Bing!

The seatbelt light on the overhead , warning passengers of their landing. Taeyeon ignored it, knowing it wouldn't matter for a little while. Instead, she continued to stare at the monitor in front of her first class seat. It was dark.

The plane slowly descended, and the flight attendant looked to make sure everyone's seatbelts were buckled. She didn't notice anything though, with her blanket covering her lap as it was.

Taeyeon turned to face the window. They descended below the clouds, and Taeyeon could see tiny lines in the window. They looked like miniscule cracks, following no set path and no direction, scratched messily over the center of the glass. Or was it plastic? Taeyeon looked closer and decided that the cracks were just frost, created when water vapor slashed over the windows. She tried to follow them, but there was no pattern. The nicks were perpendicular to each other, parallel to each other, some were slightly curved and some were not, but none of them touched. It was strange that she had never noticed them before, considering how much time she spent on planes. It was a nice thought, to still be able to discover something new the millionth time around.

The earth drew closer and closer and Taeyeon didn't put on her seatbelt. She wondered how long she could last until she did. She wondered if she could avoid it this time. Not that she didn't like seatbelts, she just wondered.

 "Put on your seatbelt." Her manager unnie gently chided her. She probably thought that Taeyeon was too lost in her thoughts to notice the overhead notification, or the flight attendant, or the quickly approaching ground. With a silent sigh, Taeyeon obeyed, knowing that manager unnie wouldn't understand why she wouldn't put her seatbelt on if she argued with her. It was just easier to follow the rules than to argue against them. 

Some people said she was just being rebellious, trying to gain a semblance of the control she lost when she decided to become a singer. She didn't want to be on this airplane, flying across the world in the middle of winter. She didn't want to be followed around everywhere, chastised for things she didn't do, mistakes she that weren't mistakes. She probably didn't want to be left to the whims of the public anymore, they speculated.

Others think Taeyeon had a penchant for death. Maybe she wanted to die and showed it in the most subtle of ways. She knew her Girl's Generation members sometimes thought that. They were always so worried about her, constantly trying to remind her to want to live without making her feel like a small, weak, child, afraid that if they took their eyes off her for a second, she'd just kind of float away from them.

She did that sometimes. She'd fade away for a few months, barely reaching out to anyone, only replying to messages if they came in and only replying with short sentences. Sometimes she would just be living her life and she'd realize that she couldn't remember laughing for the past couple of months, sometimes a year. And then the girls will pull her close and invite her to a party that she knew was thrown just to make sure she was alive. She'll laugh and joke with them and feel on top of the world when she's at Sooyoung's house and Tiffany cooks for them(and it tastes alright) and Yuri's drunk calling Jessica and even Seohyun lets loose and makes a dirty joke or two. It's the unexpected things like that that make her laugh, that make her happy. And then she'll go back again.

But they weren't right. Taeyeon knew they weren't. Because she didn't want to die, and she wasn't rebellious for the sake of rebellion. Getting where she was by following the rules of management was proof enough of that, and it had taught her a thorough lesson too.

In the end, Taeyeon was still there, with her seatbelt buckled in, staring at the pane of glass in front of her. By the time she had turned around after buckling her seatbelt, the little bits of frost already melted into drops of dew accumulated on the clear window. Taeyeon felt a small twinge of regret, without knowing what she was regretting. They were gone so fast.

The plane bumped to the ground, slightly jarring the passengers. Taeyeon didn't move from her seat,