Disclaimer: I don't own Hetalia.
Itamericano: Horror Scare
"You want us to go watch a horror movie together?" Romano asked incredulously.
America enthusiastically nodded, and Italy cocked his head to the side.
"Ve, isn't it going to be scary?" Italy asked.
"Don't worry," America said proudly. "The hero will protect you, so if you get too scared, you could always cling to me."
That was the whole goal, to be honest. He knew how cowardly the Italy brothers could be, and he was hoping for an opportunity to get the both of them to cling to him. Besides, how often did the threesome get to do something together?
Romano scrutinised him for a while longer, before he sighed.
"Fine," he said. "But you better not make me regret agreeing to this."
America pumped his fist in victory. He would get the two to cling to him and he would be their hero.
…
"Oh my god, behind you!" America shouted.
At Romano's insistence, they had chosen to watch the movie at America's house. It was some sort of supernatural slasher, with a lot of gory details. And America was freaking out.
Meanwhile, the two Italian brothers were watching him with a combination of sympathy and amusement.
"My hero," Romano remarked dryly.
"How are you two okay with all of this?!" America demanded as… Oh, that looked painful.
"Ve, this isn't so bad," Italy said. "You should see the kind of stuff that comes from our place."
"Which is nothing compared to what it was like with the Colosseum and Grandpa Rome," Romano said. "Or the Inquisition. Honestly, our history has a lot gorier stuff than this movie."
America felt a small stab of annoyance, which was ignored in favour of yelping. Perhaps he should have gone with another genre of horror.
There's a combination of things that inspired this. I was looking through my list of prompts when I saw one about one part of the OTP freaking out at the jump scares from a horror movie, and then I checked to see the requests I have lined up for America, who would be perfect for this, and then I saw Italy and Romano as part of a OT3, and I remember how chill Italy was when talking about gory horror movies, and I thought about the trope where the guy takes a girl to a horror movie in hopes of getting the girl to cling to him, and boom! This story was born. And in case you're wondering, yes, it was pretty late at night and I was a bit sleep-deprived.
I pity the poor fool that thinks that trope is going to work with me. My sister and I use horror movies as bonding time. Alone. In the dark. We're pretty good at predicting jump scares, which actually cheapens the experience. I felt it with The Nun, which in my opinion relied a little too much on jump scares. Seriously, the most memorable scene in that movie is a scene with the comic relief character, not because it stood out among all that 'horror', but because what he did at the end of the scene was memorable and unexpected. Horrors have to be about the atmosphere, the suspense, the tension… and unfortunately, jump scares destroy all of that in an instant, so that when it gets to the climax, it doesn't have the impact that it should have had.