#hoping i remembered the prompt right. hit post instead of save draft hope that didn't give you a really weird notification

[youssefguedira]

@materassassino sent me a prompt but in my exhaustion and lack of brain cells i answered the ask without writing the actual thing and then deleted it so. oops.

but the prompt was extremely sleepy Nicky is different from normal Nicky, so have a very silly little thing

"Leave him alone," Joe is saying without any real annoyance, "it's the deepest he's slept in weeks." He's in one of the armchairs, ignoring the book on his lap in favour of Andy, who's perched on the arm of the couch.

When Nile gets close enough to see over the back of the couch she has to blink a couple times: it's Nicky, completely passed out, currently with three books balanced on his chest while Andy holds a fourth. They rise and fall as he breathes. He's completely dead to the world.

"Is he asleep?" Nile asks, because she still can't quite believe that Nicky, of all people, is sleeping through that. Andy places the fourth book with careful precision and reaches for a fifth.

The thing is, Nicky has a hair trigger for being woken up. Nile learned this a week after meeting him, when she startled him by walking into the living room of their most recent safehouse while he was sleeping on the couch (on watch, but she'd forgotten) and he'd already been reaching for the gun on the side table before she realised he was even there, and then he'd apologised for the gun thing, and told her he hadn't "learned what her footsteps sound like" yet.

After a while he'd stopped going for the weapons whenever she surprised him, but he'd still wake at the slightest sound. Andy's got a similar thing going, but she's a little bit slower, whereas Joe does wake fast, but definitely isn't all the way alert the way Nicky is.

She'd wondered if it was down to what happened in Goussainville, but when she'd finally worked up the courage to ask, because she was starting to wonder if he ever actually slept properly, Joe had just laughed and said he'd always been like that.

But once Andy had decided that the loose ends from Merrick had been sufficiently tied up, she'd called for a couple weeks of downtime, and before that Nicky had been on recon duty, sleeping even less and even worse than usual. So she's not surprised he's sleeping: she's surprised he's still asleep.

"Pass me a couple more," Andy says to Joe, who sighs, but does grab two from nearby and pass them over.

Nile looks between them, and then at Nicky. "That's not gonna wake him up?"

Joe chuckles. "Not when he's like this," he says. "He won't wake for another hour or two. Definitely not until dinner."

Nile blinks at him. Joe, sure, she could believe. Andy, too - Nile's pretty sure she sleeps more during the day than she does at night. She's almost as bad as Nicky for lurking in dark rooms at night. But Nicky?

"He doesn't do this very often," Joe explains. "But the rest of us are awake, and everything's dealt with, for now, so he's comfortable enough."

"Booker built an entire house of cards on him, once," Andy says. "Record for books is, what, nineteen?"

"Eighteen," Joe says. "2012."

Andy places a sixth book and reaches for a seventh. Nile thinks for a moment.

"Only eighteen?" she says.

Andy's grin can only be described as wicked. "That's the spirit," she says. "Pass me another."

Nicky wakes at twenty-one, prompting the entire pile to crash onto the floor, which makes him scramble upright until his brain comes all the way back online, at which point he clocks why the three of them are laughing so hard there are tears in Joe's eyes, and curses them out in five languages.

But he's smiling while he does it, all the same.

#neon writes #the old guard #back on the bus. so #neon answers #materassassino #spiritually if not actually. hope you enjoyed this this was a lot of fun!! #hoping i remembered the prompt right. hit post instead of save draft hope that didn't give you a really weird notification