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The sound of his voice feels like the only tangible thing Gi-hun can hold onto. Nothing else feels quite real. The leather seat beneath him, the zip-ties tied tight around his wrists, the blindfold stealing the light from his eyes - these all feel like props. Playthings. Gi-hun may have been taken out of that arena, but he feels, somehow, as if he is still playing a game.
“Think of it as a dream,” the voice says, like the echo of a ghost, the trembles of an unknown abyss. It doesn’t even sound as if it could belong to a human. “and it really wasn’t such a bad one for you.”
It isn’t enough. It isn’t nearly enough. It hardly encapsulates the entirety of his grief, his madness, his rage.
Gi-hun feels hollow, until he thinks of Sangwoo. Sangwoo, gazing up at him with rainwater tears pooling in his dark, defeated eyes, scarlet gushing from his neck, and then he is filled with sickness. With his childhood friend’s blood.
The blood of all those people who died before him is clinging to his skin, and Gi-hun doesn’t think he’ll ever feel clean again.
“Who are you?” Gi-hun asks, even knowing he won’t get an answer. He needs to know who could do this. He needs someone to blame. To tear into. He needs someone, anyone other than himself to hate. “Who are you?”
They drug him once more. Of course, they do. Choking on smoke, Gi-hun fades from one nightmare into another. But before he fades into the gnawing darkness, he pins his eyes on where he thinks the monster might be lurking and glares with all his might, hoping that he knows that even denied a face, Gi-hun will never forget. Gi-hun will find him outside of his dreams.
He holds onto the sound of that voice, silky and cloaked in subterfuge, for as long as he can.
Maybe Gi-hun does try to forget. For a little while. Just long enough to swallow a breath. But it never works. Wherever he goes he finds them, these souls that like him, are unable to find rest. He sees them looking through windows, drowning in wavering puddles, staring back at him in the mirror, eyes empty and dead. They are the shadows forever eluding his peripheral.
Maybe it was all a dream. Maybe he’s still trapped inside of it. As the days pass, growing shorter, colder, darker, everything begins to seem less and less real.
Maybe Gi-hun never escaped that arena. Maybe he is a ghost, too.
Most of all, his eyes are stained with the blurry, indistinct shadow of him. Gi-hun feels the Frontman watching him, always. It makes him want to claw his skin off. It is strangely grounding, a tether. Something corporeal, tangible. Perhaps that is the worst part. The inextricable need and disgust entwined, to know that he is real, that the games were real, and not simply something he made up inside his head. It is lonely, to live in a graveyard.
He tries to find absolution. He makes amends, does whatever he can, trying fiercely to purge himself of his noxious guilt, his festering hatred. But it is entirely too real when he spies that man playing ddakji with another, slapping him across the face, again and again. Offering up a card, a death warrant.
Gi-hun suddenly, breathlessly, feels resuscitated. Alive in a way he hasn’t felt in years.
His fingers shake as he types in the number. His lungs squeeze around a scream.
“Seong Gi-hun. October 31, 1974,” he says, and he hopes it sounds exactly like what its is, vengeance. The coming of a storm. “I am not a horse, I am a person. That is why I want to know who you people are, and how you can do these things you do to people.”
“Player 456,” that voice again. That voice. He hasn’t forgotten, either. “Don’t get any absurd ideas.”
“It wasn’t a dream,” Gi-hun says. It wasn’t, it wasn’t. “I can’t forgive you. For everything you’re doing.”
“Just get on that plane. It’s for your own good.”
It probably would be, wouldn’t it? To board that plane, to once again hold his daughter in his arms, to walk alongside her in a country halfway across the world where no one knows his name, nor the blood he still feels staining his hands - that would, undoubtedly, be the best thing he could do.
Gi-hun walks in the opposite direction.
In the dead of night, the piercing wail of his phone breaks through the restless shadows of a nightmare.
Gi-hun fumbles for his phone, too bleary-eyed to check the caller id, “Hello?”
“You didn’t get on the plane.”
Outside, thunder rumbles, the growling of a prowling beast. In his bed, lightning crackles down his spine. Gi-hun jolts upright.
“How did you get my number?” Gi-hun demands, any lingering drowsiness rapidly dissipating. “This is a new number, how the fuck did you get it?”
“You assumed that just by cutting the tracker out of your skin we would so easily lose you?” The Frontman asks. Even through the thickness of the voice distorter, he sounds dully amused. “We have eyes on you. You should have gotten on the plane.”
“You get on the plane,” Gi-hun retorts, furious, hanging up before he realizes what he’s done, that he’s just squandered an opportunity. He curses, tucking himself back into the sheets as he glares at the blackness collecting behind his eyelids. Fuck. Well, it’s done. The bastard wouldn’t have given him a straight answer, anyway.
“I didn’t get on the plane,” the Frontman says to him, apropos of nothing, a few days later, just after Gi-hun has hired Mr. Kim to help him search for the recruiter. Funny, how life goes. Even funnier how Gi-hun is talking to the mastermind behind this whole sick business, yet he can do utterly fucking nothing but listen to the sound of his distorted voice.
Distracted - having frozen on the sidewalk, a statue passerby navigate around - he runs his finger over the bandage behind his ear. The wound is healing, and it itches all of the time. Burns, on the worst night. Undoubtedly, it will scar - Gi-hun just can’t stop picking at the scab.
Gi-hun might have been able to dig that chip out from under his skin, but he cannot separate himself from the games, or the man who runs them.
He doesn’t want to, anyway.
Yes, it would be nice for it all to have been nothing more than a dream. That would mean he would be able to wake up. To forget.
But this nightmare is endless, and Gi-hun has nothing but time.
Gi-hun doesn’t take his meaning, at first, too preoccupied with the sound of his voice, what it means, what it could mean, and everything that it doesn’t. “What?”
“I didn’t get on the plane, either.”
And what is Gi-hun supposed to do with that?
He asks a question. A different one than the one he’s been asking, that he burns to know.
“Why?”
That last parting statement has revealed a truth that rings in his head like a bell. Gi-hun knows something now, just a little bit more about this faceless, haunting man, and yet he knows nothing at all. Perhaps, even less than he knew before.
How does prey become predator? How does the sacrificial lamb on the altar snatch the knife away? How does it look down at the lambs that follow with cold, distant apathy, plunging that blade down almost robotically over and over again, just for the cheap thrills of the wolf? Is the taste of blood so tantalizing?
This man is a monster, but he has become a monster because he was once a man.
Gi-hun can scarcely comprehend it; humans should not be able to strip themselves of their flesh so easily. But he saw it in the games, hadn’t he? They all held knives, waiting to stab every turned back. It was indiscriminate. Survival was a savage thing. They were - not horses - something worse. Dogs. Beasts locked in a cage, snarling and biting and brutalizing each other for the hope that the last one left standing would be able to wiggle out in between the bars. The games changed people.
Or, the games brought out who they had been all along.
Masks should not appear like human faces.
“Hm,” the hum comes through as strange, thick and almost like a growl. It pierces Gi-hun, slithers like a snake down his spine. “I didn’t want to. I wasn’t done playing the game.”
“What game?” Gi-hun asks, barely above a whisper, but the line has already gone dead.
He’s lying in bed, sleepless, thinking about marbles in his hands, marbles rolling out from in-between the slats of his fingers, running around wildly on the ground around him, and he chases them fervently, desperately, with sweat dripping down his brow and bile clawing at his throat, but it’s no use, he can never grab them all. He thinks of Oh Il-nam. His gganbu. Blood brothers who share everything, especially the blood on their hands.
His phone rings, the sound a shrill scream. Gi-hun doesn’t bother looking at the screen.
“You won the games,” he asks, but it’s not a question. There’s a whisper of breath, and then a single, unfathomable word.
“Yes.”
“How?”
“I could ask you the same,” The Frontman asks, and there it is, that damned note of amusement, like this is still all one big game. And beneath that, he sounds knowing. Like he and Gi-hun are at all similar. As if they share some sick kinship . Gi-hun sits up, shaking, gripping his phone so hard it creaks. Maybe it will shatter. Cut into the skin of his palms and gift him another scar.
“It isn’t the same,” Gi-hun says, quite certain of this. He has to be. “I’m - I could never be like you. I could never go back. I would never continue the games.”
“No, you wanted to end the game. I remember,” The Frontman says. It sounds as if this has been weighing on him. There’s genuine curiosity in his voice, now. It makes Gi-hun feel ill to hear, nauseous as he thinks about crouching over Sangwoo’s bleeding, broken body, sobbing as the heavens sobbed. And that bastard had been watching, fascinated, musing over how Gi-hun had been willing to give it all up to save a friend’s life.
Is this something the Frontman cannot possibly comprehend? That his betting horses have souls?
“I could have saved him,” Gi-hun says. His throat is tight. It feels as if there’s a knife stabbed into his own neck, his voice blood pouring from his lips.
“And then what?” The Frontman asks. “You would have gone home with less than you had before.”
“No,” Gi-hun spits. “No. I wouldn’t have gone home alone. We would have lived together. We could have.” Quieter, rasping, in a desperate whisper, “I could have saved him.”
Who is he trying to convince?
“You could have, but what kind of life would it have been? All of that pain, your fear and suffering, it would have been for nothing. You would have had no money. No consolation prize. What kind of victory would that be? Your last prospect at a brighter future would have been lost to you forever.”
“Is that what this is?” A hysterical, half-mad laugh wells up in his throat. “You robbed me of any future I could have ever had. I can’t forget. It wasn’t a dream, but I’m stuck in a nightmare.”
“You shouldn’t see it that way,” The Frontman says, and Gi-hun hates it, how he sounds almost sympathetic. Kind. “Every game has a winner and a loser. Player 456, you won. Why can’t you accept that?”
Did I win? Did I? What kind of victory is this? Go on, tell me, you bastard. Tell me what I can do. How do I wake up from this nightmare that never ends?
A pyrrhic victory is not the same as winning a war.
“Were you a victor?”
“Yes.”
“It doesn’t haunt you?” Gi-hun presses. “You mean to tell me you don’t ever see the blood on your hands?”
Empty air drifts from the receiver. Is the Frontman genuinely pondering the question, or is he preoccupied with other business? Is he signing papers, planning the next games, watching reruns on tv? How little Gi-hun knows of this man, this man who ruined his life and thousands of others. How little he knows of the Reaper.
And yet. And yet he can’t help but seek him out, to make him see, just as he made Oh Il-nam look, while lying on his death bed, at the irrefutable truth that humans are more than a pawn, more than a body, more than a number and a bloodstain.
“Are you aware of the sunk cost fallacy?” The Frontman asks, and it’s not an answer, but it’s not not an answer, either.
“....Yes,” Gi-hun admits ruefully. “Of course.” He was a gambler, will always be a gambler, it’s his doctrine, his DNA. “But there’s a difference between betting on horses and human lives. You’re a facilitator of destruction, it’s your entertainment. You trick people, lure them in with all these sweet promises that turn out to be nothing more than rotten lies. You could stop the games. You could stop people from gambling their lives away. ”
“No,” The Frontman says, with frightening finality. “I couldn’t.”
“You could. You could give people a chance to walk away.”
“As you well know, the contract states-”
“Fuck your contract! It’s an illusion of choice, nothing more,” Gi-hun snaps, pacing now. “Don’t treat me like some fucking idiot.”
There’s a soft breath of air, a quiet exhale, a not-quite sigh. “I wouldn’t,” the Frontman says as if Gi-hun could take his word. “I do not waste my time entertaining idiots.”
Gi-hun pauses. Fair enough. “Then you know I’m right,” it shouldn’t sound like he’s begging. “There’s some part of you that must know I’m right.”
“I didn’t say that,” the Frontman counters. “It’s getting late.”
“No. No, that’s not good enough.”
“Goodnight, player 456.”
“As if you sleep, you blood-sucking ghoul,” Gi-hun spits, seconds away from hurling his phone at the wall, watching it shatter like an exploding star-
“‘Blood-sucking ghoul?’” The click of the line doesn’t come, only the Frontman’s voice, now certifiably amused. Gi-hun blinks, suddenly unmoored. “That’s one I haven’t heard before.”
“Well,” Gi-hun fumbles. “Spend enough time cursing a man in your head, and the typical curses will get boring.”
“Hm. I don’t know if I should be insulted or flattered.”
If the situation wasn’t what it was, Gi-hun might have simply hung up. It would have been more dignified, rather than just stand there, gaping like an idiot. “Flattered?”
“It’s a compliment, isn’t it?” The Frontman asks and, oh yes, there it is, that musical note of laughter. “To be told you take up so much space inside another person’s head.”
“It is absolutely not a compliment,” Gi-hun hisses. “Fuck you. You’re like - like an aggravating thorn under my skin. An infection. A parasite!”
“Well,” the Frontman says, and his voice is the audible equivalent of a shrug. “I’ve been called worse.”
And when he hangs up this time, perhaps it is a mercy, and perhaps Gi-hun should hope this is the end of it, that he never calls again. Because what is he doing, talking to a madman? Trying to make him see reason? You can’t reason with crazy. You cannot tame a wolf. Can’t keep it from hunting the lamb. There is only so long you can stare at the abyss until it smiles back.
Then again, maybe Gi-hun wants to see its teeth.
Gi-hun changes his number twice before he finally gives up. It’s tedious and meaningless and means nothing more. The Frontman always finds him. The man is a bloodhound, and the stench of Gi-hun’s is thick in his nose. He’s just as tenacious as Gi-hun, just as unyielding. Unbendable. Unbreakable. Gi-hun wonders often, night after sleepless night, which of them will break first.
He gets a sick thrill every time his phone rings, every time his eyes greedily drink in the words No caller ID. Gi-hun may know almost nothing but he does know this - one of them is slowly but surely fracturing. It’s ouroboros. The Frontman always calls, and Gi-hun always answers.
“Let’s not lie to each other,” the Frontman says when he calls next. His voice is as light as a breeze, despite the voice moderator. He sounds as if he’s in a good mood. It pisses Gi-hun off. “I will promise to be honest if you promise the same.”
“Of course,” Gi-hun can’t help his contemptuous tone of voice. He hopes it sticks to the Frontman’s skin like oil. “I have nothing to hide. I want the truth. But how can I trust someone like you? Have you ever been honest a day in your life?”
“The truth is different from honesty.”
“Bullshit. Semantics.”
“I could tell you you’re a fool for carrying on like this, but it wouldn’t be honest.”
“It’s not foolish to have hope,” Gi-hun snaps but pauses. It’s a sunny day today, but he always feels as if whenever he talks to this man, it should be raining. Neither of them should ever for a second pretend this is anything more than what it is. He asks, even though he’s not sure if he wants the answer, “Then what would be the honest version of that statement?”
For a moment, the Frontman just breathes. Gi-hun wonders if it’s sunny where he is. On that damn island. He wonders if the stench of blood and death ever really goes away. If it ever becomes overwhelming.
“You’re stubborn,” he says at last, voice strangely guarded, his words strung out and carefully selected. “You never give up.”
Gi-hun furrows his brow. “No. I’ll never give up.”
“It’s foolish but admirable,” the Frontman continues, and God, it’s like pulling teeth. “You intrigue me.”
“Is that meant to be a compliment?” Gi-hun is a little terrified. Mostly confused. Definitely angry, some version of it. It’s caustic in his stomach, furious and boiling like acid. It would be easy to mistake it for heat. “I’m not some - science experiment for you to dissect. I’m not here for your entertainment.”
“I’ve never met anyone quite like you,” the Frontman says, and even through the heavy, heavy layers of the voice moderator, Gi-hun can tell that he’s sincere. “Am I not allowed to be intrigued?”
This time, it’s Gi-hun who hangs up, heart pounding, lungs bereft of breath.
The next time the Frontman calls, Gi-hun is sitting in his car, eyes pinned on the many glowing screens and half-heartedly scarfing down an onigiri. Despite not having eaten all day, the small bit of hunger he managed to convince himself he felt all dissipates when he sees his alight phone screen, his personal phone, the one resting on his thigh. His food turns to ash on his tongue.
He shouldn’t answer as quickly as he does.
“You are looking for me.”
“Yeah, yeah, don’t let it go to your head,” Gi-hun grumbles, even though he knows it’s far too late for that.
“For what purpose?” The Frontman asks. There isn’t the slightest waver of uncertainty to be found in the hinterland of his voice.
“What?”
“What do you intend to do when you find me?”
“Wring your neck,” Gi-hun says, absentmindedly tearing the wrapper in between his fingers.
“You wouldn’t,” the Frontman says. Gi-hun bares his teeth, even though the other man can’t see him.
But maybe, just maybe, he can.
“I would,” Gi-hun says. Promises. “I wouldn’t kill you, that wouldn’t be conductive. That wouldn’t do anything to actually stop the games, I know that. But I’d still want to make you bleed.”
“Oh?” The words come across the phone far breathier than they should. Is it fear? Please, let it be fear. Gi-hun swallows thickly.
“You aren’t invincible,” Gi-hun says, but his words are a light graze, a cat scratch, because he’s thinking about his fingers around a bare throat, squeezing, shaking, fingernails ripping down his wrists, the desperate struggle of a cornered beast, eyes flashing, fangs bared, the frantic jump of a rabid pulse and the constricted flutter of airflow. Strangulation, Gi-hun realizes, might be the most intimate way to kill. To die. It is a passion, of some kind, to hold another’s life inside of your hands.
Gi-hun’s own throat tenses under phantom hands. He imagines their roles reversed, imagines dying without ever getting to see a face, staring into the pitch-black voids where maybe eyes do not even hide. His lunch threatens to make another appearance.
“What are you thinking about?” The Frontman asks, his voice broken glass rasping down Gi-hun’s raw flesh As if Gi-hun can tell him-
“I never thought of killing anyone until I met you,” Gi-hun blurts out, and the words score his tongue like barbed wire. It can’t be helped, they can’t be kept in his mouth, he’d choke on all of the blood, but it hurts even more to say. It hurts not in a wholly unpleasant way and the absence of that hurt, somehow, is an agony greater than he has ever known.
His stomach fills with dread. Pulses with it. It radiates a strange, disconcerting heat, exactly like the pain of a wound.
“You’re playing with fire, Player 456,” the Frontman breathes, and before Gi-hun could even hope to elaborate - as if he could, as if there is anything cold enough to soothe the burn of his words - the Frontman has hung up, leaving Gi-hun a choice; to cut his losses, extinguish the flames, or to toss more oil into this fire’s glowing maw.
“Let’s play a game,” Gi-hun says, in an almost conversational tone, the next time the Frontman calls. “Since you’re so fond of those.”
“A game?” The Frontman repeats. Gi-hun swirls the soju left in the bottle - there isn’t nearly enough, but the liquid sloshes in his gut, weighs down his limbs, poised to spill back up his throat at any second. He’s drunk himself sick. Drunk himself stupid. But it’s been months since he’s heard the Frontman’s heavy voice and his too-raw words. His dreams don’t count.
Gi-hun knows the Frontman won’t say no. It’s gratifying yet incredibly irritating to be proven right.
“What sort of game did you have in mind?”
“Truth or dare,” Gi-hun grins, the curve of it a slash upon his face. A quiet scuffle ensues, soft breaths of movement like the Frontman was standing, perhaps even pacing, and he is now sitting down, settling in. Listening whole-heartedly.
“Truth or dare, hm?” the other asks, - laughs - and Gi-hun can imagine the ‘smile’ he wears matches his own. “But aren’t you only interested in the truth?”
Gi-hun scoffs, “Well, you wouldn’t have been interested if that was all I asked for.” The Frontman has the good sense not to deny it.
“What are the stakes?”
“If you don’t play, I’ll never answer another call of yours,” Gi-hun says, and he’s bluffing, of course he is, and the Frontman must know it, but they promised each other the honesty, not the truth and, as Gi-hun has learned, those are two entirely different matters.
“What will be the penalty if we decide not to answer a truth or forfeit a dare?”
“You’re assuming I’ll have a question you won’t be able to answer?”
“Are you saying you’ll answer any and all of mine?”
Gi-hun drains the dregs, licking his lips as he sets the bottle down with a heavy thud. “I guess we’ll decide on a penalty when we need one.”
“Make it up as we go?” Gi-hun can hear the grin in the Frontman’s voice, the not-so-subtle taunt. Well, whatever. Gi-hun has been improvising this entire fucking time, and he’s still alive, even if only barely. Even if only to sate his starved vengeance.
Gi-hun can hear nothing of the outside world from where he sits; everything is suspended, a held breath, divorced from this damned world of their own creation, and amidst the hot rush of his heartbeat, the only tangible thing, Gi-hun softly asks,
“Truth or dare?”
The Frontman responds, in his strange, subterfuge voice, just as whisper-soft, “Truth.”
Gi-hun asks what he has wanted to ask for a while. A long, long while. It had eaten him alive, gnawed him raw. “Was there ever anyone you wanted to save?”
The silence that follows is louder than any scream.
“Yes,” the Frontman responds, and nothing more. But that isn’t good enough. Gi-hun wants more.
He wants everything.
“Who?”
“It isn’t your turn,” the Frontman chides, and Gi-hun bites back a frustrated curse. “Player 456, truth or dare?”
“Truth,” Gi-hun replies, a touch of sarcasm in his voice, but he is genuinely curious as to what truth the Frontman would desire from him.
“If we had played the games together, would you have tried to save me?”
This time, it’s Gi-hun who’s submerged into silence, gripping it with both of his hands as he tries to claw his way out, searching for an answer that won’t betray his integrity, nor his promise to be honest, but an answer that doesn’t sound as dark and aching than the immediate one that scores his tongue.
“Yes,” Gi-hun says, without barely a waver in his voice, but he’s only half there, one foot planted firmly in the past, in the dirt, begging Oh Il-nam to finish the game, plotting against an old man, his gganbu, as the marbles grew clammy in his hands. If he closes his eyes they turn into bullets. Suddenly he can’t hold them all.
As if he’d spoken his thoughts aloud, or as if they are simply just that loud, too deafening to be contained the Frontman sighs.
“I almost believe you.”
As if he knows exactly what Gi-hun’s thinking.
He probably does.
It feels as if the Frontman is inside of his head.
Gi-hun tastes bile. “Truth or dare?”
“Truth.”
“How many people have you killed?”
“You want an exact number?” The Frontman asks. “I’m assuming that you place the blame for every single player’s death on me, even though they made the choice. I wasn’t holding a gun to their heads. I wasn’t even holding the gun that shot them.”
Gi-hun sets his jaw, “Then how many people have you killed with your own hands?”
“Why do you think I can recall an exact number?”
You must. “I know you do.” You have to.
Silence reigns. After what feels like hours of listening to empty air, Gi-hun is convinced that is the only answer he will receive. Hell, maybe its the only one this monster can give him - perhaps he doesn’t even know.
But then he hears it, a quiet confession. “Twenty-two.”
This time, it is Gi-hun who only has silence to say in return.
There are no winners in this game. Only survivors - just barely, if you can call wandering this earth half-alive, ghostlike, as surviving. Perhaps there are fates worse than death.
“And you?”
“...And me what?” Gi-hun asks, dreading the answer, because he knows, he knows exactly what the Frontman is about to ask.
“How many people do you feel you have killed?” His voice is like a live animal trying to claw its way out of Gi-hun’s skull. “Because I know though you’ve never killed before, you still feel like a murderer, don’t you?” Of course, the Frontman knows this about him. Why even ask? He just wants to hear Gi-hun admit it.
“For hundred fifty-five,” Gi-hun’s throat burns from the admission, the absence of truth yet utter, flayed honesty that is ripped from him. Yes, he is a murderer who has never bloodied his own hands. If he were to kill the Frontman - if he were to lose control of his hands - would it even feel like a murder? Or something like justice? “Tell me your name,” Gi-hun knows he’ll be denied an answer before the laugh even comes.
“That would make things entirely too easy for you, player 465,” The Frontman chuckles, a sound of pure sin. Deep and darkly, endlessly amused. “It would ruin the game.”
“Fine. I’ll just have to find it myself,” Gi-hun concedes, trying not to sigh as he lies down on his back. He stares up at the ceiling, huffing out a laugh of his own, though his is far more like a taunt, to hide the frustration lurking beneath. “But shouldn’t you at least give me a clue? What’s the use in looking for a needle in a haystack?”
“It’s not important,” The Frontman says, and though the voice modulator makes his voice inflectionless, entirely indiscernible, it sounds almost heavier, carrying a certain weight Gi-hun feels pressing down on his shoulders every day. “To know the name of a dead man.”
Gi-hun’s brows furrow, trying to parse that one out. But as usual, he’s met with more questions before he can even discern the sharp, sharp edges of an answer.
“Truth or dare?”
Gi-hun licks his chapped lips. “You failed your turn.”
“So I did,” the Frontman agrees. An honest monster. “Must we come up with a penalty then?”
“It only seems fair. All games have a penalty, right?” Gi-hun mocks. “A winner and a loser?”
“Then what do you propose I do? Shoot myself?” The Frontman drawls. Gi-hun isn’t sure what the idea of that makes him feel. Of course, the man is joking, but Gi-hun pictures it, really pictures it, that formless, dark amalgamation, half-monster and half-man, kneeling in the dirt, hands held above his head, staring into the gaping maw of a gun pointed straight at his chest. Unwittingly, his heartbeat picks up. Gi-hun sinks further into his mattress, squeezing his eyes shut, colors dancing in abstract shapes behind his eyelids.
Then a crackling sigh bleeds through the receiver, followed by the distinct sound of a swallow. “A shot for every question we refuse to answer? Do you have any alcohol?”
Of course, he does. He has too much fucking soju around him, and not enough of anything else.
“Yeah,” Gi-hun mutters, sitting up, reaching towards his bedside table and opening up another one, taking a swig just for the hell of it.
“Very well, then,” The Frontman responds in a liquor-soaked voice, the swallow of poison reverberating through Gi-hun’s ears. His vision is beginning to go hazy. “Truth or dare player 456?”
“Truth,” Gi-hun drawls, smacking his lips. His words are beginning to slur.
“Why did you want to stop the game?”
Gi-hun frowns. Shouldn’t the Frontman know this? “Because they aren’t games. It’s sadistic. It's a mass slaughter.”
“No, no, not the games,” the Frontman says with a barely concealed sigh. He sounds impatient. He sounds….. hungry. “The last game. The squid game.”
Suddenly, despite the warmth of alcohol suffused throughout his supine body, Gi-hun feels cold. Deathly cold.
“Why, when you were on the edge of everything, did you almost give it up for another player who had almost killed you just moments before?” The Frontman continues - insists.
Gi-hun swallows, tastes bile. He should kill the Frontman for even daring to ask the question. For not knowing the answer.
“How dare you,” Gi-hun hisses, but it comes out weak. Wounded. “How dare you ask me that.”
“I’ve never been able to understand it, which is why I ask.”
Gi-hun barks out a laugh that feels like razor blades slicing his throat. “Even if I explained, you still wouldn’t understand.”
“Do you think he would have asked to stop the games, were your positions reversed?” the Frontman presses - presses on the wound, digs a knife in under the skin, opening it up just to watch it bleed. “Would he have saved you?”
Yes, Gi-hun wants to shout, wants to snap the Frontman’s neck - but the assertion gets stuck in his throat, where it stays. A prison of his own creation. They promised each other honesty, not the truth, but this feels like neither. What is Gi-hun supposed to say? He doesn’t know.
Sangwoo was - he wasn’t a bad person. He was doing what he felt he needed to do. He just wanted to survive. They all did. The games did this to them. Destroyed them. Killed them once and then brought their corpses back as puppets. They were changed. The Sangwoo Gi-hun knew would have never-
Killed a girl who was already bleeding out.
Came at him with dark, angry eyes who saw Gi-hun as just another obstacle to eliminate.
Perhaps he never knew Sangwoo at all.
Closing his eyes isn’t enough. Gi-hun pushes the heel of his palm into his eyesockets, hard, hard enough that colors streak across his vision, differing variations of red, red, red, like he’s trying to blind himself, as if maybe, in this way, he’ll never have to look at the truth or a lie disguised as the truth or a grotesque amalgamation of the two ever again.
Softer, as softly as the robotic voice can get, the Frontman asks, “What did he mean to you?”
Everything. He was once Gi-hun’s best friend. A symbol of a brighter future. A canvas on which to paint his wildest hopes and dreams. A chance to live another life, one where he might’ve been happy.
Sangwoo was the line between humanity, and whatever Gi-hun is now.
Gi-hun lifts the rim to his lips and whispers into the bottle, “Forfeit,” Which is more damning than any other answer he could have given.
He can almost feel the Frontman’s smile of victory against his skin.
It goes on like this for who knows how long. Time ceases to exist. They go back and forth, revealing truths that both mean nothing and everything. His soju bottle slowly drains, and the Frontman’s swallows grow more frequent. Gi-hun finds it all to be infuriating, yet thrilling and - and something else. Something darker, something deeper. Something that does not quite have a name.
It’s startling how easy it is to stew in this quiet resentment. This terrible companionship. The sharp edges of his rage have been dulled, worn down by constantly cutting himself upon them. It’s simpler. Gi-hun has to save his energy, after all.
It also loosens Gi-hun, dangerously, and he only realizes it when it’s too late, when the Frontman asks-
“Truth or dare?”
And Gi-hun, with soju thrumming hot and heady through his veins, too fucking much of it, carelessly, recklessly, defiantly drawls, “Dare.”
There’s silence, for just a moment. This is unexpected. Unprecedented. Gi-hun goes to sit up but alcohol has rendered him helpless, more a thing of suggestion. The room is spinning and he grunts as he falls back, propping himself up on his elbow with a muffled curse.
That voice bleeds through the phone, and it somehow threatens to press him back onto the mattress. Suffocate him. Steal his breath away.
“What are you doing right now?”
Gi-hun shuts his eyes. He’s drunk, officially. He thinks he could fall asleep, like this. “Lying in bed.”
“Are you?” That voice asks, tone even and mild. Gi-hun thinks he is being asked more than he knows - but he often feels that way when talking to this man, as if he is drowning in a sea of all the things they have left unspoken. Then, more words float into his ears, a life preserver against the uncertainty, “What are you wearing?”
Gi-hun blinks, syrup slow. He doesn’t take the Frontman’s meaning. “What, you mean to tell me one of your cronies isn’t watching me right now?”
“Of course not,” the Frontman laughs - the sound softer than it normally is. Strangely subdued. “It’s only you and I here. What are you wearing?”
All at once, it hits him. It hits him hard, like a gut punch. Suspicion slides under his skin like a sliver, a fish hook, and Gi-hun’s tongue traces his teeth, carefully considering his next move.
It can’t possibly be what he thinks.
“That’s personal,” Gi-hun’s voice is quiet but rough. Teetering on the precipice of something terrible.
“Is it?” The Frontman asks. He sounds as if he knows exactly what he is doing. “More personal than watching the revelation that passes through a person when they realize what’s needed for survival?”
Gi-hun sucks in a breath. It doesn’t help, doesn’t feel as if it has even touched his lungs.
“You’ll be disappointed,” he hears himself saying. For a moment, it doesn’t sound like his voice. At the same time, it’s the most he’s sounded like himself in years. “I’m just wearing a T-shirt. And a pair of old boxers.”
There was a clock ticking inside Gi-hun’s room. Tick-tick-tick. He heard a soft, pleased intake of breath.
“How could that disappoint me?” The Frontman asks. His voice seems disconcertingly human. “Right now, I am the furthest thing from disappointed.”
So, it’s a game of chicken now? But hadn’t it always been? Gi-hun’s head was spinning, but was, in this moment, remarkably clear. He was certain this clarity would be snatched away soon, but for now, he luxuriated in it. In the thought of how honesty always comes at a price.
Gi-hun waits for the Frontman’s next move.
“Are you touching yourself?”
Gi-hun’s lips are dry. His tongue darts out, but they stay just as dry. “No.”
“Touch yourself, then,” the Frontman suggests, and although the words are like the thud of a fist against unyielding metal, in Gi-hun’s ears they are silky and suggestable. It’s why he finds himself whispering back,
“How?”
Even before being given the command, Gi-hun feels his treacherous hand sliding lower. His teeth sink in deep to his bottom lip before he’s even touched himself.
“Start slowly. Tug your shirt up, or else you’ll make a mess. Run your hand down your stomach, but do it softly. So you’ll barely feel a thing.”
Gi-hun should have resented being given orders. Should have refused to follow them, just to spite the bastard. Leave him with his dick in his hands, so to speak. Though - wasn’t that a thought? Was the Frontman getting off to this? Touching himself on the other side, all alone in the quiet dark, listening to Gi-hun’s fractured breaths, closing his eyes to picture the scene in vivid detail? What was he picturing?
Was he picturing Gi-hun doing exactly as he said? Because admittedly, shamefully, Gi-hun was. His shirt was rucked up and cool air bit at his exposed skin, and his hand was gliding downwards, his abdomen jumping under the touch of fingers that were trembling but certain.
When he reaches down and grips himself, a firm grasp that momentarily stills the rabbit-quick beat of his heart, he feels as if he is losing something precious, something vital in doing this, but he knows if he were to give up now he would lose something greater. His tether. His lifeline.
It wouldn’t just be a loss. Gi-hun would forfeit something, something integral, and he would never have it again, it would always lay just out of reach. After all of this work, he would be left with nothing more than a white flag. And that was unconscionable. Unbearable to even consider.
Gi-hun’s eyes unconsciously flutter shut, as if he doesn’t watch himself doing this, then it will never have been done. But he cannot escape from the physicality of the action. He can escape his mind, but never his body. The body knows, it remembers. The body scars and Gi-hun feels as if his entirety is simply one giant, ugly wound that never healed right, and now never will.
But for a moment, it feels good. Gi-hun expects it to pass quickly, to be replaced by shame and self-loathing in the blink of an eye, but even as he begins stroking himself, shakily and hideously dry, something begins to well up in the depths of him. Something dark, something dangerous. A black, malicious pleasure that simmers in his veins like fire.
“Are you touching yourself?” The Frontman asks. His voice is a deep and quiet purr. He is a pleased beast. Something flips in Gi-hun’s gut at the sound of it. Precum begins leaking down his shaft, slickening the slide.
“Yes,” he whispers back, so quiet it may have been lost in the soft rasp of flesh against flesh, the sound now unmistakably wet, had he not heard the Frontman’s sharp breath at the admission.
“How?” he asks. Greedy, so greedy. “Describe it to me. Every last detail.”
Gi-hun’s throat twitches like he wants to give a strangled laugh. Instead his head tips back, throat bared in a way he’s only comfortable with because they are certainly kilometers apart. A whole world, perhaps. In this moment the Frontman might as well not even exist, a figment of his imagination.
Except for his voice. That voice, constantly ringing through his head, could not be conjured up in a simple dream
“I’m - jerking myself off?” Gi-hun tries and fails to hide his bemusement. He feels like an idiot - worse than that, maybe, since he’s too stupid to stop. “It's pretty, ah, self-explanatory. What else am I supposed to say?”
“Have you never had phone sex before?” The Frontman drawls, but the question isn’t exactly mocking. His curiosity is genuine. Gi-hun huffs.
“It’s not your turn,” Gi-hun screws his eyes shut. He doesn’t want to think about what this all means. This is a game, nothing more. They’ve burrowed under each other’s skin in a strictly calculative way. This is a dance between predators, undead men, nothing more.
Gi-hun’s never seen the point of it, phone sex. If he wants to fuck, he’ll find the real thing. It had always seemed pointless, until now. Yes, until now, he has never had phone sex, has never breathed down the receiver, took himself in hand, all with the knowledge that the person on the other side was listening as he brought himself off, closer and closer to the edge, depraved, wanton, unrestrained. A bitch in heat. No, he’s never had sex over the phone, never phone sex - because that’s what this is, isn’t it? Maybe Gi-hun always thought himself above it, before. He used to think of himself as above a lot of things which says a lot, considering the types of things he used to do to pay off his gambling debts, only to rack them up sky high again and again.
Once a gambler, always a gambler. He just has bigger, deadlier, bloodier debts to settle, now.
But he’s doing this because he needs the Frontman to be real. Gi-hun realizes this suddenly, sharply. That’s why he’s doing this. Stoking the fire that’s been steadily burning in the deepest, darkest depths of him since he heard that rough voice telling him it’s for your own good. Gi-hun needs what he can never have again - absolution, true absolution. And if he can’t have that, he at least needs someone else to help him bear the weight of these sins.
Somehow, the thought of that makes this easier to swallow.
Better than the thought that he’s too damned to do nothing more than keep swallowing more and more poison down.
“Then I’ll tell you what you should be doing,” the Frontman murmurs, his voice somehow soft through the voice modulator. Silky with promise. And fuck, it’s so demeaning, so degrading how his cock throbs eagerly at those words. “You should be stroking yourself, slowly. Not too fast. We don’t want the game to end prematurely. Draw it out. Ride the edge of pleasure and pain.”
Gi-hun could’ve disobeyed. The Frontman would never know. Or, better yet, he could have hung up, put an end to this madness once and for all. Still, he couldn’t stop himself from biting into his bottom lip as he did exactly what the shadowy figure on the other side had commanded him to do, his grip just tight enough for the teeth in his skin to feel like a pinch of relief. A shaky breath wormed through his throat.
Then, Gi-hun hears fabric ruffling, then a clink of metal. A soft grunt.
Fuck.
The ceiling spins above him, or maybe it’s just his head. It feels as if he’s stuck on a merry-go-round, going in endless circles, threatening to spin out - but he can’t get off. There’s no getting off this ride; no stopping this game. It only ends in death.
But here they both were, going farther and farther until they tipped over the precipice, unable to ever go back. Was the Frontman trapped on this ride with him? It felt less like a game the longer it goes on, the jerk of his wrist, the clicking of the fine bones, the gritting of his teeth and the watering of his eyes all indicators that this isn’t really a game at all. He lets go of himself just to hiss quietly through his teeth; he can feel his heartbeat in his cock. He’s so hard it hurts. He feels savage with the need to cum-
No, to hear the Frontman lose himself, to gain just a shred of vulnerability, strip raw flesh straight from the bone.
He imagines the Frontman here, touching him.
Would it be a hand trailing across his stomach, or a knife?
Or a gun?
Would Gi-hun be able to push him off?
Or would his strength be overwhelming, effortlessly overpowering, leaving Gi-hun helpless to do anything else but suffocate?
Would he lick the last breath from his lips?
His heart is a bloody punch against his ribs. Gi-hun is suffused with heat, fevered, almost frantic, gritting his teeth as he grips himself bruisingly at the base, trying to stave off what now feels inevitable.
“What are you thinking about?” The Frontman asks, his voice rasping, unravelling, as if he’s dying to know.
Gi-hun’s thoughts are running rampant: What would he smell like? What would he taste like? His skin prickles with discomfiting heat. He shivers, alight.
It feels like a kind of violence. One he is coming to understand intimately.
But Gi-hun can’t say any of that. He’s already as naked as he can bear to be. So he parries, deflects, “What are you thinking?”
“How good you sound,” the Frontman whispers, and Gi-hun immediately clamps his mouth shut. It’s good timing, too, because the words surge through him, pushing him dangerously close to the edge.
His fists spasms around the sensitive head of his cock, and the sound that escapes the confines of his lips is guttural. He strains upwards, as if seeking something. Moving his lips, searching for something wordless, his hips jerking in needy bursts. Fuck, if the Frontman really could see him like this - he would die. It would be a true little death.
Gi-hun bites down onto his lip harder, knowing surely a mark will form. He shudders out an exhalation, stroking himself quicker now, and quicker still when the Frontman makes the mistake of letting slip a rough moan.
Or perhaps it was on purpose. Perhaps the Frontman wants to tease Gi-hun with the knowledge that he can be touched - but not in the way Gi-hun desires. Giving him the carrot while holding the stick just out of reach.
“I want to know every part of you,” the Frontman breathes, his voice like thick, suffocating ash.
“You’d like to dissect me,” Gi-hun pants, then, no longer bothering to be quiet or subtle. He’s all alone, here in his bed, alone with the Frontman, a man who has ruined him, who sees him, a man who knows him yet who cannot understand him at all. It’s a challenge. A declaration of war. “Tear me apart.”
“No,” the Frontman denies. “Not entirely. Nothing so permanent.”
“Ah,” the sound is positively pornographic. Gi-hun thinks he hears the Frontman hiss through his teeth, biting off a curse. “You like the thrill of the game, don’t you?”
“I like the satisfaction of solving a mystery.”
“Is that what I am? A mystery?”
“Yes,” the Frontman half-laughs, half-moans. “Yes.”
The rough and frantic sound of wet skin against skin finally hits the speakers.
Gi-hun feels drunk. He feels desperate. His breathing grows labored, his words suddenly broken by a gasp at the Frontman’s final, most damning confession. Or, a lie that is his most compelling, infuriating, enthralling one yet.
“I can’t get you out of my head,” quiet, hushed, a confession. A knife slicing through his neck and an explosive release like arterial spray.
And it isn’t a defeat, but it’s not a victory, either. Gi-hun thinks it does feel a bit like death - but to a ghost like him, what does it matter?
It feels a bit like a heavy wallet in his back pocket that he’ll surely lose. It feels like the liquor simmering in his gut, the sick that will crawl up his throat the morning after.
The Frontman does not call again after that night. Instead, they meet again months later, in the exact same car, though now a bullet-proof partition window separates them.
But Gi-hun somehow knows he’s here. In this very car. He’d want to be close. He is Gi-hun’s shadow.
Gi-hun’s skin itches with electricity, with adrenaline. He leans forward, baring his teeth.
“I sincerely hoped you would have a good life,” the voice says, that fucking voice, coming through a golden pig’s mouth no less. It’s all so horribly unfunny. “I hoped you’d forget everything that happened and be happy.”
As if he could have. As if it wasn’t already too late when the first drop of blood spilled.
Gi-hun died in that sangine stained field, under a cloudless blue sky.
“I didn’t know you cared so much about me,” Gi-hun responds, sarcasm thick in his tone. He doesn’t want to consider whether their rule of telling the truth is still in place. “I’m almost moved to tears.”
“You should have got on that plane,” the Frontman says, that infuriating fucking line again. “that would have been the best choice you could have made.”
“I have never forgotten what happened,” Gi-hun gets out through grit teeth. His heart is pounding so fiercely it hurts. “That’s why I wanted to see you again so badly.”
A pause. Gi-hun’s next breath passes shakingly through his lungs. They can’t be far behind. Jun-ho and his team will catch up to them, any moment now.
“Well, here I am,” The Frontman says, an oxymoron. “Say what you want to say. What do you want of me?”
“Stop the game. Once and for all.”
“The game?” Gi-hun almost rolls his eyes. Is he being purposefully obtuse, or is he asking: which games? The games of slaughter? Or the game between me and you?
The answer, to both, is yes, just shy of please, just short of I'll kill you if it goes on.
“The one you’ve been playing. The one that I know is still going on.”
“We only created it. All of you participate of your own free will.”
“That’s a load of shit and you know it,” Gi-hun spits. He could kill the Frontman. He could kill him here, right now. Drive them both of a cliff - put an end to at least one game. “You take advantage of desperate people, and watch as they die to entertain your clients.”
“Anyone who died was merely eliminated. Trash removed from the world. It happened; it will continue to. The game won't end until the world changes.”
Gi-hun’s stomach roils with nausea as it digests the words of this ghost, this monster, this terrible, inhuman apathetic cruelty that masquerades in the shape of a man. “You say this is just the way the world works, but that’s just the story you hide behind to excuse your atrocities.”
“You’ve become more eloquent,” A beat. And then: “Were you planning to kidnap me?”
And it’s that easy. It’s that easy to bring Gi-hun to his knees. It’s over, it’s all over. Of course, the Frontman wouldn’t risk this without having a plan in place.
But then, Gi-hun wouldn’t be a very good gambler if he let his poker face fall now, if he didn’t have one last trick up his sleeve.
“Let me play the game again.”
“You want to play again?” Is it Gi-hun’s imagination, or does the Frontman sound almost incredulous? Excited? Afraid?
No, a voice that distorted cannot possibly be discerned.
“Your rich bosses will love it, won’t they? A returning winner. Make it all the more entertaining,” Gi-hun insists. “I can prove it to you. That you’re wrong. The world isn’t always going to work, the way you think it should.”
“....So be it.” The Frontman relents.
And so they drug him, again. Gi-hun wouldn’t expect any less. The black welcomes him back like an old friend. But he holds his breath and he doesn’t look away from the man who sits on the other side of that partition, who he knows is watching him right back, watching as he gets back on the merry-go-round to play another fucking game.
I’ll see you soon. One day, you son of a bitch, you’ll be on your knees in front of me.
And I will show no mercy.
You may have been a ghost once, but I see you now. I see you.