Archive of Our Own ^beta

                    —Emily Dickinson

"Tell me," Sang-woo's mother said. It was a bright, crisp, Spring morning. They've only gotten those back again recently. 

"Tell me," she repeats, "What part was it?"

"What part was what?" Gi-hun replies distractingly, as the faucet remains open, soaking the lettuce they're going to use for the salad.  

A pause. The kitchen hums with movement, the window blinds sway with the breeze. It's been two years. 

"Where was he stabbed?" She asked, like this was a conversation they regularly have. Like this was a conversation they were both ready for. 

The faucet is still open, Gi-hun watches as the lettuce drowns and the sink slowly fills before the water swirls down the drain. He has to breathe, gently, otherwise—otherwise he might accidentally tell her the truth. 

He closes the faucet, and turns toward her, trying not to let his face betray himself, "Why are you—" he trailed, as calmly as he can muster. 

She crosses her arms and looks up at him, "Does a mother not have the right to know the way her only son died, Gi-hun?"

He stands to his full height for a few seconds before deflating, she was right, but she wasn't going to get the full truth. (As if she's been getting the entire honest truth all this time, a bitter voice inside Gi-hun mutters.) 

Gi-hun runs a palm through his hair, it wasn't unruly like before, back when he was still at the games, and he knows he's not wrong to think that there has always been a correlation between money and self-cleanliness. He looks at her, and it feels like having to break the news to her again.

"We—" he begins, "We don't know exactly where—" A steak knife through the neck, and his blood was crimson, and there was mud everywhere, and Gi-hun sees it, still, everytime it rains. 

"His client—the suspect, they fled the scene." 

Gi-hun doesn't know why she was doing this, why she was making him lie like this after these two years.

"His body was never found, remember?"

It's true. And Gi-hun sometimes wishes he held on longer when the guards had to pull him off of Sang-woo, when Gi-hun's primal screams drowned out the rain and he gripped unto wet mud that squelched and passed between the gaps of his fingers. 

Sang-woo's mother touches her chest gently, looking at the polished floors of Gi-hun's house before closing her eyes, tears forming on the tips of her eyelashes, something Gi-hun has seen her do many times before.

"God," she breathes out, "My poor boy."

                "Grief is a Thief"

                     —Emily Dickinson

Gi-hun knew there wasn't a choice to be had. He had to take the offer. It was a choice between heroism and peace.

When the man he talked to inside the car when he was blindfolded had told him through the phone that they were going to fabricate Sang-woo and Sae-byeok's death to their families, Gi-hun waited for the other shoe to drop—and it did. It was at the cost of Gi-hun never contacting them again.

After a few days, he took it, and he stopped contacting them since then. It gnawed at him at first, the guilt of possibly being responsible for the death of the players joining the game in the future. 

It might even be selfish.

Or self-serving. 

But it was what had to happen. 

It was a mother and a young brother wondering where on earth their loved one was, even when it's not the entire truth, they still deserved an answer. No matter how fake and fabricated it might be.

Sae-byeok was allegedly involved in a turf war and died in the middle of a gang fight. Her ID was on the scene but her body was never found. The story was originally going to be cold blooded murder. But Gi-hun didn't liked how close it was to the truth. And so he asked to change it. Made it look like a gang war. And the people at the games handled the rest. 

Sang-woo was allegedly stabbed and robbed by a client. His I.D. was also on the scene but his body was never found. Gi-hun got a call from 'authorities' from the 'U.S.' that told him Sang-woo was murdered. He belatedly realized he would be the one who has to tell his mother about it.

He did tell her. It was harder than any game he played.

And she reacted in the way only mothers can.

As if the air was pulled out from her, and the world was so suddenly small, and the ground beneath her was going to swallow her whole. She cried and she cried and she fell apart, and Gi-hun cried with her. Eventhough he knows he was only alive because Sang-woo died instead. 

Some days, it makes him feel cruel. Some days, it makes him feel like he's drowning in guilt. 

When those days reach him, he makes an effort to spend time with Sang-woo's mother. He makes an effort to send Sae-byeok's brother ridiculous amounts of money. (as if it could ever bring her back—) Always careful of not letting them both meet, in fear of them asking why both their loved ones had eerily similar deaths. 

When he took the offer, the memory was still fresh, only months after the games and his mother's own death. 

Gi-hun wondered then how he would ever dig his way out of that hole called grief, how he would ever breathe again without feeling like something was lodged deeply inside his chest.

Two years after, though, and he didn't knew it at that time yet but he finally managed to breathe easier. To not let the grief consume him. Maybe he learned where to put it. But it wasn't entirely the truth, was it?

Gi-hun—he's been big on half-truths since. 

Because in place of grief, was love. And Gi-hun doesn't know which was harder to navigate. 

                 "Grief is a Juggler"

                     —Emily Dickinson

The first thing grief made him do was change, 'is' to 'was.'

For example, one time at the market, newly acquainted with death, he passed a flower shop and had a conversation with the florist and told her that peonies is his mom's favorite flower. He caught himself last minute, but he didn't change it. He didn't want to burden the florist with the grief he didn't knew yet how to carry.

Sang-woo's mother always told him how cruel the world was to take both of their loved ones nearly at the same time frame. She has always said that maybe it was fate, or it was karma, or something bleaker, something she always mutters when the dark cloud of depression hangs above her head, which is: 'Sang-woo loved me too much, that's why he went first.'

If she knew—if she knew just how correct she was…Sang-woo's last words ring out, and it was about her. 

She never even bothered to change how she calls him. She still refer to her son as if he could walk in the door any minute. 

Gi-hun doesn't try correcting her. 

He does it sometimes, too, when he refers to Sang-woo. It's only when he's alone in his big house, drunk out of his mind, feeling a sick, twisted, nostalgia for a time that should never, ever, be missed. 

When he's seconds away from being passed out drunk, he will refer to Sang-woo as if he could walk in the door any minute. 

Looking back, he should have known what that meant. Absence makes the heart grow fonder, afterall.

And what else is a bigger absence than death?

           “Unable are the loved to die,

               for

                   love is immortality.”

                    —Emily Dickinson

In the first few months, It started with a story or two, when his mother would calm down from crying long enough to talk. 

"Sang-woo is a picky eater." She had said one evening, when she was slowly getting used to vising Gi-hun's new house, "He always picked the green peas off of cream stews, and would only eat kimchi if I made it by hand."

Gi-hun dangles the bottle of beer in his hand, "Did he throw fits if he didn't like it?"

"No," she smiles, "He never liked offending me." 

Gi-hun took deeper gulps of his beer, then, wishing he was the same to his own mother. 

She brought along a photo album a week after. She clutches it like it was a lifeline, like it had all the secrets to all the riches in the world. To her, maybe it did. 

She trails her work-worned fingers against the pictures, lingering near Sang-woo's childhood ones and remaining there. "This was when we went to a hot spring in winter."

Young Sang-woo, maybe around 7 or 8 years old, it was snowing in the picture. He was wearing a thick wool sweater. His face—wasn't the same as when Gi-hun last saw him, and that was more than okay. He was a chubby kid, Gi-hun remembers with a smile, he remembers being much more nimble than him. His face in the picture looked neutral, albeit a bit annoyed. 

"He never liked the cold." Sang-woo's mother supplies fondly. 

Gi-hun hums and smiles again before his face falls and he pulls away from the photo album. So suddenly, a thought occurs.

'Was he cold, then? On the ground, underneath all that rain?'

She looks at Gi-hun the moment he was out of reach, something unreadable in her eyes. 

"I need a drink." Gi-hun says to no one in particular, before he stands and walks toward the freezer.

After that, it seemed that everything he learned about the man, he learned against his will. 

As a child, Sang-woo's favorite season was Spring, it was written on an old notebook his mother found on her shelf. Sang-woo's favorite ramen, only because his mother told it to him in passing when they went grocery shopping together. The way Sang-woo combs and parts his hair, his cologne, his preferred type of black rimmed glasses. 

It felt morbid at first to be bombarded like that, to take it all in knowing he was the reason Sang-woo couldn't enjoy the things he once enjoyed in the first place. 

But gradually, and without knowing, Gi-hun started to seek out more of Sang-woo. More than what the man was ever comfortable of showing him. 

Gi-hun began to ask questions under the guise of conversations. He wants it to be easier for Sang-woo's mother, above everything else, and so he began trying to coax more stories out of her. And if sometimes he finds new information about Sang-woo that makes him feel as if he connected with him, then that's just something Gi-hun keeps to himself. That's just something he silently indulges, because there wasn't really anything he could do for it anymore. 

"I remember one time when we were kids, he was embarrassed when our friends found out he had a stuffed elephant." Gi-hun smiles as he recalls, looking up at the roof of Sang-woo's mother's house. 

They were outside, and she was locking her gate, Gi-hun held an umbrella by their side because she insisted the sky was gloomier than usual. 

She laughs, and doesn't cry this time. 

"That darned, dusty thing, I've always forced him to get rid of it and he never did." She pulls at the lock to check if it was secure before he turns toward Gi-hun, "I'm glad he didn't. It's still in the house, along with his other stuff." She pats his arm to get them moving along the alleyway. 

"In…that house?" Gi-hun gestures towards her house.

Memories, fragments, stories of Sang-woo. Physical things. Things he doesn't know yet, things he thinks he doesn't have the right to know. 

"Yes. In that house." She gives him a look. "I had someone move his stuff in with me recently. I've been trying to sort through it before the one year anniversary." 

Gi-hun hums. It's almost a year since—everything. And yet it still is as fresh as the day before. He refuses to believe that time was still normal, the mornings felt shorter, the nights slower, and filled with misery. Gi-hun refuses to believe that time didn't stop for him.

June crept in like a flash flood. 

He found himself finally at home after spending the last week in the U.S. for Ga-yeong's birthday, aware that it was also going to be the anniversary of him joining the game.

He thinks he's prepared for it. He thinks he has done the heavylifting of coping with it, and then letting it pass over him. A year went by without him knowing, he feels like he hasn't learned enough, both about himself and other…things.

Sang-woo's mother thinks he died around September. Gi-hun will give her that, and let her believe it wasn't going to be weeks from now. She's been through a lot, at this point telling her the entire truth would probably send her to the E.R.

He walks the same alleyway he has walked on every morning. 

It's been a routine, him accompanying her to the market every day around 6:30am. Gi-hun turns the corner of the alley, the morning sun high in the sky, breathing life unto the streets of Ssangmun-dong.

Only, this time, she wasn't by the gate. She would usually be by the gate, locking it behind her. Gi-hun feels dread sink to the bottom of his stomach, feels his feet quicken against the asphalt and his mind race with all the things that must have happened to her. 

Reaching the gate, he opens it slowly and it creaks, the sound of it was unwelcomed in the morning air, the sound of it was enough to make the birds fly off from the electric wires above him. 

He has never been inside her house despite her spending a majority of her time at his. 

Overgrown vines and vegetation wraps around the metal of the black gate, hanging low in different directions, it sways with the morning breeze as Gi-hun looks at all of it once before walking up the steps to the door of the house. 

He knocks a few times before stepping back and waiting in the unkempt front garden. 

After a few minutes, the door opens and Sang-woo's mom smiles at him, "Ah, Gi-hun, I'm so sorry." She wipes her forehead with the edge of the towel on her shoulder, "I was just sorting through Sang-woo's stuff."

"Oh," Gi-hun says, "I could come back later." He turns on his heels, already wanting to flee.

"It's okay, Gi-hun." She smiles, "I'm just about done." She turns away from the door and began walking back in, as if to tell him to come in, and Gi-hun doesn't—can't come in. 

"I'm good." He started, "I'm good with staying here." The thought of this house having Sang-woo's stuff…he can't imagine it. He peeks inside, she probably didn't even hear him, she retreated back into the darkness of the house, leaving Gi-hun outside, making the morning light pour in from the opened door. 

He takes a steadying breath and walks back up the steps of the house. How many times have Sang-woo visited this place, Gi-hun wonders, and did he feel anything? Like a sadness for a home that isn't his, a longing to live under his mother's wing again, like when he was a kid with no adult responsibilities?

Gi-hun breathes out, and starts to wonder if Sang-woo has looked at the familiar streets of Ssangmun-dong and reminisced about him. 

Darkness greets him by the front door as he steps in, eyes adjusting to the sudden lack of light. He closes the door behind him, and it gets even darker. His hip bumps into a drawer, his shoulder thumps against a wooden wall, and he puts a hand out in front of him to guide him through the long corridor of the house. He turns a corner and hears the smooth slide of a box getting moved around. He began walking the expanse of the corridor until an arch at the door is in front of him. He steps under it to then enter the living room. 

The room was big, the floors and walls were old wood, deep brown in color. There's a huge window on the side, and the sunlight from outside that passes through the foliage of trees in the garden sends scattered light inside the dusty, dark, solemn living room. Everything felt old, and worn down and overused. But there's stillness. There's a center of gravity in the way sunlight arrives in patches inside a house so filled with grief. 

Sang-woo's mother touches his shoulder and he looks away from the window to face her. "I have one box left to sort through," she tells him. 

Gi-hun nods slowly, feeling like he was going to fall asleep in the stillness.

"You never told me." He said. 

She looks around them, at the state of the house she lives in. "There was nothing to say, I have a roof over my head, I have everything I need right here." She gestures around them and lingers around Sang-woo's things. 

Gi-hun doesn't reply.

She looks at him before setting a box on the dining room table. Gi-hun steps in beside her as she opens the box with her hands, "The men I talked to, to get his things even sent me stuff from his office, it was mostly documents and paperwork he never finished." Gi-hun worries everything she got was impersonal. Like the Sang-woo Gi-hun had to see in the games—calculating, a brick wall. 

Unlike the Sang-woo he had the chance to learn about now, when it was too late.

"I sorted through those boring stuff out for you already, so don't worry." She smiled, "I saved this one box though, so we can go through it together."

He knows he's overstepping. Who was he to Sang-woo to begin with? Wasn't it enough that Gi-hun had watched him at his lowest? Now, he has to defile his mementos, attempt to add his own story unto the man's memories, frozen forever?

It was like she knew he was thinking it. Because she steps into his field of vision, looking up at him, "Humor me at least, will you, Gi-hun?"

Gi-hun looks at her, sets his mouth into a straight line, and nods.

She pulls out a lanyard of Sang-woo's I.D. from college, rolls it between her pointer and middle finger like twine. She takes out brochures and restaurant menus and old receipts. Gi-hun couldn't make himself reach out, so she takes his wrist gently, placing it above a faded blue hat in the corner of the box. "You're okay." She lets go, as Gi-hun's fingers flex against the rough material of the cap. He gently pulls it out and looks at it under the light from outside. On the front, an embroidered logo of SNU. Gi-hun snorts to himself at first. He used to tease him about being a college boy, it was lighthearted at times but sometimes when he doesn't filter himself, resentment catches up to him. 

Gi-hun sets a palm against the surface of the table, feeling his chest so suddenly heavy, he attempts to breathe through it, and swallow back the tears. 

"Oh, Gi-hun," Sang-woo's mother said, already crying herself, holding him under the elbow. 

"Ah," Gi-hun chuckles through the tears, wiping his eyes with the back of his palm, "It's much more dustier in here than I thought." 

She slaps his arm playfully, chuckling with him.

She turns back toward the box, pulling out an apartment brochure before setting it aside, "You can keep it. If you want." She tells him, swiping her own tears away with her thumb. 

Gi-hun inspects it again in the light before folding it and tucking it in his back pocket, "I get it now." He wipes his palms against his pants, sighing, "Why you don't want to leave this house."

She smiles, "Last time he was here, he had wanted me to move. I don't know why he kept urging me to. Maybe it was because he was worried about me, or it was because of the neighborhood—" She leafs through a stack of paper inside the box, "or maybe it was because he had wanted me closer to him, right near the end."

Gi-hun feels like falling apart, he closes his eyes and feels tears threatening to come up again. He remembers what him and Sang-woo talked about when they were at the steps of a random building, their last coffee and cigarettes together. This was the house Sang-woo used for collateral. He doesn't have the heart to tell her that. He had promised to make this easier on her. 

"He was right, though, I think," Gi-hun forces himself to open his eyes, "It's unsafe here. I feel like he would be—like he would be more relieved if you lived with me at my house instead." 

She turns to look at him skeptically, already thinking of ways to shoot him down. 

Gi-hun stands his ground, "I have that big house all to myself, and you already spend a lot of your time there, anyway." He sighs, "It would be a disservice to Sang-woo if I let your stay here all alone."

She puts a hand on her hips, "It does get cold here at night." Gi-hun slowly smiles at her, as she gestures around them, "But—"

"Don't worry about this house." Gi-hun cuts her off, "It's going to remain here," Untouched, like a mausoleum, "Frozen in time."

The one year anniversary of Sang-woo's death was like every other day before it. 

The sun shone brightly on the shingles of his mother's now empty house, and it is quiet. Gi-hun is standing outside, by the steps of the door, holding a bundle of white orchids on his side. He sets it down on the steps, and sits beside it. He pulls out a pack of cigarettes, takes one to himself and sets the rest next to the flowers.

The days leading up to this was hectic. Sang-woo's mother finally moved to his house after days of him convincing her. She doesn't take up much space, and Gi-hun knows she was deliberately doing it as to not impose on him, he appreciates the gesture but she should know that he doesn't mind. He lived off of his mother for years, Gi-hun knows how it feels to live under someone's roof, and in a way, through Sang-woo's mother, he's returning the favor for once. Even if everything he does now to mend a relationship between a son and a mother is all just going to be one year too late. 

He should have done things, and reached out to people instead of waiting for them to do it for him. 

If he did, maybe his and Sang-woo's friendship wouldn't have turned out the way it did. Maybe this…thing would have blossomed sooner and it wouldn't be so painfully, heartbreakingly one sided. Gi-hun sighs, leaning back on his hands, feeling the dry wood beneath bite at his skin, he moves forward to look up at the morning sky, "Your mom moved in with me now," His voice sounded rough in the silence, "It took some convincing, y'know, I guess you got your hardheadedness from her."

He knows he's talking to the air. The overgrown plants, the soil that was more vegetation than earth. But he's never done this before, talked to him out loud like this. But knowing—knowing he's been in this house, and walked these steps, and slept here, and lived here, and loved here. It felt like this was the only thing in his memory Gi-hun could physically grasp at. 

"I hated you by the end." He says, "What you did to Sae-byeok—I couldn't stand it. I still haven't tried forgiving you for that."

"But—" He starts, still looking up at the clouds above him, "When I started learning about you. How you liked certain things, how you moved, how you saw the world through the stories of your mother, it was like…a longing I can't, won't understand." He says it. Out loud. Finally.

He breathes to himself gently. This is something he knows won't bear fruit, this love he has, it will be root-bound in the body for as long as he allows it. He won't ever feel the need to do anything about it, he just has to let himself feel. 

Gi-hun deflates, pats a hand around himself for a lighter, "I don't know. Maybe if you were still alive, this would be different." He pulls out a lighter from his back pocket, "Maybe it was because I've been hearing fondly of you, which in turn made me fond of you too." He looks at the lighter in his hand and at the space around him, eyes focused. A pause.

"You had written my name on a popsicle stick when we were kids. Your mother found it in a box and gave it to me." Gi-hun says.

He smiles. And doesn't light his cigarette, instead he sets the lighter on top of the nearly full pack of cigarettes by his side. For Sang-woo.

He then pulls out the popsicle stick (—yellow from years of unuse) from his jacket's pocket, turning it around in his hand for a few seconds before setting it gently next to the flowers he had brought.

"What does it mean, Sang-woo?" He tells the sky. Underneath were more questions he didn't know how to say out loud.

'Was it how you loved?

How you get infatuated with someone?

How you let your heart carry you?'

The sky moves in its own accord, unaware of the man struggling beneath it, unaware that they took the one Gi-hun never even had the chance to cherish.

Gi-hun leaves flowers at his doorstep every week after.

A solemn routine,

an endless courtship.

The window in the kitchen is open, the spring breeze lets itself in, swirling through the quiet space, leaving a citrus hint of magnolia in the air. 

"I'm sorry for what happened yesterday, Gi-hun." Sang-woo's mother says from his side. Gi-hun flinches but keeps his face normal, he knows what she was talking about but it doesn't mean he likes where this conversation was heading. Gi-hun stops stirring the pot of stew to face her.

"It's been two years. I just thought—" she sighs, touching her chest before inhaling quickly, "I thought we were ready."

Gi-hun nods, running a palm on the side of his hair, pushing back at the sweat that gathered there. He wipes his hands on a kitchen towel before shrugging his shoulders, "I guess we weren't." He smiles, "But that's okay." He nods again, turning back toward the stove.

Sang-woo's mother smiles at him, touches the edge of his shoulder before pulling away, before leaning on the counter. She's been more comfortable moving around in the house ever since Gi-hun had asked her to live with him a year ago. He feels a tiny bit of pride at the thought that he did good by her, and he's determined to do more good for her and maybe even for the people they've lost. 

"At least the wildflowers are out." She says. Gi-hun tenses but quickly recovers, "Although—" she starts, "At my old house, when I lived there, I only ever got vines and pesky weeds. I've noticed that the garden has been swallowed entirely by wildflowers now."

Gi-hun doesn't say anything, leaning down to pretend to check the stove's fire. She follows his sight, eyes squinted and looking at him suspiciously, "Was it you, Gi-hun?"

'Of course. 

Of course it was, who else would it be?'

"Yes." He says bluntly. 

"And the flowers on the doorstep?"

"Yes. Same." He says, more slowly. 

The pot of soup simmers in the silence. Outside, the smell of magnolia flowers was light, and Gi-hun thinks about him. As he does. As he always does. 

"The reason why I asked if you knew where he was stabbed was that I was afraid I was forgetting him." She admits. "It's a morbid, ugly, thing but I did not want to forget. But I found I did. And you had to remind me he died like he was nothing."

Gi-hun turns off the stove, looking at how quickly the bubbles disappeared in the sudden lack of heat.

"But you, Gi-hun, you never forgot." She crosses her arms. "How?"

Gi-hun taps a finger on the surface of the counter, not looking at her. This is it.

"I fell in-love with him," His voice was warm, but it grates like a rusty door hinge, "I fell in-love with him after." She whips her head to look at him, to read his face as if she was seeing if he would joke about such things or not. 

There was nothing to fill the silence.

The deep, steady, breaths Gi-hun was doing wasn't enough to get him to calm down fully. He is ready for her disgust, or her disapproval, or for her to tell him that his smart, golden son wouldn't want anything to do with someone like him. Her face contorts into an expression of sudden pain and already, tears were gathering in her eyes. 

"You fool—" she approaches him quickly, as he flinches back, "You absolute fool, Gi-hun." She pulls him to her tiny frame and gathers him there, gripping tightly on his T-shirt, "Falling in-love with my dead son…" She trails, voice choked up and crying, "You idiot." He hangs an arm around her like she was the one who needed comforting. 

She pulls away, looking at Gi-hun's face and searching if he was as shocked as she was. 

She doesn't know that Gi-hun has made peace with it. Has dug into the soil of her abandoned house with his bare hands, hoping to find him there, and then found nothing. That's when he started scattering wildflowers everywhere. He sits by the steps of the house and brings him white wine instead of red, his favorite books, tiny pastries they used to share from their childhood. He brings him everything he loves because that's how—that's how Gi-hun wants to remember him.

She takes a step back. Looks at him in the natural afternoon light of the kitchen. She touches her chest again, as if this was breaking her heart. It broke his, too, but he's learned how to live with it. 

"Tell me, please," Sang-woo's mother said. It was a light, quiet Spring afternoon. Gi-hun finds that he loves spring now too.

"Tell me," she repeats, "How much do you love him?"

Gi-hun steps back, lets out a laugh, he already knows the answer.

"Like it could—" He brings a hand to rest it on the side of his own cheek, like what he did for Sang-woo years ago, when they were underneath all that rain, "Like it could bring him back to life."