HAD HE NOT OFFERED HER to stay over for the night, Yoon-ah knew she would have most likely ended up skipping a night of sleep, going back to the cage and the fights, though not nearly enough of her wounds have healed just yet. Instead of adding more pain and bruises to already fatigued flesh, there she was, laid down in a proper bed, too awake to dare close her eyes. She needn't a business card to know that her car exploding as soon as she got up to her apartment and looked down to check on it, as she did every single day she got out of the house and drove her way back, was a threat. A bundle of disgust in her chest refused to let go of the fact that this all could mean one thing: they've been following her too, enough to learn routines.

Sick to her stomach and utterly dizzy with rage is how a strange sound in the quiet night had found Yoon-ah.

Was that a sob? A groan of pain?

Dozens of weirder sound existed in all neighbourhoods across the city, but then again, when Gi-hun gave her a room, she noted it had been rather close to his own. And hotels often have such thin walls.

Drawn out of her mind, Yoon-ah was suddenly compelled to listen more closely for a follow-up sound, or at least a confirmation to the first suspicion she formed. No longer than a couple of seconds later, she heard the same pained cry again, this time with a ragged breath pairing it, and though she knew better than to presume, her heart clenched in her chest with familiarity.

The nightmares from that place never did stop, she thought to herself as if that thought alone could explain to her why she let go of her handgun, until then held over her chest, placing it on her pillow while standing up. Even now, if there were nights in which it was not fatigue which made her faint into her sleep but her own conscious choice that made her slip into resting darkness, the memories burned alive. But back then, only one year after making it out of that place, they haunted her each breath, ripping apart what little of her mind was left when least expected. Countless nights spent choking on tears, muttering apologies to ghosts she could still see moving behind her closed eyes.

Those early days of being the sole survivor were torturous, and God knows she wished she had been able to cut her sleep short right before falling back into those nightmares, back into those games, because she had read somewhere once that the brain normally cannot distinguish between a dream and real life, not as long as it is dreaming. For the whole time that the nightmare elapses, the fear is real to the mind. So is the pain. That being said, Yoon-ah had gone through the games a thousand more times since winning them and if opening the door to Gi-hun's room uninvited would have him face only nine hundred ninety nine such terrors, it was a mercy anyone should deserve.

Stepping inside his room welcomed her into a world of difussed red. Had the hotel been open for business, the neons across the street and the lights from billboards would have made of this room the cheapest one in the whole building, a place where the guest would know no peace, not even with all the curtains pulled. Perhaps it shouldn't surprise her, out of all the rooms, he'd choose this one.

After a moment of being frozen before the door she closed behind herself, taking in the room from a different perspective than the one she had had being invited into it earlier that evening, another sob from the sleeping man tossing only his head in bed while he laid on his back reminded Yoon-ah that she was there for a noble reason.

Disregarding everything about the room that has changed but the scent of cigarettes making her scrunch her nose and hold her breath just to avoid coughing through it, she walked towards the bed. Stopping besides it, she made no attempt to touch him at first. Nightmares can bleed their emotions into reality when interrupted and she'd much rather not discover that way what sort of weaponnhe carried with himself to bed.

"Seong," she called, her voice carrying the normal volume for a conversation. "Seong Gi-hun," she went next for his full name, leaning ever so slightly forward.

The new angle made Yoon-ah focus on his features for once. The shine of sweat on his skin, the wrinkles in all the places where expression contoured worries. Up close, she could see his preference in keeping his moustache from growing and assume he's done this spotting job in shaving it off not all that long ago, given the little speck of irritated skin left above the right corner of his lips. But most importantly, Gi-hun looked like he was in pain. His eyebrows wete tense, furrowed down, his lips quivering parted, breathing heavily and ragged. Fresh tears were mixing up with his cold night sweat on the very edge of his eyes and she didn't have it in her to let this continue any longer.

Yoon-ah reached out and grabbed hold of his shoulder.

Gi-hun's eyes opened and with his lips still parted he gasped while tossing his cover aside to make room for his right hand to lift up the gun yet to grow warm in his hand.

Within but a mere blink, Yoon-ah had the barrel of a pistol pushed against her cheek. It should have perhaps startled her more than it did that instead of fighting an instinct to recoil, she was content with staying there, focusing on grasping a little harder onto his shoulder, to make sure he was awake.

A squint caused by that shiver of a pain she inflicted was what finally woke Gi-hun up properly. "Sorry," his hoarse voice, strained from his sleep talking, whispered the apology paired with lowering his gun and tossing it aside. Then, and only then, he felt Yoon-ah let go of his shoulder and straighten up as well. "What happened?" He lifted now his emptied hand to his face to rub away the remaining sleepiness, to wipe off the signs of his fears and thus ignore again what he had learnt to every morning.

"You were having a nightmare," Yoon-ah didn't bother hiding the real reason she was there, especially not as he seemed to believe something else entirely must have happened for her to be there, waking him up.

Unsurprisingly for her, taken completely off guard, Gi-hun looked up at her with wide eyes. Did he feel vulnerable? Exposed, maybe?

"I wasn't sleeping," she shrugged away that awkward silence building up between them thanks to his speechlessness. "And I know how I much I hated dreaming of that place, so... I thought you'd like to wake up."

Of course, he thought, unbeknownst to him, his expression softening alongside his realization. Of course she knows what kind of nightmares I have since that place.

Seeking to look now anywhere but at him, Yoon-ah ended up staring at the ceiling and discovering this way that it had been torn to shreads. All the wires gowing through it to connect to the light bulb have been pulled out and were now hanging in loops of tangled wire above. She was pretty sure the place looked much neater when she'd been there to discuss their plans.

"You told me they'd have to threaten you in person from now on while standing in this room," Gi-hun followed her gaze towards the ceiling. "I had to assume they had planted a microphone somewhere, to keep an eye on me."

"Did you find anything?" Yoon-ah's shoulders dropped still staring at the ceiling.

Gi-hun's eyes, still feeling the stings of the tears he must have cried without his consciousness in his sleep, moved to just momentarily look at her instead of the pulled out wires. "No," he admitted, looking down. "So I just got rid of my phone. I can't shake this feeling that it's not enough though."

Much to his surprise, the sound of steps confirmed to him what the corner of his eyes had alerted him to as well: Yoon-ah walked away from that spot besides his bed. Before he could ask where she was going though, she had already reached her destination: the bathroom attached to the room through a sliding, transparent door. She left the door open and turned on both the shower and the sink, actively making Gi-hun adjust his posture, ready to get up from his bed.

Yoon-ah simply returned to the room, speaking no louder than before only once she was right besides his bed again, "Hope they like listening to the water."

A puff was all Gi-hun had left to express amusement when his smile was no longer something his lips remembered to show.

"Now this is truly the worst room," Yoon-ah sighed, sitting down not on the armchair now covered with fallen pieces from the ceiling, dust and even the remanants of a broken phone, but on the edge of his bed instead.

"What?" The clinging sleep drew out confusion to the surface of his tone.

"Cigarette scent, constant light and noise, and a broken ceiling. This is the worst room in the whole hotel."

Whether it was the serious tone with which she spoke or the words themselves baring their own irony, one of the two had done the impossible for Gi-hun's lips: it made they recall there was a way for them to move in something else other than a frown. He wouldn't call it a smile though, that horrid attempt taking over his features for a brief moment gone unnoticed by the woman besides him, but it was closer than he's ever gotten to one since... well, since the games.

Merely reminding himself of them refreshed in his mind his nightmare and took this rediscovered ability away from him once more.

For a moment, however long — neither of them was really keeping track of time, both statues trapped in this destroyed environment filled with everything opposed to peace —, there was nothing but the sound of pouring water keeping Gi-hun company while his head hung low and his tiredness struggled to stand a chance in outweighing the fear of going back to that night terror.

"What was it?" Yoon-ah broke the silence. Sitting on the edge of his bed had her mostly stand with her back turned on him, staring across the room, at the window which the neon lights made it through. With only a slight movement of her head, she looked over her shoulder at him, "What part of it do you still get nightmares about?"

He hesitated. At any point, he could have just told her to leave him alone. Just because he invited her to stay with him rather than at her place, clearly not out of reach from the game makers, it didn't mean they were suddenly more than strangers.

But then again, perhaps having lived through the same torment made them something more. Not quite friends. Not even acquaintances. Gi-hun wasn't sure there was even a word for it, only that he sighed and dropped the tension from his own shoulders, looking down at the bundled up sheets beneath him. "All of it," he confessed then, a half truth, still keeping his paranoia's integrity by not going into detail of the exact deaths haunting him. However, he did not shy away from curiosity. "What about you?"

"The night," Yoon-ah answered, looking back towards the window, her voice almost too fragile for him to make it out.

The night? Gi-hun asked himself. There are plenty of nights spent there during the games. Not just one. This isn't very specific —

His own memories resurfaced as a way to interrupt his inner complaints over her choice of words. Oh, he saw those flashing lights again, the carnage, and the blood. That night.

"I didn't really get what they were doing there until that night," Yoon-ah continued, assuming from the start that he knew exactly what she was talking about. "Nothing was about fairness. We weren't chosen in any way to be there like in one of those competitions where each brings their own sob story to the table and the hosts take pity in them. We were just flies caught in a net. Whether we killed each other or died in one of their games, it was all the same to them. We were nothing."

"I don't think I've had a single good sleep since that night either," Gi-hun was compelled to confess something a little more personal after her own words stroke a chord in his heart that hasn't been exercised in far too long. "Did...?" he hesitated for a moment though he's already started his question. Was it really his place to ask her such things?

If she didn't want to speak, she would have answered, he thought to himself, and yet that did not make it any easier whatsoever to finish articulating his inquiry.

"Did I kill anyone?" Yoon-ah assumed he wanted to ask.

"No," Gi-hun shook his head. He may have been curious, but he wasn't insane enough to want to fund out the things that would make him choose anything but the hope Yoon-ah presented him with by finding him when she did. He wasn't diluted enough to believe her hands were unscathed by blood. Not even his have been spared. But he didn't want to know what she did to make it out, he didn't want the image he saw now, looking at her, to be forever ruined, like all other things the games have touched. "I wanted to ask if anyone came after you that night?"

Whether or not that was what he wanted to ask her, it didn't really matter to Yoon-ah. She turned around ever so slightly either way, aiming to face him without however getting up. Their knees bumped in the process and it was on that point of connection her eyes decided to focus on. "Someone did, yes," she nodded. "I didn't see it coming. That whole thing. All the fighting. I just went to sleep and I was exhausted enough to sort of doze off. Screams woke me up and all of sudden I had this guy above me trying to kill me and another behind him trying to stop his hands from pushing some bottle shard into my neck."

A chill ran down her spine remembering that night — the flashing lights, the death and blood speckled between darkness, and the screams, wails of pain from every single person who died, scared and confused, in brutal, unspeakable ways. Before her mind could bring back to her the face of the man who saved her life and actively ruin the entirety of her late evening, Yoon-ah shook her head and lifted her gaze to seek Gi-hun. To her surprise, until then, he was also merely looking down.

"Is that night what you were... seeing?" She inquired.

Gi-hun surprised himself with the fact that he actually shook his head.

In an attempt to move away from that single open wound she was tired of poking at for so many years, Yoon-ah allowed herself to be cheeky and press on, "What was it?"

Before he knew it, he answered, looking right into her eyes, "The last game." The realization he saw immediately take over her features assured him he wasn't sharing this with just anyone. No, he was sharing this with someone who knew, by those three words alone, that he evoked a horror worth paling over, worth parting your lips by instinct with not a single sound making it past.

"How many...?" Yoon-ah's question died out before being properly articulated. Her hands have, in the meantime, grown cold and in terms of a desire to keep the pressure on, she felt instead the guilt for having asked him about it in the first place, so soon after waking up too.

"Just two," Gi-hun sighed out what may have been to less knowledgeable ears only two words. To him, this exhale was a stone that has been crushing in his ribcage, pressing on his lungs and suffocating his heart.

"I'm so sorry," her eyebrows furrowed down and before the all too familiar hurt behind her eyes could take over, Yoon-ah stood up, promptly turning around as well. "I should be leaving you to it though. Enough intrusion for one night and if you want to still catch some rest, maybe you can try setting an alarm on your clock every two hours," a bit of rambling carried her steps into walking away from him, his bed and the conversation tailgating too closely to a crash waiting to happen between her mind and the memory of the last game she faced as well. "It's not the most satisfying sleep, but it worked for me in keeping the nightmares away."

"Thanks, but I don't think I'll be sleeping tonight," Gi-hun answered, watching from his bed as Yoon-ah's steps slowed down. If he had to explain himself just then, he would have definitely done a piss poor job with it, but since he'd formulate no such demand while tired and intoxicated on a good feeling he neither deserved to indulge nor knew how grasp, he spoke mindlessly, "I don't mind the company."

Yoon-ah stopped, but with her back turned at him, she grimaced. The white noise of the running water barely filled the silence that her hesitation to turn around formed. Though she was there in the first place because she knew she wished someone was by her side to rescue her from each nightmare she's woken up from, gasping for air and begging for some rest, she faced now a steep wall she didn't know if she was willing to climb. There were limits she didn't know about, limits about how much she could say about what happened before something in her snapped along, and while she wanted to stay true to her desire to offer a fellow 'winner' what she never had, being someone to be confided into was starting to look like a truly hard job she may not have been ready for so fast.

"Look, I—" Yoon-ah turned around before her silence could be an answer of its own, much brutal for that matter too, but from that far away, her eyes ended up first looking at his nightstand, rather than at him. To be more exact, she spotted a familiar boardgame which replaced in her mind the memories of that bloody place with a warm image, shrouded in light. "You play?" She pointed at the chess board stored in that nightsand, right above its only drawer.

Confusion hit a bullseye on Gi-hun, but thankfully to him, he needn't really answer her strange and out of the blue inquiry, because soon enough, Yoon-ah clued him in just fine. She walked back to his bed and retrieved an old chess board from his nightstand, setting it down on the mattress. "Oh," he sighed. "No, no. This thing came with the place when I bought it. Found it laying around."

"They've ruined so many games for me when I was there," Yoon-ah, much to Gi-hun's surprise, chose to kneel besides the bed and open up the board to reveal the pieces still stored inside of it. "But not this one," she stroke the piece depicting a black horse. "My brother taught me how to play it," she glimpsed back at Gi-hun, checking wordlessly if he'd be willing to fill their time with this, rather than with talks of the past, if he too would rather have a distraction than more of the same pain scratching at bleeding cuts. He didn't seem opposed to it, that's for sure, at least not since he was interested in studying the rook already, so Yoon-ah moved all pieces off and set the board down.

"He was much better than me at this, but I know the basics," she set the expectations low.

"I don't even know that," Gi-hun was not too interested in hiding his confusion, especially not as he watched lost how Yoon-ah set up the pieces so fast — white for him, black for her. "I've always seen it as more of a game for smart people."

"First we shake hands," she extended her right hand over the table. "It's courtesy. Sign that you respect whoever you're playing against."

With no objection, Gi-hun lifted his own right hand and gave hers a firm, but short shake.

"Now," Yoon-ah lowered her own hand. "White makes the first move. Move forward any pawn," she indicated to him that the first row of pieces was the one he should be looking at.

Easy enough, Gi-hun thought to himself, bringing his hand to hover above the pawn furthest to the right. Should start with the first one, no?

Before he could touch the piece, Yoon-ah caught his hand and stopped him, "That's the wrong move."

"How can you know that?" His eyebrows shot up. "It's only the first move of the game. How can it be wrong already?"

"Well, you should always aim to control the center in your first moves," she moved his hand towards the pawns in the middle of the row.

"Why?"

Yoon-ah simply shrugged, "My brother wasn't very good at explaining, and I never really bothered to ask. Chess was there just to keep us busy while we talk. Which probably explains why he always won." Though her last statement ended up fading away to a much quieter tone, she coughed away the awkwardness.

Learning that they truly shared some scars from the games may have been comforting, but to find out there were still some happy memories strong enough to be remembered even for her — that gave him hope. Alas, Gi-hun made his first move.

"Pawn to e4," Yoon-ah stated out loud with a nod. "It's a good move."

"Took us two minutes to decide on it though. Do you think we can wrap this game up before sunrise?"

"You want me out of your hairs so fast?" She made her own move, a mirror of his own.

"I thought we should go get the confessions out early, before the sections get busy," not knowing how the other pieces moved, nor caring to interrupt himself from speaking something so important in order to ask, he just moved the other center pawn forward as well.

By the time he looked back at her, Gi-hun discovered she was already staring at him with wide eyes, seeking so desperately a sign that he wasn't just joking around, that he meant it and he was in fact agreeing to follow her plan, to take a chance on it. Gi-hun would argue it was not the plan he was taking a chance to trust. It was her. But instead of pointing that out, he resorted to a simple nod, everything Yoon-ah needed as a reassurance at the time.

《 🦑 》

AUTHOR'S NOTE |   
Here we go! They are officially bonding, growing less cold with each other. Nothing like shared trauma to build bridges between strangers, I swear. Having a common goal sure helps as well. 😅

How are we feeling so far with this story, guys? Any feedback is always welcome !!