Dead Hours — On the House, Page 11
By Suha · Published
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Transcript
Panel 1: The doors open and a cheerful jogger in running gear and a headband bounces in. Kaito springs up and offers the tray. Kaito: "On the house?" Panel 2: The jogger pats their own stomach and waves the cups away. Customer: "Cleanse week! Nothing but water." Panel 3: The jogger, mid-stretch, breezily certain, heads for the cooler. Customer: "Nobody wants free stuff at 3 a.m. anyway!" Panel 4: The running beat repeats a third time — Kaito frozen, holding the tray out, flat dead-eyed, more sweat. Kaito: "...still forty-one."
Image description
Four panels: Kaito offers cups to a cheerful jogger in a headband, who declines for a cleanse and insists nobody wants free things at 3 a.m.; Kaito freezes again with the tray, now saying the count is forty-one.
About this chapter
3 A.M., rain on the dead-hours store. A crate of tiny free drink samples arrives early with the morning stock, and the note taped to it says hand out every last cup before the morning delivery or log the rest as waste. Kaito — physically unable to bear either waste or a giveaway that never reaches zero — declares quiet war on an empty tray and resolves to get rid of all fifty samples before his shift ends, spiraling all night over how a thing given away for free can be so impossible to give away. All night the sliding doors ding and Kaito springs up, tray raised, 'On the house?' — only to deflate on the identical dead-eyed beat of a customer waving him off as he mutters '...still full.' A ladder of night-shift oddballs each refuse in a worse way: the tracksuit regular just lifts his clear bag of cans, a drunk salaryman downs a fistful and then tries to buy the whole crate, a cheerful jogger on a cleanse insists nobody wants free things at 3 A.M. — three verdicts nobody can verify, about a drink no one can even name. Rin quietly livestreams the whole vigil as 'Forcing Strangers to Drink at 3 A.M.,' with one flicker of near-sincerity — that he's the only person alive who'd take a free-sample count this seriously, and it's kind of admirable — before raising her phone again. Near dawn, hollow and defeated, Kaito finally stops offering and lowers the tray — and that is exactly when the tracksuit regular quietly returns and takes a cup, the running beat inverting into a serene, triumphant '...zero,' as an early-morning trickle empties the tray at last. Then the reveal Kaito half-saw in the first minute pays off: the morning-delivery driver slides the doors open into daylight and says the crate was mis-delivered — wrong store, never meant for them, here to be collected regardless — so the giveaway never needed to happen and his six-hour war emptied a tray that was going back on the truck full or not. Rin's silent 'six hours of a man begging strangers to take free drinks' stream hits four hundred thousand viewers; Kaito gets nothing, not even the last word. Dawn light fills the spotless store exactly as the night began — and on the freshly bare counter the driver sets down another crate, mis-delivered again, Rin's phone already raised, already live.