Actions

Work Header

Rating:
Archive Warning:
Category:
Fandom:
Relationship:
Characters:
Additional Tags:
Language:
English
Stats:
Published:
2025-07-24
Updated:
2025-08-10
Words:
7,949
Chapters:
4/?
Comments:
43
Kudos:
242
Bookmarks:
50
Hits:
4,171

Playing House

Summary:

Seong Gi-hun was never meant to win.
Weak, empathetic, and unbearably human - the kind of player who dies early, the kind of player who is forgotten. Yet, against all odds, he made it to the end.

Now, after a failed rebellion and a deal he can’t afford to refuse, Gi-hun finds himself in a new kind of game - one without death…or escape.
A game of pretend.
A game where the Frontman doesn’t want a winner.
He wants Gi-hun.

—
Or, In-ho becomes obsessed with Gi-hun following his victory and decides he wants to play a different kind of game with him - house.

Notes:

hi all, welcome to a little taster/prologue of first ever work! please let me know what you think :)

(See the end of the work for more notes.)

Chapter 1: Prologue

Chapter Text

━─━────༺༻────━─━

In-ho

“People like Gi-hun never win.”

The thought entered In-ho’s mind as soon as the player entered the final game against 218.

Throughout the games the behavior he demonstrated wasn’t typical of a victor.

He was pathetic. Getting caught up with loan sharks and gambling it all - on horse races of all things. He was weak. Depending on others during this game - a game where the strongest live, not the weakest link. He was empathetic. Taking in 067, making promises of getting her out, that he’d protect her brother, weeping at her inevitable death.

It made his stomach churn, the way the words spun around in his head, like a spinning top being flung from a child’s hand. They echoed round and round.

Pathetic, weak, empathetic.

Pathetic. He offered to forfeit the game. With victory practically seeping into his fingertips he offered to walk away with nothing. Weak. He didn’t stab 218, his childhood friend had to finish himself off. Empathetic. He cried at the lost, as if the fight didn’t matter. As if this wasn’t a man who wanted him dead. As if he was flung decades back into the past, turning into a young boy in Ssangmun-dong - watching his best friend die.

Typically, victors were like player 218. Cunning, smart and willing to do whatever it takes to survive - regardless of morality. No victor he’d seen had ever acted, or behaved, like Seong Gi-hun. He hadn’t acted like Seong Gi-hun.

But as the blood poured from 218’s neck, mixing into the sand upon which he laid, memories trickled into In-ho’s head. The number 132, the bodies lying in the dormitory, the weight of the knife in his hand.

Seong Gi-hun wasn’t like him. He was pathetic, weak and empathetic. But only because he wasn’t cruel or immoral - he was pure. Like fresh fallen snow at the start of winter or the untouched, clean air of a mountain.

He was flawed, yes, but he demonstrated a pure side of humanity. A side that often dies out within the first few rounds of the game. A side which In-ho hadn’t seen so clearly in ever so long.

People like Gi-hun never win - which is what made him so perfect.

━─━────༺༻────━─━