Yeonhee realised the next time that she met the prince for another art lesson, this time at the main train station (he’d never been on a train before, which shocked her) that in most people the mannerisms and care displayed by the prince that made him so attractive would, in most people, be construed as interest in the person they were directed towards.  It made her simultaneously depressed at how unchivalrous humanity as a whole had become and frustrated that she couldn’t read him, because he was nice to quite literally everybody.  Within seconds of walking in through the door, Min and Junmyeon back from the Christmas week vacation with their families and tailing them in casual clothes, they stumbled across a lost, crying child who was about four years old and scared at the loud noises of the station and the constant bustle of people around her.  Familiar with stations or no, Yixing had crouched down to the little girl’s level to talk long enough to calm her, presented her with a small boiled sweet that he had in his pocket, and then took her by the hand to lead her over to the information desk, where he sat her on the counter while he talked to the staff there, coaxing answers out of the girl about what her parents, who she’d been travelling with, looked like.

Amazingly, throughout all of this he wasn’t recognised, but Yeonhee supposed that he was right – nobody really expected to see the prince of Taderra knocking around the main railway station and helping lost children find their parents, and especially not when he was speaking the entire time in Hanmi.  He was also even more casually dressed than she’d ever seen him before – Min had actually been laughing about the oversized hoodie the prince was wearing when Yeonhee had arrived, and Junmyeon had been looking at it dubiously, clearly unsure why the prince was wearing such a thing.

“You like helping people, don’t you, your highness,” Yeonhee said as they watched the little girl being reunited with her parents.

He just shrugged, hands in his pockets, but looking happy that the situation had turned out well.  “When I can’t actually get to know people, I guess it’s the next best thing.”

It shut Yeonhee up for a few seconds, and she swallowed.

“That’s really sad,” she said softly.  “I mean, that’s really lonely.”  It did leave her a bit confused as to why he’d decided to pursue some kind of. . . she didn’t even know what their relationship really classified as, actually, when it came to her.

“School was the most difficult,” he said, voicing what felt like it was at the end of a silent train of thought that had taken him in a slightly different direction.  “Even when I was at elementary school, it was really hard to tell if everybody else wanted to be friends with me for who I was or what I was.  Obviously I do have friends, but a lot of them are hand-picked by my parents from among the aristocracy and they’re not all my age and even there you get some of them and their parents trying to take advantage of gaining close connections to the throne and it causes a lot of unnecessary tension in what would otherwise be properly formed relationships.”

“Do you ever get people trying to set up marriages?” Yeonhee asked before she could stop herself.  She almost wished she hadn’t asked, because her heart was pounding unpleasantly and she wasn’t sure she wanted to know the answer.  If it turned out that he was already quietly engaged, or that there were views towards it, she didn’t think she’d handle it very well.  (He had implied that he was single back in November, Yeonhee told herself.)

The look he gave her felt like he’d seen right through the reason she’d asked, but he laughed.

“There are people pushing for it, sure, but my parents would never inflict it on me.  They’d much rather I be happily married because a fractious family life in the main royal family is only ever going to impact negatively on the rest of the country.”

Yeonhee nodded.

“But whoever I end up marrying will have to be thoroughly vetted and most likely taught how to be a princess.”

Yeonhee tried not to perk up too much.  “What does that involve?  Being tied to chairs to enforce the right distance from food and proper eating habits?”

The prince let out a massive snort of laughter.  “Why so curious, Yeonhee?” he asked her with that same sharp look he’d given her before.

“I’m not,” she grumbled before he could any further.  “Every girl wants to be a princess.”

He continued to look thoroughly amused.  The little girl he’d helped was now pointing in his direction and babbling excitedly to her parents.

“Even girls who don’t want the position to exist?”

“I’m pretty sure half of America’s toddlers would love to be princesses, not to mention half of France’s,” Yeonhee mumbled.

The prince rolled his eyes, though the smile didn’t leave his face.

“You know,” he said, “or actually, you probably don’t, but it seems like a large part of the republican position is predicated on jealousy.  It’s like socialism – it sees somebody in a position it deems better off in some way, thinks it’s tremendously unfair, and decides that because it doesn’t have that same thing right now, or because it doesn’t think it will be able to have it, nobody should have it.”

“That’s not—” Even remotely true, Yeonhee wanted to say, but she had to bite her tongue.  Whatever the rest of the arguments against the monarchy were, she actually couldn’t refute that the ideological standpoint was based on two premises – it’s not democratic and it’s not fair.  She wouldn’t have been able to finish her sentence anyway, though, because the little girl ran over at that point, parents in tow, and the prince stepped forward when they began to thank him to assure them that it really hadn’t been a problem.

To Yeonhee’s amazement, the parents appeared not to recognise the prince either (expectation bias was an incredible thing, really), but it looked like the girl’s mother was trying to place where she might have seen him before, and Yeonhee hovered anxiously, wondering whether it would be appropriate for her to step in and grab him away.  After a few minutes, however, they turned to leave, the little girl waving a chubby hand back at the prince.  As they walked away, Yeonhee heard the wife saying to the husband “don’t you think that young man looked rather similar to the prince?” in Zenyu.

“Perh