Have you read "Learning Rust With Entirely Too Many Linked Lists"[1]? I think it will be quite helpful for these kind of situations. It walks you through all the possible tools in the language that is available to you, and at the end, if you just want to write it how you would in C, you could always do it "unsafely" with raw pointers (which is no worse than C).
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[1] http://cglab.ca/~abeinges/blah/too-many-lists/book/