Written for pippi55s Phobias Challenge. I got Bane and nelophobia (fear of glass) to work with. Oh, and nephophilia (obsessive love of clouds) on top of that just because I'm awesome. Unfortunately I epically failed to stay within the word limit. And the story is kind of weird too, but hey - how many of you can say they've ever written or read a story about Bane the centaur?
Wolfsbane
"The clip-clopping of hooves on stone paving is something you remember from fairytales and your grandfather's rocking chair stories about how he started working as a muggle police officer, in a time that lived and breathed before horses were replaced with motorbikes and before you could admit having a muggle grandfather without having to hide under a rock for the rest of your days.
Now, hooves did not simply clippety-clop in the Forbidden Forest, for its hard ground was covered by a thick layer of the softest and greenest moss that you can imagine. Just looking at it could in an instance make you feel so tired that you would consider taking a nap on this fragrant, inviting bed. Of course that would have been more than foolish. We have all heard the gruesome tales of ogres and letifolds and … werewolves (yes, even werewolves) hiding under the shadowy arms of the trees. But, where was I? Oh yes, I do remember.
No, hooves did not clippety nor clop in the Forbidden Forest, but the moss sighed beneath them as if to greet their touch. In fact, the whole forest sang with the sound of it, like an enormous symphony directed by the rhythmic sound of horn on moss. Majestic, regal. Much like the creature, or should I say, the character carried by those hooves.
He was a sight to behold, even then, when he was younger and not quite as broad-shouldered or intimidating as he is today. The first thing that would come to your mind upon seeing him was composed, the second wild and the third Merlin's beard! Take to your heels and run!. As (contrary to the believes of many people) the first impression is not always the best and fascination often comes before the fall, no one ever really took the risk of waiting for a fourth thought to flash their flabbergasted minds before accepting their own advice and running for their lives.
Then, one evening in autumn, everything was different. The hooves were about half-way through the second movement of the night's performance, when suddenly they stopped. One eighth rest. Another eighth rest and it became clear that, for the first time in a very long period of perfect symphonies, there had been an interruption. The forest held its breath.
There, peacefully sprawled across an especially thick patch of moss, lay a young boy, an outrage to any reasonable inhabitant of the woods, peaceful as he might have seemed.
"I hope you are aware that your presence here is an offence against the laws of the forest?"
A curious glance wandered from the hooves up along the long, black legs, across the olive chest and noticed the perfect poise. One. The glance reached the unmoving face, framed by untamed black hair. Eyes like tiny suns, a determined aubergine mouth. Two.
"You're a centaur." Three.
Nothing happened. Impossible. A shooting star sped across the dark sky above their heads; he must have been leaning over too far in order to catch a glimpse of whatever tremendousness was going on in the Forbidden Forest, and simply fallen down.
"I am Bane. And you are an intruder."
"No I'm not", the boy replied calmly and crossed his legs to make himself more comfortable. He looked content, a little chilly perhaps, but by no means frightened. "I am a wizard."
Bane, the centaur snorted. He had seldom seen such intolerable impertinence. But then again the foal was only human.
"A fine bunch of scallywags you are, wizards. But it is centaur land on which you chose to rest and you must leave lest you are harmed." The boy looked up at him, mildly surprised.
"But you can read the stars", he said, wide-eyed, as if someone had finally told him that the Fountain of Fair Fortune did not exist. "You must have seen me coming all along."
"Well …" Bane sighed tiredly. "There was something, but I lost its trail when the ninth cycle ended and the clouds rolled in. I must have – but that is none of your business, man-child." His usually silky voice was now harsh and dark, as if it had been rasped with a cheese-grater. Who was this foal, unlawfully entering his forest, breathing his air, questioning his divination abilities? Bane did not know and he pretended not to care.
"What business do you have here anyway?" he bellowed. "If I am not mistaken students are not allowed out after the tenth hour, and it is only minutes away."
"Students?" A brief smile flashed the boy's face. "You knew! I know you could read the stars. I mean, all proper centaurs do."
"Enough!" Again, the forest held its breath. A centaur's cry was a bad sign and the boy did not need divination skills to know. Maybe it was not yet too late for a belated third thought and a flight back to the castle that Bane knew sat on a hill outside the forest like a lurking wolf. A wolf …
"You are wounded, boy" he declared all of a sudden, sounding almost proud. He had noticed a long and nasty cut along the boy's neck. "And it appears there was a full moon just one night ago, as any inexperienced eye may well observe." Oh how the boy turned pale at these words. As pale as a sheet of parchment. No, as pale as snow. No, even more than that. He turned as pale as starlight. Now, considering that starlight is light that has travelled to us all the way through the loneliness of the universe and that by the time it finally reaches us the stars themselves are already dead – that is about as pale as it gets.
No one spoke for a long time then; Bane wallowing in his obvious triumph, the boy trying hard to swallow the tears that welled up in his grey eyes. Finally the centaur remembered that his question had not yet been answered accurately.
"So?" he said, still savouring the last traces of his brilliant divination victory. "What are you doing in my forest?"
Your forest?, the boy wanted to ask, eyebrow raised. But then the centaur did look quite angry and rather violence-prone already and he decided not to challenge his luck.
"I'm watching the clouds" he replied truthfully, doing exactly that.
"The clouds?" repeated Bane and followed the boys glance in bewilderment for a moment, before giving another spiteful snort. "There is nothing to find in the clouds. In order to divine the –"
"A grindylow!" exclaimed the boy most excitedly.
"Where? But that cannot be … where?" And then Bane noticed what the boy was pointing at and all expression fell from his face for a moment. There was simply no grimace angry enough to describe what he felt.
"This. Is. Ridiculous" he said, desperately struggling for what he kingly called contenance. "And you are an abomination to all diviners. Get out of my forest at once."
"But I can't." The boy's eyes remained determinedly stitched to the sky. "There's a centaur up next."
This is getting more and more absurd, thought the real centaur, standing right next to the boy who obviously by no means wanted to miss his cloudy cousin. But before he could even decide on what measures to take to finally rid himself of this little nuisance, he had involuntarily looked up at the sky for a second time.
The sky was completely and utterly unfit for any decent attempts at divination. The evening star was obscured, Uranus was nowhere to be seen and even the bright light of Mars was hidden from sight behind the head of a …
"… centaur." Bane's jaw fell down, letting him look a little featherbrained for the very first time in his life.
And from that moment on he was in love with clouds. He was addicted to them, he was hooked. What did he care for the stars that were hidden behind them? What did he care for a future that could not be read from a cirrocumulus or a cumulonimbus? All he cared for were the sheer endless possibilities of shapes and patterns, flowers, animals, dreams made from fluffy white or stormy grey nothingness. He stopped asking questions and he stopped wondering. He stopped reading the signs and he stopped composing music with his hooves.
There they lay (or, in the case of the centaur, stood) night after night, eating wild pomegranates that grew in the forest and looking up at the sky.
Most nights they were busy shouting shapes ("Look, there! A chocolate frog!" – "A what?"), but then there also were the starry nights, when no clouds obscured the sky. On those nights they would talk. Philosophy, politics, bogies, music and the meaning of life; each subject was treated with equal sobriety, as centaurs hardly ever make fun of anything. And the boy just loved the feeling of being enough of a grown-up not to laugh at the word "bogey".
Then, one night, they spoke about Hogwarts. They both should have known from the start that this was a bad idea, but somehow all their previous conversations had been so reassuringly successful that they chose to simply ignore the risk.
"You know" said the boy, "I really like it here. But when I grow up, I want to have my own soft bed and my own house. And I want to look out of the window when it's raining outside and say 'I knew I could do it. No one believed me, but I knew.'"
Bane snorted, the boy startled. He had not heard that sound in quite a while.
"A house" he said, disgusted as if he were speaking about dead flobberworms. "A bed. Windows. Windows are there to make you believe that you are free, while in reality you are nothing but a prisoner of the place that you call home. Glass is nothing but a lie. To make you feel safe when you are vulnerable, to make you feel free when you are trapped. And when it shatters it breaks your skin."
The boy looked up at the centaur in surprise. Never had he sounded so … different before, so bitter. "What's wrong?" he asked, his face full of sorrow. He had become quite fond of his new friend.
"Nothing. " Bane turned away his head so the boy would not see the telltale tears in his eyes. "I just … I hate glass."
"How do you mean, you hate glass? What has it ever done to you?"
"I have dreams."
"Me too. I have them all the time. Daydreams, even. I'm having one right now; Snivellus is –"
"Not that kind of dreams. Centaurs do not dream like humans. Our dreams are visions of the future and the past."
"So you … you have dreams about glass?" The boy was trying his best to be empathetic – he himself had sometimes had horrible dreams that would let him wake up in the middle of the night, covered in sweat and his heart beating as if it was trying to get out of his chest.
There was no reply from Bane for a long time. But then he took all his strength and started recounting. And for the first time in the history of the world a centaur shared his dreams with a human.
"I … I am in the castle, your castle. I have never been there, but I know it is that place. There are … wizards. Dark wizards everywhere. My brothers and I are penned up between the tables. The air sizzles with magic, green and red bolts of light shoot past us. There are … bodies on the floor, bodies on the tables … students, adults, men, women. The windows shatter and glass shards rip my skin. They pierce my hooves, they pierce whatever stands, lies or falls in their way, reflecting the curses by a thousandfold. I dare not breathe for the fear of cutting my lungs with tiny grains of pulverised glass. The sound of shattering deafens me. I cannot find my way back out. Glass, glass everywhere. Men live in cages made of glass and now I am trapped in one of them myself. Then suddenly something hits my face and … it is over." Bane closed his eyes.
There was a long silence. A very long silence. The forest wept quietly with its king.
"But … where am I?"
The centaur looked down at the boy for a moment, not understanding. Then he opened his mouth, closed it again and shrugged his shoulders. "You are not there. At least not where I can see you."
"Don't be silly" replied the boy, now struggling to his feet with an almost angry expression on his face. "I wouldn't leave you in there alone if anything like that happened." The centaur looked tired. He did not wish to discuss these strange forebodings anymore, nor his maybe not so irrational fear of glass.
"No one can ever say for sure if a dream will come true. But it is time for you to leave; it is well past midnight and you should get some sleep. In your own soft bed." The boy nodded and wished the sun would never have to rise again. He looked up at the sky for one last time and shuddered at the sight. He wished for some monstrous nimbostratus to cover up the pale round face of the moon, despite his hate of rainy weather.
"I won't be coming here tomorrow" he said gloomily before looking at the centaur he now considered to be his friend. "And I won't care for the clouds either." And with that he disappeared in the darkness of the woods, abandoning Bane's tradition of accompanying him back to edge of the forest before saying goodbye.
On the following night Bane resolved to do some divination, which he had been constantly neglecting for precisely the course of a month by then. But somehow he simply could not bring himself to concentrate on the excellent constellation of Saturn and Jupiter; zillions of shooting stars fizzed past behind his back and all he could think of was the sad expression on the boy's face. His own fears and dreams seemed to grow ridiculously small, compared to the living nightmare that came true for his fragile little wizard-friend on every full moon. No, there must be a way he could stop it, a way he could help. He was Bane, the centaur, a prince of the Forbidden Forest. And a prince did not give up. Ever. A prince was very wise and even braver and did his very best to protect his subjects, no, his friends from harm, even if it meant he had to overcome himself.
"What is that?"
"Aconite essence."
"No, I mean –"
"Wolfsbane potion."
"No, but it's –"
"A potion that will help you keep control of your mind while transformed."
"That's really great, but will you please listen to me? What I meant is …" The boy looked up at Bane in perfect astonishment, his eyes glittering like morning stars. "… it's in a glass bottle."
"Well yes, it is. Otherwise it would be running everywhere, silly boy. Now put it away it and let us take a look at the sky. There are some rather promising formations swelling up."
From that night on they watched the clouds together on at least twenty-eight nights per month (thirty-one in October, thirty in November and twenty-eight in February that is, although they both wished for every month to last at least twice as long), until one day the boy awoke in his bed at Hogwarts and found that he had grown up.
If Bane was hurt to hear his friend was leaving for the real world that was made from bricks and hard work and not clouds, then at least he hid it well. He was a centaur after all, and centaurs know how the universe works. All things move, and from time to time they move on; but they all come back eventually, because we all just live on our own little orbits, and if Uranus and Neptune move past each other once they are bound to do so again. For the boy, now grown up to be a man, had made a promise. If Bane's strange fear of glass had not been as unfounded as it may have sounded and if his nightmare ever did come true – his friend would be there."
Tonks snorted.
"He's barely a month old and you've already started giving him ideas."
"Oh come on, you sound just like Bane. He's got a right to know what or ... who's going to expect him at Hogwarts …"
"Well he's definitely not going to wander off into the Forbidden Forest on his own, like his father …"
"We'll see I say. We'll see …"
No, they would not see. And Teddy Lupin would indeed never set foot in the Forbidden Forest.
But still, his father kept his word. He was there, on his very own bed of glass shards, looking up at the magical ceiling, where, in the very second he fell, a beautiful cirrus cloud was just drifting by.