Harry Potter 50 Shades of Gray

"Oh my! You've almost got it! Give it another try, Miss Bones!"

Cyrna relaxed as Professor Flitwick moved on to the next student. She had thought that Flitwick, like Snape, had noticed something—namely, her self-sabotage of her spellwork. There were no hypocritical feelings about it this time: Flitwick's attention was a nuisance.

"Control. Not more power," Professor Flitwick was saying, "Focus your magic on a single intent then speak the words and draw the motion."

Click.

"I did it!"

"Excellent work, Miss Bones. Four points to Hufflepuff for being second in class!"

Theodore, who had opened his lock after two minutes, was first. Cyrna was distracted from her work when the Hufflepuff gave a loud cheer and exchanged a high-five with her friend who sat beside her.

"Susan, you've got to teach me how to do this charm," her friend said.

Click.

"Ernie! You too!?"

Professor Flitwick awarded 3 more points for Hufflepuffs.

"Just keep at it, Hannah," said Ernie, the blonde boy. "I'll help. Let's see you do it again?"

After another five minutes, several more students opened their locks. "Finally," Draco muttered as he tossed his lock away. "How is it for you, Pansy?"

"Almost." Pansy smiled when the lock clicked open. "And I've got it."

"At least this'll be useful when I'm home for the holidays," said Draco, "I've always wondered why father kept certain rooms in our manor locked."

Pansy frowned lightly. "I don't think you'd be able to open those with a simple charm, Draco. Those rooms are probably warded—one time I touched a door that my mother told me not to, and I was petrified for Merlin knows how long."

"You're serious?"

"My father was really angry with me after," Pansy murmured.

Cyrna heard Draco make a sympathetic noise before they went on to guess what had been hidden in those rooms. Losing interest, Cyrna delved back into her own challenge. She could open the lock, but she wanted to hone her control.

How did one practice control?

She did not have to ruminate long for the answer. If having too much magic would 'force' the spell, then performing the spell with limited magic would translate to better control! Perenelle had even equipped her with the skill to hide her magic—which Cyrna now realized was not simply hiding; rather, it locked away part of her magic so that her effective magical reserves were lowered.

That meant she would have to hide her magic again.

Cyrna recalled the exhaustion she had felt on the night of the Sorting. Laziness tempted her to settle for her current abilities, but the thoughts of all that could go wrong in the later years renewed her urgency to better herself—she'd need these skills, even if it were to hide from a war.

With stubborn determination, she concentrated on her desire to see and looked at the Hufflepuff beside her. Deep green magic appeared as sparse, uneven ivies around the girl. There was... so little magic. Cyrna blinked back her shock and set to imitating the Hufflepuff's reserves. Pain pulsed in her ears after a while, as if she had dived too deep into the waters. In her head, pressure built, built, and built. Cyrna sucked in a breath when it passed tolerable levels of discomfort, and she stopped.

Minutes ticked away as she tried to adapt to the new sensation.

"Alohamora," she whispered. Her ears still rung faintly.

The lock shuddered but did not unlock.

She had been using her magic inefficiently this whole time, Cyrna thought with a grimace. Maybe this was why Perenelle had told her to hide her magic in Hogwarts—beyond avoiding unsavoury attention, it would have trained her control. From her experiment with Daphne, she suspected that the wand and spellwork were crutches for control, and the overreliance of them without training the wizard's innate control over magic was why so few could perform nonverbal, wandless magic.

"I think you have to really, like really, want it to work."

"What do you mean?" Cyrna hadn't even noticed Susan come over.

"Uhm," Susan—the girl whose magic she had imitated—scrunched her nose slightly as she thought over her response. "I sort of imagined it happening, then I thought really hard on that. My aunt taught me that trick, and she's an amazing witch."

....

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