From the author Myles na gCopaleen and the playwright Samuel Beckett, Artemis Fowl I had taken the names he would give to his twin sons. By naming them in this fashion, the Fowl patriarch borrowed from the wit and prosperity the writers had blessed their home country with.
And what beauty there was in those writers' success — to be beloved for the words one scratches onto a page. That was the purest milk and honey; a writer can claim better than most that his success is the result of the magic within his mind, rather than the tools lent to him by another man or the work appropriated from another.
Years before the twins were born, Artemis Fowl I would bestow his name upon his firstborn. To give someone your name is a gift that can only be given once, and once it has been passed down, it cannot be revoked. In this sense, the process of name-giving is like cell division; where there once was only the one, now stood Artemis Fowl I and Artemis Fowl II. The creation of an heir is a second act of reproduction that produces the child — although Artemis was first born as a son, the gift of his name brought him forth into the world as the heir.
Perhaps Artemis' own intelligence reinforced this fate. From the moment Artemis could speak, he effortlessly adopted the mien of his father. And how could he not? His was a mind, ravenous, whose desire to consume the world around him would always be whet, never cloyed. When the stream of cruelty refuses to be struck by drought, it is no wonder when a carnivorous lamb is produced.
Did this mean Artemis was wicked at his core?
No — though what he was at his core, not even he knew. The only thing that could be said with any certainty was that he was not enough his father for either of their tastes. When Artemis was a child, he'd not yet learned to treat the world as his thing to plunder, and when the water of the Murmansk Fjord rebaptized Fowl Sr.'s heart, Artemis had grown too cunning and cruel to ever fully kill the vampire he'd become. He was both too little and too much, both too early and too late to match the pace of his father's moral waltzing.
All of this was readily apparent to Myles.
It is a terrible thing to be born to replace another. However, Myles knew in his heart of hearts that such a statement wasn't wholly applicable to his situation. When you replace something, you expect it to be gone forever. "Forever" was an absolute that could never apply to Artemis. Myles was nothing more than a temporary replacement, for his brother's return had been expected.
The problem at hand had nothing to do with love.
Of course Mother and Father loved Artemis, just as they loved Myles and Beckett. If anything, Myles could quietly revel in the small victory of love, for Father, despite his best efforts to appear neutral, loved Myles more than his older brother — or at the very least, was able to love him more openly, more easily.
During the first few years of his life, Myles got to have a taste of the difference between love and a legacy. While Artemis was missing, Myles, unwittingly, played his role. It felt like the world's most exhilarating inside joke; to know of the grand plan that was your future, unbeknownst to all the people around you who didn't understand. Myles should have known this was never going to last, however. If Father truly believed that Artemis had died — if Father had believed in Myles — then Myles wouldn't bear the name he currently bore. Rather than having the name of a decently respected author tacked onto him like an afterthought, he would bear the legacy of his father. He could have been, should have been, Artemis Fowl III.
(Was this an immature understanding of the depth of the grief felt over Artemis' loss, or was it Myles' left-over instincts from his days as the heir to be attuned to the water of his father's crocodile tears?)
But Artemis returned.
Oh, how Myles hated him! How quickly this return relegated Myles to the role of merely being a son once more. Artemis, the prodigious-rather-than-prodigal son. Artemis, with his capacity for miracles and endless belief in his own abilities. Artemis, who when their Father talked about the past, was a figure that ambiguous represented both Artemis Fowl I and II. Artemis, who left for three years and came back with an eye that no longer resembled Father's eyes.
Ever since Artemis returned, Myles dedicated himself to the cause of tearing down false idols — he disavowed the faulty flying machines of da Vinci just as he mocked the hypotheticals of Einstein's Big Bang. These intellectual titans were frauds waiting to be unmasked by Myles — Myles, who held all the answers, and who wasn't afraid to proclaim that he did.
What did the gift of getting to play with Father on uneventful Sunday mornings with Beckett matter when compared to the gift of being seen as an equal?
Perhaps the real source of Myles' petulant rage was the fact that even more than the recognition of Father, he craved the recognition of Artemis. His older brother, his dead-and-alive sibling, his kin who was both the father and the son — Myles wanted so dearly to belong to the world of magic made possible by some unknown, special quality that seemed to suffuse Artemis with a brightness noticeable to all.
When Myles had tentatively tried to explain these sentiments to Beckett, his twin had been mystified. Beckett, who had always been more like Angeline, found the tale of fathers-sons-and-brothers inscrutable. Mystified by his brother's frustration, Beckett had countered Myles' confession with the facts he had available: Artemis loved the twins, and Beckett knew that Myles loved Artemis in turn. They were family, Beckett had argued, and they all loved each other — Myles simply got confused because he overthought things so often.
It was the worst response Beckett could have given. The fact that Artemis got to slide neatly back into his old life, sending the family dynamic into free-fall, wasn't fair — Artemis shouldn't get to just win . Every moment Artemis spent back home was a moment he was cheating Myles out of what had been his. For Myles to care for his older brother all the same… it was the most humiliating defeat he could have been served. Maybe if Myles had been born first, if he'd gotten to be the second rather than merely Myles, things would be different.
If Myles had just been allowed a fair shot, perhaps brotherhood wouldn't feel like rivalry.