[Artemis Fowl] Heliopathy
(aka 'Mushroom Soupie')
Arty-boy goes a little crazy and buys strange things off ebay, leading to evil things. Unfortunately, he doesn't get turned into a dog. This is actually very dark, satanic, and almost scary. And contains a melted lightbulb.
Genre(s): Dark, Angst
Rating: PG.
Pairing(s): Platonic Butler/Artemis
Status: 1/1. 2000 words.
Warnings: Dark, satanism, character death
Author's Note: This story was written as a birthday present for Rihana (Skye Firebane) who likes evil!Artemis, and so I took that one step further. She named it Mushroom Soupie before she knew what it was. Verily fun to write this.
When the change came, no one could see it. Because, openly, there wasn’t a change at all. Black hair can’t become blacker; a face so white from indoor activity can only go to grey… And no one ever pays attention to how someone walks. Although, closer to the end, his gaze was weaker than others expected, his manner, his actions, were unsteady, the whites of his eyes a sickly yellow from lack of sleep. But no one cared, or properly noticed, or thought anything of a genius preferring to not loose even the slightest opportunity to work by sleeping.
The change, as much as there was, happened slowly and quickly simultaneously. It was festering inside for days and weeks and months before the concept came up from his subconscious and landed in his mind, niggling at him until he gave in. They were the whys and illogical nature of succeeding once and only once, when everyone knows that once a milestone is breached to repeat it is easy. But that isn’t so with everything, it seems. Not with death at least. Death happens for each person only once, but for those exceptions to the rule, coming back from death only happens once…
The catalyst for the change, the obsession, was something unthought, unvoiced, unknown, hiding underneath it all. A dry rasping voice, a voice of death, a voice dying: “Call me Domovoi.” It was in that moment that both acceptance and determination had been born. He knew that Butler - that Domovoi - was going to die, and he knew that he had to stop it. And then, later, closer to his own fall, genius as he was, he couldn’t understand how he could have felt the dead weight, closed the staring glazed eyes, fingered a thick neck without a strong pulse thumbing under his tips, and then had the person come back, slightly the worse for wear but not broken, not gone. And then to feel it again, to see the flat-liner, to see the doctors pulling a sobbing Juliet away from the body, to stand at the open grave, staring down at the hole in the Russian soil, larger than a normal grave. And for him to be left, alone, himself as broken as the man decaying in that hole. He wondered about that, in a vague sort of way, contemplating the irony of a hole, a nothing, taking away his father - for Domovoi was his true father, not the silly little man who thought he knew so much, who acted so high, who didn’t see what was in front of his nose. Butler always saw everything. Everything.
It’s a thought that perhaps Butler would have seen it happening; perhaps Butler would have been the only person able to stop it. But he was the cause, and if he’d been there to stop it, it wouldn’t have happened in the first place. Life likes paradoxes like that. Or perhaps it’s only humans who like the ironical, only humans who gather coincidences under their shirts, hording them away to use as explanation of the universe, and how they personally must be a significant part thereof.
It wasn’t like there was much in the way of physical evidence to incriminate Artemis Fowl’s mind, and that there was wasn’t noticed. Because no one cared to look too close, just in case they saw the devil staring back. In case the devil didn’t like them for that recognition. They didn’t want to register, to see, the badness, evil, just incase it was worse for them.
But that was just a rumour; no one believed that if they had looked at Artemis closely enough they would have seen his eyes red with something more than fatigue. It was a metaphor, used so incorrectly, incriminating the devil at a time when it was really only Artemis himself. The devil was Artemis. Artemis was the devil. When people had been silly enough to look at the child with such a brilliant mind they had seen uncomfortable things and promptly pushed them from their delicate minds. So people were conditioned into not looking, and only one person had ever tried for longer, ever seen past it all for more than a moment, and after he was gone there was no one for whom Artemis wanted to control and censor his actions and facial expressions.
The obsession might have been the thing that did it. It might have been the soft voice, whispering over and over “I’m Domovoi, I’m here, but call me by my name now. Please, Artemis, stay with me. You’re no longer my charge, but still trust me, please. Please, Artemis, dear, misunderstood, Artemis. Save me/yourself. Save yourself, save me.” In a twisted way Artemis had known that his own safety and savior lay in bringing Domovoi back, while the road to that end was the real destruction that he had to be saved from.
Watching, watching from heaven or hell, or wherever in-between, or beside his own namesake, Domovoi cried as he watched it. He had cried in his life, he had cried as if nothing else mattered, but he had never cried quite so sadly or quite so hopelessly. Domovoi had patted Domovoi on the back, comforting in that way that all protectors are, simply by being there.
And sometimes, almost, possibly, Artemis felt Domovoi’s tears, sliding down his spine like wet fingers. And they caused him to strive harder, to stay up later shifting through ancient documents and useless Internet sites, looking for the answer.
The result was the cause was the result was the end. But the end was just the end.
It could be said that it started innocently, but that would be a lie in every particular. It started with passion, with fever, with determination, with the life of another held above the worth of the self. But it ended that way as well. And was that way throughout.
It also started in tears, and ended in tears. But tears mean nothing.
But the physical start was a book, blood red leather, hand-bound with dark lettering along the cover. The pages were parchment, the occult, foreign language written in a dye made from herbs. He brought it off ebay.
Then came the candles, the incense, the diagrams on the walls and on scraps of dark velvet. Then he developed the computer program that synthesized and released the chemical effects of lighted candles in his room. Then the bottles of chemicals, designed to cause the same effect as the scents, only more effectively. The diagrams stayed, not complete, but adapted as he saw fit. He drew them in crystal and placed them around the room with great concentration and care. He moved his computers into a side room, and installed a radio wave proof wall. He threw out those few textiles that were in some way synthetic, and even tested the varnish on the old wooden furniture.
He would have understood himself to be mad much sooner, if there was anything mad about it. He understood others to be mad, he knew that eccentric women with piles of silver bangles believing that magic can bring the dead back into the world of the living with a few candle were fakes. He lowered his eyes when he encountered anyone preaching in the streets about the latest cult and how the leader could bring people back to life. But he wasn’t mad. Because he knew that magic could cause the dead to breathe again, he knew that death wasn’t as final as anyone else wanted him to believe.
His dreams were to be expected, to a point, and that reinforced his normalicy. He dreamed of strong arms around him at 5 when he had scraped his knee. He dreamed of a voice, latently powerful, quiet in defiance, staring down Artemis’ parents when they didn’t understand. He remembered thinking that Butler looked like a troll after reading the Discworld books and hearing of Crysophrase in his black suit. He dreamed of watching two trolls dance on a computer monitor, a fight deadly and personal and awe-inspiring. He remembered flying through the air, the quick memory of a hand pulling against his school uniform in the ice.
But sometimes he didn’t. He dreamed of red eyes staring across ice wildernesses, a land of ice so cold that it burnt. He dreamed of dark hair spiked like a teen wearing the latest fashion, but atop a face so white as to be transparent. He dreamed of a huge man, a troll of a man, who had a mass of hair all over his face, and piercing eyes that made you shiver, and a grin that made you want to get as far away as technically, and impossibly, possible. He dreamed of things entering flames, things leaving flames, things living in flames, things of flame. He woke up cold, freezing cold, flat on his back as if he hadn’t moved all night. This would happen for days, for weeks, for ever.
Once he would withdraw the thick curtains around his bed and stand. It would be the right time. The most right that time had ever been. He would know it. Without looking at his star maps and planning he would know when it would be right. It would be right now. He would be perfectly still, perfectly balanced between his drive and his insanity.
Nothing would move. Nothing.
He would lean forward, poised on the edge of submission, on the edge of dominance.
He would speak, softly, breaking more than silence. He would know - does know - how it will work, better than those who invented it, those who practiced it, better than some of those who were giving the power in the first. Better than the demons and the devils and those who believed in both.
He would call. He will call for that which he feels he deserves, that he feels he can’t live without. And his call will be so desperate that the universe struggles with it; the world changes, changes only with the call. The world will erupt, erupt in small and large, in large and small, in unnoticeable amounts, in world shattering ways.
Juliet Butler, preparing a midnight smoothie two floors down and rooms away, will feel faint. Her heart will struggle to beat, her lungs struggle to take any nourishment from the air that comes in. Her body will try to be something, someone, else. The skin at her temples will pull itself, morph itself unrecognizable, tug at her, push her mind out. The headache will be blinding, burning, mind-numbing.
She will fall to the floor. She’ll be clutching at her head, clutching so hard that she’d have strange-looking bruises for weeks and a fractured eye socket.
In the morning it will be her boyfriend who will find her as he pops in for a visit. His exclamation of her name would resound through the house and moments later Angeline would rattle the handle of her son’s bedroom door.
There will be no answer. No way for there to be an answer.
They would break open the door hours, moments, later. There would be nothing visible except mist and smog and darkness and dreams.
Angeline would flick the light switch, but it won’t work. Artemis Senior will bring a torch. And they’ll see.
They’ll see the darkness that’s still lurking in the corners, darkness given life so it exists like light does. They’ll see the blood, darkness in it’s own right. They’ll see the outline of a human, a boy still filling out, made in smashed glass. His outline flung into the wall, jagged shafts of glass spun around, all over the wall. With a blank space that they would hope would have nothing to do with reality, and only have a relationship with coincidence. Only one triangle of clarity lies within the eerie space, placed where the heart would be if the glass silhouette wouldn’t be more than coincidence.
It was Juliet, recently woken, who would look up. Look up and see the light bulb completely melted, drips of its glass on the floor.
Arty-boy goes a little crazy and buys strange things off ebay, leading to evil things. Unfortunately, he doesn't get turned into a dog. This is actually very dark, satanic, and almost scary. And contains a melted lightbulb.
Genre(s): Dark, Angst
Rating: PG.
Pairing(s): Platonic Butler/Artemis
Status: 1/1. 2000 words.
Warnings: Dark, satanism, character death
Author's Note: This story was written as a birthday present for Rihana (Skye Firebane) who likes evil!Artemis, and so I took that one step further. She named it Mushroom Soupie before she knew what it was. Verily fun to write this.
When the change came, no one could see it. Because, openly, there wasn’t a change at all. Black hair can’t become blacker; a face so white from indoor activity can only go to grey… And no one ever pays attention to how someone walks. Although, closer to the end, his gaze was weaker than others expected, his manner, his actions, were unsteady, the whites of his eyes a sickly yellow from lack of sleep. But no one cared, or properly noticed, or thought anything of a genius preferring to not loose even the slightest opportunity to work by sleeping.
The change, as much as there was, happened slowly and quickly simultaneously. It was festering inside for days and weeks and months before the concept came up from his subconscious and landed in his mind, niggling at him until he gave in. They were the whys and illogical nature of succeeding once and only once, when everyone knows that once a milestone is breached to repeat it is easy. But that isn’t so with everything, it seems. Not with death at least. Death happens for each person only once, but for those exceptions to the rule, coming back from death only happens once…
The catalyst for the change, the obsession, was something unthought, unvoiced, unknown, hiding underneath it all. A dry rasping voice, a voice of death, a voice dying: “Call me Domovoi.” It was in that moment that both acceptance and determination had been born. He knew that Butler - that Domovoi - was going to die, and he knew that he had to stop it. And then, later, closer to his own fall, genius as he was, he couldn’t understand how he could have felt the dead weight, closed the staring glazed eyes, fingered a thick neck without a strong pulse thumbing under his tips, and then had the person come back, slightly the worse for wear but not broken, not gone. And then to feel it again, to see the flat-liner, to see the doctors pulling a sobbing Juliet away from the body, to stand at the open grave, staring down at the hole in the Russian soil, larger than a normal grave. And for him to be left, alone, himself as broken as the man decaying in that hole. He wondered about that, in a vague sort of way, contemplating the irony of a hole, a nothing, taking away his father - for Domovoi was his true father, not the silly little man who thought he knew so much, who acted so high, who didn’t see what was in front of his nose. Butler always saw everything. Everything.
It’s a thought that perhaps Butler would have seen it happening; perhaps Butler would have been the only person able to stop it. But he was the cause, and if he’d been there to stop it, it wouldn’t have happened in the first place. Life likes paradoxes like that. Or perhaps it’s only humans who like the ironical, only humans who gather coincidences under their shirts, hording them away to use as explanation of the universe, and how they personally must be a significant part thereof.
It wasn’t like there was much in the way of physical evidence to incriminate Artemis Fowl’s mind, and that there was wasn’t noticed. Because no one cared to look too close, just in case they saw the devil staring back. In case the devil didn’t like them for that recognition. They didn’t want to register, to see, the badness, evil, just incase it was worse for them.
But that was just a rumour; no one believed that if they had looked at Artemis closely enough they would have seen his eyes red with something more than fatigue. It was a metaphor, used so incorrectly, incriminating the devil at a time when it was really only Artemis himself. The devil was Artemis. Artemis was the devil. When people had been silly enough to look at the child with such a brilliant mind they had seen uncomfortable things and promptly pushed them from their delicate minds. So people were conditioned into not looking, and only one person had ever tried for longer, ever seen past it all for more than a moment, and after he was gone there was no one for whom Artemis wanted to control and censor his actions and facial expressions.
The obsession might have been the thing that did it. It might have been the soft voice, whispering over and over “I’m Domovoi, I’m here, but call me by my name now. Please, Artemis, stay with me. You’re no longer my charge, but still trust me, please. Please, Artemis, dear, misunderstood, Artemis. Save me/yourself. Save yourself, save me.” In a twisted way Artemis had known that his own safety and savior lay in bringing Domovoi back, while the road to that end was the real destruction that he had to be saved from.
Watching, watching from heaven or hell, or wherever in-between, or beside his own namesake, Domovoi cried as he watched it. He had cried in his life, he had cried as if nothing else mattered, but he had never cried quite so sadly or quite so hopelessly. Domovoi had patted Domovoi on the back, comforting in that way that all protectors are, simply by being there.
And sometimes, almost, possibly, Artemis felt Domovoi’s tears, sliding down his spine like wet fingers. And they caused him to strive harder, to stay up later shifting through ancient documents and useless Internet sites, looking for the answer.
The result was the cause was the result was the end. But the end was just the end.
It could be said that it started innocently, but that would be a lie in every particular. It started with passion, with fever, with determination, with the life of another held above the worth of the self. But it ended that way as well. And was that way throughout.
It also started in tears, and ended in tears. But tears mean nothing.
But the physical start was a book, blood red leather, hand-bound with dark lettering along the cover. The pages were parchment, the occult, foreign language written in a dye made from herbs. He brought it off ebay.
Then came the candles, the incense, the diagrams on the walls and on scraps of dark velvet. Then he developed the computer program that synthesized and released the chemical effects of lighted candles in his room. Then the bottles of chemicals, designed to cause the same effect as the scents, only more effectively. The diagrams stayed, not complete, but adapted as he saw fit. He drew them in crystal and placed them around the room with great concentration and care. He moved his computers into a side room, and installed a radio wave proof wall. He threw out those few textiles that were in some way synthetic, and even tested the varnish on the old wooden furniture.
He would have understood himself to be mad much sooner, if there was anything mad about it. He understood others to be mad, he knew that eccentric women with piles of silver bangles believing that magic can bring the dead back into the world of the living with a few candle were fakes. He lowered his eyes when he encountered anyone preaching in the streets about the latest cult and how the leader could bring people back to life. But he wasn’t mad. Because he knew that magic could cause the dead to breathe again, he knew that death wasn’t as final as anyone else wanted him to believe.
His dreams were to be expected, to a point, and that reinforced his normalicy. He dreamed of strong arms around him at 5 when he had scraped his knee. He dreamed of a voice, latently powerful, quiet in defiance, staring down Artemis’ parents when they didn’t understand. He remembered thinking that Butler looked like a troll after reading the Discworld books and hearing of Crysophrase in his black suit. He dreamed of watching two trolls dance on a computer monitor, a fight deadly and personal and awe-inspiring. He remembered flying through the air, the quick memory of a hand pulling against his school uniform in the ice.
But sometimes he didn’t. He dreamed of red eyes staring across ice wildernesses, a land of ice so cold that it burnt. He dreamed of dark hair spiked like a teen wearing the latest fashion, but atop a face so white as to be transparent. He dreamed of a huge man, a troll of a man, who had a mass of hair all over his face, and piercing eyes that made you shiver, and a grin that made you want to get as far away as technically, and impossibly, possible. He dreamed of things entering flames, things leaving flames, things living in flames, things of flame. He woke up cold, freezing cold, flat on his back as if he hadn’t moved all night. This would happen for days, for weeks, for ever.
Once he would withdraw the thick curtains around his bed and stand. It would be the right time. The most right that time had ever been. He would know it. Without looking at his star maps and planning he would know when it would be right. It would be right now. He would be perfectly still, perfectly balanced between his drive and his insanity.
Nothing would move. Nothing.
He would lean forward, poised on the edge of submission, on the edge of dominance.
He would speak, softly, breaking more than silence. He would know - does know - how it will work, better than those who invented it, those who practiced it, better than some of those who were giving the power in the first. Better than the demons and the devils and those who believed in both.
He would call. He will call for that which he feels he deserves, that he feels he can’t live without. And his call will be so desperate that the universe struggles with it; the world changes, changes only with the call. The world will erupt, erupt in small and large, in large and small, in unnoticeable amounts, in world shattering ways.
Juliet Butler, preparing a midnight smoothie two floors down and rooms away, will feel faint. Her heart will struggle to beat, her lungs struggle to take any nourishment from the air that comes in. Her body will try to be something, someone, else. The skin at her temples will pull itself, morph itself unrecognizable, tug at her, push her mind out. The headache will be blinding, burning, mind-numbing.
She will fall to the floor. She’ll be clutching at her head, clutching so hard that she’d have strange-looking bruises for weeks and a fractured eye socket.
In the morning it will be her boyfriend who will find her as he pops in for a visit. His exclamation of her name would resound through the house and moments later Angeline would rattle the handle of her son’s bedroom door.
There will be no answer. No way for there to be an answer.
They would break open the door hours, moments, later. There would be nothing visible except mist and smog and darkness and dreams.
Angeline would flick the light switch, but it won’t work. Artemis Senior will bring a torch. And they’ll see.
They’ll see the darkness that’s still lurking in the corners, darkness given life so it exists like light does. They’ll see the blood, darkness in it’s own right. They’ll see the outline of a human, a boy still filling out, made in smashed glass. His outline flung into the wall, jagged shafts of glass spun around, all over the wall. With a blank space that they would hope would have nothing to do with reality, and only have a relationship with coincidence. Only one triangle of clarity lies within the eerie space, placed where the heart would be if the glass silhouette wouldn’t be more than coincidence.
It was Juliet, recently woken, who would look up. Look up and see the light bulb completely melted, drips of its glass on the floor.