THERE WERE DAYS IN WHICH she forgot the sound of her own voice. Days spent in silence and solitude, reading from the many screens staring back at her in the apartment she could barely call home. Those were the days spent noting down names, tracking revenue spikes with no income sources, checking records and cross referencing paths of suspicious people. But today was not one of those days — Yoon-ah would not forget her own voice today. Not when she had to talk with him.

She's been tracking a new possible winner of the games for the past two months and it has become apparent already to her that had she not caught his trail earlier on, he would have vanished much like everyone else coming out of the games with a certain dosage of paranoia. It's what the games do to you, and Seong Gi-hun was clearly not immune.

God knows, she wasn't eigher. Lately she's been feeling more ghost than human, and if there was any comfort to be had in this punishing lifestyle sprung from the bloodshed of the games, it was found by her in the hope that she had found someone who, like her, cannot move on. The signs looked promising when it came to Gi-hun. For starters, he hasn't left the country yet. She's traced back a missed flight booked three month ago after identifying him as a possible winner, which could mean something made him change his mind. As selfish as it was, she hoped it was guilt which stopped him from following in the footsteps of every single other winner. It was so easy to up and leave with all that cursed money, to carve up a new life in a place where no one knew your name.

Whatever his reason was to stay, Yoon-ah was grateful either way. They may not know each other, but his choice gave her another chance to progress a plan that she's been dragging on with herself for far too long already.

Perhaps it was stupid to put her hope in a stranger she studied from a distance, but then again, his stationary presence was not the only sign she took that the two of them may be like minded.

Looking up and through the rained over windshield of her car, she took in the shell of a hotel devoid of life and light alike. He didn't choose an expensive life, she noted to herself another reason backing up her hope that her search would soon be over and she'd have that second witness needed to credit her story to the police. He chose isolation, she followed immediately with another observation in line with what she recognize too well as being a downward spiral associated with the aftermath of the games.

Since the edge of her sight caught a glimpse of the time, Yoon-ah raised her gaze to squint towards the blacked out neon letters spelling out the hotel's name to the side. Had it not been for the lights of every surrounding small business bathing the building's rundown facade in red, blue and purple hues, she would have had a much harder time double checking through pouring rain being at the right place that night. 'Pink Motel' stared back at her, unmoving and uninviting. Her shoulders relaxed.

Having followed him for two months, Yoon-ah was there to exploit the single pattern she had been able to identify in Gi-hun's isolated life — a man would make a monthly delivery of supplies to him. That was, as far as she noticed, the only contact with the world outside the hotel that Gi-hun had, and since she had no way to confirm the public records of the building were up to date and she had no way of getting out of there during other days of the month through untracked underground routes, delivery days were the only ones when she could be certain he was home and able to answer an impromptu visit from a fellow winner.

For now though, all she had to do was sit and watch the rain drops distort her sight of the back entrance of the hotel, wait for the right moment to make contact with him. The radio was switched off, the engine as well, and since the cold built up enough to irritate her skin towards that state between numbness and pain, she started exercising her right hand into a roll of the wrist and a rhythmic stretch of the bruises and cuts spread over her knuckles.

Yoon-ah's blinks were spaced out enough that had anyone known to look at her parked car directly, she would have seemed to them as unblinking or perhaps even authentically dead. A passing stranger was guaranteed to deem the sight of her as terrifying, and frankly, there was no one left to know her well enough to recognize it was nervousness which perpetrated this intent stare of hers, and still only stress which pushed her to exercise a sprained wrist, clinging like a dying man onto the pain it rung through her nerve endings.

It's been far too long since she's had any progress in finding another winner of the games. However counterproductive it was, she couldn't help but thing of how many hundreds of people have already died since she won, simply because she hasn't been efficient nor fast enough to get the proof she needs to have those masked monsters arrested for their crimes.

Her right hand tightened into a fist and the largest of cuts across her knuckles burst out fresh blood past the cracked open crust that had barely just formed above it, to let it heal. She scrunched her face at the pain, but made no effort to allow that sensation to influence her into hissing or recoiling her hand back to a relaxed state.

The man usually completing the delivery for Gi-hun got out of the hotel through the back door.

Kim Jeong-rae, Yoon-ah reminded herself of the man's name as she watched him scurry back to his car parked much further down the street. Sunshine Capital, she even recalled the name of the lending and renting business which ultimately helped her find Gi-hun. She reached her right hand, despite it's slight trembles, around back to lift the hood of her top over her head. The flimsy material was about to do very little against the rain, but she had no time to spend worrying on how she looked. As soon as Mr. Kim's car drove off, she pushed her own car's door open and let the white noise of the pouring rain fill her eardrums with something else but her own pulse.

Knowing being quick was of utmost importance to her likelihood of getting the conversation she needed, Yoon-ah didn't shy away from running across the street to that back door. She hid beneath the little cover it provided from the cold downpour over the street, but otherwise wasted no time on extra breaths or posture adjustments before knocking on the door, using her right hand, despite the hurt knuckles still begging her for a break: their pleas landed on deaf ears, as always.

After several kocks have gained her no response from inside, Yoon-ah looked around. The absence of any activity or movement up and down the street gave her permission to approach the door further and call out, voice only barely louder than the rain, "Seong Gi-hun. I'd like to talk."

I'd like to talk, repeating that back to herself in her mind was enough to make her shake her head and knock on the door again, "I know you're in there. This won't take long." You've given him no reason to want to talk with you, her thoughts switched to a judgmental stance against herself and her best attempts at figuring this out without taking breaking an entry into consideration. "It's important," Yoon-ah shouted, but not even she was convinced.

Realizing she wouldn't have opened the door either, had she been in his place, forced her hand to look around again, make sure for a second time there was no one on the street to hear her. A passing chill of paranoia made her also look up at the surrounding buildings and thankfully, nothing stood out to her on any rooftop or in any window still having some diffused light shine into it despite the hour.

Finally, she sighed and dropped her head, "We need to talk about the games."

After long minutes spent there talking to a door, those words were what finally called for an immediate response from the other side. The door was pulled open and while she caught a first sight of the man's worn out shoes, a chilling click forced her to look back up much faster.

There was a gun pointed at her face, but since the man holding it was the one she was looking for, Yoon-ah couldn't bring herself to care about the unspoken threat.

"Who are you?" Gi-hun questioned immediately, holding the end of the barrel so close to her forehead that there was no room to question whether or not his trigger finger was ready to do the job should it come down to it.

"Min Yoon-ah," she responded within an exhale, as though he was clearly apprehensive, the simple fact that he opened the door and they could talk face to face counted as progress enough for her so far. "And you're Seong Gi-hun."

There was usually a customary inquiry paired with such a statement, and since she didn't bother with it, Gi-hun's glare contoured his features a little harsher, "How do you know my name? How did you find me?"

One question at a time, part of her wished to scold him, but then again, he was the one holding the gun and she was the one who needed him to cooperate, so instead of testing the limits of a paranoid man's patience, Yoon-ah chose to bite her tongue and answer his first question first. "You paid off all your debts in July, last year. Yet you lost your job in June, right? You had no family income, no inheritance benefits fund to your name, usually as expected from someone born and raised in Ssangmun-dong. Yet you've been debt free since, with quite a lot of money traceable through multiple bank withdrawals."

To call him unsettled after hearing her list so calmly a clear background check done on him was an understatement. After all, Yoon-ah remembered clearly being equally as unnerved by that stupid recruiter knowing everything there is to be known about her after bruising her cheek over Ddakji. Gi-hun was going to either shoot her or start assuming the worst, and because she knew that, she didn't linger too long before adding her conclusion, "You won the games in the summer, last year." After but a brief sigh, she nodded, "And I know that because I won them too, a couple years ago."

Had there been a better way to ease him into this topic that widened his eyes, she would have taken it, but experience taught Yoon-ah being blunt was the best. While Gi-hun was still gathering his thoughts, keeping her at gunpoint, she watched his expression past the barrel and continued — there was no bullet in her skull yet, so she might as well keep going —, "Since you're here and not in some sunny place roasting on a beach and living life like a rich man, I'll take the liberty to assume winning turned out to be the opposite of what you thought as well. I'll go as far as assume that you would agree to help if I told you there's a way to make those people pay for what they did and keep doing."

It was either the sight of her bloodstained knuckles or her actual words that suddenly broke Gi-hun out of his stun, making him step forward and push the cold end of his pistol's barrel against her forehead. He shoved her with it alone a step backwards, off the step of his back door and into the rain.

"Did they send you?" He shouted back at her, the glare narrowing and thus losing any sight of possible mercy it might have had the chance to hold. "Is this some joke to you?"

Patience slipped through her fingers and made her hands close into fists, "It's November. Which means another four hundred fifty five people died this summer. And another four hundred fifty five people will die next year. This isn't some joke and I'm not asking you to trust me." Yoon-ah raised her right hand and pushed aside his gun, something which was much easier to do than she would have thought — though he looked determined, he may have not been willing to shoot her in that back alley. "I don't trust you either," she assured him. "All I'm asking is that you think about the people who will die."

"If you think you can stop it, you're clearly dumb," he spat the words out, lowering his gun and giving up entirely on his threat to instead turn his back on her.

"Seongdong-gu," she shouted back, desperate to give him a way to get back to her before the door slammed in her face. "I'm in that park every morning." With the door shut closed, she was unsure if he even heard the last part, so a curse made it past her exhale.

As soon as he was inside and the noise of the rain diffused again to a distant background leaving all too much room for a deafening silence, he paused his dragged steps and tucked the gun back in the holster worn like an appendage to his very being. His heart pounded in his chest unwilling to get over the goosebumps feeling passed through him while looking that woman in the eyes as she laid out all she knew of him. His stomach churned at the sensation of deja vu that made itself at home in his chest, and even more so at the fact that despite knowing how those people operate, how cruel and manipulative they can be, enough so that they'd do this to him — send him hope when needed most only to kill him —, he couldn't help but feel himself elated in the idea that he's not fighting this uphill battle alone.

Yes, Gi-hun closed his eyes to think. Other people have won the games too. He's been so busy employing Mr. Kim's people, laying out the whole operation to find the recruiter and stop the games himself, that he hadn't even realized there would be people out there willing to confirm his story to the authorities as they too have survived the same massacre.

After the failure he's faced in finding the recruiter and stopping the games from happening this year though, he couldn't deny that this, a past winner knocking on his door, was too good to be true. The timing was far too suspicious as well. As much as he wanted to believe, he wasn't just going to allow himself to. Not when she looked so unphased by his gun. Not when she showed up at his door with her hands already bloodied. He wasn't going to trust his, not without proper precautions.

And for that, he picked up his phone to call Mr. Kim and let him know there is after all something he can pay his men for over the winter: finding out all they can about Min Yoon-ah.

《 🦑 》

AUTHOR'S NOTE |   
Stalkers to lovers, done the non-toxic way ✨️

Also, for anyone confused or crazed about timelines, I have in fact modified the canon timeline because the huge ass timeskips were just too annoying to write in. 🤷‍♀️

Hope you like this first chapter, rocky start for the main characters but we'll only build up from here.