Nope (![[info]](http://www.insanejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} nope) wrote,@ 2008-09-25 14:26:00 |
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20 Facts About Firenze (HP, 1416 words, G)
Title: 20 Facts About Firenze
Rating: G
Word Count: 1416 words
A/N: Written for the Harry Potter Random Facts Fest.
Title: 20 Facts About Firenze
Rating: G
Word Count: 1416 words
A/N: Written for the Harry Potter Random Facts Fest.
- Firenze ap Malus ap Brin, son of Appledean and Oakside, entered the world under the dispassionate, watchful eye of his herd, late and on a rush of blood and amnion. Trembling on legs that would not hold, he blinked tears against the brightness of the turning stars, against the baleful gaze of Mars slicing between the treetops.
- 'Herd', a term coined by wizards, was not an accurate label, though the best the language could provide. Centaur society was a complex, fluid, global, multi-hierarchical structure involving arcane social and political constructs based on the synthesis of ten thousand years of tradition and necessary adaptation. Children were raised not simply by direct blood relatives but by vast, interconnecting groups of centaurs whose interactions were as complicated and well defined as the movements of the planets.
- Nevertheless, even deterministic systems exhibit stochastic behaviour.
- Which is probably why no one expected Firenze, at eighteen, to leave behind the cold, dark and leafy Scottish forests, canter from copse to copse across the isles, avoiding muggles, gallop down the giant's road to Ireland, and start an alternative folk rock group called Frenzy and the Foals.
- It wasn't what he'd set out to do, of course, but his tap-dancing revue hadn't gone down well and he'd been forced to make money filling in as a session player between failed auditions. He started out as a drummer, picked up the bass, segued into keyboards, and came back to acoustic guitar, all while polishing his vocal talents from drummer to lead. Firenze had perfect rhythm, an unerring sense of timing, and a taste for both the classics and new wave, marching flawlessly from one into the other. Only electronica escaped him, mostly because electrical instruments had an annoying tendency to simply not work in his presence. Some things, like gravity, goblins, and a strong personal magical field, were too ingrained to truly escape.
- Folk rock leant itself to a dependency on acoustic instruments and, also, happily accommodated a bias towards what the local music press termed 'solid, if unmemorable, New Age inspired lyrics along your basic duality-of-nature / moon-and-stars / hey-nonny-nonny lines' played by a 'group of Tolkien-wannabes'. Muggle musicians and audiences alike assumed he was, as one brief gig round-up put it, a 'fur fantasy fetishist so into his stage persona that he is never seen out of his dubiously lifelike costume'. People, Firenze found, often fit the facts to their expectations.
- Divination was a great deal like showmanship, really.
- The music industry was a complex, fluid, parochial, multi-hierarchical structure involving cliques, scenes and groupies driven by a synthesis of greed, blackmail, bitchery, drugs, alcohol, sex, and sometimes music. Bands were loose conglomerations of temporary alliances driven by, and in turn driving, various pressures (economic, social, political, geographical, philosophical, sexual) from within and without. They followed eccentric, intersecting orbits with the same heavy inexorability as the heavens, their patterns just as intricate and plain.
- Consequently, Firenze knew the band was going to break up a whole eighteen months before it finally did. He played on until the end and then a little after, strumming the last chord to himself on an empty stage in an all but cleared pub in Dublin. A last call pint of Guinness later, he strolled along the Liffey to Heuston railway station, bummed a pack of clove cigarettes from the night porter, and took the first goods train he could sneak aboard.
- Frenzy and the Foals only commercially released record, an acerbic, acoustic cover of War (Whitfield/Strong, 1969), reached number 23 on the UK singles charts.
- There were owls in the cigarette smoke, owls twisting in his camp fire, barn owls and eagle owls, wings wide spread. Chattering woodpeckers drummed on trees around his sleeping spot, guiding him on. Dogs ran at his heels in the lowlands, huffing accompaniment to the beat of his hooves, turning away only at the shore with mournful whines. On the boat, a woman with a vulture on her hat asked for his signature. The deck dipped beneath him, a trough between two heights. He galloped out into England with the setting sun at his back, a bloated red eye, slow blinking.
- Centaurs would contend that they saw only trends in the flux and wane of the stars, in the dance of smoke and flame, that the sought only the sign posts of destiny, observed only those patterns which were the grand footprints of fate ever striding between crystallised past and unformed future. To discern the actions of individuals was a cheap parlour trick, self-flattering nonsense. Nevertheless, a dozen or so centaurs made thinly veiled 'knew you'd come back' comments in the months following his return. Firenze just hummed an old David Bowie song until they went away.
- Humming became a habit; it made the miles pass easier under his hooves as he marched wide circles through the forest, seeking not just patterns, but the patterns of patterns, the keynote that ran through the whole orchestra. On one particular circuit, he encountered Hagrid, who recognised the tune, which was how he learned that Hagrid played the double-bass. The impromptu jam session that followed was how he discovered Dumbledore was an accomplished saxophonist. They met every Thursday thereafter, and Hagrid talked about beasts, and Dumbledore talked about chance, choice and destiny, and Firenze strummed his guitar until they played along.
- If Hagrid hadn't been early to that last jam session, Firenze supposes the other centaurs might have killed him. Dumbledore had had a point. That was the problem. That and the future he could hear in each pounding hoof, the relentless rising march; the future he had tasted in the bracken and the starlight; a sickly future first smelt in splatters of unicorn blood, but growing stronger in the snow rent air, in the gasps of trees, in the sweat of his herd. So vague; so eventful. Inevitable, like so many things. Like his choice. Like the rage of his companions. There is no 'if', of course. Hagrid was there because that was where Hagrid was, moving on a pre-set orbit towards that moment of perfect intersection.
- The school was a simple, mostly static, confined, single-hierarchical structure, run by simple social rules and juvenile politics. This was only to be expected. Indeed, Firenze approved of the broad mix of teachers and the broad mix of students, teaching and learning, like a very innocent attempt to emulate centaur culture. Consequently, he treated everyone as he would have any group of mentally limited centaurs: equably, impersonally and fairly in all his dealings - except when marking Dean Thomas's work. Bred like thestrals, indeed.
- There were no stupid questions, only stupid people.
- And a great deal more of them in the world, it seemed, with Dumbledore's death. Firenze watched the funeral from the edge of the lake and then, after everyone else had gone, he came and knelt by the tomb and hummed an old David Bowie song and watched Mars rise between the castle's towers, and fall, and all the stars go out, one by one.
- Pre-set, intersecting orbits, and here they all were at the last, to the rack and the ruins, and as the dark things came up, he stood his ground, listening to the swell, to that dismal dance, to the rising crescendo of complex, fluid battlefields coming together and apart and together again, stood his ground and listened to the drums without and within and there, there, there he pounded his hooves on stones and the ceiling came down to crush his foes and leave his children untouched. And then Ginny Weasley, startled by the near miss of falling rocks, accidentally blasted him right in the left flank. Typical.
- Afterwards, they came together to rebuild. His herd did that non-committal shuffle that meant they were, ever so slowly, beginning to decide he might possibly not have been exactly as much a traitor as they may or may not have suggested. Firenze nodded, hummed until they went away, and then went back to the school. Everything that had happened had brought him to this moment, to soft Mars fading on the horizon, to phoenix smoke, to a forest in a room and an endless parade of curious innocents. He was exactly where fate and the turning of the universe wished him to be, and nothing could change that.
- Though he did take six months off to be the opening act for Stubby Boardman's comeback tour. Destiny really was more of a guideline than an actual rule.