One In A Million | TWICE x Original Male Character

[27] Inner Demons

*Your POV*

After yet another successful comeback with 'Fancy', the girls set out onto another world tour, this time a 3-parter, with 2 legs in Asia and 1 in the Americas. Following the couple of months spent overseas in Southeast Asia and North America on the first half of the tour, the girls were back in Korea on a well-earned break and refresh period.

Today, everyone was in the practice rooms working on refreshing the choreography for a few of the songs being performed on tour. Nothing out of the ordinary, but today wasn't going as smoothly as it had been the last couple of weeks.

While you were no performer by any means, with the exception of that one concert back in the day, you knew after a few years of working as their manager when practices and rehearsals weren't going well. Usually, you knew where to look and where to fix so things got better quickly, but today wasn't the case.

Everyone was doing just fine during rehearsals, with the moves being done accurately and new moves being learned quickly. But it was the manner at which they were being done that threw you for a loop, more specifically, how Mina was throughout the entire day.

As you sat off to the side in between working on your laptop like usual, you took brief peeks over to the performers working hard, and couldn't help but notice just how Mina held a blank emotionless face the entire day. Sure, she was one of, if not, the quietest one during practices, but this was on another level you had never seen before. When she was asked something about the choreo, or told of a small change she should make, she responded to every single one with a simple head shake or nod, keeping that flat face for everything.

As you kept on pondering the reason, practice for the day was over, and it was time to drive everyone back to the dorm. Since everyone was rather exhausted from the early practice today, they made haste towards the van, almost leaving you behind.

You thought you'd take this opportunity to ask her about how things were going, so you tried asking her directly. "Hey, Minari?"

What you weren't expecting was to see Mina looking like she was one moment away from bawling her eyes out. Immediately, you bailed on your plan and tried to comfort her as best as you could. "U-uum, I was thinking of making a decent meal tonight. Anything you're craving?" You quickly changed the question, trying to make the conversation sound as natural as possible.

"...Not really." She returned quietly, not looking at anything in particular.

"Well, what about dessert? You and Chae were talking about those roll cakes from that one bakery downtown, right?"

"Yeah, we were..." She answered again with no emotion whatsoever.

"Send me the link to that whenever you can. I'll see if I can get a hold of some on my way back from running errands." You tried, holding the door to the parking garage open for her.

"Mkay." Mina wrapped up the conversation and pulled out her phone, typing something on it.

'Hmm, something's got her hung up. How do I approach this...' You thought as everyone piled into the van. Before you could turn the van's ignition on, you felt your phone go off in your pocket, seeing that it was a text from Mina on your smartwatch. As you turned the keys, you looked at Mina through the rearview mirror, feeling sad about not being able to figure out how to make her feel better.

Thankfully for you and Mina, the drive home was very quiet, helped by the fact that everyone else was either asleep or quietly on their phones. This gave you some time to think about how to approach this situation.

Once you arrived back at the dorm and the girls were inside, you switched to your own car and drove off to go on your errand run. In reality, you only had to go to the dry cleaners to pick up some garments, but you knew you had to try everything you could as their closest manager to make sure everyone was at 100%.