Yixing was practically dead on his feet when Yeonhee arrived at the palace the following day for lunch.  She didn’t comment on it until the staff had left them alone in the family dining room and Yixing nearly dropped off face first into his bowl of soup in the middle of saying something to her, and she only narrowly saved him from a burnt face full of scalding tomatoes by grabbing his hair.

He was too tired to even protest that it hurt.

“Have you slept since we last spoke?” she asked suspiciously as he sat back, yawning hugely and rubbing his eyes.

“Haven’t had time,” he mumbled, reaching for his spoon and missing.  His movements were slow and a little disoriented, like he was rather drunk.

Yeonhee was gobsmacked, and it took her a few seconds to find her faculties of speech again.

“How can you not have time to sleep?” she demanded, horrified. 

“There’s just so much to do.”  His fingers managed to close around the spoon handle this time.  “I’m actually supposed to be overseeing memorial arrangements for the bombing victims right now, but Mum went instead.  She wouldn’t let me leave the palace.”

“D*mn straight she wouldn’t,” Yeonhee told him.  “Once you’ve finished eating, you are going straight to bed.”

“But I don’t want to waste time I can spend with you,” he protested.  His eyelids were already drooping again.  “And there’s stuff I need to do.  We need to talk about campuses. . .”  His voice trailed off in a mutter as he began to drift off.

“Yixing,” Yeonhee said, worried.  He started awake.  “You are going to collapse if you treat yourself like this.”

He didn’t try to argue that.

“I think you should go to bed now,” Yeonhee added, removing his soup spoon from his hand.  “I’d be very surprised if you could eat in this condition.”

He didn’t argue that either.

“Sorry,” he mumbled after a moment or two.  “I didn’t mean to ruin the afternoon like this.  I wanted us to relax.”

“Bed first,” Yeonhee told him firmly.

He only made it as far as one of the sofas in the living room, but it was a large one and there were a couple of blankets that had been used as dust covers lying about, so Yeonhee threw one over him and settled down in a nearby armchair with her laptop and some university work that she’d been planning on doing that evening when she went to bed.

Yixing’s tiredness must have been contagious, because she started awake mid-afternoon with her laptop still on her knees and surrounded by pieces of paper without even realising she’d dropped off.  Yixing was awake, though he still looked exhausted.  He was reading through a piece of paper, clutching a sheaf of others in his hand, and Yeonhee realised guiltily that he’d started trying to tidy up the mess she’d made.

“Leave it, I’ll do it,” she yawned.

He jumped and turned towards her.

“Can I ask about this?” he said slowly, turning the paper he’d been reading so that she could see it.  Yeonhee squinted.  It was the list she’d written out on Baekhyun’s prompting after Yixing had spent the night in her room at university.  What it was doing among her general notes was a mystery to her, but she felt her face flaring up with embarrassment.

“Oh, er. . .  It’s just a list of, well, stuff that. . .”

He seemed to understand, and he grimaced.

“Yeonhee,” he said, “I know this wasn’t your intention, but please don’t make me feel like I’m being used.  I have to remain non-partisan, and I have to do what’s best for the entire country.  I can’t start advantaging the Hanmi people unfairly just because my girlfriend is Hanmi.  In fact, unless we get married or you go into politics, the most I can engage with you on policy is informally as a bellweather on what kind of reactions might be expected, or for informal suggestions as to what might make a positive difference.”  He sounded disappointed, and Yeonhee bit her lip.

“I’m sorry,” she mumbled, chagrined.

“I know you well enough to be confident you meant no harm,” he told her, “but you really, really do need to be aware of the way the law functions on this kind of stuff.  You don’t have security clearance, and you’re not a policy-maker.  Some day, news is going to come out that we’re together, and if people suspect that I’ve just been benefiting Hanmi citizens purely because I’m dating one rather than because those policies are what’s best for the country, that’s going to be really problematic, and it will undermine everything I’ve done.  Worse, if they think you’ve had a hand in it, or that people are by-passing legislative processes by using you to get me to do something, your reputation will be shot and you could face legal charges for undue influence on the government and breaches of security.”

Shocked, Yeonhee looked up at him.  “Could it really be that serious?”

He glanced back down at the paper and nodded.

“I’m careful with what I tell you,” he said.  “Some of it is personal, but none of it is classified.  I don’t want to put you in a situation where you could find yourself in trouble.  I don’t want you to put yourself in that kind of situation either.”  Carefully, he folded the piece of paper up, and then turned to give her a small smile.  “Please don’t see me as a means to achieve an end, okay?  I’m doing my best for the entire country.  There are suggestions on this I can use, and I’m always happy to discuss things informally with you, but we do have to do this the right way.”

Still worrying her lip, Yeonhee nodded.

Yixing sighed softly and stepped over the mess of papers on the floor towards her.  “You needn’t look so worried,” he murmured as he wrapped her into a tight hug.  “I’m not angry with you.  It’s a grey area anyway.  The problem is that I’m not allowed to be in grey areas because everybody views it as across the wrong side of the line.”

“But you’re disappointed with me,” Yeonhee said in a small voice.

He didn’t deny it.  “I’m sure you’ve been disappointed with me on multiple occasions.”

“Not really.  Not since I got to know you, at least.”

He pulled back, looking somewhat surprised.  “Really?”

“How can I be disappointed in somebody who works so hard?”

“You didn’t sound too pleased with me when you told me to get some sleep.”

“You don’t look after yourself well enough, Yixing.  That doesn’t disappoint me, that appalls me.”

Yixing laughed.  “Point taken, ma’am.”

“Yeah, but you won’t do anything about it,” she said sourly.  “This is at least the third time I’ve seen you on the brink of collapse because of exhaustion and it’s really not okay.  You’re going to burn yourself out before you even hit twenty-five.”

He was still laughing as he kissed her.

“Unfortunately I can’t arrange emergencies or catastrophes to fit my schedule, but I’ll try to be better,” he promised.  “And I’m afraid that right now I need to be a massive hypocrite and ask for your help with something political.”

Yeonhee frowned.  “How so?”

“We need a strong student response to the terror attacks and to the ethnic tension violence and vandalism, but particularly to the ethnic tension one and the One Nationers.  According to data the intelligence service has on public discourse on social networks of university students, an alarming number think that violence is a legitimate way to engage with those who disagree with them, whether they’re Antiroyo supporters or One Nationers or not affiliated to either.  We need loud student voices from all walks of life to point out that the very idea of that is asinine.”

“Sehun and Sowon are already working on a statement,” Yeonhee replied at once.

“It needs to be bigger than a statement.  I’m talking concerted student action against this kind of stuff and working with students from every possible relevant society, platform and student union to keep university campuses the way they ought to be, as places for discussion and debate, not for bludgeoning or mollycoddling people into thinking like clones or turning into zealous radicals.  Engagement with diversity of opinion is so, so important, especially in academic spheres.  I have no intentions of letting university students turn into fascist crybabies or throwing tantrums just because they don’t like something or don’t get their way.”

“Isn’t that kind of authoritation of you?” Yeonhee asked.

“However free you are, there are always parameters so that society can function,” Yixing pointed out.  “I mean, you’re not free to kill me without punishment, but we live in a free society, right?  It’s the freedom paradox.  In order to be free to do the things you want, there are certain things you can’t be free to do.  But yeah.  Luhan and Min were suggesting the possibility of you gathering together the other political societies and the student union at your university to see what can be done to combat thuggery on campus.”

Yeonhee was not thrilled at the prospect of working with Chenle on anything, but she grimaced and nodded.

“Sehun says I ought to step down as chapter president,” she said offhandedly.

“He’s right,” Yixing agreed, bending down to pick up more pieces of paper for Yeonhee.  “It’s incongruous to date a royal as a republican and the longer you stay, the worse the public backlash will be when it comes out that we have any sort of connection.”

Yeonhee slumped back down in her chair.  “I think the public will hate me anyway.”

“Shocked and confused.  I don’t think they’ll hate you, per se.”  Stifling a yawn, Yixing straightened out all the paper he was holding and put it down on a small table nearby.  “Anyway.  Can we do something fun?  You said you’d teach me how to paint.  We haven’t had time to do any art stuff for a while.”

Time passed pleasantly until dinner.  Yeonhee was surprised that Yixing was actually able to set all his worries and preoccupations aside in order to paint, but he remained diligent and focussed on what they were actually doing rather than fretting about what he felt he ought to be doing.  It probably helped that he seemed to have a knack for using watercolours and that Yeonhee had picked something he was enjoying copying.  It looked like a relatively simple mountain-forest landscape with a lake and a waterfall, but the challenges of doing the water and the trees realistically kept him interested and engaged.  Yeonhee used the same scene as inspiration to paint moonrise over a lake.

She had just put on the finishing touches and started clearing away her materials when the queen swanned in.  The woman was drawn to Yeonhee’s painting like a moth to a flame.

“My dear,” she said once she had greeted Yeonhee, “may I keep this and frame it?  It’s simply stunning.”

“I call dibs,” Yixing objected.

“Hush, dear, I’m sure Yeonhee’s painted things for you already.”

Yeonhee watched them bickering good-naturedly.  She had a good relationship with her own parents, but she couldn’t help but be a little envious of Yixing’s with his.  (Not that she’d properly met the king yet, but still.)  For all his protestations and the times before the ball that he’d claimed second hand embarrassment, the hug that he gave his mother was so affectionate that Yeonhee had to cover with her hand so that she didn’t accidentally coo out loud.

Her phone ringing interrupted the domesticity of the moment, and Yeonhee quickly ducked out of the room to take the call.

It was Minhee, and she wanted Yeonhee to come over to dinner.

“My boyfriend dumped me,” she said off-handedly just as Yeonhee was about to protest that she kind of couldn’t ditch dinner with the queen politely.  “We had a few arguments about things.”

She tried to play it off like it wasn’t actually a big deal and they were just exchanging news, but Yeonhee knew her sister and it was obvious that she was hurting and needed somebody to go on an ice cream binge with her.  Yeonhee made her apologies for already being booked for dinner that night and promised to go over for lunch the next day.

It distracted Minhee long enough for her to forget her own problems.

“Wait,” she said.  “Are you at the palace right now?  With the prince?”

“Yeah.  The queen’s back and we’re literally just about to sit down and eat.”

“I keep forgetting you’re practically a princess,” Minhee said thoughtfully.  “Oh