The feast stretched long into the night, unhurried and warm, the kind of gathering that didn't so much end as slowly dissolve — people drifting off in ones and twos until the fire burned down to embers and the music faded into quiet conversation and then into nothing at all.
Nathan learned from Genzo, sometime during the later hours, that this happened once a month. A single night set aside from everything else — from the training, the missions, the ever-present awareness of enemies on both horizons. The date itself carried meaning: it marked the anniversary of the day they had arrived here, tired and hunted, and decided to call it home. One month at a time, they remembered that they had survived.
Ayame, it turned out, was invited every time. She came when she could, and when she did she stayed the night rather than make the journey back to Minato in the dark. Nathan didn't find that particularly surprising. She had a way of belonging to places that weren't technically hers.
