While Jonghyun was paranoid and fearful for his life, Minki was as well but for a completely different reason. She was flying to Japan and she had an irrational fear of heights. The main reason that she didn’t go with her parents was because she would have to fly to America with them and she wouldn’t be able to handle the plane ride, school was the second reason. 

If she wasn’t too absorbed in her thoughts of revenge last night, she could have looked up breathing exercises and ways to meditate to help calm down her nerves, but no. Now, she is sitting between both Onew and Taemin and having a death grip on their hands. 

“Minki, calm down.” Onew tried to say calmly despite the fact that he couldn’t feel his hand anymore at all. 

“Yes, noona.” Taemin winced a little as he tried breaking away from her deathly hold. “It’s only a two and a half hour flight, that’s it.”

“Yeah, two and a half hours in the air.” Minki stressed. “Why couldn’t we take a boat instead or something? Better yet, they should build a bridge connecting the two countries.” She was being a bit irrational, but she didn’t care. She firmly set in her mind that once she has to begin doing promotions in Japan herself, she was going to beg to go by boat instead. 

“Minki-” Onew started to say something only to be cut off by Leeteuk on the intercom that they would be taking off soon and both him and Taemin yelped when Minki’s grip tightened even more, if that was even humanly possible.

Miraculously SHINee’s leader was able to pull his numb hand free, earning a glare from the maknae who was having trouble doing so since he was sitting on the side of Minki’s dominate hand. Onew pushed up the arm rest from between the two cousins and wrapped his arms around her securely. He could feel her relax, just a tiny bit, and saw from the corner of his eye that Taemin was silently cheering and rubbing his poor hand after getting free himself.

He remembered what Minki’s mother told him once that if he ever got Minki on an airplane, which she thought was never going to happen, then to just hold her and soothed her hair while singing lightly like you would to a small child who had woke up from a nightmare and he did just that. It didn’t calm her down completely, he could still feel how rigid she was in his arms, but at least she wasn’t too panicky as they flew. 

Throughout the duration of the flight, he, Taemin and even Key and Minho took turns holding and singing to her. She was family to SHINee, so of course everyone helped to take care of her, well, almost everyone. Jonghyun had probably forgot about her fear of heights, not that Onew nor the rest would remind him of it since one, they don’t know how it would turn out if Jonghyun held her and two, Jonghyun would continue to freak about when they would mention that nightmare he had about being thrown into a volcano by Minki and make it believable that it was one of the plausible ways for him to die.

When they landed, Minki stood, grinning from ear to ear like a brave little kid who had endured getting his shots and said, only to earn her glares from the four guys, “That wasn’t all too bad.” 

“Then don’t expect us to hold you on the flight back then.” commented Key in a grumble as he stood up and stretched.

Minki’s face immediately paled at the thought and she quickly hugged and held on to nearest person, Onew. “It was only not bad because of you guys! Don’t let me die!” Her reaction just caused a round of laughter from the guys and they agreed nonetheless to be her lifeline when they’re on the plane together.

Though she fully knew about her fear of heights, how she got talked into doing this was something that she couldn’t comprehend. For her stage during SMTOWN, they are attaching her to a harness and making her fly. She knew it was stupid. She knew that she was stupid, but how could she disagree when they were able to let her debut in the short amount of time she did and not make her redo all her training that she had done before leaving SM in the first place? So when her manager was telling her this, all she could do was force a smile and nod. They wanted her to make an impression and that meant being in the air.

No one knew about her stunt yet, but everyone will once they start rehearsals and she could already hear the angry yells from SHINee at the staff, at her manager, and at her for doing this. She was wearing the harness, getting ready for her stage rehearsal next after Girls’ Generation and she kept asking about the safety of her stunt only to be reassured by every staff member that it was perfectly safe.

Minki kept telling herself ‘I’m not going to fly in the air. I’m just dancing and singing. Nothing more. Just dancing and singing on a stage.’ and it only helped to calm her nerves by just a fraction, but she kept repeating that over and over again, drilling into her mind that there is no harness, no wires, just her and the stage.

When Minki got on stage, she already heard some yelling from Onew because she was wearing the harness, but the music drowned him out as she just focused on dancing and singing. Then came the frightful part when the wires were attached and she was up above the ground, but she kept focusing on her singing to get over the fact that she was high up. 

Things went smoothly...until everything went wrong that is.

---

Hello~ Jae here! Amy's been busy with Hetalia school, so I'm doing the posting without her knowledge. haha~ Posting this because it's been a while since anything has been updated including my own stories, and because I'd been listening only to SHINee songs for the last couple of days and that just means ideas are generated for this story. LOL Yes, I'm pretty notorious for writing cliffhangers and maybe if I'm feeling nice, I'll post up a new chapter soon. ^.~

And yeah, as you can see, the style is a different from past chapters. Sorry about that. :/ Been roleplaying a lot and I guess it's starting to show in my writing now.