Title: Haikyo (1/?)
Disclaimer: Viewfinder and its characters belong to Yamano Ayane. I'm just, er, borrowing it.
Pairing: Asami × Takaba, hints of Fei Long × Takaba
Rating: R (for sex and violence and blood and gore)
Summary: AU (partly inspired by Kotobuki Tarakao's Concrete Garden). Some places are better left unexplored. But for freelance photographer and urban explorer Takaba Akihito, the curiosity on what is behind the great, high walls of an abandoned mountain mansion is too great to resist.
Warnings: None yet.
I.
They called it shiyou no ie, the House of Leaves.
Rumors say it was named after that strange novel by an American author about an even stranger house that seemed to be larger in the inside, with rooms that appear within walls, first with a strange door that led to a dark hallway, and eventually expanding to numerous, constantly shifting, labyrinthine passageways and corridors, cavernous halls, and staircases that descend to the Abyss itself, a house where an unseen monster that seemed to prowl in its vast darkness of that mysterious space, its rumbling growls echoing within, devoured and ruined many of the people who dared to explore its depths.
No one knows who gave it that name, but it is known as the holy grail of Japanese urban exploration. A mysterious walled mansion hidden in the cloistered forests up in the mountains of rural Japan, abandoned by its owners to rot for reasons no one quite knows.
Akihito heard about the mansion quite early in his foray in haikyo, mostly from forums and fellow haikyo enthusiasts he'd met on joint explorations, who described it with such a reverent awe that his interest is immediately caught. That it is reportedly largely unexplored and undocumented makes it even more appealing to him.
Most of the photos taken of it were of its high, forbidding walls, cruelly tipped with iron spikes, against a clear blue sky, and the padlocked, massive wrought iron gates covered with the thorny stems of a climbing rose gone wild that barely give a glimpse of a grand, seemingly well-preserved ivy-covered English country house, looming tall and imposing at the end of a deserted, winding gravel path choked with vegetation, with only statues of weeping angels, crumbling marble hands covering their faces, wings tipped black with the corruption of time and age, scattered around the feral front gardens as silent sentries.
There are all sorts of stories about the mansion, tales of hauntings and madness and murder and suicides and deceit and betrayal, the sort of standard things expected of such places. There were rumors of monstrous strange dogs that roam around the forests protecting the mansion from the curious (some even claimed they were wolves of enormous size, which is just crazy, because wolves are extinct in Japan) and from trespassers, of compasses and GPS that go awry near its vicinity, and an eerie, silent forest surrounding it where no light penetrates the thick canopy of leaves.
Notes:
Quite short, but this will probably go longer as the story progresses. It will take a while for Asami to appear (probably in Chapter 4), as this will focus first on Akihito and his quest for this mysterious mansion (I'm sure you can reasonably expect what you'll find there).
Haikyo is the Japanese term for urban exploration (it literally means abandoned place), which is, as per Wikipedia, "the examination of the normally unseen or off-limits parts of urban areas or industrial facilities."
Gakuranman served as an inspiration and resource for urban exploration. It's a fantastic site for urban exploration photos.
There isn't really much plot shared between this fic and Concrete Garden, but reading that manga made me want to write this. This does NOT share any plot with the book House of Leaves (紙葉の家, shiyou no ie) by Mark Z. Danielewski, which is an amazing, if not outright confusing book. I have a spiral staircase in my house, and thanks to this book, at night, it terrifies me.
Aokigahara served as the inspiration of the forest surrounding the mansion. If you value your soul, do not google Aokigahara. It will only depress you.