Sooooo… this happened. I was trying to write more Magicae est Potestas, but… yeah, no, apparently my muse decided that wasn't going to happen, so have this glorious mess of a crossover in the meantime! *shoves fic at readers*
Also, since daniel knows next to nothing about KHR and can't help me with stuff like canon details and continuity errors on that side of things, feel free to give me feedback on that sort of thing! Heck, leave book reviews if you want to, haha! Thank you! ^.^
Being a criminal was a truly paradoxical state of being.
There were many, many states of being that both individual humans and humanity itself could exist within. A pacifist could lash out with words that hurt worse than any bullet when properly enraged. Another could be a priest, a man of God meant to uphold holy words and cleanse churchgoers of their sins, and yet be so greedy as to rob his own pious followers. And criminals, despite often breaking, warping, and exploiting the rules of polite society, could have their own laws that they followed right down to the very last letter. Thieves could refuse to steal from the poor. Prostitutes could refuse the advances of a married man. In the deepest belly of the underworld ruled by organized crime, there were vows to be made, vows of silence to be obeyed without question.
Amongst these scions of criminals, there was one bloodline that abided by a single unique creed, a creed of three words that generation upon generation of their family had followed come hell or high water. That family was known by the name of Fowl, and their simple creed? Aurum est potestas , gold is power.
The Fowls had been dabbling on the wrong side of the law for almost as long as their family had existed. For centuries, they dug for themselves footholds and handholds in the shadowy underworld, taking root there and refusing to be weeded out, be it by the law or by other illegal factions. All manner of criminal jewels could be found on their gilded family tree – hardly a generation went by that could be called innocent or law-abiding. Burgling, racketeering, smuggling, art fraud, information brokering – the Fowls had done it all, every possible crime on the planet and all manners of illegal and occasional legal pursuits had been pursued for the sake of filling the family vaults with as much gold as was feasibly possible, and all without a single scrap of evidence to leave to law enforcement that could prove their involvement.
And of all the Fowls to ever plunder gold to line the family's pockets with, Artemis Fowl the Second was rapidly putting all his money-mongering ancestors to shame.
At first glance (a very superficial first glance), the average layman might not think much of Artemis Fowl, except possibly to note that the boy clearly needed to spend more time outdoors. He was a slight child, with sharp aristocratic features, raven black hair, and pale skin that suited a vampire more than a supposedly healthy growing boy. But any and all casual observation of Artemis Fowl stopped at piercing blue eyes, because no normal child had eyes like shards of sapphire that were so sharp you could practically cut yourself on them. And, appropriately enough, Artemis's mind was just as sharp as his eyes, perhaps even sharper.
When other children were reading Jack and Jill, Artemis had his nose buried in a psychology textbook. When other children were learning two plus two, Artemis was writing complex algebraic equations in his notebook. When other children were building stick figures with popsicle sticks and glue, Artemis was picking apart the inner workings of a computer and flawlessly putting them back together again. And when other children were roughhousing or crying or being walked circles around by adult logic, Artemis observed the world with clinical detachment and talked circles around his supposed teachers with an air of chilly superiority. And of all of these oddities, what perhaps made the boy the oddest out of any of his "peers" was that he came by every last one of these quirks honestly . (And there was no doubt in anyone's eyes that the Fowl heir did indeed come by his smarts honestly, because the one time that a teacher accused him of cheating, the boy gave the startled man a tongue-lashing so severe that he resigned that same day as a crying, blubbering mess. After that, no one dared ever accuse Artemis of cheating ever again, and many teachers surreptitiously bought rowan crosses to wear somewhere on their person. It never did them much good, but it made them feel better.)
But while there was no doubt that Artemis was exemplary at academics, the place where the boy truly reigned supreme was not in textbooks and equations, but in shady dealings taught to him on his father's knee. From the moment that his son could walk on his own two feet, Artemis Fowl Senior would teach him how to succeed when dancing on the other side of the thin blue line patrolled by the law. By the time he was eight years old, little Artemis could plan flawless heists, forge perfect Impressionist paintings that were auctioned for truly ludicrous prices, and extort and manipulate almost any person on the face of the planet. He had learned the value of having an alibi, of blackmail, of acting, of holding all his cards close to his chest until just the right moment to play them. And, in the true way of Fowls everywhere, every last one of those skills was used to make the world dance to his own tune. So excellent at crime was he that to Artemis Fowl, crime was a game, a game to see who could amass the most money in their own personal hoard, and none was better at playing the game of criminal mastermind than Artemis himself.
And then, one fateful say shortly after his ninth birthday, the game ended. Artemis Senior had set out mere days before from Dublin's harbor on his new ship, the Fowl Star , bound for Murmansk, Russia. It was a surprisingly legal business venture, especially for a Fowl – there hadn't been a single illegal good on board, just hundreds of thousands of crates of cola, and not a single criminal, not even a petty thief, in the crew rosters. Artemis's father kissed his wife goodbye, told Artemis "not to plan any heists without me " with an amused but stern smile, just like every time he'd ever left on a long trip for the family business.
This time, however, things would be very, very different. This time, days after the Fowl Star pulled out of the harbor, Artemis flicked on the television set in his room to be treated to the sight of the wreckage of his father's ship displayed on international news, and all the boy could do, for a heart-stoppingly long time, was numbly watch the screen as the news anchor painstakingly described what little was known about the catastrophe.
The ship was sunk by a Stinger missile launched from a warehouse on the docks. The cargo bay was utterly destroyed. Sixteen confirmed fatalities, no known survivors at present time. And, worst of all, no signs of the ship's owner, Artemis Fowl Senior.
This cannot be real , Artemis distinctly remembered thinking, even years later. I know my father. He took every possible precaution he could. I was there when he was doing his research. He made certain the crew was trustworthy, searched Murmansk for any possible enemies of the family that might try to take him out. There was simply no way his father had been so utterly blindsided, and certainly no way for his father to have been killed.
And yet there was the evidence before his very eyes, scrolling past on the television screen, and Artemis's sheltered little world was crumbling down around his ears.
Artemis wasn't the only one who took the news (false news, false, it had to be, his father wasn't dead) poorly. For the first few weeks following the disaster, his mother, Angeline Fowl, drifted about the manor in a daze, pale as a ghost and fraught with denial. She attempted to call her husband's phone (the line was dead), the number of the hotel where he would have been staying if he had ever reached Murmansk (he had never checked in), his bodyguard's phone (that one rung, but the person who picked it up was unfamiliar, and informed Angeline that the Butler that had served at her husband's side for years had been fished out of the bay, dead as a doornail). She called every number she could think of and a few that Artemis offered that she would not have thought to check on her own, typed up emails with trembling fingers, paid for search parties to search through Murmansk for any signs of her husband (those search parties never returned, and the prices being named for each search grew higher and higher with every confirmed disappearance). With every new attempt to find Artemis Senior, a horrid, fragile hope would blossom on her face, only to wilt away with every confirmed failure, every person that refused to reply or sent her a negative response.
Weeks after the catastrophe that had torn their family apart, she finally snapped, weeks of grief and shattered hope fueling her breakdown. She screamed into the phone receiver, ( her husband wasn't dead, he wasn't , he was coming back ) , threw the phone into the wall without bothering to hang up, and locked herself in the attic lounge that she and Artemis's father spent so much time in, and the only sound that could be heard through the door whenever Artemis passed by were wretched sobs and screams of denial.
Her meltdown was the last straw, and Artemis, who had been clinging to his father's words ( not last words, never last) from the harbor, don't plan any heists without me, disobeyed his father for the first time in his life, and dove back into the familiar territory of the criminal underworld. He tore through his father's (and his bodyguard Butler's) contacts like a hurricane, bribing and blackmailing for all he was worth in a desperate search for information and steadily draining hundreds of thousands of euros from the family vaults in his desperation.
For one whole gut-wrenching month, he found nothing. Not a single contact of the family had been near Murmansk at the time of the attack, and not a single individual in the Fowl empire knew who might be responsible. Artemis trawled through hundreds of false leads and infuriatingly useless conversations that took every last scrap of his willpower to keep his words chilly and polite. With every new failure ( he had never failed before and he couldn't afford to fail now ) , he grew more and more irritable, sending acidic words flying from his mouth at every interruption and manor servants scurrying away in haste. He locked himself in his father's study and refused to leave, even for meals, and with every lash of his razor-sharp tongue fewer and fewer servants interrupted him, until only Butler dared to intrude on his search with sandwiches and tea, and soft words of advice that Artemis sometimes followed.
Finally, though, after countless sleepless nights that left unsightly dark circles underneath his eyes, Artemis found the bare bones of a clue that he frantically searched for.
Two days before Artemis Senior was scheduled to arrive in Kola Bay, several men were seen moving a suspiciously large container, large enough to hold a Stinger missile launcher, into the same warehouse that the missile had been fired from.
It was only the merest scrap of a clue, a mere whisper in the sea of information that had already failed him, but that was more than enough for Artemis. It took comparatively little time for him to find the men that had been spotted, and identify them with assistance from Butler's Interpol contacts – and when they had been identified, Artemis felt an arctic chill run up his spine.
The men were enforcers, working directly under Britva, the man in command of the Russian Mafia.
Despite his father's preferences for accruing allies with debts to pay and favors owed, he had still had enemies. The Russian mafia in particular, Artemis knew, loathed the Fowls, though the origins of their hatred lay not with his father, but his grandfather, who had danced circles around the Russian crime syndicate, tearing them down over and over with ruthless efficiency only for Britva's organization to rise from their own ashes again like a particularly embittered old phoenix. Being repeatedly toppled from their fragile throne had done no favors for the relations between the two criminal empires, and in hindsight, the Stinger missile was a predictable response to a Fowl trying to cut himself a piece of Russia's market – and the disappearances of the search parties equally predictable, when they were searching for a Fowl in enemy territory.
It was even possible that there was more than one criminal syndicate involved in this disastrous affair. The Russian mafia was far from the only criminal syndicate to loathe the Fowls. With so few markets in the underground to take advantage of, the criminal world was ruthlessly competitive, and the Fowls were very, very good at taking what they wanted. Many a mafia Famiglia had tried to steal resources from under the Fowl's noses, only to be thwarted every time, and sometimes ruthlessly disbanded and absorbed by the Fowl criminal empire when they tried to retaliate. Others had sent assassins, and it was only his family's steady alliance with the Butlers that had saved many an ancestor (and even Artemis himself, once) from death by enraged mafioso. Part of Artemis's criminal education had been warnings on which of the mafia syndicates to avoid, and he could count a frighteningly large number of organizations, from the Russian mafia to the Vongola family in Italy, that would pay entire fortunes to have a Fowl's head handed to them on a silver platter.
Was his father even still alive?
No. Stop it. He's still alive. He has to be. There's no body. It's just a matter of finding him.
Which was easier said than done, when your search parties kept disappearing, euros were vanishing from the family vaults, and the prices for hiring search parties were only being hiked up higher and higher with every failure on Russian soil. At this rate, it was only a matter of time before the Fowl fortune was drained dry.
Fortunately, Artemis knew more than enough tricks to keep the coffers flowing, at least until he found his father – or his father's body.
Of course, finding his father was easier said than done. Artemis knew this, could run the numerical odds in his head right down to the last decimal point, but he hadn't anticipated the sheermagnitudes of difficulty he would have with his search.
In the first two months following his father's disappearance, Artemis paid a large number of search parties to scan Murmansk and the countryside around it. Predictably, within the first month after arriving in Russia, most of these search parties either quit or disappeared, and the base price for the search-and-rescue teams rose significantly. Despite this, Artemis kept hiring more people, sometimes practically shoving the money down their throats to get them to agree with him, and while waiting for news of (inevitable) failure, he worked diligently at accruing more revenue to fund the searches. He hacked into businessmen's bank accounts, draining them dry (and not-quite-accidentally rendering at least two small companies completely bankrupt), auctioned off the Impressionist forgeries he had created over the last several months at ludicrous prices under a variety of aliases, and sold several legal patents to fervent buyers. He studiously went through some of the most expensive items in the manor, sorting through which ones he could sell and which ones he or his mother would wish to keep, and sold some of the more priceless artifacts online with a heavy heart.
By the third month following his father's disappearance, the amount of money he was paying for the search-and-rescue teams was exponentially larger, draining hundreds of thousands of euros from the family accounts at a time. On top of the fees for the rescue teams, Artemis's mother, struggling for some semblance of normalcy after months of drifting through the manor halls like a distant crying ghost, began donating massive amounts of money to various charities and organizations, and soon Artemis was struggling to earn a profit with so much money being spent. After the fifth charity donation, Artemis confronted his mother about her expenditures, furious at the waste of resources, and the resulting row had his mother locking herself in the attic lounge once more, refusing to emerge even for meals, and left Artemis feeling like his soul was bleeding .
In the fourth and fifth months, his mother's expenditures had at least gone down, but the damage had already been done. In only a few months, the Fowls had lost a large percentage of their massive fortune. They were far from destitute, with millions still left, but the status of billionaires was no longer theirs to claim. With so much of the family's money still wrapped up in funding the Russian search parties (which had covered a little over a fourth of the country by now, centered around Murmansk), the family vaults were losing money faster than Artemis could earn it, and so he finally deemed it necessary to start taking greater risks. He stepped off the safe, beaten trail he had trodden for most of his childhood and down more and more ridiculous paths. He started targeting larger legal corporations with his hacking, careful not to leave a single trace in their systems as he drained the bank accounts of CEOs and managers. He forged "lost" journals by DaVinci to sell to various history buffs around the world. He sold more artifacts from the manor, ruthlessly squashing the pangs of emotion he felt in his chest with every piece of his childhood he sold. On one spectacular occasion, Artemis somehow found himself selling the Pyramids of Giza to some rich idiot online under one of his many aliases, and netted several millions of euros out of that deal (and carefully erased all traces of the alias used, right down to the paper trail left behind, while swearing to never sell national monuments again. What had he been thinking?) And while the more ridiculous thefts and forgeries certainly netted him exorbitant amounts of gold (and a certain amount of bitter pride, because he knew for a fact his father had never done anything like this), every ridiculous new source income made him feel like he was being stabbed violently in the chest with his own emotions, and like, with every new ridiculous source of income, his father was getting farther and farther away…
Six months after his father's disappearance, the search parties had covered a little more ground, and Artemis finally directed several of them back to Murmansk, hoping the months of no activity in the city would allow the search parties to go unnoticed. For several weeks, it seemed to have worked – the search parties reported in daily, and Artemis would mark the areas they'd been able to search on a satellite map of Murmansk he'd had printed. However, a couple of weeks in, as one search team had started moving in on one particular part of the city – a residential area – they'd simply vanished, just like all the others, and within a day, all the other search teams had also gone missing. And when Artemis had managed to redirect one of the other search teams outside the city to the location of that first missing team, they found a residential apartment with evidence of several people having up and left in a hurry – and evidence of a hostage.
If Artemis had been a normal child, he would have thrown the keyboard across the room. His father had been in that apartment. He sincerely doubted there was another businessman that had been anywhere near Murmansk that could have been held hostage there – or that the mafia would have reason to hold hostage there. He'd been too impatient, and his father had been moved.
Artemis was not a reckless child, but every human being on the face of the planet, even child genii, was susceptible to the horrible siren's song of rage, and Artemis's cold fury was almost apocalyptic in its intensity. His father had been moved out of his reach. He had no doubts that Britva had most likely had his hostage moved out of Murmansk after one of his opponent's teams had stumbled across the apartment that Artemis Senior was being held in, and now he had no idea where to start looking again!
He didn't dare hack anyone from the Russian mafia, not even anyone as low on their social totem pole as a petty thief. That could very well provoke Britva into disposing of his father, and no one could be saved as a corpse. But, Artemis reasoned in his uncharacteristic moment of illogical emotion, there might be others he could hack for the information. Britva was bound to have allies outside of Russia, even if only so as to have foreign goods to ship into the country.
Month number seven was when, after calming down and using several weeks to carefully create several aliases, complete with official paperwork and passports and satellite connections that would confuse anyone trying to hack him back, Artemis began to hack into mafia databases. The first organization whose databases he ripped into was a small one, a group of gangs that operated just inside Mongolia's border with Russia. What little information he found on Britva's organization was supremely unhelpful, and so, after stealing a few hundred thousand euros' worth of money from the gang leaders' accounts, he moved on to another target, further west along the border. For a whole month, he struck at small syndicates along Russia's borders using a variety of aliases, searching their electronic databases for information and draining their leader's bank accounts of money. Though other hackers tried to hack him back several times, they never managed to get into his systems, rebuffed by firewalls and Artemis's own carefully prepared IP re-router, and every time one of the hackers almost got "personal" information on the alias currently being used, he would switch to another one. He ran circles around mafia hackers in his efforts to crack into their systems and, as the smaller gangs and mobs proved to be useless for his search, soon began to cautiously rip into the databases of larger organizations.
By month eight, Artemis hadn't been able to find a single shred of evidence as to where his father might have been taken, despite discovering several small criminal syndicates outside of Russia's borders that the Russian mafia was allied with. He hadn't dared touch any of the larger organizations, such as the Chinese triads, and the smaller gangs and mobs had been absolutely unhelpful. With no other choice, Artemis began raking in more money for search parties, draining a few small mob bosses' accounts dry out of what was, for him, petty anger before moving on to bigger and better things. With most of the most expensive artifacts in the manor having been sold, and no forgeries to sell at the time (and Artemis's own refusal to ever sell national monuments to anyone ever again) , the largest source of criminal revenue he now had access to was what he could steal from the bank accounts of gangs and mafia bosses. He robbed several small Familgias in Italy blind, careful not to attack any of the larger ones (and especially careful not to attack any allies of the Vongola or the Vongola itself – he couldn't afford to deal with assassins with his mother's mental health rapidly deteriorating and only Butler and a few nervous servants to protect him), before moving on to syndicates in other countries. Throughout the month he methodically worked his way through the Eurasian continent, hunting for information on some of the smaller mafia families and bleeding their accounts dry when he could get away with it.
At the beginning of the ninth month, when he entered the converted attic lounge that his mother had slowly migrated all her personal belongings into over the course of several months, his mother's mind finally snapped. She didn't recognize him. She didn't recognize her own son. Instead, she screamed at him, demanding to know who he was and what he'd done to her husband and her little Arty , and threw one of the many expensive vases she'd saved from the mass selling of manor artifacts at his head. If Butler had not been there, had not pulled him to the left a mere moment before the vase could impact against his skull, then Artemis might have been killed, murdered by his own mother in a moment of insanity.
With that realization, he fled from the room like the devil himself was on his heels, for once choosing cowardice over the stubborn fearlessness his father had ruthlessly trained into him. He locked himself in his father's his office, sank down in his seat, and struggled to stifle the horrible pangs of shock and horror that filled his chest.
At this point in time, Artemis had hacked so many small mafia families, gangs, and mobs that it was almost automatic for him to seek out a criminal syndicate to steal from, even when lost in abnormally intense emotions. And so, hardly paying attention and longing for some kind of stress relief, Artemis hacked into the account of the first criminal boss he managed to stumble across, draining it dry
And while it certainly helped him calm down, let him wipe away the blurry almost-tears in his eyes and steel himself to face the world outside his office again, it would prove to be one of the worst (or, depending on the context, later on, the best ) mistakes Artemis Fowl the Second would ever make.
Once, when the man that Artemis Fowl the Second would know simply as Butler had been much younger, and was an up-and-coming young prodigy in the Butler echelons, he'd asked his granduncle, then a seasoned bodyguard of Artemis Senior's father, what it was like to guard one of the notorious Fowls.
"Not worth the trouble, that's what it's like," the grizzled old veteran had said with exasperation, and had left it at that.
Butler hadn't understood, at the time, why his granduncle would say this. He was still young, with a fresh blue diamond tattoo on his shoulder to show the world that he'd survived Madame Ko's teachings, and he had yet to actually meet any of the Fowl family in person. To him, just like with most of the family, the Fowls were a distant, nigh-untouchable presence, like royalty on their thrones. To be chosen to guard one of the Fowls was perhaps one of the greatest honors any of the Butler family could be given – the Fowls only chose the best of the best to guard their next generation, and if a Fowl said you were the best, then you were .
Even when, decades later, Butler was called by Artemis Fowl Senior and asked to be the bodyguard of the man's infant son, he wouldn't understand his granduncle – or his uncle's – exasperation with their duty until his young charge hacked into the accounts of a businessman with known mafia connections and drained said accounts completely dry of coffers. At which point, the mountainous Eurasian manservant blinked at his smugly smiling young charge, at the boy's father praising him for a heist well-done but tacking on a cover your tracks better next time, son at the end, and suddenly he had a bone-deep understanding as to why his elders had been so exasperated with their principals: because, clearly, the Fowls had decided somewhere along the line that common sense, such as discouraging defenseless young children from hacking into the bank accounts of men who could order hits on them, was beneath them.
When he'd shared this revelation with his uncle that night, during their nightly patrols, the older man had simply laughed and told Butler with a sardonic smile that he hadn't seen anything yet . And yet again, Butler had been skeptical until after his charge's father had disappeared in the Arctic, and Artemis had subconsciously decided that his new mission in life was to turn everything he did up to eleven and turn Butler's hair prematurely white in the process. Just how many heart attacks could this boy give him?
The answer to that question had been insurmountable, and after the pyramid incident, Butler had found himself looking heavenwards during a rare moment of solitude and apologizing silently to his deceased uncles for ever doubting them. Keeping up with a stressed, desperate Fowl's antics was perhaps one of the hardest things he'd ever had to do in his life, and it could only get worse from here on out. But, as a Butler, it was his job, his duty to keep up with his young charge. He couldn't back out, and wouldn't , no matter how exasperated he got. Not just for the sake of his duty as a Butler, but also for Artemis's own sake, because no matter how intelligent Artemis was, anyone could make a mistake if they were desperate enough, and one mistake would be all it took for one of the many criminal syndicates Artemis hacked into to find out exactly who had hacked them, and retaliate.
The day that Artemis actually made that mistake he'd been silently prepared for was one of the worst days he'd experienced since the Fowl Star had been sunk. While he was supposed to remain unattached to his principal, it was difficult to remain emotionally distant to a boy whom you had watched over from childhood – and even the most hardened of mercenaries would be at least a little horrified when watching a boy's own mother attack him in a fit of insanity. One second slower, and Butler would have failed his principal, would have lost the boy to a disturbed Angeline Fowl – and even worse than that knowledge was the look of horrified, shocked realization in Artemis's eyes when the boy's brain had figured out what had just happened.
He'd let the boy run off on his own then. Butler could have easily kept up with him, if he had felt he needed to, but for the first time since he had been assigned to guard the boy, he'd let his emotions get the better of him. Artemis had just been attacked by the woman meant to nurture and raise him, to support him in times of crisis, and he knew his charge by now. Artemis would not want his ultimate moment of weakness to be witnessed by anyone, not even Butler, and Butler was all too willing to let the boy recover before he went searching for him.
When Butler had finally entered the office that had once belonged to Artemis Senior a little over an hour later, he'd found that in his desperation to calm down and distract himself from the second disaster of his young life, Artemis Fowl had hacked into the accounts of yet another criminal syndicate's boss. He hadn't thought much of it, at the time. Even in moments of extreme emotion, Artemis was more logical than a dozen crime bosses together ever could be, always dancing circles around his opponents without a single mistake to be exploited by enemies or allies alike, and Butler had had other things to worry about than the consequences of another hacking spree – specifically, his charge's mental well-being, which, though shaken, had returned almost to normal.
Weeks later, Butler would curse being emotionally compromised when it came to the Irish boy because, as it turned out, in his absence Artemis had finally made a mistake that could prove to be lethal. The group that he hacked had, thanks to Artemis being distracted by his own emotions, been able to hack him back and find out exactly who had invaded their systems. And they didn't appreciate a Fowl being the one to steal from their bank accounts.
The day that the consequences of Artemis's emotionally-fueled hacking caught up with him was almost ten months after his father's disappearance, and a little under two months before he turned ten. Once again, the Irish boy was at his desk, dark circles under his eyes as he tapped away at the keyboard before him. Outside, the sun was beginning to set, painting the overcast grey sky with weak shades of orange and red at the horizons, and leftover moisture from a rainstorm earlier that day clung to the window panes. The manor was quiet, with only the distant thrumming of electricity and the occasional sounds of footsteps as servants finished up their nightly duties to break the silence.
Artemis's fingers stopped typing, and his lips pursed in a stormy frown as he glared at the monitor before him.
Yet another dead end.
The boy made a soft sound of frustration, leaning back in his swivel chair and reaching for the cup of Earl Gray Butler had left for him perhaps an hour ago. The tea had cooled down considerably since then, but at this point the tea was more an attempt at a distraction from his ongoing failures than anything else.
What am I missing?
Artemis could count on one hand how many times he had actually failed at anything before his father's ship had sunk, and still have fingers left over. Failure was not an option for a Fowl – Fowls were supposed to always be at the top, never fall behind the competition, and if on the off chance someone did get one over them, they were supposed to destroy the transgressors that dared challenge them. He'd utterly demolished his competition in everything from school academics to professional heists to hacking for years, and then the Fowl Star had been sunk, and everything had gone wrong. Suddenly he was falling behind , unable to keep up with Britva's organization and allies as the Russians danced circles around his efforts and taunted him with what meager information they'd let slip about his father.
No one had ever bested Artemis before today. No one. Certainly not a criminal organization so easily taken down in the past as the Russian mafia . And yet here he was, being lead on a wild goose chase no matter what he attempted. If he hadn't known for a fact it was actually happening , he would have put it down to some horrid hallucination. But as it was, it was actually happening, and he had no idea how . Which meant, based on prior experience from the distant days when his family had still been whole and healthy, that he was missing some crucial piece of information that was keeping him from his end goal.
What trump card does Britva have that I keep missing? What is it that's helping them keep my father out of my reach?
With an irritated sigh, Artemis placed his tea back on the cupholder it had been resting on. There was nothing for it but to keep searching. This particular lead may have turned out to be yet another dead end, but he had other possible leads he could check that could very well at least give him a clue.
Artemis was about to put his fingers back on the keyboard and bring up the contact information of a man from Butler's network of contacts when his cell phone, which had been resting innocently on the desk at his elbow, buzzed softly to let him know of an incoming call.
There was only one person in the world who knew his number, and last Artemis had checked, Butler had been patrolling the grounds like he'd done every night for almost a decade. What reason could he have for calling?
A frisson of dread slowly curled in his gut as Artemis answered the phone. "Butler? Is something wrong?"
"There might be." The Eurasian's voice was as calm and level as it always was, but, if you knew what to listen for, there was an undertone of tense caution to every word. "I'm in the southeastern quadrant of the grounds, near the wall, and I heard an odd sound that didn't sound like any of the manor animals. Like metal scraping against stone."
Artemis quickly used his free hand to access Fowl Manor's security systems, checking the cameras along the southeast walls. A brief scan of the newly split screen showed no signs of intruders, and the familiar hulking figure of his manservant with a phone pressed to his ear and scanning his surroundings with suspicion. That particular camera, Artemis noted, seemed to be suffering some technical difficulties, the feed jittering at the edges as if it was about to dissolve into static.
"There doesn't seem to be anything out of the ordinary in your quadrant, Butler, save for some technical difficulties with the camera closest to your position."
On-screen, Butler's frown carved itself deeper into his face. "Nothing at all?"
Artemis cast another cursory glance over the screen. An indigo glitch flickered across one corner of the camera with its sights trained on Butler, but save for that…
"Nothing abnormal whatsoever," he confirmed. "That being said, I trust your instincts, Butler. Feel free to check the grounds for intruders personally."
"Ten-four, Artemis. I'll come back up to the office if I don't find anything."
Butler hung up, and Artemis set his phone back on the desk with a frown. Then, keeping one eye on the camera feeds (it was a rare occasion that Butler's instincts were wrong), he ran a quick systems check first, checking for camera loops and other bugs that might betray unseen intruders, then checked the statuses of each individual camera along the southeastern wall. Most were perfectly functional, save for the one camera still focused on the location where Butler had called him from, which still seemed to be malfunctioning, along with another camera further down the wall from Butler's position. There wasn't even so much as a single flicker of shadow out of place, save for those glitches, not a single sign of an incursion to be found.
The child genius huffed and wrote down a note to repair the two malfunctioning cameras before turning his attention back to Butler on screen. The manservant had just completed a secondary circuit along the wall, his pensive expression beginning to morph into puzzlement. Finally, Butler looked around until he found the camera closest to his position, and held one arm out, fist clenched with his thumb pointed up.
All clear, then. There were no intruders on the grounds, at least none that Butler had been able to find.
I suppose even Butler is prone to paranoia sometimes, Artemis mused, reluctantly amused by the idea, as he flicked off the security feeds. Then again, I haven't exactly made it easy for him, and it has been a bit of a rough month for the two of us…
(A normally beautiful face, twisted and fraught with madness, eyes wild, what did you do to my little Arty?! )
He shuddered, and quickly shoved the horrible image that had struggled to the forefront of his mind back into his subconscious, where it belonged, and went back to work.
By the time there was a knock at the door signifying Butler's return, Artemis had contacted a couple of the man's contacts, crossed two more possible leads off the list, and had finished his cup of Earl Grey. When he called out a soft enter , Butler pushed open the door with one hand, his other holding a fresh cup of tea.
Artemis took the cup with a wordless murmur of thanks and took several sips before setting it down where his first cup rested and turning his attention to his manservant.
"No signs of incursion?"
The mountainous bodyguard shook his head, his eyes looking oddly exhausted. "Nothing. There wasn't so much as a single flower out of place."
Artemis's lips pursed. "And yet something is still bothering you?"
Butler grimaced but nodded. "I didn't find anything, but I think it's best that I keep an eye on things tonight, just in case." The manservant studied him for a moment, brow furrowed. "Any luck with finding your father?"
"No," Artemis said, more sharply than strictly necessary. He paused, then grimaced, pinching the bridge of his nose between two fingers. "I apologize for my irritability, but… no. No luck."
Thankfully, Butler did not pry any further. Instead, he simply reached out to pat Artemis's shoulder once - a rare show of sympathy for the usually professional bodyguard - and then turned to leave the office.
Halfway to the door, Butler suddenly paused, his eyes darting around the room, and, noticing this out of the corner of his eye, Artemis glanced at his bodyguard with a frown, opening his mouth to ask what the matter was. Before he could, however, there was thunk, something heavy impacting against a hard surface, and Butler toppled over as if struck down.
"Butler?!" Artemis bolted up from his chair, eyes wide – and his eyes went even wider still as his vision was suddenly blocked by an obstruction that hadn't been there moments before, something dark, and something cold and metallic pressed into the skin between his eyes.
"You've got bigger things to worry about than your pet mountain over there, Fowl."
Slowly, following the sinister purr of the unfamiliar voice, Artemis's eyes slid up until they found the face of a stranger with blue-streaked hair, smirking at him past the gun held against his skull. A man that should not have been there. He was already running as many calculations in his head as he could, thoughts sharpening into cold lines of steel, and there was no feasible waythat this man could have appeared from nowhere as he had, no feasible way he could have gotten past Butler.
And yet here he was, his grin growing wider, a budding slasher smile. "What's the matter, boy? Cat got your tongue? That's no fun…"
Despite the blood-thirst evident in every line of his face, the man's expression was almost playful. Playful, as if having somehow snuck into Fowl Manor under the lenses of hundreds of advanced security cameras, past a member of the Butler family, knocking said Butler out, and then holding a Fowl at gunpoint was a game to him.
It is a game to him, Artemis realized, seeing the glints of amusement in the assassin's (for what else could he be?) eyes. He really does think of this as fun.
How dare he.
Artemis fought the urge to sneer. He was at gunpoint, moments away from death, and Butler wasn't able to stop it. Purposefully antagonizing the man sent to kill him would be idiotic , and Artemis Fowl the Second was no idiot. As much as it galled him for his current situation to be found amusing by the gunman, he would not let his emotions get the better of him.
If he's playing with me, then he's not going to kill me yet. Which means I have options.
"… I find it curious that I've never heard of an assassin of your apparent caliber," Artemis said, after carefully arranging the words in his head and double-checking them for the acidic vitriol that wanted to make itself known. "It takes talent to get past one of the Butler family."
The assassin's grin grew wider and considerably nastier. "Oh, so you can talk. Fantastic." He leaned forward, putting more pressure on the gun until Artemis was certain the barrel was going to leave a bruise on his forehead ( assuming he survived this encounter at all). "And you apparently think you're real clever, don't you, Fowl? Trying to butter me up, so I spill a few secrets? That's not gonna work – I'm not one of your petty little subordinates ."
Despite the insulted tone of voice, the assassin's expression remained fixed, sadistically amused at his attempts to fish for information - and was that a glimpse of a flash of unnatural blue-violet in his dark eyes, or just his imagination?
"Of course not," Artemis said smoothly, a picture of perfect calm despite his hammering heart. "I know better than to attempt to flatter an opponent into giving up their secrets. It hardly ever works. I was simply stating an honest fact."
It was subtle, but Artemis could see the sadistic smile twisting into something a touch more prideful, the man's aggression at his apparent attempts at manipulation easing.
"So, even a Fowl knows quality when he sees it, then? Nice to be appreciated."
That loathing. The man hadn't bothered hiding his disdain of the word Fowl , and that helped narrow down the number of people that could have sent him, if only slightly. This was no opportunistic assassination – this man held a grudge against the Fowl family. Artemis quickly searched through his memories for people he knew to be an enemy of the Fowl family. There were a great deal of them, but, judging by the man's subtle accent, he was probably European, which narrowed down the number of possible enemies significantly. The Fowls, for the most part, had sensibly avoided gaining too many enemies close to their home turf, and the few that were present were those in direct competition with the Fowl criminal empire – in other words, other organized crime syndicates.
This man is clearly a skilled assassin, despite his playing around, and skilled individuals expect to be paid for their troubles, which means that in order to hire them, one needs a fairly large budget to pull from. Now, who have the Fowls angered in recent years, in Europe, that could pay for someone of this man's caliber?
There weren't many large European criminal organizations that the Fowls had gotten on the bad side of during his father's time on the Fowl empire's throne… but there was a syndicate that Artemis had recently hacked, in a fit of painful emotion, a bare few weeks ago - a syndicate which had a decent fortune under its belt, despite its small size.
"Out of curiosity," Artemis mused, as if having an idle conversation with the man instead of confirming a theory that could prove the difference between life and death for him, "was it the Brise de Mer that sent you?"
The smile froze on the man's face. Only for the barest fraction of a moment, but he saw it nonetheless. Jackpot.
The Brise de Mer was one half of the Corsican mafia, based in Northern Corsica, a small island off the Mediterranean shores of Italy and France. Despite the island's small size, and the divide between the Brise and the other half of the Corsican mafia, the Colonna clan, the Corsican mafia did a brisk trade in all manner of illegal goods throughout the entire Mediterranean. They were more well known for smuggling and the occasional human trafficking, however, and not for their hackers, so for Artemis to have slipped up so thoroughly that the Brise de Mer had found him…
The assassin's expression cleared and darkened, blood-thirst creeping back in to fill the empty spaces left by shock. "Well, aren't you a clever little brat. No wonder the Fowl empire's still ticking." There was a deafening click as the man deftly turned off the safety on his gun, and Artemis's heart rate spiked. "Too bad it won't keep ticking after today."
Movement, out of the corner of his eyes – Butler, slowly and silently beginning to rise to his feet, hand going for his gun – but Artemis only had eyes for the gun pressed against his forehead, and the dangerous expression on the assassin's face as his finger creaked on the trigger. The amusement was gone, and its place was nothing but a cold-blooded lack of mercy.
I miscalculated, he realized, barely able to keep his breathing steady. I shouldn't have asked. If I know his employers, even if I were killed, Butler could track him down, and he knows it.
There's no feasible way he'll let me live now. And Butler's too far away to stop him.
I'm going to die.
The realization sent a cold wave of terror sweeping through his body, and every sense seemed magnified in the wake of his realization. He was hyper-aware of everything – the cold steel of the gun against his forehead, the crinkling of cloth as the man's gloved ( no fingerprints to be left behind, no one will know who did it) hands began to squeeze the trigger in agonizing slow motion, Butler lurching to his feet and lunging for the assassin, too slowly, too slowly, even Butler couldn't make it in time -
And a sudden burning , like the world's worst heartburn, was rising up in his throat and filling his body with fire.
I can't die. I can't die here. If I die, then my father is as good as dead in Britva's hands. Butler is as good as dead – no sensible assassin would leave eyewitnesses, and he got knocked out so easily. Mother is as good as dead. She's a Fowl , if only by marriage.
I can't let that happen. I won't let that happen.
I REFUSE to DIE.
Instinct is a powerful thing. Every animate being, from the smallest bacteria to the massive blue whale, wants nothing more than to live, and it is instinct which powers their efforts to stay alive, even in the direst of straits. When one's back is to the wall, when there is no way to think their way out of death, it is instinct that all creatures reach for to save them. And for all his logic and all his backup plans, Artemis Fowl the Second was no different from any other creature in the animal kingdom. He had no weapons, no help that could reach him in time, no words that could convince the assassin before him to stop, no backup plans to save himself from the bullet moments away from piercing his skull.
And so, in the face of his sheer determination to not die , Artemis's mind instinctively grappled for anything, anything to stop his end from coming – and the world around him burned.
Later, when Artemis woke up from a two-day-long sleep, all he would remember was the world around him dissolving into brilliant indigo, and then collapsing to the floor when a bullet miraculously did not embed itself into his brain and everything going dark.
Butler would remember far, far more. He would remember a sudden stillness in the air, the calm before a storm, and then an indigo inferno exploding out of his principal's body, throwing the assassin away from him and raking burns across the man's face. He would remember the assassin spitting curses in French, the horrified recognition in the man's face, before he shot the man between the eyes and a body hit the floor – and then, as he turned back to his principal, watching the firestorm licking across the boy's skin die in moments, not even a spark left to show that it had ever been there.
Even as the manservant rushed to catch his charge as the child genius toppled over, unconscious, he would wonder if he'd been hallucinating the indigo fire. Children could not spontaneously burst into blue-violet flames when they were in mortal peril, no matter how unusual those children were.
The burns on the assassin's body and the wispy indigo sparks that Artemis would somehow call up days later would be more than enough proof that apparently, in this strange parallel world Butler had somehow found himself in, they most certainly could. And at that point, with the evidence bobbing in front of his eyes in the form of the flickering ghost-light in his charge's hands, all Butler would be able to think was that he should have realized that he hadn't been hallucinating. After all, of all the people he'd ever met, Artemis Fowl the Second was the foremost expert at doing the impossible.
I had way too much fun writing this, especially when coming up with the worldbuilding stuff. Making fusion worlds is fun!
Speaking of worldbuilding – unlike with M est P, I'm going to try to integrate the worldbuilding directly into the fanfiction itself here, so it's actually a part of the text and you're learning about this fusion world along with Artemis. I might include some tidbits in the notes though.
And before anyone asks about it – no, Butler will not end up getting Dying Will Flames. Firstly, because logically a bodyguard is prepared to die for their charge, and thus would not garner the necessary motivation to go Active in this 'verse. And secondly… I have PLANS~ *cackles*