Chapter Text
The limousine is too large for two people.
It's something Gihun never got used to, no matter how many times he does this - moving through the night in Seoul in the privacy that expensive vehicles provide, that quality of being sealed from the world outside without being entirely in any world at all. The limousine is too large and too quiet and too clean, and the winner always sits in shellshock, trying to elaborate what happened and the cost of their newfound wealth.
Player 132, Hwang Inho, sits across from him, most of his expression hidden behind a dark cloth that matches his dark jumpsuit, head lolling with the movements of the limousine.
Gihun pours himself another soju. The cheap kind - this is non-negotiable, has been non-negotiable since the beginning, since he found that the expensive things this institution provides sit wrong in his mouth. He has a bottle of the green plastic kind, the kind that costs less than a cup of coffee, the kind he drank in the before-time at pojangchanjas with Jungbae after bad days and occasionally after good ones. He keeps it in the limousine's interior compartment where the expensive liquor is supposed to go. Nobody has said anything about this and nobody will.
The mask if off, sitting next to him. He drinks.
Inho raises his head in his direction.
Gihun raises the bottle slightly in acknowledgment despite the fact that the other can't see him.
Outside, the city moves past the tinted windows - streetlights, storefronts, the ordinary infrastructure of the world that has been continuing its ordinary business while everything was happening, indifferent all cities are, too large and too various to register individual catastrophes. Gihun has found, over the years, that he both resents this and relies on it.
The city's indifference is, in its way, a mercy. It means the world doesn't stop. It means there is something to return to.
"You're drinking," Inho says.
"I am," Gihun confirms. Did he hear him gulp or did he smell the liquor?
"Cheap soju."
"The best kind."
He can't look at Inho's eyes, but he knows what they must look like, he has learned about them through the monitors of the control room for six games now: eyes that process information without immediately revealing what it makes of that information, a mind that files things carefully, that is doing more work than the surface suggests. "Can I have some?"
Gihun considers this for a moment. Then he scoots over and presses the bottle to Inho's lips, tilting it upward.
Inho drinks and makes no comment on the quality.
They ride in silence for a while. The city moves. Gihun drinks some more. The white mask catches the light from passing streetlamps, throwing it back without warmth, and he is aware of how he looks in it - knows, from the other side of it, what a white mask in a dark limousine communicates. He wore a black mask, once, when he was a second in command. He remembers what that felt like to look at.
He remembers the night that didn't follow the rules, Ilnam's voice through the golden owl mask as he sat in front of him, the permission arriving from nowhere, the gravity of being saved by someone's sentimentality when he had no other claim on survival.
You remind me of my son.
He has turned this sentence over more times than he can count, has looked at it from every angle, has tried to find the weight of it distributed more evenly, has failed.
It sits where it sits.
He is alive and in this car because of it.
Inho won without it.
Six games, every choice observable from the monitors, and not once - ot once - did Hwang Inho receive anything he didn't earn. He made alliances he honored. He made calculations that were ruthless and accurate and he carried them with the bearing of someone who is not pretending the weight isn't there. He found, in the marble game, the solution that only about one in thirty winners finds, the one that requires to be both intelligent and willing to lose something to spare someone else, and he had found it without hesitation, which told Gihun everything he needed to know about this person.
He had watched that game three times on the recording, while Inho was being prepared for the return on mainland.
He had not examined why.
he thinks about Gayeong, growing safely in Los Angeles, far and safe from all of this.
"You're going to be a father."
Inho raises his head again. Outside the window, a streetlight passes and the inside of the car briefly brightens.
"It's in the file," he explains - which is true and also is not the whole truth: he read the file with more attention than he reads most files and has thought about the wife and the coming child with a frequency that is not professionally required, "What's the name?"
"We haven't decided yet."
A pause.
"She wants something traditional. I keep suggesting things she rejects."
"What do you suggest?"
"She says they're too serious."
Gihun drinks his soju: "Are they?"
Something moves in Inho's face. Not quite a smile - not yet, not in this car, not tonight - but the precursor to one.
"Probably," he admits.
Gihun presses the bottle back without being asked. Inho drinks again. It seems like he is just now realizing that he is going to survive.
It takes time. It always takes time. Gihun has experienced it first hand and watch it happen time and time again, and it always looks like this, the moment one realizes that there's still a future for them.
"The others," Inho says. He doesn't finish.
"You carried them well. The way you played."
"That's not-"
"I know," Gihun says, and he does know, knows exactly what the unfinished sentence contains, "You'll carry this too. It won't feel like it for a while. Then it will feel like it a little. Then more," He takes the bottle back, "You'll be good at it. You're good at carrying things."
Inho looks in his direction.
"Who are you," he asks.
"Nobody important," Gihun says, which is not true and also, in all the ways that matter here, in this car, tonight, is completely true.
"I'll find out," Inho replies, "I want you to know that. Whoever you are, whatever this is, I'll find it. I'll find you."
Gihun looks at him for a long moment. He thinks about Ilnam on the intercom, about fair and square, about a baby with a serious name that her mother will veto and a wife who is waiting and ordinary days stacked like an inheritance.
The bottle is almost empty.
He finishes it and wears the mask again.
"Think of it as a dream. A good dream."
He reaches across the space between them and he administers the gas with practiced efficiency. Inho goes under with the surprise of it, Gihun catches him the same way he always catches them except that he holds on a moment longer than protocol requires.
He puts the card between his lips himself.
He sets the empty soju bottle in the compartment where the expensive liquor is supposed to go.
He straightens his mask.
He tells the driver to take Inho home - the address is in the file - and he watches the city out the tinted window as they drive, the streetlights moving past in their indifferent rows, the world continuing in its comprehensive and unconcerned way.
Find me then.
The city doesn't answer.
It never does.
He pours himself a glass of the expensive liquor from the limousine's compartment, looks at it for a moment, and puts it back.
He'll pick up another green bottle on the way home.
The cheap kind.
The best kind.