"Up, up!" The little girl, barely five years old at most, only Sakura's age surely, lifted her arms up towards him. Where was her mother? There wasn't a mother or a father or any relative around to look after her.

"Hang on," Ryoma said, holding a single hand out for her to play with like Sakura liked to do sometimes as he scanned the crowd for someone who was looking for a child. There were parents everywhere, but no one seemed to be looking for a girl as young as this one. They were all looking for kids who should be coming out of an evening band performance. His mother was nowhere to be seen, but she was probably managing the others and talking to the conductor and everything. She liked to do that without him.

"Up!" She said, more insistent this time, pulling on his thumb with an unreasonably large force.

"Hey, stop that!" Sakura was not this strong, nor was she this demanding. "What's your name? Is your mummy here?"

The little girl shook her head. "I'm Elise," she said, in the proud tone that only very young children could manage. "I'm waiting for my big brother." Well, her big brother was very irresponsible, letting her wait out here where she could run into the road very easily. Elise then demanded to be picked up again, and this time he sighed but obliged.

"You tell me if you see your brother, okay?" He said, trying to hold her up high, but she was just as heavy as Sakura and both of them were getting harder to lift as they got older. "What's his name?"

Suddenly, Elise started moving around in his arms, trying to get away, and Ryoma tried to put her down as gently as he could, following her gaze to the entrance to see a very worried looking Xander. Ryoma almost laughed. Of course it was Xander, head screwed on so tightly he'd cut off the blood flow to his sense of humour, who'd lost his little sister whilst he was playing in a concert.

"Elise!" It was hilarious, he looked genuinely worried instead of horrendously smug for once. And he'd thought that Xander only had one emotion: entitlement. "Elise!" He was followed outside by two younger kids, and boy was he going to tell Xander just how stupid he was to bring a bunch of kids to a concert seemingly without an adult.

"Xander!" Elise ran towards him and Xander looked up, visibly relieved to see her running towards him. His eyes then met with Ryoma's, and he looked away instantly.

"Elise, you can't do that!" He said, ducking down so he was more on her level. "We said you had to behave when you came here and listen to Camilla."

"Excuse me," he said quietly. "Are you Elise's brother?"

"Who do I look like, Ryoma?" Xander took his usual and entirely expected tone of superiority. Like he knew everything, except he didn't know how to keep his little sister safe.

"Someone who almost left his sister to run into the road and didn't bring an adult to the concert to supervise them?" Ryoma suggested with a grin he hoped looked obnoxious.

Xander scowled in response. "My sister isn't stupid," he said, and his glare seemed to suggest that he thought Ryoma was. The sentiment was mutual, honestly. Xander may be intelligent and very good at the oversized violin, but he wasn't half stupid. It was silly even to leave Takumi alone without supervision, let alone Sakura (though maybe it was MORE stupid to leave Takumi alone).

"She's very pleasant," he said, though he didn't voice that she was almost as self centred as Xander was. It wasn't fair to judge a little girl on the same level as someone like Xander, though, who was much older than Elise and claimed to be responsible. "It was nice to meet her, and your other siblings. You played well today." He smiled again, hoping to excuse himself from the very unpleasant conversation. Xander was aggravating, but Ryoma didn't want to make him into an enemy.

He didn't see the way Xander smiled, because it happened after he turned his back. "Thank you," was all he heard, and hearing it sound genuine was strange, because whenever Xander received compliments he accepted them as if they were expected. He also didn't see when Xander bent down to hug Elise tightly, and he didn't hear him saying to never run off again because it had scared him and he didn't ever want to lose her.

However, the next time he saw Xander, at the first practise for the junior band after the Christmas holidays, Xander was…nice to him. They had never really spoken much in rehearsals because they were in different sections (also, Ryoma sort of worried that if he riled Xander up too much he'd be stabbed by the double bass spike), but in the after school practise that day, Xander approached him.

"Hey Ryoma, are you going to audition for a choir at the end of term?" He asked, and for once his tone sounded more relaxed and the way he spoke wasn't the painfully formal Xander he had grown to intensely dislike. "Your mum's a singing teacher, right, so I thought…" He smiled, and Ryoma almost got the impression he was nervous, but that was impossible for Xander.

"Why?" He asked. He knew that Xander's father was a singing teacher because the boy had mentioned it about sixty times in passing. He also knew who Xander's father was, and he knew the man wasn't very nice. He felt like he'd try and discourage him from joining a choir or something, or say he wasn't good enough at singing.

"I wanted to ask if you were joining one and which one you were planning to join," Xander said, definitely looking nervous now, "because I don't want to compete against you as I know your singing is very good."

Ryoma considered the possibility, just for a moment, that he was hallucinating. Xander would never say something like that. He'd never be nice and he'd never compliment him. That was just…giving other people credit and making other people feel happy was one of the traits that Xander did not add into his conversations. "I'm planning on auditioning for the acapella choir," he said. Immediately, Xander nodded and smiled again.

"That's good," he said. "I think my father would kill me if I didn't join the chamber choir." He laughed, and Ryoma felt like he should too.

"I hope he doesn't," he said, with a very small smile. Maybe Xander wasn't the worst person around and maybe he just had to get to know him. He hoped that, anyway, because Ryoma hated arrogant pricks like him when they weren't being decent like this.