GAME RULES ━ ATEEZ

01.

Normally, if Hongjoong had told them they would be house-sitting this weekend, Choi San would be less than excited. 

He had finally scored a date with that pretty girl from his statistics class and was looking forward to it all week—he planned his outfit and everything—but Hongjoong texted the group chat Friday morning and informed them that instead of whatever previous commitments they had scheduled, the eight of them would be spending their weekend at the fabled Fairblood Manor. And San was more than willing to drop anything and everything to see what made that mansion so infamous. 

It looks like his date with Hyewon would have to wait.

So, on Friday night, the eight of them packed their bags and piled into the back of Seonghwa's van. 

The estate was nestled into a remote, rarely-traveled pocket of woods—all forest and self-paved roads. Wooyoung was asleep on San's shoulder, and to say San was jealous would be an understatement—he was thirty seconds away from heaving his guts off the cliffside. But after three hours of winding trails and never-ending Game Pigeon, he found himself terribly carsick and standing, albeit barely, in front of the rusted iron gates of his weekend home.

There was something eerie about the way the house looked—three stories of orange-tinted metal and stripes of dying lawns, leaving San to wonder why an obviously abandoned house needed house-sitting in the first place. 

But his thinking didn't last long; Yeosang promptly interrupted it by holding up a dark brown skeleton key and unlocking the tall, oaken doors. 

——

It was midnight and Hongjoong wasn't sure why he was awake. 

There was a bounty of free rooms throughout the mansion he could choose from, but for some reason, Hongjoong was drawn to the couch in the living room—maybe it was because if anything happened to his boys, he'd be the first to know; or maybe he found comfort in the fact that he was the closest to the front door. 

He curled in on his side and tried to sleep, but the eerieness the mansion held was something that settled in his veins and weighed him down. He peeled open his eyes and sat up. 

Hongjoong was beginning to regret this. Initially, it seemed to be a good idea—it presented the eight of them with an opportunity to get closer while spending time somewhere of mutual interest. The perfect solution to the growing rifts in their relationships. 

It was no secret to the eight of them that they were slowly drifting. As time went on, they befriended new people—Wooyoung had his roommate from University, Changbin; Yeosang had that barista, Taehyun; San had the girl from statistics—point being, Hongjoong was trying to keep himself from being left behind. If the only way to maintain their friendships was to house-sit a haunted mansion, so be it. 

Everyone in their little town wanted to figure out what made Fairblood Manor so unique. There were hundreds of local conspiracies that filled the walls of the estate, but none of them seemed to make much sense— and no one had ever dared to get close to the mansion. At least, no one he had heard ever of. The eight of them would be the first, and it would tie them together in legend forever. 

Hongjoong sighed and pulled his phone out of his back pocket. Obviously, there was no service up here—he wasn't sure why he hadn't thought of that sooner. They were in the middle of nowhere. He put his phone onto the side table, in between an old rotary telephone and a crimson-colored candle, and laid down.

Hongjoong could feel his eyes drifting closed again—but instead of falling asleep, it felt like he was underwater. Everything was blurry and muted and fog-riddled, and no matter how tight he squeezed his eyes, he couldn't shake the feeling. 

The rotary telephone rang next to him. He pulled himself up and tried to unnerve the cloudy feeling from his bones. He reached for the handle and held it to his ear. 

"Hello?"

He was met with static.