BAM! Another update ;) Oh, and happy Australia Day to all my fellow Aussies out there :P

Another request from Akeri la malicieusse, this time for more Sandy. He deserves more love because he's amazing. It's just really hard to write him when he doesn't talk (there are only so many ways you can phrase the way he creates pictures from sand ^^;)

Disclaimer: Disclaimed.

...

Minions

...

The meeting was unproductive (as usual), no one really paying attention to the fact that there was supposed to be a meeting at all anymore. Tooth was off talking a mile a minute to her fairies, Bunny was busy painting an egg he must have brought with him, and North was standing in the doorway talking to some yetis about production.

Jack's gaze drifted from one to the other until he heaved a sigh and plonked himself down beside Sandy, who had fallen asleep.

"Hey, Sandy," he said, nudging the short man with his elbow. Sandy blinked awake, smiling up at him. "Don't you think it's a little unfair?"

The Sandman followed his gaze, but obviously didn't catch on to what the younger Guardian was saying. "?"

"Think about it; Tooth's got her little helpers, Bunny's got those mini eggs and the sentinel eggs, and North's got yetis and elves. Heck, even the other seasonals have minions. All the while the two of us have to do all our work by ourselves."

Sandy's eyes widened in realisation before he frowned, nodding.

"I mean, I know their jobs are more full-on than mine – they have a very limited deadline while I get a few months – but you've got the same deadline as Tooth, so why should you have to do it all by yourself?"

"What is problem?" North asked, retaking his seat at the table.

"Just trying to figure out why you guys get minions and we don't."

"Minions?" North echoed in confusion. "Oh, I get. But, you are both able to create things with your magic, no?"

Sandy let some golden dream sand pool into his hand, easily morphing it into a small butterfly and showed it to Jack.

"To be honest, I haven't had all that much luck with it," Jack smiled sheepishly.

Sandy frowned, the butterfly morphing into a dragon.

"Frostwind? He was a success, yeah, but I can't really get him to help me spread winter, you know? Not without blowing him up, that is."

Sandy suddenly smiled, 'ABC' and an apple appearing above him. Jack stared at the new images in confusion, trying to figure out what the little man was getting at.

"Wait, are you saying you want to teach me?"

The Sandman nodded happily.

"Really?"

Another nod.

...

...

Sandy didn't have a lot of free time, so Jack decided to join him on his rounds across the globe. As soon as he sent out enough streams of dream sand for the surrounding area, he turned and sat in front of Jack.

The golden man held up a finger in a 'watch and wait' gesture, forming a ball of dream sand in his hands. With deliberate slowness he let the sand shift into the form of a manta, roughly the size of a dinner plate. He then waved it off towards one of the houses, following after it on the cloud. Jack watched in interest as the manta seeped in through a window and exploded above a sleeping child's head. The sand floated downwards until it was drawn in by the child, creating the scene of a dream.

"So you're saying I could do something similar with ice? Like make things and send them out to spread snow from a distance?"

Sandy nodded encouragingly, waving in Jack's direction as if to encourage him to have a go.

"I generally have to start with a drawing," Jack admitted.

Sandy pointed to a window.

"Yeah, that'll work."

With a touch the window froze over with delicate fern patterns. Pausing a moment to decide on a shape, he started drawing an outline on the glass, much the same way he had for Jamie. It was an easy enough manner to pry the frost penguin from the glass and it happily glided and darted around them.

Sandy clapped enthusiastically, giving him a thumbs up, but Jack, while proud of his creation, didn't quite share the enthusiasm.

"I can do that, no problem," Jack told his companion. "But it's hardly enough to spread snow or anything." His point was proven when the penguin suddenly burst into a soft patter of snowflakes, barely enough to be noticed amidst the snow already on the ground.

Sandy tilted his head in confusion, the sand dragon reappearing.

"Frostwind would be too small, too; not to mention I had to completely encase him in an ice shell to stop him from exploding."

Sandy frowned in thought, tapping his chin. He personally didn't have that problem as the things he made from his sand usually only had to be enough for a small group of children at the most. But Jack was a seasonal spirit, tasked with bringing winter to whole hemispheres at a time. Judging from Jack's method of creating them, it would take too much time and effort to make one big enough, and–

Sandy's eyes lit up as an idea struck him. He knelt down in the snow and pushed a pile of it together, making a very poor looking snow figure. He created a picture of a window covered in frost and crossed it out, then pointed at the snow he had been fiddling with.

"I should… use snow instead?"

A nod in the affirmative.

"I guess I could try."

Sandy gestured with his hands for Jack to try and compact as much snow into the creation as he could, that way it would allow for it to carry more snow.

"I still don't think it would be enough, though," Jack sighed, tracing the outline of an owl in the snow. It was harder to make the image three dimensional from the snow than it had been from frost, but in the end he'd managed it, although a few bits here and there had fallen away. The owl wasn't as compact as he would have liked, but it certainly held more snow than the frost penguin had.

At his urging, it soared skywards twirling about majestically before exploding, sending a heavier snowfall than its predecessor. But he would still need heaps of them if he was going to use them to help with winter and the amount of energy that would require would leave him unable to do his own work.

"Well, it's an improvement," Jack sighed, stretching. "I'll just have to keep practicing, I guess."

Sandy nodded reassuringly, trying to tell the winter spirit that it was a skill that came with time; the others had had centuries upon centuries to perfect the art, whereas Jack had only just started learning.

"Still though…" Jack smirked conspiratorially, "I think I have an idea."

As Jack shared his plan, the Sandman's expression slowly shifted to match.

...

...

North, Tooth and Bunny chatted amongst themselves as they waited for their final two members to show up. It wasn't like Sandy to be late, so they quickly concluded that the two were together. Movement above them made them lift their gazes in time to see a small pod of frost dolphins drift in through Jack's Window, leaping happily around on imaginary waves. And was it just their imagination or were there traces of gold on them?

When the dolphins all suddenly popped like balloons, dropping a light dusting of ice and gold, the only one who was bothered by it was Bunny, and even then only because 'it was cold enough outside without that blighter's help' and 'he was just trying to be a bloody show pony'. When they felt their eyes grow heavy and started to nod off to sleep, none of them would realise it was because of the dream sand interwoven with the snow until they woke up much later. And it would take even longer still for them to realise their faces had been drawn on in a black marker while they slept.