Four Years Ago

          SHE WOULD HAVE LIKED TO DISAPPEAR. Given the chance, she would have liked to turn back time to that last game and simply let Tae-ju find her. Or better yet, she would have gone back before she signed up for that Hell in the first place, to sit instead by her brother's side when he took his final breath, not run for a finish line before an evil doll decides to kill her too.

Curled up in the corner of her empty cell at the local police station, Min Yoon-ah was all aches and regret, her head leant to the side against the metal bars and eyes staring downward, though they were not seeing much at all. She was pretty sure her tears have either run out or dried, meaning that all which was left to blur her sight this badly was the aftermath of the fights she's gotten herself into that previous evening.

Was it already the next day? She found herself wondering. Had she sat on that cold floor for longer yet?

"You should put the icepack back over your left eye, Yoon-ah," someone's voice interrupted her thinking and soon, the sound of keys rattling and the metal door being slid open to the side with a rusted creak joined in on the onslaught of noise about to break her solitude apart.

Right, Yoon-ah moved her head ever so slightly, as much as he could while still avoiding vertigo or a headache, squinting down at the already melted ice pack she was given after her handcuffs were taken off and she was pushed inside the cell. I forgot about that, she told herself as if her mind didn't quite remember her tossing that kindness aside like she was allergic to the very thought of receiving anything good just yet.

The police officer approaching her sighed his way down to be more on her level, "What were you thinking, Yoon-ah?" He sounded disappointed and, though she would have liked to ignore the chills of deja vu altogether, she couldn't deny that he reminded her of her brother way too much. "Assaulting that doctor trying to help you up. Hitting an officer. You're lucky no one pressed charges!"

Lucky. Though her voice felt too shattered to receive the courtesy of sound and existence outside of her mind, she puffed a short attempt a laugh, even doing as much as lifting the left corner of her lips.

"I'm not joking, Yoon-ah. First you disappear for a week, then we find you more alive than dead in an alley. You start fights with people trying to help you. Are you joining illegal fights again?"

She remembered him then — Du-ho, the younger police officer usually partnering up with her brother whenever needed. Of course his voice was familiar, interlinked with memories she'd rather not resurface now. Every time there was some reason to celebrate, it was him his brother wanted to tag along and be included in their nights out.

"Actually, don't tell me," Du-ho shook his head. "I don't want to know. It's better if I don't." His voice faded off into a heavier silence than the one Yoon-ah had just started getting used to before his arrival. Not that her ear ringing and storming thoughts were really letting her find any piece and quiet at all before anyway.

"I'm sorry, you know," he murmured. "About your brother."

Stop talking, Yoon-ah closed her eyes instead of tearing her voice chords over the sounds required to actually beg that of him.

"I still wish I was with him that day, when those thugs..."

"It's not your fault," she stepped over her hesitation, and as expected speaking immediately caused her to also cough out the repercussions of being choked out one too many seconds. After the coughs have left her positively rattled and downright dizzy enough to fall over even though she wasn't standing, she opened her eyes, to the best of their current extent. "He was acting outside the law when he went after them."

"Can you blame him?" Du-ho immediately fired back, far more energy left in his tone than in hers.

Yes, Yoon-ah thought. I can blame him for being a dumb, emotional bastard. I can blame him for being recklessly brave and so faithful in justice.

"Those thugs hurt his little sister. Of course he went after them. I should have known and I should have helped him. If he had a partner by his side that day, they wouldn't have managed to catch him by surprise—"

Yoon-ah lifted her right hand and dropped it blindly over his arm, efficiently shutting him up and assuring him, without a word, that what was done was done. There was some threat to her trembled grip, one that warned him through the same silence the wound was yet too fresh to be presentinf her with poking hypotheticals.

Du-ho took the hint and nodded, pushing aside his guilts from restless nights and instead placing his own hand over her own. "I came here to tell you they're letting you out."

From the many times in which fighting has brought her behind bars, this was the one time Yoon-ah's heart tightened in her chest with fear of leaving. Deep down she knew she would not be able to stand it, going back to a house which, without her brother, was no longer a home. She wouldn't be able to bear the faces of all those people in the games she still remembers, nor the pressing guilt of having all that money made in flesh and blood, and sacrifices which, at the end of the day would have deserved the win more than her. She knew, sooner rather than later, exiting this cell will put her in a grave. And perhaps that was how it was supposed to end for her.

"I'm not Dae-Sung," Du-ho continued, holding onto her hand when she tried to move away and get up. "I won't be able to keep getting you out of here wach time you get yourself into trouble. I don't know what happened to you when your brother was in the hospital, but whatever trouble you got yourself into, be done with it, Yoon-ah. Get yourself together. Get a real job. Leave it behind. Your brother wouldn't want you wasting away like this."

"I can't," Yoon-ah ended up shaking her head, forcing her hand away from his.

"What do you mean you can't?" Du-ho leant back and unfortunately for her heart, he sounded sincere, not angry with her. "If you need a job, I can help. My mother always complains she needs someone else to run the counter in her store. She wouldn't pay you much, but it would be something."

Unable to scream out at him that she would much rather deserve to die, Yoon-ah merely shook her head again.

She couldn't feel them run down her numb cheeks, but Du-ho saw her tears and widened her eyes. "Is it the trouble you got into when you were missing, Yoon-ah? Is it that bad? You can report this stuff—"

"If I..." If only it was this easy, she told herself, one ragged breath making her pause. "If I told you there's this place where some men take people to make them play games for money. Play them until only one wins and all others are dead, killed there. Would you file a report? Would you believe it?"

She forced herself to look at him, to actually see the expression on his face despite the blurs affecting her sight, and there it was indeed — a look of disbelief.

"A... hypothetical, yes?" Du-ho inquired carefully, waiting for her nod, even as it came drenched in reluctance. "Well," he sighed then, "I would ask you to identify the people."

"They wore masks," Yoon-ah whimpered out a description of the vivid images still in her mind. "The guards all wore masks."

"That would hypothetically make it difficult to make this report into an actual case. And how many people you say they killed? Like more than one? A dozen?"

"Four hundred and fifty five people." Her head leant back, watching the horror settle in with the confusion in Du-ho's eyes.

"What?" He laughed nervously. "That's ridiculous. No way someone could kill that many people and get away with it, Yoon-ah. Where is this even coming from?"

"What would it take for anyone to take a story like this seriously?"

She hadn't even realized she spoke that dreaded question out loud until Du-ho shrugged. "Some concrete evidence would be welcomed. Like pictures. Footage. Something from the crime scene. At least more witnesses..."

"I told you, only one of the players wins in the end."

"But that many people dead?" Du-ho shook his head. "If one kills so many people, who is to say they haven't killed more?"

He might have said more after that, but Yoon-ah had stopped listening, looking now through him as his last rhetoric echoed in her mind. Have they made these games before?

Present

          "HAVE THEY THREATENED YOU since you started looking for past winners?" Gi-hun inquired amongst the first things since he let Yoon-ah into his hotel and invited her to sit down with him at the low coffee table in the single area of the building he could say he actually lived in. For the first time in months, his bed to his right was actually made, and though she couldn't possibly tell, he had made sure to open a window that morning to let out all the smoke. Most furniture still retained the scent of ash, and without any perfumes, there was little he could do about that, but his mother's antics of fretting every time he brought a friend home from school, even for just a short moment, bloomed in his mind a desire to be a good host he had no heart to snuff out.

"Of course," Yoon-ah shrugged, dragging Gi-hun's attention back onto herself rather than on whatever point in the space between them his eyes have lost their focus around. "I got a call, minutes after removing my tracker. Haven't owned a phone since. If they want to threaten me, might as well force them to do it in person. Though I doubt they're brave enough to come within a ten meter pole of me at this point."

The brave facade she wore around her answer couldn't distract him however from the movement Yoon-ah made to retrieve from her bag a pile of files. Her right hand, bandaged up seemingly farther up than just around her wrist — though her long sleeve concealed just how far up the bandage really went —, struggled to hold the documents, meaning that as soon as she had them hovering above the table, her trembles were allowed to drop them with no regard whatsoever to noise.

Pointing to the first file, she spoke, "Brought some stuff on my connection in the police too. I'm doing background checks on him every two months. If he was corrupt or untrustworthy, I would have known it by now, but feel free to look him up to before committing to anything."

Gi-hun saved her the movement of a clearly wounded limb she should avoid using at all, and picked up the file himself. "So talk me through it. Your plan." After opening the file and reading for himself the name of the policeman only, he looked up through the silence to find Yoon-ah studying the walls, the ceiling, paying attention to anything but what they were there to discuss. "We're safe here," he found himself blurting out an assurance. "The place is clean."

Finally, her eyes returned to him. "It's not complicated," Yoon-ah admitted. "We go on record, ask for witness protection, and have the police open a city wide investigation into these guys."

"Do you really think they can find them?" Gi-hun asked carefully, but couldn't really stop his disbelief from narrowing his gaze onto her.

"Not really," she dismissed his concern, leaning further into her relaxed posture on the armchair she had been given, while, in front of her, Gi-hun remained constant in his slightly uncomfortable stance while sitting. "But a public investigation like that will awaken news and once people see it on the television, read about it in the papers, all the people who wouldn't talk to me when I approached them about a loved one, a friend or a distant acquaintance abruptly going missing will simply come out and speak up on their own."

"Wouldn't this risk giving more publicity to the games?" Gi-hun's chest felt heavy even acknowledging that truth, and even more by doing so out loud. "There are desperate people out there who'd seek the games out if they knew what kind of money was at stake, regardless of the death involved."

"Of course," Yoon-ah nodded. "But that wouldn't make the games too fun to watch now, would it? All these people coming in, prepared to play Ddakji, alrrady knowing what to expect and taking things seriously right from the start."

"Taking them by surprise is fun?" He almost asked through gritted teeth.

"For whoever is behind it, it must be," she dispelled his concerns with the way in which her thoughtfulness echoed in her words. Alas, she leant her head back to stare at the ceiling, "It's the only way I could explain it. The guards don't watch the games and they act more like servants than anything. Then there's the recruiter. He doesn't quite feel like a man in charge of it all, no matter how unnerving his composure. Someone must be in charge, someone must enjoy the show for it to be so show-like in its structure, with cameras everywhere, and I think I got to talk with him once. Just once. After the last game was over and they were taking me back..."

"Me too!" Gi-hun hurried to confirm that theory for her, and had she not trailed off there on her own, his enthusiasm would have interrupted her instead. "I talked with him as well," he tempered down his tone. "He's the one we should be after."

"We take the sick fun they get out of the games from them, and given time and public involvement, maybe some fellow survivors getting more confident to step into the lights as well, it's bound they'll catch one of them. And that's enough. Catch, say... the recruiter."

"He'll simply be replaced," he ended up shaking his head. "And you think they won't change the games if they get boring? Find a way to keep them going? These are evil people we're dealing with, people for which we are nothing but horses in a race."

"It's either I see them behind bars, rotting away and never seeing the light of day again to pay for what they have done," Yoon-ah lifted her head to look him in the eyes, "or I walk in there with bomb strapped to myself and make sure that place is gone off the map. Neither sound like permanent solutions now, do they?"

"Get there how?" Gi-hun poked at her latter idea, unsurprised to see her starting to loose that ease with which she sat in the chair until then.

"You're enjoying yourself trying to tear down all I've worked on?"

"That's not my intention here," he defended himself with calm. "I'm trying to make you see there's a better way. A way we can end this, once and for all."

"And let me guess," Yoon-ah almost spoke over him, leaning forward now. "It involves trying to corner the recruiter guy yourself?" After watching his expression for but a moment, she tilted her head to the side, "Come on. Your operation is not that discrete either, Gi-hun. I just don't know what you're trying to achieve by catching that guy. Like you said, get that one behind bars and another one will take his place."

"I'm trying to get face to face with the man in charge. His boss."

"And you had the audacity to think of my plan as needing improvement, huh?" She leant back again, draping her elbows over the arms of her chair.

"If I can convince him to stop the games, this would all be over. No more people would die."

Yoon-ah looked away altogether. "Let's assume, for the case of your argument, that you possess downright unnatural negotiating capabilities and you manage to convince a monster to put his favorite slaughterhouse out of business. Tell me, Gi-hun... How does the monster pay for his crimes in this scenario? Are you going to convince him to turn himself in as well?"

Though he'd never say so out loud, he had to admit to himself just then that a taste of his own medicine felt bitter on his tongue.

"You don't have to like my plan, just like you don't have to like or trust me. But just be honest with yourself on this one thing...," she took a deep breath before actually looking at him again. "Even with the odds so low, are you willing to pass on the chance that those bastards who made us compete in those games actually get what's coming for them? Yes, chances are the police will let us down. That the games will only gain publicity or up their security, and they'll never catch a single one of those bastards. But if there's a one percent chance that they can be found and arrested, don't you want to take that chance too? Not for yourself, but for the dead people without a grave."

Gi-hun lowered his gaze to the table between them, to the documents Yoon-ah brought with herself, a research that has taken her years to go through. He couldn't help but wonder, given the time, will his own attempts lengthen to such exteremes? More importantly though, he felt unprepared to give up his personal plan, no matter how absurd or how reliant on thar very same faith in humanity he was ready to criticise in her own.

As if reading a part of his mind he has never even dared to think possible for someone to understand so quickly how to read on his features, Yoon-ah spoke then again, "We've got nothing to lose, you and I. If this fails, we'll simply just do it your way."

He lifted his gaze to meet her own and her eyes have haunted him since. Though she's long been gone from his hotel by the time he laid in bed, wide awake and unlikely to find stillness enough to fall asleep any time soon, her perfume lingered in his room and her eyes were a vivid memory for him to cling onto while his mind rummaged the plan he has once again denied her a clear answer to. In the pseudo-darkness of his room, interrupted by the pulsing red neon lights from across the street, Gi-hun found himself more sincere — neither of them had much chance against the makers of the game.

Alone against those people, neither would really stand much of a chance and he only really had half a plan when it came to his own approach. A crime as complex could never be reported by just one person and expect itself to be enough in making a difference.

On one thing, he could agree Yoon-ah was right while his eyes studied the dance of hues and nuances on his ceiling: their odds were better if they worked together. 

There was a part of Gi-hun perpetually scared, expert in finding something to fear in quite about anything, and this silent decision of his was no exception at all. Are you really going to partner up with a player again? His fear asked him. Haven't you learnt what happens when two players team up?

Before he could begin to even form a counter to that line of attack his mind launched against his already made decision, his phone buzzed awake on the nightstand besides his bed, actively electrocuting him into sitting up. It was two in the morning — no one normal calls at two in the morning.

Gi-hun's hand reached out to take the phone only to hesitate above it for a second. His eyes went winder for a second, seeing as whoever it was that was calling him, he had never saved their number in his rather small contact list. An unknown number in the dead of night was sufficient to make his palms sweat, reluctant against his coercion upon them to grasp that phone, pick it up and answer.

"Who is this?" He asked slowly, quietly, phone hugged to his ear. There was a delay in the answer from the other end that made him hold his breath.

"Remember when I said they could no longer threaten me by phone calls?"

Gi-hun exhaled, his eyes closing to calm his heart down from the swerve of palpitations it went through. Had he less self control, he would have scolded Yoon-ah there and then that she was lucky he could recognize her voice already, over a phone she should, after all, not even own.

From the booth of a public phone whole neighbourhoods away though, Yoon-ah sighed, "They exploded my car."

And that was enough for Gi-hun to forget about his childish anger over a nocturnal call.

《 🦑 》

AUTHOR'S NOTE |   
This chapter pretty much explain why this first act is titled the way it is.. neither Yoon-ah, nor Gi-hun are, at first, willing to ceade their own plan for another — old dog and new tricks, aka they both have already grown used to their own method enough so to not feel comfortable to want another. Thought it would be nice to explain this bit since it's quite literally my favorite thing to come out of this chapter, apart of course from the dynamic between Yoon-ah and Gi-hun.

Thank you for reading this and see you in the next chapter ( which is my favorite overall from this act 👀👀 you'll see whyy )