This one was a really great idea by PinkTeaRose/StainedLace: "Harlock gets a frantic call from Daiba screaming in terror and when he goes to rescue him, he finds Daiba decided to go into a haunted house (like Frightland and Terror Behind the Walls) and was only scared sh*tless from it." (Psst, she's also writing a really fantastic fic where Daiba is a big scared girl. You should go look at it. It's called Arcadia Misadventures: Ghost Ship).
Needless to say, I butchered the lovely idea. Okay, I've never actually been in a haunted house before because I'm a huge baby like Daiba, so I made some assumptions here. Honestly, I don't even know what canon is anymore.
The nice parts about stopping on populated planets other than Earth were the smaller batches of authority figures trying to arrest them and rarer Mazone attacks. Things were so peaceful where they resupplied. Nice and peaceful.
"Captain, they're going to kill me! Captain! Oh my God, Captain, there's no way out of here."
Harlock nearly fell over from the sudden wailing in his ear. He was used to Daiba screaming bloody murder when they were together on some sort of mission. Honestly, he'd come to expect his youngest crewman to call for help, but it wasn't supposed to happen while on a routine stop.
"Daiba?" he questioned, placing his hand to the bug in his ear to speak through to his crewman. "What's going on?" Immediately, he stepped out from the bar. The streets outside were dusty, wind whipping up the desert climate to cling to his hair and face. But the air was crisp enough to sink through his clothes.
He wracked his brain for Daiba's position as he glanced down each length of the street. They'd all gone their separate ways after they'd restocked, so he has no way of knowing exactly where the teen had run off to without tracking him.
"T-they're going to kill me," Daiba repeated in terror. He sounded like he was trembling wildly. Even if he was a bit of a coward at times, Daiba didn't just shake from fear without something genuinely frightening to get him to that point.
Harlock pressed the small buttons on his communicator until a holographic map popped up in front of his eye. He never liked using the function because, well, he only had one eye available to check where he was going, and unless he stood still, he wasn't going to be able to use the map. Standing still was costing him time.
But the map showed that Daiba couldn't have been more than a few blocks away, judging by the distance. "Where are you exactly?" the captain questioned, hoping for a straight answer. His terrified crewman didn't seem to keen on giving them.
"Leave me alone!" Daiba howled at whatever it was closing in on him.
Flicking off the map, Harlock rushed off toward the vague direction the little green blip identifying his crewman had been. "Where's your gun?" he demanded as he ran.
There was some sort of crashing noise, like a large beam toppling down. Daiba gave a high, terrified whine. "T-they t-took it!" he squeaked.
"And you let them?" Harlock snapped in confusion.
"Well…yeah."
The captain nearly stopped in his tracks for the sheer fact that Daiba deserved whatever was coming to him for pulling a stunt like that. Still, he couldn't outright let the teen die. "Daiba, I'm going to solder that gun to your hand."
His answer was simply a whine that made the blond sound much younger and smaller than Harlock was accustomed to. "I'm scared," the boy whimpered. The fact that he was admitting it meant things were bad.
"You can't run?" the captain wasn't fond of the idea, but it was better than having to carry a body back to the ship.
Daiba spoke through a hysterical laugh. "M-my legs won't move."
"Listen to me," Harlock growled as he stopped to bring up the map again. "You get up right now, and you run. It's better than hiding. Daiba, you'd better not be hiding."
"What else should I do?" the teen hissed. "They can't see me if I'm in here."
"What are you hiding from?" He placed Daiba's position, diagonally across the street from his own. Flicking off the screen, he stared.
"Clowns," Daiba whispered as though saying their name would summon them to attack.
Harlock was surprised only because he wasn't truly surprised by what he found. "If they aren't actually coming at you with weapons and legitimately trying to tear you open, we're going to have problems."
A somewhat rundown haunted house attraction sat across the street, and Harlock calmly crossed over to it. He tried to tell himself it would be nice to get out of the cold and the constant sand blowing in his mouth, but he'd been much happier in the bar.
"But they are, Captain," Daiba insisted. He did sound genuinely terrified.
"Alright, I'm coming. Just stay put."
The bored-looking girl behind the counter glanced up at the pirate as he stepped up to the ticket window. "Nice costume," she remarked. He couldn't tell whether or not she was being genuine, but he suddenly realized that it was, in fact, Halloween.
"It seems one of my crew is inside and-"
"The one having a breakdown?" she frowned. "We've tried coaxing him out. Never had such a huge wuss before."
Harlock scratched the back of his neck, regretting his admission of a connection to the teen. "Is there a way I can just go in and get him?"
"Yeah-yeah," she sighed. "But he destroyed a couple set pieces, and someone's gotta pay for those getting fixed."
The captain decided that Daiba would need to shine his weapons and his boots and clean the Arcadia top to bottom for at least a week. Slamming an excess of cosmo dubloons down on the counter, he grudgingly asked to be led to his youngest crewman.
A young man that he guessed was supposed to be a zombie took him through the back entrance and through a few gory rooms, talking all the while. "Yeah, the clowns were having a bit too much fun harassing the kid. He obviously had some sort of wacked-out phobia, and they thought it was pretty funny, especially since it looked like a convincing scene for the other customers. Don't get a lot of interesting stuff around here, ya know? Fun to mess with outsiders. Everyone here knows each other so it's harder to get real scared. We finally got the guys to let up a couple minutes ago, and we even moved 'em to another room, but the kid still won't come out. Managers can't convince him that clowns aren't going to come out. Hell, he won't even listen to us. He just kept talking to someone else." He glanced back over his shoulder. "Guess that was you. Thought he was going crazy and talking to the things in his head. We were all getting' kinda worried."
"I know the point is to get scared," Harlock sighed. "But maybe scaring someone so much that they hide and are too petrified to run isn't the best idea."
"Well, he talked a big game when he was outside and did pretty well through most of the rest of the course. Maybe we could put some workers with a bit more sympathy as the clowns."
The room they finally ended up in didn't have much in terms of gory design like the others. It was a dim, cramped space that had been made even smaller by the set pieces falling over in Daiba's rush to escape his "attackers." Against one wall, a black curtain had been torn down to reveal a door. A woman without a costume was standing beside it and tiredly calling through. "Listen, hun, it's alright now. We even turned up the lights. You can see now. It's darker in there than it is out here. There are no clowns."
No one answered her, and she looked to the new arrivals for help.
"Daiba," Harlock called, walking up to the door and calmly attempting to yank it open. The teen had done a good job of jamming it somehow. "Daiba, it's me, and if you don't open the door, I'm going to leave you here."
There was a small scuffling, and this time Harlock was able to turn the knob and open it. His youngest crewman was huddled in a ball in the back corner of the utility closet. His hands were over his head, his eyes pressed to his knees. "Come on," his captain commanded flatly. "It's going to be a long week for you."
But for now he had to be nice. Sometimes fear did funny things to people, and scolding the teen at this point wasn't likely to help. Daiba twitchily uncurled and crawled out on all fours. Before Harlock could get onto him, he slipped behind his captain's legs, grabbed the man's cape, and wrapped it around himself, still visibly shaking. He'd obviously been crying, and Harlock could only reach down and grab the teen's arm, dragging him into a standing position.
Still, Daiba kept hold of the cape, burying his face in it to keep from seeing anything. It would have been easy to tell him off then. It would have been easy to tell him off when they picked up his gun from the ticket counter. It would have been nothing to just snap at him as soon as they returned to the Arcadia, for acting like an idiot, for destroying property, and for just forcing his captain to leave the bar in the middle of a round.
Instead Harlock led him to the showers, shoving him in and throwing a set of pajamas his way. "When you're done, I'll have a list of chores for you to do since you owe me for paying for that equipment. You can start on them tomorrow."
"I don't like clowns," Daiba mumbled, his face growing a startling red as he finally came to his senses.
"I could tell. Don't do that again."
"Yessir. Are you going to tell everyone about this?"
"Yes."
Somehow, his face managed to get even redder. "Okay. H-happy Halloween, Captain."
Harlock smiled, clapping a hand down on his crewman's shoulder to knock some of the sand off. "Happy Halloween, Daiba. Next year, just stay on the ship."
The teen's eyes went wide. "But what if it's haunted?"
Harlock thought for a moment. Well…technically… "Don't worry. We've only got friendly ghosts."
He left with a slight smirk on his face as Daiba spluttered in terror behind him. "Y-you're joking right? You do that? You joke? Captain? W-we don't have ghosts…do we?"
I'll be finishing the final one before Halloween's over. In the final fic, Mayu, Emeraldas, and Tochiro do some trick-or-treating.
