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. 

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