PoT: tongue tied
tongue-tied
Truth: When Momo first met Ryoma, he mistakeningly compared Ryoma to his younger brother. Now he knows that there's no way Ryoma could ever be like anybody's sibling, but still, he treats Ryoma like one, and he has a feeling that deep down inside his immobile heart, Ryoma appreciates it, even if both of them realize the relationship they have can never be like the relationship siblings have. There's too much effort going into it.
The thing is Ryoma is just the right height for Momo to rest his elbow on.
At first it may seem like Ryoma's height puts him in a disadvantage. Momo realizes soon enough, with everyone else, that Ryoma, clever as he is, uses this as a way to unnerve people. Ryoma doesn't bother looking people in the eye too much, forcing other people to look down or bend down or something to that extent. Sometimes Momo finds himself slouching when standing next to Ryoma just so he can be level with him.
Ryoma understands Momo in a way few other people can: silently. But no one understands Ryoma at all, least of all Momo.
*
The Seigaku regulars sometimes play this game where someone asks a question and it makes it rounds through the players, everyone answering it.
It's after Tezuka's gone that Momo and Ryoma find themselves having lunch with Eiji, Oishi, and Fuji. They start the game up for a little while and Eiji asks, "What do you think is the saddest number?"
"12," Momo says, sneaking a glance across at Ryoma.
"10," Ryoma says, looking at his cup morosely.
Momo's learned long ago that the English equivalent of Ryoma's name is 12 letters long; he knows Ryoma's age like the back of his hand. But he hasn't a clue what 10 should stand for. It's the number of the Seigaku regulars plus Tezuka and Ryuzaki. It's half of 20, it's the double of 5. It's the number of fingers Ryoma has, like everyone else. It could be an age, but it's not anyone's birthday.
Momo doesn't flatter himself thinking that it's the number of letters in the English equivalent of Momoshiro if Momoshiro had an extra u at the end.
*
Momo often makes a joke out of the fact that Ryoma is always hitching rides off of him. "Can't you ride a bicycle on your own?" Momo teases, tugging at Ryoma's hair, snaking a hand around Ryoma's waist to try and find a soft spot to tickle, and Ryoma lightly touches Momo's hand to stop it and says, "Watch where you're going," as the bicycle makes a little dip off balance.
"I like riding with you better," Ryoma says later when they're walking, tilting his head slightly away from Momo as if considering him from a different angle. Ryoma isn't smiling, which makes Momo believe him instead of tossing it out as a joke.
Momo can picture Ryoma's face in his head whenever he wants. It's like Momo can never get enough of it, it's like a drug, it's like a really crappy addiction that makes Momo's head hurt. Sometimes Ryoma's smile will hit Momo as physically as lack of sleep. Sometimes touching Ryoma can force Momo into an almost state of hyperventilation.
It's a lot of things about Ryoma that catches Momo in the weirdest places.
*
Nobody touches Ryoma much, except for Momo, because Momo likes touching. He likes finding out that Ryoma's warm. He likes finding out that Ryoma's hair is real.
Tennis is a weird sport. There's never any contact between the people, just the hands and the racket and the tennis ball, and it wouldn't matter if your opponent never even existed. As long as the ball is coming over the next in your direction, you hit it.
Fascinating, until Momo finds out that Ryoma used to flinch when anyone touched him. Now he's getting used to it. And so Momo takes certain liberties, like colliding with Ryoma when they play a mock game of basketball so that Ryoma's sprawled out on the floor under Momo, or tripping so that he has to grab on to Ryoma, or slinging an arm around Ryoma's shoulder like something familiar. Ryoma's small, Ryoma's easy to engulf, Ryoma's so unresponsive sometimes it'd be like touching nothing, but Momo likes to touch, and Momo likes to touch Ryoma and make Ryoma touch him.
Eventually, Ryoma gets used to that too.
The progression from touch to kiss is surprisingly quick, easy, and painless. It happens in the locker room, accidentally, and Ryoma doesn't even mention it when it's over or the day afterwards. Momo takes that as invitation, because he doesn't want to think of it as anything else, and because Ryoma doesn't tell him to think of it as anything else.
*
Momo's greatest fault as a tennis player is that he's very prone to assumptions. It makes for an interesting and slightly naive trait as a person, and no one really minds, because it goes along with Momo's happy-go-lucky attitude about everything. He makes his worse errors of judgement this way.
At first he assumes that what's between Tezuka and Ryoma is just as simple as competition, rivalry, and a little bit of paternal responsibility. It's not that, of course, and he sees that later, the way Ryoma looks transfixed when looking at Tezuka or saying "buchou". There was that one time where Ryoma completely crushed Hiyoshi after Tezuka and Atobe's match; when he came back to the bleachers he had told Momo, "I didn't play for him," and Momo, being the assuming overlooking idiot he was, had believed him. He wasn't there for Tezuka's announcment that he was leaving for Germany, but he didn't think anything of the way Ryoma approached Tezuka's final match with him either.
Momo takes Ryoma's tendency to not care for granted sometimes. It's easy, it really is, and in a way, not Momo's fault at all.
There's this old song about smoke getting into eyes, but that song's in English.
*
Momo likes Ryoma's nonchalance, likes his frostiness, likes his obsessiveness, even likes his inscrutable personality. Momo likes the way Ryoma says, "Should I?" when Momo asks whether or not Ryoma cares that Tezuka's gone, and he likes the way Ryoma pretends he doesn't care at all.
*
Ryoma speaks English with a New York accent, which is how he teaches English to Momo. Momo really doesn't notice it at first until he compares a passage read by Ryoma to the same passage read by his teacher. Ryoma scoffs at the English teachers a lot, saying that they pronounce everything wrong, but he's touchy about his accent. "It's a local thing," Ryoma says hesitantly. "It's something you can't help picking up."
Momo tells him all the time how much he loves hearing English come out of Ryoma's mouth.
He tries to get Ryoma to teach him how to see "I love you" in English correctly. At first, Ryoma refuses by saying he doesn't know how, and when Momo points out how obvious of a lie that excuse was, Ryoma just doesn't say anything at all when Momo asks. He says, "You can learn it from a movie or something," and Momo says, "I want to hear it from you."
Which is as much of a confession as anything, even though neither of them point this out.
*
Momo realizes with sudden clarity one day that 10 is exactly the time difference between Germany and Japan.
A/N: Ryoma's name only has 12 characters when it is spelled r-y-o-m-a instead of r-y-o-u-m-a. And I think Momo wasn't there for Tezuka's announcment, although I could be wrong. And like. RYOMA WITH A NEW YORK ACCENT. <333333333333333333 I'm sorry I'm like the biggest dork EVER.