Dead Hours — On the House, Page 8
By Suha · Published
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Transcript
Panel 1: The doors open and a drunk salaryman in a rumpled suit staggers in, flushed. Kaito perks up, tray raised. Kaito: "On the house—" Panel 2: The salaryman grabs a sloppy fistful of the tiny cups and tips them into his mouth. Customer: "Don't mind if I do!" Panel 3: Kaito, briefly hopeful as cups vanish, leans in. Kaito: "Yes— take them, take all of—" Panel 4: The salaryman slams a cup down and points grandly, swaying. Customer: "I'll buy the whole box! Name your price!" Panel 5: Kaito deflates, gesturing helplessly at the tray. Kaito: "They're... free. You can't buy free." Panel 6: Confused and put off, the salaryman sets the handful of cups back on the tray and wanders toward the door. Customer: "Then I don't want 'em."
Image description
Six panels: a drunk salaryman staggers in, downs a fistful of cups, then loudly offers to buy the whole box; Kaito explains you can't buy something free, and the man puts the cups back and leaves.
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.