"Hardison."
"Mmmm."
"Har-di-son."
"Mmm-mmm."
"Hardison!"
"Mmm-hmm."
"Alec."
The geek turned over grumpily. "What?" Nate and Sophie were standing beside the couch. Nate was tapping his foot impatiently. Hardison sat up quickly. He'd fallen asleep on Nate's couch in front of his six plasma screens. Parker and Eliot were hovering close by - Parker with a laptop and Eliot with a wide grin. Hardison blinked hazily at them and flopped back onto the couch. "What is you guys' problem? Messin' up my beauty sleep on a Saturday… A man is trying to get some rest."
"And we are trying to do a job," Nate reminded him pointedly.
Hardison craned his neck to see a clock. "What time is it?" Three in the afternoon. The job went down six hours ago. He flinched guiltily and smiled winningly at Nate. "Heh. Oops?"
Sophie crossed her arms and glared at him. "You stayed up all night playing Warcraft again, didn't you."
"Uh…" He didn't want to admit it, what with Nate standing right there and all, but there was no ducking out of Sophie's motherly glare of doom. "Maybe?"
Nate and Sophie sighed in tandem exasperation. "Of course you did."
"Look, I'm sorry." He was, really. Warcraft was fun and all, but it paled in comparison to running tech on one of their jobs. But sometimes, especially now with all the new stuff they were putting out, WoW kind of ate his brain. He'd been on his best behavior, but all it took was one slip to completely screw up an important heist. "I will never, ever, ever miss another job. I promise."
"Oh, you didn't miss it," Eliot chuckled from the corner.
"Man, I slept right through the thing. I know, I was there. Or…you know…not there."
The hitter just smiled and Parker turned the laptop so Hardison could take a look at what they were watching. It was video footage from the cameras in the apartment.
On screen, Hardison lay on the couch, dead to the world. Suddenly he jolted, apparently roused by voices in his earpiece. "Okay, alright," he muttered shuffling over to a laptop and plunking himself down in front of it. In the next few minutes he pulled information on two guards, bypassed an alarm system, and set up audio feeds from bugs planted in their mark's office. Then, finished, he trundled back to the couch and dropped to sleep again.
Hardison looked up from the laptop screen at Parker's giggling face. "Oh, you faked that."
"How would we fake that?" Nate asked.
"I don't know, but that's insane. I ran sleep-support? You've got to be kidding me."
Sophie shrugged. "Well, you're always saying you could do this in your sleep…" she commented before wandering off to the kitchen.
Hardison shook his head. "Yeah, I know, but that's…that's crazy, man. Can't nobody do that."
"Looks like you just did," Eliot said, following Sophie out of the room.
Parker grabbed the laptop and chirped, "This is so going on YouTube," on her way out.
Nate rolled his eyes and leveled a scolding finger at Hardison. "Last time. No more late nights before jobs. Like you said, nobody can do what you did. And not even you could do it twice."
"Whoa, hold up," Hardison started preaching to an empty room as Nate walked out. "I'm saying that's crazy, man, I'm not saying I can't do it. I mean, nobody's that good, but if there was, it makes sense for it to be me. If I'm that good…. Oh, this opens up whole new worlds of possibilities." His face lit up with an evil grin. "Yeah, baby. Age of the sleep-geek."