***Part 3 of 3 of the triple update for the ball!  Please make sure you've read chapters 43 and 44 before you read this one or you will a) have missed out hugely and b) probably find yourself getting quite confused!***

It was pretty clear when Yixing did find out about the incident a few dances later on, because he sat out the remaining ones until the next mazurka in a bit of a dudgeon and even with the mask on, it was pretty clear that he was angry.  Wenhan was trying to calm him down when Yeonhee summoned up the courage to go over to him, and he immediately pulled Yeonhee down into his lap.  Wenhan promptly made himself scarce.

“Why didn’t you say anything about Xiaodan and Mei?” he demanded.

“Because I knew you’d be like this.”

His arms tightened around her.  “They still had no right to do that,” he bit out.  “If Jia hadn’t been there, it would have been a publicity nightmare.”

“I would have fought back,” Yeonhee said, “and probably got away without having to call security—”

“That’s exactly my point!” he fumed.  “Whether or not they planned it, it was a win-win situation for them – either they found out who you were if you didn’t fight back or they’d be able to land you with a reputation for being a common brawler which would have rebounded badly on both of us.  It’s not right.”

“Well, neither of those actually happened,” Yeonhee snapped back tersely.  “Not to mention you were the one who invited me to the ball in the first place.  I didn’t ask to be flung into a pit of vipers.”

He went very still beneath her and his arms loosened.

“Is that all you see us as still?” he asked bitterly.

“Don’t be ridiculous, Yixing.  I wouldn’t suffer you being within fifty feet of me if I thought that about you, but it doesn’t stop some of the people in your circle of associates being absolute b*tches.”

He was quiet for a good few moments.

“I need some air,” he mumbled eventually.  “Can you give me five?  I. . . I’m sorry.”

Yeonhee stood so that he could get up.  He cupped her cheek in an affectionate gesture as he passed her with a troubled little smile.  One of the bodyguards who she didn’t know so well hurried after him as he made briskly for the doors.

“Should I go after him?” she wondered out loud to the other bodyguards.

“Give him some space to clear his head,” Junmyeon advised.

It turned out that Yixing needed a lot more than five minutes to himself, and by the time nearly half an hour had passed, people were beginning to talk about it.  Yeonhee couldn’t escape the questions whether she was dancing or whether she was sitting a song out, and she was trying to escape the clutches of a reporter who wanted to know her opinion on the prince leaving the dance so early without her when he finally reappeared a little after eleven.  The mask was gone and he looked a little pale and drawn, but all the anger had faded.

“Excuse me,” he said to the reporter, wedging himself between the woman and Yeonhee.  “The next waltz is my favourite one by Shostakovich.  Darling, would you give me the honour?”

Grateful to be hauled away, Yeonhee agreed, although there was absolutely no way that she would have refused in the first place.  The waltz had a very short introduction, only two bars or so, but rather than using them to get the tempo and taking them out onto the floor, Yixing stopped them both in the shadow of a pillar and gathered her into his arms, exhaling shakily as he swayed them from side to side in time with the beat.

“Is everything okay?” Yeonhee asked, concerned.

Cheek pressed to the side of her head, he nodded.

“Sorry,” he murmured.

“It happens.”  Yeonhee bit her lip.  “I probably could have said something, come to that.”

He didn’t respond to that one, just continued swaying them to the music.

“I would have come back sooner,” he said abruptly in Hanmi as the strings picked up the main theme, “but then the hospital rang.  Apparently there have been sporadic signs of brain activity in response to auditory stimuli.  They were running brain scans earlier today while one of the CDs I left was playing.”

Yeonhee pulled back, a sudden surge of excitement she’d never felt on behalf of another person before powering through her.  “Does that mean he’ll wake up?”

He shrugged, slipping his hands down her arms and into ballroom hold.  “It makes me hopeful.”

The words were carefully: clearly, he didn’t want to get his hopes up too high.  His fingers tapped a bar on her shoulder.  “Anyway, shall we dance?  I wasn’t lying to that journalist earlier.  This was the waltz I wanted to save for you.”

Yeonhee suppressed a chuckle as she followed his lead and he slipped them into the mix with the other waltzers.  “But the tune’s a sad one.”

“Not all the way through,” he pointed out with a grin.  “Plus it’s beautiful.”

That Yeonhee could not deny.  Laughing, she shook her head as the key modulated into a major one.  Without missing a beat, he leant forwards and kissed her cheek through the veil.

“See?” he asked.

The waltz was sadly a very short one, but his mood seemed to be back to where it had been at the start of the evening by the time it was over.  Wenhan popped up beside him with his mask almost the second it finished, spouting some nonsense about it being “highly uncool” to neglect the dress code, even if he was royalty.  Mock-grumbling, Yixing did as he was told and put it back on, promising Yeonhee he’d see her again at half past for the jive, which was usually a twenty-minute mashup of popular tunes from the past century before they finished up with The Blue Danube for the final dance of the evening.  The remaining fifteen minutes passed quickly, with one young reporter (an intern, he told her) asking if he was allowed to use a photo he’d snapped of Yixing kissing her on the cheek during the Shostakovich waltz for an article he was planning to write.  Yeonhee had to ask one of the bodyguards to help on that front as she had no idea how she was supposed to respond.  Somebody who hadn’t summed up the courage to ask her for a dance earlier that night requested the last quickstep of the evening, and somebody else she’d only had one dance with managed to charm her enough for the last polka.  Apart from Xiaodan giving her a very nasty look when they happened to cross paths on her last circuit round the room, all unpleasantness from earlier in the evening was driven from her mind, and she almost skipped into Yixing’s arms at the end of it, a little tired but raring to go for the jive.

What neither of them had expected was for a spotlight to descend and the room to go very hushed at the beginning of it.  People began calling for the two of them to step forward and lead off the dance as the orchestra struck up, but Yixing shook his head, pulling Yeonhee behind him.  Yeonhee saw him catch Chen’s eye, silently asking what was going on, but Chen shook his head in response.  Clearly, this had been an impromptu addition to the night.

After half a minute or so, a man Yeonhee vaguely recognised from somewhere, probably TV or something, took up the microphone the mayor had been using earlier.

“The last time the Phoenix Dress graced these walls, their