KILL MY FILTHY MIND + funeral

[Ivan]

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IVAN
slav. "god is gracious"
---
a son
a brother

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ALYOSHA, MY DEAR, MY ONLY SON, I'M AFRAID OF IVAN —

When Ivan caught word of his mother's funeral, it made his entire day sludge to a stop. For hours, he stood and paced in a strain as if he were harnessed to some invisible weight. He scrabbled at the hollow in his soul. It had always been there, but Ivan felt that it had surely grown wider and deeper, so much more difficult for him to climb out of.

As he was taciturn in his first moments with his mother, he was taciturn in his last parting moment. He did not even cry once during the funeral.

Ivan approached the fields, and the way he stood so still and quiet, could be passed off as reluctant acceptance. But his mind swelled in an awful inferno, and was not going to allow himself to speak at all. It did not seem right. For all his arrogant staunchness, his snide intellectual atheist bent — there was a certain pleasure he took in tearing apart notions of goodness and immortality. It was his form of justice and revenge for the brutal world he had been born into. He rejected his faith in love even though it was shown quite clearly in front of his face by the model of his parents. So how could he sit there and speak about his mother?

He failed his mother, but not as Atticus did. They were quite different and Atticus had the privilege of being part of the physical cause. Ivan recalled his journey with Beck to the graveyard. He had said something so utterly stupid of him then, though at the time he thought he was so clever. Ivan proclaimed that "bodies die but words live on forever". Moth was no grand general or leader. She was simple in the best way, the way a mother and doctor should be. She hadn't deserved such a fate and for Ivan to think that only the great live on felt like a spit towards all those poor souls who served their entire life. They were the unsung heroes who stood in the background as those in power and mobility shaped the world in their own interests. This unsung took that world and raised sons. Sons that didn't even appreciate or love them until it was too late.

Ivan watched Atticus approach the casket with eyes sunken low into his skull. He thought he must be hallucinating. The desire to give his own brother the beating of his life once more possessed Ivan so strongly that a strange and wicked smile tugged his lips. There was no reason for it, and Ivan eventually quelled himself, lowering his head in shame. He banished all thoughts from his mind, if only for a moment, hearing only the dull sobs and apology of his brother.

— I'M MORE AFRAID OF IVAN THAN THE OTHER ONE.