Heyyyy....I'm about to ruin your day. We all know how Dewdrop was turned from Water to Fire, but I wanted to share something my brain cooked up last night. Angst incoming, I fear. I'm going to put it under the cut so people can choose to ignore it if they want.
The summoning chambers of the Ministry were never meant for comfort. They were cold, oppressive spaces of blackened stone and echoing silence, smelling of ozone and ancient, stagnant magic. For Dewdrop, the air had felt like needles against his skin long before the ritual began.
He had been glowing with a secret, a heavy, humming warmth in his lower abdomen that had nothing to do with fire. It was spring, the breeding season, and he had spent weeks in a blissful, aquatic haze, his womb filled with a gelatinous clutch. He could feel them, ten small, translucent spheres anchored to his uterine wall, pulsing with the slow, steady heartbeat of Quintessence. He hadn't told Aether yet; he wanted to wait until the first stirrings of movement, until he could press Aether’s large, lavender hand against his belly and feel the life they had made together.
Then Nihil had come for him.
The rewrite had been violent. It wasn't a transition; it was an erasure. As the forbidden rites tore through his essence, stripping the water from his veins and replacing it with a searing, volatile flame, Dewdrop had screamed until his throat bled. He felt the fire ignite in his core, a sun exploding where a cool pond had once been.
And then he felt the clutch.
The heat was instantaneous and absolute. The gelatinous fluid that protected the eggs didn't just evaporate; it boiled. He felt the sudden, horrific contraction of his womb as the moisture was sucked out of the eggs, the protective membranes shrivelling and scorching. He had curled into a fetal position on the cold stone floor, sobbing and clawing at the ground, feeling the life inside him being cooked alive by the very element now coursing through his heart.
The weeks that followed were a blur of agony and denial. He played his Stratocaster until his fingertips split and bled, trying to drown out the silence in his gut. He avoided Aether’s gaze, unable to bear the sight of those violet eyes—eyes that looked at him with such unwavering love and concern. Aether knew something was wrong; he could smell the scent of smoke and grief clinging to Dewdrop's skin, but Dewdrop pushed him away, snarling and snapping, his new fire-temper shielding the hollow ache in his chest.
The "birth" happened in the dead of night, in the solitude of his room. There was no water to birth in. There was no soothing pool to ease the transition.
Dewdrop collapsed against the foot of his bed, his breath coming in ragged, scorched gasps. He didn't feel the sliding ease of a healthy clutch; he felt something jagged, something dry and hard scraping against his cervix. He groaned, his fingers digging into the mattress, his body convulsing as it tried to expel the dead weight.
When the first egg finally emerged, it wasn't a translucent, shimmering pearl. It was a blackened husk. It looked like a piece of charcoal, charred and misshapen, the shell cracked and brittle. There was no movement inside—only a dried, shrunken mass of what should have been a pup.
One by one, they came. Charred. Shriveled. Dead.
He sat there on the floor, his legs shaking, staring at the pile of blackened stones between his thighs. He reached out with a trembling hand to touch one, and it crumbled under his fingertip, turning to grey ash. He let out a broken, keening wail that echoed through the Ministry, a sound of pure, unadulterated loss.
The door creaked open. Aether stood there, his large frame casting a long shadow across the room. He had heard the scream. He took in the scene—the blood, the ash, the shattered look in Dewdrop’s eyes—and the realisation hit him with the force of a physical blow.
Aether didn't speak. He couldn't. He simply crossed the room and gathered Dewdrop into his arms, pulling him tight against his chest.
Dewdrop sobbed into Aether’s neck, his fingers clutching at the other ghoul's tunic, his body racking with tremors. "They're gone," he choked out, his voice a raw whisper. "Aether, they're all gone. I burned them. I burned our babies."
Aether closed his eyes, pressing a firm, lingering kiss to the top of Dewdrop’s head, his own tears dripping onto Dewdrop’s ember-toned skin. Aether held him with a desperate strength, as if he could somehow shield him from the memory of the fire. He didn't tell him it would be okay, because it wasn't. He just held him amidst the ruins of their first family, the scent of ash and heartbreak filling the room.
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