Disclaimer: I own naught of the following characters. JKR owns Harry Potter and the other characters in the series while Eoin Colfer owns Artemis Fowl and other respective characters.
A Shard's Worth of a Mirror-ImageChapter One: Seeming Derision
"Juliet!"
Thorns tore at pale skin, digging at the boy's flesh as he parted them with his bare hands, trying to get past the forest of thorns and vines, which seemed to conspire against him. There was nobody he could turn to, now that Butler insisted on him leaving since, as wounded as he was (Butler) now, he was only a liability. Now with Butler gone, there were no pair of big hands to help him, no large hulking piece of a man ready to assist him in going against obstacles.
Butler would have risked running around with a serious wound in his chest if he ever knew his sister is in danger, thought the boy grimly. In their attempt to recover the faerie gold stolen from them by English goblins, they somehow had ended up in a strange forest wherein, seemingly, it was eternally nighttime. Midnight, to be exact, thought the boy, judging by the position of the moon. All was well, until his small group of three encountered a gathering of about twenty people covered in cloaks and with faces behind white masks that were meant to intimidate. The gathering, who addressed the boy and his two companions Mudbloods, had immediately taken a…liking to them and started playing with them. If hexing and sexual harassment were your kind of playing.
An hour ago Butler, his large bodyguard, had bought him and Butler's baby sister Juliet time. All was well, even though Artemis could very well tell that the leader of the gathering, whose visage seemed to have been melted by chemicals, was only toying with them, giving them time to run farther so that they would be hunted in the next few moments. He was right, as he had calculated, but he was at the moment defenseless without Butler, and despite Juliet's knowledge in martial arts, it was quite useless since they just hexed her clothes right off her, and that was already enough to incapacitate her.
It was approximately fifteen minutes and ten seconds since his own escape. Errant tears sprang from his eyes as Juliet's screams of terror replaced Ravel's Bolero as his object for the Last Song Syndrome.* But the most heart-rending were Juliet's last words to him before they were torn apart:
"Artemis, don't worry about me! Go!"
All this they were willing to do, for me, thought Artemis, his mind threatening to lose hold of his usual calm demeanor. It wasn't meant to be this way! Faeries were not meant to be above ground for this night! But the People they encountered were too tall to be faeries…were they human? They had batons…
Artemis would have pondered on the subject longer, but rather suddenly, Artemis felt his strength flowing out of him as fast as blood through a pierced artery.
Poisoned thorns…
Falling face down in the cold, damp ground, his last thought was this:
This is just a minor circumstance…this is just…
But deep in his heart Artemis doubted himself. For the first time.
As soon as Severus was sure that the other Death Eaters were out of the Forbidden Forest, along with their latest Muggle acquisition, he tried to trace the path of the young boy who had escaped. Usually in his attempt to 'retrieve' a person, as he quite fondly calls it, his objective is to save the person's life. Not in this case. His main concern was that the young Muggle would not return to wherever he came from and loosely tattle about Wizards and magic. All hell would break loose.
"DIFFINDO!" Severus' booming (but usually soft and cold) voice accompanied the violet flash of light which cleared a path for him among the poisonous foliage, not minding the fact that the human could hear him say words meant for magic. An obliviate should do the trick for him afterwards. Running as fast as the lightning despite the fact that Voldemort had just cast Crucio on him just a few hours ago, he caught a glimpse of the unconscious Muggle boy face down, flat on the ground.
"Merlin," Severus breathed as he immediately saw the cause of the boy's loss of consciousness. This boy still had a hundred Arlise thorns stuck in his skin.
Forget casting Obliviate, Severus thought grimly as he quickly assessed the boy's injuries on the spot. Better move him to the Infirmary. Deciding that he could consider the life of the boy under his jurisdiction, since his troubles were caused by him meeting the Death Eaters, he picked up the boy using the Mobilicorpus spell and dashed towards Hogwarts.
Harry was tasked by Severus to sit by the boy's bedside in the Infirmary, and since he was a Muggle, Severus gave him implicit orders to make the boy's cubicle look as if it had belonged to a Muggle hospital. So Harry closed the curtains around them, and hid his wand.
He was about to fall asleep when he heard the figure stirring on the bed.
"Are you alright?" asked Harry, quite concerned. The boy had nasty cuts in his arms. He could not help but feel odd. Looking at the boy made him feel like he was witnessing what happened to him at the end of his first and also his fourth year at Hogwarts. Ending up in a hospital bed, in pain, and with absolutely no clue where he was. For ten seconds, at least.
"Yes, I am fine," the boy murmured as he took in his surroundings, which is not much, since the curtains were closed. "Where am I?"
"You're in…um…" Harry fumbled for a conspicuously Muggle name for a hospital, "Saint Ignatius' Hospital." There, Harry mentally patted himself on the back. He couldn't help but feel wary around the boy. For a Muggle, he felt too Slytherin. But this boy, as Harry had observed his quite scientific way of appraising the surroundings, he was not a typical nasty Slytherin, and not even remotely like Malfoy, No, this one looked a miniature version of his Potions Master. Calm, and even in his injured way, calculating. Just thinking about Snape's Mini-me made the image of Malfoy look like candy in Harry's eyes. Besides, Draco was just all air and no…brain, like this one obviously had.
Smooth waters run deep, Harry mused, remembering the adage. They also kill by drowning, which is often. Harry fought to keep his face indifferent despite his concern and curiosity towards the figure on the bed. Again, comparing the boy to Draco, this one was decidedly deadly. While Harry could know Draco was probably plotting something judging the noise he make while at it, this one more probably kept to himself.
The reason why Harry could know so much about one person in just a few minutes time was that he was like him.
Meanwhile, the boy's cold, blue eyes seemed to be unconvinced of Harry's answer. Then they flickered, his eyes turning frozen. Harry was right to assume that the boy was cold and calculating. He became even more wary. His cover was blown, he knew it. So much for Snape's orders. Too bad I don't know Obliviate.
"There is no Hospital by that name in this area," the boy whispered, still weak. "Are you lying to me?" Cold blue eyes met Harry's determined green.
"Well, do you think I would tell you that I'm lying if I am?" Harry bluffed; almost sure that it would overthrow the strange boy into doubt. He was wrong.
"Good answer," the boy said with a weak though distant smile. "You didn't have to hide that baton, you know. And the fact that you could use magic with it."
Harry almost could not contain his shock. How could he know? He was a Muggle, he was sure of it, but one obvious sign that the boy had only encountered Wizards now was that he called wands batons. "For your information, this is a wand," Harry said blithely as he could muster, pulling the wand out of his pocket, not wanting to lose the battle of wills against the bedridden boy. He handed it to the boy for him to satisfy his curiosity.
"That's funny. I thought magicians would want to escape stereotyping, but I don't think calling this thing a wand would help much." The boy weakly fondled the stick with his fingers, wondering at the same time what was it that made flashes of light emanate from it. He could ask the boy watching over him, of course, but he doubted that he could supply him with sufficient answers.
They both remained that way for several awkward moments (in Harry's part, at least), until Harry decided to break the silence.
"My name's Harry," Harry said suddenly, the realization that they still did not know each other's names dawning over him.
"Artemis," the other boy returned, his attention still on the wand, then stopped himself and reached his left hand which was firmly accepted by Harry's right. "Artemis Fowl the Second."
Severus held his nocturne vigil for that night in Remus Lupin's office, with Lupin beside him, the lupine professor searching the Internet database via a noteook computer charmed so that it could work within Hogwarts and also gain unlimited access through a makeshift connection to the Net.
Severus could only sit quietly, not even minding that his arm was draped over Lupin's shoulders in an attempt to shift to a better angle so that he could catch the proper spectrum of color properly. He was dealing with an LCD monitor, after all. Looking at wrong angles negated the colors. Clearly, Severus was enthralled with what the electronic universe could offer when it came to information. For a moment he felt envious of Lupin's computer-savvy, which he most probably earned in his years-long jaunt in the Muggle world, where werewolves only existed in television and the theatre.
"Aha! There it is," Remus pointed to a strip of text just below the picture of a boy who looked like the one Severus had brought into Hogwart's Infirmary. The picture had shown the boy, while a bit younger, still had the pale gaunt face, sleek dark hair, and frosted blue eyes. "I knew I saw him before," Remus exclaimed triumphantly. "This Artemis Fowl is the boy whom the goblins had been complaining to me about, when I was recruiting one of them for last year's Defense classes." Grinning as a wolf, no pun intended, he took a long deep breath, stretched, and faced the Potions master with a content countenance, which the other did not take too kindly.
"Before you pat yourself on the back for a job well done Lupin," Severus coldly said, "Tell me how this tiny fact that this Artemis Fowl is the object of the goblin's infantile ire is going to help us."
Remus was not fazed out of his contented state. "Based on what I heard about him, Artemis Fowl always had reasons in his travels. Once, it had been to steal the faerie ransom funds."
"What? That teenage runt?"
Remus only shrugged, smiling ruefully. "Why don't you ask him, Severus? I highly doubt that the kid ended up in the Forbidden Forest for a moonlight walk." He then turned his attention towards the monitor again and made certain adjustments in the computer. Switching the connection from Muggle DSL cable to Faerie Plasma-optic HFN** system, he accessed the Faerie Information Highway for Artemis Fowl. After a minute, which seemed like an eternity to the professors, they were finally reading an unofficial, though still credible, database file on Artemis Fowl.
"Responsible for the kidnapping of LEPrecon Captain Holly Short," Remus read from a bulleted list of Artemis's exploits.
"But later made an alliance with the LEPrecon against the Goblin Insurgence…"
Severus bristled. The Goblin Insurgence. There was a race of underground goblins who were surprisingly stupid (given the size of their brains) who would kill their own clansmen in their own stupidity and greed. Somehow, it reminded Severus of the present status of the Death Eaters…
"So this Muggle boy I have hauled in here is some sort of a prodigy…" Severus mused aloud, trying to bounce off ideas from Remus Lupin, whom he had come to trust for his intelligence. He may have hated the werewolf once for the school prank orchestrated by Sirius Black, but unknowing by others Severus had come to outgrown it, his hatred for Lupin once was fueled instead by the werewolf's seeming complacency towards the canine animagus.
"You seem to resent having him be submitted to Obliviate, eh, Severus?" Remus asked. He seemed to smell resentment and concern emanating from the other man, two familiar smells for a wolf. Also, he knew that Severus would kill to have a student of that caliber in Hogwarts. Not even Tom Riddle could have been that intelligent, and he didn't even have his own Interpol record. Artemis, on the other hand, had, despite his age. Fifteen. If this unofficial account on Artemis Fowl is to be trusted, then he probably had the Interpol record by the age of twelve. Remus sucked in air as he processed the knowledge in his brain. Brilliant.
"Frankly, I don't want that boy to be Oblivated just yet," Severus said, removing his arm from Remus' shoulder. "If he notices that his companions were missing, he would most likely snoop around for clues. He would know that somehow, something has happened to make it so. And with a boy of that," Severus pointed a slender finger towards the screen to the spot where Artemis' IQ percentage was written in bold font, "…intelligence, I wouldn't be surprised if he ended up here. Again. And with Merlin knows what in tow."
"So…you are suggesting that we keep the boy until you rescue his companions, is that it?"
"Maybe. I do not know."
In the moonlight glow, Artemis worried about whether Butler was alive, somewhere, and if Juliet was still…alive. If it were any other boy, Artemis would have broken down and cried for his parents, but Artemis Fowl was no other boy. He was planning something, and it would be more helpful if he bid his time in the place where he was recuperating right now. By the looks of it and from what he had discerned from Harry, the one who had been looking after him until midnight, this place was an institute for humans who could use magic. Real wizards.
If it were possible, one could hear the cogs of Artemis' brain working. Who knows what he could extort from this situation?
R and R please!