Awareness changed suddenly - blackness swallowed Charlie so completely he was sure death had finally come, but he continued to exist. No heartbeat, no light. Consciousness faded, and it seemed almost like sleep. When he woke, he was struggling to get free of confinement, weak and confused and almost blinded by sudden light. He broke out amid a swarm of small shapes, and instinctively began eat plankton in the water.
Time passed, awareness still confused and cloudy. Charlie did not really sleep - his eyes were unblinking, he never stopped moving. As he got larger, so did many around him. And his awareness grew. Fish. The word came to mind now, along with Salmon. He was a fish. He was a Salmon. He was a ... boy?
It was almost to the point that Charlie was full grown before his memories resurfaced. Life was simple - eat, swim, eat. So little was required of the salmon's brain that there was still room for Charlie's consciousness. Perhaps the Fae had done something, but for whatever reason Charlie remembered and yet Charlie was also the fish. It was a strange combination life - it felt normal and natural to be a fish, yet he also knew he was a transformed human. He'd been swimming in a salmon run and become one of the spawning creatures himself.
And died, only to be reborn as one of his own offspring. That thought puzzled him. At least when he did think. Much of the time Charlie was just another salmon, but as more time passed and the stirrings of spawning started to rise again, he struggled to resist. Two years or more had passed though it was hard for him to be sure of time. The Fae had stuck him in a cycle of birth, life, death and rebirth as a salmon. Was that bad? Charlie got lost in instincts, and the next time he broke free of the fish mind he was already amid a school of Salmon swimming upriver. He was spawning again.