Chapter Text
Hyun-ju sat defeated amongst the other remaining players.
They had been herded to the sides by the guards, X and O players forming their own little factions opposite the room. Yong-sik was pressed into her left side, Geum-ja to her right. By unspoken agreement they had both locked arms with her, like a tether. As if they were scared she’d try anything, even now, as the guards did a methodical sweep of the barracks. Her rifle and the ammo had already been found and confiscated. One of the circle guards had brought in two buckets, one for bits of broken glass, another for forks. They didn’t bother cleaning up the beds.
The huddle kept glancing at the door to the corridors, Hyun-ju more than most, hoping to see more players appear, to be pushed back into the room. She knew it was a fools hope. That she should know better.
The circle workers brought in the coffins. Shut the dead players away. Carried the coffins out.
And then they brought in one more.
The room had already been quiet, but a hush fell as they put this particular coffin down, before retreating back to the elevator.
Only the squared commander remained standing right outside. "Your pitiful attempt at rigging the game is over," they spoke. "To avoid such preposterous outbursts in the future, we will leave you with a reminder of the price paid this night." All eyes in the room locked on the coffin. "As planned, voting will resume tomorrow morning. Should you vote to stay, the next game will be played immediately."
Across the room, the huddled O’s whispered fervently amongst themselves. With the accumulated losses suffered tonight, their victory in tomorrow’s vote was more than assured.
"We suggest you get some sleep," the commander finished, stepping backward. The elevator doors closed.
Hyun-ju was the first to move. She gently disentangled her arms, keeping an eye on the doors and the elevator while she walked over to the coffin, crouching at its head. She took a steadying breath, told herself to get it over with. Opened it up. And stared.
“Hyun-juna…” Geum-ja had tentatively followed her, Yong-sik in tow. “Who is it?”
Hyun-ju looked down at the dead man. “It’s Jung-bae.”
Somewhere in the huddle of X's, someone whimpered. Hyun-ju knew without looking it was Dae-ho.
Geum-ja shuffled close enough to look, her son following along. “That poor man… do you think… the others?”
“I don’t know,” Hyun-ju began, then wearily shook her head. What was the point of lying? “Probably.”
The door to the corridor opened. The players, some of which had inched closer, hastily shuffled back in between the bunks. Yong-sik pulled his mother behind him. Hyun-ju rose, but kept her ground.
Two triangle guards entered the room. Between them, they were holding Gi-hun. The players started murmuring, some of them looking at Gi-hun with clear disappointment, others, including Hyun-ju, looking at the door with rekindled hope. But nobody else was escorted in. The guards dragged Gi-hun to the nearest bunk bed, forcing him down without, Hyun-ju noticed, getting any resistance. After handcuffing him to the metal frame, the left the room again, without a single word of explanation, slamming the door behind them.
Hyun-ju was across the room to Gi-hun before the sound had fully dissipated. “What happened?”
Gi-hun didn’t respond. Didn’t look at her. Didn’t look at anything. Only that wasn’t true, Hyun-ju realized.
Whatever Gi-hun was seeing, it wasn’t in this room.
“Lights out will be in fifteen minutes,” the cheerful announcement sounded, making most of them jump. Hyun-ju looked around for someone with a plan, realized everyone else was doing the exact same thing, and sighed. She put Geum-ja on bunk bed duty, to arrange everyone on matrasses close together. She appointed watches for the remainder of the night. Not that she was expecting the O’s to try anything, but one could never be sure. Someone might get greedy. Greedier. She urged people to go to the bathroom now, in pairs, as the guards would probably be hard pressed to show mercy again during the night.
Then, with half a minute to spare, she went and got Dae-ho away from the coffin. It took some doing. She had to wrench his fingers loose where they were gripping the wood. Had to haul him up to his feet. Once she got him moving, he walked along meekly, like a lamb. Jun-hee helped in getting him to lie down, tucking him in. She was gently wiping down his wet face when the lights went out.
Hyun-ju double checked on Yong-sik, who was taking first watch, before finding her own mattress. She pulled the sheets over her head, and locked out the world.
The despair she had refused to give to the guards, had kept at bay for the benefit of the players, came to collect its due with a vengeance. She cried, stifling her sobs into her pillow, trembling with the effort of keeping still. They had been so close. So close. Until it turned out they hadn’t been close at all. There were no partial victories in war. In these games. Only losses, again and again. And again. The rebellious dead rose up in her mind. Trapped in that corridor. Looking to her for guidance.
She’d promised she’d be back.
Please do, he’d said. 246. The one Young-mi had named Prince charming, in her last act of ever smiling. New sobs racked Hyun-ju’s body. She’d been ready to die, on that platform. Felt like she should have, after failing Young-mi so utterly, so despicably. He had jolted her out of it. Literally. Dragged her into that room and held the door, bought her time for the clouds of grief to clear, to realize that she didn’t want to die, not yet, not like this. Not really at all.
Please. He’d sounded so desperate.
She didn’t even know his name.
She sat up abruptly. Yong-sik, from his guard post, nervously twitched. “Only me,” she whispered. He kept on looking nervous, glancing to the other side where the O’s slept, then back at her, scanning her wet face. She hastily wiped her cheeks. “I’m going to talk to Gi-hun.”
“I think he might be asleep,” Yong-sik whispered.
“I doubt that very much.”
Gi-hun was still sitting on the hard floor. Geum-ja had made them move a mattress to him, along with a pillow and some blankets. He had ignored all of it.
She crouched within his field of vision, giving him a few seconds to notice her presence. “Gi-hun-shi. Tell me what you know.”
He kept silent. Kept on staring at the floor, as if she wasn’t there. She gave him some time before repeating the question, voice level, but persistent.
After the third try, he finally twitched. “What’s the point.”
“The battle is lost, but there is still a fight to fight,” she said. He huffed in annoyance, which she ignored. “Talk to me. How come you were the only survivor?”
Gi-hun leaned his head back, switching out his grave staring at the floor with some staring at the ceiling. “Because he wants me to suffer.”
She followed his gaze upward. “Not now. Back then. You said you did this before. Nobody in that game voted to get out, even at the very end?”
“It was different then. ‘On a majority vote, the players are allowed to leave.’ But if we left before the end, without a single winner, we would get none of it. And so I went home alone.”
There was grief in there, bleeding so openly one could slip in it. She tread carefully. “What gave you the confidence you could stop these from the inside?”
“Stopping the games from inside was never the first plan. It wasn’t even plan B. It took me two years to find the recruiter. To get to the frontman. But he saw us coming. So I asked to be put back in the game. I had a tracker, hidden in a tooth. I’d be brought here, and the team could follow me, put an end to this before it even began.”
“But they found your tracker," she said.
He nodded grimly. “I’m a fool for thinking I could win this.” His stare traveled again, never reaching Hyun-ju. It pulled to the coffin instead. His face crumpled.
“There’s a rescue team out there?” she prompted, shifting to break his line of sight.
He evaded her, dropped his eyes to the floor. “They won’t find us.”
“They might.” It was something to latch on to. To hope for. To not overthink what she might have done if they had been rescued before the shooting started. Would she have thanked him? Cursed him? Both?
“Jung-ho had been looking for two years before we even tried this. There’s too many islands.”
A new name. A friend, she assumed. “But he’s still out there, yes? Trying?”
“You can’t get out. None of us can get out.” He rattled the shackles. “And I only made things worse." He hit his head back into the bed frame. "You should let them have me.”
“No.” She moved into his line of sight again. “Gi-hun-shi. Look at me.” He didn’t. She kept on talking anyway, low and stern. “We do not give up. Not until the end.”
“The end might come sooner for us than three games.”
“It might,” she agreed. “But then we fight for every game. For every day.”
“A fool’s hope.”
“And yet you made it to the end, once.”
He looked at her then, sudden and wild, and the outpouring of raw grief washed over her like a tidal pressure. A grief like that, it had no up or down, no way to breach through to a surface and gasp for relief. “I didn’t. Don’t you get that? I would have been dead the first game, the first game! I was frozen under a dead body until Sang-woo told me to move. At the finish line I tripped, and Ali grabbed me, holding me up, saving my life. Our third game was tug of war. I helped pull six people to their death by someone else’s strategy and quick thinking. When we played marbles…” he swallowed, a hard anger burning. “The glass bridge, I was too late in picking a number, and all that was left was first and last. I almost picked one. Only the last three of us survived. S—"
He choked off the name, swallowed thickly, sinking deeper into the abyss of his despair. For the space of a breath she carefully held, she thought she’d lost him to it.
When he started speaking again, it was barely a whisper. “I’d forgotten which way first, left or right. She didn’t have to tell me. And she still did. And she died. Survived all the way to the final only to die in her bed. Her last words were please sir, I want to go home.”
He looked at her, and she could see her own despair mirrored in his. Young-mi, crying, begging to go home. A man she had no name for, who had saved her,who had followed her like a shadow, looking at her across the gunfire. Please.
She pushed it aside. Reached out a hand. “And then you won.”
He shook his head violently. “I tried to stop it, there at the end. But he wouldn’t let me. He took the knife… It was all luck, don’t you see? Luck. Dumb, foolish, pitiful luck.”
“And people,” she said softly.
He tensed, looked away, locked his jaw. “People put us in here.”
“Then people can get us out.”
He shook his head, turned away from her again.
“Tell me what you know,” she persisted. “As much of it as you can.”
“What good will it do?” he snarled, poked beyond rawness. “You might die tomorrow.”
“I might,” she agreed, feeling probably calmer about this than she ought to. “But some of us might not. Whatever you can tell me, I’ll share with them. You're not alone, Gi-hun-shi.”
He snorted. “Give it one more game.” But he told her.
He told her everything he knew.
***
Gyeong-seok stared up at the triangle guard in breathless panic. It felt like his entire life had been reduced to white angles on black, intercut with moments of total dark. First in the hallway, surrounded by the dead, pleading for his life to a faceless shape. The shock of pain at getting shot, at crumpling to the ground. The nudge of the rifle against his chest. Waiting for the double tap. Na-yeon had burned bright in his mind. If he was forced to leave her, he’d hold her as long as he could.
“Play dead.” He’d had to be nudge twice, told twice, and he still didn’t understand. Kept his eyes closed and his breathing shallow as he was picked up, closed off to the world in a coffin he didn’t need to see to know, then picked up again. Play dead. As if that wasn’t the entirety of all that they’d been doing. Play the games or die. Play them and die anyway.
The staircase went on and on forever. The coffins hadn’t been designed to come this way. He pitched sideways, his wounded leg hitting wood. He swallowed his cry, braced himself with a pained grunt. It evened out sudden, the coffin coming to a rest. And then they were rolling. Contained in the dark, Gyeong-seok tried to listen, but could hear nothing but wheels, rattling on and on and on.
The coffin halted, jolted, rolled. And stopped. A metallic clang venerated through all. When it went, it took all other sound with. He had a sudden sense of clarity that he was being contained by something more than the coffin and that wall of silence. His panic spiked, and he pushed at the lid. It shifted up.
The whole of his contained world dropped.
Gyeong-seok screamed. Screamed again at the jolt of the landing, at the white hot pain lancing through his leg. The coffin was wrenched open. He flinched at the sudden light, at the sudden reappearance of that pink suit, that damned triangle, looking down at him like his last moment in life was caught in a sadistic spiral. If it wasn’t for the fact that he was clearly teetering at the edge, that triangle would haunt his dreams until the end of his days.
He raised up trembling hands. “Please…” He didn’t even know why he still tried.
But the guard wasn’t looking at him. They were looking off to the side, pointing the rifle elsewhere. Through his cloud of panic and pain, he was dimly aware there was the sound of talking. No. He breathed in slowly, forcing the cloud to part. Not just talking. An argument.
Never the agreement… wait until the boss… what have you done with… I won’t… can’t make…
The guard stepped out of his view, and the argument stopped. When they stepped back, a second guard appeared. Only this one didn’t have a mask on. Even in an apron smeared in blood, it made him look startingly human.
The doctor sneered down at him in open disgust. “I hate live ones.” He took a rough hold of the wounded leg.
Gyeong-seok cried out in agony, and slipped into darkness.