He knew he had a three second attention span. He tried to think about what that meant for him but was usually distracted by the scuba diver. Then she came into his life, or did he come into hers? He wasn't sure, he'd just noticed a purple piece of gravel. There was something about the pretty human girl that actually remembered to feed him when her brother forgot, he could sometimes stare at her for up to seven seconds at a time. Maybe he did have the simplest heart of all vertebrates, but both of the chambers that were it's components had found love. All night he'd think of her, he wanted to sleep but his eyelids were translucent and he could never escape the distant shine of the bottlebot's gaze upon him, before his attention was caught by the strange fake seaweed planted in the gravel.

Every morning, when she sprinkled to small flakes of food into the bowl, his tiny heart leapt as well it could, which was not very well at all. He had to have her, but how? He had no way of communicating with her, the only thing that humans understood of goldfish language was "I need more food" and that wouldn't help him because the way goldfish communicated that sentiment was by floating around the top of the bowl before being flushed down an altogether different bowl from a sudden case of death. He had once come up with the start of a plan that might have worked, but he was distracted by the castle that was bizarrely smaller than the scuba diver.

Then it all changed. One evening, the food forgetting brother wanted to take him somewhere, but she stopped him.

"Where are you taking Percy?" She asked, even using her pet name for him, shortened from Percival Q. Hieronymus.

"I thought I'd take him to the carnival." He replied. Percy had tried everything he could to communicate that she should take him to the carnival. That would pretty much be a date and he was sure that with his eyesight honed by being unable to sleep during the dark hours, he could easily win a goldfish on the Ring Toss that they could raise as their own child.

"Why?" she asked, Percy thought his hopes were dead.

"Because I love him and I think he should get out more."

"Well, I'm not letting you take him," she said, "you'll probably drop him or something. I will take him to the carnival." And that was it, Percy knew she cared, she wanted to take him on a date, they'd confirm their relationship on the Tunnel of Love, they'd get their child, he'd get a bigger castle in the tank and they could live happily ever after.

Alas, his small heart could not take the stress from the height of the Ferris Wheel, Percival Q. Hieronymus died that night. He never reached the Tunnel of Love.

--A/N--

I wrote this for the Carly Needs More Love challenge on the 5_4_3_2 lj comm. It was meant to be a little bit of funny business and I can't help feeling it's one of my most romantic fics, and also the most tragic. I was going to do a spish/goldly love triangle but it turned out 500 words were too few to write that so I went to the fishes perspective and started riffing on the utter stupidity of what get's put in fish bowls. Why is the scuba diver always bigger than the castle? This does not make sense. One of the original lines was "A sudden case of goldfish death syndrome" which I preferred but that put it at 501 words. I doubt anyone would have noticed but I would've damn it!