jaerim, of all people, knew not to let gossip girl get to his head. the line between truth and lie was always unclear, almost as if it was blurred on purpose; as if people wanted to believe the dramatised lie over the boring truth.
when it came to gossip girl, it was near impossible to tell fact from fib—not unless you ask the person directly involved. it was clear to him what he had to do to put an end to these mindless speculations, but somehow, he couldn't bring himself to utter those words to her.
not because he's afraid she wouldn't be honest with him, but that she would be, and this fairytale he's let himself relish in will crack open, allowing reality to seep in and flood the gates of the orphanage he's let himself pretend was his kingdom, taking with it the damsel he's pretended was his queen.
maybe the truth is what he was afraid of.
and what does jaerim do when he's afraid? he runs.
it's why he's only king in a make-believe world, because cowardice makes no king, at least not in the storybooks he reads to these children. he lets himself fool them into believing he is this dauntless warrior, one they could always count on to protect them. in reality, jaerim is merely a man who has no control over his life—his career, his feelings, or the trajectory of how his story goes.
it's only here, in the orphanage, that he gets to take full control of who he really is, of who he wants to be. here, within the sheltered walls of the orphanage, there is no one to judge him for the mistakes he's made, or the women he's loved—there is no gossip girl. there are only guileless children who think the world of him even when he can't love himself.
being around these children who knew nothing of the outside world or the man he is when he isn't playing superhero allowed him to let his guard down, but that is precisely the problem—he's let his guard down for too long that he started mistaking fragments of this world he's created for the real world seo jaerim exists in.
fragments like her. he's allowed himself to forget that he knew nothing of her in the outside world; that they only knew the versions of themselves they chose to present each other and the children here. did he even have the right to be disappointed in what could be the truth about her outside this fantasy they've created for themselves? did he even have the right to question her about it?
he felt a gentle tug on his pant, to which he realises came from one of the kids at the orphanage. he turns away from the mural he had been working on, carefully setting aside the can of paint he was carrying so it doesn't fall into the hands of the careless children. he had been working on a mural by the backyard, claiming that the orphanage needed more colour, when really, he just needed an excuse to avoid her.
"you haven't been talking to mommy aera." the child points out, painfully honest, as children always are.
another chimes in, "you didn't fight, did you?"
"daddy jaerim and mommy aera broke up!" someone shrieked, possibly junho, the loudest of the bunch.
jaerim would scoop them up, silence them with some sweets and assure them that they "didn’t break up" (they were never together but children believe what they want to and neither of them felt the need to correct them anyway), whatever would help to keep the ruckus down, but he had gotten some paint on his hands and it was simply impossible to manage this bunch without her help.
as if to make matters worse, someone else starts crying, but before he could attend to them, he finds her standing before him, hand in hand with dakyung, the smallest but feistiest of them all. (she always gets her way, not because she's strong but because no one can say no to her.) it was clear the kids had joined cahoots to bring them together, after weeks of suffocating radio silence between them.
"um," his eyes meet hers for the first time in weeks, "i think i'm gonna need your help with this mess."
