Ryunosuke hauled Chitoge back up to solid ground. While he was at it, he decided he might as well see the job through and walk her home.
His primary motivation was, of course, the food he was expecting at her house. He was close to starving.
Hand in hand, the two of them left the forest. Around the same time, Raku had just arrived at the forest's edge looking for Chitoge. He and Chitoge had been friends since they were small, and when she didn't come back, he panicked and went after her. He and Ryunosuke simply missed each other in passing. Without realizing it, Ryunosuke had taken an unexpected turn at exactly the wrong moment.
On the way back, Chitoge kept crying. Ryunosuke was starting to get a headache. "What exactly are you still crying about?"
She wiped her face and pointed to her head, to the spot where a red ribbon had been. "My mom gave me that ribbon for my birthday. I lost it."
"Waaaaaaa!"
She started up again. Ryunosuke clapped his hands over his ears, but she only got louder, with no signs of stopping. Eventually he gave in. "I'll find it for you, so please stop crying."
The crying stopped immediately. Chitoge looked up at him with still-swollen eyes. That helpless, pleading look made him uncomfortable, but the promise of a meal hardened his resolve. "Wait here. Don't go anywhere. Understood?"
"Mm..." She dried the last of her tears and promised to stay. Ryunosuke turned and plunged back into the forest without another word.
Chitoge sat neatly on the grass and waited. Before long Ryunosuke returned with the red ribbon in his hand. Her eyes lit up. He tied it himself at the back of her head, gathering her hair into a single ponytail, then let out a long breath of relief.
"Now you can take me to your house to eat, right? I'm really hungry."
"Yes!" Chitoge smiled brightly at him.
They walked home hand in hand. Ryunosuke, clutching his growling stomach, was running almost completely on empty. He had burned through the last of his reserves finding that ribbon.
He noticed Chitoge walking with a slight limp. "Did you twist your ankle?"
She stopped and looked back at him. "A little. When I fell into that gap."
Ryunosuke sighed and crouched down. "Get on. I'll carry you."
Chitoge's face went red, but she accepted and climbed onto his back. He carried her slowly forward, struggling with every step on an empty stomach, grumbling to himself the whole way.
(All this just to get something to eat?)
But in Chitoge's eyes, in that moment, Ryunosuke looked exactly like a storybook prince, and the feeling went straight to her heart. She decided on the spot: when she grew up, she was going to marry this person.
Back in the present, ten-years-later Chitoge couldn't help but click her tongue. "I really didn't know anything back then. Actually thinking I wanted to marry him."
Even as she said it, her cheeks were faintly pink, and she didn't reject the idea in the slightest. She touched the red ribbon in her hair, the beginning of everything between them, something between a keepsake and a first memory of something she couldn't quite name.
Ryunosuke didn't have any key or locket of his own, since those belonged to Raku and Onodera. Because of his involvement, Chitoge never ended up with a key either. That same encounter had briefly made Ryunosuke friends with both Raku and Onodera, before he disappeared again, running from debt collectors as usual.
His next destination was the home of Tachibana Marika.
He vaulted over the fence of a luxurious hillside villa and landed in the garden, pressing a hand to his forehead and breathing out slowly. "If I hide here, the collectors won't find me, right?"
"Who's there?!" came a voice from above. Marika was bedridden with illness, and the sound from outside had startled her into shouting.
Ryunosuke froze. From the direction of the voice, he could tell it was coming from the second floor. The front gate was locked and no one else was home, so he climbed up the outside of the building, pushed open the second-floor window, and found Marika in her bed.
At that age, Marika was not yet the graceful young woman she would become. She was a sharp-tongued, willful little princess, and her first reaction to a stranger in her window was undisguised hostility.
Ryunosuke leaned in from the windowsill with a thin smile. "Hi."
"Hi yourself! What are you doing in my house?!" She glared at him, then dissolved into a coughing fit. "Uhuk, uhuk!"
Her health was poor, which was why she had been sent to this isolated mountain sanatorium in the first place. Seeing her like that, Ryunosuke figured he should leave rather than make things worse.
He turned to go, and Marika shouted, "Get back here!"
He stopped and looked over his shoulder.
"What is it now?" He scratched his cheek awkwardly. "And, hey, what's your name?"
"Tachibana Marika." She snapped, then turned it back on him. "What's yours?"
"Akasaka Ryunosuke."
And that was how they met. After that, Ryunosuke started dropping by whenever he needed somewhere to hide from debt collectors, which was often. Marika, bored out of her mind in that isolated place, had no intention of letting the only person her age she had ever met here slip away. As time passed, the nature of things between them shifted. What began as Marika simply wanting a friend quietly became something more, and she started wanting to make Ryunosuke her husband.
One day Marika asked, "What kind of girl do you like?"
Ryunosuke was eating a wild apple he had just picked. He polished another one on his shirt and handed it to her. Marika took it without making a face, nibbling at it with small, careful bites, her cheeks tinged pink as she waited for his answer.
He answered plainly. "I like girls with long hair. Someone gentle."
"Oh." Her response was short, but what she was thinking was: (So that's his type.)
From that day, her personality changed completely. The demanding, sharp-edged little princess became a composed, soft-spoken young woman with a certain elegance about her. Her father noticed immediately. There was no way he could have missed his daughter turning into what seemed like a different person entirely.
One day he asked her, "Do you have feelings for that boy?"
Marika didn't react particularly strongly at first, until her father played his hand. "If you do, I can arrange the engagement."
"Really, Papa?!" Her eyes went wide and bright.
But at that very same time, Ryunosuke had to run again. Debt collectors, as always. And this time, he fled all the way to Totsuki Academy.