this world we have built is burning down around us | Dream SMP Time Travel Fic

the battalion is coming (one soldier at a time)

Theseus would tear his hair out if he didn't know it would only send him spiraling further if he tried.

Dream's hand in his hair, pulling, tugging, head snapping side to side as the masked man yanked him around: onto the ground, against a wall, into submission. "Sit like a good boy, Tommy," he'd hiss, all poisonous coos and vitriol. "If you'd learned to listen, you wouldn't be here right now, and you know that."

"Tommy?" Theseus lifted his head at Sam's call, blinking away the memory as the creeper hybrid lifted black-tipped fingers towards him. "You with me?"

"I'm fine, Big Man," Theseus told him, leaning away from the reach and shoulders dropping their tension when Sam pulled his touch away. "These stupid bandages are just being difficult."

Hesitantly, knowingly, Sam tentatively asked, "You want help?"

"I can do it on my own," he snapped, but the green-haired male noted that it was with the normal amount of bite, a defensive tone that the blond, past or present, usually took on when offended by any amount of doubt that was placed onto his capabilities. Momentarily, Sam wondered if that defensiveness had transformed from a need to prove he wasn't an incapable child into a need to remind people that he was more than capable after everything else he'd had to do. "It's just fucking stupid, innit?"

"It's just some patterns, right?" Sam shrugged, leaning back to give the stressed boy some more space. "Like 1, 2, 3, or something."

Theseus narrowed his eyes disdainfully, and Sam nearly smiled when he noticed that, despite his complaining, the time traveler was weaving the bandages around his head with what looked to be a practiced ease, even with some pauses and hesitations. "I can't see it, though, dumbass. Like being blindfolded or some shit." The blond snorted at the irony just as he crossed the bandage over his blind eye. "If it was just about fucking patterns, I'd be fucking pog. Sewing the uniforms for L'manberg was a fucking pattern." Sam thought he might have smiled, but the bandages around his mouth made it difficult to tell. "After the first one, at least. Then it was just rinse and repeat."

"Oh?" Sam hadn't known it'd been Tommy who'd made the L'manberg uniforms, and he wasn't sure if that knowledge was saddening or heartwarming. "So you got the hang of it first try, then?"

Theseus sniffed, sounding just as haughtily smug and confident as the Tommy that belonged to the current timeline. "Of course I did. I'm just that badass, bitch."

"Only you would refer to something like sewing as badass," Sam teased with a lighthearted chuckle, grin widening as the kid sputtered, his winding slowing as he tried to regain his bearings.

"The fuck is that supposed to mean?! Sewing is a perfectly badass skill, thank you very much! I can make tons of useful shit, like fucking clothes to keep warm and packs to store food with a full inventory and arrow quivers! I could stitch wounds better than anyone during the first war! Tech told me it gives you nimble fingers; you probably have fucking clunky fingers, bitch!"

Sam huffed a laugh, nodding. "I suppose that's fair." He didn't let Theseus catch onto the heaviness in his chest at the way most of the skill the blond was so proud of relied on its usefulness when it came to survival and war. For Theseus, that skill was probably life saving at times, something likely coveted in his timeline. It was something to be proud of, Sam knew, but he could also see why a skill usually deemed soft or feminine would be considered 'badass' to the child soldier.

"Only you," he'd told the boy, but perhaps, he conceded regretfully, that was not the case; perhaps it had been seen in the same light Theseus saw it back in his timeline, a skill no longer seen as recreational and a hobby but necessary and a duty.