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How do they react to scares or frights? Do they laugh, get nervous, or not react at all? (Harry)

HALLOWEEN QUESTIONS // always accepting!

Harry most often has a myriad of responses to being scared, but the most often ones he has are;

a) laughing! it's a coping mechanism mostly stemming from the more social ━ and logical ━ sections of his brain. He laughs when he doesn't know what to do, or understands that whatever response that something was supposed to illicit simply didn't happen, or is just flat-out confused! it initially came from the idea that, well, if you're already laughing, you're in on the joke; Harry was always the joke, so being the first to laugh at himself, at least for a while, made the ridiculous feel intentional, as though even he was having a 'i can't believe i just did that' moment, even if the cause was entirely unintentional or from something that's just part of him but he knew wasn't socially 'normal' ( a good example is how autistic people, including myself, might laugh at themselves when they've done something that neurotypical people find strange. Definitely not the healthiest, but a very rare few things he does are! )

with laughter as a response to being afraid, it can be from the social point of 'hes supposed to experience one thing and hes not, therefore: laugh', but most often its from an incongruous emotion in of itself ( an emotion in a situation that doesn't necessarily call for it, like laughing as someone's crying, which is often perceived as a result socially as 'not making sense' ) or straight-up just finding the failed scare attempt funny! like watching an actor fuck something up in their take, yknow? sometimes its a shield from the fact he got spooked in the first place, making it nervous laughter to calm himself down, which leads into...

b) flinching! This is the more sincere out of the two, where the scare actually lands to some extent moreso. Harry, almost ALWAYS, responds to just about everything. his composure may mask it, but he is, at all times, answering and responding to and calculating just about everything. this often feeds into his Already pretty bad paranoia ( Imperial Empire, you're doing your best but alas you oft freak him out more than anything actually threatening him... ) and bodily responses to traumas he no longer remembers, things the skills keep from him; huddled in blankets citing its better not to know than to know at all, to make choices of what to do with the pearls of something terrible coddled in those clothes of neurons and grey-matter ━ or, at least, that's how it feels. like keeping secrets.

this means, even in false strikes and in fake-outs, there are things to respond to. even if he already knows the threat isn't real, and even isn't very scared of it at all, the overwhelming sensation of that abrupt happening can make him recoil, half overwhelmed, half new information, always tied to the impulse. be it by physically flinching back, violently lunging forward, parts of his mind surging to answer, or his mind going dead for juuust a moment ━ like the moment the rock breaches the lake's surface ━ then it ripples out again, the latter; a feeling he often finds himself craving to recreate. the impact felt but faux nonetheless. at the end of the day; it invokes a survival response him, and for a split second it's like a millisecond, high saturation dream of watching reality burn alive before reverting to how he knew it like the colors of a broken camera. a microbomb of trauma re-firing, before going dead again.

( Though, if the scare in question has anything to do with touching him, you can bet your bottom dollar that he's going to start swinging )

overall, though, what he does exactly highly depends on what specifically the scare is, how it's performed, the medium ( is it a movie, is it a coworker trying to scare him, is it in his home, is it in the office, how has he mentally been doing overall himself lately, etc etc ) and so on! it's extremely conditional, including whether or not he get's scared in the first place! some days he's untouchable, other days he jumps at everything! depending on what it is and how it's done, harry's responses can ENTIRELY change! it's his nature to be inconsistent and unpredictable, in a way.

he IS however a big horror fan, especially gore since it taps into an animalistic sense in his head kinda that Half Light really digs especially, as well as his creative sense to see how they did it! plus something could 100000% be said about desensitizing himself from terrible things given his job is seeing terrible things a lot of the time. ━ sometimes he's a fan despite himself, given he sometimes uses horror as a 'safe' method to punish himself with triggers or generally invoking a fear/disgust response at all or fucking up his paranoia which bleeds back into his age-old problem of self flagellation and self-loathing, which also ties into his desensitization thing, but that aside, he sincerely does enjoy horror in general!!! I personally like to think he and Jean used to watch horror marathons together during October and November, depending on what they could get their hands on, though Harry doesn't remember this.

this is only tapping into the 'non-harmful scares', though! things like horror movies or the like. his response to genuine threats are overwhelmed with his mind clicking together like the joints of a machine with one goal; to keep him alive.

it's done a surprisingly good job thus far, given how difficult he makes it.