Fated To Love You: Episode 16

by HeadsNo2

Good intentions can be just as poisonous as bad ones, as our hero maybe kinda sorta hasn’t come to realize just yet. But for as much as they interact both directly and indirectly, Gun and Mi-young are like two ships passing in the night when it comes to revealing their true feelings—although I’d put most of that blame on Gun and his inability to sort through his own feelings first. What’s a heroine gotta do to get a little honesty around here?

SONG OF THE DAY

Melody Day – “사랑을 몰라서 (I Don’t Know Love)” from the OST [ Download ]

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EPISODE 16 RECAP

A charged moment passes as Gun leans in ever so slowly to kiss Mi-young… but the mood is broken when she slumps forward onto his shoulder, unconscious.

Gun keeps vigil at her bedside as he attempts to help with her fever, and in her fevered dreams, she murmurs Keddongie’s name. Gun, heartbroken, asks her why she’s still hurting like she is—if she stops, he can too.

Daniel’s calls to Mi-young’s phone go unanswered as Gun continues to change the cold rag on her forehead throughout the night. It’s much later when she finally comes to, and she seems surprised to find Gun asleep at her feet with his hands clasped around hers.

She tries to wake him up, and when that fails, she feels comfortable enough to switch to calling him the more familiar “Gunnie” instead of using his full name like she has been. Then she tentatively reaches out to hold his hand. Awwww. Wake up, Gun! Wake up and see this!

By the time he wakes up, Mi-young is gone—all she’s left is a note. Daniel confronts Mi-young as soon as she gets home with how worried he was when she didn’t come home last night, but is soothed when she claims she was temporarily ill and much better now.

He thinks she’s still not looking well and sets to babying her, which makes Mi-young think back to waking up to find Gun asleep, clasping her hand. “This should stop, this isn’t right,” she thinks to herself.

The next morning, Manager Tak finds Gun with his trademark under-eye circles and non-trademark painted tears. Gun then rips into Manager Tak about not taking care of their artists—of course he means Mi-young specifically, but covers it up by claiming that he means ALL of their artists, present and future.

In order for Manager Tak to make up for his terrible error, Gun orders him to find out the address of Mi-young’s studio. Manager Tak dances his way out of the office because he knows what’s going on, and he is all for the Snail Couple Reunion.

After an extra-long PPL break where Daniel buys Mi-young exercise sneakers, we find Gun outside Mi-young’s studio, loaded down with all kinds of herbal supplements and vitamins…

…But then he sees Daniel and Mi-young walking under the same umbrella into her studio, new sneakers on their feet. Needless to say, he is not happy.

Meanwhile, in Meta Makjang Parody Land, Mama Yong’s blood pressure spikes when Yong introduces Ji-yeon as his girlfriend. Since Mama Yong wants her son to marry a wealthy girl, she screams that she won’t ever accept their marriage.

Since Daniel and Se-ra are neighbors now, he happens upon a scene with her and her overbearing mother in the hallway, who coldly instructs her to stop teaching—she should either do ballet or marry Gun.

Se-ra warns her against talking to Gun, not knowing that her mother’s already done that, and sinks to the ground in tears when her mother storms off.

Haha, but it’s kind of funny when Se-ra turns away all dramatically as Daniel arrives, thinking he’s going to insist on comforting her… when really he just needs to get past her to open the door.

Since he’s not heartless, he decides to take Se-ra out for ice cream in order to make her feel better. When he offers her two flavors, she ends up picking his favorite. (We know why, but he doesn’t.)

He notes how nice of a daughter she is to understand her mother even when she’s so mean to her, before asking her if she still meets Gun. She says she does, but in no capacity greater than friendship—Gun will never come back to her, and she can’t go back to him.

Daniel seems very curious to know what’s holding them back, at least until Se-ra says that she can’t when she committed so many wrongs to “them.” He’s confused with her saying “them” and not “him,” but when he presses her, claiming it’s his business now because he proposes to Mi-young, she doesn’t elaborate.

Gun doesn’t hear Manager Tak and Yong conspiring to win Mi-young back for him (aww), but refuses to let them go to her to do business by using a bogus excuse that they can’t take “top secret” boxes of files out of the office. It’s his way of getting her to come to the office instead, and it works.

I love how Mi-young isn’t buying his act about the secrecy of the files, but sits down to work anyway. Then he brings in a rolling cart packed with vitamins and supplements, presenting it to her like a waiter at a restaurant. Hahaha.

She’s unimpressed and attempts to ignore him. That doesn’t go so well when Gun decides to sit in the room with her to watch her work, which eventually makes her uncomfortable enough to mention it to him. He pretends to acquiesce to leave, before feigning that his leg is too asleep for him to walk. HA.

But he eventually has no choice but to give up and leave her in peace when Mi-young doesn’t respond to any of his pitiful excuses to stay. Aw.

At Mom’s restaurant, the sisters and Soapsuds Duo argue the pros and cons of being Team Gun or Team Daniel. But if one thing’s clear, it’s that both President Park and Mr. Choi are jealous that Mom loves Gun enough to call him by name, when she doesn’t with either of them.

Mi-young leaves the office late that night, and finds that the lights keep turning on mysteriously everywhere she walks. It’s Gun’s doing, since he’s got his security team on it to make sure she gets home safely.

She doesn’t notice Gun standing in the window as the taxi he hired drives her away, and he waves after her.

Grandma Wang is all but jumping in excitement when she finds out from Manager Tak and Yong that Gun has been working late with Mi-young, even though they have to tell her to dial back her expectations—Gun and Mi-young agreed to part ways after the collaboration.

However, that doesn’t mean they still don’t have feelings for each other, and Manager Tak is happy to report that he’s 200% sure that Gun has feelings for Mi-young. It’s Mi-young’s feelings they aren’t so sure about.

Gun frets when Mi-young makes progress much faster than expected, because it means that her visits to the office will end after tonight. He tries to make excuses about how she must’ve sacrificed quality for speed in an effort to get her to stay longer, but Mi-young is sure of her work and isn’t worried.

Later that night, Mom worries when Gun doesn’t show up at his usual hour, since she knows he never misses a chance to eat no matter how busy he is.

Which means she has to hide her relief when Gun does enter, and he laughs about how Mom is just like other women when it comes to playing push and pull, since he knows she missed him. Aw. But tonight he can’t stay to eat, and asks for takeout instead, causing Mom to wonder whether he’s meeting Mi-young again.

Gun returns to the office with food to find Mi-young asleep on a bench. He can’t help himself from wanting to brush his fingers against her cheek when he sits next to her, and fights with all he’s got not to lean closer, and closer, and closer… (All the while he can’t stop thinking “Bare neck! Bare neck!” like a vampire.)

Mi-young wakes up to find Gun’s face hovering over hers, and she quickly jumps up before anything happens. They both decide to pass off the awkward situation and turn to the food, but it’s not long before Mi-young realizes it’s her Mom’s.

She’s upset that Gun didn’t listen to her when he asked her not to meet her mom anymore, and gets even more upset when he attempts to pass her words off in that trademark light manner of his. “You don’t think about the other person and just do what you want to do,” Mi-young accuses. “Did you even try to listen to the favor I asked you?”

Gun claims he tried to listen, but Mi-young disagrees, saying that he clearly didn’t try that hard when they’re sitting at a table of her mom’s food. He defends himself by saying that the first anchovy wrap (Mom’s specialty) he ever had was with Mom, and he hasn’t been able to get over the taste since.

“To you, she’s the very important mother you want to protect, but she also became a mother to me,” Gun argues. “What do you expect me to do now when you’re telling me that you’re taking my mother away? What do you want me to do?!”

Mi-young flashes back to warm memories of Gun and Mom, and finally relents in the argument. She doesn’t have the energy, and Gun is full of misplaced anger when it comes to her not eating the symbol of his sincerity toward her.

He resolves to eat it all himself then, but when Mi-young points out that he’s taking his anger out on the food, he explodes: “Drugs! There are drugs in this food!” HA. You guys are being ridiculous, I hope you know that right now.

Gun tries to solve the silence by playing a song on his phone, but it’s too reminiscent of the music they once danced to. While he continues to fiddle around awkwardly, Mi-young decides to text Young-ja, forcing Gun to covertly text back even though he’s standing right next to her.

He gets so flustered he accidentally calls Mi-young, and has to go running from the room in order to answer in a higher pitch as Young-ja. Hah. While telling Mi-young he/she’s too busy to talk, Manager Tak emerges from the bathroom—and before he can out Gun’s true identity, Gun hits him in the throat so he can’t. (Best part? Manager Tak thinks Gun’s finally lost it now that he’s talking like a woman.)

Gun returns to the office in time to overhear Mi-young telling Daniel (over the phone) that today will be her last day at Gun’s office and that she’d be happy if he could pick her up later.

He decides to address the Daniel subject jokingly in an effort to try and get Mi-young to open up on the subject, but all she says is that Daniel isn’t someone he can speak badly of, because he’s a good person she’s incredibly grateful to. Gun just plays it off that it must be nice for her to have someone like that by her side.

Se-ra ends up reading about Mi-young’s artistic involvement with Jangin Chemicals with a serious expression, as we find Daniel and Mi-young in her studio hanging some of her paintings. One of them is the silhouette of a man, filled in with heart-shaped lollipops. Aww, is that supposed to be Gun?

Meanwhile, Gun looks at the painting of Keddongie as he says, “Keddong-ah, I’m now totally prepared to send your mom away.” Noooo!

Gun happens to text Mi-young as Young-ja right when she’s at her most frustrated in regards to an artistic block. Like before, Gun appears in her studio as a manifestation of his voice in text.

He’s nothing but supportive, even as he notes that she seems very childlike (not in the bad way, in the “the world is full of wonders!” way). She admits that she does hear that she looks young for her age, but Gun/Young-ja tells her to forget about age for today so that they can talk more freely, since Young-ja is technically Mi-young’s unni and all that.

“Whenever I have these conversations with you, Ellie, it reminds me of my childhood when I used to run around with my friends. It reminds me of that friendship, as if I’ve gone back to being a young girl,” Gun says. Mi-young: “‘There lives a little girl in every woman’s heart.’ You mean that, right?” He says yes.

Gun: “There was a girl I used to know. That girl wore ugly glasses and thought that she was an ugly duckling. But in my eyes, she was so very beautiful. In her heart was the widest sea and the brightest star. She was a beautiful girl who cherished those qualities. Women want to change their outer appearances into something fancier than themselves, but actually… a woman is most lovable and beautiful when she’s a girl full of dreams.”

Mi-young feels inspired, and Gun gives her a good “Fighting!” to spur her on. Aww.

The next day, Gun’s face falls when Manager Tak tells him that Mi-young’s already completed her first project for the company, because it means she’s that much closer to having zero ties with him.

But he immediately perks up when Manager Tak tells him he invited Mi-young to the office, claiming that the CEO wanted to speak to her directly. “I did well, didn’t I?” Manager Tak beams. Gun couldn’t be happier, and they’re both jumping in excitement for Mi-young to come through the door…

…Only it’s Se-ra who enters instead. She wanted to have lunch with Gun, but is politely sent away when he claims to have a business meeting. As she’s leaving the lobby, though, she sees Mi-young.

Cut to: Another one of Se-ra’s coffee shop meetings with Mi-young. We know this isn’t going to end well. (Why does Mi-young keep agreeing to meet with her privately?!) Se-ra tells her how much learning of her collaboration with Gun’s company upset her, while Mi-young defends that she would’ve felt the same if she were Se-ra.

She also reassures Se-ra that their collaboration is nearing an end, and there isn’t any need for her to be concerned. “We only met for work. There aren’t any feelings between us.” Se-ra actually thanks her for understanding, like she’s actually got something going on with Gun. What the hell? I thought Se-ra took these three years to un-bitch herself, but clearly that didn’t happen.

Finally, at the meeting, Gun takes a look at the drawings Mi-young made. He’s clearly reluctant to admit that their work will be done once the advertising team takes a look at it, but Mi-young, perhaps spurred on by Se-ra’s “talk,” seems more ready to end things than he is. Even if she doesn’t look happy about it either.

There’s so much passing between them that they aren’t saying, with both of them looking like they’re in physical pain at the thought that this will be one of the last times they see each other. As they review the images with the team, they both think back to their text conversation from earlier: There lives a little girl in every woman’s heart.

Her work is a rousing success, but in the speech Gun gives to her and the whole team afterward, he seems half-hearted and sad as he thanks everyone—and Mi-young—for their hard work.

But Gun makes sure to catch up to Mi-young before she leaves: “It’s really over now. I’d like to treat you to dinner one last time.” Mi-young replies that she’d already planned a family dinner at Mom’s restaurant, since it’s also Mi-ja’s birthday, and Gun can’t catch himself before he refers to Mi-ja as his “sister-in-law.” Aww, sad.

He tries to make small talk about her family, anything to make her stay, but the tension is all but palpable. They both know what’s going on, and eventually Gun stops with the facade as Mi-young says she’ll be taking her leave and bows.

Resigned to fate, Gun bows in return as he calls her by her formal title (now “Artist Kim Mi-young”) and tells her how satisfied he was with her work. He means it. Mi-young looks on the verge of tears as she formally thanks him in return, before disappearing into the elevator.

He watches her through the glass until he can’t any longer. “This is really the end,” Mi-young thinks to herself. “Take care, Gun.”

At home, Gun tells Keddongie’s picture that he asked Mi-young out to dinner, only to be refused. Then he looks sadly at where France is on the globe and decides, “Let’s go. I can’t send your mother away, Keddong-ah. Our Keddongie should go with her instead of me.”

Mi-young calls Daniel to say that she’ll be late to her sister’s birthday party, since she forgot the presents at her studio. But Gun makes it there before she does with Keddongie’s painting in hand, ready to finally return it… only to see the painting of what can only be him: the silhouette of a man with heart-shaped lollipops.

He’s immediately flooded with flashbacks, but Mi-young’s presence snaps him out of it. She wants to know what he’s doing in her studio, but he can only stare at her as he holds the painting of Keddongie…

…And slowly, it all starts to dawn on her. “You were Young-ja?” she asks disbelievingly. He says nothing, but Mi-young is almost shaking: “Lee Gun, why are you doing this to me? Who the hell are you?”

Gun flashes back to the moment he had to himself after the loss of Keddongie, one we haven’t seen before, where he sobbed and sobbed and sobbed. Alone. Ooof. Wow, this tears open old wounds.

As the memories play back, so do the thoughts he had when he left the heart-shaped lollipop outside Mi-young’s hospital door: “If there’s a little happiness left in my life, I’ll give all of that to you. You have to be happy, Mi-young.”

In the present, Gun leans in close to Mi-young and nods. “Yes, Kim Mi-young. I’m your number one fan, Lee Young-ja.”

 
COMMENTS

Oh, Gun. You really did this one to yourself, didn’t you? It’s so easy to love and pity Gun, but sometimes I just don’t know what to do with him—and neither does Mi-young, apparently. What makes his situation especially difficult is that he is the source of the problems between them, and it’s due to his own confusion about what he actually wants that this kind of situation is happening at all.

To his credit, I’m sure Gun would really, really love to be able to let Mi-young go. Not to be rid of her, not because he doesn’t love her, but because he wants what’s best for her and always has. The problem is that Gun has never really had his finger on the pulse of what’s best for Mi-young and has been frequently and egregiously very, very wrong. It makes him both complicated and pitiable, because not once has he ever hurt Mi-young out of selfishness—it’s just that in all his effort to be selfless for her own good, he’s more or less failed.

It felt like a punch to the gut watching that flashback of him sobbing over Keddongie, since it brought to mind just how much suffering Gun has had to endure alone, even if it’s been of his own making. That almost makes it worse, doesn’t it? Especially considering that he couldn’t foresee any of this, or know just how much pain he was inflicting on both himself and Mi-young. But while Mi-young was able to escape for a few years to try and start anew, Gun was left behind with only himself and his memories. He never disconnected, even if he wanted to.

Unfortunately, Gun’s curse is that Mi-young interprets events exactly how he wanted her to, so that she still thinks he was done with her as well as Keddongie before that fateful event. Se-ra’s interventions have been annoyingly awful in their own right, but this episode’s talk is really the one that threw me. The show had led me to believe she’d actually matured too, considering that she admitted to Daniel that she’d hurt not just Gun, but also Mi-young. And now that her ties to Gun are tangential at best, she still feels like she has the authority to pull Mi-young aside and warn her away from a man she has no claim to? Girl better check herself.

If there’s anything these last few episodes have proven, it’s that neither Gun or Mi-young have been able to forget each other or move on despite their best efforts. Even if Mi-young can do so physically, even if she could just up and return to France right now, her paintings prove that her marriage with Gun is a part of her life she can’t or won’t erase. The fact that she held his hand for that brief moment, even while he was unconscious, went a long way in proving that her feelings for him, however repressed, are still very much real and alive.

But then again, her feelings were never the ones in question, were they? She admitted that she loved him, but Gun never returned the sentiment in words, even if we could see it in his actions. That’s what makes his case such a sad one, since we know he’s always been trying, we know the kind of pain he endured even when he was pushing away the best thing that ever happened to him… but unless he ever allows himself to be honest with Mi-young, she never will. Here’s hoping that this confession will be one of many, many more to come.

 
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