glencolareef | Day 29

It's a charitable assessment: Rust's been limping along, crude crutch jammed under one arm, dirt-streaked bone clutched in the opposite hand, for hours. His clothes are filthy, his face dark with stubble and glistening with sweat. About the most that can be said for him is he's not visibly bleeding—and closer inspection reveals fresh scrapes in predictable places, aging bruises all up and down his limbs.

He doesn't even seem to register her at first—seems like he'll simply keep on, one agonizing step after the next. Then he stops, almost dangling between his makeshift supports. “You got water?” From the sound of his voice, he does not. Or not much.

He takes his bearings in a dazed way, eyes darting from her face to the underbrush to the sky, begins the laborious process of shifting his weight so he can tug at the—also grimy—strap across his chest, grab at the roll of cloth slung across his back. One-handed, he starts pulling it open. “Gotta show you something.”

She pulls a half-full plastic bottle of water out of her sleeping bag roll, and puts it in his hands; she points to the ground and says, "Sit".

If he has something to show her, he can do it while she's patching him up.

No argument from him but Rust's a long time in acquiescing—working a piece of something soft and rustling from his little pack, letting it and the rest of its contents sway to the ground with a metallic clink. Taking the water, drinking in controlled sips. Passing it back.

“Here.” It's little more than a grunt. He tries to hand off the waist-high bone splinter—if she takes it, she might see, or feel, the markings clawed into it. Then he leans forward to shrug his arm out of a bag that clatters heavily to the ground, unloads a roll of some material that shimmers in the moonlight from his back.

Hobbling his way to the nearest boulder, he lowers himself gradually, bending his left knee, scrabbling for purchase with the crutch as he fights to keep his weight from his right leg. His breathing quickens to pained gasps; he groans, half-collapsing against the rock. Leg outstretched.

His ankle's swollen in his boot—he couldn't risk taking it off, not being able to get it on again—and the leg's not faring much better, bloated and bruised. It doesn't take medical expertise to tell he's been thoroughly worked over by someone who wanted him to suffer.

But the scrap of cloth's still clutched in his hand, and he wastes no time in spreading it out on the rock. “This is his print. Salamanca's.” The tread of a man's boot's been sketched in black marker—rendered in quick, strong strokes. “And this—fucker at the cabin.” A smaller print, clawed and almost delicate. Rust pauses, takes a ragged breath. “It's a lizard. Some kinda fucking four-eyed lizard. That knows a damn sight more than it should about human anatomy.”

Edited 2023-10-13 01:13 (UTC)

Exhausted as she is, Shaw does her best to help him hobble over and get himself to the ground, at which point she kneels next to him and starts looking him over more closely. She quickly comes to the same conclusion about the boot, but she will try to roll up the leg of his pants as best she can, looking for anything that might need bandages or antiseptic.

"Not much I can do about the swelling beyond keeping your weight off it and waiting," she says. "Can I take your shirt off for a sec?"

Lizardman talk can come in a moment; first, she wants to make sure she doesn't see any signs of broken ribs or internal bleeding around his abdomen.

Once upon a time the slacks he's wearing were the bottom half of a suit—which is to say, the pant leg'll be hard to roll up but easy to rip or cut, and Rust won't object. The situation where the top of the boot—less a hiking boot than a sort of heavy-duty, thick-soled shoe—meets his leg is bad, the skin under his sock red and raw. It's a safe bet his other foot's a mess of blisters and abrasions as well.

Aside from that: his left shin sports a fairly fresh gash. His left wrist is still in a discolored, sweaty brace. But the cabin-dweller seems to have contented themselves with inflicting pain just short of broken bones, targeting joints and leaving a map of bruises spanning almost Rust's entire body.

“I can take off my own shirt,” he grumbles, then goes still. Gaze fixed on something far off. He rolls one shoulder back, shakes his arm until it's free of the sleeve of his patchwork leather jacket. Pulls the jacket off his other arm with a slow, shuddering exhalation.

He brings his arms to his chest and closes his eyes, grinds down on his jaw, feeling for that first button. His fingers sluggishly work it free and his arms go slack, his head tipping back. “Too many fucking buttons.”

He lets her take it from there. Beneath the shirt—a grimy former dress shirt with the sleeves already lopped off—she'll find more bruising, a tattoo on his chest as cryptic as the markings on the bone. But nothing that points to cracked ribs or internal bleeding.

And through it all he carries on talking. “He was, ah...” Rust's eyes roll back—the color, to him, is bound up with taste, citrus-sour. Too specific for words. “Red, red-brown, like clay. All over scales. Wore clothes. Skins. I guess that makes some kinda sense, if you're cold-blooded.”

Edited (forgot his jacket 🪦 GOD MORE JACKET EDITS) 2023-10-14 17:30 (UTC)

Clothing isn't exactly easy to come by here, and maintaining it is important, so Shaw leaves his pants intact: once she realizes how difficult they are to roll (honestly, men and their suits), she doesn't try to force them, instead just noting the lack of blood seeping through and hoping that means he doesn't have any open wounds under there.

"Not too bad," she murmurs, as she examines his chest and back; saying he got lucky feels like a bit of a stretch, but it definitely could have been worse. "I'm gonna patch up that gash on your arm, but nothing too major looks busted."

It's only when she's halfway done with rebuttoning his shirt that she asks, "Could you tell what the skins were from?"

There's an underlying tension—to him, to his body, an inescapable lack of ease—but Rust allows his attention to wander as she examines his wounds. Trusting her hands and her eye; trusting her to not to hurt him or overreact. “There's a kit. In the bag.” A battered metal box with a familiar red cross on it, containing everything from a plastic bottle of cinnamon to a hunting knife to a suture needle and ankle brace. “Picked up some bandages could do the trick.”

Are they sterile? Are they hell. But it's mostly the edges that are stained.

At her question he reaches for the jacket he's just squirmed out of, offers it to her. Rubbing the leather in his fingers. It's clearly animal hide but the shades vary. “Think this is his work. I found other pelts too—one over there's a fish”—the shimmery bundle—“and there was something, I couldn't tell. I'd say gator but...”

But it finally occurs to him that if he keeps on like this she might conclude he's not altogether in his right mind.

Edited 2023-10-14 20:31 (UTC)

Well, would you look at that. So he does. She'd come with a few supplies of her own, but battered as it is, this kit is better than that, and she sets to work patching up his gash with the least-grody bandage available. Ideally she'd dab some antiseptic on it first, but. Well. She'll just have to be sure to change his bandages regularly to make up for that.

"Mostly I was just wondering if anything looked like human skin."

He thinks about it—the beating a blur of pain broken up with moments of clarity, hard-won and excruciating. The hue of the creature's skin, those eyes. Stray sounds, trying to match them up with his body. “Didn't get a good look. Can't say I'd know on sight either.”

Rust twists his torso, digs a smashed pack of Camels from his pocket while moving as little as possible. He takes one for himself—there's a handful of cigarettes inside, not all of them matching—then extends the pack to Shaw.

“It'd vanish though, wouldn't it? Unless you think...” He's getting his hands on people not like them. Or stripping the back off someone left dangling in that cabin. “He called Salamanca pet before he offed him. Toy. Not things you'd go carving chunks out of. Traditionally speaking.”

"But you're worried about captives, yeah?" she asks, waving off the offer of a cigarette. "You think he might keep people in there?"

It's a sore spot—if he is taking prisoners, Rust's worry's done absolutely nothing for them, maybe made things worse—but fuck, his whole body's a sore spot right now. He just nods, mechanical. “Remember that girl Beth? And Zam.”

Smoking doesn't relax him: he does it with the same intensity he does most other things, taking long deep drags and studying her in the pinpoint light of the cigarette. His drawl, though, stretches out—making itself at home.

“Telling Martin he'd keep him in a cage. I mean, how much of that was bullshit, second-rate mind games...but there's something with him and chains. He took my cuffs after he beat me senseless. Left me everything else, near as I could tell.”

"I told them I'd bring you back to the airfield to rest," Shaw says - dropping back against a sturdy tree trunk now that she's done patching him up, already feeling the weariness of the past few days catching up to her. There's still a sharpness to her eyes, but it's directed off into the middle distance, not at Rust. "But we could rest out here instead. Finish healing up. Scout out the place, and then make a move. We might do better coming at him from two directions at once."

The draw of this option will only get stronger in the next few hours, once she finds out that Maddy and Lalo have both disappeared, too.

He smokes a while, weighing the proposition. Gauging his own feelings about heading back there, likely to serve as bait. It's like prodding a bruise, but he finds it doesn't give rise to dread. Fear, sure, but that's containable. “He might not even be up there, not now,” he says. “Couple hours ago I saw...mighta been an elk, practically on his front lawn. Usually the animals won't go near that place.

“But it's too much time. They need what I've got on Salamanca. Need someone to make them take it seriously, too. Especially with him...” A throwaway gesture, Rust's cigarette weaving through the dark like a drunken firefly. “Doubt dying another time's made him less of a fucking maniac.”

He takes another pull on his cigarette. “Martin's supposed to be out here somewhere. Jet. We could meet up, hand off what I know. But, ah, if the guy at the cabin's out there watching, that's two more people dragged into this.”

Edited (defining pronouns.......) 2023-10-15 14:39 (UTC)

He might not even be up there. It's s sorely tempting tidbit of information, but Shaw is nothing if not practical, and she came out here with one purpose and one purpose only: to get Cohle to safety. She's not going to abandon the mission right in front of her to run off on another mission, one that might pan out but that is just as likely to be a wild goose chase. If Cohle wants to go back, then back he'll go. She'll complete the mission at hand, and then she can think about the cabin again. After all, if the guy (the lizard guy, what a trip) left this once, then surely he will again in the future. She has time.

"The airfield, then," she says definitively. "If we run into Martin and Jet, we can reassess our options."

Without shifting his gaze he nods, exhaustion hitting all of a sudden now that he's no longer on the move, now that the pain's receded. He thinks of asking what it's like—the airfield—but even with her here and a plan between them he can't picture himself there. It'd be like asking her about Disneyland.

“He was following me a while. Making noises in the night. Left me a rabbit, every limb snapped. Message”—his fingers drift in front of his forehead—“carved into it. I, ah, I think that was two days back? Couldn't swear to it. He starts that up again—I can't lead him back there, you know.”

"I got something like that, too."

Before she, you know, was brutally murdered in her sleep.

"Minus the message. I get it; there's noncombatants there. Kids." Her mind keeps coming back to pain-in-the-ass Maddie, in way over her head and trying desperately to pretend she's not fucking terrified. "We should rest. Not going anywhere tonight."

“Yep,” he agrees. The word's taut as a bowstring. He stubs the cigarette out on the rock and stays where he is, gaze flicking off into the dark. He reaches for the crutch, jabs the end into the ground and uses the resistance to slide down the rock. Shoulder throbbing from the effort. The leather jacket he wads up and tucks behind his head.

Rust stares up at the sky. His breathing slows. “Gotta keep an eye out for Salamanca. He'll be back here, matter of when. And who he drags along,” he says, as if that's a reasonable substitute for good night.

But it's so nice to be able to dispense with social niceties sometimes, so really, good on you, Rust. She copies him with her own leather jacket, laying herself out flat on the ground - deciding against her usual bedtime routine of climbing a tree, because she figures she'll be able to better protect him if she's close.

"I won't be able to keep watch. Gonna tap out even if I try not to."

Eyes still open, he allows the possibility to unfold: Salamanca descending on them, moving with that quickness he's sometimes possessed of. His stare black as he cuts into her. Rust forced to watch, Salamanca primed to his least reaction. As ever.

A breath sighs out. He can't muster the energy to articulate it, if Shaw doesn't know. He suspects she does.

“Feels like I've been sleepwalking, past few days. Trespassing on, on someone else's nightmare.” He shifts his head, burrowing into the jacket. At long last his eyes close. “You never told me to kill myself. Why not?” His voice has started to drift, but he asks with a curiosity so open, so close to the surface it verges on childish.

"It'd be a crappy thing to say to anyone who doesn't deserve it," she says - trying to keep her eyes open, but already feeling herself starting to lose that battle. "I'm not sure that you guys are real. I still think this is a simulation. But, uh-- that doesn't mean I couldn't be wrong. So. Don't kill yourself. Even I only did it when it felt like my only option."

Her answer surprises him—in an abstract way, lapping at the edges of his consciousness. “Wouldn't have mattered,” he says, toneless. His speech measured, automatic as breathing. “I can't. Couldn't do it in the cell, couldn't do it before. Maybe he knew, somehow. Why he did everything but.”

Which makes him laughably egotistical, thinking he could inflict suffering on par with existence itself. But makes Rust a coward down to his bones.

"A strong survival drive's not the worst thing you can have," she murmurs. "Even here."

"Don't know about that," he says, a musing hum to the words. "Look at what's survived."

"Seems worth it to me," she says matter-of-factly. "But you should rest."

“I know that's doctor-speak for 'shut the fuck up.'” And, wonder of wonders, he complies.

Being a Marine, a special agent, and then a weird freelance quasi-superhero who keeps odd hours had all trained Shaw well when it comes to getting rest when she can. There's no insomnia or restlessness or lying awake brooding here: it's time to sleep, and so she decides to sleep. Inside of a minute, she's out like a light.

Without the benefit of drugs or books—two kinds of escape hatch from his own psyche—Rust doesn't have much hope of sleep. For a while he hones in on the pain in his leg, lets the ache expand until it's blotted out everything else. In the ensuing stretch of pain-streaked half-consciousness his dreams are musical: reverberations and piercing notes.

He snaps awake from it, gropes for his walkie. Shaw's a dark lump on the ground. He almost pitches himself toward her, ready to crawl on his stomach, then remembers the crutch. He grabs it and prods her a couple times, wherever's closest, puts his free hand up in anticipation of the gun that's likely getting drawn. “Shhh shhh shhh,” he says, harsh and urgent. “Just me. Forgot to show you something.”

Shaw wakes as easily as she fell asleep, still exhausted but not groggy: and though his instincts are correct and her hand immediately flies to the gun at her hip, she at least has the presence of mind not to pull it out and point it at him.

"Yeah?"

She doesn't sit up, but she does shift a little, rolling her head back to look at him.

He drops his hand—a few seconds and his arm's ready to buckle under the weight of it. “You got your walkie?” His eyes are bright in the dark, follow the shifting shadows to her hip.

Distractedly he struggles closer, breath catching now and again. “When I was in that cell, I tried opening it up. Now I—I was dehydrated. Coming off a mystery drug, no telling what was in my system. And—” The pause wouldn't fit a knife's edge; he can't allow himself more than that. “I see things. Sometimes. Lights and colors, patterns. But not like that, not like what happened.”

"See things, present tense."

She's sure she'd heard him correctly, so it's not a question so much as a confirmation; the information makes her frown a little.

"No way it's the dehydration; if you were still messed up enough to be hallucinating, you'd have other bad symptoms too. I figure we're all a little dehydrated, but hallucinating's not like yellow pee."

A pause.

"So it's probably long-term effects of that drug. What else happened?"

He makes a noise in the affirmative, too soft to qualify as a grunt. Grateful they're not plunging deep into the weeds of his dubious fucking sanity. Not right now, at least.

“The screw at the back. Ah, I took my knife to it. Worked fine, but—” He touches a hand to his chest, fitting his fingers into his jacket. “Every time I turned the fucking thing, it was like—like a shock. A jolt. Right in the chest. After three I couldn't handle it.” He pauses, takes a ragged breath. Goes still, gaze unfocused. “And it just kept hurting, you know, until I screwed it back in.”

Shaw wiggles her walkie out of her jacket pocket, studying him.

"You still got that screwdriver?"

He can probably guess why she's asking, and she's out of luck if he won't fork it over for her to experiment with; she'd had a screwdriver, but had left it behind at camp for the others to use.

He nods automatically but doesn't reach right away for the knife clipped to his belt. Appraises her in turn—what he can make out of her features, how she holds herself. Seeking traces of stiffness, discomfort. Tamped-down pain.

“You in good enough shape for this?”

It is so, so tempting to say Only one way to find out and just get on with it. But she's not in the city anymore, with access to near-endless supplies and medical facilities. Here, if she pushes herself too far, she's a liability to herself and others - which doesn't mean never do it, but it does mean don't do it without a damn good reason.

"Good enough shape that I can do it once," she allows. "One jolt. More than that, probably not a good idea."

Rust holds her eyes another moment—as if he might discern there, through the intervening darkness, something not in her voice. Gives a twitch of a nod. “Lemme get the candle.”

The candle's bundled in the cloth lump worn on his back, now set beside the patch of ground he'd been drowsing on. He drags himself a few feet and grabs at it, half-shuffles, half-crawls back to her with it in his lap. Rummaging inside he produces a tuna can clotted with fat, sets it between them and touches his lighter to it. It glows low and steady.

He hands over the knife, blade folded in—solid and well looked after but nothing special.

Day 29 - ???

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lmao feel free to have her start patching him up in the middle of this...he will just keep talking

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cw: suicide/ideation

cw: suicide

cw: suicide

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