"I follow into the mud. I am Hamlet the Dane, skull-handler, parablist, smeller of rot in the state, infused with its poisons, pinioned by ghosts and affections, murders and pieties, coming to consciousness by jumping in graves, dithering, blathering."

- Seamus Heaney, excerpt of "Viking Dublin: Trials Pieces [IV]", in North

Angeline sat next to Artemis, chewing her bottom lip as she read through the medical file. A physical examination was required for each year a student attended Saint Bartleby's, and, revitalized in the aftermath of Christmas, she'd wanted to get a head start at preparing Artemis' paperwork. He'd not protested, but she could sense that her attempts to reaffirm her role as the adult in his life were frustrating him. Ignoring the way his gaze was boring into her, she flipped onto the next page of the handout.

"Dr. Walsh told me that he has already sent the information over to the dean," Artemis said mildly, and Angeline looked up, startled.

"That's good," she replied, a tad absentminded. "Guiney was so helpful in the months after we got the news about your father."

Artemis cracked a small grin, amused by the comparison.

"I can explain the finer details of the bloodwork to you," he suggested.

Angeline returned his smile, expression carefully put together. "I'd like that."

Nodding, Artemis moved closer, taking the file from her. As she watched him point to different parts of the page, she found herself tuning out his voice. Though she knew he was making an effort to simplify the medical jargon for her, she found that the words seemed unable to penetrate into her mind, eluding her attempts to understand just as bubbles pop when one tries to reach out and capture them.

"Mother?"

She blinked, startled. Artemis looked back, patient as he always was with her. Chest tight, Angeline rested a hand on his shoulder, pulling him to her.

"I don't understand," she revealed, reaching to card her fingers through his hair. Tentatively, her hand found its way to the curls that rested just above the nape of his neck — Artemis was so meticulous in using gel to part his hair just-so, that that was the only part of his hair soft enough to run her fingers through.

Subtly, he shrugged off her hand, and her frown deepened.

"I was just explaining it," he said gently, taking her hand and placing it back in her lap.

"I know," Angeline sighed, fighting the urge to snap at him. "You were explaining that you're sick."

"Not quite 'sick'," he corrected. "It's not a disease."

Her grasp on the file tightened, crinkling the papers slightly.

"Oh," she faltered. "Then — then what is it? You've been fainting and… well, you've never been a hearty thing, but it's as if I can see you shrinking before my eyes. And — well, there's also headaches and the weakness. That might as well be sickness. I don't care what the doctor calls it."

The sides of his mouth quirked upwards. "If it were a sickness, then it might be able to be treated."

"Don't," she warned him, and he flushed, opening his mouth to protest. "Artemis Fowl, you stop that. Stop joking about—"

"It's not a death sentence," he interjected firmly, moving to take her hand back into his. "Mother, I apologize. Clearly, I've upset you."

Artemis gave her a smile, but his eyes remained shrewd. "Perhaps we ought not talk about this further."

"I'm your mother," Angeline said under her breath, cursing herself for losing control in front of him. "I'm supposed to..."

She trailed off, unsure of what it was that she was 'supposed' to do.

"Why don't you check the mail to see if Dean Guiney has gotten back to you?" Artemis offered, and she almost scoffed. One didn't have to be a genius to hear the condescension in his voice.

"I might," she tried, keeping her tone light.

"He was so helpful with father, after all," Artemis agreed, echoing her sentiments from earlier.

She shut the folder.

Holly hadn't meant to look at Foaly's dossier on the Fowls. Not initially, at least. She'd first noticed the files sitting in the LEP central server when looking for the write-up on one of Haven's many DVD smuggling rings. Instead, to surprise, she'd found the document about the siege. It'd been neat, labeled, and, most importantly, completely open access on the shared drive.

To be fair, she'd gone looking for the name of Fowl's boarding school herself, but that was neither here nor there.

It'd taken some time before she felt like she could reasonably put in a request to go topside, but there she was, zipping across the darkened Wexford sky. It was an opportunity to prove she was still capable of topside missions, Holly had told Foaly. That had been all he'd needed to hear before he'd defended her request to the commander.

Paradoxically, Holly felt a twinge of guilt at the lack of regret she felt towards manipulating the centaur. She knew he blamed his equipment for Fowl's success — she'd realized as much once she'd noticed the increase in appeals for budget increases piling up on Root's desk. Not general requests, either. Foaly wanted investments in tracking technology.

Holly was glad he'd not tried to apologize to her for the kidnapping.

The density of the treeline thickened, revealing the increasingly thin trunks of the oaks stretching up to the sky. She began her descent, and ahead of her, Saint Bartleby's loomed. The building rose into the sky strangely, ensconced on all sides by greenery. It wasn't an ugly structure, Holly thought, shooting a glance at one of the sheds. Just out of place. Ostentatious.

Her eyes climbed the walls of the dorms, taking in the sight before her. It was a stone macédoine of oddly decorated windows and adorned windowsills. She'd not exactly expected Fowl to be housed in a USSR tenement, but the school had more… personality than she'd thought humans like him cared for. Holly quashed the slight grin that the various football team banners threatened to put on her face. She didn't have time to sightsee — Foaly was liable to come barreling up topside himself if she left her surveillance tech off for longer than half an hour. She was on the clock now, and she needed to act like it.

Holly floated up, drifting past level of windows after level of windows. Whisper silent, of course, and shielded. The only sign she was there at all was the way her body momentarily blocked the moonlight as she passed by each room. Fowl's room was hidden away nearly 40 feet off the ground.

She hovered, studying the exterior of the room. A sizeable garden box hung from the sill, its iron fasteners glinting in the dark. A cluster of tiny, bell-flowered foxgloves and larger, bell-flowered campanulas obscured the lower quarter of the window. Holly reached out, taking the head of one of the white foxgloves into her hand. As her fingers made their way to its stem, the flowers parted, tumbling over her digits as soft as silk and twice as delicate.

Real cute, she thought sardonically, drawing her hand away from the flowerbed. A techno-terrorist with a soft-spot for the natural world.

The faint sound of movement came from behind the window.

For a moment, Holly considered shooting back into the night, the feeling of tension wrapping itself around her gut like a vise. Scowling, she steadied herself, ignoring the feeling. She reached out, and she knocked.

The curtains parted.

Holly's eyes widened.

The mud-boy's skin was so pale, the hand curled around the drapes cast a slight glow that was warped by the thick glass. It could have been the night, but he was somehow even more wan than she remembered. After a moment, the window swung open. There, half-hidden by the night, she was greeted by a face from which any pretense brightness or warmth had been completely drained; the human equivalent of how the dyes in fabric are bleached away by being left in the sun, forgotten.

She was face-to-face with Artemis Fowl II for the first time in three months, and she found herself speechless.

For all of a few seconds.

Finally, she snorted, breaking the silence. "Figures they'd make you live alone. If I were the dean, I'd be worried about you killing your roommate — no offense."

Artemis' face was inscrutable in the dark. "I have a single dorm due to health concerns."

"My magic should have taken care of those," she pointed out, smiling in a way that showed her teeth. "Liar, liar, mud boy."

"I would likely be dead if not for the magic you left in the manor," he said cooly. "In a way, the trade for the gold was the only thing that allowed me to keep it in the first place."

"You're welcome, then," she muttered, looking back out into the night.

Artemis moved closer to the window, resting an elbow on the sill. Leisurely, he plucked a petal from one of the azure flowers, twirling the piece of the flower between his thumb and pointer finger. The evening was cool. The slightly bitter scent of the specimens in his moon garden seemed to hang suspended in the night air, and the smell of the pale foxgloves intermingled pleasantly with the gentle, earthy smell of the blue campanulas.

Idly, Artemis rested his hand in the bed of his window box, looking up at her.

Holly's gaze bore down at him.

His eyes flicked up to meet hers, and he grinned back at her.

"I would bet," he began, and Holly's expression darkened, "that if you took my arm and pulled me out the window, you would be within the limits of your laws."

She made a face, and he stretched his arm a bit further out of the window, movement deliberate.

"It's based on the same logic your commander used when trying to coax me to conduct negotiations outside of my manor — you needn't abide by the geas' rules if the human is already outside of the property line," he explained.

Impulsively, Holly grabbed his wrist.

He raised an eyebrow, not moving to wrest himself free.

"Your room is up very high," she remarked, tightening her grip slowly, finger by finger.

"Correct."

Experimentally, she pulled. Not very hard, nor very far — but the motion caused Artemis to jerk forward slightly, his free hand fumbling to steady himself against the windowpane.

Yet still, he didn't try to break free.

His wrist, like the rest of him, was diminutive. The feeling of grasping his arm wasn't as alien to her as she'd expected; the boy was hardly bigger than an adult fairy. If she'd closed her eyes, Holly could have perhaps pictured his limb was that of a particularly gangly elf.

The night breeze made the small hairs on the back of her neck prick.

"The Council would know as soon as they heard you'd tumbled out of your dorm window," she noted, and Artemis smiled again, pleased she'd come to the conclusion he'd been expecting her to. Finally, he pulled back his arm.

Holly refused to relinquish her grip.

Artemis raised an eyebrow. "Weighing the pros and cons of eliminating one of the existential threats to the People at the cost of your own career?"

"The whole point of this was to get in my head, Fowl," she surmised. "I'm not going to play these games with you. You got your gold, fine. But that means the old rules of engagement have run their course."

"Blunt as ever," Artemis chuckled. "But I shall keep that in mind."

They both fell silent, the faint sound of the night filling the space left by their lack of bickering.

Holly let go of his wrist, and Artemis stumbled forward. In his surprise, his arm fell before he could engage the muscles to keep it outstretched. Wrist jouncing the edge of the window box, he hissed in pain.

Engaging her wings, Holly flew slightly closer. Deliberately, she stopped near the edge of where the night met the room's interior.

"I just told you that you should be more careful when dealing with the People," Holly chided. "All that cleverness and you couldn't even predict I was about to do that — you're lucky you've just got a sore wrist to show for it."

Artemis pulled his arm back into his room fully this time, glowering.

"What," she cracked a grin, "do you think the Council will check in to make sure I didn't leave a bruise?"

He rolled his eyes, rubbing at his wrist.

She continued, mirth slipping away from her expression. "You're right I can't send you tumbling through the window, Fowl, but I'm afraid that's where their concern ends."

As Artemis moved closer to the window, she could see the way his eyes hawkishly studied the line that Holly's magic bade her to stay behind.

"Speaking of how… thoughtful you are," he mused. "I do believe I ought to thank you for coming round after the siege. Checking to see if your bomb had done its job before rummaging about my property? Very classy. I'd imagine if your squadmates were in your place, they would have taken advantage of the open invitation, grabbed the gold, and fled."

"Rubbing in escaping the timestop just because you got a little banged up? Don't be a baby."

He almost looked abashed at that. "Hardly."

"Also, I figured something out — if we're still talking about the siege."

As if to show her she'd not rattled him, Artemis rested an elbow on the windowsill again. "Oh?"

"You lied back there."

"Forgive me, but you'll have to be a tad more specific."

Sighing, she alit on the box, peering down at him. Ever so faintly, her wings hummed, preventing her from resting her full weight on her perch.

"You had the Book all along," she accused, eyes narrowing.

"And you were more compliant when you were under the impression that you'd betrayed your people," he responded airily, daring her to react with rage at his nonchalance. "It was a necessary deception."

Forcing herself to the lump forming in her throat, Holly shook her head. "I don't care about that."

Artemis didn't look convinced.

"I care about how you got the damn thing. About why you knew how to read Gnommish."

She jutted out her chin defiantly. "I care about who you had in that cell before me — whatever poor sprite or dwarf had the misfortune to not come with an LEP ransom fund."

A peal of laughter erupted from Artemis, and he leaned back from the window. "You— are you implying that I killed a fairy for its Book?"

She didn't respond.

"I'm afraid the truth is much less gruesome than you'd like."

"Than I'd like ?"

"I'd imagine the longer my catalog of cruelties, the easier things are for us both."

"You're so dramatic," she sneered. "If not anything else, I hope you outgrow that."

He drew his lips into a thin line. "I'm not sure I will."

Sighing, she engaged her wings again, hovering away from the window. "I've wasted enough time here."

"Sorry I couldn't provide you with closure," Artemis drawled, and she made a rude gesture at him.

He slid the window shut, and Holly could hear the muffled click of the lock sliding into place.

Oh, please, she scoffed internally. Paranoid as ever — as though an intruder was even capable of scaling the building to make it to his room.

Shuttering her visor closed, Holly shot off into the night, refusing to look back.

Artemis watched the Captain fly off into the night, her dark suit blending in with the tenebrous horizon of twisting trees and gloom. For a moment, he simply watched, unsure of himself. Then, he turned away from the window, annoyed.

She was going to complete the Ritual soon, he thought, the bitterness he'd felt so acutely after the siege only a pang now.

Was this envy? He didn't think so. The magical arsenal of the People was hardly awe-inspiring. Neither the mesmer nor shielding held his attention. Although the Captain's healing capabilities had intrigued him, he'd found that they, too, were exactly what they purported to be: a way to accelerate the body's natural ability to repair physical and mental injuries. There was no mystique, no higher level of skill to aspire to achieve.

Still, a traitorous part of him whispered, it's safe.

Impulsively, Artemis looked back, trying to see if he could still spot her.

The night sky, empty of life and full of stars, seemed to wink back at him.

A few years ago, he'd briefly wondered what Dmitry had to gain by taking on an apprentice. That line of questioning had been answered by the obvious explanation: Artemis was a prodigy. Any time invested in him was a tenfold gain down the line. Dmitry wanted a legacy, and who better than young Artemis to provide him it?

Artemis had been right, in a way. He held immense promise — otherwise, the necromantic charm he'd cast to evade the bio-bomb would have permanently killed all the manor's inhabitants. Similarly, he doubted that the House would have played so nicely following Dmitry's death had it any reservations about his ability to continue the Endor mantle.

What he had realized far too late, however, was that his ability was the problem.

Tonight, Holly would commune with the Earth, drawing from an unending well of telluric power to replenish her magic.

Artemis had always known that there was no equivalent of that process for mages, but he'd assumed, admittedly arrogantly, that that was a deficiency of the People rather than by design.

Tonight, the only well of power from Artemis would — and ever could — draw from lay firmly inside of himself, somewhere.

Biologically speaking, Holly's magical ability was like a negative feedback loop: she drew from her internal reserves until her magic was drained, at which point, her body prevented her from continuing to try to access her magic. Artemis', on the other hand, was positive. He drew from his internal reserves until his magic was drained, at which point, his body tried to make more magic; whatever paltry sparks he could generate, his body latched onto, pulling even harder on whatever meager power it could force to the surface in an unending loop.

Artemis ultimately didn't know if Dmitry had been directly killed by the Council. Perhaps they'd coaxed him past his limits, encouraging his delusions of grandeur until their natural conclusion. Perhaps Dmitry's own body had been the one to kill him, filling him up with magic he'd been too weak to handle.

Artemis had given up something when he cast the spell to escape the bio-bomb. He'd been allowed to escape death, to continue walking the earth after his thread of life ended; in turn, he'd not been allowed to remain as he was.

Privately, he suspected that he'd been offering up pieces of himself to his magic long before that major spell.

His yearly physical results had flummoxed his general practitioner. Although physically weaker, Artemis had felt relatively fine going in to the exam. However, Artemis' health chart painted a completely different picture.

He was dying.

Or, rather, he should have been dying. Though, maybe it was that he should have already been dead? One of the two, Artemis thought dismissively. Was 'undead' most accurate as a description, perhaps?

Holly Short was likely not having this internal debate on a Friday night, he decided, mood souring.

He slid the curtains shut.

AN:

Holly: this human is so vile and wicked… who knows the extent of his myriad crimes… he could be capable of unknown terror, trust mebr /

Artemis: *is 12 years of age and spends most of the school year stuck at a boarding school*

Also: I chose the Seamus Heaney quote because 1) death symbolism w/i the context of using Hamlet to make a greater statement on life and living and 2) one of my favorite Irish poets! He is so evocative and fun to read, check out his poems that are online to read for free.

By the way, comments are always appreciated! Hope you all are well, and I'll see you next chapter.

addendum: if you couldn't tell my brand is 1) messy characters 2) morally grey characters and 3) characters who can't talk about their emotions to save their lives