By Monday evening, with resignation, Yeonhee had to admit that it was very difficult to dislike the prince as a person.  She’d tried.  It made it extremely difficult to continue disliking the occupation of prince, but a day of going over the facts and figures that had (alongside the prince’s then notoriety) first convinced her that republicanism was a good idea and she thought she was capable of drawing the line between objecting to the concept of a prince while at the same time conceding that the prince himself really quite sweet.

(It still wasn’t easy.)

She also dug out some of the news reports from the prince’s more objectionable teen years, but she was only able to read through two of them before she had to set them aside, and she couldn’t bring herself to go back over the video of him throwing up on the vice chancellor at her sister’s graduation.  Technically speaking, the logical argument that stemmed from bad behaviour in a role was removal from that role, not ditching the role altogether (almost any type of system could function well provided a good person was running it, and basing the merits and flaws of a system around a mortal individual was a terrible way of evaluating a system when what needed to be evaluated was the system itself.  (Though, multiple terrible individuals would probably suggest a flaw in the system or they wouldn’t be so many of them.)  It was immoral to keep holding something over him when he’d clearly bettered himself.  Yeonhee was pretty sure that he’d apologised somewhere for the graduation incident and probably a good number of other ones, too.

It didn’t help that something Min had said to her kept floating around in her mind.  She reckoned she’d probably been a bit naive in believing he’d pulled her away just to give her pointers for how to react if the press spotted and recognised the prince (which she had forgotten anyway when her name had been called and she’d started panicking), but once he was done, he’d checked quickly that nobody was listening in before subtly backing her into a corner.

“Miss Im,” he’d said, “I really have to ask you to show his highness some proper respect.”

It had left Yeonhee baffled.  “But I am.”

“You aren’t.  He won’t correct you on it because he finds it far too awkward, but you’re being overly familiar with him and it isn’t right.”

That had confused Yeonhee even more (and more so after him basically saying he was taking her out to dinner).  Looking back, she reckoned she might have got a bit further if she’d pulled the “he started it” card.  Instead, she’d said, “I give respect where it’s due.”

He’d given a very pointed look over her shoulder at her grandmother.  “If you still think he’s done nothing worth your respect, I don’t think your high standards are humanly possible.”

“I respect him as a person,” Yeonhee grudgingly admitted.  “But I can’t accept or respect him as a prince.”

Min looked irritated.  “Perhaps I’m not making myself plain.  When I say – when we say—” he gestured to the bodyguards “—that we have concerns about you not according his highness proper respect, we’re talking about how you address him, which should predominantly be ‘his highness’ if he is in the vicinity or ‘your highness’ when speaking directly to him.  If he asks you to address him less formally, that’s a different matter, but refusing to address him at all becomes rude.”

Yeonhee frowned.  “Me avoiding calling him anything at all is a big deal?”

“Yes.  Whether you agree with the concept or not, he is still your prince, and he is still my prince.  I won’t stand to see him disrespected, even if it is only slight.”

“I really think you’re making a mountain out of a molehill.”

“Miss Im,” he said.  “When you had bad teachers back at school, or teachers that you disliked, did you still refer to them by their title and position?”

“I don’t see how this is relevant.”

“And when you were speaking to them, you didn’t leave out the Miss or the Sir or the Teacher despite disliking or having no respect for them since they were bad teachers or unpleasant people?”

Ah.  So that was what he was getting at.

“They weren’t born teachers.”

“But they could help the fact that they became teachers.  His highness can’t help the fact that he’s a prince.  Discriminating against somebody for their birth is hardly—”

“It’s not like he has royalty encoded into his DNA.”

“It’s not like you have Taderran encoded into yours,” Min shot back.  “But you’re Taderran.  Your birth makes you Taderran.  Ethnically and biologically, you are Hanmi, but by birth, you are Taderran.  You can change nationalities if you want to, but would you do it if you were expected to just because you were born Taderran and somebody who was not Taderran didn’t like that and thought the concept of being Taderran shouldn’t exist?”

Yeonhee had to admit it was a perspective she’d never even considered before.

“Look,” said Min.  “I don’t particularly care what your views on the existence of royalty are, and I daresay his highness doesn’t particularly care either, but his highness is royalty, whether you like it or not, and he is your prince, whether you like it or not, and for as long as he is royalty, you should address him as such.”

Like you addressed the rotten teachers you didn’t respect as teachers.

It was very awkward trying to address somebody as your highness, though.  Yeonhee sighed.

The king’s sudden illness was all anybody could talk about in the wake of the weekend.  Chenle had somehow organised another inter-faith prayer extravaganza (his words, not Yeonhee’s) to prayer for the king’s swift recovery, and on Tuesday, Yeonhee had a tired Sowon knocking on her door and asking her to please help with responding to the press on both the king’s health and the prince effectively taking over the country.  Yeonhee had tried not to look too guilty, since she’d turned her phone off of Sunday evening and was trying to avoid turning it back on again.  In part it was because she was aware of the incoming deluge of calls bound to happen once the media actually found out who was in the hospital, and in part it was because she’d tried to figure out how to block the prince’s number so he couldn’t text her with an invitation to dinner, only to discover that since his number had only been registered as “private” in his call log, she had no means by which to actually do this.

She had to admit, though, it would have been a petty and futile gesture.  He knew where she lived during the university term, so even if she blocked him on Easyl again, she didn’t think it would be too difficult for the prince to get hold of her if he really wanted to.  If she’d already been subjected to a background check, which she didn’t doubt, there was a high likelihood he knew where she lived during the university vacations, too.  She also wasn’t really sure what she’d gain from blocking him and refusing to go out to dinner, and so she decided not to pursue it further.

On Wednesday evening, which was the typical night for the republican student chapter to meet, Yeonhee fou