RIP, Ambriel.

One of my betta fishies died this morning.

I'm a little surprised at how upset I am. I'm not normally one to get all mopey at the loss of a fish, but Ambriel was ... special. He was, quite frankly, the most hateful fish I've ever had, and his hostility towards every living creature he saw endeared him to me like nothing else.

He attacked the cup all the way home from Petco, hammering the plastic where my fingers were so hard that my fingertips were vibrating from the force of his wee fury. When I put him in his tank, he flared up and attacked the sides, still trying to take me out. Then he spotted Asmodai, my other betta, and spent the next few hours trying his damndest to get at the other fish. (Asmodai, for his part, flared once, half-heartedly, then went about his usual fishy business.) When he wasn't busy trying to kill everything and everyone, he built a MASSIVE bubble nest.

As it turns out, his nest-building and his constant showmanship at Asmodai heralded the beginnings of a long-running unrequited gay love between those two. I had been mistaking a lot of Ambriel's flaring and behavior patterns as hostility; as it turns out, those particular displays as well as the quality of his nest-building was much more Marvin Gaye in nature than L7.

Over time, I moved their tanks around the house, trying to keep them in the warmest areas. Ambriel treated all this as a grievous personal affront, swishing his fishy hatred at me every time I came into view. He continued to parade for his dim lover in the other tank, though, and Asmodai even built a teeny little nest in return. If I put the tanks too far apart, they would get rather depressed, so I simply got into the habit of making sure they always had one wall touching so they could see each other.

I'm going to miss that fish. Asmodai already misses him; he's moping about his tank, mostly lying about on the gravel. He even ignored his food, something that he *never* does.

Wish I could find those pictures...