Written for the durarara kink meme!

Original prompt:Masaomi/Mikado - Language barrier, orientation issues, Love at first sight, Fluff~

Masaomi is a transfer student from America and his japanese is basically non-existent. So when he finally settles in and starts attending Raira Academy the teachers have him shown around by the top student at the Academy Mikado Ryugamine, whom sadly is not that skilled in speaking english but his english is the best out of all the other students so he was choosen to help Masaomi get accustom to everything. Masaomi finds himself instantly falling for the shy, polite teen whom tries pretty hard to be the best of assistance to him. Mikado on the other hand only thinks of Masaomi as an acquaintance at first and Masaomi realizes that he'll have to work his way into the teens heart. I know this might make it a long fill but I like when things move slowly, so if A!A would not mind?

Disclaimer: in my profile. I do not own Durarara or anything to do with it. I don't even own this plot ^.^;

"Ah…konnichiwa – I mean, ohayogozaimasu!" Masaomi gulped quietly as he looked upon all the curious eyes staring at him. His anxiety was making him stumble through his Japanese – as if it wasn't shoddy enough already. "Watashi wa Kida Masaomi desu…yoroshikuonegaishimasu!" Masaomi sped through the rest of the sentence – his usual bravado trampled by the language barrier – and ducked his head down, hoping the teacher would let him sit soon. The turtle-like man in question was giving him an odd look – his pronunciation was probably terrible, he learned it all a week earlier by flipping through an English/Japanese children's picture book – then said something in spitfire Japanese that made the students nod in understanding or whisper between themselves. He caught 'foreigner' in there somewhere, but for all he knew they could've been saying 'dumbass'.

The teacher ('sensei', Masaomi reminded himself) pointed to an empty desk somewhere in the middle of the rows of desks, and Masaomi quickly walked over, swerving past a few long legs before quickly plummeting into his seat, hands clutched tightly on the strap of his messenger bag, the only familiar thing in this room aside from him.

Everything was new here. His clothes (a uniform, boring and pale and severely less creative than free dress at his old school), his home (an apartment with no backyard), and his school (a drone-filled concrete block with hardly any posters on the wall, and probably no school plays).

Masaomi fiddled with the pins on his well-loved bag in thought. They all had band names or catch phrases from television shows, all in English, and probably rare here overseas. Had any of these people ever even heard of David Bowie? Beyoncé? Lady Gaga? Masaomi wanted to let out a whopping sigh and let his head fall heavy onto the desk before him, but refrained if only to protect a small scrap of his remaining pride.

The teacher said something that completely passed over Masaomi's head. He needed to learn to stop tuning out things he didn't understand – it's how he failed Spanish class all those months ago, anyway.

"Ah…hello…" Masaomi looked up at the sudden familiar exclamation in his first (and only) language. He turned his head to his right, where a slight boy with a kind smile was giving him a minute wave. His blue eyes were wide and naive, set into an open face with an innocence that would never last a day back home.

"Hi?" the blonde replied, confused, though warmth was bubbling up in his chest with the hope that maybe this wouldn't be all bad.

"My name is Ryuugamine Mikado. Yamato-sensei ask me is your…leader." The boy's unsure tone at the last word made a wide smile split on Masaomi's face. He wasn't perfect with English, but he was clearly the best speaker in this room.

"You mean guide?"

Mikado nodded quickly with a bright, "Hai!"

Masaomi wanted to ask this boy more, the black-haired-blue-eyed cutie who had already turned back to face the front and take notes in what the blonde could see was perfectly neat printing. He settled for trying to make sense of the lesson while taking occasional (okay, frequent) glances back at Mikado.

Back in America, Masaomi was pretty popular with the girls and boys. He was half British and half Japanese from his mum and dad. Having blonde hair paired with a hint of Asian features was enough to look temptingly exotic, and sometimes he slipped into a British accent like a new pair of shoes.

Here he had hoped it would be similar. After all, last he checked there wasn't exactly an abundance of natural blondes strolling Ikebukuro's streets. Maybe his popularity would be just as explosive here?...No. He could hardly speak to anyone, let alone tell them his crazy stories that always had all his American friends laughing and joking along with him. Plus, there wasn't exactly a blooming gay community around here, as far as he could see.

He figured it was dad's fault that he had to endure this kind of cruel and unusual torture (and by the way, didn't that entitle him to refugee status?). It was his fault that he chose a job opportunity across the whole freakin' Pacific Ocean with almost no warning, effectively ripping Masaomi away from the city where he was raised and planting him down in a new place with no instruction.

Masaomi already missed the lights and sounds of New York. Maybe it was too romanticized and dreamy of him, but he found a sense of wonder in Times Square, spinning and beholding the sheer grandeur of the walls around him, the crowds of people, tourists and natives alike, and could almost believe that everyone in the world might be just as small and human as he was. In the hustle and bustle of New York, he could pretend to be anyone he wanted. He could have breakfast at Tiffany's and throw a ball around in Central Park and hail a cabby like a real city rat.

But here everything was different. Words weren't spelt in the alphabet he had known since kindergarten. They were made of lines with no meaning, dashes and squiggles and curves that looked more like pictures than words. Traffic was crazy and there were just so many people, even more than New York – something that was altogether hard to believe and terrifyingly overwhelming. All he knew about Japan was that it was the source of those funny comics full of girls with giant boobs and all the crazy weird stuff you'd see on the internet.

And maybe Masaomi was being naïve, but he'd always hoped to go to some big name university. Despite what most people believed, what with the careless way he seemed to approach schoolwork and the abundance of time spent horsing around with friends instead of studying, he was actually a good student. Great, in fact. While his friends aimed for small art schools or considered dropping out, Masaomi was browsing the websites of Harvard, Princeton, and Yale. He filled his resume with summer jobs and volunteer work with inner city kids, even took advanced classes some years.

Now the dream was pretty much lost. His grades would plummet when he couldn't even communicate, and all of that hard work to maybe get somewhere without the help of his father's big name would be wasted.

Masaomi was jerked back into reality by a gentle tap on his shoulder. Mikado was standing beside his desk, smiling down at him with a box wrapped in some sort of handkerchief. The blonde was struck with how adorable Mikado looked, standing there with his bashful smile and pink-dusted cheeks that he had frozen for a moment in his mind. The feeling was familiar to Masaomi – he wasn't some cliché movie character who couldn't recognize love when they saw it. He'd fallen in love before, but never so quickly. The cheeky teen wasn't about to brush this off as nothing. He was open to anything, including love at first sight, and was known to be loud in his declarations.

But no need to scare the kid right away.

"Kida-kun, it is lunch time." Masaomi realized that Mikado probably wouldn't use contractions any time soon.

"Oh, thanks…uh…Mikado-kun?" He asked hesitantly. He wasn't too certain with honorifics, but Mikado used it with his name so it should be alright…though he couldn't remember if he was supposed to use the last name or first…

Mikado gave him an encouraging nod paired with a polite smile, instantly comforting Masaomi and making the familiar warmth spread through his chest again. He reached into his pack and grabbed his lunch, self-packed and dumped into a plastic bag like always, before being led by Mikado up through a stairwell and a door, something Masaomi thought was odd. Back home he usually just ate on the front steps, and sometimes they would play chicken by running across the road and trying not to get hit by cars. When the door opened, a cool breeze hit Masaomi in the face and he stepped out onto the rooftop of the school. His eyes widened – the roof at his old school was strictly gang territory – and watched as Mikado walked over to a small bench next to the tall fence that bordered the area, probably to combat suicidal teenagers jumping.

Masaomi followed and sat beside the smaller teen who was much too kind and cute and endearing. He watched as the fabric surrounding Mikado's lunch was untied, giving way to a small kit with rice and other little bits of food he didn't recognize. It was a lot fancier than anything Masaomi could make – he once burned pancakes, unable to flip them and letting them roll over in the pan until they greatly resembled fried turds.

The door opened again, its creak echoing slightly in the quiet air, and Masaomi turned to see a girl peer through then begin walking towards them. She was petite and slim, with glasses and choppy hair and HOLY SHIT THE BIGGEST RACK– Masaomi cleared his own thoughts with an internal smack and tried to look somewhat friendly even as his eye started to twitch.

"Anri-chan!" Mikado waved at the girl, and she sat at the other side of him on the bench. Her polite smile and quiet demeanour already told Masaomi that she was nothing like his old friends, who were either obnoxiously loud guys who kept strings of condoms in their back pockets or girls who spent more time spraying their hair than reading the textbooks.

"Anri-chan," Mikado said, and the rest was a string of Japanese that Masaomi didn't even try to translate. He heard his name somewhere in the jumble, and knew that Mikado had introduced him. Despite this, he held out his hand and repeated his introduction in broken Japanese, because even though he wasn't raised right he'd seen enough to know how to act it.

"My name is Sonohara Anri. It is nice to meet you, Kida-kun."

"You too…Anri-chan." He knew enough about honorifics to know that what he said wasn't correct and he should've been using something more formal around someone he'd just met, but he'd always been one to test his boundaries, push and push until he could barely nudge before things fell apart.

Apparently he was allowed to slip up, since he was only just learning the language. Anri just gave him a smile and a small shrug then leaned away to open her own lunch kit, even tidier and cuter than Mikado's – was it just him, or were those sausages shaped like octopi?

He suddenly felt inferior to their lunches that were practically Van Gogh paintings and opened up his own abstract Picasso: a convenience store sandwich (one of the many he kept from back home), a juvenile juice box, and an apple.

Just as the blonde took a bite into his deli meat delight, Mikado said something to Anri in Japanese that made her giggle charmingly. Masaomi couldn't help but take a more forceful bite than intended, teeth joining in an almost-audible clack, as he suddenly realized that Anri might not just be a friend. What if they were going out?

No. No, Masaomi had seen 'going out' before, bombarded with it every day in fact, and he could tell they weren't. Her lunch box was placed right in between them, a measure of distance that told him they weren't together. It was odd how they weren't sitting closer, actually. At home even friends would sit on each other's laps or lean on each other, arms wrapped platonically around shoulders and legs splayed across laps. The lack of interaction was a little off-putting, though maybe it was just these two and their polite and quiet personalities.

I'll be the one to fix that, Masaomi thought smugly. He'd never been terribly touchy-feely, what with the kind of family he grew up with, but he'd been known to hang off of those he admired, enjoying getting close to them and sometimes overwhelming them with his intimacy.

This would be a good time, actually, Masaomi realized. Stake my claim and all that.

He set down his sandwich and pulled back slightly, then pounced next to Mikado and wrapped his arms around the boy's small (adorable!) shoulders. The black-haired boy instantly jumped in response, his face flushing pink as he struggled in shock.

"K-Kida-kun!" He paused, probably trying to translate in his head, "Not how greet people in Japan!"

"Oh, really? Sorry," Masaomi grinned, releasing Mikado from his grip and sitting back down. "Back home we're all like that."

Mikado stared at him with wide eyes. "Kowai…"

Masaomi laughed at his expression. He's so cuuuute! "Don't worry, it's not always without warning."

Mikado looked confused, and Masaomi realized he shouldn't have used a double negative. "I mean: don't worry, there's usually warning."

Mikado gave a nod of understanding, and Masaomi found himself wondering how many words the boy could actually pick out of the sentence. Obviously more than the blonde could pick from a Japanese sentence, anyways. He'd never had a relationship with a language barrier.

But Kida Masaomi never backs down.

AN: I'm sorry that this first chapter is a little rocky. It gets better in the next ones, I promise! This chapter is mostly about introspection and Masaomi's all moody about moving, so it's not terribly happy to read.

Also, I'm sorry if Mikado's language shortcomings seem unrealistic. I'm sort of trying to compare it to my knowledge of French (okay but not fantastic), how I sometimes drop a few little words in a sentence or use a few words to describe what I'm trying to say since I don't know the exact single word (ex. sing at the karaoke bar vs. sing at the drink building for shows), and how difficult verbs and their forms can be for me.

Parts of this are gonna get very angsty and real, because I like to write about orientation issues (seeing as I have dealt with them and continue to, so I can relate). It won't be completely about that, but it will come up several times as a bit of a reality check.

Also, if anyone would like to see any situations or plot points, let me know and I will try to incorporate them! ^w^

Edit: 23/07/11, fixed 'kowaii' to 'kowai' :S Whoops! Thanks to Tears Parallel for the correction!