Fic post! "Ragged remains"
Title: ragged remains
Author: miri_away
Type: Fanfic (Artemis Fowl)
Genre: General, angst?
Rating: PG
Summary: There were so many questions. Mrs. Fowl waits for her son to explain.
AN: I finished it. I miss them. I could go on and on about the series, for days, but this is about the little story I wrote a few hours after. Remember, I had spoiled myself by re-entering the fandom without reading the last two, three books, so hints were not gentle and the things I learned were out of context at times. This, however, did not spoil my readings at all. This story, though, never seems finished, but I just felt like posting something. The quote is something I made up on the spot after reading the last few scenes and the ending of this is awful. Feedback welcomed!
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ragged remains
What remains to be said is the last, ragged shred of a lie you hold in your hand.
Angeline watches her son. She wills herself to be objective, to catch the things she knows she has missed, and, at times, she sees him. Artemis. She sees him and, if no one else will, Lord help her, she is torn between sobbing out of frustration and just holding him because she can hold him.
She knows he has a bit of ragged tragedy about him now, an aftershock of something he tries to hide, and she knows it must have taken something like magic to have made her oblivious to it.
He's grown, obviously, but his body...oh, where to start? There were so many questions.
"I'm going to start at the beginning, Mother." He informs her. Even sitting at her feet, dwarfed by the four poster bed's oak pillars and 'uselessly decorative' comforters, he is all taut and sincere awkwardness. If he notices how much he is giving away by not slouching, fidgeting, or even looking at her, he does not stop himself. She appreciates this: he is a genius, after all, and would know how to manipulate body language and her own maternal instinct to fit into an elaborate lie, but she knows now.
(Inside somewhere is something new and hot, something foreign and residual. It buzzes about like electricity, organic and smooth, but it is fading while its influence is only intensifying. Angeline Fowl has never felt so healthy, so good, but she can still feel the fever and hear that woman's cackle like a nervous sweat, invisible and dirty. She can still feel impressions of mania and utter hatred, could possibly act on the abandoned vestiges of rage, but no mother would even tolerate knowing of such disgust for their own child, even if it was not borne willingly. While it occasionally bubbles up or that voice screeches or whispers suggestively it is all she can do to ignore it. She gets a headache for her trouble and finds it fitting enough to bear.)
If her memory serves her correctly--and since this conversation is happening, she can guess it does--Artemis has only ever been able to act emotions out, has never been able to express them, but she now recalls the last few months and the years before that and knows this struggle is real. It may be part pride but there is something he wants to say, something he's willing to say.
Her boy is finally breaking. There is nothing she would do to stop that, not now or ever. This moment of tension is less like a blow on bruises than it is a tenderness he had been denied as a child. Whatever changed him--whoever changed him, she blesses. She blesses those events for destroying his chances at a miserable life; she is grateful to know that he has already experienced pain sharp enough to leave him vulnerable; she is thankful to have him back, alive, even though he seems bewildered and entranced by the changes he came back to; and she is glad to see his will as sharp as ever.
Angeline Fowl had never hoped to be proud of her son as other mothers could be with their sons. Their sons were not brought up with his values and their sons would never achieve half of what he could in a month, but their sons were not being groomed to be calculating to a fault and their sons would not surprise anyone by exhibiting empathy.
There are things that she can remember now, weeks of aching for the pain of his cold gaze so she could just know he was alive, not missing; months of confusion and...guilt. A normal teenager would have rebelled, would have hated her, but he is not normal. When he explains himself, she will find out why he still like a teenager and why he seems so tired, so...relieved.