Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Some time after dying, Sang-woo wakes up.

A younger, more naive Sang-woo might’ve thought he was in heaven. Wherever he is, it's bright. The insides of his eyelids glow a lambent red, embellished with a tracery of capillaries.

The morphine does a good job of letting his logic regress. Only heaven, he thinks. Only heaven could shine like this.

It’s important to note that Sang-woo had never been a pious man at any point in his life. Instead, he’d always been a firm believer in the idea that, when people prayed to God, they were really praying to their fathers. So far, he hadn’t had any desire to invoke his own. However, his fear of death meant that he’d found it easier to hope that He had something merciful in store for him despite his many sins. Perhaps God could forgive him where both he and his clients could not.

But the Sang-woo that lies in this hospital bed knows that, if there really is something waiting for him after life has run its course, it certainly isn’t salvation. 

His eyes peel open. Harsh white sears his vision. If this is heaven, it hurts. As consciousness returns the feeling to the rest of his body, he becomes aware of a dull ache that has settled into his very marrow. Next comes the sensation of a scratchy mattress beneath him. The pallid glare beating down on him isn't from the sun or some other divine luminary; instead, a plaster ceiling yawns overhead, its blank expanse somehow perfectly featureless.

The intrusive poke of an IV drip, the way the smell of isopropyl alcohol stings his nose – Sang-woo can imagine he’s become stuck in an old memory far away from the games. This hospital room is a mere afterimage playing across the retinas of his corpse. If he turns his head, he’s sure he’d feel his mother plant a papery hand over his and chide him for not resting.

But that doesn’t happen. Even turning his head doesn’t go as planned. A thick swathe of bandage chafes against the skin of his throat, and a dumb, animal panic takes hold, causing his fingers to itch with the need to tear it off, along with all the wires and tubes taped on or jammed inside him.

He doesn’t do any of that, either. Sang-woo soon finds that simple movements have become unbearable, especially around his head region. Even swallowing feels wrong. 

A real memory comes to him then, unbidden, of how the breath had come gargling through the blood stopping up his windpipe. Of how his flesh had throbbed around the knife’s cool, slender body for a mere moment before a hand jerked it back out, his hand, and his life spilled out onto the wet sand. Sang-woo counts the seconds the wound had remained naked, smarting and weeping in the open air, until another palm clamped over the breach, slick with rain and sweat. He remembers how it had felt like he was drowning. 

He remembers letting himself drown.

“Cho Sang-woo.”

For some reason, he can’t even bring himself to be surprised by the careful sound of his name in a stranger’s mouth. Slowly, gingerly, he tilts his head to the right, the stubble on his jaw scraping the thin pillow. 

The rest of the room is no more interesting than the ceiling. White walls mirror a white linoleum floor which shines like it’d been cleaned in anticipation for Sang-woo’s waking. He can just about see the stool on which the man sits. It’s the only thing in here that seems out of the ordinary; unlike the flexible chairs or cushioned benches expected of a hospital room, it’s almost brutalist in its shape, not much more than a bleached slab of cement on four stout legs.

He’s instantly reminded of the architecture of those blocky, pastel-coloured stairways, stark and geometric despite their soft coats of paint. The man matches the stool perfectly. He looks to be an extension of its concrete form, his silhouette all hard lines and sharp edges, like he himself had been cut into existence with a masonry saw. 

The man isn’t facing him. The hair on the back of his head is neatly cropped, and a black, high-collared coat almost hides the vulnerable spot where his spine joins his skull. Almost.

He doesn’t even pause to wonder how quickly his mind has started to anticipate attempts at violence. He blames it on the lack of a mask. Sang-woo finds that part the most terrifying; whoever he is, he clearly doesn’t care for anonymity. Adrenaline has made him lucid enough to deduce that there are two possible reasons for his lack of qualms: either Sang-woo was going to die in this very room, or he'd be enjoying an incredibly long stay. Either way, he would never leave this island.

“Cho Sang-woo,” the man repeats, leaning forward a little in contemplation. Already, Sang-woo knows that he hates him. His clothing, his rigid shoulders. Most of all, he hates the way his voice shapes each syllable like a question. He almost prefers being called a number again.

“How long?”

Sang-woo winces inwardly at how quiet and tinny his own voice has become after extensive disuse. The man doesn’t even flinch. 

Even though that wasn’t what he was asking, the words float up anyway: how long had he been here? Had they picked up an elevated heartbeat, a jagged green line on a monitor, and sent him in? Or had he been waiting, parroting Sang-woo’s name in a thousand different tones, cracking it against the walls like a crow with a nut?

Just as he assumes he won’t be given an answer, that clear, placid tone sounds again. “A little over two weeks.”

He doesn’t know why he asked in the first place. The words mean nothing to him, especially within the confines of this alabaster cell, where time has as little erosional power as water lapping at the edges of a bathtub. 

Nevertheless, he tries to grasp it. Two weeks he’s been in here, drowsing and fantasising of death, the idea of which is still so close he can taste it, feel its coolness clinging to his lips like a film of poison. A lot can happen in two weeks. His mind had been blissfully empty upon waking up, but he now finds it crowded with its usual parade of disconsolate thoughts. 

A name jumps up his throat, but falls silent upon reaching his mouth. He watches the man. A nauseous sort of rage begins to curdle the bile in his stomach, and the itching returns to his fingers, this time with the urge to wrap them around the stranger's neck. 

Sang-woo can’t say the name he's thinking of. Actually, he can’t do anything at all. Anger, sorrow, fear; the man’s dark form bends the lines of the room towards him like a black hole, the point of singularity that will suck Sang-woo in by the heartstrings. With an odd, astonishing clarity, he looks at this stranger and knows him – not in the way you’d know a friend or even an adversary, but how Sang-woo expects people to know God. From the monolith of his back, Sang-woo recognises that He will drink his tears, his sweat, only to savour the aftertaste of his agony.

It is in this hospital room that Sang-woo accepts he will never love God. Currently, he wants to be the one to kill Him. Ironically, he longs for the knife that had, two weeks prior, left his own throat gaping like a pig carcass hung up to bleed at a butcher’s stall. It becomes apparent to him that bloodstains would not show up on the man’s coat. 

“Why?” he tries, the ghost of the knife’s handle startlingly cold in his balled fist.

‘God’ hums. Sang-woo’s teeth begin to ache with how hard he’s gritting them. He could’ve yelled that word a hundred more times, a thousand, just to see whether these unsympathetic walls would even grant him an echo.

In the face of the man’s great and terrible silence, Sang-woo suddenly supposes that he will die right here and now. The question wasn’t why, but why not? Sang-woo had lost the game. That much was obvious. His heart thrums in the barrel of his chest, sent into a frenzy not unlike that experienced by livestock who realise the shack they’ve been dragged into is indeed the slaughterhouse. 

Two weeks ago, Sang-woo hadn't been afraid of dying at all. Not there in the rain. He remembers the damp sand beneath him feeling almost warm just before he’d passed out, as if he'd been laying on the wet, loamy lining of the earth's womb. A different God had been towering over him then, although that God had screamed and sobbed with a destructive, puerile abandon. The Lord of the playground – Seong Gi-hun. He’d thrust his knife between the tendons of that juvenile God’s hand. Sang-woo wonders whether even Christ had wailed nearly as loud when they fired the first nail through his palm and into the wood of the cross.

This blackened God on his concrete stool would have obliterated him.

“Do you know how to use a gun, Sang-woo?”

Gi-hun, Sang-woo thinks. Gi-hun, Gi-hun, Gi-hun.

The answer is yes. Although both of them know what Sang-woo would do if God pressed a loaded pistol into his hand.

‘God’ shifts on his stool. Sang-woo cannot imagine why He would be uncomfortable. He realises he will not die in this room – in fact, it will likely be a long time before he is allowed to even dream of death.

Without the man saying anything, Sang-woo gets the faint feeling that their conversation is over.

As He rises, he can’t even find the energy to be shocked at how soft, how calculating even his footfalls boil down to be. But this stranger isn't God. The muscles in Sang-woo’s back tighten like a bowstring drawn back, their atrophied state making them feel almost as thin. He'll strike when his back is turned, lock his hands around his throat until that supposedly immortal pulse is stilled forever. It's not like God would dare to kill him, and man is no longer God if Sang-woo knows the yield of his flesh. That was the mistake Gi-hun had made.

The man turns before opening the door. 

Man is also no longer God if Sang-woo knows his face.

He turns, and pauses. Not a turn at all, really; a slight tilt of his jaw, more like a stutter in his smooth, sweeping stride. He is thinking. Sang-woo strains to get a better look despite the strange, warning twinge in the left side of his neck.

The moment he assumes the man will simply resume his step and slip out the door, he tips his head an inch more to the right. A bare sliver of his side profile gleams in the bright, clinical light. Sang-woo registers nothing beyond the dark, clever eye that scans him with a glittering shrewdness before it blinks and swivels away. The last thing he sees is the back of the man’s head as the door swings open and closes softly behind him, leaving no evidence of his presence but a faraway stirring of the mild, stuffy air. 

Defeated, Sang-woo pitches his head back to its original position. He lies facing the ceiling once more.

There's nothing to feel apart from his consciousness ebbing away as they pump him full of sedatives. His vision goes from white to murky brown as his eyelids close of their own volition, then the familiar, infinite black of sleep.

Chapter Text

Four years later, Sang-woo dreams of a girl in a bed, her slumped shoulders barely propped up against its metal headboard. Even from a few feet away, he can smell the death on her like putrefying flesh. 

Sang-woo knows how this dream goes. He closes the distance between them and hovers by her bedside, numb. The knife’s handle is so slippery that he’s forced to practically strangle the hilt, his fingers locked protectively around its smooth, metal body. 

The girl glances up at him, eyes glazed and half-lidded. Can she hear how heavily he’s breathing? Can she see the blade flashing beneath the white, bony cordon of Sang-woo’s knuckles? He knows she can. He hates her for that, for the sharpness and the cynicism that lies under that damp, feverish brow. For that, he must kill her.

And he doesn’t do it gently.

Before he slits her throat, he is reminded of the day his mother showed him how to gut a fish. It was after school and already dark, yet brilliant with yellow light beneath the shop’s rafters. Gi-hun had been there too, naturally. They’d been inseparable back then. Sang-woo’s mother had declared him a rascal, but she pretended not to notice whenever he sampled her wares.

His eomma had donned them in thick, rubbery aprons of their own as well as disposable gloves that they had to hike halfway up their forearms. Gi-hun went first – he always did. Sang-woo watched dubiously as the other boy was guided through the routine of cutting off the fins and tail before scraping the scales with the knife’s spine. 

As expected, Gi-hun regularly made squeamish noises to express just how disgusting he found all of this. He finally cracked when the tip of the blade broke the fish’s belly, which prompted a yelp and an awkward jump backwards, as if the clotted slime had given him an electric shock. 

Sang-woo had smiled as his mother finished the task with ruthless efficiency, only pausing to mutter her disapproval, while Gi-hun paced round and round the table, shuddering and wringing his hands.

When it was his turn, he’d sworn to make all signs of fear or revulsion a totally private matter. The knife’s hard plastic handle felt powerful through the filmy barrier provided by the glove. The tail and fins came off in a flash. He’d seen his mother do this a million times before, and the movement had essentially become reflex from observation alone.

He made his mistake when slicing open the belly. His mother always did it so quickly; he didn’t think twice when he yanked the knife back with a savage jolt and ended up cutting the soft, taut stretch of skin between his thumb and index finger. It was nothing, really, barely a nick, but it bled wonderfully for the first couple of seconds. Sang-woo’s mother was all hurried footsteps and indignant fussing as she fixed him up with a plaster and plenty of reprimands. 

Sang-woo didn’t complain, even though he knew the plaster wouldn’t hold. He flexed his hand too often – everybody did – and the bandaid would soon peel off like a flake of dead skin, leaving the tiny wound raw and pink but thankfully bloodless. The only reason he was content with simply picking at the plaster’s cool, flappy edges was because of Gi-hun’s anxious stare, which constantly shifted between Sang-woo’s fidgeting and his presumably moody expression. 

When he kills Sae-byeok, there is no Gi-hun to lend him his puppy eyes and doleful patience. There is only Sang-woo and the knife. 

It happens all at once. Sang-woo leans forward and grabs her neck with his free hand, the flat of the blade pressed against the tender, clammy flesh. She struggles, but only the mandatory amount. They both know she won’t survive no matter what happens in the next few moments. She claws weakly at the air surrounding his arms, the gesture about as threatening as the dying spasms of a baby deer. Sae-byeok is the sacrificial lamb; Sang-woo is making a martyr.

He dimly realises that she already has a scar along the right side of her neck. Not wanting to reopen it, Sang-woo digs the point of the knife into her left jugular and splits her throat wide open.

The blood comes out in violent, treacly gouts. Even though he pulls back almost immediately, the initial spurt coats his cheek and soaks his hands with the hot reek of iron. Its warmth leaches into his palms as he shrinks away from the bed, his chest heaving erratically with the poisonous thrill of taking a life. 

Sae-byeok does not flail, nor drown, nor even choke as she continues to bleed and bleed and bleed. The only noise she makes is a faint, thready gurgling as her last few breaths bubble through her newest airway. 

There is something soothing about watching his clean incision become blackish and gummy with blood. The blood, her blood, is everywhere. By now, it’s not only dyed the bedsheets crimson but also made them luxuriously, abhorrently glossy. White cotton to red silk. Sang-woo thinks about the fish, how cold and dead its pinkish-grey entrails were in comparison to this visceral display. 

Somewhere far, far away, Sang-woo can hear someone banging on a door. He stares at Sae-byeok. Her lids have fluttered shut, feathering the rimy arch of her cheekbone with those fawn-like eyelashes.

She looks almost peaceful, curled up in the corner of a bed that now appears too big for her. Sang-woo has killed before, but only now does he realise how much smaller a body looks in death.

He wakes up when the banging stops and he knows they’re about to bring in the coffin.

The guard quarters are more cramped than he remembers. Walls swoop and squeeze in on him from all sides. Everything is too much, too loud after the blurry memory of his dream.

The nylon cling of his undershirt is unusually uncomfortable. He’s also already been clothed in the lurid jumpsuit courtesy of the guard uniform. His hands are drenched with sweat within the slick confines of his gloves. They usually only dress him up when it’s important that he be punctual, so Sang-woo takes the hint and begins the slow torture of clambering out of bed. 

Even four years after finding himself disturbingly alive in that hospital room, Sang-woo’s schedule consists largely of being knocked out, woken up, and knocked out again. Because of this, an air of drugged exhaustion sticks to him like the stench of vomit cleaves to a drunk. Sang-woo is an insomniac who spends the majority of his time in an induced coma. 

This isn’t to say that he doesn’t understand why things are they way they are. In fact, the purely rational part of him agrees with it. For the other guards, the games are but one meagre week a year that will never be spoken of again once they step back onto the mainland and resume their normal lives. In Sang-woo’s case, that week is the only reason his heart is still beating in his chest, and therefore the longest they dare to keep him conscious. 

He maintains his poker face – there are cameras on every corner of the ceiling, and likely more he doesn’t know about – as he gradually rises to perch seated on the edge of the bed’s rubbery mattress. It takes half a minute of rest for his joints to stop screaming in protest. Sang-woo uses this time to roll up his sleeve and examine the myriad of scars on the soft, pale skin of his inner forearm. 

Tiny bruises pockmark the sallow flesh, the scabby calling cards of all the tubes that have ever invaded him intravenously. They’re not particularly ugly; even the freshest is but a mild blot of burgundy on the crook of his elbow. He prods it experimentally. Tender, but not enough to make him wince. The oldest blemishes are beige echoes of their former, angrier selves.

A cocktail of sedatives lines his nostrils. The bruises are only significant because of his pallor. If Sang-woo had any colour still left in him, anyone would be confident in saying they’d healed over wonderfully, although he supposes that’s unsurprising, seeing as he’s this hospital’s only patient.

With one arthritic effort, Sang-woo hauls himself to his feet. The general ache seems to have lessened, and now he just feels thoroughly tired. Two masks beckon him from atop the plain white desk on the opposite wall: one fabric, one plastic. Both are black apart from the white, unbroken circle that loops across the plastic one’s grille surface. 

He looks in the mirror to delay putting them on. The pride of Ssangmun-dong stares back with the dead, glassy tact of a taxidermy piece. 

The likeness also lies in the wiry, hunched curve of his shoulders, as well as the defeat that lingers on the stark ridge of his brow and sinks his eyes deeper into his skull. A diet of dissolved nutrients pumped directly into his bloodstream has given Sang-woo the appearance of a winter rabbit: too lean-muscled and gamey to cook into a proper stew.

Funnily enough, his hair doesn’t look too different from how it was when he first landed on the island. The length is the same – perhaps somewhat shorter – and he’s forced to wear it combed back unless he wants hanks of it obscuring his vision. His jaw is sharper but still shadowed with the familiar sooty grey of fresh stubble. Sang-woo’s reflection is a husk, hollow-cheeked and hollow-bellied. His soul had congealed.

He picks up the balaclava and slips it over his harsh features, leaving nothing revealed but an ashen streak of skin and those terrible, haunted eyes. It takes longer for him to put on the second mask. Sang-woo turns it over in his hands a few times before clicking the clasp into place and pulling up his hood.

The world becomes meshed with darkness and he gains the faceless, wordless power which belongs to all the staff: the safety and status that comes with being just one drone in the hive. No identity, no individuality, no conscience. Sang-woo is a pawn amongst pawns, but a god amongst players.

He considers this for about two seconds before opening the door.

His quarters are isolated from any other facility in the labyrinth. He’s never even seen where the other guards’ dormitories are, but he assumes they’re at least grouped together by class. 

Cell 218, on the other hand, is the ugly duckling, situated on a lonely pastel-green bend which is so short you can actually resume along the main corridor in about six paces either direction. In fact, its sole purpose seems to be to house Sang-woo. As well as keeping him from possible co-conspirators.

Sang-woo doubts that there are over 200 circle guards on the island. If there are, he wonders whether Guards 217 and 219 ever question their adjacence. 

Either way, Sang-woo is a prize racehorse. He will bear this lucky number to his grave.

Two guards wait for him outside. Squares. Both are also likely to be men from their broad shoulders and tall, stocky statures. They carry the heft of those foreboding automatic rifles with a graceless sort of ease. They’re awkward with them – which makes sense, seeing as heavy artillery is a triangle’s job – but they’d somehow seem lopsided without the dark steel at their hips. Sang-woo has no doubt that they have more in common with their firearms than him. 

He can humour them all he likes, but he had a total of six guards supervising him on the walk to his first ever meeting. The gleam of their gun barrels were especially bright that day.

Apart from the games, the meetings are the only reason they wake him up. Being comatose as well as constantly underground has the tendency to mess up your sense of time, and they don’t bother giving Sang-woo a calendar, but by using the games as a chronological waypoint, he estimates he gets around ten meetings per year.

For the first three years, these meetings were exclusively with Young-il. The Officer had given him that name. He has no idea whether it’s his real one, but he covets anything that makes the Front Man as weak and inferior as the rest of his flock. 

He’d never gone to a psychiatrist’s office, but he imagines that one would have the same clinical discomfort as Young-il’s domain. Which is strange considering its black, crystalline panelling and glittering chandeliers. The general aroma was puzzling, too: a bizarre marriage of whiskey fumes and a very green cologne. It wasn’t unpleasant, but it carried the undeniable fetor of opulence, and that was enough to turn Sang-woo’s stomach.

Their first meeting had been spent in silence. Fury had curbed his tongue, and, frustratingly, Young-il seemed to know he wouldn’t be able to wring anything out of him. Sang-woo had stood there, seething, eyes fixed on the nape of his would-be interrogator’s neck, who’d contented himself with a drink. An hour later, his escort came to guide him back to bed.

By the time the second meeting rolled around, the drugs had cooled his blood and Sang-woo was ready to have an adult conversation. 

The atmosphere could not be likened to any other discourse he had ever partaken in. It wasn’t simply the awkward resentment between prisoner and captor; despite the quid pro quo nature of their discussions, he felt more like some despondent zoo animal who’d have a sharpened stick shoved through the bars of its cage every now and then. 

Each careful enquiry jabbed at his temper, the parts of him that had gone tender with age, like the bruises found on old, overripe fruit. Young-il poked and prodded with that matter-of-fact tone of his to see what would make him bite.

So far, Sang-woo hasn’t shown his teeth once. 

Once he realised he could exploit these conferences, he’d started probing for information on the games themselves. In exchange, Young-il would ask for stories from his youth. 

Sang-woo never questioned this agreement. Young-il lived off that stuff, fed off it, quenched his thirst with the horrible, nostalgic, hateful softness that tended to spill out of Sang-woo no matter how deadpan he made his voice. It was better than booze and twice as heady. Partnering it with alcohol didn’t seem to hurt, though.

They made a beautiful pair. Like a fish hook to a thumb pad, as his mother would say. That simile would make Sang-woo's thumb one formless callus, pitted with little pinprick scars.

A failed chemistry test would earn him the number of years the games had been going on. The price for a detailing of the VIPs’ arrangement was the reason his father had left home. He’d soon ran out of anecdotes that didn’t contain Gi-hun, and from then on each word, each stilted breath in between, was a terrible betrayal. Even the guilty crumpling of Sang-woo’s gut would never repay those debts.

He didn't bother asking Young-il for yarns from his own childhood. Sang-woo wasn’t interested in how monsters were made.

His long-time residency means that the squares feel no inclination to flank him as they stroll, but they’re hot on his heels nonetheless. They’re hardly useful as guides; the right turn that they took a few steps back already informed Sang-woo that they were heading towards the elevator. He could pretend he was going there alone were it not for the leaden footsteps that follow his own and the gentle, endless clicking of jostled rifles.

Their company doesn’t last much longer. They leave him at the doors of the lift, but Sang-woo can feel their eyes boring into him, piercing right through their masks and the stupid, stupid uniform on his shoulders.

The chrome jaws of the elevator slide open. He steps inside without turning back.

During his first few elevator rides, he’d had the temptation to scream. By now he’s mature enough to realise that these years are one long silent scream in themselves. The mask, at least, helps to keep his mouth shut.

Those meetings with Young-il had also taught Sang-woo the amazing amount you could learn from the back of someone’s head. His captor had the mild, attentive disposition of a keen student. Like a student, his queries were often alarming in their specificity, and Sang-woo’s memory was not always up to the task. 

Whenever this happened, Young-il would swirl his whiskey glass in annoyance, the eddying liquor flashing gold beneath the oiled leather of his gloves. It was one of the only mannerisms that had managed to crawl through some cleft in his armour. While it seemed wildly optimistic to believe he wasn’t aware of this habit, Sang-woo couldn’t imagine what Young-il got out of letting him know he’d succeeded in ruffling him.

Another attribute he’d picked up on was how Young-il’s posture would list ever so slightly to the side over the duration of their hour-long colloquies. Alongside being basically negligible, the change was so painstakingly slow that it had taken three consecutive meetings for Sang-woo to confirm his hypothesis. 

He’d theorised that some sort of injury on the right side of his torso was forcing him to favour his left. An old stab mark, a surgical scar, the puckered crater of a bullet wound. It was either that or simply another oddity. Again, he had trouble believing anything Young-il did was without reason.

Sang-woo thinks about nothing as the lift glides to a smooth, hushed halt and the doors whir open once more. Bronze pools on the gauzy mirror of the floor. He feels nothing. His hands dangle at his sides; only his right is balled into a fist, clenched around the mirage of a knife. Nothing.

Young-il is not in his chair. 

The knife melts into mist and slithers from his grasp, gone into oblivion.

For maybe a minute, Sang-woo lingers. If the hallway before him is a gullet, then he is balanced on the edge of the beast’s lip, delaying his inevitable descent into its stomach. Sang-woo does not deal well with the inevitable. 

“Come in.”

He concentrates less on the pithy order itself and more on who’s saying it. His muscles slacken, but suspicion moves quickly to tighten them again. Tense now, but no longer rigid. Sang-woo ambles forward, upsettingly aware of how the chamber’s silence makes each clacking footfall as rude and terse as a gunshot. 

Despite its lack of an occupant, he pauses behind the chair. Ever since his delirium in that hospital room, he’d sickened at the notion of calling Young-il God again, but the air appears to thrum around that chair in a manner that is no less than sacred. Sacred, sacrilegious. He wonders if you’d still describe a holy relic as sacred if God was evil. It occurs to Sang-woo that an uncaring God is still God. 

The purling, almost musical noise of liquor being poured is enough to snap him out of his trance. The Officer’s scrutiny appears to be wholly on his drink, but Sang-woo is no fool; he is still very much being watched.

At the beginning of the most recent games – or twelve, maybe thirteen meetings ago, depending on how you count it – Sang-woo had been ushered into a room that was decidedly not Young-il’s. He’d discovered his actual supervisor to be a patently different man from his boss, as if he’d been penned by a heavier, more candid hand. 

Sang-woo is also not so afraid of him. This could easily turn out to be a lapse in judgement, but he’d only learn that lesson the hard way.

The Officer reeks of ex-military. It hangs about him like gunsmoke, pins the echo of a tarnished badge to his breast in defiance of his creased uniform and barely neatened hair. He has none of Young-il’s slyness, and therefore requires no gentlemanly airs to use as a charade. He is unapologetically unceremonious. There is something refreshing about that, and possibly amenable.

“Sunbae-nim.”

This catches his attention. The sidelong glance he casts his way is hugely unimpressed, and Sang-woo has to keep from cringing away.

Both Young-il and the Officer have the same lack of reservations when it comes to abandoning their masks before Sang-woo, but only the latter ever dares to turn towards him. The Officer’s face appears to have been constructed for the expression he’s wearing right now: a sort of semi-scowl, a pragmatic neutrality made scathing by the sheer intensity of his glare.

There is a pause before he responds; he considers the bar’s smooth surface and the white, liquid gleam of the whiskey glass. “It’s 7 in the morning.”

Their exchange might have seemed nonsensical to a spectator, but Sang-woo has to restrain himself from visibly sagging in relief. Young-il never risked telling him the time, but a perfunctory sprinkle of ass-kissing usually elicited the desired results from the Officer.

That’s another thing – there’s no intellectual waltz with him, no carefully laid tripwires or pitfalls Sang-woo would have to skirt around unless he wanted another blow to the neck. No mental chess. And games in general are, thankfully, kept to a minimum.

Of course, this didn’t mean the Officer was soft on him. Like any military man, a certain curtness had been drilled into his brain, cached somewhere between the instructions for reloading a gun. Although age has unravelled it, as it does all things. Yet it is not so much like a dull blade as it is a sheathed one; Sang-woo supposes that is where his strength lies. 

While he ruminates on this, the Officer loses interest and sips his whiskey. He can be understood as a man who needs alcohol to stay sober and tobacco to breathe freely. With this, Sang-woo can empathise. But the Officer has no use for empathy. He is deeply poisoned.

“Breakfast time.”

He says this in a kind, ironic manner; gooseflesh crackles along Sang-woo’s arms. “Second day?”

The Officer nods. The glass is set down with unexpected clemency.

Second day. Naturally. And why not? The announcement of the games should no longer be a surprise to a seasoned guard like Sang-woo. He was always awoken on the second day, when it was time to dole out the players’ rations. The first meals were always the best. A little voice in the back of his head tells him to treasure it while it lasts.

The next task on his schedule would be corpse clean-up. 

“How did the first game go?”

He asks this after every game. He doesn’t know why. 

Something that borders on amusement flashes over the Officer’s stern features. That’s a recurring event, too. But the mirth never reaches his eyes.

“Better than usual,” he muses, raising the glass a few inches off the counter in preparation for his next mouthful. “Over three quarters moved onto the next round.”

A peculiar, staticky thrill runs through the room, like a displacement had occurred and then stirred up a stray breeze in the aftermath. It is perceivable to Sang-woo only. 

It’d been 173, then 198 the year before, then…he strains to recall how many had made it through after his first game, but only comes up with a ragtag bunch of estimates. He’s promptly furious – not because he can’t remember a population of people he had known, rubbed shoulders with, and eventually left in the dust, but because numbers are the easiest to cling onto and, once they’re gone, the only thing left from those games is the pain.

He wonders if Young-il, too, would consider this the ‘better’ outcome. Sang-woo guesses that a bigger crowd of survivors means a more entertaining run, especially during the special nighttime event. 

The Officer remains oblivious to Sang-woo’s internal turmoil as he takes another swig and puts the glass down with a nastier thud than before. His fingers remain curled around its faceted walls. He badly wants to continue this line of questioning, but a dour mood lingers on the Officer’s brow like the shadow of a storm cloud. 

“Is that all you called me here for?”

“I didn’t call you here. He did.” 

Sudden distaste colours his words, so Sang-woo knows them to be true. “And where is he?”

“Otherwise preoccupied.”

This is pointless. Three quarters of 456…one quarter was…and 114 multiplied by three made for a neat 342. Again there is this terrific flattening of Sang-woo’s innards, a slow, grave descent into the cradle of his pelvis. It’s wrong. He’s accustomed to not knowing half of what’s happening, but this is the silhouette of something much bigger, and he can't tell whether he wishes to bring it to light and drive it back into the shadows.

“Is there anything else you need to get off your chest?” he offers as coolly and inscrutably as possible. 

There is no need to slip any sarcasm into his tone – the Officer’s humour is a wry, insouciant thing whose brilliance stems from how unintentional it looks. Glib remarks are delivered stony-faced. 

He fixes Sang-woo with a curious stare. “I thought I was supposed to be your therapist, not the other way round.”

Actually, unintentional may be the perfect word for it; his retorts are pure reflex. He’s obliterating his own liver, and the irony’s still pouring off him in sheets as thick and palpable as honey. He sweats it. Bleeds it.

“I don’t think therapists are allowed to drink in front of their patients,” he responds. “Or smoke.”

Less like Young-il’s chess. It’s quicker, more instinctive. It’s verbal ping-pong. 

“How rude of me. I forgot to offer you a glass.” Genuine or not, the invitation to indulge in Young-il’s wine trove is immediately defused. “And I thought you gave up smoking.”

His substance dependence is his most obvious weakness, which is why he’s so good at satirising it. Sang-woo pauses before countering.

“I didn’t have much of a choice.”

“Mm.” The Officer swallows this fact with some more whiskey. “You’re right. But you should be grateful. That stuff kills, you know.”

“And this job doesn’t.”

He doesn’t bother phrasing it like a query. The Officer’s brow twitches upwards in a suggestion of surprise, but quickly reassumes its usual, sombre position. Sang-woo isn’t sure whether he’s even scored a point.

“Not the people doing it, no. What, these are your…fourth games? And you’re still here. So there.” He breaks eye contact and taps the bar absentmindedly with his free hand. “Much more dangerous for our customers. But we’re angels of death, you and I. We’ve got nothing to fear.”

He’s looking at his mask, he realises. It lies maybe a foot to his right, its hollowed black shape like a giant beetle shell with all its meatless marrow scraped out. 

Seeing as he’s distracted, Sang-woo lets his own gaze slide down and rest on the outline of the Officer’s pistol. Angels of death, indeed. What are his odds if he lunges for that gun and attempts to put a bullet in his head? Put a bullet anywhere, really. He doesn’t have any use for his uniform, regardless of how powerful it may be. It’s the mask that he wants.

Even if he manages to wrestle him for the trigger, this room has more cameras than types of booze. There’s a small chance the space itself isn’t bugged, but the Officer almost certainly is. A gunshot would be rather hard to ignore over the comms system. 

Would they kill him for trying? He hadn’t resisted once since he’d arrived here; day-to-day life had been punishment enough. But his mind has already moved on from the consequences of an early failure and now dreams about what would befall him if he was caught with the Officer’s blood on his hands. 

Could that be enough? No. No, murder would only show how desperate he is to escape, and death is nothing if not escape’s most basal form. The wisest course of action would be to point the barrel at himself. They wouldn’t be able to take that from him. He’ll be an executioner today no matter what he chooses – in this mere blink of time, he has the freedom to become his own.

The Officer turns back around and the moment is over.

He jiggles the few remaining sips in the glass with a sort of distrait expression blearing his eyes. The alcohol isn’t causing the fog. Sang-woo doesn’t know what is.

The silence is abruptly cleaved in half by a click of the Officer’s tongue. “Your shift’s soon. Dismissed.”

It takes a couple of seconds for the command to register. Once more, the queasiness that washes over him is from how simply wrong this all is. Their discussion is lopsided, an unwitting amputee, and it strikes Sang-woo that this is because it’s just one huge diversion. The Officer is stalling. 

He could’ve just ignored the meeting altogether, but his role in these games is different and he’d rather sulk in his superior’s quarters and brood over a drink from his superior’s cabinet. And that’s why Sang-woo doesn’t fear him. The Officer is a herring of a man; he’s pickled and smoked his own flesh to the point of it practically falling off the bone. He’s dying. He is roadkill dressed in military fatigues.

Just as he starts to leave, Sang-woo notices that he is not merely leaning on the back of Young-il’s chair but grasps it fervently with both hands. Horrified by himself, he cautiously loosens his grip, subsequently blenching at the row of dents left behind by ten angry fingers. Struck with a blasphemer’s shame, he doesn’t even dare to smooth over the lush upholstery before hurrying back down the hallway.

“218.”

The Officer speaks again when he reaches the lift doors. He doesn’t bother glancing back, but ends up facing him anyway after stepping inside and turning around to watch those metal jaws slide shut. 

His conversation partner has finally drifted from the counter and now loiters at the other end of the corridor. He looks strange standing in the mouth of that room, his square silhouette limned with a filmy amber, almost as if he were floating in his own whiskey.

In the slow, deliberate tone you adopt while talking to a young child, he says, “Hwang In-ho.”

The lift begins to whir as he rounds off the last syllable. Sang-woo barely has time to breathe before it clangs shut and he is left alone with the elevator’s reposeful hum and the drum of his own pulse.

His mind is empty when the lift shudders, quiets, and vomits him out. It stays that way as they steer him towards the players’ dormitory – right, left, up one of those soft-hued staircases, then down, then up again – in an endless, awkward march that cannot last more than three minutes. 

It’s still empty when they guide him through those huge double doors and station him behind a trolley stacked with tin dosirak boxes. Miraculously, Sang-woo’s field of vision has been narrowed down to a grainy ring immediately in front of him, like the halo of a flashlight just before it sputters into lifelessness. 

He’s barely aware of the players as they hesitantly mill towards the front of the room, initially hovering with an aimless sort of apprehension before recognising the appeal of food and forming rudimentary queues. The first box is pressed into a sweaty pair of palms without Sang-woo caring who they belong to or how thankful they are. 

But then it returns. That restless dread mutters, chafes, clings to his vertebrae, crawls up his neck and forces him to lift his gaze from his task. The dread tells him that he’s looking for something, but he doesn’t know what.

Until, suddenly, he does.

Because waiting at the very back of this open space is Seong Gi-hun. And, standing but a few feet away from him, is Sang-woo's cruel, cruel God, looking the very picture of polished sureness.

A God whose real name he now knows to be Hwang In-ho.