There were a lot of things Hideyoshi hated about himself. His almost complete inability to stand up for himself, his extremely rocky relationship with his father, the fact that his first response to almost anything was to start crying, the list went on and he usually just summarized it as "everything." He often found himself thinking about everything wrong with himself, and, letting this consume him, found himself to be thoroughly unlikable.
When taking this into account, he wasn't terribly surprised that nobody his age would willingly interact with him, some even going out of their way to avoid him entirely. And so it was that he once again found himself walking home alone on this particularly cloudy day, the clouds in question beginning to give way to a light rain.
The quiet loneliness of his walks home usually gave Hideyoshi time to think about a lot of things, whether he liked it or not. Today was particularly bad, as it had been marked with the disappearance of one of his classmates. It wasn't anyone he knew personally (though, Hideyoshi supposed, he didn't know anyone he went to school with personally), but it was at least someone he recognized; a shorter boy who, like Hideyoshi, seemed shy and quiet, and, unlike him, people seemed to like well enough. There had been rumors going around all day about why exactly he disappeared, ranging from the possibility of it being gang related, to the idea that there was a killer somewhere in Morioh. Hideyoshi didn't know and, trying to quell his rising anxiety, tried to convince himself he didn't care. He tried to reason with himself that people go missing all the time, and more often than not, turn up just fine. This reasoning ceased to work when he remembered that he lived in a town with a disappearance rate much higher than the national average. Feeling blood starting to drip down his chin from the lip he had been chewing on, he quickly tried to occupy his mind with something else.
He had settled on letting his mind wander off completely while his body made the rest of the walk home uninterrupted. By the time he had made it inside, the weather had gone from a shower to a much heavier rainfall. On this level, Hideyoshi was kind of glad he had, at some point, increased his walking pace. He didn't want to have to deal with wet clothes or hair, especially when he was in one of his more negative moods. He had also noticed that he was currently the only person in the house, and took this an an opportunity to try to sleep off at least some of his stress. He didn't really count on it working, though. Something would likely come and make it far worse than it already was, sooner or later. He was sure of that.
Luck had, after all, never sided with Hideyoshi Higashikata.