Archive of Our Own

Artemis watches every video his past self had left for him. He devours every second, notes every movement he makes, memorizes every tidbit of information his own mouth is saying. 

And yet he remembers none of this. 

He thinks he knows himself. He knows his facial expressions, his body movements, his tells. He knows how to tell a lie without anyone knowing and he knows how to tell when he's being told a lie. He knows how to edit a video without leaving any sign of tampering and he knows how to spot when a video has been tampered with. 

This video has not been tampered with. The Artemis on the screen is not telling a single lie. 

And yet he remembers none of this. 

He sees himself, on the screen, apparently mere months ago, calmly and professionally listing facts in exactly the way he would go about reminding himself of something he'd forgotten, were that ever to happen to someone with a near perfect memory such as himself. He sits on the slightly uncomfortable ledge in the middle of a ship designed and built by and for species he had never thought even existed before today, and he watches himself talk about a personal and emotional journey over the past two years that had clearly deeply affected him. He watches himself describe going from kidnapping and holding a creature of another species for ransom to fighting by her side. 

He watches his own face when he talks about Holly - the creature that had found him this morning and who had impacted this other self so much. He watches his features alight in a way he isn't quite sure he recognizes. 

He knows facial expressions. He knows what happiness looks like. He has simply never seen it on his own face before. 

He and Holly had been through so much, apparently. She had been his first ever friend, the first one he'd made all on his own, the first person he had seen as an equal and the first person who had cared about him all on her own - not like Butler, who was different, because he was family his oldest friend but also his employee. Holly had come to be his friend all on her own. And he doesn't say it outright, in this video diary, but he sees how much he cares about her in return. 

He recognizes why he had made this. It's ingenious, he thinks or it would be if it had worked . He records himself giving an overview of all the things that the mind wipe would take from him, all the facts and all the feelings, and his present self would find enough in these descriptions to make the memories slot themselves right back into place. 

And yet he remembers none of this. 

He's jolted out of his musing by a knock on the door. Butler calls out, asking if it's all back. 

He opens the door. Something is very different in his manservant, something is off about his stance and his expression that he can't quite place until he remembers that he had left a video diary for Butler, too. 

Butler looks different, stands different, is different, because all of the ways he has changed have come back to him. Butler remembers everything. He, too, had changed throughout their time with Holly and the others. He isn't like the Butler of this morning at all. 

Artemis? Artemis is still just like the Artemis he'd always been. But not always, because there is another version of him, lost forever, trapped on a disc in a failed attempt at keeping himself alive who is just as alien from the original version as this Butler is. 

Artemis wants to demand to go home. He wants to get back to the hotel room and pack up his prize and go back to his manor and pretend none of this nonsense had ever happened. But he knows too much now. He doesn't remember, but he knows about another life he had led, another self he had been. 

He's seen himself happy. 

And he can't let that go, somehow. Despite not needing friends his whole life, now that he knows he'd had them and lost them, he feels like something is missing. He feels resentful of that other self who had felt so happy with these lost friends. Why did he get to be happy, when the Artemis of now has two parents who are present and willing to be there for him for once and a butler who will be by his side no matter what and all the possibilities in the criminal world open to him and yet is so confused by seeing happiness on his own face? 

He had thought he'd been happy, before. He had thought all his money and power and success had made him happy. But seeing himself talk about Holly and the other friends he had made in his missing time makes him realize he doesn't even know what happy feels like. 

"Did it come back?" Butler asks. "Do you remember it all too?" 

Artemis blinks. He looks at Butler, the man who had gone through so much for him in a life he doesn't remember, who had died for him. He looks at Holly, sticking her head out of the cockpit to hear his answer, her face so unfamiliar for all she meant to his other self. And he makes his decision. 

"Yes. I remember everything." 

The lie comes easy. They always do, to him. He knows how to control his features, smother his tells. He thinks he knows how to fool Butler, if he has to, even this version of him, because their shared history is so great. He doesn't know if he can fool Holly, because she knows him and yet he doesn't know her. He decides to take the risk. 

He wants to know more about this other version of himself. He wants to know what friendship is, whatever qualities of it that could change him so deeply. He's too far down this rabbit hole, too curious about what comes next, to turn back now. 

Holly scrutinizes him. Butler scrutinizes him. The dwarf, Mulch, who had been another unexpectedly dear friend in a lost life, scrutinizes him. 

As one, they say, "No, you don't." 

Mulch looks bummed, ducking into the now-empty bathroom. Butler looks disappointed, in a way he never has before. Holly simply looks hurt. 

"If it didn't work, it didn't work," she says almost coldly, turning back to look out the front window, pulling her knees into her chest and wrapping her arms around them. "Stop getting my hopes up by trying to pretend it did." 

Artemis wants to go join her. He wants to tell her that the friend she's lost isn't truly gone, that part of him is still here. But he doesn't. It isn't his place. For all he knows the facts of their friendship, for all he knows how he had once felt about her, it is all still just something he'd learned through a screen. The person he is now had never been through all of those things with her. They'd been through a harrowing experience of their own just a short time ago, but that doesn't mean she isn't still grieving the loss of a friend with whom she'd been through even more. 

"I still want to help," he says, almost to himself, sitting in the main room with Butler, who won't even look at him. "I still want to stop Koboi. I know everything I used to know about her, I know I can come up with some way to stop her." 

"Great," Holly says, dully. "Let us know when you have a plan." 

He does, eventually. Artemis hatches a sensible plan, it goes wrong, and then he hatches more, increasingly insane plans until the day is saved. 

At no point during this time do his memories return. He uses what he'd learned from earlier in the day, his video diaries, and suggestions from Mulch, Holly, and Butler to patch together what he should have remembered. 

Even at the end, when they win and they're alive and everything seems to have wrapped up nicely, there's still tension in the air. 

Mulch keeps trying to fall back into a rhythm of banter that Artemis simply can't follow, and each time he makes the wrong response, the disappointment in the dwarf's face is obvious. 

Butler almost seems to be holding back his own knowledge, trying his hardest not to call attention to the fact he's remembered but his charge hasn't. 

Holly won't look him in the eyes. She smiles at him, she seems genuinely pleased when his smarts pull them out of a sticky situation, but she still won't make eye contact. 

The worst part is, Artemis understands all of this. He's disappointed, too, in the technology that took all this from him, in Koboi, for forcing him back here to shove his lost moments in his face, but most of all in himself. He's done what he could to remember, and nothing seems to be working. It's all still gone. 

When it's all over, Holly drops him and Butler off at the manor. Butler hugs her, and she hugs him back, and it seems genuine. Butler has his memories, he remembers all the moments he had shared with her. Their friendship is intact. 

When they separate, Holly turns to Artemis. He thinks about the last time they had said goodbye, before the wipe. He thinks about the story behind the computer disk, how she had shot a hole through a gold coin and given it to him as a token of their friendship. 

He doesn't know what happened to that coin, since his past self had replaced it with a disk and told no one. He doesn't remember the moment in the first place, but he misses it anyway. 

Now, Holly stands apart from him, clenching and unclenching her fists. She doesn't seem to know what to say. 

Finally, after a loaded silence, she speaks. "I hoped you would figure it out. All that time after - and when I found you again, after Julius, I knew you'd have no memory. I thought I'd be ready for it. But somewhere inside, I guess I still thought you'd find some way around it, with all your smarts. And then I saw the disk and I thought - that's it, he's done it, but." She takes a shaky breath. "It didn't work. And you're back to where you were before, but I - I'm not the person I was when we met the first time." 

She turns away, staring at the ground. Artemis thinks he sees tears gathering in her eyes, but he's not sure. 

He doesn't know how to respond. This is his friend, he can say that much at least, after all they'd just been through. But Holly has another friend, a better friend, who's gone forever, leaving this Artemis in his place. He knows he has to say something, he just isn't sure what. The other Artemis would know exactly what to say here. The other Artemis would be able to comfort Holly the way she needs. 

If the other Artemis was here, she wouldn't need comfort, because she would have her friend back. 

"Call anytime," he says, to say something, "If you need a consultant. Free of charge." He means it, too. He wants her to call, he doesn't want all he's been through to end like this. He's selfish by nature and he wants what his lost self had. 

Holly nods. She leaves. She doesn't meet his eyes. 

She doesn't call. 

Artemis could easily take what he knows about the fairies and use it to discover them all over again, to build up his knowledge to where it had been. He could make contact with the ones he'd known in another life, take the first step to rebuilding those relationships. 

He doesn't. 

The way Holly had looked, the way Mulch had acted, he can almost feel the missing person in the room. He wants to be who they wanted him to be, but he simply isn't. On some level, he doesn't want to face that disappointment again. And so he leaves the fairy world alone. He goes out of his way to avoid any mention of it, even going so far as to block any mention of them when he hears some girl go public with a fairy she's apparently caught. He goes about his days in rigidly enforced ignorance, going to school and stealing what he wants with no real sense of purpose anymore. All he can think about is what he'd lost, and at the same time his thoughts are dominated by trying not to think about it. 

There's a barrier between him and Butler, now, one that had never been there before. Butler has two years worth of memories and experiences that had irreversibly changed his relationship with his charge. Artemis simply does not have the same. Butler doesn't know how to act around him, how to talk to him. He tries to hide his discomfort, but Artemis can see it clearly. It hurts, in a way he hasn't felt hurt before. He feels like he's lost his only friend. 

He goes through life feeling like a chunk of himself is missing, but he learns to ignore it. He still has goals, even if they don't fill him with the same drive he used to. He still has dreams of wealth and power, even if they feel more like a chore these days. He expands his criminal empire under the noses of his parents, and he can barely drudge up any sort of satisfaction from it. 

He feels lost. 

Suddenly, he's an older brother, and suddenly, he has something to do in life. Myles and Beckett, when they're old enough for coherent thought, collectively decide Artemis is the ultimate authority. 

It is with them that Artemis, for the first time, feels like he can talk about the fairies from the life he's lost. He tells them tales of Haven, of a city under the Earth, and he feels like a fraud every time they ask questions he doesn't know the answer to. He remembers every word of his video diary perfectly. The issue is, the diary had been meant to jump start existing memories that it never had. There are gaps in the knowledge he'd saved for himself, and they become increasingly clear as he tries to pass it on. Still, he feels almost a duty to tell his brothers. They are the only ones he can talk to about this, now. Not his parents, who would never believe him. Not Butler, who remembers too much. Not Holly, who had left. Myles and Beckett, who hang on his every word and believe everything he says, are the only people he feels close enough with these days to talk to. 

Years after everything with Koboi had gone down, years after he'd last seen Holly, years after he'd lost a part of himself forever, Artemis is having a particularly nasty dream about the trolls he'd faced, one he hadn't had in years. In his dreams, Mulch and Butler never come, and he wakes up just as the first claw arcs at his head. He shakes off the cold feeling and gets up, needing a walk to clear his mind. He puts on an old sweatshirt to keep out the chill of the night, and finds one of the pockets is full. He pulls the object out. It's the disk, the one he'd left with Mulch disguised as a coin, the one that had been meant to bring his lost memories back but had failed. 

In an uncharacteristic fit of anger, he hurls it at the wall. It bounces slightly, unharmed. He's never been very good at throwing. 

A shadow near where it had impacted shifts, and a figure steps into the light, some being he had never seen before, a creature he doesn't think even his lost self had known of. It looks at the fallen disk with its strange eyes. "Careful where you throw things, you almost hit me." 

"Who are you?" Artemis asks, hand in his pocket ready to call Butler to his location should the creature prove hostile. 

"I'm No.1," It says, as if that means something. "I heard a lot about you from Holly Short. She's given up on you, but I haven't! I want to meet the famous Mud Boy everyone always talks about." It turns to Artemis and smiles, or at least he thinks it does. Its facial features are strange, alien. He isn’t sure what to think about it, whether to trust it, but the mention of Holly keeps him listening. "I think I might be able to restore your memories!"