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Most people, including Barry and Iris, change their clothes at least twice a day- once when waking up, once when going to sleep. They also don’t wear more than a single layer of clothes indoors unless it’s cold, and wear different sets of clothes each day.
Hal doesn’t. Even a momentary change into uniform cleans his civilian clothes completely and repairs minor wear and tear, and there’s really no point to changing clothes or removing garments without a specific reason to. Unless he’s getting completely naked, in which case there’s no reason to get dressed again unless he needs to leave the house in civvies.
People often give him weird looks for wearing a jacket, gloves, scarf and boots indoors at all times, or for wearing what they think is the same outfit 24/7, 365 days a year.
Which is silly. He does actually change his clothes to match the environmental conditions and formality. It’s not his fault they can’t tell apart clothes meant for different climates. (Barry says that since they’re roughly the same color and style and he always wears the same jacket over them, nobody really notices. This is incredibly stupid- they’re obviously entirely different garments.)
Hal also makes concessions to sleeping in a bed with other people- he takes his boots off, and empties his pockets. He long ago mastered the trick of putting objects in his loop pocket directly onto his body or into his physical pockets, so there isn’t any appreciable inconvenience from having to put them back.
Hal is aware his clothing habits are generally considered unusual, but neither Barry or Iris care, so he doesn’t make any attempts to change it.
Oliver has apparently never heard of the very simple concepts of permission, timing and not trespassing, seeing as how he broke into Barry’s house at three in the morning and somehow expected them to be awake and willing to help him with whatever.
Hal freely admits that healthy adult speedsters usually take occasional 5-15 minute naps for a total of about an hour and a half of sleep every 24 hours instead of sleeping through the night, and the only reason Barry's been sleeping for the last hour is thanks to a recent fight with Gorilla Grodd and his minions that left them injured severely enough to fall unconscious the second they didn't need to keep moving.
However, Oliver doesn't know about that little tidbit, so he has no excuses.
Hal instructed his ring to wake him if anyone entered the house that wasn’t Iris, or if an alert of priority three or higher got sent to his comm. Seeing as how he got woken up by the first and not the second, Oliver better have a good explanation for breaking in instead of calling an alert or waiting until morning.
Hal doesn’t exactly want to move, though, seeing as how Barry has tucked themself under his jacket, and will definitely wake up if he moves. Barry’s got broken ribs, a concussion, a fractured skull, a shattered leg and three punctured lungs(yes, three- speedsters have four small lungs instead of two big ones), and even though their healing factor has fixed the worst of it already, they're still exhausted and definitely should not be awake right now.
“What are you doing here, Hal?” Oliver says, as soon as he opens the door to their bedroom.
“Quiet. It’s three in the morning.” Hal says as quietly as he can. “And I was sleeping, before you showed up.”
“Okay, but why are you in Barry’s bed? Actually, where is Barry?”
Oliver reaches for the lightswitch, and Hal makes a largely formless construct to bat his teammate’s hand away. “Get out, Oliver.”
“Not until you explain why the fuck you’re sleeping in Barry’s bed?!”
Barry stirs at the sound of Oliver’s voice, making a soft “mrrp?” noise as they push themself up so their head lies on top of Hal’s shoulder, from where it had previously been tucked under Hal’s jacket.
“Look at what you did.” Hal hisses, and Barry looks up, opens their eyes and blinks in confusion- a full blink, nictitating membranes slowly sliding over their eyes and retracting over the course of three seconds.
“No, not you, dsi ssivaa. Oliver.” (Hal is calling Barry “my heatstone” in Nagaji, which is both a pun and very sappy in the original cultural context, since nagaji are cold-blooded.)
“Okay, what the fuck?!” Oliver shouts. Barry squeaks and pushes their face back into Hal’s shoulder.
“What part of get out did you not understand?!” Hal snaps. “It’s three in the morning, and Barry has a concussion!”
Oliver pauses, then continues, much more quietly.“Okay, but Roy-”
“And you thought it was a better idea to break into your teammate’s house rather than, I don’t know, send a priority alert? Or wait until a reasonable hour?” Hal pinches the bridge of his nose. “I am not here to solve your relationship drama. Barry is not here to solve your relationship drama.”
“Roy’s been kidnapped, and the culprits used the League servers to send the message.” Oliver says, radiating worry. “Time is essential, and I can’t trust that comms aren’t compromised.”
“Fine, that’s a good reason. Say that up-front, maybe. Instead of freaking about me being somewhere I actually got permission to be.”
Oliver still wants to argue, and is still very confused, but thankfully doesn’t say any of that out loud so Hal doesn’t have to address it. (Thank you, baseline Hal not really consciously recognizing that he’s an empath, and not being strong enough to do anything with it even if he did!)
Hal extricates himself from Barry’s grip with a quick “Sorry, Barry”, then gets out of bed, putting his boots back on in the instant before his feet hit the floor.
The sound of rubber-soled boots landing on a wooden floor is very different from the sound of bare(or even socked) feet landing on a wooden floor. Even the average civilian can often tell the difference.
Oliver is definitely not an average civilian. “Hal, were you wearing shoes in bed?!”
“They’re clean.” Hal assures him, pushing apologies towards Barry as soon as he feels Barry’s fear.
The warbling noise vaguely reminiscent of a punctured bagpipe mixed with a game show buzzer that follows is only fully audible to Hal because of his ring pitch-shifting it down into human hearing range. Barry isn’t pleased, but they accept that Hal still has to leave.
“Most people don’t wear their shoes indoors, nevermind in bed!” Oliver looks him over, completely unaware of Barry’s distress. “Actually, do you change your clothes at all? Because those are the exact clothes you were wearing two days ago.”
“Are we going to un-kidnap Roy or not?” Hal redirects, dragging Oliver by the arm out of the room as he does so. (He has his suspicions that Roy hasn’t actually been kidnapped, but he’s not 100% sure, so better not risk it.)
“Right.” Oliver takes a deep breath. “I came here from the Fox and Gardner zeta, so we’ll need to go-”
Hal raises a hand to interrupt Oliver. “No need. Barry has one in their basement.”
Oliver blinks. “...They have a zeta tube in their basement? How?”
Hal shrugs. “They built it. I’m not exactly sure how but they did it, it connects to the network, and it hasn’t exploded any of the times it was used, sooo…”
(Hal could build a semi-functional zeta tube with three hours, a pile of scrap electronics and spare parts, a screwdriver and a plasma torch. He’s not going to tell Oliver that unless he has to.)
“...Right.” Oliver shakes his head. “Where is it?”
“Just follow me.” Hal makes his way to the basement, occasionally glancing behind himself to make sure Oliver’s following him. (Hal’s ring lets him see in near-infrared easily, so even though colors don’t translate, he can still see contours and motion just fine.)
Barry’s basement isn’t quite the full underground research complex it is when they have time to improve it, but it still looks like a mad scientist’s laboratory, especially with the main lights off and only the occasional indicator lights of various equipment providing minimal illumination.
Hal flicks on the main lightswitch with a construct, blinding white light flooding into the room and forcing him to squint as his eyes adjust.
Oliver gasps as soon as his vision clears and he can see the full scale of the equipment(not actually that impressive by Barry’s standards). “They just had this in their basement?!”
“They do.” Hal confirms. “Anyway- don’t touch that! Do you have no self-preservation? ”
Oliver yanks his hand away from what probably looks like a harmless shoebox-sized metal cylinder to him, but is actually the control panel for several pieces of advanced scientific equipment. (One of the first things Barry did upon looping in was hook up all their equipment to a 25th-century holoconsole.)
Hal sighs. “Okay, new rule. Don’t touch or bump into anything.”
Oliver nods, then proceeds to break that rule in two seconds flat, admittedly by accident, but once again he has no excuses for not looking up and seeing the crossbar directly in front of him.
At least that crossbar was legitimately just a structural support for the ground floor. There’s a lot of other, more breakable equipment down here that he could have walked into.
Hal sighs. “Really? I thought you were an archer, Oliver.”
“It’s dark down here, okay!” Oliver complains. “Lightbulb’s burned out, I think.”
“Is it?” Hal glances around, then realizes that he’s turned on the red-dwarf-sun illuminator by accident.
He turns on the yellow-sun light switch, and Oliver blinks at the sudden increase in brightness. “...Oh my god, is he doing a ritual on the whiteboard?”
Hal glances at the whiteboard in question and shakes his head. “Nope, that’s just Kalaveran duodecimal spiral script. Apparently it’s more intuitive than decimal Arabic numeral linear script.”
“...It’s what now?”
“Kalaveran duodecimal spiral script. Originally used by the Kalaverans, which vaguely look like squid with twelve claw-tipped tentacles.” Hal explains. “Symbols, functions and operators are arranged in chronological order and in meaningful spatial relationships, and it’s a base-12 mathematical system rather than a base-10 mathematical system. Which, according to Barry, makes it infinitely superior to normal human mathematical systems, especially for vector calculus.”
“...I thought they were a forensic scientist?” Oliver says faintly.
“Well, yeah, they are, and that’s what they get paid for doing.” Hal shrugs. “Not their only field of specialty, just the one that pays the bills.”
“...Oookay.” Oliver glances around. “Where’s this zeta tube?”
Hal sighs and points to the zeta tube. “Once again, don’t bump into anything. This equipment costs thousands of dollars.”
Thankfully, they manage to zeta up to the Watchtower without any further issues.
“Alright, so you said they sent a message?” Hal asks, once both of them are through.
Oliver nods. “Yep. Text transmission- just two messages, on the monitor console, sent through League servers through a connection I don’t know enough about computers to track.”
“Hence why you went looking for Barry, who knows a lot about computing and cyberforensics.” Hal agrees.
Oliver makes a noise of agreement, then leads Hal into the main monitor room, where he apparently still has the message open.
Hal glances at it, and sighs- exactly as he expected, Jason has just completely forgotten that no one knows he’s the Red Hood in this loop.
Red Hood: We kidnapped Red Arrow.
Red Hood: Don’t follow us.
“So, what do you think?” Oliver asks.
“Roy’s fine, he’s just hanging out with his friends, but I really need to have a talk with my son-in-law about how to properly word “I’m borrowing Roy for a sleepover”.” Hal sighs. “What a waste of time.”
“...You have a son-in-law?” Oliver blinks, curiosity winning out over shock and surprise. “How?”
“The normal method- when your son marries someone.” Hal pauses. “Although I’m not entirely sure if son-in-law refers to just your son’s husband or your son’s husband’s brother. Either way, I need to have a talk with my son’s husband’s brother.”
With that, Hal walks back to the zeta, ignoring Oliver’s attempts to secure more information. At least he accepted that Roy wasn’t actually kidnapped easily.
He makes his way back up to his bedroom, shoves his boots back into his loop pocket and narrowly dodges being bowled over by a clingy, nonverbal speedster with a severe head injury.
Barry wails mournfully like a digital banshee and presses themself to Hal’s chest.
“Yes, yes, I abandoned you, I’m the worst.” Hal murmurs, pushing more apologies and comfort Barry’s way, and then floating both of them back over to the bed. Barry’s shattered leg may have healed enough to walk while he was gone, but they still shouldn’t be out of bed.
Barry wraps their arms around Hal’s chest, tucks their head under his jacket and starts purring, happiness and comfort radiating off them in waves.
Barry is probably going to be absolutely mortified once their neocortex is fully functional again and they're no longer running on lizard brain, but in the meantime Hal gets to sleep with a warm, purring speedster tucked against his chest.
Hal closes his eyes, absent-mindedly strokes Barry’s back and leans back into the pillow. He’s asleep within seconds, courtesy of extensive practice and Barry being a cuddly electric blanket.