Disclaimer: Ronin Warriors is not mine, but they have my love.
Summary: Keisuke and Ryo at a party. Ryo is a dangerous man to have near fire. Specifically tells the story of the scar on Ryo's arm from part six of "Persuasion".
Warnings: Fear my original character romances. No sex, but somebody says "fuck." My friend tells me this is bizarre.

Candlelit Dragon

Jinko dropped them off outside the backdoor, pulling out of the driveway before they could ask her for the host's name because her friend/cousin/girlfriend had called en route asking for more chips and dip.

Keisuke shrugged it off, more used to anonymous friend of a friend of a friend parties at unfamiliar houses than Ryo ever would be. He lead the way inside, turning the doorknob after nothing more than a cursory knock. Ryo followed him, asking if there'd be music. He never remembered the bands, but he liked the volume and the dancing.

"Jinko's friends are witches," Keisuke said, patting at his hair with an absent hand, "Not real, we-are-misunderstood, Wiccan witches, but bored, it-sounds-cool witches."

"What?" Ryo asked, hesitating in the doorway when no one came to greet them or even to tell them to get the fuck out. Either one would have been more... comfortable. "What does that mean?"

"It means no glam rock, Ry. They're probably trying to summon up the dark wraiths of another world. I don't know. Everyone will be high."

Ryo frowned. Keisuke asked what the fuck was up with the expression, but then he said, "Ah, here we go!" as he found the door to the basement. Ryo came the rest of the way into the house, following him down the stairs.

There were candles everywhere, burning brightly among the guests, on the defunct fireplace, on tables and on the floor where they sat on plates to keep the wax off an old brown rug the color of burnt flan. The furniture was surprising commonplace, continuing the color study of over-cooked custard. A more appropriate gothic black had been added in a sheet draped over one of the couches and a few tablecloths under the bowls of snacks and punch.

Sure enough there was a small group of men and women in the middle of the floor trying to raise a demon.

Not all the guests were paying attention, but some were hanging about the edges, offering suggestions about the placement of the participants or the writing on the stylized circle someone had painted on another black sheet spread out beneath the hopeful summoners, most clothed in black, at least one dressed as a Shinto priestess, another in a hasty costume of a Buddhist monk. Everything was spoken with an air of great weight.

A tall woman who had been sitting silently by the circle, her eyes closed in unfathomable wisdom, opened them when Ryo and Keisuke came down the steps. "Oi," she called, "Did you bring the chips?"

Ryo was staring at the candles and the people on the floor with disapproval so Keisuke said, "Jinko's gone for them."

"Alright," the woman said, and seemed to forget they were there.

Keisuke went to the table with the food, returning with an orange paper plate of cookies and the last of the chips and dip. "Hey," he said softly to Ryo, "Let's go find someplace to watch."

Ryo followed reluctantly. "You don't think they're going to do anything with that... thing?" He nodded at the grade school art project the witches were sitting on.

Keisuke pulled him down onto a pile of cushions against the wall. "No, but it could be fun, right?"

"Unless they actually do what they're trying to do," Ryo muttered, leaning back against Keisuke's chest when the other man tugged at his sleeve. He turned his head to the side a little and saw that Keisuke was looking at him oddly. "What?"

"I keep forgetting you're superstitious," Keisuke said. His frown was somehow amused as much as thoughtful.

Ryo stiffened. "I'm not."

"You so completely are. And even if you're not, you're into herbal medicine and all that weird grandfather crap so it's the same thing."

Somebody turned up the trance music that had been playing softly in the background. The woman in Shinto robes started chanting something indecipherable.

"What will they do," Ryo asked, "when nothing happens?"

"Nothing. They're going to sit there for a while, probably until Jinko shows up with more food, and it will be some kind of inner spiritual experience for whoever has enough popularity points to do it this week. You can bet one or two will think they've spoken to some higher being. Or lower, if demons are in vogue." He looked down at Ryo, asking, "Are you bored?"

Ryo shrugged, unimpressed by any of it. "Why do they think any of this is going to work? It's a mix of – "

"Popular culture," Keisuke supplied, smiling.

" – that didn't exist a decade ago and they want to call ancient power of... of things that they wouldn't survive if they did come. This is so stupid."

Keisuke was looking at him oddly again. "A lot of them are high. That smoke in the corner over there isn't cigarette smoke, and some of them took something more serious before they showed up." He opened his mouth, shut it again.

"What?" Ryo demanded.

"I just... I just realized that you don't think it's not going to work because the whole idea is so absurd it's funny. You think it's not going to work because they're doing it wrong."

Ryo hesitated, unable to deny it but thinking he had to. Keisuke shrugged, looking back to the circle of mystics where they sat swaying in time with the music. Candle light glinted off the gold paint of their demon-summoning circle.

"Fed up yet?" Keisuke asked. "We can go – "

He was cut off when somebody in the circle screamed. The gold paint was flaring up in a trail of sparks and flame that scorched the ceiling at the same time the electricity went out.

Ryo stared, shocked into inaction and trapped by Keisuke's embrace.

Except for the meager candlelight, there was nothing to see by but the glare off the flames still growing over the black cloth. Some of the circle members and the guests were shrieking, scrambling back while others stared up at it in awe. Keisuke's arms went deathly tight around Ryo's waist, still too surprised to be horrified at the ball of flame that was twisting slowly in front of them, unfolding into the supple body of a serpent as it extended short flickering limbs with delicate claws of fire.

The dragon's nostrils hissed white steam, coal-black smoke burst and billowed from between the crumbling embers that formed its scales. It lashed out with its burning tail, slashing the painted circle open with a smell of burning cloth, blackening the rug beneath and lighting up the dark room with a sudden flash of flame.

A few more people screamed, some of them running up the stairs to get away. Someone, it looked like the tall woman who'd asked about the chips, tried to hit it with a candle stick, but an explosion of heat and air tossed her back against the wall. The dragon flicked its long whiskers of fire in amusement.

When the intolerable heat hit his face with the breaking of the circle, Ryo did not panic, feeling the power within the creature that was kin to his own. The dragon turned its head in the sudden unpredictable motion of flame, obsidian eyes locking onto Ryo's blue. Its feet touched the ground, winding across the carpet, baring the tiled floor underneath it in a trail of ash.

"Fuck," Keisuke whispered into Ryo's ear, desperate and terrified, "I'm not high." Ryo put out his arm and the dragon, no bigger than house cat, stepped carefully onto it.

Perched there, its claws pinpricks of heat against his skin, the dragon burned softly, the flames licking along his arm but leaving no mark. He felt Keisuke hide his face against Ryo's neck from the heat and the smoke.

The dragon opened its mouth in a puff of steam, revealing gold teeth unmelted by its inner furnace. "My lord, why do you mingle with charlatans?" it asked, the room reverberating with the unreal depth of its voice.

"Oh my god..." Keisuke breathed, lifting his eyes to stare despite the smoke that had turned their whites an angry red. He coughed against Ryo's neck.

"I don't know," Ryo said to the dragon. "They didn't seem like they'd do any harm."

The dragon paused, saying nothing at all just long enough that Ryo knew something was wrong, but by then the dragon's tail was already wrapped tightly around his arm. Suddenly the fire was no longer sparing him but eating, devouring, digging into his flesh like a bright star of hurt and Ryo screamed.

He flung up his other hand because there was suddenly a sword in his fingers, called by his pain, pulling itself into existence and tearing through the brittle core of the dragon's body.

It shrieked now, flames bursting out along the blade, meaning to consume it. But the sword belonged to Wildfire, and instead, the blade consumed the dragon.

Ryo dropped the sword when the lights came back on, the remains of the party scattered, some terrified, others staring at the scorched floor in stoned awe.

"Ryo," Keisuke said, and then when he couldn't think of anything else, "Ryo – Ryo, that was – "

Ryo stood numbly, his burned armed limp at his side. He didn't dare look at it, leaning over instead to blow out two of the candles by the circle before kicking them over on top off the burned rug.

"Ryo," Keisuke insisted again until Ryo stared at him, at a loss. The rest of the people were starting to react, to look like they recognized him as the one the dragon had gone to, had called "My lord," and by whose hand had died.

"You were high," Ryo said.

"High?" Keisuke repeated.

"They spiked the punch. You're still high." He was a horrible liar, saying something so obviously stupid while looking at Keisuke with huge, blue eyes.

"Oh, ok," Keisuke said, dumb. He stared at the katana on the floor. Ryo couldn't remember how to send it back to where it had been, so he picked it up with his good hand before he turned around and went up the stairs.

The kitchen was empty. He put the sword by the sink before he brought up his burned arm to where he could see it. A lot of the skin was gone, grotesque blisters already forming among the blood and char. He swallowed back sickness at the sight of it.

Keisuke came up behind him, staring the burn and at the sword sitting on the counter next to a blue checkered dishrag and a spice rack. "I didn't have any punch," he managed, voice stretched and cracking. Ryo turned to look at him sadly.

"No," he said. "You didn't."