Memory did not vanish all at once.
It thinned.
At first, the changes were subtle enough that he could pretend they weren't happening. A word would slip just out of reach, its meaning intact but its sound lost. An image would surface without context—someone laughing, a room filled with light—and fade before he could grasp why it mattered.
He told himself this was exhaustion.
The encounter with the Gyarados had taken more from him than torn fins and scraped scales. For days afterward, his body demanded rest, pulling him into long stretches of half-awareness where thought softened and blurred at the edges. Hunger returned more aggressively during those periods, forcing him to choose between feeding and drifting dangerously close to unconsciousness.
Still, the river did not wait.
He resumed his routines slowly, carefully, moving through familiar routes with a new caution born of experience. The river seemed unchanged, flowing with the same impartial patience as before—but *he* was not.
Something inside him was wearing away.
---
It began with faces.
He realized one day, while resting beneath a fallen branch, that he could no longer clearly picture the people he had once known. He remembered *having* known people—friends, acquaintances, voices that had mattered—but when he tried to summon their faces, they appeared indistinct, like reflections seen through fogged glass.
This unsettled him more than hunger ever had.
Faces were anchors. Proof that his past had been real, populated by others who had recognized him as human.
*If I lose them,* he thought, a dull panic stirring, *what's left?*
He forced himself to concentrate, pushing against the lethargy that crept in whenever he tried to think too hard. He replayed fragments deliberately, as though rehearsing for an exam he couldn't afford to fail.
Rain on asphalt.
A crowded street.
The sound of an engine idling.
The details came—but without emotion.
They felt like facts learned secondhand rather than experiences lived.
---
He noticed the river more keenly now.
Not because it had changed, but because his perception of it had sharpened in compensation. Where human memories faded, sensory awareness intensified. He could feel minute variations in current strength, predict subtle shifts in sediment before they happened. He sensed approaching Pokémon long before they came into view, their movements echoing faintly through the water like distant drums.
The trade was not fair.
But it was efficient.
*This body prioritizes the present,* he realized. *The past is expendable.*
The thought frightened him.
He did not want to become something that existed only moment to moment, stripped of continuity, identity eroded into pure reaction. Without memory, what separated him from the other Feebas? From instinct alone?
He began to resist.
---
At first, resistance took the form of repetition.
He chose a single memory and returned to it obsessively, replaying it whenever his body rested or drifted. It was an unremarkable moment—standing near a window at night, city lights reflecting faintly on glass—but it felt *solid*. Real.
He clung to it.
Each time he revisited it, however, it changed slightly. The lights blurred. The shape of the room softened. The sense of self standing there weakened, until eventually the scene felt more like an image observed than an experience remembered.
Frustration surged.
*Stay,* he commanded the thought, pushing against the current of forgetting.
The memory slipped through him anyway.
He felt suddenly, acutely tired.
---
Other memories proved even more fragile.
Language frayed at the edges. He still *thought* in words, but the words grew simpler, less precise. Complex ideas took longer to form, requiring effort that drained him physically. Sometimes a concept would arrive whole—clear and sharp—only to dissolve before he could examine it fully.
Emotion followed the same path.
He remembered fear easily; the river reinforced that daily. Hunger, pain, caution—all of those remained vivid. But subtler emotions dulled. Nostalgia lost its warmth. Regret lost its bite.
Even grief faded into abstraction.
The loss terrified him.
*If I forget why this hurts,* he thought, *I might stop caring that it does.*
---
One evening, as light filtered weakly through thickened sediment, he encountered a moment that crystallized his fear.
A small Feebas drifted nearby, younger and clumsier than most. It struggled against a mild current, its movements inefficient and poorly timed. Watching it stirred something faint inside him—an impulse to intervene, to guide, to *help*.
The instinct surprised him.
Before he could act on it, the current shifted slightly, easing the younger Feebas's struggle. The moment passed. The other Pokémon drifted away, unaware of how close it had come to needing assistance.
He remained where he was, unsettled.
Why had he wanted to help?
The question lingered longer than the feeling itself.
In his human life, empathy had been reflexive. Automatic. Here, it arrived sporadically, weakened by layers of instinct and exhaustion. It no longer shaped his actions unless he forced it to.
The realization was quiet—but devastating.
*I am changing,* he thought. *Whether I want to or not.*
---
That night—if night could be defined in a world where light faded but never vanished entirely—he rested in a narrow alcove carved into the riverbank. The current there hummed softly, steady and unthreatening.
He focused inward.
*What must I keep?* he asked himself.
The question felt urgent, almost desperate.
He could not preserve everything. The river, the body, the relentless demands of survival made that impossible. Something had to give.
Slowly, reluctantly, he began to sort.
Names were already slipping away. Faces followed. Specific places blurred into generalized impressions. He let them go—not willingly, but consciously, acknowledging their loss rather than fighting blindly against it.
What remained, stubborn and intact, surprised him.
A sense of unfairness.
Not rage. Not bitterness.
But the quiet certainty that being overlooked did not equal being worthless.
That idea had followed him from his human life into the river, unchanged by scales or hunger or fear. It resisted erosion where everything else wore thin.
He held onto it.
*As long as I remember this,* he thought, *I remember myself.*
---
In the days that followed, the erosion continued—but it no longer felt entirely uncontrolled.
When a memory surfaced, he examined it quickly, assessing whether it anchored him or drained him. Some he allowed to fade. Others he reinforced, tying them to present sensations so they had something to cling to.
The process was imperfect.
Some days, he woke with a dull sense of loss he couldn't name. Other days, he felt oddly light, unburdened by the weight of a past that no longer pressed so heavily against him.
He did not like the trade.
But he accepted it.
Acceptance, he was learning, did not mean approval. It meant survival without denial.
---
The river carried him onward, indifferent to the quiet struggle unfolding within a single small Pokémon. Algae grew and vanished. Predators passed. Currents shifted with the weather.
And within that constant motion, a Feebas moved forward—lighter in memory, heavier in awareness—clinging not to the details of who he had been, but to the one truth that refused to wash away:
He existed.
Not because he was chosen.
Not because he was remembered.
But because he endured—and *knew* that he did.