Notes: Because I love silly Japanese wordplay, I arbitrarily decided that the 23rd day of March, April, and May should be days that I devote to possibly my rarest of rarepairs, Maki/Mikan. (I'm not sure it even has a ship name...?) Last month I doodled a picture that I put on my Twitter, so I figured that this month I'd finally post (part of) this fic I've been planning for literal years...!

This story is part of my soulmate AU, and is technically a side story of Blue Marble (which is in itself a side story of WDWMOSATOK!) but it stands on its own well enough that you really don't need to read either of those first. The only thing you're missing is the explanation of how soulmate marks work in my AU, and it's nothing really revolutionary: both members of a pair have a matching mark somewhere on their body, and once they meet some cryptic script materializes near their mark.

The title of the story comes from the song Merry Christmas by BUMP OF CHICKEN. Because this is kind of a Christmas-y story. Which I'm posting in April. Don't question it.

I hope you enjoy!

Decorating with the Stars in the Sky
Part 1

The commercial phantom of Christmas always lingers upon Japan long and early. Convenience stores start taking reservations for Christmas cakes as early as late September, before temperatures have even had a chance to fall any significant amount, and preorders for chicken dinners generally aren't far behind.

None of that ever mattered much to Mikan. Festive Christmas feasts and cakes were a foreign concept in her home, so the approaching Christmas season always remained outside the scope of her attention until the weather would completely shake off the lingering heat of Japanese summer sometime around early November. Perhaps it was no coincidence that it would be just about the same time that Christmas decorations started to go up at the hospital where she volunteered.

Maybe she was a little airheaded; she would always realize, in retrospect, that she had already heard "Last Christmas" over convenience store speaker systems several times while stopping in for dinner, but it never truly hit her until the nurses were hanging up tinsel in the waiting rooms, replacing the jack-o-lanterns in the pediatrics ward with tiny Christmas trees and gingerbread houses.

Mikan liked Christmastime at the hospital; it actually made her happy, excited. She loved to see the way that patients' faces would brighten, even just a little bit, when catching a glance of the decorations adorning what would otherwise be a bland, too-sanitary hospital room. Most importantly, the in-patient children became so excited by the upcoming holidays, thrilled to the point of momentarily forgetting any pain with each decoration added to the ward.

Normally, Mikan's tasks were little more than running errands and delivering messages, sometimes fetching one or two pieces of innocuous equipment—as a student volunteer, she wasn't authorized to do any treatment, and she was too clumsy to be trusted to carry anything potentially dangerous, and even then, not too much at once. Around Christmastime, though, her tasks were a bit more involved, a bit more fun—deliver these gifts donated by a local charity, read that Christmas storybook to the children, arrange those cookies that were donated by the nearby bakery.

Even in areas of the hospital that perhaps didn't have the best insulation, where continually opening and closing doors to the outside kept the winter chill creeping in, Mikan was shuffled around to enough places that her body was always kept plenty warm.

Volunteering at the hospital was meant to be a distraction, something to keep her away from home and focused on something she truly enjoyed, but Christmastime was when all those other worries truly left her mind in favor of making sure that all the patients had an enjoyable holiday season.

The decorations didn't all go up at once—it was a gradual process throughout November, starting in the nurse call rooms then working outward into the front-facing areas like waiting rooms, and then spreading throughout the hospital buildings like tinsel ivy creeping along a wall, converging mainly in the pediatrics wards.

Mikan enjoyed lingering around the children's areas whenever she could, to see the way that their smallest, most vulnerable patients would glow with excitement despite perhaps having not much else to be happy about while hospitalized. If time allowed, she would sometimes greet them kindly and engage in small talk, but on that particular day, with her arms full of Christmas lights and on a mission to bring them to the maternity ward, she didn't have the time for that. Shaking herself from her reverie, Mikan rushed towards the pediatrics exit and hoped that she wouldn't trip over any small children.

Of course, she didn't trip over a child. It was, instead, the trailing edge of the very Christmas lights she was carrying that found itself wrapped around her ankle and, caught off-balance, she stumbled forward.

"Ah— whaaah, watch out...!"

"Hey—!"

With barely enough time to register what appeared to be a walking tower of towels in her way, she fell into the pile of terrycloth and brought down with her whomever had been carrying them.

"Ahh, I'm so sorry!" she cried, immediately scrambling back to her knees and bowing apologetically to the girl she had knocked to the floor. The girl sat up among the towels, long dark pigtails cascading down her deep red school uniform to fan out upon the floor around her, and pinned Mikan with a sharp crimson glare.

"What's wrong with you?! Do you want to die?!"

"Yessss, I'm so sorry, I'll just go ahead and die now—!"

The other girl blinked at Mikan, dumbfounded, as if that was the last thing she had expected to hear in response to her threat.

"I really am so sorry!" Mikan blubbered, feeling tears gathering in her eyes. Her right ankle hurt a bit—perhaps she had twisted it—but she couldn't worry about that at the moment. It didn't matter what sort of injury she had, not when this person she didn't even know was so angry, angry enough to order her to die, and if that's what it would take to make earn forgiveness then—

"Wh— wait, wait," the other girl said, cutting in on Mikan's thoughts. "I didn't really mean... That's just a bad habit of mine, I don't actually..." The girl trailed off, her brow furrowing as she turned her gaze instead to her own right ankle, rubbing it through her sock.

"Ah— oh no, did you hurt yourself, too?!" Panicked, Mikan jumped to her feet—and that wasn't the pain of a twisted ankle, she realized upon putting weight on it, but more of a skin-level tingling, so maybe it was just a friction burn or—

"No, that's... that's not it..." The pigtailed girl frowned down at her ankle for a moment longer, muted realization slowly spreading across her face. She glanced up at Mikan again, accusingly. "Show me your ankle."

Mikan reflexively jerked away, hands going protectively to her right side even though she couldn't reach down to her ankle while standing. "I— I... n-no!" she said, scrounging up the courage to be defiant of that, at least. "Not— I won't— anything but that!"

"You're being ridiculous." The strange girl stood up on her own then, tapping her right foot against the floor and nodding approvingly before looking Mikan straight in the eyes. "I'm asking you to let me confirm that we have matching marks."

"M-marks?!" Mikan shrunk back, the situation finally beginning to register. Was this girl... this girl was trying to imply that...? Mikan shook her head, with growing intensity as her defiance grew. "No! I won't— I won't show it to anyone!"

"Then at least describe your mark to me."

"I— I don't—! I don't have a mark!"

"Then why are you acting in such a way?"

Terrified and intimidated, Mikan took several steps back, quickly stooping back down and grabbing one end of the Christmas lights to pull the rest toward her—the bulk of the mess was at the other girl's feet, but she wouldn't dare approach her again. "I'm sorry, but I don't— I can't— I have to go!" She hurriedly scooped up the last of the lights and spun around to dash down a flight of stairs, deciding to take a more indirect route to the maternity building.

"Hey—!"

Shaking her head, Mikan rushed down the stairs, nearly stumbling and tripping again on the last few steps but managing to keep herself upright this time.

The hospital was supposed to be her refuge. A place where she was able to forget about anything that was bad, or scary, or wrong.

She wasn't supposed to meet someone who shared her soulmate mark there.

Mikan wasn't meant to have a soulmark. There was no way there would be anyone in this world that was paired with her, so the fact that there was a reddish-purple flower on her right ankle was wrong. A fluke. Just a cruel trick of fate. It might be there on her skin, but surely no one in the world would ever have her match.

That was what Mikan had always been told, so there was no reason not to take it as truth. It only made sense, after all. Mikan was filthy, disgusting, not worth anyone's time. The only attention she was worth was cruelty, and that was fine. But that wasn't befitting of someone who had a soulmate, so the logical conclusion was that she didn't have one at all.

The fact that Mikan unwrapped her leg in the bathroom to see delicate soulscript spread beneath her mark, stark burgundy against the pale, puckered scar tissue, didn't mean anything. It was a fluke. It wasn't real.

And she couldn't ever, ever let anyone see.

Mikan had never seen the girl with pigtails at the hospital before. She wasn't part of the hospital staff, and she wasn't any regular patient that Mikan knew of, so she convinced herself, desperately, that she was a one-time patient and they would never happen upon each other again.

Unfortunately, fate wouldn't have it that way, and Mikan was distressed to find that the girl was back the very next day, arranging a tray of hypoallergenic cookies in the pediatrics ward when Mikan stopped in to deliver a message to one of the nurses.

Spotting her, Mikan tried her best to evade the girl's notice, but as if she had some sort of homing beacon on her the girl's gaze locked on to her immediately. Something sharp flashed in her bright red eyes, and with a squeak, Mikan quickened her pace. Maybe she could completely avoid having to interact with her if she moved fast enough.

"Hey."

Mikan's wrist was captured, and she cried out, jerking away as if burnt by a brand. "I'm sorry, I'm really sorry—!"

"I... didn't mean to surprise you like that," the pigtailed girl said, eyes widened and her tone perhaps a bit less accusatory than it had been initially. She quickly retracted her hand, bringing it up to fiddle with one of her pigtails, and Mikan noticed that the girl's crimson eyes had softened to something a bit more unsure. "I actually... wanted to talk a bit. And, uh. Apologize." She paused, her eyes searching Mikan's. "You've been apologizing so much, it's kind of unfair."

Mikan shrank back. "I— I'm sorry..."

"See? Just like that." The girl sighed, released the pigtail from her fingers to toss it back over her shoulder, and shrugged. "Look, I think I scared you before, and I really... didn't mean to. I guess my way of speaking can be a little forceful and off-putting sometimes, and it makes some people uncomfortable, so... I'm sorry. Let's start over." The girl gave a slight, awkward bow. "My name's Maki Harukawa."

Mikan stared, failing to comprehend what was happening, until the girl stood up straight again, raising an eyebrow, and it occurred to Mikan that she should probably introduce herself as well. "Ah... um! Well, I'm—!" She bowed low, at nearly a ninety-degree angle, deep enough that her long hair fell forward to the trail on the floor. "I'm so sorry for the rudeness! I'm Mikan Tsumiki...!"

"Ah— you... You can stand back up," Harukawa said, sounding a bit embarrassed. "We're equals, as soulmates, so there's really no need—"

"I don't have a soulmate!" Mikan insisted, popping back up into a standing position.

Harukawa fell silent, her gaze calculating, flickering down to Mikan's tightly-bandaged right ankle for a moment before meeting her gaze directly again. "Are you sure?"

"I— I'm positive!"

The air was uncomfortably silent between them for a long moment before suddenly Harukawa stooped and began rolling down the thigh-high sock on her right leg.

Panicking, Mikan slapped her hands over her face to obscure her view, her face growing warm. "Wh— wh— what are you—?!"

"Do you have a rather Victorian view on exposed legs, then?"

"I— no, it's not that, I just—"

"You know what I have hidden under my sock, then." Mikan sensed Harukawa standing back up, so she chanced a glance through her fingers, only to feel her breath freeze in her lungs when she saw that her sock was still rolled down.

It was bunched up at the ankle, but the familiar sight of purple flower petals peeking out above the fabric told Mikan all that she didn't want to accept.

Harukawa must have noticed Mikan's discomfort, because with a sigh, she knelt down and pulled her sock back up again before standing up and fiddling with her bangs restlessly. A nervous tick, whispered the part of Mikan's brain that was intensely attentive to others' ailments, though the part of her determined to see Harukawa as a threat was larger and louder. "Can I ask why you're so spooked by all this?"

"I— I— I'm not spooked!"

Harukawa gave her a rather unimpressed look—the kind of look that one might give a young child being caught in an obvious lie. But Mikan wasn't lying. She might have deserved to be looked upon that way anyway, but she wasn't lying. She didn't have a soulmate. She didn't. Why wouldn't couldn't this girl understand that?

"I— I really don't have a soulmate. I can't," she tried again.

Harukawa's eyes narrowed. "Don't you have a soulmark?"

Mikan shook her head, her hair fanning out wildly about her. "It's— it's just a fluke! It's an ugly mutation that appeared on my body, it can't possibly mean—"

"So mine is an ugly mutation, too?"

"Of course not!" Shocked, Mikan willfully brought her gaze to meet Harukawa's for the first time. "I would never be so— I'm sure your mark is lovely and wonderful!"

Harukawa pointed a finger towards the bandages on Mikan's right leg. "Then, if ours are identical, shouldn't you say the same about your own?"

Mikan fell silent, dropping her gaze again, and pulled her hands against her breast, curling in on herself. "I... no, that isn't..."

After a long beat of silence, Harukawa gave a heavy sigh and began combing fingers through a pigtail again. "This is getting ridiculous," she breathed.

"I— I'm so sorry—"

"Stop saying that."

"Y-yes, of course! I'm so sorr— I mean, ah!" Mikan clapped her hands over her mouth. "I'm sorry, I said it again...!"

Harukawa's fingers, twined within her own hair, tightened their grip as her frown deepened. "...Look," she said finally. "I don't want to make you uncomfortable. It's not like this whole soulmate thing is that important to me either, I've always been just fine being—" She cut herself off, expression twisting into a contemplative frown, before she continued. "If it makes things easier for both of us, I can leave you alone for good and we'll never have to talk again."

Mikan's eyes widened and her breath caught in her throat. Leave her alone? For good? Never talk again? Her clasped hands began to tremble. That's— the thought of that, of yet another person writing her off as nothing, and not just any person, but this person... She wasn't Mikan's soulmate, Mikan didn't have a soulmate, but still, the thought of being ignored by this person—

Apparently reading some sort of answer in Mikan's silence, Harukawa dropped her hands and gave a curt nod. "All right, then, we'll do that. We might still cross paths here sometimes, but I'll make sure to never—"

"Wait!" With a boldness that Mikan didn't even realize was anywhere inside of her, she shot her trembling hands outwards and gripped the hem of Harukawa's uniform top before she could step away. "P-please, don't...!"

Harukawa blinked down at the fingers gripping her blouse, eyes locked on the same point as Mikan's. She finally sighed again and moved to release herself from Mikan's grip before thinking better of it, halting just shy of touching Mikan's hands. "I'm... not that good at this sort of thing, really," Harukawa started, and when Mikan raised her gaze to the girl's face, she saw that her cheekbones were growing quite red—not nearly as red as her uniform, but somewhere approaching that. "But if we're going to avoid the subject of... that," she shifted her right foot, crossing it behind her left leg as if to further obscure the mark that was already hidden. "Then, would you... do you want to be friends?"

The suggestion was so unexpected, so foreign to Mikan's ears that she dropped the fabric between her fingers and took a step back again. Friends? Having friends, in itself, wasn't a completely foreign experience to Mikan, albeit still a relatively new one—she wasn't sure how, but she had found herself accepted into a group of friends after entering high school—but that had just happened without her realizing. But this... this sort of thing... "N-no one has ever asked to be my friend before," Mikan said in a tiny voice, mostly to herself.

"Yeah, well I've never asked to be anyone's friend before, either," Harukawa muttered, fingers twitching—seeking a pigtail to fidget with again, Mikan guessed. "Usually annoying people just cling to me without asking permission first."

"I— I— I'm sorry I'm so annoy—"

"Do you want to di— I mean— can you just shut up?"

Mikan flinched backwards, giving a tiny squeal. "I'm sorry...!"

Harukawa closed her eyes with an expression that made it obvious she was already regretting trying to befriend someone but like Mikan, but even so, she asked, "So do you want to be friends, then?"

Mikan was dumbfounded. She still had no idea why this girl would want to be her friend—would even go so far as to ask, which she admitted herself she had never done before—when Mikan was so detestable, so unworthy, and obviously such a pain for Harukawa to deal with. And yet... yet, with this person, she couldn't help but want to be selfish. Just a little bit selfish, and—

"Y-yes!" Mikan forced from her lips, before she could think through all the reasons she should answer the opposite. "Y-yes, please... I would be honored to be your friend!" She fumbled for her cell phone, extracting it from the pocket in her skirt and presented it to Harukawa with another low bow. "L-let's trade contact information! And... and please treat me well from now on...!"

From somewhere above her head, Harukawa gave a soft chuckle, mostly exasperated but, if Mikan wasn't being more hopeful than she ought to be, perhaps a little good-naturedly amused. "I told you, you don't have to be so formal." But the phone was carefully plucked from Mikan's fingers, and in its place Harukawa presented her own. "Go on, then. Give me your contact info, too."

Over text, Mikan learned little by little about what kind of person Maki Harukawa was. She was a second year in high school, the same as Mikan, though she attended a co-ed school several wards away. Normally she wouldn't be anywhere near that area of Tokyo, and naturally Mikan was most interested to find out what brought her to that particular hospital, so once she felt comfortable enough to ask a question of her own, that was the first thing that she brought up.

Apparently, Harukawa had been brought up in an orphanage, one of the very lucky few to have been adopted into a healthy, loving family after just a few years in the nightmare of Japan's foster system. Many of the children that she had grown up with, however, hadn't been so lucky, and with the support of her new adoptive parents, Harukawa continued to volunteer with the orphanage to help those less privileged children grow into well-adjusted adults, in hopes they would be able to stand on their own once they were cast out at the age of eighteen.

That still didn't entirely explain Harukawa's presence at the hospital, but Mikan cut in there, a bit panicked by the barrage of text messages appearing on her phone screen. "Are you really okay with telling me all this?" she typed out, afraid that Harukawa hadn't realized how open she was being. She barely knew this girl, but she hadn't gotten the sense that she was normally so forthright about such things.

Harukawa's text messages paused for a minute or two before Mikan received a short, "It's fine. It's not a big deal."

"But it is!" Mikan insisted. "Something so personal like this... why would you want to tell it to someone like me?"

The pause was longer this time. The undulating dots indicating that Harukawa was composing a message appeared and disappeared several times, before another text finally popped up on the screen.

"I'm fine with it. Because you're my friend."

Friend. The word had Mikan freezing up, still so unused to hearing someone describe her that way so frankly, until another message followed it up.

"But if you're uncomfortable hearing about this, I'll stop."

Mikan considered that for a moment, humming indecisively over her phone as she pondered the suggestion. It didn't bother her to hear it, exactly; on the contrary, if Harukawa found it cathartic to talk about it, then it would be rude of Mikan to tell her to stop, right? And if Harukawa for whatever reason found Mikan to be a reliable person to talk about it to, to find it comforting to tell her about it... well, that just made Mikan feel... she felt...

Happy, maybe?

She wasn't sure if that was the right word, really, but it was enough for Mikan to type back, with trembling fingers, "If you're okay with someone like me hearing, then I don't mind listening."

And so Harukawa continued.

Apparently, a young boy at the orphanage had recently been diagnosed with an illness that brought him to that particular hospital. Harukawa didn't specify what the illness was, but it wouldn't be life-threatening as long as it was treated properly, and the hospital where Mikan volunteered happened to have the specialists needed. The in-patient hospitalization would be a lengthy one, at least through the Christmas and New Year, and Harukawa had decided that, during that time, he needed a familiar, friendly face to visit every few days, instead of just a cold, aloof case worker doing the bare minimum required for the job.

So for the time being, at least, Harukawa would be visiting the pediatrics ward a few days a week and helping out wherever allowed.

"That's so nice of you!" Mikan enthused once she had the full story. "You really are such a wonderful person, Harukawa-san."

"I wouldn't say I'm wonderful, really," came Harukawa's response, curt and brusque. "I'm just normal. Anyone with half a gram of empathy in their cold bones would do the same."

Maybe that was true; Mikan couldn't imagine anyone doing such a thing for her if she were in the boy's situation, but if she were on the other end, she probably would do the same as Harukawa. Though her motivations were far less noble, surely. Still, that Harukawa would do such a thing for one little boy... Yes, she truly was a wonderful person.

Far too wonderful to be Mikan's soulmate, if she had one. Which she didn't.

Whoever was Harukawa's soulmate would need to be an equally wonderful person, and Mikan crafted a text message that said as much.

For some reason, though, her finger hesitated above the "send" button, hovering in mid-air, and in the end she backspaced the entire thing and instead bade Harukawa a good night, thanking her for sharing her story and ending the conversation there.

There was no use in stating the obvious, anyway.

Notes: Hoping to update with the second/last(?) chapter of this fic on the 23rd of next month...!