Sunrise [Yungi FF]

1. A Typical Day

Now that he was on his third year, he had finally accepted the fact that this was not something one could get used to, because the moment you think you had heard and felt everything, people would come up with new and creative ways to stike you down again. Harder and faster than before.

The professional thing to do was to ignore it, so Yunho asked again, "How may I help you, sir?"

The man announced in a tired voice that he lost his credit card.

Yunho resisted the urge to sigh. There were already two other missing cards this morning, and each call took almost an hour to resolve. He had a bad feeling that this call would take even more than that, or at least feel longer than that.

As Yunho collected the customer's account details and explained the steps to recovering a credit card, he listened to the foreboding silence from the other end and subconsciously braced himself for an imminent scolding.

He learned to trust all his bad intuitions so that if they did come true, at least he wouldn't have to hate himself for not seeing them coming.

"What do you mean I have to make a trip to the bank?! Do you have any idea how busy I am?!"

Yunho shrunk into his chair as if that helped him escape from the noise coming from the headset that was more or less a part of his body.

"I hope you understand, it's for security reasons," Yunho replied, trying to keep his voice steady when his heart was already going miles per hour.

He barely finished his sentence when the man shouted back, "Then why can't you disable my account first?!"

Ignoring the profanities decorating that sentence, Yunho answered, "We can only disable your account if we see suspicious activity."

Typing a few commands on his keyboard, he scanned the monitor and continued, "You said you lost your card yesterday night, and there weren't any transactions made from then to this moment. We assure you that your account is protected. All you have to do is to go to one of our branches with identification documents-"

"Wait, I couldn't hear anything you said just now." Yunho looked towards the ceiling when he got interrupted a second time, but the irritation was rapidly replaced by anxiety as the customer continued, "Why are you so quiet? Are you scared or nervous or something? What the f**k is this?!"

All of a sudden Yunho was rid of the ability to speak. He swore he was just talking normally, but as his brain tried to put together the words he just heard he couldn't shake the possibility that what the man said could be true.

Sweat glued the back of his shirt onto his flaming skin, yet his hands, frozen in place on the keyboard, were ice cold. He tried to say something, only to choke on every intake of breath whenever he opened his mouth.

"Hello?! This is ridiculous!" The infuriated customer yelled, but Yunho could barely hear him over the clamor of his own thoughts. "How can you just stop talking?! You're even worse than a chatbot! Is this how you treat every customer? A person who can't talk working in customer support? What a joke!"

Yunho was biting the inside of his lip when the man hung up in a rage. There were many things he could think of, like the fact that the call had finally ended, but the only thing on his mind was the fact that he was compared to a chatbot.

He hunched his back and stared at the "i" key of the worn keyboard, feeling as if all twenty-nine pairs of eyes in the room were directed onto him. They would all be thinking about how he kept his position for three years when he couldn't even speak properly.

The weight of the judgemental stares sat on Yunho's shoulders and neck until his muscles ached and he could barely breathe.

He tore his headset away and stood up, keeping his head low to avoid seeing people's eyes. That was only so effective - he caught Jongho's worried expression as he ended a call in a way that was certainly a violation of the company's rules.

Yunho sped walk as he navigated around the rows of desks, thankful for his overgrown bangs that obscured half of his vision. Jongho was close behind, his hurried footsteps making soft thumps on the floor.

Yunho entered the washroom and closed the door with his body. As he turned around to lock the door it swung open again, forcing him to step back in order to let Jongho in.

Jongho almost gasped when he saw Yunho's pallor. "What happened?"

Yunho didn't reply, because as Jongho closed the door again he caught a glimpse of the office and saw that no one was staring at him after all.

-

I hope you enjoyed the first chapter! It's more of an introduction to what kind of person Yunho is, but I assure you that things will get interesting very soon ;)