Work Text:
“Sentinel, I need your help.”
Sam crosses his arms slowly in front of his chest. He stares directly down at Dream, face only half-covered by his mask – typical of him, even if technically a breach of protocol. Dream’s got his hands clasped together in front of him so tightly his knuckles have turned white.
“I’m in the middle of something,” Sam says with a warning edge to it. He gestures to the disassembled drone in front of him. “Now’s not the time, Ranger.”
“It’ll only take a second!” Dream insists. He puts a hand on the table as he leans a little closer, too close to the machine. Sam’s respirator hisses.
“What part of ‘now’s not the time’ can’t you understand?” Sam groans, swatting Dream’s hand away from his meticulous repair work. “Don’t you have targets to be tracking down right now? I thought they had you on the search for that vigilante group, the three, uh…”
“That’s just it,” Dream says. “I can’t find them. They move too fast, and by the time I’ve figured out one location, they’ve moved on to the next. Gemini knows when I’m coming, Hornet finds the route, and then Canary – don’t even get me started on Canary.”
Sam tilts his head to the side. “Canary’s giving you trouble? I thought he was the least threatening of the three.”
“No, it’s-! Ugh,” Dream groans. “Like, on paper, sure, his powers aren’t anything abnormal, but he’s just – he’s fast.”
“He’s… fast.”
Dream nods his head rapidly. “He’s fast, and he can get the three of them out of my sight without even breaking a sweat. If I take him down, I can get all three of them. And I need your help, Sam.”
Sam sighs, irritated. “It’s Sentinel when we’re at work. Listen, Ranger,” he says, “I don’t have time to be out there in the field with you! I have repairs to finish, which are going to take me the whole day, and once they’re done, I have to send my drones out to the west side of the city. We’re intercepting a shipment on that smuggling case that’s held half of us in overtime every week for the past month. I can’t help you.”
“But I don’t need you to be out in the field with me,” Dream says, exasperated. “That’s not what I was going to ask you for. I don’t even need you to leave this room!”
Sam pauses, raising an eyebrow. “…Then what do you need from me?” he asks.
“I need to borrow your drones.”
Sam tilts his head back and stares at the ceiling. “What did I just tell you!?” he exclaims. “I need those for-”
“For tomorrow, right?” Dream says. “I’ll have them back to you by then, I promise! Look, if I don’t find anything, if I don’t succeed, I’ll give up and go back to doing what I was doing. Not even a single second past, okay?”
Sam squints. “These things can be fragile,” he says, gesturing to the one on the table he’s repairing. “I don’t want you breaking any of them. I don’t want the vigilantes breaking any of them.”
“Please, Sentinel,” Dream says. He lifts his hands to his mask, taking it off his face so he can better look Sam in the eye, and holds it in front of his chest, giving his best attempt at… is he trying to give him puppy-dog eyes? “I’ll owe you one, I really will.”
“For god’s sake, Dream, put your mask back on!” Sam hisses. “We’re still at work!”
“Will you let me use your drones?”
“Yes! Fine! Just – mask back on!” Sam whisper-shouts. He gestures frantically for Dream to put it back on, and he does.
“Yesss, thank you thank you thank you,” Dream says, and in one quick motion, put his mask back on and turns to leave Sam’s workshop.
The interception goes off without a hitch. Dream had returned the drones the previous night, claiming to have once more found nothing (met with a stern I told you so,) and with Sam’s newly repaired drone to finish the set, he’d taken it out on the mission. Needless to say, it had required a bit of sacrifice to make sure that everything was in place, so with a broken drone under each arm, Sam enters his workshop again.
“Sentinel! Sentinel, wait!”
Sam turns. Behind him is one of the heroes that had accompanied him on the mission, though he can’t recall their name at present. They’re holding a newspaper, and as soon as they catch up to him, they hold it straight up to his face.
“Did you see this?”
Sam takes a moment to scan the headline. His eyes widen.
“…I’m going to-”
“-kill him,” says Dream, very definitively. “I’m going to kill him! I hate him and his stupid face and the way he dodges every last drone photo and I want him dead. I want him dead, Sentinel.”
The wall in front of him is not the work of a sane man. Countless pictures litter the corkboard, pinned with varying colors and connected with little strings. It looks comical, and were it not for Dream’s firm conviction in the matter, he would be the laughingstock of the entire department.
(Not that he wasn’t already – he just hadn’t been made aware, yet.)
Sam lets out a long, deep sigh, which hisses through the fans on his respirator. His eyes glare, half-lidded, unamused, forward at the board. “Ranger, we need him alive. You can’t just go around breaking legal codes whenever a vigilante inconveniences you.”
“Inconvenience,” Dream scoffs. He crosses his arms in front of his chest and turns face-to-face with Sam. Once again, he’s not following protocol, and is lacking his mask. “He’s not just inconveniencing me, he’s making it actively impossible for me to do my fucking job!”
“Really?” Sam asks. “I couldn’t tell. He seems to be really distracting you.”
“No, it’s…” Dream sighs, then pauses, glancing at the paper in Sam’s hand. “Sentinel? What’s that?”
Sam lifts the newspaper.
Dream’s face turns as red as a tomato.
“So, you needed my drones to track him down, huh?”
“Shut up. Shut up. Shut the fuck up, I don’t want you saying a word-”
“Little bit late for that.”
“Fuck.”