***Possibly a sort of double-update-ish?  I've updated a fair bit recently so make sure you've read chapters 7 and 8 before starting this one!***

Twenty minutes into starting drawing an apology, Yeonhee was ready to give up.  She couldn’t get the narrative right.  At first, she’d decided to do it as a side-by-side to the Perfect Date painting she’d done, sort of like an alternate reality, but the juxtaposition of the two would portray it all in a romantic light, and the last thing she wanted the prince to misconstrue was that she had a crush on him.  Initially, she’d chosen the juxtaposition because of the restaurant obviously being Tempe, and because the original picture had been drawn on his prompt, and she was pretty sure that the combination of the two wouldn’t escape the prince’s notice.  Her second attempt had also been based around a building with heavy correspondence to Tempe, but that too gave the image too many ties to the Perfect Date, and so she ditched that as well.

By three in the morning, she’d gone through another twenty different designs, some of them storyboards, some panels, some incredibly realistic and others more like cartoons, and she was still unable to settle.  She’d even considered trying something based on the story of the Prodigal Son from the Bible, or drawing a girl walking home with the biblical verses of the story referenced, but she was worried that might suggest to the prince that she was doing more than apologising and had decided that he did deserve a birthright position at the head of the country after all, and she also wasn’t sure how her followers would react to something overtly religious completely out of the blue when she deliberately stayed away from religion as much as possible.

The other problem she found she had was that she made the person on the receiving end of the apology resemble the prince a bit too closely.  Drawing him in any recognisable fashion, unless it was a caricature, would garner too much attention.

She tried various different image narratives, too, like a man with his arm around a crying woman, but that looked too much like comfort for an apology, and so she scrapped that.  Another one, which she’d planned for colour, had had a woman in a pool of tears and blood reaching out to a horrified-looking man, but that was a bit too melodramatic, and that went in the bin as well.  In the end, she decided to sleep on it in the hopes that unconsciousness would give her inspiration.

Yeonhee woke up to Sehun banging on her door with a copy of Friday morning’s paper.  Bleary-eyed, Yeonhee let him in, grateful that he at least didn’t do what Baekhyun usually did and swan in anyway so long as the door wasn’t locked.

“Just thought you should see,” he said as she tried to blink away the sleep in her eyes and yawned heavily.  “I don’t know if declining comment was the best idea but I don’t think I would have done anything differently.”

“Mm.”  With another loud yawn, Yeonhee took the paper from him and tried to read it.  With a chuckle, Sehun reached over to turn on the bedside light.

“Oh.”  She hadn’t bothered opening the curtains or turning on the main light, and her eyes watered with the sudden brightness.  “Thanks.”

He just shrugged, amused, as he read the article over her shoulder.

It was several pages in, which was good because it meant it was sort of buried, but bad because it meant it got a double-paged spread and then a string of opinion articles after it, but Yeonhee had seen the damage that came of being on the first page (especially as the main headline), and she was at least glad the news wasn’t so slow that a university student politics fiasco had made the main headline.

As she’d expected, the slant was heavily in favour of Chenle and the Zenyu students (like Yeonhee, the paper didn’t blame Jiawei for resigning, but it did take the spin that she was to be pitied for the bad treatment she’d suffered at the hands of the horrible Hanmi students).

What got her sitting up, though, was a paragraph with a statement from a spokesman for the palace.

When contacted for comment, a spokesperson from the palace said that an independent investigation revealed the prince’s injury last Friday was not due to student protest activity, the paragraph started off.  “For any event a member of the royal family is due to attend, organised protesting groups and venues, as well as attendees, are thoroughly vetted.  We understand that there were unauthorised protesters who caused problems, and that they are not affiliated with the university’s student chapter of republicans.  Currently, legal processes are being pursued along these lines.”

Yeonhee blinked furiously at the paragraph, as if it was a hallucination that would vanish when she was seeing clearly again.  It was probably nothing, probably the palace just protecting its own interests, but she couldn’t help the wave of relief that there was something in the article, however short, which represented the situation a bit more accurately.  It was also an official source she and Sowon could use to defend themselves and the republican chapter’s existence when the proctors called them in on Monday for another grilling on the details of the prince’s visit and Taehyung’s interview.  With any luck, they’d be able to reduce the misdemeanour to flouting regulations on sending only the officially constitutionally recognised people onto TV, and the punishment for that was very unlikely to be shutting down the chapter.

“It’s a lot better than I’d expected,” Sehun said cheerfully.  “Though my expectations couldn’t have been lower, so that’s not really saying much.  Might want to watch out for the Hanmi papers, though, they got comments from Taehyung as well as Sowon.”

Yeonhee screwed up her nose.  They’d deal with that when it came to it.

By the end of Friday, Yeonhee was more or less happy with what she’d drawn.  She went to water Juan so that she could get a break from pencil and paper, and then went out to get hot chocolate with Baekhyun at the student fairtrade campus café.  He seemed preoccupied, tapping his finger absently against his mug and humming to himself.

“Have you been kicked out of The Rolls?” Yeonhee asked him when she could stand it no longer.  He jumped.

“Huh, what?  Oh, no, no!  Why would you think that?”

“You’re acting weird.”

He shrugged, sipped at his mug, realised it was empty, and stole Yeonhee’s.  She let him, since it was nearly at the dregs anyway and they were getting cold.

“Are Sehun and Mihae dating?” he asked her once he’d finished off her hot chocolate.

Yeonhee nearly choked.  “Not that I know of.  Why?”

“Apparently Chanyeol’s interested in her.”

Yeonhee frowned.  “Are you sure?”

“Well, he was very drunk when he told me, but I did hear it from his own mouth, so about ninety-five percent sure?”

“That explains why he’s always so happy to hang out with us.  Are you sure he didn’t let you into the band just so he could get closer to her?”

“Kyungsoo was actually the one who asked me, so I don’t think so.”

“Well.”  Yeonhee sat back.  “I have no idea.  I can ask Mihae if you want.  She might think you’re hitting on her if you do it.”

Baekhyun snorted.  “Mihae’s been convinced I’m gay since I was in first year.  I’m pretty sure she wouldn’t believe I’m straight even if I got myself a harem.”

“Mihae—”  Yeonhee frowned.  “Wait, how did she come to that conclusion?  And how come I don’t know about thi