EGOIST (Sang Woo x Fem!OC) [COMPLETED]

53

The winter time gets tougher in the tall, cold walls of the penitentiary. Although, with the greyness painted all over the walls, boring beige tiles that made the place ever so dull, it was not that different from his apartment. Cell mates were another thing, when Sang-woo himself had been so used to solitude that even the smallest of snores at night couldn't make him fall asleep. The noise, the cold, and everything that led him to where he is; the bedsheet hung from the grated windows of his cell had become his only hope for a freedom he was promised, but never gained. But then, in the pause when he would realize the grip of the cloth around his neck, he'd think about the face of his mother who haunts him with guilt and shame. It is a reason to go, but also another reason to stay and redeem himself.

To think that he still had a sliver of humanness that remained in him was perplexing, that after everything that he has done and has been through, he still kept that noble thought of owning up to the shit he's done. Killing himself would just be another sin his mother would have to wash up, of everything they have done to reach this point just wilting away in vain. It was a constant battle in his head, always, with the thoughts of living and dying ebbing away simultaneously; then the noose just became an afterthought.

He can't exactly be sure if, out of everyone who had gotten out of that hell hole--if anyone else had gotten out, he was the only one who vividly remembers being thrown off to the streets in the middle of the night with 22.7 billion won miraculously appearing in his bank account. And then, when he finally faced his mother with broken bones and a beaten face, she only cried. Then the cops came, and he did everything he could with the money given to him. No more debts, but the consequences never went away. Hae Young was right, there was no guarantee of freedom the moment he had gotten out of the games. Just more and more consequences wherever he went, devolved into a man sharing a room with five other men; his windows now barred and grated.

In the silence of his aloneness in the cell, he hears the anticipated footsteps of a guard walking up to his window.

"Inmate 2390." The corrections officer rang his baton against the metal grates. "You have a visitor."

************

It has been months since she'd seen him, though everyday he only seemed more and more disheveled. Despite the clean look and trimmed beard, the straightened inmate uniform, and the well-kept hair, Cho Sang-woo looked as if his spirit was sucked out of him. When he finally sat before her with only a pane of glass dividing them, the first few seconds were spent sitting in silence.

"Did you do what I asked you to?" He finally asks the kid, voice low and quiet. She only answered with a curt 'yes'.

"Did you find them?"

"No." Was all Sae-byeok said. "I couldn't find them in Ansan. I only found out later that they flew back to Pakistan about a year ago."

Sang-woo just nods.

"Mrs. Seong has gotten her treatment." Sae-byeok recounts, "Mr. Moon is buried in Gangwon. I have no news about 001's family." She tells him honestly, summarizing the progress of the past year; of tracing families and mailing them cash that came from nowhere.

"And your mother asks how you've been doing."

He just nods again, though he does not answer the question. Sae-byeok did not pry any more.

"How about your mother?" Sang-woo asks her this time. "Did you finally get her out of the North?"

We're getting there. She wanted to say, but she just gave him a nod instead. Vague and quick so he would not pry as much. She wanted to keep it that way.

"I've done everything you've asked me to." She tells him. The money he had asked her to give to those who had died; Ali Abdul, 001, Seong Gi-hun, Han Mi-nyeo, Ji-yeong, and Moon Hae Young, now were just names listed down on a sheet of paper tucked away in Sae-byeok's coat pocket. Each name scratched out after every task.