Something a bit more light-hearted after yesterday's fic! I seem to be incapable of writing Team Wild Fang at Christmas without getting them all into mischief. There are call-backs to several scenes from An Inadvertent Advent, unsurprisingly considering that Nile managed to get gingerbread as one of his words…

Nile

Three jobs.

That's all he had to do. Three jobs. If he could just manage to get those done, Christmas/Yule/Hanukkah/Solstice (what were they celebrating again?) would go off pretty much without a hitch. Which, considering that they were Team Wild Fang and chaos always seemed to follow them around at this time of year, would be a first.

Job number one: clear out the spare room. Jokes about bunk beds and sleeping in the wilds aside, there really wasn't room enough in his house for Benkei, Demure and Kyouya unless the spare bed was accessible, and Nile had spent enough time around his team to know that a sleep-deprived Kyouya was no-one's idea of fun.

Job number two: make sure there is enough fuel in the generator to at least run the heaters, if not the lights. Nile's house could be crushingly cold in the winter season, and whilst he was used to basically hibernating in the kitchen for three months of the year, giving his team-mates frostbite at Christmas time was a pretty good way to ruin it for everyone.

Job number three: don't let my team-mates find the gingerbread.

That was the job he was looking forward to the least. Between Demure's eyesight that could spot a grain of flour at fifty paces, Benkei's talent for discovering food in strange places and Kyouya's somewhat unnerving ability to know when Nile was hiding something, this was going to be interesting.

And he had the grand total of three hours before Team Wild Fang descended on his home.

Okay, easy one first – checking the fuel. He'd bought extra, so it was easy enough to make sure that the generator had been topped up fully, which would be at least a week's supply unless they went crazy with the heating.

The spare room was… less easy. By the time he had managed to clear it enough that three people could sleep in there, he only had half an hour before Demure's plane was due in, which coincidentally was exactly the length of time it took to walk to the airport. Panicking just a little bit, he stuck the box of gingerbread on the top shelf of the larder, figuring that he could always move it to his sock drawer when he got back.

.

Demure took a deep breath as soon as he walked in through the door, and then his face fell a bit. "Oh, that's a shame," he said.

"What?"

"I was hoping to smell ginger. I've been daydreaming about your grandmother's gingerbread for weeks."

Nile pretended to be affronted. "You think I'd cook my grandmother's famous gingerbread for a bunch of ragamuffins like you?"

"What's a ragamuffin?" Kyouya asked, rolling the word around in his mouth. "It sounds rude, I like it."

Nile shrugged. "It's something the foreign tourists used to yell at me and my brothers when we were children and they thought we were in their way. It's English, I think. And yeah, probably rude. I never bothered to find out what it meant."

"Ragamuffin," Kyouya said again, this time with relish, and Nile laughed at the pleased look on his face.

"But no gingerbread?" Benkei said, unfortunately getting the conversation back on track. "Oh."

The gingerbread was their Solstice present, not that Nile needed them to know that. "Nope. No ginger left." That was also true.

"I forgot how much I like your house," Demure said, trailing a hand across the woven panels Nile had put up around the walls to keep the chill out. "It's just like being in our tents, a little home from home."

Nile spread his arms out. "Make yourselves at home," he said. "I'm going to the market to grab some vegetables."

"I'll come with you," Kyouya volunteered, surprisingly. "I've been sat on that plane for hours, I need to move."

"There's food in the larder," Nile told the other two. "If you set the table, I can get everything ready as soon as I get back so you can eat."

It was only as he closed the door behind him that he remembered where he had hidden the gingerbread. Surely it would be fine, though? It was on the very top shelf, hidden behind the jars of preserved vegetables. No-one could grab that without the step he'd used, which was hidden in the kitchen.

No such luck.

When he opened the door an hour later, a bag of vegetables slung over his arm and Kyouya behind him carrying a small sack of bread, the first thing he saw was the box of gingerbread in the middle of the table, and Demure with half of a gingerbread giraffe in his mouth.

Nile could neither hide his expression nor the box. Oh dear.

"Nile," said Kyouya sternly as he took in the scene, putting the bread down on the sofa. "I thought you said there was no gingerbread."

Nile gave up. There was no hope of keeping secrets with these guys anyway. They knew him so well. "That was your Solstice present. I thought I'd hidden it on the top shelf, I forgot how tall Benkei is."

"...oops," said Demure around his mouthful, and swallowed. "I'm so sorry, Nile, I thought you'd just forgotten about it and it's so good I couldn't help it."

Nile sighed. "I did tell you to make yourselves at home," he said. "I guess that means helping yourself to what's in my larder."

"We can always make more," Benkei suggested. "Unless you were telling the truth about having no ginger."

Kyouya and Nile both gave him a nearly identical look of horror. "Benkei, don't you remember what happened the last time we tried to make gingerbread? We nearly set fire to Gingka's house and two of us got locked in a wardrobe for four hours."

"Oh yeah." Benkei's eyes went wide. "That was a brilliant Christmas, but never again."

"I still can't believe how many people we managed to fit into Gingka's front room for the present swap."

"Oh, presents!" Benkei suddenly exclaimed. "I've got a present I was meant to give you, Nile, hang on."

That was odd. Benkei didn't usually get Nile gifts. "You didn't have to -" he began, but Benkei was already digging around in his bag. Finally, he pulled out a strange, curved, white stick with red stripes running diagonally through it. Nile gave the strange thing a closer look. He'd seen pictures of them before, of course, hung over the branches of Christmas trees in America. But why had Benkei thought he might like one?

"It's a candy cane," Benkei explained, when he realised why Nile was giving it such a strange look. "They're a traditional sweet in America and Europe, King brought some over the last time he visited Japan and I thought you'd like to try them because you love mint so much and they're mint flavour."

Still not entirely reassured, Nile took the cane from Benkei and put the end into his mouth.

It… didn't really taste of anything, much to his surprise. It certainly didn't taste sweet, or of mint. Perhaps there was a coating that had to dissolve off first? He really couldn't see the appeal – the 'sweet' was slippery and an awkward shape and just… tasteless.

"What's wrong, Nile?" Demure asked.

"People eat these?" Nile grumbled. "They don't taste of anything."

Benkei frowned. "That's weird," he said. "They're meant to taste of peppermint."

Nile shook his head. "It just tastes… odd," he said.

Demure suddenly burst out laughing. "I know what the problem is," he said. "You haven't taken the wrapper off."

Nile blinked. Then he slowly took the cane out of his mouth and gave it a closer examination. Demure was right. The whole thing was shrink-wrapped so tightly that he hadn't even noticed that he was actually trying to eat plastic. "What's the point of that?" he muttered, biting through it until he could pull the whole thing off and stick it back in his mouth.

The first thing to hit his tongue was sugar. Okay, he already knew that the whole thing was basically made of sugar, but still. That was a bit of a shock. He didn't like sweets all that much.

The peppermint cut through at last, and Nile raised his eyebrows. Now that was better. It swept through his head like a cool breeze in summer.

"Good?" Benkei asked. Nile took the cane out of his mouth again and gave it an appraising look.

"It's… not bad," he said hesitantly. "Just… different. I'm not sure what to think. I've never had anything like this before." He offered a smile anyway. "But thanks. I like new things."

"I got the best ones they had in Japan," Benkei told him. "There's cheap ones from America, but they taste wrong, there's almost no mint in them. And I know you don't like sweets much, but you do like mints so I thought you'd like to try them, and I looked it up and you can't get them in Egypt so..."

Nile looked around at his house, so full of people for the first time in months. To his right was Demure, who was leaning back against the mat walls, all-seeing eyes closed and expression blissful as he relaxed in the presence of his team-mates. In front of him was Benkei, generous enough to bring foreign foods into Egypt just so that Nile had the chance to try them, as he could no longer leave the country on his expired passport. And to his left was Kyouya, now happily munching through the enormous gingerbread lion Nile had made for him, relaxed and happy in a way he so rarely was around anyone except his team.

Nile looked around at the only three people he ever really wanted to spend Christmas with. "Okay," he said. "Let's have dinner, then I'll go and get some more ginger. It's about time I taught you the Secret River Nile Gingerbread Recipe anyway, you're basically family at this point considering how much my brothers talk about you. You're not getting more presents though, not if you've eaten them."

Kyouya, mouth full of gingerbread lion, shrugged. "Don't care," he mumbled. "'s good."

Sweets and gingerbread, and a house full of friends and baking. There were worse ways to spend the holidays.