I should have been there years ago, but at the time, it seemed so easy to put it off, and to forget how short-lived humans were.


It felt like an unwritten rule that heroes deserved to die heroic deaths. Maybe throwing themselves on a grenade to save their squad. Maybe rushing through a flaming building to get the last orphan out. Or at least if they did survive to old age, then they got to pass while surrounded by their loved ones - their children, their grandchildren, maybe a spouse.

Heroes are supposed to have a fitting death.

Maybe Artemis Fowl the Second was not a hero.

Artemis Fowl was killed in a car accident going from Logan Airport into Cambridge, the night of St. Patrick's Day. A young woman had drank more than a little too much, but insisted to her friends that her honors college education meant that she had enough intelligence and good judgement about her to drive the five miles back home. She'd had a spotless driving record, and with the number of sensors and automatic overrides that existed in cars these days, accidents seemed like a thing of the past.

Artemis' death certificate put him at forty-seven years old.

The elf, Holly Short, saw his casket from above and a ways away, standing, as she was, in the branches of the tree behind the mourners. She wept silently, with little sobs shaking her small frame, and big droplets of tears rolling down her tanned cheeks. She wore the white silk gown traditional to Elfin recycling ceremonies - the one she had worn most recently to Commander Root's recycling, three decades ago - though none of the humans saw her.

She still stood there well after the funeral was over, when the mourners had already begun to disperse. It was a large crowd, probably bolstered by a number of professional colleagues of Artemis'. If her hands had not been covering her face at the time, she might have noticed when Butler walked up to the tree.

"Fairy," the young woman called, her piercing brown eyes looking directly at Holly's shielded form. She looked familiar to the elf.

Holly unshielded.

Ramona Butler nodded in recognition when she saw her standing in the tree.

"Holly," she said, looking the elf in the eye now, "it's been a long time. Is it too cliché to say that I was expecting you?" Butler smiled, but it didn't quite reach her eyes.

"Ramona," greeted the elf, wiping her eyes and nodding at the woman as she briefly activated her wings and floated to the ground.

Butler towered over Holly, such that only the lowest button of her open black overcoat was at the elf's eye level. Her hands were hidden just inside a pair of wide sleeves, doubtless with easy access to at least half a dozen weapons of varying degrees of lethality. She'd inherited some of her mother's already-mixed Eurasian features - mostly in her thin face and long black hair - but also had some Latin genes hitherto unknown to the Butler line, making it even more difficult for strangers to pick out her origin.

Holly had a vague memory of seeing this Butler sprint past the background of a hologram call she'd had with Artemis some time ago, back when the woman was maybe a preteen. She'd heard an irate-sounding Juliet pronounce her daughter's full name in the way that only a parent does when something very bad was going to happen to their child. Humans grew up so fast. Ramona looked nothing like the child that Holly remembered, and appeared as if she had doubled in height. Could it really have been that long ago?

But no matter what time, the Butlers always did have an uncanny ability to pick out the shimmers in the air that hid shielded fairies.

"Thank you for coming," Butler said, "I know Artemis would have appreciated it."

Holly dipped her head again slightly, but looked away. What was the use in his appreciation now? She'd had decades to visit before.

"Good thing I found you," the woman said, quickly looking around to make sure the few remaining people were preoccupied, and that the tree mostly covered them before crouching a little to get closer to the elf's height. She reached into a deep pocket in her dark coat and pulled out a thin white envelope. "Mr. Fowl left something for you."

Holly took the envelope silently, feeling it and realizing that it wasn't completely flat. There was an old-fashioned wax seal on it, imprinted with the Fowl family crest. Inside, it felt like there was a small object, maybe the size of a coin. It was hard through the paper, and resolved into a circle when she rubbed her fingers against it.

"Thanks," muttered the elf.

"No problem," replied Butler, straightening up again, and sweeping her hands down to smooth the wrinkles on her coat. "I hope it means something to you, whatever it is. Though, knowing Mr. Fowl…" she trailed off, and had a faraway look in her eyes. "You must have known that he didn't have many friends."

Holly nodded mutely. She didn't know exactly, but it fit. Probably a good number of the people here weren't actually all that close to Artemis, but were touched by him or his work in some way. She looked off behind Butler, past the tree to the curbside, where an tall man opened a car door for a shorter, solemnly-dressed woman whose hair flowed down from her black beret to the middle of her back in golden ringlets. The woman disappeared into the car and there was a light thump as the car door closed.

"I'd best be going," said Butler, glancing at the smattering of remaining people. Holly wasn't sure who her principal was, though she would have guessed it had previously been Artemis.

"I'm glad to have finally met you, Holly. I only wish it'd be under better circumstances."

"I… I'm sorry for your loss," Holly said finally. She said it so quietly that she wasn't even sure if she'd just thought it, or actually vocalized it.

"Me too, Detective… me too. Artemis was a good man."

It was sometime after everyone had left that Holly found herself - shielded - in front of the grave marker, the top of which stood just below eye level for her.

"Hey, Arty," she whispered, letting go of a long breath, and wiping away a teardrop that had reached her chin.

She wanted to say how much she wished she had come up to visit him more, or at least talked to him more when he was still around. Part of her was already giving excuses for why she didn't: increased restrictions on surface travel, an influx of cases to the private detective practice, court and council appearances to try to convict this criminal and justify that action…

Truth was, fairies just had very long lives. Years to a human passed like days to the People. A few months, a few years of absence wasn't very much at all between friends underground. Life just moved at very different paces for Artemis Fowl and Holly Short.

Now that she thought about it, Holly realized that their communication must have seemed extremely sparse to Artemis after his teenage years. It wasn't that the world had become a calmer place, it was more that the various bits of excitement in the world never really brought the two of them together quite as much in the subsequent years.

Holly had forgotten how short-lived humans were.

Holly sat down, with her knees up in front of her, despite the streaks of dirt that would now rub onto her white gown. She didn't think Artemis would have minded. A light misting of rain came down. If not for the circumstances, it was something Holly would have enjoyed. It wasn't often she got out to the surface these days, and even when she did, rain was an even rarer treat.

"Hey Arty," she repeated. "I'll miss you."

In this rain, a keen observer might have just been able to see a hole in the sparse droplets that came down in the space before the tombstone, shaped like a sitting child with a child-sized set of wings, with her head bowed down, and her arms wrapped around her knees.