Summary: Dean is living the dream, a rockstar on tour in a band with Sam, Gabriel, Crowley and Abby Donn. The band manager Castiel is capable, efficient, hard-working. He’s also Dean’s best friend and the love of his life. Ex-love of his life, who broke his heart, that is. It would serve Cas right if Dean started sleeping with the hot new roadie.
Link to fic: https://archiveofourown.org/works/36866260/chapters/91973839
Link to art: https://archiveofourown.org/works/36757477
feyre is away on high lady business, making allies with the night court and kicking ass, so rhysand is looking after their little daughter. he’s getting his nails painted by her. She does violet on his fingernails to match his pretty eyes and she asks him what colour he wanted his toes done. Rhys ponders over it for a minute then says, ”something that mummy would like, do you think you could do that for me?”And she’s super excited, nodding and does a mix of splotches of colour on his toes because “mummy likes rainbows and lots of colours”. Rhys’s hair is pinned back with sparkly clips too. And when Cassian sees him he says “Business on the top and party underneath. It’s a good look”. Rhys sends images down the bond of his beautiful new nails to Feyre.
Okay but seriously all of the soft asks are A BIG ASS MOOD goooood I just want to hug and cuddle someone, and all of the drivers are SO SOFT, THEY ALL ARE BIG BALLS OF FLUFF
Original Imagine/Quote: “I’ve let you take everything else from me, but I won’t let you take her.”
Mab sat back in her throne, drumming her darkly painted nails on the armrest, staring dead ahead of her. Her lips were pursed, her eyes narrowed, and her ankles crossed. The entire throne room was deadly silent. On her left, Sage stood just a ways behind her seat, eyes set ahead of him as well, but he didn’t actually seem to be looking at anything. His expression was vacant, uninterested. His arms were folded loosely across his chest, and where his mother seemed to be waiting in growing agitation, he looked as though he were becoming more and more bored the longer her stood there.
Mab’s tapping fingernails suddenly stilled, and she whipped her head around to glare at her eldest son.
“You said he was coming,” she hissed.
“He said he was,” was the response he gave without looking at her.
She gritted her teeth and resumed her impatient staring and fingernail drumming. Her high-heeled feet uncrossed themselves, but then she started tapping her right one in time with her clicking nails.
“You’re sure of what you saw?” she asked for the umpteenth time.
“Yes, my Queen,” said Sage patiently, glancing sideways at her with a small frown.
“Quite sure?” she insisted.
“Yes, my Queen,” he repeated, barely managing to restrain himself from rolling his eyes at the ceiling.
“...And you are certain they have been seeing each other extensively?” Mab asked harshly, her dark eyes narrowing to slits as she glared at the entrance to the throne room, waiting. “Not just the one time you saw them?”
“I saw them together several times, my Queen,” Sage said, calmly as ever. “And I have it on good authority they have been meeting for many months now.”
Mab gnashed her teeth and got up abruptly from her seat, beginning to pace furiously back and forth in front of it, clearly unable to keep still any longer.
How dare he? she thought in outrage, spikes of ice jutting up from the ground wherever she set her foot down; her fury barely contained. How dare he?! After everything I’ve done for him. Everything I taught him and showed him!
She stopped pacing as the heavy door into the throne room swung wide with a loud, prolonged creak, the sound echoing ominously in the ice-encased room. She looked around, nostrils flaring as she drew herself up, and locked eyes with her second son as Rowan stepped slowly into the room, his expression carefully composed, but his blue eyes burning with anger. His glamour poured off of him in waves, and as he stepped over the threshold the door slammed behind him with such force that it made the walls tremble, and the ice chandelier overhead tinkle loudly in protest, swinging dangerously.
“So,” Mab said in a ringing voice that echoed almost as loudly as the slamming door, “You seem to think that when I summon you that means you are free to take however long you like to come. I sent Sage to you over an hour ago. What excuse do you have for coming here so late? And I hope for your sake it is a good one, Rowan.”
Rowan did not answer, but his glamour pulsed with anger, and the icy walls of the room seemed to tremble again. An icy wind swirled through the room, and Mab glowered at her second oldest son, but Rowan merely met her stare with a defiant expression.
Mab’s lip curled. “I think I can guess what has caused your late arrival,” she said with a sneer in her voice. “Your little human plaything held you up, did she? Couldn’t be bothered to let you slink out of her bed so you could return to your rightful place? I expect she made quite a fuss when you tried to leave.”
Rowan’s mouth was the thinnest of lines, and his hands were curled into his fists. One hand twitched almost longingly towards the sword sheathed at his hip, but he did not draw it. He merely continued to stare venomously at his mother, and did not respond.
Mab’s sneer became a snarl, and her voice rose as her temper did, “Your brother has told me everything,” she hissed, “That you and some human wench have been meeting in secret behind my back, sneaking around together in the Human World, spending nights together as though you are some lovestruck child! That instead of seeing to your duties in Court, you have been entertaining this woman with your company, even making childish promises of making her your wife!”
She glared at Rowan, teeth bared, but when he continued to keep his silence, she spat, “Answer me!”
Rowan’s face was no longer composed. He looked even paler than usual, and the tiniest trickle of blood had escaped from the corner of his mouth where he’d bitten down on his lip to keep from speaking. His eyes were narrowed in fury, and the shaking in his hands had traveled into the rest of his body, so it looked like he was vibrating with rage.
At his mother’s screech, however, he finally opened his mouth, and said in a voice of barely controlled calm, “I cannot answer you if you have not asked a question, your Highness.”
Mab went rigid, her expression akin to having just been slapped across the face. Rowan had never, not once in nearly five hundred years, referred to her as anything other than “My Queen” or “My Lady”.
“Have you,” she said in a voice barely above a whisper, “A prince of the Winter Court, and my son, been traveling to the Human World and fraternizing with a human wench? Have you actually dared to even suggest that she could be your wife?”
Rowan’s mouth curved into a cold smile, blood still visible on his lips. “Yes, your Highness, I would say that I have,” he answered softly. “Though, if my darling brother has already told you as much, I don’t know why you are acting as though this a surprise to you, seeing as he cannot lie, can he?”
Mab’s face was chalk white with fury, and her dark eyes were bulging as she opened her mouth and let out a scream of uncontrolled rage.
Wind whipped through the room, tearing at Rowan’s cloak and tugging at his hair, striking him across the face and leaving small cuts as shards of ice sliced into his skin. He squinted his eyes against the gale, but did not move, or raise his hands to defend himself from the attack, merely standing and waiting as the storm tore around the room, before dying out all at once to leave a ringing silence behind.
Mab was panting, her chest heaving, and her teeth clenched. “I forbid it,” she spat when she had gotten her breath back, “I forbid this-this--!” She was so incensed she could barley speak. She gave herself a shake and tried again. “I will not allow this! You will go to this human wench and tell her you will never see her again! That you were merely toying with her! That she--”
“No.”
Mab went completely still. Sage, still standing just behind his mother’s throne, had tensed.
Rowan stood in the center of the throne room, staring directly at his mother without flinching.
“What...” Mab breathed, “Did you say to me?”
“No,” he repeated coldly.
“No...what?” she whispered.
“I will not tell her I won’t see her again,” Rowan said curtly, “Because I will. I will not tell her that I was ‘merely toying with her’ because I wasn’t. I will not lie to her just because you want me to.”
Now Mab was the one trembling with rage, and her aura swelled until it filled every corner of the room, giving an almost suffocating feeling to the place.
“Yes, you will,” she said, her voice rising again.
“No,” he said, “I will not. I’ve let you take everything else away from me, but I won’t let you take her.”
Mab was shrieking again, “I HAVE GIVEN YOU EVERYTHING YOU EVER WANTED!!”
Rowan’s blue eyes were like ice as he leveled a stony glare at his mother. “You have never known what I wanted,” he said softly. “Never once have you ever asked me what I wanted. She has. Every day, she asks what I want. What I want to do, what I want to eat, where I want to go, whether I want to do this or that. Never once has she ever assumed that she knows what I want. And more than that, she’s given me what I need.”
“And what would that be?” Mab sneered.
“If you don’t already know, then telling you won’t make a difference, will it?” Rowan asked quietly. “If you didn’t figure it out what we needed when Ash married Oberon’s daughter, then I doubt you ever will.”
And without further ado, he turned on his heel, and marched out of the room, shoulders rigid and head held high. The door swung open to let him through, then swung closed with a resounding bang behind him.
There was a long, stunned silence, in which Mab stood dumbstruck before her throne, staring at the place where Rowan had vanished, and Sage stood watching her quietly. After several long moments, Mab turned slowly to face her eldest son, her expression quite unreadable.
“Go,” she said quietly, the slightest tremble to her voice, “Just...go...”
Sage bowed his head, and swept towards the door without a word, leaving Mab to sink into her throne, her hands over her face. As Sage stepped out of the throne room, he heard a quiet, strangled sob from behind him, and glanced back in time to see a single tear appear from behind the Queen’s hands before the door closed with a soft thud.
