thirteen update ☀️🥀🪰🏚️
chapter 6: march
summary:
(“Be here. For Adrien.”
“Emilie, I can’t…”
“For me, then. Love him for my sake.”)
A sob cracked open Adrien’s chest. He ripped away from the wall, clapping a hand over his mouth to try and stifle himself. His lungs wheezed, a crumpled can, and the world slipped off its axis.
She was dying. She was dying. She was dying, for real, and soon, and this was what they hadn’t wanted to tell him.
excerpt:
Time barrelled on after that, like a ground speeding toward him in freefall.
Lessons slipped through his head and smiles stretched over his mouth and Adrien’s life became, more than ever before, defined by the moment he would next see Maman. It was like his brain couldn’t catch hold of anything else, couldn’t grasp it. Even when he was out doing other things, in other places, he wasn’t really. He was always back with her.
The shift happened sometime in the beginning of March.
A change in the air, the bones. The house held its breath. Walls stood cleaner and quieter and bigger than before. Or maybe Adrien just got smaller. Maybe it was like a vacuum, like he’d learned about in physics. All the air sucked out of his lungs, crumpled up like a can.
The silence was the worst. When Adrien was gone, he could lose himself a little. Turn his brain off at photoshoots and fall into the monotony of fabric on his body, skin on his face, hands all over, fixing him and fixing him and fixing him. Dissolve into the rhythm of fencing, blocking and thrusting and parrying and sweating and not thinking not thinking not thinking. But being inside the house was different. He couldn’t do anything but think, couldn’t be anyone but himself. Even his shows started to fall flat; Adrien found himself restarting the same Ouran episode ten times because he hadn’t absorbed a thing. The house was so quiet, his brain so loud. The world was transparent and he wasn’t quite sure he was real.
And then he would see Maman.
read on ao3
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New farmer in town.
had ideas in my head. couldn't get contain them. i apologize in advance afsafasf
somehow this turned into March's pov and tbh it is what it is
Warning: mild swearing
~0~
People had expectations when they found out that someone would be moving into the old farmhouse south of the town.
It took a little over a week for someone to accept the terms to the land, which wasn't at all surprising. The earthquake took toll on Mistria and not many of the passing adventurers were willing to help out on the rebuilding efforts and monetary aid from the Capital would take days, if not weeks, to arrive unless the trade roads were cleared in a timely fashion.
When Adeline said someone bit on the notice, people were ecstatic. That old farm was decrepit for years with no one bold enough to take on the labor to tend to it long term.
There were bets called from the old guards. Of course there were. Will it be a runaway from one of the neighboring cities trying to find their fortune? Will it be some lowly adventurer that found out early in their career that adventuring and the mercenary life was just not for them? Will it be a former noble exiled by their family to some small town in the middle of nowhere with the hopes that they'll be able to come back as the prodigal child to vye for the position of head of the family, if not the throne (Maple was particularly fond of this theory)?
Not all of the theories were as dramatic as these, however. Celine hoped for a plant lover like herself. His brother, Olric, hoped for an outdoorsy person like himself.
March, of course, didn't care.
They didn't need another person to live here. They were doing fine. His brother, Ryis, and he would be enough. It's not like one person could make that big of a difference. The person could be some shady motherfucker, anyway.
Well, whatever he thought, he would have been wrong either way.
The new "farmer" was not some naive, doe-eyed low level adventurer who had nothing to their name but the clothes on their back. The new farmer was not some inexperienced moron that needed handholding throughout every step. No, they didn't get any of that.
What they got was a woman, taller than most of the women in Mistria, with long (though not as long as that witch Juniper's) hair as dark as midnight. There was a cautiousness to her eyes, one that he couldn't quite pinpoint, that was present even when Adeline was excitedly chatting her up in the town square. Dark, dark eyes fully alert to the comings and goings around them. She was polite enough, he'd give her that.
The chatter changed its tone rather immediately. The woman, Sandra, was here barely here a week before the rumors and gossip started anew.
Balor said he saw her scale the side of one of the cliffs at the western side of Mistria without breaking a sweat. Nora said she was damn sure she saw a knife tucked beneath her shirt while harvesting some berries in the eastern ruins. Dell was adamant that she saw their new villager transform into a dragon at the western excavation site (this was an fib and everyone knew it).
But he didn't care. March did not at all care. He just hoped to god that the woman would leave him the hell alone.
Boy was he wrong.
---
for anyone wonder who my oc is, meet sandra haha (gonna make more art of her soon)
What his eyes can see, part 1
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Palestinians to platform, part 1
مؤمن الناطور / Moumen Al-Natour
@MoumALnatour
رئيس الشباب الفلسطيني للتنمية / President of Palestinian Youth for Development
Moumen Al-Natour is amazing. Not only does he run a Palestinian youth organization that is doing great work in Gaza, but he's also one of the organizers of the 2019 anti-Hamas protests.
Even to criticize Hamas, in Gaza, means to be interrogated, and potentially jailed, tortured, and/or killed. To actively protest Hamas is many times more dangerous.
To have survived that work and continued doing it? I cannot imagine the emotional strength this dude has.
Here's what Center for Peace Communications (another great organization) has said about him:
So many Palestinians, in or from Palestine, are out there talking about what everyday life in Gaza is like. About Hamas, about Israel, about what they want and what they need, about their struggles and their interests and their families.
My goal, in finding people for you to follow and platform, is to help more voices get out of Gaza after years of suppression, and to help more outsiders (like me) connect with them.
People care SO MUCH about Palestine. But frequently, all there is to share is outrage, semi-accurate news, and more outrage. Frequently, we're not calling for the same things they are. We call for a ceasefire; they demand Hamas return the hostages and surrender. We call for Israel to let aid in; they say Israel is letting the aid in, but it's being stolen, and call for air drops rather than trucks. We call for Israel to stop fighting; they say they hope Israel takes Hamas out first.
We aren't centering their voices and experiences. We aren't lending our reach and our strength to their demands.
I want to make that possible.
Ala Mushtaha, the son of this imam, evidently said, “On Saturday December 30, our front door was busted down and twenty masked men barged in and took my father, a widely respected and deeply learned imam here in Gaza."
“One dragged him by his head and another grabbed him by his beard. My younger brother tried to intervene and reason with the kidnappers, but they beat him. I have a medical condition that makes it hard for me to breathe, so all I could do was watch as the horror unfolded.
“He wouldn’t preach what Hamas told him to. He refused to tell Gazans that violent resistance and obedience to Hamas, is the best way out of our current hell.”
ok this dude needs his own post honestly, he goes on to say so much intense stuff about their lives.
OMG his dad was actually released!
This is what I'm talking about. This is effective activism. Imagine what all these people could do if they had the entire global pro-Palestinian movement behind them.
Al-Natour posts a fair amount of political commentary.
The "we want to live" hashtag is a callback to the amazing "We Want To Live" protests he co-organized against Hamas, in Gaza in 2019, and again in the summer of 2023. Activist Hamida Howidzy (who will also be getting a separate post) wrote about them in Newsweek recently.
Some things he posts in Arabic and then in English. Some of his posts are in Arabic only. In the thread above, he actually posted a couple more that were just in Arabic, presumably aimed at Arabic-language comments.
What I like about Twitter is that you can whack the "translate post" button and get a pretty decent translation most of the time.
Translation:
"I saw all the responses... What is wrong and forbidden in reuniting the West Bank, Gaza and Jerusalem through elections in which the people choose who will represent them??!?? Why are all the responses offensive...a collaborator, a traitor, and contain insults that indicate that whoever wrote them needs restructuring?! What prevents us, after ending the war, from returning our choice and choice to the Palestinian people?!+
"Everyone wrote that I opened??!! how did you know???!! Stopping the war is the most important thing now... Whoever sees the condition of the people and feels all this is easy for him does not have humanity, and is not a human being... Whoever, after the destruction of more than 80% of Gaza and the North, and still writing in a way that wants the war to continue while he lives abroad, should reconsider. He accepted to live the same suffering!++"
Note: I copied the "I opened" bit and threw it into Google Translate separately, because that cannot be right. It still insisted that it meant "I opened".... but it gave me the transliterated words, "ani fatah."
Everyone wrote that he's Fatah -- the party that runs the West Bank, the one Hamas violently kicked out of Gaza in 2007-08.
"The end of my speech... I know... whoever is not with you is a traitor and an agent... shameful... by God, by God, by God... there will be an account[ing] for all of this talk... so that you understand the word agent... and the account will be through a government of law... It is clear that there are many who benefit from the poverty and destruction of Gaza, and they must be held accountable according to the law.
"Have mercy on people with your tongues"
The comment on that one is noteworthy:
"Yes, whoever is not with the resistance is indeed a traitor, and those who must be held accountable are the traitors, agents, hypocrites, liars, and racists who slander the resistance and who want to hold it accountable only because it fights the enemy of humanity and defends truth and the oppressed. If you want to apply the law, apply it to yourselves first."
It highlights how much of what we hear in the West is Hamas propaganda. That's a whole other post too. But Hamas claims to be "the resistance," to "defend truth and the oppressed," while arresting people who refuse to preach its propaganda. While jailing and torturing someone 20 times for organizing a protest.
Which are the exact tactics that make it so easy for their propaganda to reach us . And so hard for us to even know that there has been an entire protest movement against Hamas in Gaza, much less to support its activists.
I'll just cut and paste the translations from his most recent thread, above. All emphasis is mine:
"When demonstrations took place in Israel demanding that Netanyahu stop the war and free the hostages, Al Jazeera and Hamas considered it a victory and an achievement, and that the Israeli government was under pressure. But what is striking is that these demonstrations were not suppressed. They were secured. The hostage issue and public pressure were dealt with professionally.
"The demonstrations that took place in Gaza demanding an end to the war and the return of the displaced...they were classified as suspicious [by Al Jazeera etc] ...even though the displaced Israeli lives in a 5-star hotel and has the privileges of the displaced, and when the Palestinian displaced in Gaza receives help, he needs a mediator, and if he wants a tent, he needs leadership intervention, and if he does not have the mediator And the intervention wants to scratch his pocket..+++
"Why did Israel allow demonstrations and look pressured, always trying to contain everything... while we have a displaced person lost, homeless, and no one is trying to contain him, and when he talks, they call him a fifth column???"
Last month, he posted about pregnancy in wartime. Note the cost of the tent later in this thread! Numerous Palestinians have posted about humanitarian aid getting stolen -- by Hamas, by NGOs, by others -- and sold on the black market. Food and tents especially get mentioned a lot. Everyone mentions the tents are being sold for more than (the equivalent of) $700, even though they were supposed to be free.
I'll leave you with this one for now:
You can read all the posts in this series in my "platform palestine" tag.
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