Winds of Destiny: Converging ~ {Hawks x OC}

Give & Take

Ten-year-old Torimodo Misaki opened her eyes in the darkness surrounding her and sat up. She stretched her arms high above her head before pulling back the hood of her light gray sweatshirt and removing her headphones. Her ears quickly adjusted to the subtle, everyday noise of the bustling net café around her. After flipping on the light, she reached into her backpack on the shelf above the computer and pulled out a small toiletry bag before making her way to the shower room.

She'd been living at the Free Bird net café for the past month and a half, ever since she'd run away from being sent to a group home. They offered an overnight package that included all you could eat meals and drinks, as well as access to showers and a huge library of all kinds of books, all for the low price of two thousand five hundred yen per night. She'd found out pretty quickly that getting a job as a "fifteen" year old was not as easy as she'd thought it would be, since she didn't have a graduation certificate from a junior high school, nor a guardian to approve her employment. The junior high diploma she could fake pretty easily, but the guardian approval was another story; they tended to like to verify those kinds of things.

The owner of the net café took pity on her sometimes, giving her odd jobs to do around the place for a discount on her room fee for the night. It wasn't much, but she'd take what she could get. At the rate she was going, she'd burn through all of the money she'd managed to scrounge up from her parents in the next two months or less. She was spending most of her time at the moment trying to find some place to employ her that wasn't super shady and wouldn't ask too many questions. Unless she wanted to end up living on the street for the next eight years, it was imperative to her survival that she find a halfway decent means to earn some money soon.

"Good morning, Yotogi-san," she called out to the older man sitting behind the front counter as she walked toward the meal area of the café after her shower.

"Mornin' Misa-ko," the man grumbled in reply without looking up from the sudoku puzzle he was pouring over.

She stopped in her tracks and asked in concern, "What's wrong?"

The old owner was typically fairly mild mannered, it was rare to see him so disgruntled. He glanced up at her over the top of his glasses before tilting his head toward the lanky looking guy with long hair making a scene at the row of vending machines next to the coffee and fountain drink dispensers. She'd seen the guy around a few times over the past week. As far as she'd heard from eavesdropping around the stacks, he was some sort of researcher from the big university down the street. Why he was hanging out in the net café she didn't know, but from what she'd seen of the guy so far, he was about as prickly as a cactus most of the time.

"If he keeps causin' a scene like that, he's gonna end up bringin' round a buncha unwanted attention, if ya know what I mean," Yotogi grumbled conspiratorially.

The kind of unwanted attention he was referring to was the law. Free Bird was known around the underground to be a haven for those who needed a place to lay low and didn't ask too many questions. That was one of the reasons why she'd ended up choosing the place when she'd been looking for somewhere to stay. She'd seen her fair share of fake IDs from the few times that she'd helped out behind the counter; much like the one she'd used to rent her own room. Yotogi had told her not to worry about it as long as they were paying customers, a policy that she herself often benefitted from.

"Is he violent?" She asked as she turned her concerned stare to the raving lunatic.

Yotogi clicked his tongue and shrugged. "Nah. But somebody's gonna end up killin' him for makin' all that racket one of these days. I get any more complaints about the guy an' it might be me."