'Thinking'

"Japanese"

"English"

Emphasis

___________________________________

Chapter 2: We All Fall Down

Ring around the rosy
A pocketful of posies
"Ashes, Ashes"
We all fall down

"You need help!" Ryoma's mother's voice could be heard from outside. Its shrillness rattled the windows.

"I'm not crazy!" Nanako, on the other side of the house, winced at the expensive sounding crash that followed Ryoma's protest.

"I'm not calling you crazy Honey; I just think you need more help than we can give you! If you would just take your medication…" Rinko tried to reason with her outraged son. The spark for this particular argument was Ryoma deciding to flush his new, very expensive, prescription of antidepressants down the toilet. His mother and father had decided that he needed full time professional help in the form of a mental hospital. Needless to say, Ryoma was not pleased.

"The pills make things fuzzy. I can't think. They don't help anyway." Ryoma's was no longer yelling, though his voice seemed, if possible, more dangerous than before.

"They were working! You haven't tried to…do it again since you got back from the hospital have you?"

"I promised Momo I wouldn't." Ryoma growled out.

Rinko's tone of voice was careful, almost hesitant. "Ryoma, I know how much your friend Momoshiro-"

"Boyfriend" Ryoma interrupted, voice a study of purposeful indifference.

"-means to you but that's a big weight to put on one person." Rinko continued over top of her son's correction. "He may want to support you, but this is really something that should handled by family."

"I'm not related to any shrinks." The teen's fingers began tapping out a silent staccato rhythm against his thigh, a habit inspired by years of tennis practice and an adventure into music lessons (on his mother's demand he have interests other than tennis) as a child that popped up whenever the dark haired boy began to feel too cornered.

"I just mean that the decisions on how to help you should be made between us." The woman took a step forward, which Ryoma paralleled by taking another step backwards toward the door.

"We didn't decide. You decided. It's different." Ryoma pointed out, trying to grip onto a rational argument even as the anger and hurt and resentment began to set in. He needed to get out, needed to see Momo. Takeshi didn't make decisions for him. He helped him calm down, helped him think.

"Honey, all Momoshiro seems to do is make you upset. We always end up fighting about him. Maybe, just for now, you should stay away from him. Just till you get better. Rinko suggested gently. "We need to focus on getting you back to normal. After that we can talk about your relationship with that boy…"

Hazel eyes widened. She couldn't do that. Momo helped keep Ryoma focused, helped him come back when things got too heavy, too dark. If she took that away… "No."

Rinko blinked for a moment before her brain processed the word. Though she was fluent in both, English was her first language. The abrupt change to Japanese made her pause. "What?" she heard herself say, though she couldn't, for the life of her, remember having meant to say it.

"No." her son repeated before turning on his heal and walking out the door. Rinko's shock held her firmly rooted in place long enough for him to make it out the door before she thought to stop him. By the time she ran to the front door, Ryoma had vanished from sight.

______________________________________

Momoshiro lay quietly on the couch, staring with only slight longing at the phone. Ryoma had said that he needed to have a 'talk' with his family, which Momo translated from Ryoma-speak to mean 'I'm expecting a long, unpleasant fight with one or both of my parents and a phone call in the middle from you will not help the situation one bit', after which the smaller boy had said he'd call him. Which lead to one Momoshiro Takeshi sitting alone in the house wishing desperately for the phone to ring.

This was, perhaps, why he missed the knocking at the front door at first. By the time he had noticed, the fairly polite knocking had turned into near hysterical (if knocking was capable of sounding hysterical) knocking. Momo pushed himself off the couch and bounded to the door in one smooth movement. When he opened the door he was only dimly surprised to see Ryoma standing on the doorstep. What he was surprised by was just how pathetic the younger boy looked. Some abstract part of Momoshiro's mind compared the weathered looking boy to a particularly cold abandoned kitten. The rest of Momo's mind couldn't find enough at fault with the comparison to object.

"Ryoma?"

"Can…can I come in?" Ryoma's voice was distant and Momo knew enough to recognize that the boy wasn't really there at the moment, but rather was reliving something else and had gone to his natural source of comfort. The older boy felt twin jolts of anger and warmth. On the one hand, Ryoma had trusted him enough to come to him. On the other hand, this was hardly the first time this had happened and Momo could hazard a guess at who had caused this.

"Yeah," Momo wrapped his large arms around Ryoma's small frame and lead him into the living room. The smaller boy leaned into Momo's side slightly, but made no move to uncurl himself. Momo sat them both on the couch and absentmindedly wrapped a blanket, which had been draped across the back of a chair, around Ryoma before he tried to talk to the smaller boy.

"Ryoma, what's up?" Momo was rewarded with only a small shake of the head and Ryoma hiding his face in the older boy's shoulder. Momoshiro softly steered the face up. "Ryoma… Come on, look at me. You gotta calm down." Gold-green eyes looked held his for a moment before they flitted away this time.

"…Takeshi…" Ryoma murmured, barely audible. Momo sighed. He hated when Ryoma got like this…Too far into his own thoughts to even talk about them. He'd learned quickly that all he could do was simply hold onto him and reassure Ryoma that he'd still be here when he was okay enough to talk. So he held his love close and murmured comforting words that he wasn't sure Ryoma heard and wished once and for all he could tell the smaller teen's parents what he thought of them.

____________________________________

A.N.: Just thought I'd explain why I chose to have Rinko and Ryoma's conversation in English. As she is rarely in the show (I think I've seen her once, outside the flashback to how she and Nanjiro met), I was given a lot of free reign and figured that, given a choice, she'd probably use whichever language she'd learned first. Since she was raised in America (as was Ryoma), I thought that English would be fairly commonplace at least between the two of them, if not between Ryoma and Nanjiro. Especially in a stressful situation, I could see her switching to English subconsciously. One-on-one interactions between Rinko and Ryoma will likely switch between the two languages frequently.