Chapter Text
The magic of children, who could not control it and thus would spontaneously do things that no ordinary Muggle child could. Something powerful, yet innocent, a thing that some celebrated and others feared. A sign that a child was not a Squib.
Children of any age are taught how to behave, how to act in a society of adults and rules and restrictions. In England, a magical child’s family took on this role, in most cases, taught them how to hide their magic from Muggles, and then shipped them off to school at eleven. Some learned a few spells with their parents’ wands beforehand, others were homeschooled or took private tutelage, or even attended small day schools—a new but emerging trend, especially for families where being away at a boarding school for nine months out of the year simply was not an option.
Nonetheless, for over a thousand years, there had been a constant: once you began your magical education, your magic was directed and would no longer be “untamed”.
At least, that’s what the officials claimed.
The children knew better.
After all, wizards and witches had been doing things without spells for ages. Spells directed the magic, yes, but children sometimes learned how to do things with the magic they had, specific things, long before learning a single incantation. It was wandless magic. There were magical folk that knew how to fly, could sense what was inside a wand, could connect with animals and never get lost and make flowers appear out of thin air, all without a wand. A wand was a conduit, and a spell simply an easier way to get the thing you wanted to happen.
Anyone who could think for more then two seconds could figure that out.
And of course, many did.
.
The most prominent example of a student who had discovered the art of untamed magic was Lukas Bondevik, the prime culprit of the “untamed magic trend” that had come upon Hogwarts. Though in his defense, he hadn’t intended to start anything.
He’d never liked being overly chatty. Sarcastic, yes. Straightforward, yes. A chatterbox? No, Mathias could handle that. Tino, if he was in the mood.
Even as a child, he had been quiet, preferring his fairy tales to reality unless his family was involved. Emil was the one talking during most of the time the brothers spent together, and was surprised to find the house not much quieter after Lukas went to Durmstrang.
Durmstrang, the leading magic school in Northern Europe and a place with a lot of people.
Lukas had once perfected the art of sitting in a room, waiting as Emil walked past, and then “teleporting” to whichever place Emil seemed to be heading. It was how his parents had first realized he’d done accidental magic, and since they’d never stopped him, he just…kept doing it. Until he could quite accurately Apparate without Apparating inside his own house, a handy trick when the house was rather large and he didn’t feel like walking to the dining room for dinner or to the closet to get his broom. It wasn’t like there were any Muggles who they needed to hide their magic from in the area, anyways. The one Muggle couple nearby had a son who was Muggleborn, and had no problem with seeing their neighbors flying around on broomsticks or throwing rogue garden gnomes into the woods.
So Lukas had made good use of his accidental magic as a child, and soon discovered he could use the same tricks at Durmstrang, though it was much harder to get away with his disappearing acts and was honestly too exhausting when he had to carry his books and supplies with him. But at home during the holidays….
He was glad being under his parents’ roof meant that he technically didn’t have to worry about the Ministry sending an owl about underage magic. He wasn't entirely sure if what he was doing counted as casting a spell. Most twelve year olds weren't trying to scare their little brothers by turning invisible without their wand, after all.
It was second nature by the time he got to Hogwarts. Being able to sit upside down had been a surprise for both him and Mathias when Lukas appeared on the boy’s dormitory room’s ceiling one day, but it was a fun trick that he immediately put to use for the greater good, until prefect Basch Zwingli yelled at him to come down from the rafters of the locker rooms. Then Lukas learned how to sit sideways on a wall. Much less fun, but it confused the poor Swiss boy all the same.
To the point that he decided to look into whatever Lukas was doing himself. He wasn’t about to be beaten by a Norwegian with an attitude.
Basch was smart. It didn’t take him long to figure it out. So it really should’ve been no surprise that he was scaling walls to get to class faster so that he could sleep until it was time for the lesson to begin, and then stay up an extra hour or three at night to ghostwrite for Magical Business Magazine.
Lukas was soon wishing Basch was more like Feliks Lukasiewicz, and kept his nose to himself, because now Basch could get up to wherever Lukas was perched. Sometimes. Magic was hard to control, and occasionally Lukas would get a little laugh at the prefect swearing as he tried and failed to climb the castle walls.
And then there was Roderich Edelstein, who refused to be outdone by his cousin and had more then enough spite to fuel his ambitions. He spent a month enchanting one of Feliks’ beanbag chairs, and then another figuring out how to steer it so he didn’t have to walk. And by "steer", he meant “without using a wand”.
He’d done it before as a child, once, when neither Basch nor Ludwig had been around and he’d gotten tired halfway through an afternoon walk. He’d sat down on a rock, wished he could fly home, and suddenly found himself in the air, floating towards the Edelstein manor.
Now, he channeled that desire to just get to where he needed to be into his newest project.
Somehow, it worked. Kind of. It wasn’t as effective as he’d hoped, since the Grand Staircase kind of confused his beanbag. And sometimes, when he wanted to go back to the Ravenclaw common room, he ended up at the entrance to the Gryffindor Common Room instead. He also still had to climb up the ladder to Divination.
But he could float from breakfast to Herbology or the library or the music rooms, and that was much faster than walking. And less tiring.
He tried the same tricks on the wheelchair he’d been stuck in for the past several weeks. It wasn’t quite as effective, though, so he scrapped that idea and decided to just stick to the beanbag. Professor Flitwick thought it an absolutely marvelous creation.
From Roderich, similar mental techniques spread to his girlfriend Elizabeta, who found a way to retrieve books from across her desk when working on large assignments. The use of “accidental” magic then caught on with the seemingly oblivious but surprisingly nosy Alfred Jones, who utilized it to get food from further down the table, and then the Italian heir Feliciano Vargas caught wind of it and suddenly remembered that he used to use untamed magic to mix paint.
He was found in an empty classroom covered in half-dried paint, fast asleep but smiling. On a palette next to him, different colors of paint swirled into each other and from the middle of it all was a gorgeous shade of indigo.
Feliciano’s twin Lovino pretended not to care about the spread of this unexplainable form of magic, but accidentally turned several black pepper vines into tomato vines when Alfred burst into the greenhouses one day yelling about “this really cool thing all the cool kids are doing, you should try it, dude!”
For a small fee, Luca Vissar and his siblings would make latte art during the lunch break, Luca and Laura using their wands, while their younger brother outdid both of them with nothing but a snap of his fingers and a flourish. Perfectly-poised Slytherin prefect Arthur Kirkland acted as though he had no knowledge of any untamed magic, but Lovino and Mathew Williams knew that he had started going off to Hagrid’s hut and could make the flowers open and close, something he found rather soothing.
And of course, Lukas’ friends knew. Mathias was too impatient to try, and Emil didn’t like the lack of a structure linked to the art, but Tino had embraced it fully, having learned from a young age that a little cold was nothing to him and that with enough jubilancy, a little leap off the astronomy tower was nothing to fear. And Berwald…
Berwald had no plans of telling Mathias he’d figured out he had magic after walking on water as a child who’d grown up near the ocean, and only did so again a year after coming to Hogwarts, when a cheeky Mathias melted the ice on the Great Lake around one of the first-year journey boats that they had been trying to return to the boathouse. Lukas had picked at his nails while smirking to himself as Mathias screamed about the Swedish boy doing the impossible. Emil had rolled his eyes at the whole lot of them.
And then there was Vlad Lupei, the reason the professors finally decided enough was enough and that they would offer a course for students to practice and study untamed magic, now please stop leaping off the Grand Staircase to float in midair—
Untamed magic, accidental magic, natural gifts, hedge magic, magic of the ancients, unknown magic…it had many names.
But it was magic, and it belonged to whoever was able to adapt to it. It was uncharted territory, an adventure for all who took part in its antics, and proof that even in the 21st century, magic could still be improved upon.
Now, if they could just get Lukas to stop taunting Basch from the top of the Clocktower while Tino sat on a ledge below laughing…