Lost Cause

[Aura]

It was sometime around late-as-hell o' clock when Hirono came walking down her street. Another wild night was almost behind her. A little flirting here, a little shoplifting there, and a whole lot of hedonistic delight had kept her out for hours after she was sure all of her classmates had gone to be. Hell, she was pretty sure that even Mitsuko had hit the sack long ago. Now she was back in her own neighborhood, and everything seemed quiet aside from the sound of her own footsteps as she made her way towards her house.

It didn't feel right to call it a home, so she just thought of it as a house. All of the lights were off, unsurprisingly. Hirono had no allusions that her parents would bother to stay up and wait for her to get home. Hell, she doubted that they even thought about it for a second before they went to sleep. At this point, she was pretty sure that they were just counting the days until she was out of the house.

Hirono leaned against the wall near the back door and fished an illicitly-acquired cigarette from her pocket before lighting it up. She took her first inhale of the addictive little bastard and looked up at the sky. She could see a lot of stars tonight, and if anyone else was around she would have had to admit that it looked kind of beautiful. But right now she was alone, even with her parents sleeping only a wall away.

They didn't think much of her, she knew that. Hell, she'd bet that the only futures they saw for her were in jail or in a coffin. These days it seemed like they only ever talked to her when it was absolutely necessary, and those occasions seemed to be getting rarer by the day. Even when her grades started going up recently after she had a talk with Hayashida, neither of them had a word to say about it. She wondered what would have happened if she had been stabbed and left to bleed out in an alley that night, or kidnapped off the street. Would they have even cared when she wasn't there in the morning?

Shit, what was getting her so theoretical tonight? Couldn't have been booze, she hadn't had any tonight. She knew not to drink in public. Not only did she not want to get picked up by the cops for it, but she wanted to keep her wits about her. Hirono was wild, but she wasn't dumb. Her knowledge of downtown Shiroiwa was pretty keen, not bragging, and she knew how to look for trouble without getting in real trouble. Yeah, she'd been arrested before, but she'd dodged the cops more times as they'd caught her. She had her instincts, and they did a nice job of keeping her alive and intact.

The sound of nearby meowing distracted her as she took another drag from her cigarette. A local cat wandered into her backyard, possibly sniffing around for some food. She watched it wander around silently, quietly impressed by how it managed to avoid making any noise. If she hadn't been hanging out in the yard at the time, then she never would have realized it was there.

The cat sniffed the bottom of the trash can at the corner of the yard before looking at her with its big, wide cat eyes. She wondered if she was kind of like this cat, a stray without a true place to call home. The cat scampered out of the yard mere moments later, leaving her completely alone with her thoughts once more.

Hirono finished the last of her cigarette and extinguished the shouldering butt on the side of the house before discarding it in the trash. Stepping into the house revealed exactly what it showed on the outside. All of the lights were off, and everyone was asleep. She was pretty sure that if she checked the kitchen, there wouldn't even be any dinner set aside for her. She had grabbed a yakisoba pan a couple of hours ago anyway, so she would deal with it.

Back in her room, Hirono added her new pack of cigarettes to the small collection of illicit items stashed under her mattress and tossed herself onto the bed, bundling herself into her blanket. A peek at the clock revealed that it was almost past 2 in the morning, and she sighed resignedly. School was definitely going to suck tomorrow. However, that was tomorrow's problem, and right now Hirono's main concern was getting some sleep so that she wouldn't have to do it at her desk in the morning.