#and getting to examine that illuminates the sheer tragedy of it all

[trashlie]

hey, i'm that anon that sent you the long message about FP 215 and 216 a while ago, thank you for giving such an elaborate response. and i hope you get plenty of time to relax and catch up on sleep, make sure to drink lots of water! 💗

i'm dropping by to bring up a couple of points for your consideration, if you don't mind. just something i've been thinking about lately.

i absolutely agree with you that kousuke doesn't really want nol out of his life. in my opinion, the reason is not guilt or jealousy or loneliness (i bet he'd 100% prefer being an only child even if his siblings were born in wedlock, also he's had a friend group in college, so he is/was capable of making friends). the reason for it is fear. 1) fear of disappointing father - since kousuke is nol's 'guardian' and if anything happens to nol, it'll be a 'failure' on his side and strain his relationship with rand. 2) fear of losing control - nol being gone = out of reach = out of his control = unpredictable = more of a threat. and we know how much kousuke needs to control everything in his life. 3) fear of losing a part of his identity - being 'better' than nol has become a big part of who he is. kousuke is nothing without his name, the company, etc. similarly, traits like being the better, smarter, more successful brother, the golden child, the 'rightful' heir have all become a part of him thanks to nol. kousuke can only achieve those by bringing nol down to push himself up. he needs nol to remind him of those traits, and he needs nol so he can look better compared to him to other people. and i believe he subconsciously realizes this, and hates nol even more for it.

in general, a lot of kousuke's behavior and the main reason for kousuke's mental state is that he's being eaten alive by his fears. fear of failure, fear of disappointment, fear of his image being damaged, fear of not being in control, fear of being exposed, fear of being nothing, fear of losing everything etc. some of those fears are made up and/or planted by yui (like disappointing his father, or nol being the enemy), but to kousuke, they're very much real. and if kousuke's going to grow, dealing with those fears, and recognizing the root causes of them (there's multiple), will be a big part of it. for now, in his current state... it seems to me like he's completely overwhelmed and craves safety more than anything, and well. yui is right there. idk if the brothers can ever reconcile tbh... it seems to me that nol hasn't completely lost hope in his brother yet, so it'll completely depend on kousuke.

and good point, you're probably right about nessa protecting nol from yui until she couldn't anymore, i didn't think of that, thanks for pointing it out! we still know so little about nessa and yui both, it's going to be really interesting to learn more about them...

AAAAHHHH hello Nonny! I've been looking forward to you coming back! Also thank you! I am trying my best!!! This week has not been my best but at least my brain is feeling less sluggish, so there's that at least!

Also I have got to say, reading this message made me feel really weepy. I think it's obvious, but Kousuke is a character I've come to be just as invested in as I am in Nol and Shinae and now Alyssa, and I think you hit the nail right on the head. I think because of the way Kousuke has treated Nol, and his apparent privilege coupled with his less than savory personality, a lot of readers just kind of... dismiss him. And to some degree, I get it. Kousuke is rarely doing himself any favors to endear the audience to him - but that is what makes him such a fascinating character. The story proves that privilege and opportunity alone are not enough, but it also shows us that people do not exist in a vacuum, and that everything they do is impacted by and also impacts something else.

And you're right - it does come down to fear, and there's a reason fear remains a prevailing emotion/driver in many stories. I think man vs man conflict so often comes down to fear, it's the root of a lot of ugly emotion. Jealousy stems from it - a fear that someone has something you don't, that maybe you'll never come to possess yourself.

I think there's a lot to be said of formative foundations. Had Kousuke been older when he learned of Nol, had he received security and love and comfort from his parents, maybe we wouldn't be here. But it was when he was young enough to be influenced, when he was so lacking in his father's love, and to learn that this boy knew there existed a side to Rand that he himself had never met? It never registered to him that Nol had never actually met him because fear came crashing down - all those rumors people were whispering about him were true. Rand, the man too busy for his own son, too busy for his own family, had a whole other family, and they knew a version of him that he'd never gotten to meet. It took root in him at such a young age all it could do was grow with him like a weed. He had no way to know otherwise!

And something that really fosters all that fear IS the fact that he endured that kind of neglect. On some level, Kousuke knows what Yui does. He's gone to great lengths to try to keep his life private from her so she doesn't interfere. He was rightfully upset when he realized she'd gone behind his back to hire Shinae (and under such false pretenses, too!) and upset about the birthday antics. But he still went to her when he found out Nol might leave, that he might have a one up on him. He knows Yui is horrible, but she's also his only pillar of security. She's also the one who fosters that sort of false reality he lives in, because it's only there that he has that security. When facts and logic counter what he believes, he loses control, and he retreats into the version of reality he knows, because that's the only place he feels safe. I think that's a big reason why he cannot face the truth, why he so often finds himself rewriting accounts of things that happened - he cannot handle the unsettling dissonance between what he believes and what is so.

What a driver fear is, too! On some level, I think Kousuke might be aware of that connection of his identity with Nol. Perhaps not on a conscious level, but I think subconscious he reacts to Nol leaving for exactly that reason - without Nol to serve as a metric for which to measure himself against, how can he be sure he's better, he's the best? As much as Kousuke's identity is wrapped up in trying to please his father and earn a transactional concept of love, it's also wrapped up in being Nol's guardian - which, as you point out, is just an offshoot of not disappointing Rand. I definitely agree, too; it just makes that resentment stronger. Wouldn't you feel a little self-loathing, too, knowing that you can only see your greatness if you see how you measure against someone else? Living and believing this person you are constantly trying to be better than might know something you don't, might have been privy to something you never were? Acknowledging that he tears down Nol because a part of him doesn't trust that he can lord over him unless he does, that maybe he COULD best him?

It makes such COMPELLING storytelling! Once you can see Kousuke from this angle, it makes sense - why he can't stop trying to drag Nol down into his pit, why he stumbles on reality and has to rewrite things, why he's so desperately in need of control. It's so easy to say that Kousuke should know better because he's an adult, but one of the loudest, flashiest messages of ILY is that age does not make someone any better lol. Wisdom doesn't come with age - it comes with experience and also humility. There's no room for that in Kousuke's life and his experiences definitely are lesser than others. He's surrounded by people who tell him what he wants to hear, who just make nice with him to get by and maybe see if they can take advantage of their proximity to him. What experiences does he have, outside of those with Nol, that can drown out the fear he's living with?

Something someone brought up on reddit was that Kousuke was, for the most part, pretty "chill" (lol chill for Kousuke that is) when we first met him at the start of the story. Okay, let's nix that, he DID trip Shinae for a piece of cake LMAO but that brings me to what I'm getting at. When the story opens, it feels like Kousuke isn't around Nol nearly as much. He has an informant in Soushi which allows Kousuke to keep tabs on Nol without needing to be involved, and he's at a sense of peace. When we see him interacting with Shinae, while he's definitely cold and blunt, he does try to treat her with some regard of respect after Shinae essentially saves his hide by keeping Nol's date-rape drink a secret. Now we certainly can argue that this is because Kousuke feels he is indebted to Shinae, but I think it's also because when he has less of that stress going on, when he has a clearer mind that's not so cluttered with his fear, he has room to be the gentleman he wants to believe he is, to be the person he hopes will make Rand proud.

But it's once Kousuke gets re-inserted in Nol's life - the hospital after the masquerade, Nol coming to work for the week, the entirety of the black and white formal - that's when we start to see all the cracks forming and watch Kousuke slowly start to lose that control and spiral. Nol coming to work was the real curveball for him. Not for one minute did Kousuke expect Nol to take work seriously, but worse, he never anticipated that Nol would be so good at it or that his people skills would illuminate a jarring truth that Kousuke had blinded himself to. From that very moment, Kousuke enters a grappling battle to maintain his role. It's not enough to be the heir - it's about impressing Rand, it's about earning some transactional love, it's about fulfilling a duty that he takes too seriously, it's about ensuring that he is not lost. I think to Kousuke you are in one of two places: either the light or the shadow, and you cannot share them. If Nol is in the light, that relegates Kousuke to the shadows, so compelled by fear, he starts on his quest to sabotage Nol, so that his own weaknesses are not illuminated by the points where Nol shines.

Aaaaaaahhhhhhh!!!!!! I really do have SO MANY thoughts and feelings these days about Kousuke and especially Kousuke and Nol, and the ways they are impacted by their families, the ways their circumstances pit them against each other. Kousuke has become a character I WANT to find his way, because I WANT him to be freed from the effects of his family and especially free of their control. I think your third point is SO VERY IMPORTANT because WHO is Kousuke outside of all of this? Who is he outside of Hirahara Heir, outside of besting Nol? He definitely knows there is something hollow and empty inside him - he wouldn't have to convince himself that he wants this career, that he wants to move to Japan, that he wants to do this if that wasn't true. He's so afraid that there is nothing more to him than the husk of a boy who is so desperate for his father's love, who tore others down for something that he ultimately never received, and frankly I cannot blame him for wanting to hide that and avoid facing it lol but I DO want to see him face that. I want to see what kind of person he decides to be outside of everything if he gets that chance. I say "gets that chance" but it's definitely more that he needs to actively come to that conclusion, but it's hard to imagine at this point what it will take for him to get there.

I don't think there's a lot that a conversation with Rand can do - though I do think that's highly necessary, if only to put everything in the open. I would love for Kousuke to get the chance to be honest with Rand, and not while being drunk leaving a voicemail or anything, but that's a big, big step. It goes against everything he's worked towards, goes against the very things that drive that fear. But I want to see him reach that point where he can tell Rand pointblank the ways he failed him, the way everything he ever did was because he just wanted that love and look at him, look at how he turned out! aaaaaaahhhhhhhhhh!

I'm also inclined to believe the same as you re: Nol. I know Nol made it sound like he's absolutely done with Kousuke - and I certainly don't think he'll be welcoming him with open arms any time soon lol - but I think much like us as readers, much as characters like Hansuke and Yujing, I think Nol wants to see Kousuke break himself free. Let go of Rand, escape the sordid security blanket that is his relationship with Yui, and find himself. Become his OWN person. I think Nol will be more receptive to Kousuke when he can finally do that. Because again, as established, so much of Kousuke's personality thus far is just being better than Nol, is just trying to earn Rand's affection. But what does he do for himself? WHO is he? I think that's what Nol is waiting for and I don't think we'll see any kind of amicable relationship until that comes.

AAAHHHHHHHH this is so long lmao but MAN I have so many thoughts and feelings about this and I LOVE getting to talk to people about Kousuke when they can see these aspects of him. In an intriguing way, both Nol and Kousuke are driven by fear, right? Nol lives in fear of himself, of whatever guilt it is he carries. He carries this fear that he is a harbringer of doom and harm, that association with him will only get people hurt, that getting too close and caring too much is damning people, so he spent his life wearing a mask, trying to keep others at bay, trying to coast by and hope maybe, MAYBE he could absolve himself of whatever that guilt is by helping others. And when he got too close, when he started to care too much, he ran away, he lashed out, he took up a new facade. He's denied himself anything he wants or anything that brings him comfort out of fear. But where Nol's fear is internal, Kousuke's is so completely external. But at the end of the day, they are both driven by fear. Nol, I hope, will come to terms with the reality that he DOES have safe spaces. Nana loves him and wants to help him, wants him to live, wants him to find enjoyment. Shinae has proven what a caring friend she is, that even after the way he tried to ghost her and the guys, she still keeps coming back. But Kousuke doesn't quite have that support system Nol does. Or, rather, let me take that back. He does, he's just not aware of it and can't see it for that. He's so blinded by what he's lacking in a parental way that he can't see that Hansuke is the one person in the world who absolutely 100% has his back, and I think in time, depending on the choices he makes, he could find that in Yujing and Meg, both. (I think there is SO MUCH room for Meg and Kousuke to eventually be friends with a similar dynamic to him and Shinae - where she is no longer so besotted or obsessive and she can call him out when he's being y'know, Kousuke, where he can develop respect for her as a person. I want it SO badly lmao I want SO BADLY for him to come around on her!)

Basically a very important thing I think is: neither Nol nor Kousuke have that family relationship with their parents. Nol lost the one parent who ever gave him warmth and comfort, and I don't think Yui sees Kousuke as a son so much as an extension of himself. I think found family is the way to go for them. Nol has it, if he's willing to let them be that, if he can swallow his fear and let them be there for him. I think Kousuke could have it, too, if he, too, is able to let go of his fear. AAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHH I told you, just nonstop FEELINGS over here lmao thank you for always indulging me and my longwinded responses ;~; I just get SO EXCITED to talk about this, and especially to have these conversations who think so similarly about Kousuke and don't immediately go "throw him away he's irredeemable trash" lajfkafjkafjkaf lmao like fine for people who have those opinions but I just wanna dig into why these characters do the messy shit they do LMAO

[phoenixrisesoncemore]

I was tagged by @wangxianbunnydoodles (oh my, this is long and you might regret it; also I don’t follow instructions well 😉). I tend not to be very good at these things (sorry to anyone else who has tagged me in these kinds of things before—this is a rare event happening mostly because I wanna talk about Tolkien books and ships) but here goes:

Top 3 Ships

I don’t actively ship characters that often. I’m not sure why that is. I do enjoy reading fic with pairings either canon or not, but I don’t often go “all in” on ships in most narratives I consume. There are notable exceptions (more than three but these are the three most recent—I have no idea how to identify my top ships):

WangXian (CQL). This is surely obvious from the current state of my blog, right? I blame The Untamed and its impossibly tender, only-subtextual-by-a-hair’s-breadth romance. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a show express ultimate devotion, deep affection, true appreciation, complete understanding (eventually), and the sheer *necessity of the other* between two people quite like this one has. Hell, I don’t think I’ve ever seen two characters and desperately wanted them together and happy as much as I have these two, so bravo to the cast and crew for generating such second-hand devotion in me.

Silvergifting (Tolkien). This is all @thearrogantemu’s fault. I’d read some Silvergifting before I read These Gifts That You Have Given Me, mostly out of curiosity (some good stuff, too!), but I had never read any Tolkien fic that convinced me it was *true* (on many, many levels, though the ship level is the one pertinent to this post). In any canon-like universe this ship hurts, but in the Gifts universe it hurts the most; it hurts like Hell. It hurts in the way only razor-sharp, sorry-the-universe-works-this-way, oh-are-those-my-entrails-on-the-floor-I-didn’t-even-feel-the-knife tragedy can hurt. And it’s so convincing that it’s just...a fact now. Tolkien just forgot to tell us. So now I ship Silvergifting, but most deeply, specifically THAT Silvergifting. (Meanwhile, 14 year old me continues to look at *significantly* older me like I’m insane.)

ZeLink (Legend of Zelda). Deep down I’m still 12 years old and no amount of fine lines and wrinkles is going to change that. When is Breath of the Wild 2 coming out?

Last Song

I listen to soundtracks and bombastic and dramatic orchestral pieces much more often than I listen to what people mean when they say “songs,” and a significant chunk of the “songs” I listen to are from musicals/operas.

Earlier today it was Hanz Zimmer’s soundtrack to Dark Phoenix (don’t start me up on the continuing disappointment that Phoenix adaptations continue to be to me—you don’t want to hear it; even I don’t want to hear it).

Before that it was Barbra Streisand’s The Broadway Album. (I prefer her outer space cover of “Somewhere” to the actual thing. Fight me.)

Before that it was Carmina Burana (One of my favorite things ever was when we went to a live performance of Carmina Burana and a boy who couldn’t have been more than 7 years old sat in the aisle in front of us and head-banged enthusiastically through “O Fortuna.” It was so metal. You go, kid. You get it.).

Before that it was a splattering of Billy Joel hits with emphasis on “2000 Years”, “River of Dreams”, “Scenes from an Italian Restaurant”, “The Stranger”, and “Only the Good Die Young” (thanks to that outstanding WangXian interpretation!).

Of course the soundtracks to The Untamed/CQL have been on repeat for weeks around here, particularly every single iteration of “WuJi” and the flute-heavy instrumental pieces (man, those are good!).

Not long ago I had Sarah Brightman’s covers of “Figlio Perduto” from La Luna and “Glosoli” and “One Day Like This” from Dreamchaser burning through my iPhone battery (yes, I like popera).

Enya, and especially Shepherd Moons and The Track Which Shall Not Be Named has been on repeat a lot.

Last Movie

I don’t sit down to watch movies that often any more. It just takes too much stillness and undivided attention and more resistance to multi-tasking than I have. The actual last movie that I watched (in a “have it on on another screen while I work” kind of way) was Raiders of the Lost Ark, which, of course, I’ve seen umpteen times and which followed a similar rewatch of the Back to the Future trilogy. The last movie I watched completely without distraction was Book Smart; I don’t watch comedies very often, but I really enjoyed it in an “OMG, I can totally relate to this” kind of way (except for the class president thing—that would have required that I interact with other people my own age and also not be homeschooled). Before that I think it was the Tolkien biopic. Man, I still haven’t written anything about that.

Currently Reading (in order of when I started them)

Oh dear.

The Familiar: part 1, Mark Z Danielewski. *sigh* For as much as I think Danielewski is brilliant and House of Leaves is one of my favorite books ever, I’ve just not been able to get into much of his other work. It’s universally a time and energy investment to penetrate and puzzle through, and I just don’t have as much of that as I used to. House of Leaves makes that investment worth it from early on and is absolutely a page-turner once you settle in, but other than The Fifty Year Sword I’ve just not been able to get into the rest of his work. The Familiar: part 1 is supposed to be the first in a 26 part series which is currently halted at part 4, I think. Without a guarantee of all parts ever being published, I don’t think I’m ready to invest more time into part 1 and may end up abandoning it, unfortunately.

History of The Hobbit, Douglas Anderson. Anderson did what Christopher didn’t and gave The Hobbit the HoMe treatment (if a bit less literal and opaque in format). It’s fascinating (I mean, there’s the Beren and Luthien name drop you were not expecting right there in the first draft), but reading essentially the same passages with only small changes over and over can be a slog, so reading it has been an ongoing project for over a year now.

Splintered Light: Logos and Language in Tolkien’s World, Verlyn Fleiger. This is Fleiger’s look at Tolkien’s Middle-earth in light of his association with Owen Barfield. Particularly, she is examining Tolkien’s work in conjunction with Barfield’s Poetic Diction and his thoughts on language and meaning. I have not read Poetic Diction, but I probably will now since it apparently addresses language formation as related to the origin of human consciousness which is SO up my alley.

New Seeds of Contemplation, Thomas Merton. My late sister-in-law had a masters in theology from Notre Dame and became a huge Merton fan. Meanwhile, my best friend actually spent a weekend retreat at The Abbey of Gethsemani. Between hearing about him from the two of them, I developed an interest in Merton. I happened to read “Moral Theology of the Devil” a couple of years ago. It was one of the most illuminating theological things I have read and deeply inspired my own Tolkien fic-writing (let’s just say the progress there is otherwise slow). This book is a collection of pieces which happens to contain that piece, and I’ve been skipping around through it for a while now.

The Lord of the Rings reread (Tolkien, obviously). I hate this, but I am so deep in so many critical Tolkien books that I’ve not had the chance to really sit down and relax into my reread for months and months and will likely just end up starting over. Plus I want to read it concurrently with the next entry in this list and the next entry is taking longer to get through because of its format. That entry being:

The Lord of the the Rings: A Reader’s Companion, Hammond and Scull. This is a treasure trove of data and insights for those really wanting to dig critically-historically into The Lord of the Rings on a chapter-by-chapter, passage-by-passage basis. The only issue with it is that jumping back and forth between the two (as you have to: this is a reference book) tends to kill the mood of The Lord of the Rings when read as it’s meant to be read: for enjoyment!

The Power of Limits: Proportional Harmonies in Nature, Art, and Architecture, Gyorgy Doczi. This has been an ongoing read here and there since Christmas, especially as I work on two personal projects.

The Gospel in a Pluralist Society, Lesslie Newbigin. To be honest I don’t think I am going to finish this one. I like a few of the things he says, things I think are truthful and which need to be confronted in American Christian culture in particular, but it’s just too much Calvin for my taste, too many assumptions I do not share being the heretic that I am, and I spend too much time anger-notating about theology to read it with grace.

In Full Measure I Return to You, thearrogantemu. This is a reread of the (relatively) happy AU fic for my most favoritest Tolkien fic (Gifts), but I’ve put my reread on hold while I finish one of the two projects, after which I am diving in and screw the rest of this list for the time being.

Food Craving

Sushi. My kingdom for some good sushi. I’ve only had sushi once since we got back from NY and while it was the best sushi I have had locally IT WAS NOT OMAKASE AT SUSHI NOZ. It also didn’t require a personal loan to pay for, but *shrug* I’m spoiled now and will forever crave what I can no longer have.

People I’d Like To Get To Know Better

I hate tagging people in these things because I’m awkward and shy and do them so rarely myself that it feels hypocritical for me to ask it of others. That being said: if you’re a follower of my blog and you want to do this, please do! And please tag me! I’d love to get to know more about you 😊.

[pinkletterday]

The Universal Constant

Pairing: Gen, Barry Allen/ Iris West

Rating: Teen

Characters: Barry Allen, Joe West

Tags: Pre-series AU, Grief, Bereavement, Wrongful incarceration, confrontation, junk-adjacent science, Not any junkier than the show though

Warnings: Death, Graphic Description of Murder, Discussion of Intimate Partner Violence

Summary: When Henry Allen dies in prison, Joe goes to comfort his foster son. He's unprepared to confront Barry's hard truths.

A/N: One author's determination to shove the Savitar storyline and its perversion of who Barry Allen is where the sun don't shine, thanxkbai.

Read on AO3

To say Henry Allen's funeral had been sparsely attended would have been to understate the case. His friends and family had all cut ties with him over the decade he had spent in prison, so that when the casket was lowered to the ground, only his son stood over it, flanked by Joe and Iris in silent support.

(Joe would later discover that Henry's cellmate had appealed for furlough to attend the funeral but had been denied.)

Barry had walked through the entire affair as though in a dream. He had stood at a remove from the proceedings, staring sightlessly out into the sea of headstones dotting the green through the pastor's generic eulogy, and then at the dirt trailing through his fingers as though analyzing the soil composition, ignoring the coffin it fell upon. The only point he had been adamant about when Joe and Iris had handled the arrangements was that his father be laid to rest beside his mother. They had expected nothing less, even though Joe knew Chyre and a few others in the force thought it perverse that the man be buried beside the woman he had murdered.

He had been equally adamant on not having a wake ("Why? Who else is mourning him?") so when the pastor had taken his leave, Joe turned around to find his fosterling missing.

Barry would need space right then, Joe knew, but he was also worried about what he might take it into his head to do if he was left alone. Joe had despised Henry Allen since he had first drawn back the plastic sheet over his wife's face to shield the young shell-shocked eyes of their son, but the man's death could not have come at a worse time for Barry. He was almost done with his CCPD internship, so close to graduating and joining the force with Joe where he could keep him close but behind the scenes. Where he could slowly experience for himself the inevitability of the evidence that condemned his father and finally move on with his life.

Instead, Henry Allen had died protecting another prisoner in a riot and martyred himself forever in Barry's eyes.

Despite all the interactions he had seen betweeen them giving every appearance of selfless devotion, Joe had never been able to figure out whether Henry really had loved his son as much as he seemed (hadnt he also seemed a devoted husband till he murdered his wife?). But now it was a moot point, as he had died letting his son believe the lie of his innocence. It was the worst kind of cruelty to the boy, and Joe feared that the boy's obsession with proving the impossible would now carry him further adrift than he or Iris could ever reach him.

He finally found Barry sitting in the second pew inside the empty chapel. His back was still held in that unnaturally ramrod line, staring at the kaleiscopic pattern the afternoon light cast on the limestone floor as it filtered in through the stained glass window. A sunbeam from another overhead arch slanted over his head, illuminating the dust motes dancing around him, bringing out the mahogany burnish of his hair. Taking in his pale composure, tie loosened under his Adam's apple and blazer outlining the breadth of his sloping shoulders, Joe could still only see the little boy of ten years agone, uncomfortable as a penguin in his starched Sunday suit, holding his and Iris's fingers in a death grip in front of his mother's coffin - a small, terrified but brave David facing his own Goliath of tragedy.

Joe shuffled himself over next to him, the honeyed oak seat sliding solid and polished despite the clear scuffings of age. Barry's hands rested on the back of the pew in front, long fingers unfurled as if to catch the light on each tip. Joe didn't know what to say, so he said nothing and simply sat, the ache in his heart heavy with the storm he could sense within Barry's.

"Do you know who I love most in the world, Joe?"

Iris. He had always known that. He suspected most people who knew Barry knew that; those expressive eyes always so unknowingly worshipful of her since they were kids.

Still, he wasn't sure he was supposed to know, so he stayed silent.

"It's Iris," said Barry. "Always has been. She's - to me, she's everything."

Joe nodded cautiously, wondering whether Barry meant him to interpret this as a platonic love or if it was a tacit confession.

"Do you ever wonder about the inconsistencies in my mother's case?"

Joe blinked, unprepared for the subject change. Then sighed deeply. So we're doing this again.

"Barry, your father was found-"

"Over her body with the knife in his hand, no sign of break in, yeah I know. But what about the autopsy report?"

Sharp projectile thrust diagonally through the 2nd rib, two inches to the right of the heart, penetrating the upper ventricle and top of the left lung. Projectile embedded five inches deep stoppering blood flow without immediately rupturing the organs. Impact has failed to shatter rib but penetrated cleanly without laceration. Slow haemorrage took approximately three minutes, victim likely in shock but maintaining blood pressure for approx 60 seconds before bleeding out. Cause of death: aortic rupture

"It was a deep stab wound."

"Yes it was," said Barry, distant yet conversational. "It was just a paring knife, not a meat cleaver or fish knife. She was cutting an apple. The blade was slightly curved, the sharpest edge along the side and not the point. It would have needed a huge amount of force just to drive it into five inches of muscle....but it also went through bone."

"The bone should have slowed the knife's downward thrust, but it didn't. He had to have pinned her down and held it right over head while she was looking up at him. And then, instead of jamming it into the join between her neck and shoulder - the most vulnerable place she had from that angle - he drove it into her heart...and missed."

Joe tried not to at cringe the dispassionate way Barry rattled off the facts. It was a testament to how long the boy had been analyzing every gruesome detail inside his head until the most traumatic event of this life was nothing more than a breakdown of physics and anatomy, detached yet frustrating as constantly fiddling with an unsolvable Rubik's Cube.

"My father was a surgeon, Joe. He knew exactly where the ribs are in a body. Why would he miss the heart and try to go through a rib instead of over or under?"

The old fatigue sank like a stone inside him as his breath escaped in an even deeper sigh. He had tolerated and fielded a barrage of questions like this for years after Barry had come to live with them, usually culminating in Joe sharply ordering him to his room or Barry storming off in tears. But after that last terrible fight during his senior year of high school, the boy had finally realized the threshold of Joe's patience and the cross examinations had stopped. Something had broken between them in the aftermath, some strand of hope and trust forever retracted from Barry. Joe had balanced out his irrational guilt with the sheer relief at the tenuous peace he thought they had forged - till now.

"Barry, stabbings are usually not premediated," he said, dusting off the same old, well-worn arguments in resignation. "In the heat of the moment, people forget who they are, much less their training."

Barry nodded complacently. "Yes. It must have been the heat of the moment. No one ever saw them fight before it happened, did they? My Dad's lawyer tried to use that. Usually before a crime of passion happens there's some sort of tension, some background that leads up to it. But no one ever thought my Dad had anything but love for Mom, and there was never any evidence of money disputes or cheating. Heat of the moment...with no fire behind it."

But you can never know what happens behind closed doors, thought Joe. Sometimes our own love takes terrible faces, especially when betrayed.

"But you can never really know someone, can you Joe?" said Barry as though he had read Joe's mind. He examined the texture of the aged oak pew under his hands with distant interest, fingertips trailing lightly over the slight cracks and grooves. "You only assume that you know them, until you don't, isnt that what you always say?"

"Everyone assumed my Dad loved my Mom till they assumed he drove her to her knees, braced her shoulder with one hand, and plunged a fucking paring knife into her chest, somehow passing through bone without crushing it. That should be impossible, Joe. There were no lacerations. That bit confused the fuck out of three separate medical examiners and what the defence lawyer tried to get to stick before the proesecution decided that the knife being the murder weapon was enough. He was precise and powerful enough to somehow incise through bone from and he still missed the heart." Barry's hands gripped the wood convulsively, gaze now fixed unseeing over the altar.

"A longtidunally oriented stab requires an axial force of over nine hundred Newtons. That's for an overarm stabbing. For a light handled knife to be embedded five inches deep into the body, clean through both rib and lung, you need a whole lot more. He'd have had to lay her down on the floor and sit on her chest before driving it into her heart with both hands, which at that angle, was not what happened. At that angle, for that depth, you'd need far more than twice that power."

"When a person sees something bearing down on them, they turn their face away. The knife had to have come down on her from roughly two to two and half feet from her face, giving her enough time to flinch away. But the blood splatter pattern indicated she never had."

Joe couldnt take it anymore. "Barry, please..."

The boy ignored him and pushed inexorably on, reciting his well-learned catechism of facts. "For her to not have had enough time to turn her face away, at the force of roughly 2000 Newtons wielded by a 200 pound man the knife should have come down at an acceleration exceeding -"

"People arent physics, Barry!," Joe burst out in frustration. "They can do things in an adrenaline rush that shouldn't be possible!"

The kid's posture suddenly relaxed. "Yes. Again. 'The heat of the moment'," said Barry, still with that light, eerie pleasantness. "An unlikely knife and lack of reflex, an entry point and angle that makes no sense, an unbelievable force, a completely unexplainable wound and the "heat of a moment" no one ever saw coming."

"Unexplained but not impossible," said Joe gently. "The paring knife was the murder weapon. Your Dad's prints and Mom's blood were all over it."

Barry's face looked more angelic than ever as he continued gazing thoughtfully at the resigned countenance of Jesus on the cross, the marble head bowed in an eternity of disappointed, weary love.

"Not impossible," he acquiesced. "Less impossible than a man in a ball of lightning that only a frightened child saw. Less impossible than someone else having broken in, knocked out my father, killed my mother and left without leaving a trace. Less impossible than a fruit knife that can cut through a bone without shattering it or crushing the muscle underneath, clean as butter."

"What's your point?," said Joe, patience too frayed to keep the bite out of his tone.

Barry leaned forward, resting his elbows on the front pew, trailing steepled fingers over his face to rest under his chin. "Tell me, Joe," he said, "How impossible would it be for me go home today, and become so angry at Iris that I would push her to the ground. How mad would I have to be to look her in the eyes, the ones I can never say no to, and plunge a knife into her beating heart, nearly to the hilt, with enough force to break bone? What in this world could she do that would make me do that?"

He could see it all too clearly, his baby's eyes glassy and vacant, the blood seeping down her chest, the dusky brown skin ash-grey under the blue plastic tarp...

"That's it," the sudden chill in his bones burned away as he rounded on Barry furiously, trying to pierce through this terrible, impassive veil and rip out his son who was bleeding underneath. "Don't think I dont know what you're trying to do, Barry, but you are not him! You are not your father -"

"But I am his son," he said calmly, "the son of a murderer who has defended him all his life."

"You're my son!" said Joe angrily. "You're the boy I raised! I know you!"

"And I knew my father, Joe!"

He got his wish when the unnatural stillness was shattered by Barry's shout, a thunder clap in the high enclave. The fury Joe had sensed seething under the surface was finally unleashed, teeth bared and eyes streaming, his face a rictus of wild anger he had never seen on Barry before.

For a strange, unforgivable moment, Joe wondered whether this was the same kind of ferocity that had ended Nora's life.

"I knew my father! I saw the way he looked at my mother the first decade of my life! The way he held her hand, the way he kissed her hair, the way he smiled at her - I know what that feels like, because its the same thing I've felt in me for Iris since I was ten!"

The tears drowned Barry's eyes and voice even through his yelling, but he leaned away from Joe when he tried to pull the boy to his chest. "I couldn't do it, Joe! I could never hurt Iris like that, couldnt ever even dream of hurting her, there's nothing in the world that she could ever do that would make me so angry, no heat in the world, Joe!"

"I know that," Joe finally managed to grab him by the elbows, forcing him to look at him. His own vision was blurred with tears now, desperate to get through to Barry, to make him understand how much Joe loved him, trusted him - "Barry, I know that! I know how much you love her - I've always known!"

"No, you don't!," Barry cried, struggling against him. "You don't know. Because if you did you'd at least believe I know what love feels like! You'd believe I saw it in my father! You'd know how impossible it is to love someone so much and ever - ever -,"

He crumpled with a suddenness that caught Joe so off-guard that he barely caught him when he fell forward. A keening wail burst from Barry's throat that he tried to bury too late in Joe's shoulder, slender frame shuddering and wracked with an anguish still too towering for his young body to contain. Joe could only cradle the back of his boy's head and wrap his arms around him, as tight as he had when Barry had cried for his parents after Nora's funeral, holding him as close as when he had found him huddling in the dark, tear-streaked and terrified from his nightmares. He simply held on, anchoring him through the storm, murmuring comfort into his hair.

Gradually, the violence of his sobs subsided. Barry drew away and wiped his eyes, neither of them caring about the wet patch left on Joe's coat.

"And if I ever - Iris - if that ever -," he stuttered, determined to finish saying his piece even with his face damp and averted, tremors still running through him, "- I wouldn't be able to lie, Joe. I wouldnt be able to live with what I had done. I'd...I'd kill myself too. Because, she is... she's everything to me."

"I know, son, I know -," Joe kept up his low, soothing litany.

"Do you really? Do you really understand?" Pleading, desperate, searching eyes pierced into his own. "We can disagree about what things are impossible in this world but not that. That is the only impossible thing I could never become. It's because I know that to be true...that's why I don't doubt my father."

"A man that's faster than lightning may be impossible," Barry slumped against the pew, head bowed low, his face bathed in both tired, resigned grief and the rose-gold of the dying light, "but it's less impossible than that."

Joe held onto the boy's limp hand. "I know," he said helplessly, "I understand."

The two of them sat in silence, Joe rubbing the aftershocks from the line of Barry's back. Eventually as the shadows of the pews lengthened, the boy stopped shaking, instead leaning listlessly against him, head flopped on Joe's shoulder, completely worn out and drained. He slid an arm under Barry's back and helped him up from his seat then, almost carrying him out of the pew and along the aisle, a mess of heavy, hollowed-out limbs. Joe chivvied him outside in front of him and turned around to close the heavy chapel door.

The jeweled light now lay at the feet of the Saviour, His body limp with agony and exhaustion but his face still gentle with love - patient, forgiving, inexhaustible.

"Barry, look at me. Look at me! Now, Joe's gonna look after you till I get out of here. You just - be the good boy your Mom and I know you are."

"I love you, son. You hear me? I will always, always love you."

[daggerzine]

Milemarker: Re-Animated in the Future Now by David Ensminger

As the millennium unfolded, bands like These Arms Are Snakes and Milemarker felt like redeemers that cracked the egg-dome of punk norms. Emo had taken shelter in pop modes, math rock unleashed charmless vanities, street punk often felt sulking and rodent, but Milemarker felt like an expedition transmitting new frequencies. Their searing coterie of tunes, like “Signal Froze” (with its warped vocals, undulating electro vibes, and crackling rock’n’roll urgency) and dramatic “Shrink To Fit” (imagine Gary Numan meets Atari Teenage Riot), signify their crack post-modernism.

 Instead of mustering play-by-numbers angst, thin protest, and soon faded disaffection, the stuff of teenage war cries, the music of Milemarker seems fermented in a nuanced analysis of the sensory-overladen landscape of late-capitalism and the information economy. Plus, they always feel shaped by prescient literary sources: William Burroughs, William Gibson, J.G. Ballard, and more. Hence, nothing in their music, lyrics, or composition is overtly stripped-down or bareboned; they offer no simple recitation of revolt. Instead, they approach tunes in a cyber-fiction way, creating scenarios, news dispatches, and memos from the digital edge, producing music that morphs and transcends.

 Roby Newton’s (who also masterminded their light show) moody chromium voice fills tunes like the hypnotic “Food For Worms” as she excavates all the damage done to women in the world of dead, damaged, suicidal heroines and forced silence, when the best minds of a generation starve for their place in intellectual and cultural spaces: “The girl's heroes have taken their own lives. We're left with sewn lips and model lines. The place for us: we are seen and not heard.” She urges people not to take shelter in desultory destruction; instead, turn off the ovens, throw out the stones, shut off the gas, she infers, and don’t enact the tragedies all over again, like a vicious interlocked replication of breakdowns. It’s a call to liberate from the dire ends of Sylvia Plath and others, to crush the monocles of madness, and to fight omnipresent confinement, barriers, and censure.

 Meanwhile, her tireless tidal waves of dark, distressing keyboard shape the erratic pull and push of “New Lexicon,” a prescient tune examining the idiom of conformity – the recited phrases learned by rote, never questioned or doubted, like pre-programmed, mass-recited Orwellian thought squelching all dissent and difference. Due to so many memes, jargon, and scripts emanating from the political spectrum, the song looks hard at how language can become no more than a glass paperweight dampening the flicker of free thought. 

Yet, despite heady preoccupations, Milemarker can still unleash pummeling power and slanted rhythms, like “Sex Jam One: Sexual Machinery” and the holographic punk of “Tundra,” which doesn’t feel a million miles from Kanye West (as does their urban dance-throttled “Idle Hands”) as it gnaws on incandescent keyboard riffs, the drums explode in sudden urges (from jazz-bridged syncopated asides to sheer fist-stomping smackdowns), and the slow, degraded guitar forms a distorted plumage. Newton and crew weigh in on the impending ice age – using the song as stretching harsh light to illuminate the impending eco-cataclysm bound to upset economies, military agendas, populace routines, etc.

 Having taken a break since 2005, they have re-emerged, like nomads populated with new band members and up-to-the-minute visions, on Overseas, with Monika Bukowska providing the unflinching internal roil and rhythm on the heaving beats on songs like “Conditional Love,” an electro-punk motif frosted with singalong punk propellants. It’s dancefloor odored and ordered, an electrifying emblem of punk hybridity.

  Questions answered haphazardly by Al Burian.

 No doubt, members of long-lived bands come and go, line-ups change, etc., but now only half of the band remains at the core. Have you essentially re-imagined Milemarker, not just resurrected it ... perhaps taken off the guardrails?

 Milemarker always had a pretty shifty line-up; every record has had some variation in the musicians playing on it. And from the beginning, we always had an agenda of pushing boundaries, at least our own personal boundaries, of getting the people in the band to go places where they are uncomfortable. Dave and I wanted to do some new stuff with the band in 2015, so we found the other two people, Lena and Ezra, and immediately wrote a record with them. The band history gave us some sort of aesthetic range or parameter for writing– I guess in that sense the band as an abstract entity is the guardrails. 

 Your tune “New Lexicon” (which musically always reminded me a bit of …Trail of the Dead) is so apropos to this volatile era, this immediate strife. Was the song intended as a play on Orwell’s notion of language being an epicenter of control: “We don’t need big brother to enforce the new lexicon … we wrote it for ourselves.” Is the general public, and not just Trump, responsible for the emergence of alternative facts? 

.A lot of the dystopian science fiction elements in the bands’ past lyrics are becoming descriptive of current reality, which is not a very good development. It seems to me that this current administration is fundamentally different from anything I’ve experienced in my lifetime.­ Though to be honest, I have no idea what to expect. I’ve been sitting in my apartment in Berlin, viewing the U.S.A. through the mediated lens of the internet. Of course, we are all responsible in some way for what is happening. With the band, and especially with touring in the U.S. now, I assume everyone in the audience is going to be aware of what's going on; they don’t need a political analysis from us. Our agenda is to make music. That’s not meant apolitically: if I’m going to be optimistic, I’ll say hopefully that music can serve as a unifying force, maybe even communicate something fundamental and transcendent. 

 Another changing format that has become the de facto norm is “reality TV” (actually, scripted to the core), which the band presciently recognized on “Make Love to the Camera Obscura.” The line “what’s the point of doing anything if it’s not on camera” is eerie. People have shifted from mere consumers to endless makers of content. Does that appeal to you, in the “become the media” sense punks like Jello Biafra once espoused, but also trouble you?

 That line is actually taken from Warren Beatty, spoken derisively to Madonna in the documentary, Truth Or Dare. But yeah, if "new lexicon" is Orwellian 1984, dystopia "make love to the camera obscura" is Huxleyan Brave New Worlddystopia. I think Huxley was closer on the mark in terms of predicting our present situation, although really maybe it's kind of a gross melange of the two, with an authoritarian Big Brother presiding over a sheep-like hedonistic pleasure-centered society. The worst of both worlds! I think the song still holds up overall, social criticism-wise, although the line "you're on camera an average of ten times a day" is out-dated: that was the average number of surveillance cameras you'd encounter per day in 1999. The number of cameras that capture you on a daily basis now is undoubtedly exponentially higher. 

 By the time you cut tracks like “River of Blood” for the last album– over eight minutes in length – had you become restless with post-hardcore routines? The lyrics seem pointedly political – the destructive machinations of government and war, but the song (called “math-core�� by Pitchfork), seems restless as hell…searching.

 “Rivers of Blood” was a pretty old song when we recorded Ominosity. It was written fairly soon after the songs onAnaesthetic. We were into longer songs at that point. As far as the lyrics, why do you say "but"? You can't be pointedly political and restless as hell at the same time?

 People tend to romanticize the independent networks of labels, indie publicists, and fanzine editors that formed the backbone of punk from the 1970s-2000s, etc., but the longer I chronicle the movement, the less transparent, and even less honest, it all seems. How would you describe dealing with the punk “infrastructure” (for lack of a better term)? Did we create an alternative commerce and ethos, or did we fail?

 Punk led me to pretty much everything I know about as far as "alternative" or anti-mainstream ideas. It’s a conduit for all kinds of information and can lead you to all kinds of interesting places. But it's only one way to get to these points, and it can lead you to some pretty dumb and nihilistic places too. The question of failing depends on what the goals are. We're all only humans, and we exist in the framework of the current economic system; to feel like a new world didn't spring out of your efforts is a beautifully idealistic standard to hold yourself up to, but maybe a little unfair to yourself. We're all doing the best we can, for the most part. One thing I always liked about punk is that it embraces deviance generally. So there are a lot of freaks, a lot of scam artists and schizophrenics, a lot of bad thoughts, bad ideas, experiments gone awry. There are a lot of lonely people just trying to get attention. That's all part of it, and part of what makes it great. "Succeeding" might be the wrong paradigm for thinking about it.   

All photos by David Ensminger 

www.milemarkerwebpresence.com

www.lovitt.com

Milemarker’s new album, Overseas, is out on Lovitt Records now!