***Double update (or possibly triple or quadruple, depending on when you last checked in here): please make sure, if you haven't read the previous chapters, that you do so before reading this one!  (Chapter 9 was uploaded a few hours ago and some of you will already have read it.)***

Yeonhee woke up with Baekhyun’s foot in her face and his arms tightly wrapped around both her ankles.  Once she’d managed to wake him up and push him into the bathroom for a shower, he decided that they ought to go shopping as soon as possible so that he could spend the voucher before it expired or Yeonhee decided she wanted it back.  Snorting to herself, Yeonhee had eaten the last of his favourite biscuits and then went to wash and dress.

The mall was a good forty-five minutes across the city by public transport, and Baekhyun dozed off on her shoulder during both tram journeys (it had been a battle to wake him up so that they could connect to the second line).  He was properly awake by the time they arrived, though, and made a charge for his favourite gadgets shop, already excited about buying himself a new pair of speakers, since there was a large sale on and his ones were broken.  The conversation he struck up with the store assistant had Yeonhee lost within a matter of seconds, and she wandered off, absently checking her phone.  She’d logged into Easyl before she even realised it, and nearly balked at the astronomic number of notifications when she remembered that she needed to check whether or not the prince had seen the apology picture.  A quick glance told her that Baekhyun was still engrossed, and so she began to scroll through them.

Ten minutes later, she gave up and just went to the prince’s profile.  The notifications came with a timestamp, and she’d wanted to see at what time he stumbled across and responded to the image, but with over two thousand new comments and almost twice that number of hearts (seriously, where did all these people come from?), that was going to be even more impossible than she’d realised.  She didn’t usually get a response this big within the first twelve hours of uploading a picture, especially not during the night.

Searching through Lonelyblues’s profile, though, it quickly became apparent that he hadn’t responded to her image in any way, and so, feeling a bit deflated, she started reading through the comments.

Almost everybody absolutely loved the image.  There were a good number of comments to the effect of this is your best yet! and such detail!  Wish I could draw like you!  A huge number, as expected, were relating the artwork to current ethnic tensions.  Most were complimentary, though there were some complaining that it wasn’t like people were actually being killed and could people please stop hysterically overblowing things because then people would cease to care.

There were also a number of Zenyu comments in and amongst all the ones saying things like such a talented artist, how come I didn’t know about her before? and so what else has she drawn?  What do we know about her?  The presence of Zenyu comments on a predominantly Hanmi site confused Yeonhee.  As far as she knew, there weren’t many Zenyu people on the site in the first place (the only person who she knew for sure was Zenyu was the prince), and it was an unspoken rule of the site that everybody communicated in Hanmi anyway.  When she went onto the forums, there were one or two posts from people complaining about the newcomers ruining the atmosphere by not playing by site norms.  A little bit of digging around and she discovered where the influx had come from.

The same journalist that had plagiarised her caricature of the king had tweeted out her image, this time correctly attributed and with a link back, as well as sharing it on other social media platforms, and it had been picked up by the official handle of the national news station, Prime Minister Huang, and several celebrities.  One or two of the big players that had tweeted it had related it specifically to the incident at the university, which had been the most recent example of Hanmi-Zenyu tensions to come to national attention, but all of them were taking it as a commentary on the ethnic divide in the country and most of them were using it as something to call for everybody to come together and unite Taderra and to stamp out the division and problems.  Yeonhee gulped.  She’d never even conceived of her work blowing up in this manner.  Drawing was just a hobby.  The (admittedly very detailed) sketch had been done, exaggerated symbolism and all, as an apology to the prince.

But when it was this big, there was absolutely no way that he didn’t know about it.  Yeonhee was prepared to conceded that he might not have seen it before going to sleep, but he wasn’t even going to have to go on Easyl to be aware of it now, especially if politicians were talking about it.

It left her an anxious wreck waiting for him to log on and see and acknowledge it as she trailed Baekhyun around various different sets of speakers.  More comments came in attempting to dissect the imagery.  It appeared to have killed the theory that she was Im Yeonhee, since once the national bird and the national flower had been pointed out, despite the fact that the bird was eating the flower, everybody agreed that the person behind the artwork wanted a united country.  The main argument was over whether the male or the female in the picture was Hanmi, and how that changed how to read it.

When they left the store forty-five minutes later, Baekhyun with a new set of speakers tucked under his arm in a box and practically bouncing from the sixty percent discount that left him with ten dollars to spend elsewhere, Yeonhee couldn’t help occasionally catching snippets of people discussing the picture as she and Baekhyun toured through the shops.  It made her feel incredibly self conscious, much more so than the first time she’d gone out in public after going on national TV to represent the university republicans and her face had become known across the country.  Whenever she heard pencilmania or something about the picture, she couldn’t help looking around, partly afraid that somebody had connected the dots and realised that she was the artist behind it.  Baekhyun thankfully was too happy choosing the most garish socks he could find (in a three-packs-for-the-price-of-one bargain, which meant he could get himself fifteen pairs for nine dollars) to notice.  The final dollar went on getting them both freshly baked, still-warm cookies from a baker they discovered from the second floor, and then Baekhyun’s stomach demanded lunch, and they went up to the third floor to find a restaurant.

“I need pasta,” he announced as soon as he saw the Italian, and he shoved her into the open seating area that the serving counter opened out onto before she could complain or point out how packed the restaurant was.  He kicked his heels up, leaning back in his chair and adjusting his beanie on his head as soon as the waiter had taken their orders.  Yeonhee couldn’t help another check of her Easyl notifications, and Baekhyun took out his own phone.  For a few moments, they were both silent.

Lonelyblues was still nowhere to be seen in Yeonhee’s notifications.

“Hey,” said Baekhyun just as the waiter was returning with their food.  “Have you seen this?”  He tilted his chair back into the upright position as he thanked the waiter for the food, but waited for the man to leave before passing his phone to Yeonhee.

She tried not to react too suspiciously at her apology picture on the screen.

“What about it?” she asked.

“It’s viral at the moment,” he said.  “Apparently some journalist plagiarised some of the artist’s earlier work and now he’s sharing and crediting her best picture to make up for that, like that counts for an apology.  I thought you might like it, since I know you draw.”

“Well, it is good,” Yeonhee mumbled.

Baekhyun nodded in agreement as he took the phone back.  “Lots of people think it’s, like, a personification of ethnic tensions and the artist is calling for peace and harmony.  I just thought you’d like it because I’m pretty sure there’s some kenaf on it and it made me laugh.”

“Are you sure it’s not weed?” Yeonhee joked, and he grinned at her.

“Just what are you insinuating about Juan now?”

“You were the one who gave me Juan!”

Baekhyun gave her a cheesy wink and tucked into his pasta.  Shaking her head, Yeonhee followed suit.  Conversation soon turned to how they were going to set Mihae and Chanyeol up if it turned out that Mihae and Sehun in fact weren’t dating (which Yeonhee doubted, but then Baekhyun and Mihae had managed to keep their not-quite-hook-up secret for a few years and Mihae and Sehun were both quiet people).  There was also the question of whether or not Mihae and Sehun would actually tell them if they were dating, because if they were and were keeping it on the down-low, they might