams of light, flocks of birds in strange configurations, and even experienced particular smells and tastes in specific locations. (Though this may be overlap with synesthesia...which he also has...sorry he's so much.)

AND TO MIX THINGS UP, I'd like to break his leg upon arrival—immediately, if possible (maybe he hits/lands on a rock?). Rust has a ton of survival experience and knowledge, so I think this 1. would be funny and 2. would force him to work with and rely on other characters in ways he otherwise wouldn't have to. (Hopefully he could do collaborative search requests by running support over the walkie or something similar.)

History:
For reference!

• Rust was born in Galveston, Texas and lived there with his mom until the age of two, at which point she left him with his dad—a Vietnam vet who raised Rust in the Alaskan wilderness. He was a survivalist who “had some pretty fucking strange ideas” according to Rust, and coming from him that’s saying something.

• Rust eventually left Alaska and returned to Texas, where he joined the Houston Police Department. Around this time he met his wife Claire, and they had a child, Sophia. When she was two years old, Sophia was hit by a car while out on her tricycle. She died.

• Rust and Claire blamed each other for their daughter's death, and Rust spiraled out of control. He transferred to narcotics and started using 24/7, ripping off criminals so he could feed a bottomless drug habit.

• Claire left him (Rust doesn't seem aware of when exactly it happened) and Rust "emptied a nine into a crank head" who'd injected his own infant daughter with meth. At that point, Rust was given only one option to stay out of jail: work undercover indefinitely, for any agency or department that needed him.

• Rust was undercover for four years as "Crash," a junkie and member of the Iron Crusaders, a biker gang. In 1993, he was in a gunfight in Port of Houston, killing three cartel members but getting shot himself. The department sent him to a psychiatric ward in Lubbock, Texas and offered him psychiatric pension, but he said he wanted to work homicide instead. He was sent to Louisiana, where he was partnered with Marty Hart.

• January 3, 1995, a woman was found dead outside of Erath, Louisiana. The crime scene was striking: the perpetrator had drawn a spiral design on the victim, blindfolded her, placed antlers on her head, and posed her beneath a tree. The scene was also adorned with twigs strung together in odd, artistic configurations. Rust and Marty were assigned the case; after taking a look at the body Rust immediately hypothesized it was the work of a serial killer, though Marty insisted he was jumping to unfounded conclusions.

• The woman was eventually identified as Dora Lange, a sex worker who’d lived at a “bunny ranch” with other women in the same line of work. In an attempt to scrounge up some kind of lead, Rust and Marty read her diary, spoke to the other women who'd lived with her, interrogated her ex-husband in prison, and questioned members of a revival ministry she’d attended. There were vague allusions to a tall, scarred man seen with her at church, but no concrete leads.

• As time dragged on, Rust and Marty’s superiors grew impatient and suggested everyone would be better served by handing off the case to a newly founded task force charged with investigating “crimes of an anti-Christian nature.” Rust was apoplectic at the suggestion that the murder had anything to do with Christianity and openly contemptuous of the task force’s very existence. Marty wheedled a little more time before they’d have no choice but to move on to something else.

• With the clock ticking, Rust started spending his evenings combing through pictures of dead bodies—women from cold cases who might have been murdered by the same man. Weeks later, he found one: a supposedly drowned woman with a crude spiral drawn on her shoulder. Upon speaking to the woman’s grandfather, Rust and Marty discovered she’d been dating a man named Reggie Ledoux, who—surprise, surprise—had been cellmates with Dora’s ex.

• The detectives paid another visit to Dora’s ex-husband, who gave them the name of one of Reggie’s buddies and confirmed that Reggie knew how to make meth and LSD—both substances found in Dora Lange’s system at the time of her death. He’d also shown Reggie pictures of Dora during their time in prison.

• Almost simultaneously, Marty’s marriage imploded. He’d been systematically cheating on his wife Maggie, and when the other woman wanted to end it, he hurled verbal abuse at her and threatened her. She responded by telling Maggie everything. Boiling over with rage, Marty tracked down Reggie Ledoux’s friend and threatened him at gunpoint until he told him how to find Reggie.

• As it happened, Reggie was cooking meth for a biker gang called the Iron Crusaders—the same gang Rust had run with during his undercover days. Convincing Marty that the best play was to do everything without the rest of the police department’s knowledge—a more conventional show of force would only scare everyone off—Rust prepared to re-assume his undercover identity. He started drinking again, brewed up a concoction to simulate track marks on his arms, and stole a kilo of coke from the police evidence locker, leaving flour in its place.

At this point he arrives in game.

Personality:

Pros:

• Responsible: Rust not only takes his duties as a homicide detective seriously (and he does, to an obsessive degree—his house is stacked with books on serial killers), his sense of responsibility extends to society as a whole, particularly people who society’s likely to turn its back on—children, the poor, sex workers. A self-proclaimed nihilist who doesn’t give a shit about emotionally devastating someone he thinks deserves it, he nevertheless cares deeply about human suffering on a vaster scale. It’s not exactly compassion, but it’s as close as he gets—he believes that harm visited on any one individual contributes to the deterioration of humanity.

This means he’s pretty much racked with guilt at all times, but it also means he never lets himself off the hook.

• Truth-seeking: Don’t get me wrong, Rust is full of shit—especially when it comes to his own feelings—but the truth matters to him, and he pursues it relentlessly, even when it’s unimaginably ugly, even when it might blow up in his face or derail his career. When his partner Marty asks him point blank why he gets out of bed in the morning, Rust says, “I tell myself I bear witness.” He refuses to look away from even the most horrific aspects of life. In a literal sense, as part of the Dora Lange case, he spends hours upon hours reviewing photos of murder victims, trying to find some detail that might link their death with Dora’s. In a more philosophical sense, he tries to dismantle his own delusions and see himself for who he really is; he makes every attempt to look at the world the same way.

• Resourceful: Between his upbringing in the Alaskan wilderness and his years undercover, Rust’s very good at thinking on the fly, taking stock of what’s on hand and improvising accordingly. He’s almost preternaturally skilled at “working the box”—getting a read on suspects brought in for questioning and manipulating them into confessing. In less controlled environments, he’s also able to act quickly and decisively: when his partner executes a murder suspect, Rust jumps in while Marty’s still in shock and talks him through the cover-up, down to removing the dead man’s handcuffs so the blood won’t settle.

Cons:

• Judgmental: Rust is, simply put, brutal on other people—quick to dismiss or even write them off entirely if it seems like they don’t have their priorities in order. Uncomfortable at a religious revival meeting, he shit-talks (in the most pretentious way possible) everyone there to Marty, dismissing religion as a virus and their faith as a “yen for fairytales.” He struggles to hide his contempt—if he even bothers—when faced with lazy colleagues or work directives he doesn’t agree with. It’s not an everyday occurrence, but goes so far as to outright tell one woman—who's confessed to murdering her three infant children—that she should kill herself.

His is a harsh worldview, and he’s a relentlessly harsh person.

• Hypocrite: Rust's nihilistic outlook—that life is meaningless, that human experience amounts to nothing more than a collection of urges and fleeting impressions—is hollow at its core, a series of justifications he uses to avoid grappling with his own grief over his daughter’s death. Her death was only meaningless, he's able to tell himself, because every death is meaningless. The feelings that threaten to overwhelm him—guilt, pain, anger—don't matter, because feelings are ultimately just signals from the brain, chemical reactions blown way out of proportion by biological puppets with delusions of grandeur. Rust is uncompromising because any deviation from his black-and-white conception of reality, any admission of doubt, could jeopardize the precarious balance he's managed to find.

• Disconnected: Marty calls Rust aloof, and that can be true—at times he deliberately sets himself apart from other people, refusing to play nice or pay lip service to social convention. He remains a cipher to his fellow cops—many of whom suspect him of being an internal affairs plant, since he transferred from out of state—and makes no attempt to impress or buddy up to his superiors. He’s so indifferent to politics and political maneuvering that he doesn’t know who the governor of his own state is.

But Rust is also just profoundly isolated. Coming off years of undercover work that culminated in a mandatory stay in a psychiatric institution, he’s uncomfortable in his own skin, never mind around other people. The house he lives in is pretty much bare, except for work he’s taken home and piles of books to supplement it. He makes attempts to reach out—when Marty invites him over for dinner, for instance, he brings flowers—but they’re often misinterpreted or simply misguided. It’s like Rust has a mental list of “things a person does” that he tries to abide by, a hyper-intellectualized approach to the natural give-and-take of human relationships. Unsurprisingly, the effect is more alienating than endearing.

Inventory:
• suit jacket, button-down shirt, tie, wristwatch, pants, socks, shoes, and underwear
• on his belt: police-issue gun, handcuffs, pager, badge
• in his pockets: keys to the evidence locker, car/house keys, knife, lighter, cigarettes, wallet (containing driver's license and about $80 cash)
• stuffed down the back of his pants: a kilo of cocaine (sealed in plastic)

If it's helpful, there's a clip of the scene right before his arrival here.

Powers/Abilities:
No superhuman powers or abilities, but throwing his skillset on here for reference (and since it's all over the place):

• Survival/Wilderness Skills - Rust was raised in a remote part of Alaska by his father, a Vietnam vet who took self-reliance to extremes. From a young age, the skills necessary for survival in a harsh, inhospitable environment were ingrained in him: he knows how to track game and bow hunt, how to navigate without the aid of a compass, how to monitor and assess his own functioning and perform rudimentary medical procedures. Even when he's not in a survival situation, he's acutely aware of his surroundings.

• Police Training - Rust has roughly a decade of police work under his belt, in a variety of departments—vice, robbery, narcotics, and homicide. He's proficient with most firearms (he carries a Glock, but has no trouble handling a machine gun when the situation demands) and skilled at physical combat. He's well versed in investigative and interrogative techniques and has supplemented this knowledge with a compendium of books on serial killers.

His time undercover lent itself to the cultivation of an entirely different skillset—he can lie convincingly on the fly, work up a concoction that when injected simulates track marks, ride a motorcycle, and do all sorts of questionable shit. He knows a fair amount of Spanish (very little of it polite) as well.

• Drawing - He's pretty decent.

TDM Sample:
here!