onepieceyaoi100 | It's been a while...

Title: For His Amusement Only
Topic: Amusement Park
Rating: G
Pairing: Coby/Helmeppo
Word count: 450
Notes: Um, Happy (very) belated birthday to Helmeppo? Apologies for the length of this one, it kind of had a mind of its own past the first paragraph...

Helmeppo didn’t like the look of the haunted house. It wasn’t as if he was particularly bothered by haunted houses – in his experience they’d always been rubbish – but he had a funny feeling about this one. He’d had a funny feeling about the whole day in fact, right from the look that Garp gave him when Coby told him they’d spending their day of shore leave at a funfair, and it felt like someone had been watching them all day. But Coby was insistent that they queue up for it:

“Come on Helmeppo, we’ve done everything else here. Worried that it’ll scare you?”

“Pfft, me, scared of a few plastic skeletons and goons in masks? Like hell I am.”

“Then you’ll come in with me?”

“If you insist.”

He reluctantly followed Coby inside, though he might have been a bit more eager if he’d known that Coby only really wanted to get him alone in the dark for a while. An attendant in a lab coat ushered them though and bid them to explore the house, a gory hospital set-up that gave Helmeppo the creeps – he’d never been overly fond of hospitals, especially since Coby had been in one with that head wound. There was blood splattered from room to room and groaning shapes moving behind the medical screens, although strangely nothing jumped out at them. Helmeppo drew closer and closer to Coby as they negotiated the house.

“I-it’s not real, it’s just a fake hospital,” he said, more to himself than anything. Coby linked their arms and squeezed his hand in an attempt to distract him.

“Of course it’s not real,” he laughed, “It’s all just fake blood and props!”

“Yeah,” conceded Helmeppo, “And this zombie is probably just covered in jam or – AGHHH!”

He practically leapt a foot in the air as a man in a white coat leapt out at them through the darkness, leering and laughing, his face and beard seemingly matted with fake gore. Without a second glance, Helmeppo bolted and Coby had no choice but to follow, wondering briefly where he’d heard the zombie’s laugh before. He tried to convince Helmeppo to go back inside, to prove to him that it wasn’t really that scary but Helmeppo was having none of it and Coby was forced to abandon whatever plans he had made for the darkness.

Perhaps it was just as well that they didn’t return as Helmeppo may have been disturbed to realise how right had actually been. A second longer in the house and he would have recognised the white jacket, the figure busy cackling into his bag of doughnuts and been spared several weeks of zombie jokes back on the ship.