Chapter Text
i am no good for you/seeing ghosts in everything i do
walk away from me lover/away from me lover
the reality of the situation is: rust is unfamiliar, and that's both dangerous and appealing.
everything about marty has become predictable. she loved him, and she loves him, but she can almost feel him vibrating with the need to be someone new to someone new. that's not her goddamn fault. he doesn't even realize he's projecting it so loudly, but she knows it. she knows it in the way he's settled, how comfortable he is. sometimes when he's arrived home (late again) and is eating dinner (eyes on the game) his side of the conversation distracted, his motions routine and pedestrian-- she knows -- he's fucking some other woman. he doesn't seem worried that she might be seeing anyone else. he's comfortable even in his lies to her. it comes as naturally as getting dressed in the morning. she wonders if she should make some kind of preemptive move. draw her gun first. strike before he even knows he's lost. ethically, it would be self-defense, but without definitive proof . . . she won't, can't allow marty to make her the villain. again.
still, just watching the easy languid movement of rustin cohle's reach for a glass of proffered tea, she's tempted. the power in each small unfolding gesture reveals that rustin's only recently taken up residence once again in civilization. somewhere before, not so long ago, he was corybantic, an untamed, primal creature. he's hungry under all that ambling slow energy, and all of her poise can't hide her desire.
there was a time when marty was wild, when they were young together. when he wanted things passionately, and one of those things he never held back from was her. he's always been the kind of man that most people find endearing. charming, bright-eyed; good looks even if he's beginning to round and thin in the requisite middle-aged ways; he can tell a story, all acknowledged-hyperbole and humor; and he is unflinchingly masculine. he understands duty, and security, and to any other man would be loyal to the end of time. maggie's sure that if questioned, he would proclaim his undying devotion to her, and he would believe it to be the truth. but she's become His Responsibility, and that kind of fidelity doesn't extend to his remaining desire.
rustin is none of these things. hard-edged, unlikable, brutally honest at all times, particularly, she had come to find (to her surprise) about his own failings, when it could be pried out of him. he didn’t exactly make a mystery of himself. there was no need to “perform,” as it was with so many other men from the State Police CID. he didn’t perform manliness. no swagger, no boasting, nothing to prove. no, rust would just allow his understanding of the world to cut through anyone else’s (undoubtedly more naïve or optimistic) vision with that same flat drawl that he’d use to observe the weather. this is true. sleep with that rattling around in your brainpan if you can. even without marty’s patronizing reassurance, “Trust me, Honey, you do not want to know” . . . she found that she really, really didn’t care to find out what multitude of skeletons lined rust’s closet.
she doesn’t want to know what he was before, doesn’t want to fix him. he frightens her, in a way. she dreams of him as a dark vortex. in the dream, he draws anyone close into the crushing terrible maw of the truth of existence—a truth that consumes.
she wakes up and realizes that she'd let him eat her alive. wants it, even.
maggie marks this desire down in the ledger of her marriage and its accounts as a potential debit.
one day. she'll owe marty this.