Chapter Text
Gi-hun does not intend to let Myung-gi get so far with the baby.
It’s not because he secretly wants her dead—such an idea disgusts him even more than Myung-gi’s assumptions about him and Jun-hee’s relationship do and, in truth, it’s for an entirely opposite reason. With Myung-gi swinging Jun-hee’s baby around on the pole like something detestable, an ant clinging to the sole of his shoe, Gi-hun dares to hesitate.
What if the baby falls before I can get to her? he’s thinking anxiously. His eyes dart to the cameras, to the one-way glass he knows hides the Front Man’s—Young-il’s—viewing room, and he will despise, later, the imploring nature of this glance. But he quickly refocuses, because no matter how human Young-il had seemed as Player 001, Gi-hun would be an idiot to assume any of it was real.
He steps forward, toward the final platform—and that’s when he hears it. The robotic voice, announcing the time they have to kill each other. Myung-gi has pressed the button.
Out of time, Gi-hun charges.
Myung-gi seems to startle when he sees Gi-hun coming, as if he never imagined that a player in these games would save a baby over the two remaining men who could split the prize instead.
But Gi-hun made a promise, and he intends to keep it. Jun-hee’s baby will not be just another sacrificial lamb.
Gi-hun swipes at Myung-gi’s hands with the knife the Front Man gifted him, forcing him to drop the pole or lose his fingers. The baby hits the ground with the pole and rolls with it toward the edge before her nest of a dead woman’s jacket snags on the stone and catches her. The pole plummets into the depths of the canyon off the platform’s ledge and both Myung-gi and Gi-gun flinch at the crash when it hits the bottom.
The knife flashes out, once, twice. As Gi-hun lunges to stab at Myung-gi’s gut, he’s reminded bitterly of a similar situation three years ago. He imagines Sang-woo’s hand on his own, and his voice, guttural and rattling in his dying moments: I’m sorry. Gi-hun will not let this man, this violent echo of the father Gi-hun may have been had he succumbed to Oh Il-nam’s bleak philosophy and damned everyone around him, make all that he’s done and everyone he’s killed obsolete. It will not be for nothing.
In the end, Myung-gi’s the one who holds the knife in his hand when that robotic voice announces the game’s winner and leaves out the loser. He gets a good few slices in—most notably across an artery in Gi-hun’s leg which he knows would prove fatal if they had hours to play this game instead of minutes—before they’re both dangling off the edge of the platform.
Against everything Gi-hun will always fail to stand for, when Myung-gi drops, Gi-hun goes after him.
The jacket he ends up holding him up by stretches and tears. Myung-gi still has the knife in a white-knuckled grip and takes the opportunity he has while in close proximity with his enemy to imbed it in the flesh of the back of Gi-hun’s leg, right above his knee.
Gi-hun bites his tongue to hold back a cry as Myung-gi tears it out and aims another jab at his ribs, but his grip spasms through the pain and Myung-gi, still desperately scrabbling for a handhold from too far down, plummets with the knife still in his hand, shimmering with Gi-hun’s blood.
After a moment, the sound of bones breaking echoes through the chamber. Gi-hun shudders before he begins to pull himself up.
His limp is substantial when he moves to stand. Black spots dance before him, hiding the baby from his sight. He stumbles, almost falls back. The yawning mouth of the long fall welcomes him through the pain that’s quickly turning from a screaming in his leg to a humming.
The robotic voice says something. Gi-hun’s deaf to everything but the baby’s confused cries.
His legs give out halfway to the baby. He drags himself the rest of the way, his determination a solid thing pulling him forward, voices echoing from over his shoulder: take care of my mom…my brother…my baby…
At last, he grasps Jun-hee’s baby. His hand, bloodied, lands on the number emblazoned across her torso: 222. He thinks it would okay if he died here—after all, they’ve won. But—and he shudders at this, too, only this time he’s gathering his strength—he wants to see his daughter again. Just one last time; once is all he asks.
He cradles the baby for what he hopes won’t be the last time and drags himself laboriously to his knees.
Footsteps echo like gongs, advancing on Gi-hun, whose eyes blink blearily open from where they’ve closed against his reawakening agony. His vision wavers for a moment, flicking to what appears to be a timer on the wall, the green of its light swirling before him. And then he tilts his head up and sees the Front Man standing before him.
Only, it’s not the Front Man. It’s Young-il—if that’s even his real name. His mask has been discarded, and though his expression is its own emotional concealer, there’s something in his eyes that reminds Gi-hun strikingly of the man he played the first few games alongside.
Gi-hun’s breath comes out in a rasp. He doesn’t know what the timer on the wall means, but he doubts it’s anything good. Young-il stands impassively before him, seemingly in a state of thoughtfulness, or perhaps anticipation.
As his final act, Gi-hun hefts the baby higher in his arms and offers her to Young-il. “Please,” is all he has the strength to say, hoping it communicates all that he wants to add: please don’t kill her or leave her or hurt her. Please take care of her. Please don’t ever tell her what I did for her. And please, please don’t forget me, even if you leave me to die here right now.
Young-il’s mouth ticks down halfway to a scowl, and Gi-hun holds the baby higher. His arms shake with the effort and his balance on his knees wavers. You have to, he tries to communicate wordlessly. She’s a winner. You have to save her.
But Young-il doesn’t take her. Instead, he circles around to Gi-hun’s side and, without warning, pulls him to his feet.
Gi-hun staggers. The baby, hanging precariously in his shaking arms, begins to cry. He grits his teeth and hugs her to his chest as Young-il takes most of his weight and tugs him forward.
He picks up his pace once they’re on the stairs, and Gi-hun finds himself swallowing pained sounds as his leg, the blood so fast and the damage so deep it looks as if it was mauled, is made to hold some of his own weight up. Young-il drags him down most of the steps before Gi-hun can’t remain quiet any longer.
“S—stop,” Gi-huh tries, but Young-il only glances at him before he continues, and there’s some of the man he pretended to be during the games in the way his jaw is set hard as if the scrape of Gi-hun’s breaths pains him, too. But the rest of him remains stubbornly the Front Man, who is unyielding and unstoppable as the bullets he orders to be put in the bodies of men who may once have called themselves his friends.
Gi-hun digs his heels into one of the steps and gets only a frustrated grunt in response. “We don’t have time,” Young-il finally explains, eyes darting to the timer on the wall and then back to the steps they still have to descend. “We have to get out of here, or we’ll all die.”
“Leave me,” Gi-hun offers immediately. He makes to thrust the baby into Young-il’s arms and then aborts the motion when his leg is jostled and a hiss makes it through his teeth. “Please,” he implores, “just take her.”
Young-il cuts his eyes at him with an exasperation that Gi-hun refuses to be endeared by like he was in the games. “You’re both winners,” says Young-il, only this voice is very much the Front Man’s. “You will both survive.”
But this stubbornness—funny how pieces of the man Gi-hun thought he knew appear in Young-il like the ghost of a man who died instead of one who was made up all along.
It’s fruitless, Gi-hun knows, and hates himself for giving up so easily. Instead of continuing to argue, he bites his tongue till it bleeds and drags himself along down the spiraling staircase with Young-il’s help.
They stumble through multiple corridors before they find what Gi-hun remembers are the Front Man’s rooms. There’s a corpse in the elevator and the air’s strangely smoky past the door concealing the source. Young-il reacts only by looking in the direction of that door, positioned at the end of a long hallway, muttering “Looks like someone did my job for me,” and steering Gi-hun and the baby in the opposite direction.
Through the smoke and the blood loss, Gi-hun just barely makes it to the hidden compartment in which Young-il has concealed some kind of speedboat. He brings Gi-hun onto the deck and pushes him against the hard edge of the boat’s low walls before busying himself with what Gi-hun assumes is the process of starting the boat. The timer ticks somewhere out of sight, and Gi-hun closes his eyes against the ache in every part of him.
He’s cold now. The baby shakes in his arms as he shivers. He slumps and allows himself to slip away some.
What may be minutes later, a pair of hands shift him none-too-gently onto his back and then try to take the baby from him. Gi-hun tenses like he touched a live wire.
“No,” he snaps, holding the baby as tight as he can. Nonetheless, she’s gradually pulled away from his arms, and panic surges through Gi-hun, leaving him even colder than before. He does his best to surge upward, though it’s more like a writhing attempt at stretching out his arms, reaching for her. One of the hands that took the baby comes back to hold him down, and Gi-hun hates how in his hazy state it’s easy for this stranger to subdue him.
He draws a leg up, confused as to why he can’t shift the other one, but just as quickly feels the hard edge of a knee weighing it down. The panic is a living thing now, tearing him apart, pulsing in his bloodstream—“Wait,” he pleads, “no, don’t touch her, give her back—”
“Gi-hun,” comes a voice, and Gi-hun blinks in surprise because for some reason it feels safe. His hands spasm but otherwise he falls still. His eyes won’t focus, everything an amalgamation of everything else, but he can’t see the pink of guards. His body doesn’t loosen but it does slowly fall back, until his arms are against his sides once more.
“Don’t hurt her,” he feels the need to implore, even though what’s left of his consciousness believes this faceless form holding him down to be some sort of ally.
“I won’t,” the voice says. Its weight doesn’t ease off of him but it seems to relax a little. “May I help you?”
For some reason, Gi-hun is well aware the question is only a courtesy. He closes his eyes and lets himself slump, hoping that it comes across clearly enough as a yes.
The weight shifts. It jostles the leg Gi-hun can’t move, but he can’t bring himself to care. Sleep is welcoming and though the hard surface beneath him is hardly comfortable, it feels—safe here. Safe enough.
He slips into unconsciousness as a loud noise like an explosion thunders behind him, its reverberations doubtless rocking Jun-hee’s baby to sleep.