Game of Mercy
game of mercy - part nine
synapse: with everything on the line, jace must decide not only how to survive but who he wants to be when itâs over
pairing: kang sae-byeok (player 067)x male oc
contains: physical violence, blood, death, angst, grief
. . .
Jace didn't remember the walk.
He didn't remember leaving the dormitory. Didn't remember the guards taking him from the floor. Didn't remember the hallways or the stairs or whether anyone had spoken to him and received an answer. Everything after Sae-byeok disappearing into the black box had collapsed into one long stretch of nothing, like his mind had simply refused to witness the rest.
The next thing he really registered was a voice.
"Player 214. Player 218. Player 456."
Jace lifted his head.
Slowly.
He was standing in a dark corridor now, the floor beneath him cold and hard, the air too still. His eyes burned. Everything around them was dim except for the light falling over the three of them and the triangle-masked guard standing nearby. Sang-woo was to one side. Gi-hun to the other.
Jace looked at Sang-woo and felt the numbness crack.
His white shirt was still stained with Sae-byeok's blood.
Dry now.
Dark at the collar.
On his face too, faint streaks that made the whole thing worse because they looked casual, like he had been allowed too much time to wear the evidence of her death without consequence.
Rage rose so fast it nearly made Jace dizzy.
He wanted him dead.
Not abstractly.
Not later.
Now.
The guard spoke again.
"Welcome to the final game."
Jace tore his eyes off Sang-woo only because the sound forced him to. The corridor ahead opened out toward a circular arena flooded in cleaner light, and beyond it, painted into the ground like a mockery of childhood, was the final game.
Squid Game.
The shape of it was there in white lines and hard angles. The circle, the square, the narrow waist between them. Too simple-looking for something that had eaten this many people.
"Before we begin," the guard said, "there will be a coin toss to decide offense and defense. Please choose triangle or square."
"Triangle," Gi-hun said immediately.
The guard flipped a gold coin into the air. It spun once, twice, then landed in his palm.
"Triangle."
He looked to Gi-hun. "Please choose either offense or defense."
"Offense."
The guard inclined his head slightly. "Player 456 will play offense. Player 218 will defend."
Jace frowned.
There were three of them.
Even in the fog of grief and fury, that much cut through.
The guard turned to him as if anticipating the thought. "Player 214 will begin as a neutral contestant."
Jace stared at him.
The guard continued, voice flat and precise, like he was explaining the rules to children at recess and not to the last survivors of a slaughter.
"In the traditional game, one side attacks and one side defends. Because three finalists remain, Player 214 will begin outside both roles. He may choose to assist either side at any time by physically joining that side's movement within the boundary."
Jace's expression hardened immediately.
No.
He was not helping Sang-woo.
The guard went on.
"Once Player 214 enters in support of offense, he will be treated as an attacker. Once he enters in support of defense, he will be treated as a defender. Until then, he remains unaffiliated."
Gi-hun glanced sideways at Jace.
Sang-woo did too, and there was something ugly and knowing in it, as if he'd already started calculating what kind of leverage that gave him.
Jace's hand curled at his side.
He still wanted Sang-woo dead.
"Victory conditions remain the same," the guard said. "An offensive player wins by reaching the squid's head with at least one foot while still eligible to attack. A defensive player wins by preventing the attackers from doing so until the attackers are unable to continue."
The guard paused just long enough for it to settle.
Then came the part Jace cared about.
"In this final game," he said, "there may be more than one winner."
That pulled Gi-hun's full attention too.
The guard clarified.
"If Player 456 reaches the squid's head and Player 214 has joined the offense before the game is concluded, both may be declared winners, provided both remain capable of finishing and neither violates the boundaries of the game."
Jace looked toward the arena.
So he and Gi-hun could both leave alive.
The thought hit him strangely after everything. Like it belonged to another world.
The guard continued, and the possibility tightened.
"If Player 214 remains neutral or joins the defense, only the appropriate surviving side may win."
Jace understood.
Three players.
Two roles.
One floating piece.
He could help Gi-hun and leave with him.
He could stay out of it and let the game narrow.
Or he could, if he lost his mind completely, join Sang-woo.
That last option barely deserved to exist.
The guard's tone never changed. "Player 214 is not required to declare allegiance before the start. He may choose during play."
Jace looked back at Sang-woo.
Sae-byeok's blood was still on him.
Ji-yeong was dead.
Sae-byeok was dead.
And the man who had taken the last one from him was standing here being told he still had a fair chance to win.
Jace felt something inside him go cold and sharp.
He wouldn't work with Sang-woo.
Not for strategy.
Not for survival.
Not for anything.
If Jace stepped into that arena at all, it would be to help Gi-hun or to make sure Sang-woo never walked out of it.
The guard gave the final explanation.
"If more than one player survives in a winning position, more than one player may receive the prize. If only one player remains able to continue, that player alone wins."
A possibility of more than one winner.
But only if they got there.
Only if the final game didn't finish what the others had started.
The corridor fell quiet again after that, the rules hanging in the air between the three surviving players.
Gi-hun stood offense.
Sang-woo stood defense.
And Jace, bloodshot-eyed and hollowed out by loss, stood between them as the one variable no one could predict.
He looked at the arena.
Then at Gi-hun.
Then at Sang-woo.
And in the silence before the final walk, one thing was already certain:
Jace would never stand on Sang-woo's side.
Rain started before the first blood hit the dirt.
By the time Jace stepped out into the arena, the sky over the Red Light, Green Light field had gone black and swollen, the giant doll standing at the edge of it all like some dead witness that no longer needed to turn its head to kill. The squid game was drawn in white lines over the wet ground, already beginning to gloss under the first thin sheet of rain.
The triangle guard's voice cut through the weather.
"Now let the game begin."
They moved into position.
Gi-hun at offense. Sang-woo at defense. Jace just outside the first shape, neutral only by rule, not by intention.
Gi-hun started first, hopping on one foot toward the entry point of the squid, body already strained and battered from everything that had come before. Sang-woo watched him, shoulders set, blood and rain starting to run together down the front of his white shirt.
Jace stood still.
Watching.
Waiting.
Then Gi-hun snatched up a handful of wet dirt and sand and flung it straight into Sang-woo's face.
Sang-woo cursed and recoiled, wiping at his eyes, and in that second Gi-hun crossed into the neck.
The rain came harder.
Cold. Immediate. Turning the dirt slick beneath their feet.
Jace's gaze locked on Sang-woo with a look so stripped of anything human it almost felt calm.
Sang-woo blinked the grit out of his eyes and found him.
And because Sang-woo had always known exactly how to weaponize words when he no longer had an advantage anywhere else, he said, "She was going to die anyway."
Jace didn't move.
Sang-woo kept going.
"I just ended her pain quickly."
That did it.
Jace's face changed.
Not loudly. Not dramatically.
It simply emptied out.
"You don't get to talk about her with that mouth," he said.
Rain ran down Sang-woo's face. "That's why I killed her."
His eyes flicked between Jace and Gi-hun.
"You and him would've given everything up just to save her. I'd have had to leave here without a penny!"
Jace took the knife from inside his shirt.
The metal flashed wet under the stormlight.
"You're gonna die," he said, voice low and sure, "and leave without a penny anyway."
Then he moved.
No warning. No hesitation.
He stepped into the game.
Not for Sang-woo's side. Never that.
For Gi-hun's.
And the final game became what it had probably always been underneath the rules: two men trying to hold onto whatever humanity they had left, and one man who had already traded his away.
Sang-woo met them hard.
The three of them stayed inside the squid's shape, slipping in mud and rain and blood, the fight turning brutal immediately. Sang-woo went for Gi-hun first, maybe because offense still technically mattered, maybe because Gi-hun was the easier of the two to read.
Jace was there before Sang-woo could finish anything.
Every time Sang-woo drove Gi-hun back, Jace slammed into him from the side. Every time Sang-woo regained footing, one of them took it from him. They weren't graceful. They weren't strategic in any neat, careful way. It was ugly. Wet. Desperate. A real fight at last, with nothing ceremonial left to hide behind.
Sang-woo managed to catch Gi-hun across the face hard enough to send him stumbling.
Jace launched at him immediately.
Sang-woo turned and met him with the knife.
They crashed to the dirt together.
The blade flashed toward Jace's throat. He twisted just in time, the tip cutting across his collar instead of sinking in, and then Sang-woo was on top of him, pressing down, stronger than Jace expected, rain and mud turning both of them slick.
Jace grabbed Sang-woo by the shirt and drove his forehead straight into his face.
The impact cracked between them.
Sang-woo reeled back just enough.
Jace jammed his thumb viciously into Sang-woo's eye.
Sang-woo screamed.
Jace shoved him off and came up on top.
And then something in him broke loose.
He hit him.
Once.
Twice.
Then again and again and again, his fist slamming into Sang-woo's face until the rain started washing blood into the dirt beneath them. Jace barely felt his own knuckles splitting. All he could see were flashes:
Ji-yeong smiling crookedly on the marble steps.
Her saying thank you for playing with me.
Sae-byeok pale in the dark, saying I do like you too.
Sang-woo standing over her bed with blood on his shirt.
The black boxes.
The pink ribbons.
The piggy bank filling up with people Jace had loved.
He hit him harder.
He didn't care about the game anymore.
Didn't care about the money.
He just wanted Sang-woo dead.
Below him, Sang-woo stopped fighting back properly. His arms went weaker. His face turned slack under the blows. Limp enough that Jace's rage had nowhere left to land except into a body that was almost no longer resisting.
Then Jace looked up.
Gi-hun was there.
Bloodied.
Limping.
Alive.
And the squid's head was open behind him.
Jace, chest heaving, rain pouring down his face, looked at Gi-hun and said, "Go."
Gi-hun stared at him.
"Finish it," Jace snapped.
Gi-hun limped forward.
Step by step.
Toward the head.
Toward the win.
Toward the end of all of it.
Then he stopped.
Just short of the circle.
Jace, still straddling Sang-woo, still gripping the knife, saw it in his face before he heard it in his voice.
"No."
The word cut through the rain.
Gi-hun looked at the two of them, Jace with the knife, Sang-woo half-conscious beneath him, the whole final game spread around them in white lines and mud.
Then he shouted, voice breaking under it, "I quit!"
Jace froze.
Gi-hun kept talking, louder now, forcing the words through the storm.
"Clause Three of the agreement. The game may be terminated upon a majority vote!"
His eyes locked on Jace first, then on the barely-breathing Sang-woo.
"If we all give up," Gi-hun yelled, "the game ends here!"
The rain hammered down.
For a second, all Jace could hear was his own breathing and the pulse in his ears.
His hand tightened around the knife.
He could end it.
Now.
One thrust.
One clean answer.
No more Sang-woo.
No more chance for him to walk out with anything.
No more letting a man like this survive one more sunrise.
And part of him wanted it so badly he could taste it.
He looked down at Sang-woo's face, ruined and bloodied beneath him.
Then he heard her.
Not really. Not aloud.
But just as real.
You're not that kind of person.
Sae-byeok in the dark. Stopping him before he could kill Sang-woo in the dormitory. Still believing there was a line in him worth protecting.
Ji-yeong too, in her own way, had done the same thing. Given him a life instead of a body count. Forced him to keep being the person they had seen in him, even when he didn't want to.
Jace shut his eyes for half a second.
Then opened them.
When he spoke, his voice was wrecked.
"I hate you."
It wasn't clear whether he meant Sang-woo or Gi-hun or himself.
Maybe all three.
Slowly, shaking with the effort of letting go, Jace pulled the knife back from Sang-woo's throat.
Not because Sang-woo deserved mercy.
He didn't.
Not because Jace forgave him.
He never would.
But because Ji-yeong had died to give him a life, and Sae-byeok had kissed him like she still believed there was something left in him worth saving.
And if he killed Sang-woo here, helpless, beaten, already done, he would carry that too. He would walk out having proved them wrong.
Jace stood.
Rain ran off the knife in his hand.
He looked at Gi-hun, then at the line of the squid's head still waiting unfinished, then down at Sang-woo.
"Vote," he said.
He hated the word the second it left him.
Because it meant Sang-woo still got to choose.
Because it meant the ending slipped out of Jace's hands and back into the game's.
But deep down, through all the grief and fury, it was still the choice he'd make.
Jace wouldn't become Sang-woo to stop Sang-woo.
Not in the final seconds. Not with Ji-yeong and Sae-byeok already dead behind his eyes.
So he stood there in the rain, blood and mud and loss clinging to him, knife lowered at his side, and waited to see whether the last thing left in any of them was enough to end the game without one more death.
Gi-hun held his hand out to Sang-woo through the rain.
"Let's go home."
The words sounded impossible in that arena. Too soft for the mud and blood and white lines drawn into the ground. Too human for a place that had spent days grinding human things down to almost nothing.
Sang-woo looked at him.
For a moment, he didn't move at all. Rain ran over his face, through the blood, into the dirt beneath him. He looked less like a man now and more like what was left after too many choices had carved everything decent away.
Slowly, he reached.
Jace stood only a few feet away, soaked through, knife still in his hand, too tired to even hope this would end cleanly. His body felt hollowed out. Every muscle ached. His cuts stung. His grief had burned through rage and come out the other side as something colder.
Sang-woo's hand stopped short.
"Gi-hun," he said.
His voice was weak now. Broken.
"I'm sorry."
Then it happened too fast.
Sang-woo's hand shot not for Gi-hun's, but for the knife still hanging loose in Jace's grip.
Jace reacted a second too late. Not because he was slow. Because he was exhausted. Because some part of him had stopped believing there were still surprises left in this night.
Sang-woo yanked the knife free and drove it into his own neck.
The motion was brutal and immediate.
Blood spilled hot and dark into the rain.
Gi-hun made a sound that didn't even sound like words anymore and fell to his knees in front of him, catching Sang-woo as he collapsed. His hands went to the wound instinctively, uselessly, trying to hold in what couldn't be held. He cried out Sang-woo's name like saying it hard enough might undo what had just happened.
Jace didn't move.
Didn't rush forward. Didn't shout. Didn't feel even a flicker of sympathy.
He just stood there in the rain and watched Sang-woo die.
Maybe there should have been satisfaction.
Maybe some part of him should have felt relief, vindication, justice finally arriving in the form of Sang-woo's own hand.
But what Jace felt instead was exhaustion.
Bone-deep. Soul-deep.
Sang-woo was dying in Gi-hun's arms, and Jace could only think of Ji-yeong. Of Sae-byeok. Of the fact that none of this brought either of them back.
The rain kept falling.
Gi-hun cried openly now, holding Sang-woo as if the force of grief alone could keep him here. Sang-woo's body weakened quickly, the blood loss too severe, the wound too final. Within moments, whatever last consciousness had been left in his face was gone.
He was dead.
The arena went quiet in the way only a place soaked in death could go quiet.
Jace stared at the body for one long second.
Then looked away.
Somewhere overhead, unseen speakers would say something. Guards would move. The game would be declared finished because there was no one left to play it except the two men still standing.
Or half-standing, in Gi-hun's case.
Player 218 was dead.
Which meant it was over.
Gi-hun and Jace had won Squid Game.
The thought landed with all the weight of a tombstone and none of the triumph it should have had.
Won.
Jace stood in the rain, blood drying and washing away on him at the same time, and understood with perfect clarity that winning had nothing to do with feeling alive.
Not after this.
Not after Ji-yeong. Not after Sae-byeok. Not after watching the last man in the game choose death with Jace's knife.
They had won.
And Jace had never felt emptier.
. . .
The ride back felt like being buried alive in velvet.
Jace sat in the back seat blindfolded, hands loose in his lap, body swaying slightly with every turn of the car. He knew it was a car because he could feel the movement in the frame beneath him, the hum of the engine, the change in speed, the subtle lean when they curved left or right. Beyond that, he knew very little.
Not where they were taking him. Not how long he'd been in here. Not what time it was.
Only that the games were over.
And he was still somehow here.
The numbness came and went in waves. Sometimes he felt nothing at all, just the heavy drag of exhaustion through his muscles and the ache of half-healed cuts. Other times everything came back too fast, Ji-yeong's voice, Sae-byeok's blood, Sang-woo dropping with the knife in his neck, the rain. Then his mind would shut itself down again like it couldn't bear to keep the whole thing lit for long.
He sat with his head tipped back against the seat and said nothing.
Then a voice beside him spoke in English.
"Congratulations on your victory. It was quite the game."
Jace didn't move at first.
The accent was polished. Calm. Male. Expensive in the way certain voices were expensive even before you knew what kind of man they belonged to. And something in the ease of it like he was discussing a performance he'd just attended rather than a slaughter he had orchestrated, made cold anger stir through Jace's exhaustion.
He turned his head slightly toward the sound.
Even blindfolded, he knew.
This had to be one of them.
Maybe not the only one behind it. But one of the men close enough to the heart of it to speak like that. To sit beside him after all of it and offer congratulations like they were old colleagues leaving a meeting.
Jace answered in English too, voice rough from disuse and grief.
"Am I supposed to say thank you?"
The man gave a soft, amused breath. "No."
The car kept moving.
Jace swallowed once, then asked, "Are you the one behind it?"
There was a pause. Long enough to suggest the man enjoyed pauses.
"Would it matter if I said yes?"
Jace's jaw tightened. "It'd save me the trouble of guessing who to hate."
Another small breath of amusement.
"You already hate me," the man said. "You just don't know my face yet."
Jace almost smiled at that, but there was nothing in him soft enough to make it happen. He sat straighter instead, blindfold still tight over his eyes, and let the silence between them stretch until it hurt.
"You watched all of it?" he asked.
"Yes."
"All of them?"
"Yes."
Ji-yeong flashed behind his eyes. Then Sae-byeok. Then the bridge. Then the marble alley.
Jace's fingers curled slowly against his knees. "And you enjoyed it."
The man didn't answer right away.
When he did, his tone hadn't changed. "Enjoyment is a shallow word for something so elaborate."
Jace turned his head fully toward him now. "You're sick."
"That may be true."
The easy acceptance of it made something hot and ugly move under Jace's ribs.
He laughed once under his breath. "You say that like it's weather."
"You say it like it changes anything."
The car rolled through another long turn.
Jace pressed his teeth together. "People died."
"Yes."
"I watched people I..." He stopped there, throat tightening unexpectedly around the sentence.
The man beside him noticed. Of course he did.
"You cared for them," he supplied.
Jace hated him more for saying it out loud.
He looked down even though there was nothing to see through the blindfold. "You turned them into a game."
"No," the man said. "Desperation did that long before we found them."
Jace went still.
Then: "That's your excuse?"
"It is not an excuse. It is an observation."
Jace let out a harsh breath. "You think because people were desperate, it makes what you did cleaner."
"No," the man said again. "Nothing about it was clean."
That answer caught oddly.
Not because it softened anything. It didn't. But because for the first time since the voice began speaking, it held no pride either. Just fact.
Jace leaned his head back against the seat again. "Then why?"
The question came out smaller than he meant it to.
He heard fabric shift beside him, maybe the man turning slightly toward him.
"Because people reveal themselves under pressure," the voice said. "More honestly than they ever do in comfort. You saw that."
Jace thought of Sang-woo. Of 244. Of 212.
Of Ji-yeong handing him her life with her own hands. Of Sae-byeok telling him she liked him in the dark.
His mouth twisted. "Yeah."
"You survived it."
Jace almost laughed again. "That's one word for it."
"And now you have the prize."
That made him go cold.
The money.
He had almost forgotten the money sitting somewhere real in the world now, waiting for him like the final punchline.
Jace's voice dropped. "It doesn't feel like winning."
"No," the man said quietly. "It rarely does."
For the first time, that answer got under Jace's skin in a different way. Not because it comforted him. Because it suggested this man knew too much about the shape of aftermath. Knew exactly what kind of wreckage they delivered people back into.
Jace turned toward him again. "How many?"
The man didn't pretend not to understand. "Before you?"
"Yes."
Another pause.
"Enough."
Jace breathed out slowly. "And you still kept doing it."
"Yes."
The simple, unashamed answer knocked the air out of the anger for a second, leaving only disgust and fatigue behind. Jace slumped back into the seat.
His cuts itched beneath drying bandages. His shirt still smelled faintly of rain and old blood, no matter what they had changed him into since. His body was in the car, but the rest of him was still in a dozen places at onceâunder a bridge of glass, in a fake marble alley, kneeling beside a bed in a dormitory gone too quiet.
After a while, the man spoke again.
"When this is over," he said, "you will be returned with more money than you have ever seen in your life and no proof that any of it happened."
Jace listened.
"You may tell yourself whatever you need to."
Jace's throat felt dry. "What do you tell yourself?"
The man was quiet long enough that Jace thought he might not answer.
Then: "That I saw the truth."
Jace turned away from his voice like that might make it less revolting.
Outside the car, something changed in the road surface. Smoother now. Closer to civilization, maybe. The engine slowed slightly.
Then the man beside him said, in the same calm English he'd used from the start:
"Just think of it as a dream."
Jace's whole body went rigid.
"It wasn't a bad dream for you anyway."
For one second, everything in him went dead still.
Then anger came back so sharp it felt clean.
He turned toward the voice, blindfolded and bloodied and shaking with exhaustion, and said in a low voice that made every word sound like it had to claw its way out:
"Tell that to the people who didn't wake up."
The car didn't stop.
The man beside him didn't answer.
And Jace sat there in the dark behind the blindfold, knowing with absolute certainty that whatever waited when they dropped him back into the world, one thing would never be true, it had not been a dream.
And there had been nothing good about it.
Rainwater and blood still clung to him in places that had dried stiff by the time they threw him back out into the world.
The car stopped hard enough to jolt him sideways. Before Jace could brace, a hand shoved him and he went stumbling out into the rain, blindfold still tight over his eyes, knees almost giving on the wet pavement. Something thin and hard was jammed between his teeth at the same moment, gold card stock, familiar in shape even before he bit down on it properly.
Then the car door slammed.
The engine pulled away.
And Jace was alone.
For a second he stayed on his knees in the rain, breathing hard through his nose, the blindfold soaking almost immediately. Then he spat the card into one hand and tore at the knot behind his head until the black fabric came free.
Light hit him.
Gray, dirty, real city light.
Jace blinked rain out of his eyes and looked up.
The street.
The same one.
He knew it instantly.
The same stretch of sidewalk where Sae-byeok had first taken the last of his money. The same place where he had stood with twenty thousand won to his name and a bruise on his face and a plan to sleep train to train because it was all he had left. The same street where he'd thought he was already at the bottom of his life.
It felt impossible that it had only been days.
It felt like another version of him had stood here, hungrier, dirtier, angrier, but somehow still lighter because he hadn't known yet what real loss would cost.
Jace stayed crouched there in the rain, blindfold hanging loose from one hand, gold card in the other, and stared at the spot on the pavement where she had bumped into him.
Sae-byeok.
Ji-yeong.
He had walked into the games with nothing and somehow walked out with less.
The rain soaked through his shirt, through his hair, through the paper card in his hand, but he didn't move right away. He just looked around like the street might still hold some trace of the life he'd had before, some version of himself he could step back into if he stared long enough.
But there was no going back to sleeping on trains. No going back to twenty thousand won and a stolen wallet and thinking that was the worst night of his life.
That boy had died somewhere between marbles and glass.
Slowly, Jace looked down at the card in his hand.
Gold.
Expensive-looking.
Proof that the whole nightmare had been real.
He curled his fingers around it until the edges bent, then pushed himself unsteadily to his feet. The city moved around him like it always had, cars passing, rain running into gutters, distant lights blurring in the wet but for the first time it all felt too small for what he was carrying.
He stood there a moment longer on the street where everything had started, soaked to the bone and too tired to cry again.
Then he slipped the card into his pocket and walked forward, one step at a time, carrying the weight of two girls who should have been the ones to make it home.
. . .
Months passed, and Jace barely noticed them go.
The motel room became everything.
A box with stained walls and buzzing lights and curtains he rarely opened. The same mattress. The same bathroom sink. The same low television hum he never really watched. He stayed there because leaving meant movement, and movement meant thinking, and thinking meant the games came back too clearly. So he slept when he could, lay awake when he couldn't, and let the days stack on top of each other until time lost any shape it had once had.
He was always tired.
Not the kind of tired sleep fixed.
The kind that sat in his bones and behind his eyes and made getting up feel like dragging himself through water. The money existed now, somewhere accessible, somewhere real enough to change his life if he let it. But most days it just sat untouched except for the motel fees and convenience store food and the bare minimum required to keep his body moving while the rest of him stayed gone.
He still hadn't left.
Not really.
Not in the way Ji-yeong had told him to.
Not in the way Sae-byeok had asked him to.
He told himself he would. Tomorrow. Next week. When the numbness wore off. When he stopped waking up with blood and rain still stuck behind his eyes.
But tomorrow kept turning into months.
That day, though, hunger won.
Eventually it always did.
The room had gone stale around him, his stomach tight and hollow in the familiar way that finally pushed him up off the bed. He pulled on a jacket, shoved his hands into the pockets, and stepped out into the corridor like he was entering another country instead of just going downstairs for food.
The city air hit him strangely after so long inside.
Cooler than the motel room. Realer. A little sharp.
Jace kept his head down as he walked, moving more on instinct than intention, following the route to the nearest place he could get something hot and cheap without having to think too hard. People passed him on the sidewalk in blurs of coats and umbrellas and shopping bags, all of them ordinary in a way that still looked surreal to him.
Then someone bumped into him.
Not hard.
Just a shoulder clipping his on the crowded sidewalk.
Jace turnedâ
And for one impossible second, his whole body forgot.
Forgot the marble alley. Forgot the black box. Forgot the blood on the bed.
All he knew was the shape of a girl moving away from him, slight and familiar enough that his heart jumped straight into his throat before his mind had a chance to stop it.
Sae-byeok.
The name hit through him like lightning.
Jace spun fully and started after her without thinking. He pushed past one person, then another, suddenly wide awake in a way he hadn't been in months.
"Hey!"
She didn't turn.
His pulse went wild.
He moved faster, shoes scraping wet pavement, breath already catching as he closed the distance. The back of her coat. The angle of her shoulders. The dark hair. It was enough. It was her. It had to be. Somehow. Some fucking way.
"Waitâ"
He reached her, caught her by the arm, and turned her toward him.
And the world dropped back into place all at once.
Not her.
Just a stranger.
A girl with the wrong face, wrong eyes, wrong mouth, already pulling her arm back with a startled, offended expression.
"What the hell?"
Jace let go immediately.
His hand fell to his side.
The crowd kept moving around them.
Rain from earlier still clung in the cracks of the sidewalk, catching city light in dirty little reflections. Somewhere a bus groaned to a stop. Somewhere else, someone laughed. The girl he'd grabbed said something else, annoyed, cautious, maybe asking if he was crazy but Jace barely heard it.
Because of course it wasn't her.
Of course.
Sae-byeok was dead.
Ji-yeong was dead.
And for one humiliating, brutal second, he had let himself forget that just because someone had bumped into him the wrong way on the wrong street.
The stranger yanked her arm fully free and walked off with one last disgusted look over her shoulder.
Jace stayed where he was.
His chest hurt.
Not physically, not exactly. Just that same old wound opening under the ribs again, the one that never fully closed no matter how many days he wasted inside that motel room.
He looked down the street where the girl had disappeared and laughed once under his breath.
A hollow, broken thing.
Then he dragged a hand over his face and stood there in the middle of the sidewalk, letting the truth settle back over him like cold rain.
It would never be her again.
And somehow, even after months, that still had the power to ruin the whole day in a single heartbeat.
. . .
Jace sat alone at the little counter by the convenience store window with a triangle kimbap in one hand and a cold banana milk sweating against the other.
Outside, the city moved in its usual indifferent blur, headlights smearing over wet pavement, people ducking under umbrellas, the neon reflecting in broken pieces on the glass. Inside, it was all fluorescent light and low refrigerator hum and the faint smell of instant ramen and coffee machines that had probably never been cleaned properly.
He liked convenience stores because they asked nothing from him.
You walked in. You bought your food. You left.
No one cared if you looked tired. No one cared if you were quiet. No one cared if your whole life had collapsed and all you could manage for dinner was convenience-store kimbap and a drink sweet enough to almost make you sick if you thought about it too much.
Jace took another bite and stared blankly out the window.
Then someone slid onto the stool beside him.
He didn't look at first.
Just assumed it was another customer looking for a place to sit.
But the girl beside him smelled faintly like perfume and rain, and after a second he became aware of her in the specific way you become aware of someone who has decided they might want your attention.
She was Korean. Cute, in a bright, easy kind of way. Nicely dressed. Soft makeup. The sort of girl who probably got smiled at back by strangers more often than not.
When Jace finally glanced sideways, she was already looking at him.
Not shy, exactly. Just friendly.
"You come here a lot?" she asked in Korean, her tone light enough that it might've passed as casual if she hadn't clearly sat right next to the only other person at the counter.
Jace blinked once.
Then looked back down at his banana milk like maybe if he stared at it hard enough the universe would explain itself.
Of course.
Of course this would happen now.
The girl mistook his silence for uncertainty and smiled a little. "I only asked because I've seen you here before."
Jace slowly lifted his head and looked up at the ceiling.
Then the bright plastic store signs overhead.
Then the security camera dome in the corner.
Like somewhere up there, beyond the fluorescent lights and instant noodle ads, was whoever had decided his life still had enough in it to make this funny.
A cute girl. A convenience store. Normalcy trying to tap him on the shoulder like it hadn't been absent for months.
It felt less like hope and more like a sick joke.
The girl followed his line of sight, confused. "Are you okay?"
Jace let out a short breath through his nose.
No.
Absolutely not.
But instead of saying that, he looked back at her and gave the faintest, driest curve of his mouth.
"Depends," he said in Korean.
"On what?"
"On whether this is the universe trying to be kind," he said, voice flat, "or trying to piss me off."
She stared at him.
Then, unexpectedly, laughed.
Not mockingly. Just surprised.
"Well," she said, "I was trying to be nice."
Jace looked at her properly then.
Cute, yeah.
Kind eyes. Open face. The kind of person who hadn't done anything wrong except sit next to a man carrying too much grief to know what to do with someone gentle.
And for one second, he could feel it, how easy it would be to let the scene become something simple. A pretty girl in a convenience store thinking he was cute. A conversation. Maybe a number exchanged. The kind of tiny beginning people had all the time without even realizing how lucky they were.
Instead, all he could think was:
You're not her.
Not Ji-yeong with her sharp mouth and stupid jokes.
Not Sae-byeok with her guarded eyes and quiet honesty.
Just someone alive and warm and looking at him like he might still be worth talking to.
That hurt more than he wanted it to.
The girl shifted slightly on the stool. "That bad, huh?"
Jace looked down at the half-eaten kimbap in his hand. "You have no idea."
Her smile faded just a little, enough to show she heard the truth under the dryness of it.
Still, she stayed.
"That doesn't answer my question," she said. "Do you come here a lot?"
Jace took a bite, chewed slowly, then answered without looking at her. "Enough."
She nodded like that was progress. "And what's your name?"
That one made him pause.
For a second, names felt dangerous again.
Too personal. Too real. Too much like stepping into a life he still hadn't decided he belonged back in.
Finally he said, "Jace."
The girl smiled a little. "Jace."
Then she offered her own name, soft and easy, like names didn't carry ghosts for everyone.
Jace listened, nodded once, and took another drink of banana milk.
The sweetness hit his tongue too hard.
Beside him, she was still waiting, clearly hoping he'd say something else. Ask her something back. Meet her halfway.
Jace looked up at the store signs one more time, then shook his head faintly to himself.
Yeah.
Definitely a sick joke.
The girl kept talking.
She was sweet about it too, which almost made it worse. Asking easy questions, offering little pieces of herself in return, smiling when he gave her just enough back to count as polite. Jace answered where he had to.
Yeah.
No.
A little.
Sometimes.
Enough not to be rude.
But the whole time, all he could think was:
She's not her.
Not Sae-byeok.
Not the girl who used to look at him like she was already halfway gone before he'd even earned the right to miss her.
Not the one who stole from him and then somehow became the person his body still looked for in crowds before his brain could stop it.
The girl beside him laughed softly at something she'd said herself, and Jace gave the faintest automatic nod like he'd heard it.
Then his phone rang.
He frowned immediately.
Almost no one had this number.
He wiped one hand on his jeans, dug the phone out of his pocket, and stared at the unknown caller for half a second before answering.
"Hello?"
There was a pause.
Then, in Korean, a voice he hadn't heard since the games said, "Jace?"
Jace sat up straighter so fast the stool legs scraped lightly against the floor.
"Gi-hun?"
The girl beside him glanced over, then politely looked away.
Jace turned slightly toward the window, attention narrowing hard around the call. "How did you get this number?"
Gi-hun let out a tired breath on the other end. He sounded older somehow. Not by years. By damage.
"That doesn't matter right now."
Jace's stomach tightened. "Then what does?"
Another pause.
Then Gi-hun said, very quietly, "001 was alive."
For a second, Jace thought he'd misheard him.
The convenience store hum dropped out. The girl beside him disappeared. The banana milk in his hand became just another cold object he no longer felt.
"What?"
"The old man," Gi-hun said. "Il-nam. He was alive. Recently."
Jace stood up without realizing it and moved a few steps away from the counter.
"That's not possible."
"I know."
"No," Jace snapped, voice lowering quickly when he realized how sharp it had come out in public. He dragged a hand over his mouth and walked farther down the convenience store aisle, toward the refrigerators, away from the girl. "No, Gi-hun, I saw him. I heard his number get eliminated. He wasâ"
"I know what you saw."
Jace stopped walking.
On the other end of the line, Gi-hun told him everything.
About the old man. About the truth of who 001 really was. About the money. The games. The fact that the frail, trembling, smiling old man who had stood on the bunk begging them to stop had also been one of the men behind it all.
Jace listened in complete silence.
At first there was disbelief.
Then disgust.
Then something colder than either.
Every memory of 001 shifted under the weight of it. The calm on the tug-of-war elevator. The strange ease in Red Light, Green Light. The way he had looked too comfortable sometimes in places where everyone else had been breaking.
Jace leaned one shoulder against the refrigerator case and closed his eyes.
"Why are you telling me this now?" he asked at last.
"Because I didn't want to be the only one who knew," Gi-hun said.
Jace gave a hollow little breath through his nose. "That's generous."
Gi-hun ignored that.
Then his voice changed, just slightly.
More direct now. Less like a man delivering terrible news and more like one refusing to let another man drown quietly in it.
"Jace."
He opened his eyes.
"I know what this place did to you," Gi-hun said. "To all of us. But if you're still breathing, then don't live like you died there too."
The words hit hard enough that Jace went completely still.
The refrigerator motors hummed behind him. Somewhere near the counter the cashier laughed at something on a tiny TV. The normal world kept moving while Gi-hun's voice cut straight through the numbness Jace had been wearing for months like it was skin.
Gi-hun kept talking.
"They took enough from us," he said. "Don't give them the rest on your own."
Jace didn't answer.
Because suddenly he could see it.
The motel room. The stale air. The curtains never opening. The way he had been eating and sleeping and existing, but not living. How he had let the games end everything except his pulse.
He thought of Ji-yeong telling him to live. Of Sae-byeok making him promise not to lose himself. Of the Maldives and the mojito and every stupid impossible thing he'd treated like a joke because hoping for it hurt too much.
Gi-hun's voice softened a fraction. "You hear me?"
Jace swallowed.
"Yeah," he said, but it came out rough.
"Good."
Another beat passed.
Then Gi-hun ended the call in the simplest way possible.
"Live."
The line went dead.
Jace stared at the phone in his hand for a long time after.
He could see his reflection faintly in the black screen. Pale. Hollow-eyed. Standing in a convenience store aisle with a half-finished banana milk waiting by the counter and a cute girl he hadn't really been talking to still sitting where he'd left her.
For months, everything had felt far away.
Muted. Heavy. Like he was walking under deep water.
And suddenly it didn't.
Not because the pain was gone. It wasn't.
Not because the grief had lessened. It hadn't.
But because something in him had finally, violently, had enough of being dead while still alive.
Jace looked back toward the front of the store.
The girl was still there, glancing his way now, curious and a little uncertain.
For the first time in months, he really saw the room around him.
The fluorescent lights. The drinks in the coolers. The food warming under plastic. The ordinary, stupid, miraculous fact that he was here to see any of it.
He slipped the phone back into his pocket and exhaled slowly.
Then he walked back to the counter, not because the girl was some magical answer, not because moving forward would be easy now, but because standing still suddenly felt unbearable.
Because Ji-yeong had died for him to live. Because Sae-byeok had asked him not to lose himself. Because Gi-hun had just reminded him that the numbness was another kind of surrender.
And Jace, finally, was starting to understand he didn't want to give the games one more piece of him than they had already taken.
. . .
The office smelled faintly of paper, old wood, and tea.
Jace stood just inside the doorway for a second, taking in the place before stepping farther in. It wasn't much, small, a little cluttered, practical rather than polished but it felt lived in, which was more than could be said for most of the spaces he'd occupied since the games ended. A desk. Filing cabinets. A coat hanging by the wall. A kettle still warm.
Across from him, Park Man-cheol looked up.
Recognition came quickly.
Not because Jace had met him before, they hadn't but because Sae-byeok's name still lived here somewhere, in the set of the man's face when he heard who Jace was and why he'd come.
Without a word at first, Man-cheol gestured to the chair across from his desk. "Sit."
Jace sat.
Man-cheol poured tea into two cups with the practiced calm of someone buying himself a moment to think. He slid one across the desk.
Jace looked at it for half a second.
Tea.
Of course.
He almost smiled at the irony and took it.
Man-cheol settled into his own chair and studied him over the rim of his cup. "So," he said, "you're the one asking about Kang Sae-byeok's mother."
Jace nodded once.
Man-cheol's gaze sharpened slightly. "And Sae-byeok?"
There it was.
Jace looked down at the steam lifting from the tea, then back up.
"She died."
He didn't say how.
Didn't say where. Didn't say there had been blood on a bed and a promise in the dark and a black box with a pink bow. Didn't say he still woke up some nights hearing the sound of her name inside his own skull like a wound that had learned to speak.
He just said, "She died."
Man-cheol was quiet for a moment.
Not prying. Not sentimental either. Just letting the answer sit there with the weight it deserved.
Then he nodded once, slow. "I see."
Jace's fingers tightened around the tea cup. "I promised her."
Man-cheol leaned back slightly. "To find her mother."
"And her brother."
That got a more measured look.
The broker folded his hands once on the desk. "Finding her mother won't be easy."
Jace didn't look away.
Man-cheol continued, voice calm and grounded in the practical realities of what he did. "If the information Sae-byeok gave me before was accurate, then her mother may be in a prison camp in the North. If that's the case, tracking her, confirming she's alive, arranging extraction..." He shook his head faintly. "That takes time. Money. The right people. And luck."
Jace set the cup down. "I'll pay more if it helps."
The answer came too quickly to be posturing.
It was just fact.
He had the money. More money than should exist in one person's hands after surviving what he had survived. He would spend all of it if he had to. What else was it for if not this? If not keeping the last promise that still mattered?
Man-cheol looked at him for a long second, then let out a small breath through his nose.
"That part," he said, "wouldn't be difficult."
Jace's brow tightened slightly.
"The money," Man-cheol clarified. "That's not the impossible part."
He glanced down into his tea, then back up. "After the last time, I owe Sae-byeok."
Jace stilled.
He knew the story. Or enough of it. The broker. The scam. The hot tea she'd thrown in his face when he failed her. Even now, months later, Sae-byeok still moved through rooms she wasn't in.
Man-cheol's mouth twitched faintly, the ghost of ruefulness. "She had every right."
Then his face sobered again.
"I'll help bring her family back together."
For the first time since walking in, Jace felt something in his chest loosen by a fraction.
Not relief exactly.
Relief would've been too easy a word for something this fragile.
But close.
Man-cheol reached for a folder on his desk, opened it, then looked up again. "As for her brother..."
Jace leaned forward slightly before the man had even finished the sentence.
"Are you interested in getting temporary custody?"
"Yes."
It came out immediate. Certain. No pause, no need to think.
Man-cheol blinked once, maybe surprised by how fast the answer came.
Jace didn't care.
"Yes," he said again, steadier this time. "Tell me what I need to do."
The broker studied him for a second, taking in the answer, the bruised seriousness of him, maybe the fact that he was still young enough to look barely old enough for this and yet already tired enough not to be.
Then he nodded.
"There'll be paperwork," he said. "Interviews. Probably questions about your income, your housing situation, your legal status, whether you can provide a stable home."
Jace almost laughed at the word stable.
Instead he just said, "Fine."
"You may need to clean up the living arrangement first."
"I will."
Man-cheol's eyes flicked over him, measuring. "And you understand what this means?"
Jace held his gaze. "Yeah."
"That it isn't temporary in the emotional sense."
That landed.
Jace looked down once, briefly, at his own hands.
Then back up. "I know."
Because Sae-byeok wasn't coming back to take over.
Because "temporary" on paper could still become forever in a boy's life.
Because if her brother ended up in Jace's care, it wouldn't be a favor. It would be the beginning of everything else.
Man-cheol seemed satisfied enough with that. He opened another file and pulled a document free. "Then we start here."
He slid the paper across the desk.
Jace looked down at it.
Forms. Names. Spaces to fill in. Bureaucracy. Ordinary, boring process. The kind of thing that once would have annoyed him just for existing.
Now it looked almost holy.
A real way to do something. A real way to keep a promise. A real way to build something out of the wreckage.
He picked up the pen.
Before he started writing, he glanced once at the tea beside his hand, steam fading now into the quiet office air.
Sae-byeok should have been here.
The thought came as naturally as breathing.
She should have been the one doing this.
The one signing papers. The one bringing her brother home and fighting with her mother and pretending she didn't care while caring more than anyone.
Instead, it was him.
Jace lowered his eyes to the form and began to write.
Not because it felt fair.
But because it was what was left.
And because for the first time since the games ended, what was left finally looked a little like a direction instead of just survival.
. . .
The apartment smelled like fresh paint and dust that had not quite settled yet.
Jace stood just inside the doorway with his hands in the pockets of his jacket, looking around while the woman from the leasing office stepped ahead of him in sensible heels and started pointing things out in the practiced tone of someone who had shown the same unit too many times to still sound excited about it.
"It's a two-bedroom," she said. "One bath. The neighborhood's quiet. Mostly families, some students, a few older couples. The elementary school is about ten minutes away walking, and there's a convenience store and grocery mart at the end of the block."
Jace nodded once, but only half-listened.
His eyes were moving.
The floors were clean. Wood, or at least something pretending to be wood well enough to pass. The windows actually let in light. Not motel light filtered through nicotine-yellow curtains and grime, but real daylight. The living room wasn't big, but it was enough. Enough for a sofa. A little table. Maybe a television if he decided that was the kind of thing a home was supposed to have. The kitchen was small too, but there were cabinets, a proper sink, a stove that looked like it worked, and a refrigerator bigger than the one in the convenience store aisle where he used to decide dinner by whatever was cheapest.
It was too normal.
That was what made it feel strange.
The woman kept talking as she walked farther in. "The previous tenant moved out about three weeks ago. We've had some interest already, so if you're seriously considering it, I wouldn't wait too long."
Jace followed her into the hallway.
Two bedrooms.
The first one was smaller, probably meant to be a kid's room or an office or whatever stable adults turned extra rooms into when they had their lives together. Jace stopped in the doorway and looked at it longer than the leasing woman probably thought necessary.
A bed could fit in here.
A small desk too.
A lamp in the corner. Shelves maybe. Clothes folded and put somewhere they belonged instead of piled on a motel chair or shoved into a duffel bag.
Cheol.
The thought came with a weight that still made him stand a little straighter every time.
He had spent so much of his life not changing.
Not really.
He changed cities, sure. Changed where he slept. Changed which people he owed money to, which alleys he avoided, which jobs or fights or scams got him through the next week. But those weren't changes. Not the kind that made you better. Not the kind that made you safe for anyone else.
Back before the games, he hadn't made much change even when he knew he should. After the games, for a while, he hadn't either. He had just rotted in that motel room with money in the bank and grief in his lungs and called it surviving.
Now here he was.
Looking at apartments.
Thinking about schools and grocery stores and whether a kid would like the room at the end of the hall because it got better morning light.
Trying, for the first time in his life, to become the kind of adult a child might actually be able to rely on.
The woman moved past him toward the larger bedroom. "This one's the primary. Closet space is pretty good, and the windows face west, so it stays bright in the afternoon."
Jace stepped in after her.
It was decent.
Nothing luxurious. But clean. Quiet. Stable.
The word still sat oddly in his head, like a jacket he wasn't used to wearing. Stable. As if that could be him. As if he could somehow build enough of it around himself to make it true for someone else.
He walked over to the window and looked out.
The neighborhood below was calm. A small courtyard. A patch of grass. Two kids riding scooters on the sidewalk while someone's mother called after them from a balcony. Laundry hanging a floor below. A dog barking somewhere in the distance.
Normal.
God, it looked normal.
The leasing woman smiled a little, mistaking his silence for the usual kind of considering. "It's a good area," she said. "Safe."
That word hit harder than stable had.
Safe.
Jace looked down at the street and thought of all the places he had slept before this. Cheap motels. Train cars. Rooms you locked with a chair shoved under the knob because the bolt didn't work. Apartments where the shouting next door lasted until dawn. Places where safety meant you got through the night without anyone finding you.
This... this was different.
He could picture Cheol here in a way that made his chest ache a little.
Not because the picture was perfect. It wasn't. He didn't know the first thing about being responsible for a kid full-time. He didn't know how to explain loss without making it worse. He didn't know how to be steady on command, or whether his own damage would start showing through the cracks the second someone smaller depended on him.
But he knew one thing.
Cheol deserved something better than a children's home. Better than uncertainty. Better than a man who still lived out of a motel room because grief had convinced him that standing still counted as honoring the dead.
Jace turned away from the window and walked back into the living room slowly, looking over it again, this time with the feeling settling more firmly in his chest.
This could work.
Not forever maybe. Not yet. But enough.
Enough for a start.
The woman was saying something about deposits when he stopped near the kitchen counter and turned to face her fully for the first time since they'd come in.
"If I wanted it now," he asked, "how fast could I move in?"
She blinked a little at the directness of that. "Assuming paperwork goes through, very quickly. A few days, maybe less."
Jace nodded, gaze drifting once more over the apartment. The empty rooms. The clean walls. The possibility of dinner at a real table instead of balanced on motel sheets. The possibility of Cheol walking through that door and having a place that belonged to him waiting on the other side.
He thought about Sae-byeok.
About her promise. About his. About the fact that she should have been here doing this herself.
The ache of that didn't leave. It probably never would.
But for once it wasn't paralyzing.
It was guiding him.
He turned back to the leasing woman and asked, with complete seriousness, "Do you take cash?"
. . .
Jace had done everything he could before this.
Paperwork. Meetings. Signatures. Questions about income, housing, suitability, plans. He had sat through every one of them, answered what he could, fixed what needed fixing, and kept moving even when every step of it made him feel like he was building a life with shaking hands.
Now he stood outside the children's home with a plastic convenience store bag hanging from one hand, full of sweets he had grabbed on instinct because he had no idea what else you brought a kid you were about to change everything for.
The building was plain. Quiet. The sort of place that tried very hard to feel orderly and safe without ever becoming warm.
A staff member led him down the hall, stopping in front of a shared room.
"This is his," she said softly. "He knows someone is here to see him."
Jace nodded, but suddenly he couldn't trust his voice enough to answer.
The bag of sweets crinkled in his hand.
For the first time since stepping into the games, since facing loan sharks, since being thrown onto a bridge of glass, Jace felt nervous in a way that made his stomach twist.
He had never been the kind of person who cared much whether people liked him or not. Most of his life had gone easier if they didn't look too closely in the first place.
But Cheolâ
He wanted Cheol to like him.
Or at least not hate him.
He wanted the kid to look at him and not see another stranger making promises adults never kept.
Jace stared at the door for a moment, trying to work up the courage to knock.
Before he could, it opened.
Cheol stood there.
Small. Thin. Looking up at him with a guarded sort of curiosity that hit Jace right in the chest. For a second he couldn't say anything at all because Sae-byeok was suddenly there in the shape of him in the eyes, mostly, and the set of his mouth.
Cheol stepped back a little. "You're here to see me?"
Jace blinked and forced himself back into motion. "Uh... yeah."
Cheol moved aside enough to let him in.
The room was simple. Two beds. Two desks. A few shelves. Everything neat in the way institutional places were neat, nothing really belonging to anyone except in the smallest possible ways.
Jace stepped inside awkwardly, suddenly aware of how big he looked in the small room, how badly he wanted not to get this wrong.
He held up the bag a little. "I brought this for you."
Cheol's eyes went to it immediately.
Jace gave the faintest, uncertain smile and offered it over. "From the convenience store. Didn't really know what else to bring."
Cheol took the bag with both hands, cautious at first, then a little more openly once he peeked inside and saw what was there. Chocolate. Gummies. Chips. A banana milk too, because Jace had thrown that in at the last second without thinking.
"Thank you," Cheol said quietly.
Jace nodded once and looked at him more fully.
God.
He looked so much like her.
It slipped out before he could stop it.
"You look a lot like your sister."
Cheol's expression changed immediately. Not closed, exactly. Just sharpened by something hopeful.
He clutched the bag lightly against his chest. "Mister," he said, "do you know my sister?"
Jace's throat tightened.
He looked away for half a second, buying himself time. "Yeah."
Cheol took a small step closer. "Where is she?"
The question landed like a blow.
Jace went silent.
His eyes moved around the room without really meaning to, searching for somewhere safe to rest, and stopped on the small desk near the wall.
There was a framed photograph there.
Cheol and Sae-byeok.
Both of them younger. Both smiling.
Jace stared at it.
That smile.
He had never seen it in person. Not really. Not like that. Not open and bright and unguarded. The version of Sae-byeok he had known had smiled rarely and carefully, usually like she was letting the expression out against her own better judgment.
He took a step toward the desk and looked down at the photograph, voice quieter when he finally spoke.
"I always wondered what she looked like when she smiled."
Cheol followed his gaze and looked at the picture too.
Jace swallowed hard.
He couldn't do it.
Not yet.
He couldn't tell this kid, standing in a shared room with a bag of sweets in his arms, that his sister was dead. That she had fought to the very end. That she had talked about him with her last real strength. That she had wanted so badly to get back to him and never got the chance.
Not yet.
So instead Jace turned back to Cheol and crouched down a little so they were closer to eye level.
"I was a friend of hers," he said.
Cheol looked at him carefully, like he was trying to decide whether that sounded true.
Jace kept his voice steady. "Before... before everything, she made me a promise. And I made one too."
Cheol said nothing, but he was listening in that intent, quiet way kids did when they already knew adult words mattered most when they came soft.
Jace went on. "I'm here for you."
The words felt strange and heavy and real all at once.
"I'm going to help get you out of here. I found a place. A proper place. And I'm working on finding your mom too."
Cheol's eyes widened slightly. "My mom?"
Jace nodded. "Yeah."
The child's face changed in tiny ways too fast for Jace to track properly, hope, confusion, caution, longing, all layered together. He looked down at the bag of sweets, then back up at Jace.
"Really?"
Jace felt the weight of every promise he had ever broken in his life press against the inside of his ribs.
Then he answered with all the certainty he could give.
"Really."
Cheol was quiet a long time after that.
Long enough that Jace started wondering if he'd said the wrong thing, or too much, or not enough. He was already preparing to backtrack, to try again, to explain himself better, when Cheol asked in a small voice:
"Did noona tell you to come?"
Jace's eyes burned unexpectedly.
He looked at the photograph again, then back at the boy in front of him.
"Yeah," he said softly.
It wasn't the whole truth.
But it was true enough.
Cheol's mouth pressed together. He nodded once, very small, as if something inside him had settled into place just a little.
Jace slowly stood again, not wanting to crowd him. "You don't have to decide anything right now. I just... wanted to meet you."
Cheol held the bag tighter and glanced inside it again, maybe because it was easier than holding eye contact through feelings too big for the room.
After a second, he reached in and pulled out one of the candies. Then he looked back up.
"Mister..."
"Jace," he said gently. "You can call me Jace."
Cheol repeated it carefully, like trying out a word that might matter later. "Jace."
Jace gave him a small nod.
Cheol hesitated, then asked, "If I come with you...will I get my own room?"
The question almost undid him.
Out of everything, out of grief, promises, mothers across borders, lost sisters, that was what a child needed to ask first. Something simple. Something solid. Something he could picture.
Jace thought of the apartment. The smaller bedroom. The light through the window.
"Yeah," he said. "You will."
Cheol looked down again, and Jace could almost see him imagining it.
Then, so quietly Jace nearly missed it, Cheol said, "Okay."
Just that.
Okay.
Jace looked at him and felt something in his chest shift, not healing, not relief exactly, but the first shape of purpose that didn't come from surviving.
He nodded once, more to himself than anyone else.
"Okay," he echoed.
And standing there in the small room, with a bag of convenience store sweets between them and Sae-byeok's smiling photograph on the desk, Jace understood that this, this awkward, tender, terrifying beginning was the first real step he had taken out of the games and into the life he had promised not to waste.
. . .
The food was hot enough to burn his fingers through the paper tray.
Jace didn't mind.
They sat on a low curb near the street vendor's cart with the night moving around them in soft city noise, cars passing, a scooter whining by, someone laughing too loudly across the street, steam rising from the griddles and pots under yellow vendor lights. He had bought Cheol dinner and, because he was still Jace no matter how much he was trying to become something steadier, he'd bought a ridiculous amount.
Tteokbokki. Hotteok. Twigim. And two fish-shaped bungeoppang because the old woman at the cart had looked at Cheol and immediately insisted.
Jace was happiest with the twigim and tteokbokki, tearing into the fried sweet potato first before going after a piece of squid, then stealing a rice cake from his own tray with the sort of focus usually reserved for much more serious things.
Cheol sat beside him with his own food balanced carefully in his hands, eating slower, quieter, still not fully relaxed but no longer looking like he expected the whole evening to vanish if he blinked.
Jace liked that.
Not that the kid was still guarded. He hated that part, actually, because he knew too well what had put it there. But he liked that Cheol was here. Beside him. Eating hot food under the open sky instead of in the children's home cafeteria.
For a while they just ate.
Jace didn't rush the quiet.
He'd learned enough, painfully late, that people talked when they were ready and not a second before. So he drank from the paper cup of fishcake broth the vendor had handed him and let the warmth settle in his chest while the steam rose into the night air.
Eventually he said, "You like tteokbokki?"
Cheol nodded, still chewing. "My sister used to buy it for me sometimes."
Jace looked down at the bright red sauce coating the rice cakes. "Yeah?"
Cheol nodded again. "She said street food tastes better when you eat it outside."
That got a small, crooked smile out of Jace. "She was right."
Cheol glanced at him then, just briefly. "You really knew her."
Jace's smile faded into something gentler. "Yeah." He picked up a piece of twigim and held it out. "Try this."
Cheol took it, a little cautious at first, then bit into it. His eyes widened just enough to make Jace almost laugh.
"Good?"
Cheol nodded quickly and reached for another.
"There he is," Jace muttered. "That's more like it."
Cheol looked down at his food, then at Jace's tray. "You really like eating."
Jace gave him a flat look. "Deeply."
That made Cheol smile.
Small. Quick. But real.
Jace saw it and had to look away for a second because there she was again in pieces, the shape of a smile, the timing of it, the familiar way joy looked like something half-earned.
He cleared his throat and went for easier ground.
"So," he said, leaning back slightly on one hand, "what do you like besides stealing all my fried food?"
Cheol looked mildly offended. "I only took two."
"Three."
Cheol thought about it. "Maybe three."
Jace nodded once like that proved his point. "Exactly."
The boy's mouth twitched again.
Then, after a pause, Cheol said, "I like drawing."
"Yeah?"
"Cars. Buildings." He shrugged a little. "Sometimes people."
Jace glanced at him. "You any good?"
Cheol's expression did something halfway between proud and shy. "A little."
"That means yes."
Cheol didn't answer, which Jace took as confirmation.
He tore off a piece of hotteok and burned his tongue slightly on the syrup inside. "You can draw at the apartment."
Cheol went quiet at that.
Not upset quiet. Thinking quiet.
"The room with the better morning light can be yours," Jace added. "So you don't blame me later when your drawings are ugly from bad shadows."
Cheol looked at him. "They won't be ugly."
Jace held up a hand. "Alright. Confident. Good."
That got him a proper look this time, the kind that almost said Cheol was beginning to understand Jace's sense of humor even when he looked too serious to be joking.
Then, after another bite of fish bread, Cheol asked it so suddenly Jace nearly choked on air.
"Were you my sister's boyfriend?"
Jace turned his head so fast he pulled something in his neck.
"What?"
Cheol looked completely sincere. "Were you?"
Jace stared at him, then looked down at the tray in his lap like maybe the answer had been hidden under the tteokbokki this whole time.
"No," he said finally.
Cheol frowned. "But you liked her."
Jace coughed once into his fist. "Eat your dinner."
"That means yes."
"That means mind your business."
Cheol gave him the smallest, most suspicious look, then took another bite like he had already decided the answer anyway.
Jace rubbed a hand over his face. "You're trouble."
"My sister said that too."
That one hit him right under the ribs and still somehow left him smiling.
"Yeah," he said quietly. "She would."
The conversation got easier after that.
Lighter.
Cheol asked if Jace had always been bad at answering questions. Jace asked if Cheol had always been nosy. Cheol asked if England really had bad food. Jace told him yes, deeply tragic food, and that Korea had saved him from a life of boiled disappointment. Cheol laughed hard enough at that to almost spill his drink, and Jace found himself laughing too before he realized how unfamiliar it felt.
Then his phone rang.
Jace frowned and pulled it from his pocket.
Gi-hun.
He answered immediately. "Hello?"
"Jace."
Gi-hun sounded tired, but different than before. Lighter in a way grief didn't erase so much as sit beside.
Jace glanced at Cheol, who was busy trying to catch sauce dripping from a rice cake, then turned his face slightly away to take the call. "You alright?"
A soft pause.
"Yeah," Gi-hun said. "I think... I'm leaving Korea."
Jace stilled a little. "Yeah?"
"I'm going to be a father to my daughter," Gi-hun said. "A proper one this time."
Jace looked down at the curb beneath his shoes for a second, then out at the street beyond it.
Good.
It was good.
After everything, after all the blood and the games and the lies and the old man and the years Gi-hun had already lost, it was more than good. It was right.
Jace leaned back slightly, watching Cheol beside him with the paper tray in his lap and sauce on one sleeve he hadn't noticed yet.
"That's good," he said. "You should."
Gi-hun let out a small breath on the other end, maybe relief, maybe gratitude. "How about you?"
Jace's gaze stayed on Cheol.
The boy looked up, noticed him watching, and held up a piece of twigim like a silent offer.
Jace took it from him without a word.
"I'm trying," he said into the phone.
Gi-hun seemed to understand exactly what that meant.
After a moment, Jace said, "I wish you the best."
"You too."
They stayed on the line a second longer, neither of them really needing more than that. Then Gi-hun hung up, and Jace slipped the phone back into his pocket.
He sat there with Cheol under the streetlights and understood, maybe for the first time in a way that didn't hurt quite as sharply, how strange life was after the games.
Gi-hun was going to reunite with his daughter.
And Jaceâ
Jace was sitting on a curb beside Kang Sae-byeok's little brother, feeding him street food and trying to figure out what kind of man he had to become to keep the promises the dead had left behind.
He looked over just in time to catch movement across the street.
A girl.
Slim. Dark-haired. Moving fast through the night in a worn jacket with her head slightly down.
For one suspended second, she looked exactly like Sae-byeok had the day she stole his money.
That same shape. That same ghost of a walk. That same pull in his chest before thought could stop it.
Jace watched her go.
And didn't move.
Didn't stand. Didn't chase. Didn't call out.
He just sat there with Cheol beside him and let the figure pass through the edge of his vision and into the crowd beyond.
Because it wasn't her.
And for once, he didn't need to prove that to himself by running after the ghost of her.
He looked back down at the food in his lap, then at Cheol, who was now trying very hard to pretend he hadn't noticed Jace go distant for a second.
"Eat," Jace said, nudging the tray toward him.
Cheol blinked. "I am eating."
"You paused."
"So did you."
Jace gave him a look. "You're definitely her brother."
Cheol smiled around a mouthful of hotteok.
And under the city lights, with Gi-hun leaving to be a father and Jace beginning, slowly, painfully, to learn how to be something like family to the boy beside him, the grief inside him didn't disappear.
It just stopped being the only thing there.