Chapter Text
The bed they fall asleep in is too large for two people. It looks like something meant for a family.
Gi-hun’s body is sticky with exertion, covered in a thin sheen of sweat and cum. His throat throbs. Everything in him throbs. It is blessedly, miserably quiet again. He stares at the etchings on the headboard, english characters he can’t read. Traces them over with his finger. The sound of his nail against the wood gets swallowed up and muffled against the cotton of his ears.
Beside him, In-ho starts to giggle. Laughs and laughs and laughs.
For the weeks leading up to it it’s a furious kind of heavy petting that would make even the most hardcore of teenagers blush. In-ho finds no lack of places on Gi-huns body to kiss, mouth moving fervently like they’re running out of time. Gi-hun stays limp as fresh squid every time, but the evidence of In-ho’s arousal isn’t anything he tries particularly hard to hide.
Once, blurry at the edges from some medication he’d been pumped full with, he asks what’s the point of it, the gentlemanly act. Why bother with pretending.
In-ho stiffens only a little bit, clicking his tongue against his teeth. “I value you more than that.”
Gi-hun almost snorts, head lolling to the side. “Not by a lot.”
Something in In-ho’s expression sours, curdling with distaste. As of late, he hasn’t been too big of a fan of the hospital visits, which wasn’t true a few weeks ago. For one deranged, psychotic moment, Gi-hun had thought he was jealous of the nurses, able to handle him in a way even In-ho can’t manage. Poke and prod in all the smallest little parts of him, rip it out and tighten. His heart is monitored to an almost obsessive rate, but at the end of the day not even the games can control that; if he goes, he goes.
Usually, that makes him seize in panic, but everything is loopy and mostly nice, so it washes away to the beach where the rest of those ideas go, eroding into fine sand he can pretend not to notice. He’s staring at his hand, the swaying of it from where it’s propped up on his knees. He can see the river-thin lines of his veins. He’s old.
“I’m old.” He says, and In-ho shrugs mildly.
“No older than me.”
“Well, yeah, but you look —like that,” He sways and almost throws up onto the sheets, but manages to choke down the nausea by slumping face first into his chest. He wants to sleep but they’re measuring something, and for that he needs to be awake. “It’s different. I don’t even get how you stomach it.”
“Stomach what?”
He grimaces “Doing those things. With—with me. It’s not natural. You’re young enough to get a pretty girlfriend, I think. Or a wife. My wife left me, but she wouldn’t leave you.”
In-ho sidesteps his question with practiced ease. “I have no interest in your wife.”
“Which means you have interest in me.” Gi-hun frowns past the migraine that’s been drumming against his skull since that morning, squinting to look at him. Everything is fluorescent and halo-bright. “I’m not stupid, you know. I know how that works.”
A small, secretive smile. In-ho’s eyes are half moons when he’s amused, crows feet betraying him. When he looks like this is when Gi-hun can stand to see him the least. He turns his head away. “Congratulations, Gi-hun. You’re quite intelligent.”
“Don’t be mean to me,” he mutters, yanking the blanket over his shoulder with too much force. He’s cold. Dizzy, too. All of him is swimming in milk. “I’m your senior.”
“But you called me hyung.” In-ho got over that rather quickly, quicker still when Gi-hun gave in and let him lick all into the roof of his mouth. He smiles about it now, like it’s a joke they share. “You relinquished that title to me.”
He purses his lips. “I don’t want to talk to you anymore. Tell me when they finish.”
In-ho’s smile drops. He crosses his legs, looking over to the side. The moment’s gone. Gi-hun is disturbed to find there was a moment at all.
“Don’t fall asleep. It’ll mess with the calculations.”
Out of nothing but spite, Gi-hun tries with all his might to pass out. The drugs make him loopy and smooth-brained, everything almost pleasant enough to doze. Ultimately, he’s unsuccessful, because Sang-woo chooses that exact moment to walk into the room.
He’s kept in the hospital for two more days, put on watch as a result of his nervous breakdown. As they’re leaving on the last, In-ho makes a sudden executive decision. He cuts off his supply of anesthesia.
“It’s messing with his brain,” He tells the doctor, speaking like Gi-hun isn’t there.
Sang-woo observes with some mild interest from the corner of the room, leaning against the wall. His glasses are broken in one edge, lips pressed flat. Silent. Young-il left when he appeared and has been gone since. “He doesn’t act right when he’s on it.”
“Well,” The doctor gives him an uncomfortable glance before looking back at In-ho, rushing out in one breath, “He’s—he’s not supposed to. It’s keeping his vitals—”
“I don’t think it’s good for him,” In-ho repeats, slow like maybe his words didn’t register right. His face is utterly blank. “I’d like you to take him off of them starting today. No more going forward.”
The doctor manages three more awkward sentences on his behalf, then quietly concedes. In-ho is pleased as punch on the walk back.
“Why did you do that?” Gi-hun asks when minutes pass by and he’s sure In-ho’s mood is a little bit more settled. He’s picking at the skin on the back of his nails, thinking. There’s an endless stretch of doctors appointments in his future. The thought of doing all of them sober is daunting.
“They made you act strangely,” They get to the room and In-ho pushes the door open, holding it for him as he walks inside. Not for the first time, Gi-hun feels like some housewife. “Giggly, sometimes, for no reason at all. It made me think of the you from the first game.”
Gi-hun’s shoulders hitch. In-ho loves to drop little things like that, things he thinks doesn’t matter. “And you didn’t like it? That I was—happy?”
In-ho gives him an inscrutable look.
“I didn’t like that you needed a drug to remind me of that version of you.” He glances away, staring at his dress shoes as he toes out of them. Soft, muffled rustling. This room was the prettiest cage Gi-hun had ever seen, a vacuum, and it nearly took In-ho’s voice with it, his words uncharacteristically quiet. “I don’t want you associating the hospital with positive feelings like that. It’s dangerous.”
Gi-hun thinks of blood drips and the smell of listerine. Of floating miles and miles out of his body. From behind him, Sang-woo gives a low, quiet hum.
“It’s interesting, ” His eyes are a deep, deep brown, blood seeping down the side of his slacks. The sound of his lighter is a dim click. “He actually sounds like he means it. ”
Later that night, he tiptoes to the sprawling mirror on a dresser he’s hardly ever touched. All his clothes are bunched into the night stand, expensive brands wrinkled beyond recognition. In-ho buys him a surplus of gifts, twice as many clothes as he needs. His room is a mess with it, button-ups and slacks covering every inch. He’s afraid that any care he gives them will be misinterpreted, turned back onto him. He hopes turning this pinnacle of luxury into a pigsty will make In-ho want him less. He’s afraid that it’ll work.
He looks a bit like a Gi-hun that never existed, hair growing long and shaggy down to his neck. He does look younger again, somehow, something about the healthy weight he’s put on with the meals they give him even with his interspersed refusals to eat. He takes a slurry of medications in the morning, all monitored by In-ho who makes sure the amounts are exact. The fruits of it are seen in everything but his eyes—skin flushed and mostly healthy looking, all of him bright, awake.
But his eyes are lifeless, distant. There’s bags under them not even vitamins can fix.
Awkwardly, he tries to grin. It looks more like a baring of his teeth.
Gi-hun wonders, occasionally, if he’s seriously ill. He must be. When he was poor and he was sane, Sang-woo was flesh and blood and real and tangible. Sang-woo was his friend.
This Sang-woo doesn’t want to be friends at all. He thinks, quietly, that this Sang-woo hates him.
“And to think, ” He says one day, cigarette smoldering. In-ho is gone, and Sang-woo never waits too long to come see him whenever that’s the case. It’s never really a social call. Sometimes, he wants to ask for Young-il back. “You could’ve saved us all the trouble and just spread your legs. ”
Gi-hun doesn’t really get it at first. When it hits, it comes with a nauseous, queasy feeling. “It’s not like that.”
“You can’t really believe that. Even I know you’re smart enough not to—” (In-ho’s voice, calling him intelligent, smiling—) “You should have just let him stick it in you, advertised yourself as a whore first. ” He flicks cigarette ash down onto the pristine white sheets. “Cut the middleman, like the American say. ”
“I’m not,” He can hardly say it, face flashing hot, “a whore. We don’t have sex. That’d be—that’d be sodomy. I don’t like it when we kiss and, and stuff. He does. I like women.”
Sang-woo stares at him from the corner of his eye, bringing the cigarette to his lips. “I think, ” He begins mildly, “That you have bigger problems than sodomy.”
Sang-woo comes in irregular intervals. Once, when In-ho is in a good mood and treats them both to some trashy melodrama he can’t exactly remember the story of, just that he’d been relaxing despite himself. The room stinks of popcorn and cigarettes with him there, his commentary short and disinterested. He always says the same thing; that Gi-hun’s a whore and not even a good one, that everyone died just for him to end up being a cockdrunk slut. No matter that they haven't slept together at all—Sang-woo says it like some forgone truth.
He waits for the day he’ll desensitize to it but it doesn’t come. Young-il soothes him with his practiced condescension when his throats clogs with memory. His words are soft.
“He was always smarter than you, you know. I’m sure he knows what he’s seeing. There’s nothing wrong with it—the VIP’s saw it too. ”
Young-il and Sang-woo don’t really get along, but they seem to agree on a lot of points. They both want him to give in.
And then In-ho is gone. A week and a half of nothing, of radio silence. Gi-hun goes half crazy, nearly out of his mind. The guards come back to watch him. He takes his pills and they feed him food. No one talks when he talks, no one does anything. He stops sleeping in his bed and crosses the hall into In-ho’s, curls up on his mattress and wonders what he would do if he saw him here. If he would touch him.
Gi-hun needs someone to touch him like he needs to breathe. Sometimes, when the loneliness has him starved and desperate, he digs his fingers into the strange etchings in the wood of In-ho’s bed and pretends like he’s holding him back, like he’s hurting him, like he’s here at all.
Sang-woo warns him that he’s in over his head. That a few weeks gone shouldn’t be where he unravels like tugged threat. Sang-woo tells him, voice low, sweet, “You’ve failed in every aspect. I’m not sure why you tried. ”
The door opens with a thump, and Gi-hun jerks back, scrambling away from the vintage looking handheld mirror he’s observing. It drops to the ground, and In-ho clambers in without grace. Doesn’t even mention that he’s not meant to be here.
The smell hits him first, cloying and thick like something rotting. It’s so heavy it’s almost sweet, and Gi-hun scrambles away when In-ho gets close, breathing out shallowly through his mouth. His coat brushes against the line of Gi-hun’s ankle, and the mask is as unfeeling as it was during the first—as it was—
Blood, his mind quietly supplies. It’s the smell of blood.
In-ho peels the metal off his face, answering for him. “We had to clean up a mess. A few police officers were digging their nose where it didn’t belong.”
He swallows, trying to look at something that isn’t drying brown. In-ho’s face slides into his line of sight, and a whimper dies in his throat. A hand reaches up to cradle his cheek, rubbing figure eights against the line of jaw.
“They were going to find you. They would’ve hurt you for participating, for being here at all. I saved your life,” A smile that doesn’t quite reach his eyes, “Again.”
The figure eights crawl down to his pulse. This time, he expects it when In-ho’s mouth hits his.
He’s learnt with practice to breathe out in the few breaks In-ho gives him, sucking in air frantically and trying to force his heart into something like calm. In-ho likes it when he clings to him, so he does. The finger on his neck slips down to his collarbones as a reward; a knee sliding into the space between his legs. He closes his eyes tight and tries to step out of his body.
In-ho always gets hard quickly, and today is no exception even with the blood drying all up the side of his face. He rocks into Gi-hun a bit harder, pushing him up into the glass. The dresser clatters with the force of it and he groans, head dropping into the space between his neck and his shoulder. His hips are jerky, grinding out for friction. Gi-hun holds his breath and waits for it.
“‘m gonna stop,” He mumbles, quiet like a sick child. Gi-hun shifts and hears In-ho swallow down a sound not half as put together as he normally is. Gloved hands reach down to grip at his hips, holding him in place, holding him still. They don’t move. “I’m gonna stop. I’m going to stop. I will not fuck you today. I won’t—” He chokes on a curse, “I won’t.”
There’s a long stretch of time where nothing happens. Despite himself, Gi-hun’s eyes are open again. Staring.
Young-il and Sang-woo stare back at him.
“He doesn’t want to fuck you,” Sang-woo hums, soft, almost kind, and his heart gives a painful squeeze. “You’re losing your value.”
“And you had so many chances, ” Young-il is caked in blood, bathed and doused and thick with it. He’s cross-legged on the ground, unabashed about the boner straining against the thin material of his tracksuit pants. His eyes are brilliant, miniature supernovas. “He gave you everything. You we’re always so greedy . ”
“You were never satisfied. You always wanted more.” Under his glasses, Sang-woo’s grin curls, vitriolic. “You probably even wanted me. Glued yourself to my side when you found me in the games.”
“I’ll leave you be,” He hears In-ho grunt out, and panic seizes him. Young-il’s voice drowns it all out.
“Now you’re going to lose again. The last chance you had to have anyone want you. What else is left? Who else to go back to? You’re used up, damaged goods. You’ll be— ”
“Don’t go!” He cries, and everything shuts up all at once. His eyes feel glassy and wet. Hand trembling where it’s twisted into the collar of In-ho’s coat. “Don’t go, don’t leave me. I want you to—I want to stay. Don’t go.” His voice comes out in a thin reed and he stumbles over himself, collapsing to his knees. He scrambles forward, gripping at the frayed edges of black leather, looking up. From this perspective, everything is large and superimposed. “ Please,” He chokes, “Please don’t leave me alone.” Laced boots take half a step back and Gi-hun clings to them, ignores the burning shame. A beat, a quarter of one.
“Okay,” He breathes. In-ho stops being a person and instead is a voice. The word comes out shaky and quiet. Gi-hun feels it more than it’s heard, this selfish exchange. “Okay.” He says again. “I’ll stay with you. I’ll stay.”
He stays.
The night is long, silent. He’s facing the wall, listening to the small puffs of air In-ho expels as he breathes. He’s still in his work clothes, body stiff as they sink into the mattress. Even then, his face looks utterly peaceful. Content.
Gi-hun doesn’t see a gun, but he feels the threat of one anyway.
The night gets longer, even more silent. He can’t see Young-il or Sang-woo but he can hear them, their voices endless pratter somewhere near his frontal lobe, overlapping by the tens, the thousands.
“He’s in your bed.” A soft, curling purr. “Kill him. Kill him. You won’t get the chance again. Show him that you’re worth something. Show him you’re alive.”
His bones creak with effort. Slowly, so, so slowly, he sits up. Stares at the profile of In-ho’s face. His migraine has started up again, pounding against his skull. The blanket has slipped down on In-ho’s side; it’s hot. Must be late in August by now. The belt he wears is already loose.
“Kill him, ” he hears, and then even quieter than that, “Prove that you want him too. ”
He’s lost a lot of weight since he’s been here, all bones and sharp edges. Straddling In-ho’s thighs is harder than he expects. He swallows past the lump in his throat, shaking minutely.
Please, god, he prays, reaching for the zipper. Please let me have this. Please let me win just once.
It’s a bit like cutting out the shapes of a dalgona cookie. If he moves to quickly, he runs the risk of waking In-ho up, and will die. Too slowly, and his nerve will fail him, and will wake In-ho, and he’ll die.
A half crazed laugh of hysteria bubbles up in him; it’s exactly like cutting a dalgona cookie.
The belt slips into his hand, weighted leather and sharply cut buckles. He can see the fine white edge of In-ho’s boxers, the peek of it from the gap between the zipper. His mouth dries.
“Go ahead, ” Young-il urges him, pliant. “This is what he wants. ”
In-ho sleeps like a lead weight. When Gi-hun digs his fingers under the cotton and yanks, he holds his breath and waits for the bullet in his temple that never comes.
It’s sort of strange, seeing In-ho’s dick. Up until this moment it didn’t really hit that he was a man, too. It was all sort of vague to him, a concept. This is what he’s making hard.
This is what he’s going to be making hard again.
He grinds down softly at first, trying to find a position that keeps most of his weight on the bed and off of In-ho’s lap. It strains on his legs and beads of sweat drain down his back, and it’s the most horrifically nonsensical thing he’s thought to do, making a man hard in his sleep. It’s all just uncoordinated bumping and grinding and hoping and wishing, searching for proof that In-ho will keep him as long as he says.
A low, worrying heat pools in Gi-hun’s stomach, some mix of dread and burgeoning arousal. He gasps when he feels it, grinding down too hard and freezing when he hears In-ho give a low grunt, shifting more to his back. Unconsciously, his hips give small jerks upward, chasing the feeling now that Gi-hun’s withholding it. His face dusts a light pink. He’s hard.
Gi-hun is, too.
There’s a small, withered croaking sound. He recognizes a minute late that it’s coming from him. He recognizes two minutes late that In-ho’s waking up.
It all happens in slow motion, the light twitch of his eyelid. There’s a comma in between his eyebrows, furrowed from frustration. His eyes squeeze, then start to open. His mouth drops into a small ‘oh’.
“Gi-hun?” He coughs out. He looks confused. “Gi-hun, what are you—”
He moves quicker than he thinks, both hands wrapping around the unmarred column of In-ho’s throat. In-ho blinks only once, and otherwise stays still. Assesses him.
“Don’t move,” Gi-hun hisses. He tries to ignore the erection bobbing against his stomach. “Or I’ll squeeze.”
“Alright.” In-ho doesn’t move. His hands stay flat on the bedspread. Even his hips stop moving, leaving Gi-hun feeling oddly cold and afraid. He’s always afraid, but he’s afraid more now of what will happen to him after this. If he’ll die. What will happen to him if he doesn’t.
“Nothing you hadn’t planned on doing to him, ” Sang-woo points out. The nauseous feeling comes back. His fingers flex.
“I don’t—” he starts, and realizes quite abruptly he doesn’t know what to say. He doesn’t want to kill In-ho, didn’t want to even at the start of this. He’d wanted In-ho to stay alive. To stay with him.
He’d wanted him to promise.
“You won’t leave,” he says instead, like a statement. “Ever. You won’t leave.”
The realization comes to In-ho in live time; eyes glazing over. He looks impossibly, damnably happy, lips unfurling into a smile. He ignores Gi-hun’s earlier threat and moves, broad hands going flat on his waist. Pushing there, like he wishes he go go straight through. He tugs him down half an inch. “I would never kill you, Gi-hun.”
It’s not really about that, but theres this swelling feeling in his chest and In-ho sees it and hears it and smells it and knows it and he’s surging upwards, mouth hot and hard and pleading.
Gi-hun moans into him, nearly cries out when In-ho digs his fingers in hard into the meat of his thigh. In-ho gives a stuttered gasp into his mouth, shaky when he speaks.
“You want me,” he purrs. Involuntarily, Gi-hun thinks back to that first time, when his heart was failing him and all that was left was this. It’s a little bit like that now. A little bit. “You want me, you want me. This is proof of it.” He nips on Gi-huns bottom lip, words smothered into the warmth of him. “I’ll never let you go.”
Everything in him is vibrating and alive and he shoves In-ho back down, ignoring the dull thunk of his head hitting the headboard. He shambles out of his own pajama pants, pointedly avoiding looking at himself. In-ho is shameless in his ogling.
“You can fuck me now,” is all he says. Lets In-ho take the reins.
It’s sex in the loosest terms, probably closer to something like devouring. He’s never done this before but In-ho seems like he has, moving recklessly when he realizes that Gi-hun is letting him. He’s on his stomach, ass up, In-ho’s fingers plying him open with he hears a small laugh.
He’s too horny to really be embarrassed anymore, but turns wet eyes to the form behind him anyways, almost slurring. “Wh–what?”
“Seeing you like this,” In-ho tells him. His forearms flex from keeping them both upright. Lubricant smears all down his skin. “It made me think of dalgona." He says, and Gi-hun thinks, dim in the haze of it, that maybe In-ho had been right. They've always been similar; all they know is the games.
His fingers are kinder than his chuckle, voice light as he continues. The sounds of them are practically obscene. "You and your little umbrella.”
He sours a bit with memory, but then In-ho hits something fantastic and it all becomes white noise. Still, he turns his head to ask, strands of hair blocking his vision and making it look like In-ho is in a cage. Or he’s in the cage. Something’s in somewhere; he can’t really think. “You watched that?”
“Yes. Many times.” He curls the fingers already in him, and adds another. “I never got the sight of it out of my head. It messed with my work; I was obsessed with the thought of bending you over, right in front of that little friend of yours.”
A strange feeling takes over him, one he doesn’t have a name for. Another moan, wanton, (whorish) before he allows himself to choke out a final question. Thinking is going to ruin his orgasm and this is the best he’s felt in months, years. “And the—the second game? What about then?”
“Then,” In-ho hums, fingers sliding out of him. He pulls down his pants. “Then, I saw my chance. ”
Gi-hun cries as he rocks into him. He’s not sure it’s because of the sensation.
The pace In-ho sets is relentless and frantic, made faster by the position he has them in; Gi-hun straining against the grip on his hair, cheek squished flat against the cheeks. Every time In-ho slams back into him his dick grinds against the mattress, making him nearly weep with relief. He strains further back, nearly babbling.
“Don’t leave me,” He pleads, voice hoarse. The broad palm of In-ho’s hand rests at the base of his neck, not really holding, just there. His nails graze the the dip in his throat every time he moves. “Please don’t leave me, don’t—” A mortifying thought comes to him, and he scrambles to turn around, hissing, nails digging into In-ho’s back. He hasn’t taken off his shirt but Gi-hun can feel it, the damp patches of sweat along his spine. This position isn’t hitting him inside as deep but looking into In-ho’s eyes makes him feel hot and desperate.
“Don’t hurt me and, and leave me, I don’t know what I’d do if you did,” He chokes it out, scalp stinging. He’s going to come and the thought is suddenly horrifying. He might throw up doing it; he feels sick and disembodied. In-ho kisses him and he whimpers into his mouth, needy and afraid. “Don’t hurt me and leave,” He clings even closer to In-ho, doesn’t want to see what emotion it is that’s on his face, listens to his swallowed groans and thinks I'm doing this. I'm doing this. “Don’t make me be alone, please, please, don't leave me with them again, I don’t want to— I don’t—”
His orgasm comes with a sloppy, messy jerk, staining In-ho’s button up shirt. In-ho isn't far along behind, filling him in deep and unmoving even Gi-hun tries to scrub the water from his eyes, hiccuping. He’s quiet as he does it, quiet as when he does anything, panting muffled into Gi-hun's shoulder.
He sinks his teeth in deep enough to break skin, lapping up at the blood in apology. The aftershocks are still rolling through him, enough so that Gi-hun hardly feels it, just the quiet promise In-ho breathes into his ear.
“It’s just us,” In-ho sighs out. Gi-hun thinks he’s hyperventilating, chest heaving too hard. His eyes are wide and unseeing. His shoulder throbs with ache. In-ho grabs his face and says it again, tender. “It’s just us. You and I. There’s no where else to go. I’ll never leave.”
“You’ll never leave.” Gi-hun repeats. Confirmation.
“I’ll never leave. It’s just us.” A breath, hot against his skin. In-ho’s grip on him is suffocating. Gi-hun feels himself sink into it. “It’s just us. It’s just us.”
It’s just them.
There’s a lot of evers' in forever.