***Triple update!  Double yay!***

Yeonhee’s grandmother was asleep when Yeonhee signed in and was let into the ward.  It was a small one, only four people and Yeonhee’s grandmother probably the youngest there, but it was also very quiet.  Yeonhee looked sadly at the empty vase beside her grandmother’s bed – flowers were not allowed on wards in case they brought infection or contamination or hayfever with them, but her grandmother had still insisted on the vase – and then carefully propped up a watercolour painting of a bouquet of orange roses and yellow lilies that she’d done, knowing that they were some of her grandmother’s favourite flowers.  Then she popped down a bowl of freshly washed grapes beside the painting and took out one of her course books to revise from while she waited for her grandma to wake up.

It was almost midday before she did, her face screwing up in confusion at the sight of the visitor as she struggled to sit up.

“Easy, Grandma,” Yeonhee murmured as she helped her, glancing over the bruises on the old woman’s brittle skin.  “How are you?”

“Grandma?”  Her gran looked even more confused.  “Which one are you?”

So she did at least still remember she had grandchildren.

“Yeonhee,” she said, smiling.

“That’s impossible,” her grandmother said.  “You’re far too old to be Yeonhee.”

Yeonhee laughed, because she felt it was the only thing she could do, though it did hurt a little.  Her grandmother chuckled too and pinched her cheek between bony fingers.

“How old are you now, Yeonhee?”

“I’ll be twenty-one on New Year’s Eve.”

“That old already?”  Her grandmother sounded shocked.  “How far away is that?”

“Just over three weeks.”

“Gosh.”  It looked like her grandmother couldn’t quite comprehend that it was already December.  “How terrifying.”

Yeonhee laughed again, stuck for any other kind of response, and offered her grandmother the grapes.

Her grandmother smiled at her and pinched her cheek again.

“Such a dutiful granddaughter,” she cooed.  “Which one are you again?”

“Yeonhee, Grandma.”

“Yeonhee’s much younger than you, you terrible prankster.”

It went on that way until lunchtime, when a nurse interrupted asking for food choices and Yeonhee’s grandma tried to say that she’d already had lunch.  Yeonhee ordered a simple meal for them both and spent half an hour explaining and re-explaining that she was in university and what she was studying.

By mid-afternoon and the fifth “somebody’s brought me a lovely painting of flowers, dear, have you seen it yet?” Yeonhee’s grandmother was beginning to tire.  Yeonhee had managed to keep up a cheerful front while conversation was actually going, but when her grandmother settled down for a short nap, it was impossible to keep the smile in place and tears stung at her eyes.  She sniffed quickly and returned to her revision.

Sehun rang at quarter past five.

“You might want to check Antiroyo’s online news blog,” he said.  “They’ve made a bit of a gaff.”

It was something Yeonhee had hoped not to hear, and with resignation, she looked up the blog on her phone.

“Gaff” was probably the correct word.  Halfway through the article on the prime minister’s death, her statement, including the hopes that the prime minister would get well soon, had been included, following student co-chair of the college republicans, Im Yeonhee, who wishes to remain anonymous, told us. . .

Yeonhee shook her head at the incompetence.  It could admittedly have been worse if they’d decided to go through a bout of malicious editing, but as well as making themselves look like idiots, they’d also made her look like a fool by apparently not being aware of the prime minister’s condition (there had been nothing to say that half of the article had been written before the prime minister had actually died), and they’d also made it obvious that she was trying to avoid a connection to Antiroyo.  Maybe they’d just decided to bite the incompetence bullet to shame her a little.  Either way, the situation was ridiculous.  She was tempted to ring Kim Sohye to point that out, but decided it wasn’t worth it.  She also decided it was a good idea not to go on social media after briefly checking it and discovering that it had flooded with notifications of people laughing at the article (and some at her), and she returned to her revision.

At dinnertime, her grandmother was awake again and they ate while on the speakerphone to Yeonhee’s mother, who apologised profusely for not being able to be there.  Yeonhee sweet-talked the nurse into letting her sleep in the chair by her grandma’s bed, since she wasn’t sure if she’d be able to come again and her grandmother didn’t seem totally aware that she was in a hospital and was trying to make arrangements for Yeonhee to stay anyway, and once the nurse had left, the two of them played card games until Yeonhee’s grandmother drifted off to sleep.  Yeonhee watched her for a while, trying to bite back the tears again, before settling back with a blanket and pillow and drifting off herself.

Even though the visitor’s chair was a relatively comfortable armchair, and the hospital was warm (especially in wards with elderly or very young patients, it was not Yeonhee’s most comfortable night’s sleep.  The steady beep from the hospital machines was asive, and there was a permanent glow of light from the nearby nurses’ station, where the overnight nurses chatted incessantly in hushed tones.  The first time she woke up, it was shortly after midnight, and she was able just to check the time on her phone and shift her position in the chair before going back to sleep.  The second time, it was after three in the morning and she had a burning need for the bathroom.

Walking just that short distance down the corridor woke her up, and when she tried to curl up in the chair and go back to sleep, she was irritated to discover that she couldn’t.

Checking quickly on her grandmother and the others in the bay, Yeonhee contemplated turning on a bedside light and doing half an hour’s work to tire her out again, but if it didn’t wake her grandmother up, it would probably attract the attention of the nurses, and considering she wasn’t really supposed to be there, it would probably annoy them and they might kick her out.  She settled for playing around on her phone instead.  Social media was asleep (though there were a good number of notifications waiting for her laughing over Antiroyo’s blog mistake, and she quickly switched websites before it could annoy her too much.

Out of habit, she’d already typed in and started loading the homepage for Easyl before really registering which website she was going on.  Her apology to the prince was still getting a ridiculous amount of traffic, which had boosted the traffic for her entire account, and she spent some time sifting through the host of new comments.  More conspiracy theories had sprung up, and there seemed to be a genuine quest in the comments section to figure out who she was.

Torn between feeling frustrated and flattered, Yeonhee clicked on the messages icon to clear that notification (or else it would bug her that she had unread messages every time she logged into the site) and then prepared to log out.

The topmost unread message caught her eye before she could, and she paused, her thumb hovering over the screen in confusion.

According to the time stamp, Lonelyblues had messaged her at 3.13am, which was almost twenty minutes ago.

Wondering what the prince had to say, she opened the message.  Six days was a bit of a gap between him noticing her apology and commenting on it in person.  If it wasn’t that, then he’d promised not to bother her anymore and she couldn’t think of anything he might want.

It wasn’t what she expected.

Dec 10th two hours ago, lonelyblues w