Chapter Text
This was the last place Keigo “Hawks” Takami wanted to be.
And it was all Rumi’s fault.
“Oh come on, I want to have fun!” She whined earlier that day, appearing upside down from the way Hawks hung off his bed. The blood had rushed to his head from lying that way, but he preferred the pulsing sensation over the ache that had consumed his heart for the past four months.
Rumi had pushed herself off his bean bag and shoved her phone in his face, purposely holding it upside down so he could properly see the screen’s contents.
“The Menace Mansion is only a thirty-minute drive from here,” she pointed out, trying to build her seemingly impossible case to get Hawks out of his own head.
Her phone illuminated a poorly designed ad for the so-called “Menace Mansion” that consisted of clipart bats surrounding a group of scare actors in skeleton and killer clown costumes.
“From what I’ve heard, it’s the scariest haunted house in the whole country.”
“A haunted house that the redhead from your entrepreneurship class may happen to be at?”
Rumi’s cheeks flushed, but she stood her ground. “That’s beside the point! I’m just worried about you, okay? I know the breakup—”
“It wasn’t a breakup,” he snapped, admittedly a bit too aggressively. With a sigh and a mumbled “sorry,” he stretched his hands over his head and to the ground. Then, he kicked his legs off the bed and held himself in a handstand for a few seconds before losing his balance and falling onto his feet. Although he quit gymnastics when he graduated high school and joined UA University’s track team, he still enjoyed exercising the flexibility and strength he gained from the sport.
“That’s a fun trick.”
Hawks ignored her comment and reached for his phone on his nightstand. He knew there wouldn’t be any notifications of interest on his lockscreen, but he pretended there was so he wouldn’t have to see Rumi’s pitiful look.
“It wasn’t a breakup,” he repeated, “since he never even said goodbye. For all I know, he could be…”
“Hawks.”
He cringed at the way Rumi used his nickname, the one he earned from breaking three state track records his first year on the UAU team. “He runs so fast, it’s like he’s flying, ” his teammates would always exclaim. He had never had a nickname prior to being at UAU, and once he had gotten used to responding to “Hawks”, he slowly saw himself as a different person with the name, a person who was stronger, brighter, and more confident than the person “Keigo” used to be. But when Rumi said his nickname just now, her tone carried an uncharacteristic softness to it, as if her voice was a soft blanket that a parent would swaddle their baby in. It was the same tone that adults used to use with Keigo all the time, a tone that he thought he had escaped from hearing when he moved to UAU with a full-ride scholarship.
“It’s been four months,” she reminded him with that same pitiful tone.
“You don’t think I know that?” He tried to add some bite to his response—he needed to let off some steam and knew Rumi could handle it—but all his words came out desperate and defeated. He cleared his throat and tried again, trying to sound unbothered.
“I can’t help it, Rumi. Everywhere I look, there are reminders of him,” he emphasized the personal pronoun, knowing he couldn’t even bring himself to say his name out loud. Hawks continued his rant.
“Music, TV shows, study spots on campus—hell, I can’t even eat at the cafeteria without thinking of all the meals we shared there. I basically spent every day with him when we lived on UAU’s campus. Every. Day. That’s why I can’t forget even if I wanted to.”
Hawks’ gaze remained on his phone (checking the weather app of all things), but his focus wandered to what he just said. I can’t forget even if I wanted to. The question he then found himself asking was whether or not he actually wanted to forget. If he had the chance to erase the best year of his life, to forget all the inside jokes and shared looks during concerts and stolen kisses in the library…would he?
Before he could dwell on the hypothetical question any further, he saw Rumi out of the corner of his eye approaching his closet.
“That’s exactly why going to the Menace Mansion is the perfect idea!” She threw open his closet door and ripped his favorite fur-lined jacket off its hanger.
“Have you ever been to a haunted house with him?”
“…No.”
“Then there will be nothing there that’ll make you think of him!” She exclaimed triumphantly, tossing his jacket at him while doing so.
“He loved this jacket,” he muttered more to himself than her, gently petting the fur lining.
“Okay, that’s it—WE’RE GOING!”
That’s how Hawks ended up paying a ridiculous price to walk up the Menace Mansion’s mile-long driveway from a grass parking lot across the street. On their way up the long and windy paved path, Rumi distracted them from the cold weather by reading the house’s backstory, which she found online.
“So some old rich guy named Yoichi Shigaraki used to own the mansion before he died,” She began, her hot breath immediately condensing into white clouds with every word. Her eyes squinted, and she used two fingers to zoom in on her phone screen before continuing. “His will left it to some bigshot movie producer who maintains everything so it can be used as a filming site. Apparently every fall, the producer gives the place a spooky makeover and opens it to the public.”
“GAHHHHHHHH!”
Hawks didn’t even flinch at the screaming masked man who jumped out from the bushes that lined the driveway. His face was covered by a white ski mask stained blood red that had a fake eye hanging from one of its eye holes, but the scare actor’s scream sounded a tad tired, as if that was his hundredth time attempting that same scare.
All in all, Hawks was not impressed.
“We should be getting close to the house,” Rumi thought aloud, but she seemed more focused on scanning the surrounding crowd of people, no doubt looking for the redhead she had developed a major crush on throughout the past semester.
With her head swiveled over her shoulder, she nearly ran into a group of teenagers passing them. Hawks pulled her to the side just before they collided.
“Pay attention to where you’re walking, doofus,” Hawks said.
Rumi rolled her eyes, but he managed to catch the small smile pulling on her lips.
“As I was saying,” she began with more focus, “the mansion apparently has over fifty rooms that are all connected through secret passages that the servants used to use. I heard that if you make it through the house in less than an hour, then you get exclusive access to the grounds behind the house! I overheard someone in my marketing class talking about a huge hedge maze that’s back there, along with an Olympic-sized pool!”
As soon as she finished talking, a dark roof came into view ahead of them. The shingles were darker than the starless sky surrounding them, but a stream of moonlight beamed down on them and reflected off the metal finial that stood on the apex of the steep roof.
With every step they took, more parts of the house came into view. White LEDs flashed around the dark bricks, causing the whole mansion to appear continuously struck by lightning. Boarded-up windows, exaggerated spider webs, and an excessive amount of skeletons hung to look like they were climbing the house made the whole haunted theme unmistakable. Hawks had to admit that the place looked impressive; the mansion was huge but not obnoxiously tasteless, at least, he imagined it would be without all the cheesy decorations.
“Look! There it is!” She exclaimed as if Hawks could possibly miss it.
Rumi bounced on her toes in excitement and tugged on his arm. He couldn’t help but notice some nearby guys fixated on her movement, so he scowled at them and pulled Rumi closer to him.
“Let’s go then,” he suggested, feeling a new motivation to enter the house.
A winding snake of metal crowd control barriers occupied the space directly in front of the house. Slithered through the rows was a line of people, shuffling up to the grand front doors that looked more like palace gates. For some reason, the image reminded him of lambs going to the slaughter.
A young girl stood at the line’s entrance, face barely visible with the hat and scarf bundled around her.
“Tickets,” was her muffled greeting once Rumi and Hawks approached her. Other than the (hopefully) fake cuts and bruises that covered visible portions of her face, she did not look like the other workers with extreme costumes and makeup. She scanned their digital tickets without another word, then gestured them forward.
As long as it was, the line moved fast, allowing them to take a few steps every minute. Rumi stood on her tiptoes, scanning the crowd for who Hawks assumed was her crush from her entrepreneur class.
To keep himself occupied, his mind thought it was a great idea to replay all the potential ways he could have prevented his recent heartbreak.
For starters, there was his obnoxious need to make everything about himself. He’d be stupid not to admit it: he liked attention. Hawks knew that personality trait got on a lot of people’s nerves, and maybe he was no exception; maybe he needed some of the attention that Hawks always stole.
Or maybe he needed nothing more than to hear Hawks say those three little words. There were at least a dozen different times when Hawks nearly said them—he knew they were true within the first six months of knowing him—but they never left his tongue, never filled the hot air that would fill the millimeters between them after all those times they kissed.
Despite all the conversations they shared, they never brought up the status of their relationship. They didn’t even have an anniversary because everything progressed so organically. After they met through mutual friends, they slowly got to know each other in group settings. Eventually, they began hanging out without their mutual friends, and then their teasing turned into flirting, and their flirting turned into kissing, and then one night Rumi asked him how his boyfriend was doing, and it finally hit him: Hawks had never talked with him about what they were to each other. All he knew was that they shared something special, and they were on the same page about being exclusively together; that was enough for them.
Not for the first time, Hawks wished he’d said something, anything, that clearly conveyed how much he cared. Maybe if he had, then they would still be together. Maybe, just maybe—
“On behalf of all ghosts and ghouls, I wish you a chilling welcome to Menace Mansion,” a worker boomed, snapping Hawks out of his thought spiral. The speaker was a man dressed in a green jacket with a ridiculous-looking purple boa, two articles that should never be styled together. He wore a plague doctor mask over his mouth and yellow eye contacts that made Hawks feel uneasy.
“Only past the threshold if you can hold in the contents of your stomach,” he warned in a theatrical voice that Hawks couldn’t tell was sarcastic or not. “The actors can’t touch you, so please don’t touch them. Although,” the guy added, “I’d make an exception for you,” he directed to Rumi.
Waves of disgust crawled up Hawk’s throat. Four months ago, he would have slapped on a flirtatious grin and said something that drew the worker’s attention off his friend and onto him. He would have quipped something clever, something like…well…something clever.
Hawks realized he couldn’t even think of what the past version of him would say; that past version died the moment he realized that the man he loved had ghosted him. Now, the “New Hawks” can’t seem to crack a joke or put on his obnoxious charm. Instead, all “New Hawks” wanted to do was punch the creepy worker’s teeth out or cuss him out.
Before he could choose which idea to pursue, the worker continued his cheesy monologue.
“Your goal is to escape through the back door in less than an hour, although we won’t make it easy. You’ll wear these,” he gestured to the lanyards hanging on his arm, “so the actors will know what time you entered. If it takes you longer than ninety minutes, one of them will personally escort you out so things don’t get too crowded in there. No phone usage allowed, of course.”
After dramatically draping the lanyards over their heads and writing the current time on the cards attached to them, he pressed a button that automatically opened the mansion's front doors.
“Now, enter if you dare…”
Hawks shared an unimpressed look with Rumi before walking inside.
Part of him wondered if the attraction would muster anything out of him beyond the occasional flinch. The other part of him reminded himself that he really didn’t care; he was solely there to humor Rumi’s attempts at making him feel better.
After passing through a curtain that prevented people in line from seeing anything beyond the doors, his surroundings attacked all five of his senses. An excessive amount of flashing lights hurt his eyes, and the blaring noises of monster growls and thunder assaulted his ears; the distinct smell and taste of a fog machine consumed him, and the feeling of cold air blowing around him felt violating.
His eyes tried to adjust to the overall darkness of the space, but they seemed confused from the sudden flashing of fake glowing eyes plastered on the walls around him. The narrow hallway spat them out to three different paths they could take.
“Shall we try going straight?” He hollered over the loud sound effects.
“I tried that in middle school, wouldn’t recommend!” Rumi said back, sharing a grin with him.
They opted to go down the left hall, which appeared to be themed as a graveyard. Scare actors lurked in the corners of the winding path, beckoning them forward with lifeless eyes and skeleton arms. They were dressed as corpses—or were they zombies?—that had dug themselves out of their graves. Hawks hated to admit it, but their costumes and special effects makeup were impressive. Though he felt no hints of fear from them, he could appreciate the artistry that went into everything.
“Look!” Rumi shouted over the spooky-sounding music. She pointed ahead of them where the walls were lowered to waist-height. There, Hawks could see more winding maze paths that led up to a grand staircase. Dark decorations adorned the railings, and a scare actor swung from the dim chandelier that hung above it all.
“I think that’s her!” Rumi tugged on Hawks’ jacket sleeve and pointed across the foyer where a redhead was huddled with a few other girls. Although he could only see the back of her long curly hair, Hawks was sure she was the one Rumi had been showing him pictures of over the past month.
His best friend took a step in her direction, but paused and looked back. Without a single word, Hawks knew what she was thinking.
“Go!” He shouted with an encouraging smile. “You’ve been slowing me down anyway!” He mustered his best I’m-totally-fine-and-am-not-about-to-wallow-in-a-corner look and held two thumbs up.
Hawks knew she worried about him. After all, she witnessed up close how everything fell apart, beginning with the unanswered texts and phone calls over the summer, to when this fall, Hawks found his name missing from UA University’s student directory. She was there when Hawks cried for the first time in years; she silently brushed his hair while he curled up in his bed like a wounded animal.
Although it probably didn’t look like it, Hawks had been trying his best to act better for Rumi. She had been so comforting over the past four months, and she had kept a near-perfect balance of supporting him while also giving him space. He knew he had been miserable company to keep and, overall, a poor friend recently; Rumi deserved to spend the night with someone who was actually fun to be around.
His best friend bit her lip and hesitated before returning the thumbs up. “Call me if you need me!” She shouted before running off in the direction of the redhead.
A sad smile crept up Hawks’ face. “Okay,” he said to no one but himself. After taking a deep breath, he trudged on, determined to make it out of the overstimulating space as soon as possible.
His gut told him to go upstairs, so he pushed his way through the thin walkways and dodged people walking down the grand staircase that he trudged up.
Once he was on the second floor, Hawks opened a plain-looking door that led to a long hallway lined with more doors.
“Great,” he muttered before picking another one at random to open.
Inside the second door, he squinted in response to the bright strobe light inside. The room—or was it another hallway?—seemed empty except for a single figure standing a few feet away from him. He stepped forward, trying to make out if the figure was a real person or not.
Once he got closer, he froze.
For the first time that night, Hawks felt genuine terror course through his veins. In between the flashing strobe light’s milliseconds of illumination, a pair of electric blue eyes that seemed too vivid to be real came into view. Except, he knew they weren’t colored contacts or a trick of the light…no, those eyes belonged to none other than the man who captured his heart one year ago, then brutally broke it without a single word of explanation.