Yixing actually managed to finish his tour of the military this time, but not without another catastrophe.  Yeonhee had managed to formulate a concrete-ish idea of what she wanted and run it past Sehun before taking the proposal to Chenle in the afternoon when the news broke.  The two of them were sitting rather awkwardly in the Fairtrade café, Chenle unconvinced that an actual movement was needed, when the headline flashed up on the new TV on the wall behind Yeonhee.

Chenle stopped trying to find flaws in Yeonhee’s proposition and blinked, his expression suddenly stunned.

“Isn’t that your old school?” he said blankly.

The query of how he even knew where she’d been to school on the tip of her tongue, Yeonhee turned and was met with a scene of horror.

Shootout at prestigious Hanmi school, the headline read, before mercifully cutting away to a studio, where subtitles indicated that a reporter was talking about what they so far knew, which wasn’t a lot beyond the fact that the perpetrator was young, male, and a Taderran national – and that he had a gun, which was against the laws of the country.

Chenle let her watch as far as the current death count before drawing her attention again with a cough.  Head reeling, Yeonhee turned back to him.  Twenty-three already confirmed dead.  Twenty-three children already confirmed dead.

“If that’s a motivated attack rather than somebody wrong in the head,” he said, uncharacteristically grim, “count me on board.”

Naturally, Yixing knew more about it than Yeonhee did when he rang her that evening, fresh off the plane but sounding jaded.

“Some depraved twenty-two-year-old nutjob decided he was going to eliminate the country’s problems by getting rid of the ‘problematic ones’,” he said.  “Looks like he built the gun himself.  He fits a lot of the stereotypical profile as well, bit of a loner and all that.  The pictures of his room are crazy.  It’s like a One Nationer supremacy shrine.”

He didn’t have time to talk for long, since there were still arrangements to be looked over for the national memorial service on the Thursday, and he was due to meet with the next of kin of the dead victims in about an hour and he needed to be briefed for it, which was making Luhan very antsy (Yeonhee could hear him trying to get Yixing to hang up in the background), and they were likely going to have to plan another memorial ceremony for the following week as well.

“It’s your friends’ concert tomorrow night, isn’t it?” he said after convincing Luhan to leave him alone for just another couple of minutes to finish the call.  “I don’t think I’ll have time to stay for more than an hour of it—”

“Yixing, if you’re busy, don’t worry—”

“No, I want to come.  Minseok’s going anyway.  It’ll be nice to do something that takes my mind off things.  They were looking pretty good on TV yesterday – some of the soldiers at the last base we visited had heard of them and so we watch the interview with them while they were off duty.”

Yeonhee made a mental note to tell Baekhyun, because he would be absolutely thrilled at that news.  Come to that, there was a fair chance he already knew if Minseok had told Jongin, but Jongin might not necessarily have passed it on.

Having established with Chenle that forming a student movement against extremism and ethnic tensions and violence was worthwhile and actually important, Yeonhee spent the next morning hammering out details on it with him and Sehun.  They eventually agreed that it would be a small umbrella organisation, Yeonhee as co-president, with the committee made up of a representative of each of the various student political bodies in the university, preferably the society presidents.  The constitution was simple, under a page, defining the three terms and the positions in the group.  Chenle agreed to propose a motion at the student union to mandate him to join the panel and offered to help Yeonhee and Sehun to write round to the other political societies.

“We can leave the republicans off because you’re evidently going to be joining,” he mumbled as he made a list, before quickly flicking back to the draft constitution.  “Wait.  Shouldn’t we put in a provision for elections?  We need a proper democratic primus inter pares here.”

“I’m stepping down as president,” Yeonhee told him.  “I want to concentrate on this.”

“There’s not going to be that much to do unless there’s a sudden spate of criminal activity on these grounds,” said Chenle.

“As soon as we’re established here, I’m hoping to set up something similar in universities across the country,” Yeonhee said.  “Ours isn’t the only one with problems.”

Chenle winced.  Sehun sat back, looking a little smug as he exchanged glances with Yeonhee.  She raised an eyebrow back at him as if to say I know.  She hadn’t expected to get him to agree to the existence of problems so quickly, let alone committing to tackling them.

“We’re going to need a name,” Sehun said, “but we can decide on that later, unless anybody has any particular ideas.”

“We also need to make sure that we don’t just fall into a pattern of ‘strongly condemning’ the issues,” Chenle mumbled, checking through his phone to see that he’d got all the societies and adding a couple he’d missed.  “It’s about as effective as a strongly worded letter of complaint to somebody who doesn’t give a d*mn.”

“I know.  I was thinking about organising history, philosophy and psychology talks.  Or seminars.  Or screenings of talks on those matters on youtube.”  Yeonhee began to pack her stuff away.  “And maybe organising a few debates.  I mean, we can decide exactly where we’re going to go when we’ve got people on board, because everybody will have different ideas.”

Chenle looked up at her.  “Are you sure you’ll be able to command everybody’s respect?”

Sehun laughed.  “Why do you think you’re here?”

“There’s a reason I said we needed two presidents in the constitution,” Yeonhee told him.  “At the moment, I think we’ll have much more clout if we have one Hanmi and one Zenyu.  Maybe when relations between the two communities are better it can be a single one and cycle yearly between the two, but unity is very important too.”

Chenle grunted, and Yeonhee left to return some books to the library.

When Baekhyun had first told Yeonhee that their record company had decided to book out the Old Royal Concert Hall (with a seating capacity of three and a half thousand) for the showcase, she’d balked, wondering if that was fair to newcomers on the scene who wouldn’t necessarily be able to draw a crowd.  When she showed up there after they’d had a camera, lights and sound check to give them cake, it was to find them all crowded around Chanyeol, who had his tablet on his lap.

“There are only thirteen seats left!” Chanyeol exclaimed when he saw her.  “We might sell out!”

It left them in an exuberant mood.  The show was even going to be televised – which the record label had promised to wrangle if they got past a hundred thousand pre-orders, and there were a couple of special effects staff running around and a number of people figuring out where on the stage it would be best to place a couple of large screens to reveal the music video for Rock ‘n’ Roll ‘n’ Buns, which Yeonhee hadn’t even been aware existed.  When the press began to show up an hour before the show was due to start, some to be nosey and others because it had been agreed they could do interviews, the doors through to backstage were locked for the sake of privacy.  Baekhyun had managed to sweet-talk somebody into giving him a couple of VIP passes for Yeonhee and to give to Sehun and Mihae when they arrived, and then things started to get busy.  There were last-minute checks needed; cameramen needed to be cued for certain parts of certain songs, especially the effects; the techies in charge of the screens needed to run through the list of what was being cued when so that videos and pictures and lyrics would come up at the right time; an army of stylists descended on the four boys to make sure they looked their best; they were hauled off for individual interviews or all together.

In the midst of the chaos, Yeonhee found herself tidying the mess that had resulted in the room next door to the waiting room, which the boys were using as storage.  She was glad she wasn’t performing herself, because she would have been at her wit’s end with panic at how frenetic everything had become.  A number of boxes and other things appeared not to be related to the boys, and so she ended up trying to divide the room between what was and what wasn’t.

She didn’t realise she had company until a pair of hands jabbed lightly at ticklish nerves in her waist and she shrieked, dropping the box she was holding.

Yixing caught it with his arms around her, and she turned around in his embrace to face her.

“Hey,” he said with a tired smile, pecking her on the lips.

It was so good to see him again that Yeonhee wrapped her arms tightly around him and squeezed.  Wheezing, Yixing carefully set the box down and then folded his arms around her, resting his chin on her head