Four Years Ago

          IN THE DARKNESS OF THE BLINDFOLD hung around her eyes, she saw nothing but flashes of red.

Reason told her she was in a moving car, with normal clothes draped over her skin feeling like sandpaper scratching up the dried blood at each bump and turn, but her mind seemed more inclined to believe the flashes than her dulled senses spread bare across hiccups and groans of ghost pains, thus presenting onto her fragments of screams, of cries and of begging, each in a different voice.

There was no way for her to know, other than in a passing hunch of just how pathetic she must look, that she was shivering, unfelt and cold tears quivering down her cheeks from underneath that cloth forcing her eyes to choose between staying shut and desperately looking around for nothing but darkness to see. No salvation awaited her in that void, because her damned mind was overflowing with faces.

Four hundred and fifty five people. Dead.

And she had the money it has been decided they were all worth.

A knot tightened that truth in her throat and there was a sob waiting to happen behind it too.

Before her eyes, the flashes slowed down and she remembered the last game, the one her mind has been racing to avoid.

The feeling returned to her with the images burned into her memory far clearer than she would have liked. Mere hours ago, her hearthad clenched knowing the last game had been going on for too long. The clock was ticking towards the final thirty seconds and the silence surrounding the cardboard playground was deafening. All she had to do was touch the wall and it would all be over.

Perhaps the ease of it all struck her before the sudden personal nuance of it all ever could. It was too straight forward. Too clear. Too easy. Just the two of them.

It was either him or me, her own thoughts from the game echoed back on her and she felt sick enough to grasp a little tighter onto the baggy shirt hanging looser around her back, even at the cost of dragging the collar tighter onto the front of her neck and adding pressure onto an already building suffocation.

A reminder of the fact that she was barely breathing made her aware that she should perhaps care of her surroundings, of her location, of her predicament of being tied up and taken somewhere after all that has happened in the last game. But to consider to move or to speak at that point was all too much.

The car came to a stop and took away the white noise of engine murmurs facilitating her dreadful walk down a bloodstained memory lane built over the course of a single week. With these memories halted, her thoughts of inquiries burst to the forefront of her mind and got met with by a wall.

"Congratulations," a cold voice spoke to her.

The idea that she's had company in that car all along made her stomach churn, but being spoken to so suddenly was what startled her most — not merely spoken to, but congratulated.

Yes, congrats, Yoon-ah. You won. Wasn't this everything you wanted? Victory? Money? A little bit of fame? Something to be proud of? Yes, Yoon-ah. Aren't you proud of yourself?

"It must feel great to win again after losing in those boxing matches for so long," the man spoke again and each word drove another nail into her trembling arms, forcing her hands to grip onto herself tighter and thus press tbe collar of her shirt onto her throat further. Somewhere behind her, the white of her knuckles stood out from underneath the sporadic dried blood.

All she could do was shake her head. She heard no mockery in his tone, but then again, how could he possibly be serious. To claim such a thing. To believe it.

"Or would you say cage fighting is different?"

"I didn't kill anyone," she defended, unsure if it was herself she defended so eagrely or the violence she had called a job and a passion before playing Ddakji on a subway platform.

After being spoken to so calmly, hearing the man's sigh of supposed disappointment broke in her something she hadn't a clue it could be broken, and before she could stop herself, her lips parted and a voice much more fragile than before raised its tone to repeat, "I didn't kill anyone!"

"Of course you didn't," the man sounded downright bemused with her, like a master entertained by a subject recoiling from a gesture of kindness, just in case it would have been cruelty that met it instead. "You aren't the one who pulled the trigger," he offered her a reminder, his voice joined in by some shuffling and, finally, a familiar sound of hissing — gas was filling the vehicle, as it had when she first showed up for the games. "You'll do well to remember that and forget everything else. It will be easier that way."

What will be easier? Yoon-ah wished there was strength left in her enough to ask that of the stranger whose face she didn't know and frankly, she doubted she ever will. But the gas was doing it's job, dulling her senses further, filling her nostrils with dizziness, and forcing her muscles to remember — she was exhausted, running on two nights of hiding under beds, of clutching her hands into fists and trembling at the flinch of every shadow in the corner of her eyes. Being lulled to sleep has never been easier, as her body ached for the break, for the moment her hands released her shirt and let go of all the tension.

There was some mercy to this sleep, as it had been dreamless. No terrors, no remembering, just a veil of blackness and silence dropped over her, one that once lifted, she was bound to question the reality of. The world she woke up to was a nightmare perhaps more cruel than anything she could have imagined herself.

A golden card's edges poked in the palm of her right hand — there were the money. Everything she's sacrificed her mind for was right there, in her grasp and the one who she had sacrificed it all for was also there, beneath her eyes, six feet underground.

《 🦑 》

AUTHOR'S NOTE |   
This prologue was supposed to be far longer in theory, but as I was writting it, I realized it would be much more useful to give less information about the last game she was required to win, and of how she coped immediately after winning and realizing her reason for justifying wanting to win died while she was away. Those things are too emotionally charged and relevant to the plot not to explore them through actual conversations between her and Gi-hun later.

I mean, at least for the game I did give a hint with touching the wall being the end of it 😅 but yeah, hope y'all enjoy this little start, setting the tone, laying a foundation and introducing Yoon-ah