Lullaby in G Minor
/I hear the summons

Word Count: 945
Rating:K
Notes:Yeah, I have absolutely no idea where that title came from. Entered as a contest entry for shinypoke, an LJ community dedicated to the only Pokemon better than regular Pokemon.

x x x

He didn't really know a lot of things, and he wasn't really aware of a lot of things. Certainly, there had been many days before this day since he found his way out of his egg, but suddenly he opened his eyes and was aware. Not just of the dim sensation of light and water, but of what he was, and what the others weren't.

They had lived here for many years, safe from harm- Pidgey, Spearow, the sharp feet that came from above the edge of the Lake. Also the food-that-was-not-food, that when brothers and sisters fed on they flew out of the water and were never seen again.

The larger ones, mothers and fathers who had escaped the terrors beyond the sky, told the pod that they were all alike and special. They should be proud to be the greatest tribe of all water creatures: who else swam with such slow confidence? Who else could splash up water in such an elegant stream?

But he was not alike, and his mothers and fathers and sisters and brothers were unkind enough to ignore his difference. While they had a lovely red hue, all he was given by the Great Dragon in the Sky was a bright yellow- and now he knew that it was his contrast to the blue of the Lake made the fishermen even more determined to feed him the food-that-was-not-food.

He longed to be red- the red of his family, his tribe. Yellow was for the land-walkers who could not live in the water. Yellow was a colour of death, of the sky and sun, of a place where no Karp belonged. Once a Karp, always a Karp, they said, and he was certain that the same was true for the colour of a Karp's scales and fins.

x x x

He was fooled into eating the sky-food once. He had been young then, and not aware of very many things. The memory is distant but real- he remembers seeing the juicy Caterpie, hanging suspended as though it had fallen from a tree and was blown into the Lake. He had swum up and caught it between his two front teeth, and instantly was gripped by an unknown emotion when the food was not warm and tasty, but cold and hard as Skarmory feathers. There was the sensation of being pulled upward, a reverberation of racial memory that instructed him to swim down, swim down, pull away from the thing that was lodged in his mouth.

Karp are suited for water but (like all kinds of creatures) can live in the open air if necessary. He had flopped around madly as two pairs of eyes looked down with a kind of unhappy satisfaction, and had a long string of words he didn't quite understand shared between the two of them. He heard 'gold' and 'red' and 'radio' and something about a team of space-ships, but eventually, as if his yellow was too disgusting even to be appreciated by a human, they picked him up by the tail and threw him back into the Lake.

He remembers the shock of hitting the water and the pleasant cold feeling as he slid under. But more than that, it was that day that made him truly aware that there was something strange about him that made even the land-walkers dislike him. There had been times when he wished that he could have asked the Older Karp about the men from Team Radio, but decided not to and broke a sacred Karp rule: all Karp who return to the Lake from the Sky must make it known to the Pod.

x x x

The other Karp began to ignore him after the Sky incident, and without the communal food gatherings he grew weak and angry. Strong, too. Somewhere lost in those days he learned how to beat his body against the rocks in the Lake and crush them to powder.

He wasn't angry at the pod, because they had every reason to hate him. Karp don't like strange Karp. Karp do what Karp must do. Karp are born Karp, live as Karp, die as Karp in the same Lake that they had lived in for much too long. But he was different. He was special. He was the Gold Karp.

x x x

He wasn't aware of the song until it was much too late, but as he spent his days lost between a longing to become red like his Karp-mates and a desire to free himself from his own destiny, it kept inching its way into his head. It was a strange kind of noise that swam in waves.

He tolerated it for a while and tried to live in the dim stupidity of his brothers and sisters, but as the music got louder it grew more insistent, keeping him awake for long nights and following him wherever he swam. It made him angry. He hated the sound, and the more he hated the sound, the more he hated everything. And the more he hated everything, the angrier he got until one day the music got so unbelievably annoying that he cried out in anger and evolved on the spot.

Karp don't usually evolve unless a trainer comes along and forces them too, since Karp are content with being Karp. But as his body grew long and his teeth grew out and his scales flushed to a beautiful, fiery, Karp red, he knew that this was what he was destined to be. He would become the Dragon of the Sky, the Lord of the Lake.

Lord of the Lake of Rage! The Red Gyarados!

x x x