Nobody moved to leave right away.
For a long while, the ruined street simply held them, dawn light spreading slow and gold across cracked pavement and scattered wreckage, the whole exhausted line settling into whatever patch of rubble happened to be nearest. Nobody seemed to mind the dust or the debris anymore. After tonight, comfort had stopped meaning anything close to clean. Somewhere further off, one of the hospital fighters had produced a battered canteen from somewhere and was passing it around, water rationed carefully but shared without a second thought.
Joon was the first to actually laugh, a short, disbelieving bark of a sound that cracked something loose in the rest of them too.
"We actually did that," he said, staring up at the brightening sky like it might disagree with him. "We actually, genuinely did that."
"Barely," Echo said, though he was grinning despite the arm still hanging wrong at his side.
"Barely counts," Joon said. "I'll take barely."
