"TAKE IT BACK," Yoon-ah demanded, feeling the chair beneath her turn in real time to a seat of needles, mocking her for having gotten so comfortable as to walk into that office confident enough to think she won't have to worry anymore about those people still being able to reach her. One car up in flames was not nearly as important to her as knowing that, even after getting rid of her implanted tracker and every damn device that could record her, those people making the games were still able to find her, and plenty resourceful to time their attack such that the threat would be loud and clear. But she was able to ignore that brand new knot of desperation and fear tangling up in her chest, especially after Gi-hun agreed to help her out.

How very stupid of you that you actually believed, her thoughts echoed back to her a bemused shun.

Having Du-ho across the table from her and staring with wide eyes ignorant to the distress written in her own, and even the tremble her hands gained, grasping onto the arms of the chair beneath her, only added fuel to a smoldering fire inching Yoon-ah vision into turning read.

"Take it back," she repeated, though this time she was certain she meant it less as a beseech clinging to her shriveled spark of hope before it was blown out, and more as a threat coming from a place within where the spark had long been gone from.

"Oh," Du-ho laughed awkwardly before her unmoving stare, and she wondered, for just a moment if he still saw her brother every time he looked at himself in the mirror in the morning, before coming to the station he now led. Cruel as it was, she couldn't stop herself from thinking whether or not Du-ho too was aware — had her brother still been there, this promotion would have never happened. "I didn't think you were being serious back then, Yoon-ah..."

Between her ears ringing and her vision's edges blurring out, Yoon-ah hadn't a clue when she stood up or how she got around the table, only that her hands took hold of Du-ho's uniform while she pulled him to his feet and pressed him against the wall.

"Yoon-ah, what the hell are you doing?"

His desperate plea, worded out while his hands were flaying uncertain whether he should reach for his gun or even push her off of him, was the first thing she heard after rage has gifted her a moment of blackout.

Blinking back to the present, Yoon-ah features contorted to match this anger more so than the numbness that came with their previous conversation. She pulled him away from the wall only to slam his back again, a little harder, "You don't get to tell me I need a witness only to change your mind years later and tell me it's not enough anymore!"

"You need to calm down...," he warned, but his voice trembled. Most of Du-ho's attention was on the door of his office, closed shut, and the curtains Yoon-ah had insisted to pull before they watched through the tapes her and the man she came with officiated that day.

"No," she decisively shook her head. "It took me years to find a witness willing to back me up. Years of looking over my shoulder wondering when will I see those people again, when will they have had enough of me and just take me out. So I am not calming down until you take back what you said about not having any evidence, take our tapes and go to start a case like you told me you would."

"Yoon-ah," Du-ho looked back at her, frantic gaze hardly making up its mind between staring at her tears or trying to find reason in her eyes. "You said it was a hypothetical. I was just trying to cheer you up, to be nice to you. But your story is crazy and I don't know how you convinced that guy, or if this thing is real, but no sane court would believe such an operation exists solely off of two random people's words. I mean, people getting killed in children's games? I don't believe it either."

"Dae-Sung would have believed me," Yoon-ah's breathed out, though she had been certain she instructed her brain to keep that echoing thought away from her voice. Such a broken and frail statement had no place to exist while she gripped onto the police captain's shirt, ready to rip it bare of its decorations.

"Well, your brother is dead—!"

By the time the ear ringing disappeared again after that unepxected surge feeling more like a slap across her face, Yoon-ah found herself walking out of the police station and taking on the cold air the city had that late morning. It was that same cold which stung the cuts on her right hand's knuckles and made her self-conscious enough about what she had done to hide that evidence she wore in reopened wounds into her pockets.

Gi-hun has been waiting for her across the street from the section, and if he hadn't already tempered down his expectations beforehand regarding this plan of hers, then the amount of time she had spent in there would have clued him in instantly on the defeat he should prepare to face upon her return. Then, there she was: trying to hide a fist with bloody knuckles, her eyes lost and unfocused, and her shoulders slouched with defeat. She looked like her nerves were hanging by a thin thread and for a moment, Gi-hun found it reasonably likely then for her to simply walk past his car and away, seeking solitude.

He was surprised to find her opening the door to the passenger seat besides him and getting in wordlessly.

Testing the waters was always hard, especially when you knew what sort of fish you could risk disturbing, but still he found himself approving innerly that when it comes to losses, directness is the best. "I take it didn't go well."

The residue of her anger dripped venomous sarcasm into her tone, "Yeah, it was a waste of time. You can gloat an 'I told you so' now. I've wasted both our times."

It was the harshness with which she spoke of her plan and her past underlying faith in it that first made Gi-hun grimace. He wasn't some heartless man yet — he would not want to rub it in her face that she had misfired with this plan, especially when he knew so well the bitterness of defeat, his own attempts at progressing his plwn having been less than satisfactory.

"I'm sorry," was the only thing he could think of mumbling to her. I'm sorry your plan had to fail. I'm sorry the police failed you. I'm sorry it had to be this way, the apologies kept piling up in his mind, lining up for a row that will never exit through his voice. He was left with a simple, pathetic phrase, a poor attempt at letting her know there was some sympathy to be felt between them just then.

"Four years," Yoon-ah mumbled, and if Gi-hun were to guess, she was more likely then to talk to herself than to him. Did she even know he was there? Did she even care that he was watching now, helplessly, how her eyes grew glassy, filling with tears? Another lucky guess told him that no, she wouldn't care for such things, not when hope had been ripped from her.

"Four years I've been clinging to his words like a damn idiot," she puffed in disbelief with herself. "I worked day and night, sometimes forgetting to eat or to sleep, just to find him a damn second witness, and turns out, all I really did was waste precious time while more and more people died. No wonder they didn't care to stop me until I met you. I must have looked like a dumb dog chasing its own tail, doing nothing of importance, digging up the wrong places and for all the wrong reasons."

"What about the tracker?" Gi-hun asked before he could stop himself from interrupting what he wasn't diluted enough not to recognize as a downward spiral on full display. He was witnessing the collapse of Yoon-ah's whole world and his silly question wasn't going to make a difference, but he wouldn't forgive himself for not trying at least to help.

"It proves nothing, he said," she spewed on her bitterness, though the corners of her lips let tears slip their salty taste onto her tongue. "Nor does the scar behind my ear. Or behind yours. I'm a fucking idiot, it's what I am." Her hands, until then hiding their tremble in her pockets pulled out and raised to cover her weak eyes, already stinging. "I shouldn't have made it out of that last game."

Her audacious conclusion ripped an immediate reaction from Gi-hun. He striaghtened up and raised his voice, "Don't say—"

"But I'm right," Yoon-ah interrupted him, raising her own tone to match his. But while determination fueled him, it was despair that fired hers up. Her hands dropped away from her face, but their trembling hadn't stopped, nor did her uncontrollable tears, falling without a single sob hiccuping through her words. "I only made it out because I thought I had someone to fight for, who needed those money to survive. Turns out all I did was kill the man who saved my life for nothing. For no one."

The man who saved her, Gi-hun tried to piece together what she was telling him, words flowing out as if some dam inside of her had just cracked. The one she mentioned saved her during the night fight?

"Everything I did in those stupid games, I justified by thinking of my brother first. But he died alone, in the hospital bed my own fucking greed put him into. Because Yoon'ah didn't want to lose this time," she mocked herself without a second of hestiation. "He died because I refused to let money buy this wannabe thug a win in my cage. My brother paid the price of my stupidity and I wasn't even able to help him in the end. They buried him without me and all that money... Fuck!" Her left hand moved over her right and started picking violently onto the edges of the cuts on her knuckles, regardless of the blood that immediately spurred.

Alarmed by her seemingly conscious way of expressing her frustrations and her pain, Gi-hun hurried to bring yet another possibly pointless detail to her attention — he would have done anything just then but cross the imaginary barrier between their seats and hold her hand from hurting herself, because that would have been far too close for comfort. "We still have our plan, it doesn't matter if this one didn't work out."

It doesn't matter, repeating his own words back to himself almost made him want to slap himself. Sure, as if you wouldn't slap the guy telling you your search for the recruiter is just another drop in the ocean.

Thankfully for him though, Yoon-ah didn't seem to have heard him at all. In fact, as soon as he acknowledged that possibility, temporary relief morphed right back into panic. Righteously so — Yoon-ah ears were ringing, forming a wall around her mind where all she could hear was everything wrong that she did, accompanied only by her fast beating heart.

"I didn't deserve to get out of there alive," she breathed out, her inhales shorter and her exhales more ragged. Mindlessly now, her nails dragged across the open wounds her knuckles have become, digging in and scooping out as much pain as they could from the endless fountain within. Usually, pain was a catalystz an anchor, but just then, it was only another campfire lost in a wildfire. "Tae-ju did. I should have just let him win. The money I give his daughter can never replace the father she was supposed to have."

The little girl she met in the cafe, Gi-hun remembered, realizing then that perhaps he should have guessed that meeting was all about soul debts formed in the games.

At the same time, Gi-hun started to piece together that she wasn't letting it all out because it was him besides her. In fact, she's stated quite a few times that they were still just stranger, with no substantial trust between them. This vulnerabiliy would have come out regardless of where she would have ended up after the failure of her year-long plan, and for that, he did think of her as lucky that it was him, not some clueless stranger who wouldn't have known how to even begin to understand what she had gone through and what she still relived every day.

"But I was so greedy," the words trembled out of her and there wasn't much to see of the real world anymore, not past her tears, so her mind had a free reign taking her back to the last game, to the last time she looked Tae-ju in the eyes, her hand on the wall, her hiding done and his seeking over. Yoon-ah knew she will never forget that man's sigh, his nod, the beginning of his smile, like he wasn't even angry that she took his life away from him, that because of her, he'll never see his wife and child again.

"You didn't know you lost your brother already," Gi-hun hoped to remind her, but still she could not hear him.

"I really thought I could repent myself, that I could...," finally, a sob broke apart her sentence, shattered across her thinner voice. "That I could help their spirits rest and just make things better. But I always just made them worse. And this was all for nothing. I don't deserve to be alive, not with four years leading me nowhere close to stopping those monsters."

"It wasn't all for nothing," Gi-hun's words approached her despair carefully, yet it was not his voice that broke through the bubble formed by her ear ringing around her suffering, but his hand, reaching over the space between their seats and stopping her left hand from digging her nails through her own blood, even at the sake of some stains winding up on his fingertips too.

That was the only way he could have made her listen, that he could have built a bridge for her out of that spiral and back to the present, where, though it wasn't much, he had one last scrap of hope to give her that perhaps would stick enough to help.

Hope was dangerous for people like them, as dangerous as betting all your chips on a single round, in terms of odds.

And perhaps all reason pointed him towards not needing to care about her tears, or about the blood under her nails. Perhaps, wanting to bandage her up made of him the very same fool who walked through the first games blind to the nature of humanity only green and desperation gets to see.

They may not have known each other, but he knew what it took to survive the games and that was enough to look at her and see perhaps who he will become, given the years and the time. He knew for a fact though: no one deserved to feel like their life had lost its value, despite the game makers loving to seed that thought into their minds waiting for the roots to spread out this infectious thought throughout the reminder of their lives.

That is how Gi-hun found himself holding her hand down, thinking to himself what he could possibly begin with saying while the silence drew out to encapsulate the whole car.

It didn't take all that long until he ran out of time and Yoon-ah flinched her hand out of his grip, immediately raising to wipe her tears. "Shit," she cursed under her breath, panic on the rise as she realized just how damp her cheeks have been left by whatever had gotten into her. "I'm sorry," she barely uttered out when daring to look down at the damage done to her knuckles. Though she knew she shouldn't consider it now, the masochistic side of her was quick to point out, He must think so lowly of you now.

There was nothing left for her to do to salvage the situation, so she turned around to leave the car.

Though he had been shaken off once, Gi-hun did not find it in himself to give up, not before he told her what she needed to know. So, with barely any hesitation, he promptly grabbed hold of her arm, around her elbow, and tugged her back ever so slightly.

Words don't mean much these days without proof, he decided eventually that asking her to stay wouldn't be sufficient. Thus, he used his free hand to reach out and unlock one of his phones strapped to the radio panel of the car.

"One of my guys found your painter," he said, and still not letting go of her arm, Gi-hun maneuvered the phone around so she too could see the screen with the conversation he was just having before she came back from the station.

He watched her lips part in confusion, without however any energy left to spend asking the question lingering on her mind or to even as much as change her expression away from distress.

Since her eyes may have been too puffy still to see the pictures part of the conversation he was showing her, he pressed on the first picture to enlarge it — it was phone taken picture of a much more professionally taken one that had been framed to a wall. In it, several men and women stood side by side, a glass of champagne in one hand and in the other, a full-face mask, each fancier and more expensive looking than the other. Towards the middle of the group taking the picture was the painter behind that art she found laying around in some gallery and depicting a bit too loyally the place of their nightmares.

"Well, not exactly found him, as in person," Gi-hun made sure to correct himself then, in order to manage her expectations regarding this last bit of hope left that he could offer her in exchange for that which she had offered him by simply reaching out. "I took the freedom of letting Mr. Kim know about this painter guy being a possible person of interest to us, and one of his men, while he was out with his wife, found our guy festured in every single sponsor picture taken at the annual fundraising event of this museum they were at. Every single one of them, including the one last year and going at least a whole two decades back."

He scrolled to the next picture in the chat and there was no mistaking it now: Yoon-ah was starting to realize what he was saying. It hasn't all been exactly for nothing.

"I was going to share this with you after we were done at the police station, and I suppose we are done with them now."

"You could say that," Yoon-ah answered, her voice carrying in its hoarseness the proof of everything failing had done to her soul. Gi-hun didn't know if he helped her at all, not for certain anyway, but he let go of her arm when she reached out and took his phone to read the texts exchanged. "Can we go there? The museum is not that far."

See for ourselves, he realized he should have expected her reluctance to trust something just through a screen.

She held onto his phone while he started the car, and all the way through their silent drive away from the police station. The further she got from Du-ho, the easier it became to breathe.  Yes, the part of her who believed that day would mark the end of all her struggles, the day after which it would be easier to move on, died for her innocence, and yes, her tears were yet to dry out completely on her cheeks. But the distance helped in its own strange way for her to end up telling herself a cruel line much calmer — it was bound to happen.

Though it was barely the middle of the day by the time they entered the museum in question, the place was already busy with groups of children being led by their teachers, as well as tourists, flocking from side to side, gaping at what each new window had to show. It was enough of a crowd around them for them to remain silent upon entering the museum as well and though he shouldn't have been surprised, Gi-hun was pleased to see Yoon-ah take the very same precautions as him — wearing a baseball cap and avoiding staring up towards the ceiling, should any camera be sought out to be used against them.

Thankfully, the wall dedicated to the most generous sponsors of the museum had no curious visitors but them. Some of the pictures depicted patrons who perhaps thought it would be funnier for them not to remove their golden masks for the picture, but most definitely, the artist behind that painting of the stairs was present in every single recent picture.

Gi-hun was about to break the silence and thus try to nudge Yoon-ah towards rejoicing that she does in fact still have one lead left. However, merely looking at her changed his plan altogether. "Oh," he gasped. "Min Yoon-ah, is that a smile?"

Instantaneously, Yoon-ah gave up her attempt at hiding her hands in her pockets simply to raised her left hand and smack it over Gi-hun's arm. "Shut up," she warned him, though the hit had been just about light enough to make the both of them stare ahead at the wall of pictures and chuckle.

In the fade of that little joy, Yoon-ah's sigh made her relief known. "Thank you," she whispered, and though he might as well have thanked that wall for existing, Gi-hun accepted the gratitude with a nod.

No longer needing to linger there, Yoon-ah turned around to face him and extended his phone back. "The event is held every August 31st, which means from now on, we focus on getting you face to face with the recruiter first. If...," Yoon-ah's confidence faltered for a second. "If you'll still have me."

Gi-hun made use of the extended phone to grasp her hand between both of his and shake it before actually taking his device back. "I admit, I didn't expect you to want to help with that after all of this."

"We're in this together now," Yoon-ah turned back for one last glance at the wall of pictures and at the golden masks depicting animals. "No one else would believe us, but us."

I couldn't agree more, Gi-hun did not stop that thought from occupying his mind.

《 🦑 》

AUTHOR'S NOTE |   
Nothing quite as painful as spending years worth of energy only to end up being proven wrong in the shortest of time.

And for anyone who might complain about Yoon-ah just "randomly" "trauma dumping" on Gi-hun — she would have done it with anyone by her side, she would have said the exact same things even if she was all alone after the police station scene because she needed to speak it, not to be listened in that moment. Hence why she didn't really hear him, not until he made his presence known to her.

Now, this is the end of the first actually 😅 Second act we get into exploring the painter/architect plotline I just introduced, as well as the recruiter centric first episode of season 2 and the second episode with Halloween as well.

Good time to ask for overall thoughts on Act 1? 👀✨️