A/N: I think it's clear from the title that I have no self-control. But try not to jump to conclusions.

Ladies and gentlemen, my first attempt at merging the worlds of the genii Sherlock Holmes and Artemis Fowl. Closely follows the events of "The Last Guardian" and precedes the start of the BBC Sherlock series.

"Artemis."

The young man had been standing at the window, staring into the distance, when he heard the heavy tread of his bodyguard in the hallway. Now he half-turned, all traces of his thoughts wiped from his features.

Thoughts would have been one word for it. Resentment was another. Strange how often the two ran together lately.

"Here again, I see."

Impatience crossed the boy's face. Another heart-to-heart chat threatened.

"Yes, Butler." He turned back to the portal. "Your powers of observation have lost none of their potency in my absence."

Butler snorted. At least some things hadn't changed. Although this conversation would be a lot easier if Artemis wasn't clever enough to see it coming. The big man took another step toward the window and tried again.

"Artemis. It's been a month. There's no reason to wait any longer. Everyone has suffered enough, your family most of all. Your parents...the twins...they deserve to have you back."

Artemis stiffened imperceptibly. It had been said now, what had hung on the air for weeks. No one wanted to push him. None of them were stupid enough to believe they could understand. No one tried to pry, not even Foaly or Mulch, the most socially challenged of our jolly little band, apart from myself, thought Artemis bitterly.

He kept his voice light in reply.

"Good idea, Butler."

Butler drew a startled breath, but before he could open his mouth Artemis continued.

"I'll just skip up the front step and say hello, shall I? Or do you think it would be better to have a witty line prepared? After all, this is the sort of opportunity that only comes once in a...lifetime." Or two, he amended silently.

Butler rolled his eyes. Maybe that was true for normal people. Something about this scenario was giving him deja vu, not that Artemis could be expected to remember that. So the manservant only gave a grunt and repeated stubbornly, "Putting it off will make nothing easier."

The boy gave a shaky laugh. "There's little danger of anything being easy, Butler." Turning away again, he added in a more even tone, "Leave me now...please."

Butler placed a broad hand on his charge's shoulder. "At least think it over, Artemis."

Give my regards to Holly and Foaly, thought Artemis as his bodyguard exited. He took a deep breath and turned toward grey sky outside the portal again, trying to quell the rush of red anger that flooded through him. He'd never felt this kind of fury...before. Adrenaline was for people like Butler and Holly. Now these mood swings were a common enough occurrence. And it was fairly obvious what that implied.

They think I'm imbalanced, he thought. They have no idea.

Holly sighed and settled back on the sofa. This used to be a state-of-the-art facility, a crowded, bustling shuttleport. Now, thanks to the frequent meddling over the centuries of the Mud family nearby, it was inhabited only by creaky, abandoned equipment and the occasional cockroach. At least the lounge was still comfortably furnished. And she had to admit that they couldn't have asked for a better hiding place. No one came here except the occasional safety inspector, who always scratched out a few notes on hazards so the Council could decide there was no budget to do anything about it. The inspector wasn't due for a decade at least.

Abandoned shuttleports were low on the Council things-to-do list, and no wonder. Renegade fairies were more likely to be taking advantage of recent chaos to make a few crocks of gold belowground than hiding away on the surface, and it would be an intrepid human indeed who could discover the old port beneath its layers of cam-foil and concealment spells. Sure, some humans were a little more open-minded after the chaos of seven months ago, but few of them really believed it had been magic. That was preposterous. Surely there was a better explanation.

And few things were more powerful, Holly had discovered, than Mud Man delusion.

Speaking of which...

"So how'd it go?" she queried, as Butler entered the lounge and with a sigh stretched his bulk across three fairy-sized sofas. Foaly entered at the same moment, kicking the door to his makeshift laboratory closed with a back hoof. He'd been in there all morning, making improvements to his dubiously legal biotech experiments. The Council was cautious about messing with genetics and limited permits to a few specific labs, all operating under surveillance and strict conditions. Genetic engineering, cloning; both big no-no's to private scientists.

Well, we've blown that particular rule right out of the water.

Foaly's pretense of obeying this law included staying tight-lipped around Holly, since technically both were still LEP. Watching Foaly struggle to keep his mouth shut had been one of Holly's chief amusements over the past month. As if the centaur could last five minutes without showing off his brilliance to someone.

Keep an eye on Foaly, Trouble had said with a wink as Holly left the office to take her first vacation time in half a century. Even Trouble Kelp, the most gung-ho fairy law enforcement chief in centuries, had to admit that Foaly's little creations came in handy. His swarms of ARClights were still used on the sly to supplement the Haven city alarm network, although most officers had taken to calling them DragonEyes—a habit that Holly adopted mainly to incense their creator.

Holly chose her own sofa, returning her attention to Butler as Foaly sidled up behind them. "How'd it go?" the centaur echoed.

Butler grunted and stretched out further. "How do you think?"

Holly rolled onto her back and closed her eyes. What did I expect?

"Well, you can't blame him," Foaly muttered, trying to mask his disappointment. "How would we know what it's like to come back from the..."

Biting back tears and suddenly furious, Holly leapt to her feet. "Not blame him! That's all we've done for the last month! I don't care anymore what he's been through! The Artemis we knew had the courage to face the world! The Artemis we used to know threw himself into certain death for..." she choked.

"Yes." Butler's huge hand gripped her shoulder unexpectedly. "He wasn't afraid to die for his friends."
Holly's fist slammed against the sofa, hard enough to bruise through the thin cushion. "No, he wasn't." She closed her eyes as an unexpected tear traced its way down her cheek. "He shouldn't be afraid to live."

Foaly stamped and whinnied softly. Reversion to equine habits was unusual for him, given the years he'd spent working alongside two-legged fairies; a telling mark of his discomfort with the situation. Elves were made of stern stuff, and Holly was no exception, but they had a far wider emotional range than centaurs. One with which he was eminently unqualified to cope—even in a best friend. Still, Holly had never fallen apart before. Not when Artemis collapsed in the closing of the magical gate that destroyed Opal Koboi, not in the six months of mourning that followed, and not when he awoke in his new body and turned piercing blue eyes on her, empty of recognition.

Nor in all the weeks since, during which only bits and pieces of his memory fell into place. Holly was certain the majority was lost forever. Artemis would never recall their adventures, the times they'd fought side-by-side to save the world, never know what they had once meant to one other.

Foaly was less sure, but kept his ideas to himself. Better to let Holly believe that his time behind closed lab doors was spent on illegal genetic experiments than to raise false hopes. He watched her now with concern, exchanging a panicked look with Butler. Females are so emotional. What would Caballine do in this situation?

Foaly reached out a hairy arm for an awkward hug and pulled the crumpled elf close to him, feeling sobs shudder through her.

"It's all right, Holly," he muttered gruffly at last, conscious of the inadequacy of the words. "Everything will be all right."

Leaning on her friend's shoulder, Holly gave a final shudder and looked up through red-rimmed eyes. "The Artemis that saved my life. Is he still in there?"

A floor above, the Irish boy was wondering the same thing.

"I chose this."

He spoke the words aloud into the darkened room.

Nothing his friends said, none of the stories they related or the video clips they showed gave Artemis the whole story. But it was clear that whatever brought him to this had been his own choice. Artemis could follow his logic backward, admire his own scheming resourcefulness, deduce circumstance, all without recollection. There was only one part of the story he couldn't wrap his brain around.

Because whatever part of him had drugged Holly and walked into death in her place, and whatever part had been so desperate to return that he'd tied himself to the physical world for six months, he could no longer find. Nor could he recall the memories that had once been strong enough to tether a spirit to the mortal realm.

Yet I did it. They must have been potent indeed.

Logically, the motivation still existed, if Artemis could find it within himself. If he was still the same person. Perhaps he ought simply to play along, feign the emotion he should be feeling until memory returned it to him. Go back to his family. Live a normal life.

Normal.

Right.

Artemis Fowl had never been normal, and there was no reason to believe the return of his memories would change that.

If they ever return, he reminded himself angrily.

I chose this! his brain screamed at him. Artemis paced the room, fury pulsing through him again, blood pounding to his brain, quickening his breathing and blurring the edges of his vision with nameless colors. Before, hadn't he been calm and disconnected? Had he lost the ability to effortlessly examine a situation beneath the lens of logic?

Emotion fogs the intellect, Artemis reminded himself, unconsciously beginning a breathing exercise that Butler taught him when he was nine.

In all fairness, he did remember some things. Most of his general knowledge of the world was intact, but his personal life was nearly a blank wall.

Everything that's most important, torn away.

It was true that, though he lacked conscious recollection, the faces of his friends were familiar to him. Butler's nightly custom of cleaning his Sig Sauer, for example—in spite of the choking monotony and utter lack of violence that plagued their days. Disassemble, oil and sight down the barrel, reassemble. The actions were smooth, monotonous, a gratingly familiar ritual that itched unrelentingly at Artemis' thoughts until he found an excuse to leave the room and take solace in his own company—just as depressing, perhaps, but less exhausting.

There were other things too. Foaly's scowl whenever he caught Holly smirking at his tinfoil hat. The traces of sadness in Holly's tone, the way her shoulders fell limp the few times her old commander, Julius Root, came up in conversation. Mulch's questionable dietary practices. Again and again, Artemis found their habits and quirks unsurprising, their company a constant source of déjà vu. That alone was enough to incline him to believe them.

But not to trust them.

Their friendship, loyalty, even adoration was for the Artemis they'd known before. How long would it last?

No, trust would only return with memory. Belief would have to do for now. Because as mad as the tale was, Artemis did believe them. There was the inescapable logic of it, for one thing, not to mention a video sequence...from himself...that corroborated much of their story. But there was more.

Six months of clinging to a highly magical point on Earth's crust was a mental and spiritual challenge of herculean proportions. To occupy his mind and tether himself to the place, Artemis had delved deeply into the traces of ancient magic there. They dated back well before the battle of Taillte, and in his desperation not to lose hold of the Earth Artemis was pulled ever deeper into its history. He learned things lost to humans and fairies alike for thousands of years, and because the nature of the connection was magical, so was most of his newfound knowledge.

In later years, Artemis' instinctive knowledge of the fairy peoples would make him a valuable target for overenthusiastic historians. For now, it was his only real asset. Feeble reparation for what he'd lost.

And sometimes it only made the past more real than the present.

The only memories I have, and they aren't even mine.

Artemis finally stopped at the window and rested a clenched hand on the sill. He opened it slowly, staring at the lines and creases in his palm. Were they the same hands he had been born with? Doubtful. Cloning was by no means a precise science. There was no reason to suppose that his body was wholly unchanged. Or even his personality. Six months clinging to magical dirt will do that to a person.

Even disregarding the memory loss, which had apparently been preceded by a fairy mind wipe, multiple jaunts through the space/time continuum, and a magical psychiatric illness resulting in split personalities. Artemis groaned.

If amnesia is the last of my mental troubles, then I'm a fairy.

He gazed moodily out of the portal again, where a few short miles away the remainder of the Fowl family was sitting down to breakfast.

Angeline Fowl was no stranger to loss. Her husband's kidnapping and presumed death years before left lines of grief on her delicate features that never completely faded despite his miraculous return. And now, the still-fresh loss of her eldest son was that nightmare reincarnated. This time she was determined to hang onto sanity for her younger children's sake. Only her husband could read the suffering in the shadows of her face.

He reached out to her now under the table and gave her hand a light squeeze. Angeline returned it and forced herself, again, to eat. Breakfast, lunch, dinner. The cycle never ended. Like refueling a car in preparation for the junk heap.

She downed fresh-squeezed orange juice and poached eggs robotically, barely noticing the pleasant blend of flavors. It would be a long time before Angeline tasted more than sawdust in every mouthful.

Family mealtimes were special for an entirely different reason. They'd rarely had them with her eldest son—before his disappearance Artemis Sr. was generally busy arranging enterprises of questionable legality, and their son was engrossed in projects of his own. Save for Butler, his constant but deferential companion, Artemis had grown up far too solitary, and far too quickly. Not to mention far too independent for his mother's liking. Somehow that made this time with her younger children all the more precious.

Angeline surveyed the boys across the table. Beckett's face and blonde hair were, as usual, coated an indeterminate shade of grayish-brown unbecoming to a Fowl heir. He had either been sampling his own mud pies before breakfast or furthering his newfound interest in the art of camouflage. Angeline prayed it was the latter. She turned her gaze toward the other twin and swallowed, hard. Myles Fowl was his older brother in miniature. The same unconscious shrug as he pushed his dark hair back from his brow, the same slight frown wrinkling his forehead as he analyzed the contents of his breakfast bowl.

"Mother?"

The same formal address. A child of five should say Mummy.

"Yes, Myles?" She kept her voice light.

"This meal is entirely too deficient in Vitamin D to suit my needs. Vitamin D is highly important for proper development at this point in childhood."

Artemis Fowl senior rolled his eyes, putting his newspaper aside. "Beckett doesn't seem to have that problem."

Myles cast his brother a slightly contemptuous look. He raised one eyebrow, and Angeline felt her heart contract again with grief.
"Beckett also lacks my ambition. I am far too busy to spend my time in the garden getting sunburnt."

Myles felt his hand start to knead unbidden at the tablecloth, but he didn't mention the other reasons he stayed inside. Partly sorrow. Mostly fear. In his mind, the fairies never really went away.

But with the same childish logic that turns pulled-up bedcovers into a fortress, Myles sensed that indoors they couldn't reach him.

Artemis excused himself as quickly as possible from the obligatory morning meal and returned to his vigil on the shuttleport's empty upper deck. The issue that Butler had brought up would not be dropped. Even Mulch's usual unsavory jokes weren't sufficient to break the tension. And every eye had darted between him and Holly all throughout breakfast. It had confused him, for a split second, and then he understood. Soldier she might be, but she was still an elf, incapable of hiding the fresh traces of grief on her face. It didn't take a genius to divine the cause. She was at her limit. They all were. One way or another, their dubiously legal little Artemis Fowl support group was about to get broken up.

And if that happened, Artemis preferred it be on his own terms.

Which left a couple of options.

I can stay here, he thought. And feign delight at reuniting with a family I don't know.
If my memories return, all will be well. If they don't, I may grow to love them anyway. Artemis sighed. Right now, I barely know the meaning of that word.

How simple it would be, if things worked out that way. How perfect. Artemis was not superstitious, but during the last month he had gradually begun to accept the common misinterpretation of Murphy's law as a principle of life, or at least a working hypothesis.

Things will not be so simple. And I will not spend a lifetime pandering to the person I no longer am.

That left option two. The one he'd considered for weeks. Almost unintentionally planned and fleshed out, in desperation during those moments of full-blown panic when his mind tried to trace its way along old paths and found roadblocks instead. Artemis had tried to push back. Rationalized that he'd remember, that these people would again mean to him what he apparently meant to them. And realized, with some remorse, that he would actually miss them. Artemis could hardly doubt the sincerity of Butler's and Holly's friendship. Foaly was always good for intelligent conversation, or a companionable afternoon of research in the lab. Even Mulch had his endearing qualities.

But if I'm not going to make a grand reentrance to my own life, thought Artemis with a twisted smile, I suppose I'd better find a new one.

Myles gave the stepstool a final shove and jumped up, glancing covertly down the lavishly carpeted hall. Father was probably in the study. Butler...well, who knew with Butler anymore. And Mother would be at her usual place in the garden. Gazing at that rosebush, the odd formation that had cropped up as if by magic. Vacantly twirling petals between her fingers and tracing its leaves with her eyes as though the thing could bring her son back. She might not even realize it, Myles thought. But every day for nearly a month now her meanderings had brought her there.

Shaking off his thoughts, the little boy tilted his head back and studied the painting's frame. Something about it wasn't right. It was too thick. Almost imperceptibly so; a fraction of an inch thicker than the adjacent frames. Was it made that way on purpose? Heavy duty, meant to protect something? If that were the case, he'd hardly be able to remove it by himself.

Myles thought about enlisting Beckett's help, but instead reached up and pulled, nearly toppling off his stepstool as the wide frame swung out smoothly. The metal face of a safe stared down at him.

Myles frowned. This wasn't right. It was too obvious. And while Myles was far from certain that he really knew his elder brother, he had never heard Artemis accused of lacking subtlety.

The little boy swung the heavy picture back and forth a few times, brow wrinkled, studying its thickness.

It was best not to make them wonder. Artemis conducted himself as he had for the past month. It was easy enough to assume a brooding and melancholy air, as his building excitement was tainted with regret.

Foaly was mildly surprised not to see Artemis enter the lab that day. He'd looked forward to showing him a new specimen he'd been working on: a mosquito engineered to inject a harmless, mildly radioactive substance into the victim's bloodstream. A very user-friendly control would remotely guide the insect's actions and glow when it sensed the radiation nearby. The tracking device was a mere offshoot of preexisting technology—and, for that matter, far less practical than slipping a tracker-pill into the suspect's boot—but Foaly couldn't hold back a hint of smugness at the way he'd managed to marry the insect's biological workings to his brain-stimulus microtechnology.

He thought about searching Artemis out, but the shuttleport lifts hadn't worked in decades, and like most centaurs he hated narrow stairwells. Ah well, thought Foaly, another little project to keep me busy. Should be simple enough to rig up a neutrino generator to the lift. The other project, the one in the back room, as Foaly liked to call it, had to wait a few days anyway.

Light footsteps sounded and the door swung open. Foaly hastily slapped closed the mosquito case and leaned against the counter, feigning innocence. For once Holly barely noticed. Her hair, which during the months of anxiety had grown out from its usual buzz cut, was damp and tangled over her panicked hazel eyes.

"Artemis! Where is he? Have you seen him?"

Foaly had a very bad feeling in the pit of his stomach as he shook his head, unconsciously pawing at the ground with a back hoof.

Trust the hooves, his old granddaddy used to say.

Artemis had waited for Butler to make his way to the manor for his daily security check before making his move. The plan was far from complex. Therefore no one who knew Artemis Fowl would expect it.

Taking a deep breath, Artemis swung the modified wingset onto his back and rolled open the well-oiled portal. He was some two stories above the grassy hillside. If he weren't wrapped in cam foil and any Mud Man wandered by and chanced to look up, he would doubtless appear some sort of young god hovering in the sky. Albeit a god in oxfords and a pinstriped suit.

Even if they had anticipated his desertion, Artemis' friends would never suspect him of this route. From what he had gathered of his own well-established reputation for athletic ineptitude, Artemis realized that the sight of himself strapping on wings would be more shocking than that of Mulch Diggums riding a troll into battle.

Perhaps he was more sure-footed in his new frame, or perhaps the frustration of the last month overrode all fear, but as Artemis gazed down at the grassy stretch below he experienced only exhilaration. He listened to the motor catch and begin to purr, and then threw himself from the ledge.