The quiet hum of the UV express engine was the only sound keeping Yuuma awake during the long ride through the sleeping city. By the time he paid his fare and stepped onto the damp asphalt of his street, it was past midnight. The narrow alleyways were pitch black, save for a few pale streetlamps flickering against concrete walls.
He walked quietly, trying not to let his worn out sneakers make too much noise on the gravel. When he reached the small gate of their house, he noticed a faint yellow glow coming from the porch.
Elena was sitting on a low plastic stool near the door, a small sewing kit in her lap as she mended one of Leo’s school uniforms. Her eyes looked small and tired under the dim bulb.
"Ma," Yuuma called out softly, slipping inside the gate. "Why are you still up?"
Elena looked up, her expression immediately softening as she set the needle down on a plastic tray. She pushed herself up slowly, resting a hand on her hip for support.
"I was waiting for you," she said, her voice barely above a whisper so as not to wake the kids inside. "Your brother said you messaged earlier about overtime, but it is almost one in the morning."
"The queues were heavy, Ma," Yuuma replied, setting his heavy backpack down by the door. He rubbed his eyes, feeling the familiar sting of exhaustion behind his eyelids. "And the systems crashed for a while, so we had to clear the backlog."
Elena walked over to the small wooden table where a covered plate was sitting. She lifted the plastic wrap, showing a cold serving of fried fish and a cup of rice.
"Eat first," she said gently. "I can warm it up for you."
"No need, Ma. Cold is fine," Yuuma said, sitting down heavily on the bench. He picked up the spoon, but his appetite was almost gone. Still, he forced himself to take a few bites knowing how hard she worked to keep food on the table.
Elena sat across from him, watching him with quiet concern. "You look so pale, Yuuma. Are you eating properly at work?"
"I am, Ma. Vanitas bought me dinner earlier," Yuuma offered a faint smile. "Don't worry about me."
"How can I not worry?" she murmured, reaching across the table to pat his hand. "You leave before the sun comes up and you come home when everyone is asleep. Hannah was asking for you earlier before she went to bed."
Yuuma paused, his chest tightening slightly. "Is her leg aching again?"
"A little," Elena sighed. "The physical therapy sessions are helping, but the medicine is almost ran out. Your father said he would try to pick up extra driving trips this weekend to cover the rest of the prescription."
Yuuma set his spoon down, reaching into his pocket to pull out the small envelope where he kept his remaining cash for the week. He slid it across the table toward his mother.
"Use this for Hannah's medicine first," Yuuma said quietly. "I still have enough left for my transport allowance."
Elena looked at the envelope, her lips forming a tight line as if she wanted to refuse, but she knew the reality of their finances better than anyone. She slowly took the money and tucked it into her apron pocket.
"Thank you, Yuuma," she whispered, her voice thick with emotion. "Get some rest now. You have to be back at the office in a few hours."
Yuuma nodded, standing up to wash his plate in the small sink. He tiptoed into the bedroom where his brothers were sleeping, carefully avoiding the creaky floorboards. As he lay down on his thin mattress, listening to the steady breathing of his family around him, his mind drifted back to the office, dreading what the morning shift would bring.
The next afternoon, the floor felt unnaturally quiet.
Yuuma arrived twenty minutes early for his day shift, his body still heavy with fatigue despite getting barely four hours of sleep. As he sat at his workstation and logged into his computer, he noticed Marcus walking down the aisle with a stack of printouts.
Marcus didn't yell or make a scene like he did the previous afternoon. Instead, he maintained a calm, professional expression as he stopped at Vanitas's empty desk directly across from Yuuma.
Marcus set a thick Manila folder right on top of Vanitas's keyboard, placing a sticky note on top with a bright red marker scribble.
Yuuma leaned over his partition, trying to read the writing on the note. It was a list of twenty individual ticket numbers, all labeled as priority escalations, alongside a formal coaching notice for quality assurance audits.
A few minutes later, Vanitas slid into his seat, tossing his jacket onto the back of his chair. He immediately spotted the folder sitting on his keyboard.
"What is this trash?" Vanitas muttered, picking up the folder with two fingers as if it were contaminated.
"Sir left that for you right before you logged in," Yuuma warned in a low voice, looking around to see if Marcus was nearby. "He spent twenty minutes at your desk going through your old ticket logs from last month."
Vanitas scanned the sticky note, a bitter chuckle escaping his throat. "Twenty high risk escalations? Half of these aren't even from our queue. These are tier two supervisor tickets."
"He's giving you the worst ones on purpose," Yuuma said, leaning closer so neighboring agents couldn't hear. "Because of what happened yesterday during the CRM outage."
"Of course he is," Vanitas sneered, tossing the folder onto his desk with a heavy thud. "He can't write me up for speaking the truth, so he's trying to ruin my handle time and force a failed QA audit instead. He wants me to drop my metrics so he has a valid reason to give me a disciplinary memo."
"Vanitas, just be careful," Yuuma pleaded softly. "If you fail those ticket audits, he can flag you for performance management."
"Let him try," Vanitas gritted his teeth, opening the first ticket on his screen. The account was a massive mess of disputed billing charges that would take at least forty five minutes to resolve per customer. "He thinks he's being clever with this passive aggressive move."
For the next three hours, Vanitas was buried under a mountain of complex customer complaints. Every single ticket assigned to him required extensive manual calculations and manager approvals, grinding his daily productivity to a crawl.
Meanwhile, Yuuma's queue was relatively stable. Seeing Vanitas staring intensely at his screen, his jaw set in frustration as he tried to cross reference three different spreadsheets at once, Yuuma pulled up his internal agent portal.
Yuuma looked over his partition. "Hey. Send me five of those ticket numbers."
Vanitas stopped typing, looking up in surprise. "What?"
"Send me five of those escalation tickets," Yuuma repeated, his voice calm and steady. "I'll process the backend notes and financial calculations on my station while I'm on standby between calls."
"No way, Yuuma," Vanitas immediately rejected, shaking his head. "These are assigned directly to my agent ID. If Marcus catches you doing my assigned tickets, he'll write you up too."
"He won't catch us if I just draft the resolution notes and transfer them back to you for final submission," Yuuma explained quietly. "Your handle time is going to crater if you process all twenty of these alone before the shift ends."
"I don't care about the metrics, Yuuma," Vanitas insisted, though his voice lacked its usual sharpness. "I'm not letting you take the fall or strain yourself over his petty revenge against me."
"You stood up for me yesterday when he was pressing us about the queue," Yuuma said, staring directly into Vanitas's eyes with rare firmness. "You literally put your job on the line so I wouldn't collapse on the floor. Let me help you with this."
Vanitas stared at Yuuma for a long moment, visibly torn between his pride and the dark reality of his workload. Finally, he let out a long breath, slumping slightly in his chair.
"You're way too nice for this job, you know that?" Vanitas muttered, though a faint, genuine smile touched his lips.
"Just send the ticket numbers," Yuuma replied, turning back to his dual monitors.
A second later, a notification popped up on Yuuma's chat window with five account IDs.
Working together in quiet coordination, they began dismantling the pile of retaliatory work Marcus had left behind. Yuuma handled the tedious data entry and ledger corrections on his secondary screen while taking regular incoming calls, while Vanitas focused on drafting the formal customer responses.
By six in the evening, as the day shift came to a close, Vanitas cleared the very last escalation ticket from his portal. His metrics were perfectly intact, his handle time safely within the target range.
Marcus walked down the aisle one last time before the shift handoff, stopping briefly near their cluster. He glanced at Vanitas's monitor, expecting to see a red backlog indicator on the dashboard. Instead, he saw a clean zero.
Marcus's eyes narrowed slightly, his expression tightening, though he didn't say a single word. He adjusted his jacket and walked away toward the supervisor booth.
Vanitas leaned back in his chair, putting his hands behind his head as he watched Marcus leave.
"Did you see his face?" Vanitas whispered across the partition, a triumphant smirk spreading across his face. "Priceless."
Yuuma couldn't help but laugh softly, the heavy knot of tension in his stomach loosening just a little bit. "Don't celebrate too early. He's probably going to give you another stack tomorrow."
"Let him," Vanitas said, pulling his headset off and tossing it onto his desk. "As long as we're working together, that guy isn't breaking anything."
Yuuma smiled, shutting down his monitors as the blue light faded from his desk.
They logged off their workstations together, the familiar chime of the agent portal signaling the end of another day shift. As they pulled their bags from under their desks, Vanitas stretched his arms over his head, letting out a long, dramatic groan that made a few reps in the next aisle turn their heads.
"My shoulders feel like they're made of concrete," Vanitas muttered, slinging his backpack over one arm. "I need something cold right now. Walk with me to the 7-Eleven down the block."
"I should probably head straight to the jeepney terminal," Yuuma said, though his body was already moving alongside Vanitas toward the glass doors of the elevator bay.
"It's barely six thirty," Vanitas countered, tapping the elevator call button. "Ten minutes won't kill you. Besides, you look like you need a break before you squeeze yourself into a cramped public commute."
They rode the elevator down in quiet solidarity, joining the small crowd of call center workers spilling out into the building lobby. The evening heat hit them the moment they pushed through the heavy glass doors of the tower, a sharp contrast to the freezing, air-conditioned floor they had spent the last nine hours in.
The convenience store across the street was lit up in bright fluorescent white, buzzing with the hum of refrigerator doors and the distant beep of the cashier scanner. They walked inside, the automatic doors sliding open with a soft chime.
Vanitas went straight to the back refrigerators, grabbing two iced cans of coffee and a hot steaming siopao from the warmer near the counter. Yuuma picked up a cheap, bottled green tea and a small pouch of salted peanuts, carefully calculating the change in his pocket.
"Put those on my tab," Vanitas told the cashier before Yuuma could even reach for his wallet, sliding a hundred peso bill across the counter.
"Vanitas, I have money," Yuuma said, frowning slightly.
"Keep it for your jeepney fare tomorrow," Vanitas replied smoothly, taking the plastic bag from the cashier. "Consider it my tax payment for you saving my metrics today."
They sat on the high metal stools by the glass window facing the main road. Outside, the street was alive with evening traffic. Red taillights stretched down the avenue, jeepneys were barking for passengers, and street vendors were setting up pushcarts along the sidewalk.
Vanitas cracked his coffee open, taking a deep gulp before leaning his elbows against the counter. "Seriously, Yuuma. Thanks for taking those five tickets earlier. If I had to sit through five more of those manual ledger corrections while Marcus was watching me like a hawk, I might have actually thrown my keyboard at him."
Yuuma opened his green tea, taking a slow sip. "It wasn't a big deal. The account structures were almost identical to the ones I cleared yesterday. Once you figure out where the system error is, the calculation takes less than three minutes."
"For you, maybe," Vanitas chuckled, shaking his head. "You're too patient with these broken tools. Anyone else would have let those tickets breach SLA just to make Marcus look bad in front of the operations manager."
"And then he would use that breach as an excuse to give you a written warning," Yuuma noted softly, staring at the condensation dripping down his tea bottle. "It's not worth giving him ammunition against you."
Vanitas went quiet for a moment, tearing off a piece of his steamed bun. He looked at Yuuma sideways, his tone shifting into something a little more serious.
"You know he's not going to stop at this, right?" Vanitas said quietly. "Marcus is petty. He knows he lost control of the floor yesterday when the whole bay backed us up. He couldn't write me up today because we cleared the queue, but he's going to keep stacking the deck against our cluster."
"I know," Yuuma admitted, letting out a long, quiet sigh. "He'll probably monitor our handle times even stricter next week."
"Then why do you stay so quiet about it?" Vanitas asked, turning his body toward Yuuma on the stool. "You're one of the best agents on this floor, Yuuma. Your quality scores are always in the top tier, you never go on unexcused leave, and you take double the workload whenever the queue spikes. If you actually called him out or requested a cluster transfer, HR would have to listen."
Yuuma looked out the window at the passing cars. The reflection of his own pale face against the glass looked hollow under the store's bright lights.
"Transfers take weeks to approve," Yuuma said, his voice barely audible over the hum of the drink coolers. "And if a transfer request gets flagged, supervisors can freeze your performance incentives while it's under review. I can't risk losing my monthly attendance bonus, Vanitas. My family needs every single peso of my paycheck right now."
Vanitas stared at him, his jaw tightening slightly. The usual sarcastic spark in his eyes softened into a heavy, dark concern. He knew about Yuuma's family, the sheer number of dependents relying on a single CSR salary, but hearing the quiet desperation in Yuuma's voice always hit like a cold weight.
"You carry too much on your own, man," Vanitas said softly, setting his coffee down. "You don't have to treat every shift like a survival test."
"It is a survival test," Yuuma replied with a small, tired smile that didn't reach his eyes. "At least until Hannah finishes her physical therapy and Mark finishes his college term. Until then, I just have to keep my head down and work."
Vanitas looked like he wanted to argue, to tell Yuuma that no job was worth burning himself out to the bone, but he held back. He knew Yuuma wasn't looking for pity or lectures. Instead, Vanitas just reached over and lightly clinked his coffee can against Yuuma's tea bottle.
"Well, whenever Marcus tries to pull another fast one, you're not dealing with it alone," Vanitas said firmly. "If he wants to play petty games with our schedules or ticket queues, we'll just keep beating his metrics together."
Yuuma looked at his friend, feeling a small, genuine warmth settle in his chest despite the heavy exhaustion dragging at his muscles.
"Deal," Yuuma whispered.
They finished their food in comfortable quiet, watching the city slow down as night took over the streets. When they finally stood up and walked out of the store, the cool evening breeze felt a little lighter against Yuuma's shoulders.
"Get some actual sleep tonight, Yuuma," Vanitas said as they reached the corner where their paths split. "And stop drinking those yellow Cobra bottles like they're water."
Yuuma laughed softly, waving a hand as he stepped toward the jeepney line. "See you tomorrow, Vanitas."
"See you tomorrow," Vanitas called back, turning toward the train station.
Yuuma boarded the jeepney, squeezing into a narrow spot near the entrance. As the driver pulled out into the congested street, Yuuma leaned his head against the metal handrail, closing his eyes. For the first time in a long week, the dread of returning to the office tomorrow didn't feel completely unbearable.
ns216.73.216.48da2
and then Add to home screen.