The Sunset Castle by thesweetnessofspring
If it had not stormed on a certain March morning, Peeta Mellark's whole life would have been entirely different.
Peeta Mellark, twenty-nine and unwanted, lives under the control of his family: dependent on his oldest brother for his livelihood, in the shadow of his handsome older brother, and bearing the insults and hands of his mother. But then he learns that he has at most one year to live and he refuses to spend it like he has for the past twenty-nine. He begins keeping company with the drunken district handyman, his sick ward, and the mysterious forest woman, Katniss Everdeen, while he lives out his sunset in all the colors he can find.
Based on L.M. Montgomery's The Blue Castle.
If it had not stormed on a certain March morning, Peeta Mellark's whole life would have been entirely different. He would have gone, with the rest of his family, to Aunt and Uncle Cartwright's engagement picnic and the doctor's office should have continued to have power. But it did storm and you shall read what happened because of it.
Peeta awoke in the early morning when others slept their deepest, having spent the past several hours tossing and turning without a wink of rest. Usually, such sleepless nights did not trouble him. When that happened, he simply went into his Sunset Castle. Once as a young child, he had seen a Capitol program where a third son won the hand of a princess with the help of a clever cat in boots, and in the end he and his bride lived together in a castle with the sun setting in oranges and golds into their happily ever after. For years when his mother hit him or compared him to his older brother or he had to wear ill-fitting faded t-shirts or a girl turned him down to be "just friends" while giving a glance at his prosthetic, he would find solace in his Sunset Castle. There he had true friends, men and women dressed in the elegant gowns and suits while he himself wore a fitted suit and his curls smoothed over his brow. In the castle they had games, humor, dancing, and laughter.
Peeta also had lovers—one at a time, of course. They tended to fade from one into the other, never dying, but changing as he did as well. As a boy of ten, he gave adoration to a girl with long, curly blonde hair and green eyes who enjoyed playing tag and checkers. At fifteen, she had dark hair and eyes and pale skin and wrote poetry from the agony of her soul. At twenty, she was tall with silky mahogony skin and a wide smile and danced with him more than all the others. And recently, he found his lover had dark hair in a braid, gray eyes, and a smile that was worth winning away from her typical scowl.
But today, his twenty-ninth birthday, his Sunset Castle had shut its doors, darkness coming around him both in reality and his dreams.
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***gif of luke grimes by @stannyramirez and as a reminder canva glitches it when i download the banner, so that's not on the gifmaker. rain gif is from canva.
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