“Outline and evaluate the cases for and against global governance,” said Baekhyun, fingers poised over his keyboard.  “For: fewer wars.  Against: everybody hates you.”

“Not quite two and a half thousand words,” Yeonhee joked.

He closed his laptop.  “I tried.”

Yeonhee smiled at him from where she was tucked up in bed, an ice pack on her head to cool the raging fever she’d come down with.  It had hit late on Tuesday while she was playing dodgeball on the tennis courts with the others, and Baekhyun had taken it upon himself to bring her all the Wednesday morning lecture notes, and an assignment that was due in the next week.  The ice pack had been Mihae’s idea when she’d appeared briefly to find Yeonhee still extremely sick but having already taken the maximum dosage of medication that was safe for the next four hours.  If the icepack was working, it was giving her brain freeze.  If not, the reason Yeonhee was struggling to think straight was still because of the fever.

“I think I should leave you to rest,” Baekhyun told her.  “Would you like me to leave you my iPod?  It has the Juan song on it.”

Yeonhee did not think she’d be able to cope with listening to Juan my beauty being belted out by four male voices, and so she shook her head.

Baekhyun shrugged.  “Your loss.  Text me when you want dinner and I’ll bring something over, okay?  If I hear nothing by ten I’m coming anyway with noodle soup.”

“I have literally puked up a country,” Yeonhee said, her stomach churning at the mention of food.  “I don’t want to eat ever again.”

“That’s extremely unhealthy,” Baekhyun told her as he made a beeline for the door.

Seconds after he was gone, he was back, holding up a thermos flask and a small bouquet.

“This says that it’s Soup for the Sick,” he told her, looking rather dubious, “and I don’t recognise the handwriting.  Is it Sugar Daddy?”

Yeonhee just shook her head.  There was no point trying to correct Baekhyun on his terminology.

“Ooh,” he said, looking at the flask with renewed curiosity.  “Do you have a secret admirer?”

“Apparently,” said Yeonhee.  “It’s a little creepy.  This person sent me Christmas and birthday presents too, direct to my home.”

“That is creepy,” Baekhyun agreed.  “Any suspicions as to who it is?”

Yeonhee just shook her head.

“Well, the handwriting’s really messy, so I’d say ninety-percent certain it’s a dude.”

“That’s, like, half the population of the country.”

“I know.”

“Doesn’t narrow it down much.”

“Nope.  Well, I made an effort.  How regular are these gifts?”

Yeonhee turned the ice pack over, water dripping down her face.  “They aren’t,” she said.  “There appears to have been no rhyme or reason since the birthday and Christmas gifts for them to appear.”

“Odd.”  Baekhyun frowned.  “Well, do you want the soup?”

Yeonhee pulled a face.  Even the thought of water made her stomach churned.  He plopped it down on her bedside table.

“Well, I’ll leave it here just in case.”

He hit the lights on his way out and Yeonhee rolled over to get some sleep.

It wasn’t until nearly six that she remembered Wednesday evening was supposed to be a regular meeting day with the prince, and as reluctant as she was to have to rain check, there was absolutely no way that Yeonhee was in a condition to even cross the room, let alone go outside.  The nausea had thankfully died down over the cause of the day, but she felt like a wreck as she sent off an apologetic text to the prince explaining why she wasn’t available.

It was one of the very few occasions that there was a gap of over an hour before she got a response, and it came in the form of a call.  Too weak to sit up and put the phone to her ear, Yeonhee curled up on her side and put the phone on speaker, happy just to hear his voice.  He was concerned enough to suggest calling a doctor for her, which just about made her heart melt, but she managed to assure him that it looked like the worst of it was over and what she most needed was rest.

“This does at least solve your dilemma for tomorrow,” he pointed out.

Yeonhee was disorientated enough to be confused.  “What?” she mumbled back.

“The protest,” he pointed out.  “It doesn’t sound like you’re in much condition to go anywhere.”

“Mm.”

After a little trivial conversation, he bid her a speedy recovery and said goodbye, mentioning something about having to check arrangements for entertaining the prime minister of Japan for the next couple of days.  Not long after, Mihae let herself into the room with a top up of medication, and the two of them sat watching re-runs of a sitcom until Baekhyun showed up with enough noodle soup to feed an army.  Yeonhee drifted in and out of sleep sandwiched between her two friends as Baekhyun dug out her Little Imp DVDs, because apparently no student could eat noodle soup without watching something (and he didn’t like the sitcom).

Before too long, they were ignoring the show in favour of talking quietly, but Yeonhee was too feverish still to bother joining in.

“So, you know Sehun,” Mihae began a little hesitantly.

“Tall dude who hangs out with us a lot, super smart?” Baekhyun said.  “Yeah, a little.  What about him?”

“I was in the library today with Sowon and he kind of cropped up in conversation,” said Mihae, “and she said that he’s really, really protective over Yeonhee.  Like a mother bear.”

“And?” Baekhyun asked.  “I’m protective.”

There was silence for a good while.  Yeonhee could only imagine that Mihae was fixing Baekhyun with a pointed look, because he eventually gave a nervous laugh.

“Oh.  Oh, that.  Sehun’s not interested in her like that, Mihae.”

“How do you know?” she asked.

“Because he complains to me all the time about people thinking he has a crush on her and trying to set him up with her.”  Baekhyun’s laugh was more genuine this time.

“Sowon said he’s nearly ended up fighting Taehyung about Yeonhee more than once,” Mihae said.  “It is kind of over the top, isn’t it?”

Baekhyun hummed softly as Iggy the Imp shrieked with glee from Yeonhee’s laptop speakers.

“I know one or two of his high school friends and apparently he’s just always been like that,” he said.  “Apparently in his first year of senior school he stumbled across some of the top year students having a bet over who could get one of the students in the year below to sleep with them first.  Sehun didn’t even get on with this kid and yet he went in and apparently these top years all got hospitalised.”

“Do you think maybe he’s gay?” Mihae asked, before adding, “you two would actually look pretty good together, you know.”

Baekhyun coughed awkwardly, and Yeonhee felt a smile creeping over her face.

“I’m pretty sure his ex was female,” he said.  “He barely even talks about past dating or dating interests, to be honest, just that he wishes people would stop thinking he has something for Yeonhee.”

“If he didn’t act the way he does around her—”

“He’s trying not to let it affect their friendship.”  There was a pause.  “By the way, somebody keeps leaving Yeonhee gifts.  Any ideas who might be hitting on her?”

“Well, that guy she’s always hanging around,” Mihae grumbled.

“She says not.”

Yeonhee instinctively held still, wondering what else they would speculate.

“Do you think following her when she goes to meet him is a step too far?” Mihae asked, her voice hushed.  “At this rate, that’ll be the only way we find out.”

“I don’t think stalking our best friend is the solution.”  Baekhyun’s voice was just as quiet.  “But I’m still worried.”

They lapsed into silence again, and Yeonhee drifted off properly before the Little Imp episode came to an end.

Sehun dropped by the next morning with breakfast.  He didn’t look surprised that she was too ill to join them at the demonstration, but Yeonhee was at least able to sit up and hold down food, and he helped her sponge away the clammy sweat that had built up from over a day in bed.  After clearing all the dishes away and cheerfully asking if she wanted him to bring anything back after the trip out into the city, he skipped his morning seminar to keep her company and sat on her legs with his laptop balanced on his knees, striking up conversation every so often as he picked his way through a series of case laws he was currently analysing.  By lunch, they had got into a discussion about whether or not the death penalty should be legal for serial killers.

“I mean, there’s murder,” said Sehun, gesturing as though he was placing the concept in a box, “and then there’s deranged, psychopathic, gleeful serial pleasure-killing.  Neither’s morally right, but serial killers are just on a whole different level of evil.”

“But if it’s the scope of the murder, surely extra-brutal murders ought to carry a death penalty?” Yeonhee argued.

Sehun looked up from his second imaginary box.  “How brutal is brutal?”

The room felt a bit empty once he was gone, and Yeonhee found herself talking to Juan out of boredom as she dragged herself out of bed to get her art equipment.  Propping herself up with pillows once everything she needed had been set out on her duvet, she started on some charcoal sketches of her room.  She was so engrossed that it wasn’t until she began to feel lightheaded that she took a break and texted Baekhyun with a plea for food.  He showed up in a matter of minutes with smoked fish and salad.  Yeonhee wasn’t too sure about the fish choice, but once a small portion of mackerel and a distinctly larger one of salad had been demolished, she was feeling distinctly better.

“You’ve got more colour in your cheeks,” he said.  “You should be up and about tomorrow.”

He’d also brought some dried apricots and a selection of films over, and so they set up for a lazy evening in.  While Baekhyun was fixing up the speakers and busying himself with the lights, Yeonhee checked her phone.  Her parents had rung earlier in the day and had mentioned possibly ringing again later to see how she was, and she’d almost forgotten about it.

There was a text from her big sister telling her to get well soon, and also to message her if she needed anything or was ill enough to want to spend time recuperating away from campus, and also one from the prince, which had a photo attached to it.

The view from the administrative palace committee room, he’d captioned it.  There looked to be a sizeable protest outside, and she wondered why the prince was sending it to her until another message popped up.

There, fixed it, he’d written.

It was the same photo, but photoshopped deliberately badly into it was her own head and shoulders (at least twice the size of any other head in the crowd, and with a different filter and colour) cropped from a photo she recognised as being on the website of the national student republicans, and she burst out laughing.  Baekhyun looked round inquisitively, but she shook her head, and he raised his eyebrows, mouthing Sugar Daddy?

Yeonhee rolled her eyes at him, and texted back a 10/10 for art skills.