Title: Language Barriers
Summary: Snippets of Tsuna's time in China as he travels with seven other people and their rather colourful personalities.
The train jerked as it began to pull away from the station, startling Tsuna enough that he face-planted into Hibari's back.
Hibari, riled up enough at the argument that his fingers were caressing phantom cool metal, simply grabbed Tsuna by the back of his shirt and tossed him through the doorway of the nearest cabin before turning back to the crowding herbivores.
"Hiiieeeeee!"
Hayato blinks at the airborne form of Tsuna and promptly freaks the fuck out, lunging to catch the man but misjudging greatly in his panic and ramming head-first into the wall.
Turns out Hayato shouldn't have bothered because while Tsuna is sent flailing, he falls on one of the beds instead of on a corner or the floor, landing with an oof on a hard lump under the quilt.
The lump rose in a jerk and Tsuna was rolled off onto the floor. The man -for it was a man, not a lump- sat up and smashed his head on the bed above in a truly cringe-worthy thunk, but he didn't seem to notice. He then screams out, 'Extreme!', to no one in particular but with a truly admirable intensity for a person who was rudely awoken by having a man flung onto them. He pumps his fist in the air, barely missing punching the bed above, and giving a demonstration of how big the muscles on a boxer are.
'Wow, that must have hurt,' called down a friendly voice from the bed above, with a small laugh tacked on at the end. The man on the upper bunk was tall, having to curl up to fit on the shelf, with short black hair and a wide smile. 'I felt the bed jump,' he explained and then cocked his head to the side in curiosity. 'Who are you?' he asked Tsuna.
"I don't speak Chinese, I'm sorry," Tsuna managed, eyes wide at being addressed by someone who was caressing a baseball bat. He wasn't ecstatic with landing on someone who could break him in half over their knee, either.
'I can't understand Chinese,' the man on the upper bunk said sheepishly with a grin.
'My name is Ryohei,' the white haired man declared loudly in Mandarin.
Hayato finally staggered in, rubbing his forehead with a grimace. 'Don't worry,' he reassured Tsuna. 'When I get more dynamite the first thing I'll do us take out the violent bastard for daring to throw you.'
'My name is Ryohei,' the white haired man declared once again, evidently the only foreign words he knew.
The man on the upper bunk announced his name to be Takeshi with the same awkward pronunciation as Ryohei, except in Cantonese, obviously having learnt it off Google translate.
"I don't understand what's happening," Tsuna admitted, understanding the basic sentences from Ryohei and Takeshi but now even more confused as to the conversation beforehand. He's not exactly upset about it though, as this is around the same level of understanding he and Kyoya have. 'I'm Tsuna,' he tried in Mandarin, then again in Cantonese, before finally in Changsha just because he could.
'And I'm trying to sleep,' groaned another lump in the bed opposite Takeshi. 'Nice to meet you.'
'You shut up,' Hayato snapped at the Russian before tuning on Ryohei and Takeshi. 'Those accents were pathetic - if you're going to speak do it properly, don't gargle,' Hayato berated. 'You were perfect, Tsuna.'
The brunet smiled for lack of anything else to do in the face of Italian.
Takeshi asked for Hayato's name.
'I think that's Korean,' Hayato mused. 'And what about you, Turf-top, I doubt you're Chinese since we're apparently playing Hetalia.'
Ryohei announced his extremeness, declared everyone in the cabin extreme, and demanded an extreme boxing match.
Hayato's muttered comment about insane Germans was interrupted by the loud thump of an Herbivore who got slammed into a wall.
"Hibari-san, no!" Tsuna cried and darted around Hayato who had thrown his arms out to block Tsuna from entering the danger zone. Tsuna stumbled to a halt at the sight of bodies littering the train floor and briefly wondered how he managed to miss the slaughter.
Kyoya glanced over hi shoulder with a raised eyebrow.
A/N:
Tsuna- Japanese
Kyoya- Chinese
Hayato- Italian (and a 7 year old kids understanding of a few others)
Mukuro- Afrikaans
Chrome- Dutch
Lambo- Russian
Ryohei- German
Takeshi- Korean
Depending on the point of view, all other languages will be shown 'like this'.
Poll: Pairings?
Kyoya-4
Oblivious Tsuna/none-2
Meh - I was completely set on Ryohei being German ever since I've started this, for those exact reasons ;)
Xcer – I learned that Chinese was an overall term for the dialects/languages like Mandarin, Cantonese and Shanghainese, etc. (And it's simpler to say Chinese instead of specifying. Excuse my laziness in future chapters :D)
Toraffles – Chrome isn't actually Mukuro's sister. Their relationship is complicated but the closest word for it is sister, so they use that for simplicities sake. They speak different languages because they don't know each other's, but Dutch and Afrikaans are close enough that it's understandable. Kyoya doesn't understand Tsuna; Chinese does have written characters that mix with Korean and Japanese but there's no spoken words that cross the languages.