SUMMARY: Expansion of the last camp scene in Breath of Fire III, specifically interaction between Rei and Ryu. Spoilers for all of Eden Garden.

DISCLAIMER: I don't own anything. This simply took hold in my head, and was so much fun to imagine that I thought it would be even more fun to write down.

A/N: The title is a paraphrase of a lyric from the "Arrows to Athens" song "Dust and Gold."

All I Know Is Dust and Gold

by Alicia

The rhythmic scratch-scratch-scrape from the other side of the campfire was unusually loud tonight. Ryu had often wondered if the sound to sharpen a magical blade was different than the sound to sharpen an ordinary blade. The sound had been the earliest lullaby he had known. His earliest memories were full of horrible sounds: the grating of cage bars, the screams of miners as they burned to death, the cries of fear and hatred: "dragon!" "dragon!" He had not understood. His earliest sleep in safety, if troubled by dreams of the Brood, had been in utter silence. His earliest untroubled sleep had been to the rhythm of Rei's McNeil-fashioned blade against Rei's newest forest-found sharpening stone. Now Rei's blade was magically forged to navigate psionics and kept its exact sharpness no matter what it was used for, and Rei's sharpening stone was a piece of desert glass that probably would not have sharpened an ordinary blade. Still Rei scraped the weapon methodically, three strokes per side, switch, duck a glass shard, three strokes.

Ryu listened to the rhythm for long moments. He wandered around the tent, connecting with each of his friends. Scratch-scratch-scrape. All was normal. All was safe. That morning, Teepo had been long-dead, lost in the battle with Balio and Sunder. Now Teepo was freshly dead. Killed by Ryu's own hand. Much blood has been shed up to this point … the blood of strangers … your own blood … That morning, Ryu had awoken in an uncomfortable chemical-smelling bed in the midst of a nest of monsters – sleeping in a battlefield always troubled him, and it was particularly unnerving with the nitemares around. Now, he was to sleep in a familiar bedroll, after watching Peco sleep for as long as he liked (your power cannot heal or destroy the world) … and to wake in a world that would never again contain Teepo.

The remainder of Ryu's family scraped away against a knife that would never need to be sharpened.

It had been Rei's hand as much as Ryu's that had killed Teepo. Ryu wished that Rei had been in weretiger form at the time, so he could blame it on the tiger, so he wouldn't have to remember.

Scratch-scratch-scrape-CRACK. Two halves of a piece of desert glass fell into the fire. The fire made several loud pops before subsiding. It was a testament to Rei's expression that neither Garr nor Momo dared to approach Rei's side of the fire to reignite the flames the glass had extinguished.

There was no need for a fire in the desert, anyway.

The flames flickered almost to nothing, and the camp was left illuminated only by starlight. The desert grew much darker than the city. Ryu was accustomed to finding his way using only a sense of touch far more acute than that of an ordinary human. But he associated that sense with a power uncontrolled and uncontrollable, with breathing fire, eating whatever came his way, and killing whatever innocent random miner wandered into his path. Teepo had surrendered the power. Ryu still carried it. Power, and the hopes and dreams of an entire species. It was too big.

Without realizing it, Ryu had wandered into the territory that the other members of their little circle had been giving a wide berth. Perhaps this was right, though; perhaps they had the idea that only Ryu had the right to approach Teepo's former foster father.

Rei spoke, quietly. "I would have been happy just being a thief, but I guess," and his voice trailed off into the night. All the times Rei had questioned his own ethics flew through Ryu's mind. Was it right stealing from the rich? Was it right stealing if no one got hurt? Was it right to let the weretiger power loose on bad people? Ryu understood his friend's longing for a simpler world. Rei's last two words were almost inaudible. "Darn… Teepo."

What was Rei to Ryu? All of Ryu's earliest memories contained Rei. Fighting, joking, jumping across rooftops and debating Teepo's silly schemes to get attention. Keeping his two charges safe and fed, even when that meant he would go hungry. After Ryu had grown up, found Rei, and pulled Rei back from Rei's own uncontrollable power, their roles had reversed. Rei looked at Ryu with a kind of respect that Ryu wasn't sure he'd ever be able to earn. We won't be able to get back now…I'm impressed, Ryu…As I watched you kill the rakda, for some reason I thought of that time we fought the Nue together. Now he saw something besides respect in his friend's eyes. Emptiness and confusion, and pain.

Rei stood. "I'm going to go hunt," he said, abandoning the broken stone and holding up his magical knife. He smiled with his eyes, if not at all with the muscles of his face. "Coming?"

Grateful for something he could do, Ryu nodded and followed Rei out into the sand, leaving his companions to reignite the fire.

They killed two mutant cactuses and a scorpion without exchanging a single word. They left the monster shells where they had fallen in the desert, since one of their party would have to be at the brink of starvation to see one of the desert monsters as food, and their group was still well stocked with provisions from Caer Xhan. Ryu saw the telltale blurring around Rei's back and tail that meant that he was fighting the weretiger form. It was a familiar quirk, but unlike the months he had watched it as a child, Ryu understood what it meant.

"You can use It, you know," he finally ventured, since Rei was unusually silent. "Your power."

"I can't control it," Rei said tersely. "I'm no good."

Ryu wanted to contest this idea. Rei was … he wasn't sure whether to think 'father' or 'brother.' The people of McNeil referred to Rei and Teepo collectively as kids, and Rei had never asked for or desired any kind of adult responsibility. But he was Ryu's superior, not his equal – not through design, but through the way he had accepted another mouth to feed without a second thought, the way he left Teepo and Ryu behind to keep them safe but took it on himself to fix their mistakes. The way he gave up most of his life to avenging them.

Rei grunted and swung his knife. A mutant cactus which had previously been in one piece dropped to the ground in at least ten.

Ryu thought hard, swinging his sword to cut off a couple of scorpion claws without consciously noting the hot stings across his upper arms. "There might be times when we're not expected to be in control," he said, thinking of the way it felt to be a helpless baby dragon, unaware of other intelligent beings, unaware of anything besides pain and cold and threat. He pushed back the memories with a shudder. He didn't know what to say to Rei.

"You can't afford to think like that, Ryu," Rei said.

"Rei…" Ryu would have said more, but was cut off.

Rei transformed. He killed three scorpions at once in a spectacular burst of fury, then turned a challenging stance on Ryu.

Damn.

Ryu sheathed his sword. "Rei, it's me," he said. If Rei could learn to control his power through his grief, then Teepo's death wouldn't be meaningless. Rei's control would make it worthwhile that Teepo's life had faded away under Ryu's Aura blow…

Rei pounced.

Ryu found himself pinned under a tiger that felt every bit the monster as the Nue Chimera, or the mutant plant. This is the way he would die, then. He wouldn't turn the Brood power against another friend. He understood. This was why the Brood had allowed the Guardians to kill them. Pity he couldn't tell Garr.

Rei leapt from Ryu to the back of a huge magma monster. Ryu didn't know – and wouldn't know, he told himself – whether Rei had chosen not to kill him, or whether Rei had simply seen the bigger monster as the bigger threat.

Whichever it was, Ryu didn't intend to stick around to find out whether he truly could die rather than kill a friend. He bolted back to the campsite.

"Ryu!" Nina greeted him. She ushered him to the fire, fussing over the wound on his shoulder.

"It's nothing," Ryu said, gritting his teeth against the pain of the hot cloth over scorpion venom.

"Idiot," Nina said without her customary accompanying smack. Nina had treated Ryu as an equal and friend for so long that her eggshell treatment bothered him.

He smacked her lightly on the side, well away from her shoulder.

She reciprocated.

Ryu smiled, for the first time all evening.

"I'm sorry," Nina said. "That's a human thing you're going to have to get used to, Ryu. We're afraid of not knowing what to say. So we avoid people who have lost someone precious."

"That's stupid," Ryu said automatically.

Nina gave a small sigh. "Yeah, I suppose it is. Just as stupid as meddling in someone else's romance."

Ryu felt himself giving his second smile of the evening. "No, it's stupid to not be allowed to meddle in Beyd's romance. You did the smart thing and disobeyed the stupid rule."

"So I should disobey this stupid rule then too, shouldn't I?" Nina snuggled up next to Ryu, careful to snuggle on the uninjured side. "I just feel horrible, Ryu. I helped kill him."

"You didn't have a choice. None of us did."

"No, but he was … just a dragon … to me. You know? Teepo was your brother."

Ryu didn't know what to feel, except that he felt safer with Nina than with the others in the camp because Nina had been there, she had seen Teepo die, she had heard his last words. I just wanted to be with you, Rei, and you, Ryu, my family. Years counted the same as months, apparently. It had only been the one winter that Ryu had hunted at Teepo's side, fought for his turn in the one bed, traded berries for edible mushrooms, played pranks on Rei. Rei, who'd never asked for a turn in the bed but slept seated by the fire, weapon and sharpening stone in hand.

"Ryu? Another stupid human thing, but say something?"

"Sorry," he said.

"What are you thinking about?"

"The house must have been Rei's originally," Ryu said. "The log house where we lived. Teepo and I traded for the bed. Rei slept in the downstairs chair by the fire, guarding us."

"Were you afraid of him? Rei?"

That was incomprehensible. "Never."

"Where is he now? Do I need to ask?"

Ryu made a noncommittal noise. "He'll be okay," he said. "We're out in the middle of nowhere, there are lots of monsters to kill and Rei won't hurt us."

"Are you scared for him?"

"Terrified." Ryu felt himself beginning to shake, and it would have been embarrassing around anyone but Nina if he'd been concerned with appearances.

But Rei walked into camp then, dirty, looking exhausted but unhurt, in human form. Due to that same stupid human custom Nina had described, Momo and Garr made themselves scarce, Momo carrying Honey and Garr carrying a sound-asleep Peco, and let Rei stomp through the campsite, around the subdued fire, and into the tent.

Nina gave Ryu a little push.

Ryu wrapped his good arm around Nina's shoulders and squeezed once, then stood and went into the tent.

Rei sat on one of the bedrolls in the corner. His shoulders shook.

Ryu came over to him.

"I'm sorry, Ryu. You should stay away from me. You Brood may be cursed, but I'm cursed worse."

"That's not what I think," Ryu said, refusing to let himself be pushed away, settling just as close to Rei as he could get. "I told you to let go."

"Damn it… Teepo."

And suddenly all questions of Brood or human or power or control or the fate of the world were meaningless, and the only things that mattered were the expression of pure mischief on Teepo's face in the forest, and the feel of Teepo in dragon form, life draining away under Ryu's and Rei's combined weapons. Knowing Teepo was dead was unendurable. Knowing he had killed him was just as unendurable. Ryu hadn't cried often since finding his human form, but he recognized it. The pain in his chest, the tearing feeling of an emotion that needed to come out but couldn't come out, came from an inexhaustible spring like the fire breath that lived inside a dragon.

Could Ryu surrender to this without surrendering to the awful power of the Brood?

But just as he had found earlier when Rei had attacked him, in this moment Ryu didn't have a choice.

So they stayed there, in the tent, crying until at last the sun rose over the desert sands and brought the need to face the responsibilities of the light. There were no answers, only the pain that cries like a hurt child. And within and below that pain, holding it and them together, their family.