outtakes: squid game, jiyeong/saebyeok
I've only posted the one Squid Game jiyeong/saebyeok fic, but like all my other decisions to commit self-torture fic attempts, I usually write reams and reams of stuff that simply doesn't get used or goes nowhere. for self-satisfaction or just exhibitionist reasons, here are some of them -- bloopers, outtakes, post-canon ditties, and all. they're not exactly dubiously good, they simply exist, but for posterity here they are. largely canonverse, and canon-divergent AUs:
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The van deposits them somewhere in a remote Seoul neighbourhood, and they spend the hours after regaining their bearings, returning themselves to the grip of faceless crowds. For lunch and dinner the off-road 7-Eleven outlets provide plenty in sustenance and, according to Jiyeong, dubious monounsaturated fats. A family-owned inn becomes their stay of refuge for the night, booked through Jiyeong’s phone: a shared room, with two white drab beds, separated like in the games’ dormitory.
“What are you going to do?” Saebyeok asks Jiyeong, after their first pass to the ATM.
Transactions have clear beginnings and ends, a point where obligations elapse. Nothing owed to another beyond your initial purpose. I’ll do whatever it takes to make you win, Jiyeong had said. Now, standing before Saebyeok, Jiyeong shifts unsteadily on her feet, her smile coy underneath the sickly floodlights of Seoul’s street lamps, face burnished to a numinous shine like a gold coin. Friendly feeling bleeding beyond all the checkboxes. This is not a contractual agreement. She is staying, she says.
“We should stick together,” Jiyeong says. “Who knows what’ll happen, out here?”
Saebyeok doesn’t refuse. This is not a debt but accrual, she decides, or a write-off in that vein. Just two people’s conveniences intersecting for the moment; she can abide that.
-
Jiyeong makes it a mission to introduce Saebyeok to pop culture too, and TV nights become a regular occurrence, as Jiyeong shows Saebyeok both classic films and handpicked dramas. Jiyeong has a twisted sense of humour, and so delights in films like Oldboy or The Host; Saebyeok comes to like romcoms and K-dramas, meanwhile, because they resemble the shows she watched in secret, off the black market, back in Hyesan.
“You had a black market for TV shows?” Jiyeong asks, blinking with wide-eyed shock.
“We had many things,” Saebyeok says dryly, “that you wouldn’t expect.”
But the film that sticks with them most is Kind-hearted Miss Geum-ja, or Sympathy for Lady Vengeance as it’s known overseas—they watch it and by the end Jiyeong is crying, very silently, over the closing scene. Saebyeok can see why; it’s hard not to notice the parallels between her own circumstances and those of Miss Geum-ja, the indignity of being accused for a crime you didn’t commit—or had no choice but to commit.
-
Seoul remains the same way she left it. Cold, dreary, ruthless. The city teems with life and bright lights like no other place Saebyeok has known, but that is matched in turn by the underbelly of misfortune that runs beneath it, the knife-flashes of violence scrawled into its people’s lives and hiding within the looming shadows of its skyscrapers. Saebyeok has long observed this with pragmatic indifference, a flat-buried background fact of the world, and navigated it as a matter of survival rather than something lamentable.
And yet something has changed; if not in the city, then in her, and the things she’s carried forth from the games. It’s in what she feels at night when she shivers with the heated blood of recollection, the afterimages of the sunlit model village churning away at her. It’s Jiyeong herself, in the space she has nudged her way into in Saebyeok’s company. In the coming days Saebyeok scrutinises Jiyeong, in furtive, searching glances thrown forth when Jiyeong’s back is turned to her or she’s glanced away. Looked at sideways Jiyeong is a mystery, a puzzle Saebyeok can’t figure out.
Part of it is their superficial differences, though that isn’t all of it. With the full expanse of time and freedom at their reach, no longer regulated by red numbers hovering above in digital typeface, Saebyeok gets a taste of life, or what it looks like from Jiyeong’s perspective. They rent a room together at a modest inn with two separate beds, and take turns buying food and choosing meals. Saebyeok tends to opt for convenience store packages, things warmed up quickly in microwaves or eaten straight from the box; for her eating is an utilitarian affair, no more a fuel than a means to an end. Jiyeong chides this as an unhealthy habit, and drags her to sit-down restaurants where she splurges on bibimbap and mandu and more substantial dishes for them.
(“Proper nutrition,” Jiyeong proudly calls it. Saebyeok scoffs and quips that she sounds like a naggy ajumma, but she will admit she was half-tempted to smile.)
Once or twice she also buys peach soju from a late-night pocha for Saebyeok, and though Saebyeok doesn’t delight in alcohol—it dulls her reflexes, it slows her judgement—she doesn’t say no, and quietly enjoys the few sips she takes, tart but mellow in taste.
Perhaps it’s the way they move differently, Saebyeok considers next: Saebyeok always acts with decisive momentum, while Jiyeong is happier to linger and contemplate, the distance between intent and action less a straight line than a meandering dance of ideas and possibilities. A function of Saebyeok’s time spent on Seoul’s less pristine streets is that she has learned to press on, no matter what; you get knocked down, you get right back up, wiping the blood off your face as necessary. Jiyeong has no such instinct.
But that still isn’t it, and Saebyeok realises this one day when she converses with Jiyeong about their prize money.
“You can take most of my share,” Jiyeong says, casual. “I don’t need it.”
Saebyeok stills, and stiffens. This line of conversation seems somehow familiar, an ominous echo, and yet. “Keep it. You won it fair and square.”
“You deserve it more,” Jiyeong says, earnest in her smile, face crinkling like a private joke Saebyeok doesn’t understand. “I don’t know what to do with half of it, anyway.”
Jiyeong isn’t stupid, Saebyeok knows; she can see through the act. It frustrates her when Jiyeong wears ignorance like a shroud over her true intent, instead of coming out and saying what she means. “Can’t you think of something?”
“Maybe,” Jiyeong says, “but it’s like I told you: I don’t have anything for me out here.”
Saebyeok bristles. The next words from her mouth form a warning: “If you’re trying to make yourself feel better, this isn’t the way to do it.”
“I’m not trying to be cool,” Jiyeong continues. “I just think you’ll make better use of the cash. I don’t want for anything.”
Saebyeok grows cold all over, suddenly, like she’s been submerged in the chilly, sterile air of the dormitory again, waiting and waiting for a death sentence in the next game. A gunshot epiphany, and then it dawns on Saebyeok. This is the wedge between them, after all: Jiyeong’s nonsensical generosity, the naïveté with which she sacrifices herself for Saebyeok time after time. Her senseless fatalism.
That’s not how the world works, Saebyeok wants to say, not on virtue or goodness or how much of yourself you parcel out for a stranger on the killing floor.
Instead she says, coldly, “Too bad—I don’t want your kindness,” and walks away, pushing past Jiyeong as she departs.
-
There are also the anecdotes Saebyeok tells Jiyeong of moments from the years before she ever made it to Seoul from Changbai-xian in China. The month when she learned what daisies were called—a name for a hundred nameless things—and thought of her and her brothers, both deceased and alive, as unfortunates in a daisy chain, heads lopped off at the stem. They were the weeds growing in the cracks between pavements, fit to others only to be stamped out underfoot; and not many wanted to deal with or help them, as if coming from North Korea was a curse.
But if they were weeds, they could be good at clawing towards life with stubborn persistence too, her and Cheol both. That was the point she learned. You were separated from death by the skin of your teeth. Near-misses, the awful precision of interpersonal cruelty. But if you fought for it nobody could rob you of that—your right to live, essential and elemental.
What she doesn’t tell Jiyeong is this: it disturbs her that what she observes in Jiyeong is the opposite, not the determination to live but the negation of it. When Saebyeok dialled the number on the business card and submitted herself to the vagaries of the games, it was a gamble with death for the extension of life. But Jiyeong seems to hang in the inverse state: life lived as an extension of death.
-
Later she weaves her way past buildings and the ramshackle shells of shuttered stores with Jiyeong, aimless but not lost, until they climb up onto the rooftop of a gosiwon building to wait for and watch the sunrise, united in the unspoken decision not to sleep. At first some grave part of her thinks it’s not going to happen, that it can’t possibly happen, not after the past week—but the sun rises eventually, the same as it always has, peering out with the burn of an old bruise.
She finds the thought almost comforting, for a moment: that something can be so grand and predictable, immaculate in its ability to outlast every shot-ridden body and cruelty she's seen, beautiful in its constant indifference to private troubles and worldly foibles. Everything bound to fade away under its glare, eventually.
She stares at it until the last moment, letting its intensity overwhelm the last winks of sleepiness in her and rivers of lurid blood stamped into her memory. Not as purification, but as a simple reminder: that she, too, can survive this.
-
Because she was left alive to think about it, Saebyeok deals, early on, with the suspicion that she was the wrong person to win. Her life too small, her wishes laughably modest, all too insignificant to compensate for the enormity of all the lives lost. She only ever wanted things everyone else already had: the presence of her mother beside her, her brother in a better place. Nothing like greed or ambition in her stride.
She entertains the logic for the barest moment before she turns it on its head and rejects it entirely. It’s nothing she hasn’t encountered before: these devaluations are par for the course for every North Korean resident from Hyesan. The question, accosting you at Hanawon and through every border guard’s stare: what value could you possibly bring to our country? To this world?
Then and now, her response is to shrug the whole business off. It’s not that she won fair and square, or that there was a secret grain of merit in her, lying dormant all along, but that the very notion of value is an empty and impoverished thing itself, run through with cracks, a violent line of separation drawn by people to exclude themselves from others. It’s not useful, not against the truth she knows: that once you’re here on earth, you already are, and have to press on, if only for the ebb and flow of your battered lungs in your chest, the blood on your fists and face reminding you you’re alive, the tiresome but serious responsibility of seeing yourself through to the end.
Back at the games Jiyeong had thought herself a person bereft of worth. Hadn’t been able to perceive it in herself. It was why Saebyeok had been furious with her; why she’d shaken her by the shoulders and yelled at her, against the clock ticking away, to take another throw with her marble. The model village sun was pressing its warm, tangerine light into their backs, but all Jiyeong could talk about was dead-ends and foreclosure, as though she was fated only to a lifetime of desolation.
What Jiyeong didn’t know was that Saebyeok was anguished because her fatalism reflected hers; that Saebyeok had been there once, too, at breaking point after arriving in Seoul without her mother, numb and exhausted from being squeezed by circumstance at every turn. Foolish would have been an unkind word, but it resembled, in bits and pieces, what Saebyeok had been trying to tell her, before the organisers called off the round at the last moment: don’t do that to yourself. You deserve a fighting chance too. Please.
Someone else did this to you, she wants to tell Jiyeong. You can’t let them win. You want badly to live, you’ve just been convinced there’s no reason for you to. It pains her that Jiyeong couldn’t see this. Sometimes, she catches Jiyeong looking at the sky, with an unreadable expression that borders on awe, or wistfulness, and she wonders if she’s found something to hold on for yet. She hopes she has.
-
No mood for Jeju-do, for now, but Jiyeong suggests they tour Myeong-dong, and Saebyeok accepts. “What,” Jiyeong exclaims, “you've never been there? Well, neither have I,” and the matter is settled there and then.
Myeong-dong, tourist heart of Seoul, when they alight onto its glittering pavements: people in high-flying coats milling about, foreign brand houses and billboards cutting a blinding silhouette against its skyline. Saebyeok’s gait turns self-conscious in its midst. She feels, again, like an outsider. Here, Seoul presents itself as a city of glitz and glamour; but Saebyeok cannot leave behind her experiences of the misery and misfortune running in its veins beneath, the knife-flashes of violence scrawled into the lives of so many people she has known and mourned.
Walking down the district’s alleys, incongruously clean and sleek against her footsteps, Saebyeok—always attuned to these details, always assessing and scrutinising her surroundings—looks for the expected glimpses of houses dilapidated and creaking, networks of homeless people huddled within the jut of triangular shadows.
But she finds nothing.
“Oi,” Jiyeong says next to her, raising her palm close to her forehead to measure her temperature. On instinct Saebyeok catches her hand to stop it, and then relents, admitting the contact into her space. Not a pickpocket. “You’re drifting. Are you alright?”
She smells the vapour of food. Jiyeong has bought tteokbokki from a roadside stall and is pushing it towards her chest, offering her a fork and spoon along with it. The flame of late-evening lamps from stalls setting Jiyeong’s face alight with a soft inviting glow.
“Yes,” Saebyeok says, and accepts the food with gratitude. The tteokbokki is chewy and tasty, a familiar staple she can stomach. A few good things here, at least. “I was just thinking.”
“About?” Jiyeong throws her a curious smile.
“Nothing,” Saebyeok says, then clarifies: “Nothing important.” Jiyeong is here, and that’s what matters, she resolves. She’s learning now: some things are bearable as long as you have the right company. In Jiyeong’s presence she somehow always finds herself walking lighter, the air around her turning gentler and more relenting.
Before her Jiyeong’s upraised hands are flushed with warmth, her knuckles a steadfast cherry-red even against the frostbitten cold. She wants, for a moment, to reach out and run her fingers along her palm, to touch someone else’s solidity. To share and carry her warmth in her own grasp, too.
“Let’s go on,” Jiyeong cuts into her reverie, pointing at a section of other shops and stalls ahead to their right, their lanterns a colourful string of beads against the drape of night. Her voice picks up with excitement: “Hey, is that—I think they’re selling mocktails there! I wonder if they have mojitos. We should try one, you and I.”
-
She wakes up against the smothering fabric of darkness one night with the tremor of unrest skittering down the edges of her body, shaken by the footage-burn of another nightmare. A rotating kaleidoscope of images this time, hyperreal and just this side of wrong, the watercolour vividness of contestants’ deaths blending into each other. Sang-woo fragmenting on the floor among the glass tiles, Gi-hun breaking his dalgona candy. Ali falling during tug-of-war, the shock of betrayal still preserved in his features. It’s at that point she sits up in bed, breathless and jolted to a panic, gulping down air for her iron-bound lungs, shuddering against the nausea of finality and remembrance.
At the edge of her awareness she hears a bleary voice speak up. “Saebyeok?” Jiyeong stirs in the bed opposite hers, looking at her with mussed hair, working through the fog of drowsiness. “What’s up?”
It takes her a while to regain her voice. “Just a bad dream.”
“You were shouting,” Jiyeong says, blinking herself awake, “that doesn’t seem like just any bad dream.”
Saebyeok pauses, unclenches her hands. “It’s not a big deal.”
Jiyeong studies her curiously. Then she sits up, peeling back the covers of her bed and patting the space beside her. “Okay, business time. Get here.”
“What—“
“Just trust me.”
A bladed remark, hovering on Saebyeok’s tongue—like you told me to, when you said you were going to make sure we won?—but she bites it back, and complies, climbing into bed beside her. She finds, promptly, a gentle hand being placed on her head, Jiyeong wrapping her arms around her.
The full-bodied touch makes her seize up for a moment. She wills herself not to flinch: it’s only Jiyeong, not a prelude to violence. With the remnants of the nightmare still palpitating freshly upon her skin, she sinks loosely and deeply until she’s resting her head in Jiyeong’s lap, turning her whole self over to her.
“Is this alright, Saebyeok?”
“Yes,” Saebyeok says, voice shaky with tension. Jiyeong strokes her fingers through her hair in absent patterns, directionless and comforting, murmuring soft words: it’s alright, it’s alright. Something about her touch makes her cry; she wrenches her eyes shut against the embarrassment for a moment. The last time she’d been comforted like this was years and years ago, faraway like a hazy sea, impounded within the country of memory: her mother cradling her to sleep after various distressing events in Hyesan and, with it, one of the last times she knew what it was to feel safe and protected, your own self untouchable and whole, able to depend on others without fear.