I did this one for myself because I think Nazca and Tochiro make cute friends and Tochiro would be the type to put up ridiculous decorations. These boys are such nerds.

Without much to do on a normal day aboard the Deathshadow, Nazca usually found himself in Tochiro's workshop. He'd carved out a little seat for himself among the piles of junk, an old wooden chest with more scraps inside of it. For hours he could just sit there and watch the man work. It was the only time the loudmouth brat was known to be able to keep quiet and still. Instead of asking a lot of questions, he just watched Tochiro tinker with whatever. He was mesmerized by the way the man could make just about anything work with just the right adjustments.

But when it came to the odd strand of lights hanging from a lengthy wire, Nazca was stumped. It obviously worked just fine. All of the blinking, colorful bulbs came on when Tochiro checked. Nazca just wasn't sure what purpose they served. The lights were pretty and all, but they certainly didn't seem useful in any way.

Tochiro tugged at the strand, one end in his hand, and Nazca watched with a smile as the man began to spin, allowing the cord to wrap around himself as it was drawn from one of the many boxes stacked in the room. This one was labeled "X-mas stuff" in an uneven scrawl that could only be the engineer's handwriting.

"Mr. Tochiro?" Nazca called as the man continued his odd dance to pull all the lights out.

"Mm-hm?" He was starting to get a little dizzy.

"What's X mass?"

The short man stopped in surprise, his vision tilting and swaying momentarily. "You know, X-mas. It's a shorter way to say Christmas since I couldn't fit it on the box."

Nazca placed his elbows on his knees and cradled his chin in his hands, frowning in confusion. "Christmas…it sounds familiar."

"Wha-? It's a holiday!" Tochiro cried. "The twenty-fifth of December! You wrap presents and give them to people!"

"Sort of like Valentines?"

"Sort of," Tochiro shrugged as he returned to spinning, the lights squeezing against his stomach. "Except you give presents to everyone, and you put up a tree."

"You put one…up?"

"Yeah, you put one up in your house or your ship – a fir tree – and you decorate it with ornaments and lights. Not these lights though. These are the big ones. They go around the outside of the ship for decoration."

Nazca opened his mouth a few times, closing it as he retracted each thought. He was trying his best to make sense of it. Really, he was. Finally, he had to give up. "So you take the tree from outside and put it inside?"

"Yep."

"And you take the lights from inside and put them outside."

"Uh…" Tochiro blinked a few times. "Yeah, that's right."

"That's just about the stupidest thing I've ever heard."

Tochiro couldn't help but laugh. "It's just for fun, kid. No need to take it all so seriously. You can help me with the lights if you want. I need to get them on before we leave this planet."

Always eager to assist with mechanics, Nazca hopped from his perch and went to pull on the remaining string of lights, wrapping them around his arm. "Won't these be destroyed when we leave the atmosphere though?"

"Nah, they're specially made, by me of course," he grinned proudly. Nazca started to glance over one to see why it was special, but the engineer urged him to get the rest of the line. It was absurdly long, Nazca thought. But the ship was also huge, so maybe that made sense. This was going to take forever.

"This is just the first roll," Tochiro said as they carried the bundles of lights out into the hall. "But don't worry. They're really easy to put on."

"I sure hope so," the scamp grumbled.

"Anyway, about Christmas. You put the presents you get for people under the Christmas tree, wrapped in pretty decorative paper. They're fun to open that way. And you can get presents for anyone you feel like. The presents can be whatever, but you have to keep the gift a secret so they can be surprised when they open it. I already got you a present, you know."

"W-what?" Nazca couldn't even remember the last time he'd gotten a gift from someone. His parents had given him things, but that had been a long time ago. He could feel his pulse speed up at the thought of something for him. Mr. Tochiro had gotten him a gift. Why? Sure, there was the holiday, but Tochiro said you only had to give presents if you felt like it.

"Of course," the man smiled at the boy's confusion. "You're part of the crew now, and so you get a present from me, though Harlock said it was a bad idea. I'm not really sure why. He got you a gift too."

For once, the loudmouth was struck speechless. The captain couldn't stand him and was always getting onto him for things. There was no logical explanation for Harlock ever wanting to get him a gift. In a daze, he nearly tripped over the tail of the lights following behind them. "I-I don't have anything to give you," he realized, dread in the pit of his stomach.

"I figured," Tochiro shrugged. "If you did have something, I'd be a little worried about where it came from. Don't worry about it. Your gift to me is helping me with these lights."

It didn't feel like enough, but Nazca nodded. He didn't have any other options right now, and he still needed to figure out something to do for the captain. Maybe he could put something back together that he'd busted up. Then again, he'd probably only break it further.

It was dark on the planet, and it would be dark for the next few months. It had a slow rotation, and the howling winds picked up flurries of snow that ate at Nazca's skin despite his clothes completely covering him. Snowflakes caught against his eyelashes and hair, and despite how used to the cold he was, he still shivered. Hopefully this wouldn't take long, or they'd both get frostbite.

"Alright, take that end you have there and throw it up toward the nose," Tochiro instructed, raising his voice over the wind.

"What!?" Nazca had been hoping for an explanation, but Tochiro assumed he hadn't heard him and repeated the instructions louder, pointing toward the front of the ship. Nazca could only guess he was crazy and dropped the bushel in his arms into the snow, holding onto the end. He didn't have much of a throwing arm, but he reared back and threw so hard the muscles in his arms seemed to snap. "This had better work!" he yelled.

Tochiro laughed as the first light shot toward the end of the ship as though it were magnetized. "Of course it works. I made it. They're programmed to lock against the ship in a specified pattern, and they use just a small amount of energy from it to light up."

The lights flew up from where Nazca had dropped them, tracing the edges of the ship in a bright, glowing pattern. He was so amazed by Tochiro's ingenuity that he nearly forgot that the man had wrapped himself in the second half of the strand. "Oh, hell," he hissed, as he grabbed the string hanging off the engineer. "Get them off!"

Tochiro realized it belatedly too and hurriedly began spinning as Nazca ran around him to remove the lasso. "Guess I should have thought ahead on this one," the man laughed nervously as his footing began to slip. It was already hard to move around through the snow that nearly reached his waist, and the dizziness wasn't helping him.

Nazca bit his tongue to keep from calling him an idiot, but a loud squeak escaped him when the line in his hands was suddenly tugged away by the pull of the ship, sending him flying a few feet before he let go. Tochiro, meanwhile, was able to slip off the last off the lights with a relieved sigh before they began to disappear toward the glowing ship. "You okay, kid?" he called toward the shivering form lying in the snow.

"I'm probably dying," Nazca growled irritably.

"Well I'm glad you're not dead yet, because we still have quite a few more strands to go."

The boy decided this probably was enough of a Christmas present for the crazy engineer.

Inside the ship, Harlock sipped cider, because it was too cold for wine, and he was in the mood to be a little buzzed. There was some sort of odd clicking coming from somewhere that would last for a few minutes before disappearing. Then it would return again every half-hour or so. He guessed it wasn't anything to worry about, because the noise was pretty quiet, and none of the alarms were going off. Maybe Tochiro was making adjustments, but he certainly hoped not. It was too damn cold for that. The only reason they'd stopped here was to hide out for a while. Going out into that storm hadn't been part of the plan.

He finally realized his mistake when Tochiro and Nazca crashed through the doors of his room, covered in slush and soaked through their clothes. They both shivered so much that their teeth chattered, making them stutter every word. "Quit hogging all the cider," Tochiro huffed, snatching the kettle from its hot plate. "The poor kid's about to keel over." That being said, he poured himself a drink before shoving the kettle over toward the frozen boy.

"I hate the cold," Nazca muttered, placing the kettle back and snatching the captain's mug from the table.

"Excuse you," Harlock frowned. Nazca ignored him, crawling into his bed and shivering under the covers with only his arm and his head out so he could sip his drink. "Excuse you," the captain repeated dryly.

"You're excused," his youngest crewman sighed sleepily.

Harlock was forced to give up on him and turned on Tochiro instead. "What were you two even up to?"

"Decorations."

The captain grabbed his friend's ear, pulling upward. "You didn't put those lights on again, did you?"

"Aw – ow ow – be a little more festive."

"You know how obvious those make us on radar, and that's a bit of a problem when we're currently in the middle of enemy territory." He shook Tochiro by his ear as he spoke. They'd been over this.

"But we can handle them. If I had to wait until we were out of this area, they only would have been on for a few days."

"I know what I'm going to get the captain for Christmas," Nazca mumbled, his mug set against the bedside table as he burrowed under the blankets. "Gonna take down all those damn lights."

"Can I get my present early?" Harlock requested hopefully.

"Hell no. Not after I spent all that time putting them up."

"Then can you at least go to your own bed?"

"No." He pulled the covers tightly over his head. "Happy X-mas. Enjoy your flamboyant ship."

In the next fic, Monono's past makes me really sad a lot.