Every now and then, when I'm discussing my plot with my bestie, we come up with absolutely random scenes that go between scenes that I include in the story. The kind of scene that we find hilarious purely because of the back story we come up with to accompany it, but would slow the plot down too much if I actually included it. This is one of them.

This story takes place during Not as Planned at the club when Lester invites Greg and Halfred to join them. (Between Chapters 25 and 26). The story is from Greg's POV.

Things that are vital to know before reading this story (in case you haven't read Not as Planned, which you really should first): Greg and Halfred are from Rangeman Miami. Diana, the Miami branch manager, is a very dominant woman and has claimed Halfred as her own. She is fiercely protective of her feeble turtle duck. Ranger is dead. Rangeman was forced to change its name to RCM Security. Lester has assigned nicknames to the three RCM Security branches based on who is in charge there – Tankman, Dianaman, and… well, I'm not revealing the third just yet. I have plans for it :P

Happy reading!

Halfred, Do the Thing!

We'd been in the club for about an hour and I was bored. The atmosphere was tame in comparison to the spicy Miami night clubs I was used to frequenting back home, but I couldn't skip out early without risking ridicule. Not that I cared what the Trenton guys thought of me. In fact, given that I was the guy they went to when they had something they needed to get off their chest and out of their heads, I was surprised they invited me along. I'd spent years treading the fine line between friend-and-colleague, and psychiatrist. It was interesting to interact with the others on that normal everyday level, because if you join in with their jokes and rough housing enough, they tend to forget that you're the head doctor that knows all their deep dark secrets.

Lester had insisted that both Halfred and I joined them on this almost lame excuse for a guys night out. And then, of course, Diana had threatened my life if Halfred returned to the building with so much as a scratch on his person. I didn't really get what Diana saw in the guy, but I knew damn well that I wasn't going to tell her that.

Diana was a fierce woman, especially when it came to her personal men. And that only seemed to double the moment she decided she wanted Halfred. I'd had a few sessions with each of them. Separately, of course, because Halfred would never openly discuss how conflicted he was in front of Diana. On the one hand he was shit scared of her to the point of nightmares, but on the other, sometimes those nightmares turned into wet dreams. And, of course, Diana was also conflicted. She was drawn to Halfred, like she needed him in her life and in her bed, but she couldn't reconcile her need to protect him with her need for a strong man.

I'd noticed the way she treated him. Pushing him to his limit and then nudging just a little more. Dragging him off randomly to what we all knew would be an intense session of what she might consider lovemaking, but was probably a terrifying two hours of sweet torture for Halfred. I shuddered at the mere thought of being at the woman's mercy and could only wonder at how Halfred had survived this long. Probably a combination of a secret kink on Halfred's part and a protective instinct that kept Diana from taking him to the point of no return.

Either way, despite all the misgivings I might have about how their relationship could last and what the fallout would be like for both of them, it was none of my business. Besides, Halfred and I had sort of formed a friendship. Probably, it was based on the fact that we were both kinda different from the rest of the guys. We were both more intellectual than physical. Halfred's was more extreme, but that didn't change the fact that we were different from the rest. We had to stick together.

At the moment, Halfred was on his way back from the bar carrying no less than seven bottles of beer with his spindly, bare hands. He was always doing weird shit like that, proving how convenient he was to have around.

"Dude," Hal breathed in awe as Halfred expertly set down the seven bottles without spilling a drop.

"How'd you even do that?" Lester asked.

Halfred grinned from ear to ear. He was a little drunk. "Physics," he stated, leaning one elbow on the table and taking the most casual sip I'd ever seen in my life. I'm pretty sure Hawk taught him that move a year ago when we'd needed him for a distraction. And I don't have to mention how pissed Diana was when she found out about the plan. She'd handed every single man on that team their ass in the gym as a warning. Not to mention what happened when he'd ended up getting shot.

"That's nothing," I mentioned, chugging half my beer in one go. I met Halfred's gaze for a second and we both knew what I was about to say. "Halfred, do the thing."

The shit eating grin that came across Halfred's expression was all I needed to see to know that whatever he was about to do was guaranteed to be good. See, while I made it sound like I had a pre-planned 'thing' in mind, I didn't. It was all up to Halfred's genius brain. That's the way it had worked ever since that fateful day.

I'd just flopped onto the sofa in the break room with a cold bottle of water in hand, utterly exhausted after the marathon shift. It had started the previous day with my usual nine til six, a bit of paper work, some basic skip tracing, a couple of sessions with guys who recently returned from government missions. The usual. I went home, had dinner, watched some TV and was preparing for bed by eleven when I got phone call.

The guys had organised a last minute distraction based on some fairly concrete intel they'd received that afternoon and I needed to be present as the inside man to let them know if anything tipped me off behaviourally as to the skip's plans. What a joy. When the skip was in cuffs and I was on my way back to my apartment I was called out to a takedown that had turned bad. That skip had somehow managed to take one of our guys hostage and I was now required to negotiate. Honestly, I'd just wanted to shoot him in the head and be done with it, but that was an awful lot of paperwork.

Finally, at six in the morning, I made it back to my apartment and crawled into bed when there was a pounding at my door. I opened it to find Damon pale as a ghost with a manic look in his eye. He needed to speak with me urgently. Before he did something he'd regret. The part of me that was devoted to my profession knew that I couldn't turn him away or I'd regret t. The rest of me just wanted to sleep.

So I let him in and listened to him tell me about his dream and his urges and gave him my advice. By the time he was done it was eight and I had a report that needed to be sent to Boston by ten, so I'd dressed and made my way upstairs to start the day, despite not having slept. I finished the report on time and immediately went to see Always Stephen to get him to clear me for the rest of the day. There was no way I could function any longer on my lack of sleep.

A lot of the men would have scoffed if I'd complained about my thirty hours awake, reciting well worn tales about the time they hadn't slept for three weeks when they were trapped in a cave in the woods behind the Spanish King's country house, but I Always Stephen knew the importance of sleep for the body and brain. A few minutes in his sterile little office at the end of the hall and I was a free man until nine the next morning. The expectation was that I go to my apartment and sleep, but I couldn't be bothered making it that far and stopped off in the breakroom instead.

I tipped my head back on the couch and stared at the flat screen television mounted on the wall, and right next to it, the remote control, which had been returned to it's little Velcro strip. The one and only time I didn't have the energy to get off my ass and some genius had returned it to the place it was supposed to live but never ended up.

Fuck. My. Life.

Rolling my head to the side I noticed Halfred puttering around in the little alcove he'd claimed as his "lab". I didn't know what he was doing, all I cared about was the fact that he was on his feet and could pass me the remote with ease just by moving his legs.

"Halfred," I called "Do the… uh… thing…" I couldn't think of the words I needed in order to convey my needs. Apparently my vagueness didn't faze Halfred, though, as he crossed to his laptop and typed in a few commands. The next thing I knew, a Roomba with a mechanical claw affixed to the top drove across the break room floor in front of me. It stopped just to the left of the fridge and a small red light on the Roomba turned green and the fridge door popped open. The reached inside, grabbing a pre-packaged sandwich from the middle shelf. The Roomba reversed, green light returning to red as the fridge closed again. It then drove over to me and deposited the sandwich in my lap before going back to whatever hidey hole it came from.

I looked at the sandwich (Roast Beef. My favourite) and glanced over at Halfred. He had already returned to scribbling gibberish on his whiteboard. I didn't say anything. It wasn't what I'd attempted to ask for, but it was impressive all the same.

A few weeks later, we'd been hanging out with some of the guys in the breakroom when I decided to try impress the others. I'd glanced over at Halfred, sitting on the floor against the wall under the TV and said the same thing I had last time.

"Hey Halfred, do the thing."

He'd looked up from the iPad he was fiddling with (he had the entire back off and was actually fiddling with the insides), his eyes moving swiftly from me to the other four guys that were now staring at him. His expression didn't change but stuck his arm out to the side, making a few random hand gestures before the TV suddenly clicked on. My eyes immediately cut to the remote on the wall and back to Halfred. He was staring at me. He made another gesture and the channel changed.

I remember wondering why he couldn't have done that last time as the guys marvelled. I'd actually expected him to do the same things as last time.

From then on, it became a thing, so to speak. We never discussed it, but whenever I wanted something interesting to happen I'd say the words and he'd make something happen. It was an unspoken agreement we apparently had. I never knew what he was going to do, but it was always epic as shit.

Halfred's things were the main reason I was so good at masking my expression. I got a lot of practice hiding my surprise every time I told him to do the thing. It confused the hell out of the guys once we'd done it enough. "How does he know what thing you want?" they'd ask. I'd just smile.

Of course, the flip side of this was that it pissed Diana off to the max. For a start, she reserved the right to be the only one to boss Halfred around. And then there was the fact that when she tried to do it herself it never had her desired result. Alas, Halfred was not a mind reader, he just had a lot of tricks up his sleeve.

*o*

Lester and the Trenton gang stared from me to Halfred, expectation clear on their faces. Halfred didn't noticed, of course, because he was already typing away at his phone. Without glancing up he pointed at Tim who was in the middle of bending his arm behind his head. "Favourite song," he said.

Tim cut his eyes to Halfred an then the other guys. "Uh," he said eloquently. "Uptown Funk?"

Halfred nodded, still focused on his phone. He lifted on hand from the device, still typing with the other, and held up three fingers. We stared as he lowered one. Then another. And finally, the last finger went down. At the same moment, the song blasting through the speakers all around the room abruptly changed.

To Uptown Funk.

The Tankman guys were suitably impressed. As was I, but I'd never let them know that.

"How'd you do that?" Hank demanded, rising from his chair to lean across the table, obviously hoping to catch a glimpse of whatever app Halfred had used. Hank was one of two tech guys at the Trenton branch, but even together, he and Hector didn't come anywhere near the level of tech-savvy that Halfred had all on his own. He was clearly jealous. And mildly intimidated, if I was reading his body language right.

Halfred shrugged. "It's easy. I cased the sound system earlier and just used the app I created to hack it."

"Remotely," Hank pointed out. "What did you plant on the system?"

Halfred blinked, like he didn't understand. "Nothing."

The guys continued to ask Halfred question after question about his technology and what else he could do. The scrawny, intoxicated man obliged, telling them all about the things most of them didn't actually understand. I sat back and revelled in another wall torn down. Newbies to the Diana/Halfred thing tend to be wary and mocking toward Halfred. By showing them how much of a genius he could be when he wasn't being awkward or dragged around, I'd opened up the their minds to the possibility of Halfred being one of the guys.

My job here was done.

And so is mine. Keep an eye out for further updates. I have at least two more shorts to add to this series. Maybe three. I'd also like to know what scenes you all would like to see.