Written for the Quidditch League Signature spells Round (Daily-Prophet Mini-Comp), Appleby Arrows CHASER 2: Ginny—Bat Bogey Hex; (emotion): desperation, (quote): "To live is to suffer, to survive is to find some meaning in the suffering." – Nietzsche, (object): pillow .

Word count: 1358

and leave me none of your wisdom (I don't need your lies)

Ginny wakes up with blood between her legs and an ache in her lower stomach. This body doesn't feel like her own.

It's too early for anyone else to be awake yet, so she gets up slowly, gingerly, and washes up in the bathroom. She has potions for this in her trunk - every girl has them, and if they don't or run out, Ms. Pomfrey is always happy to provide them with more; but today Ginny doesn't feel like a girl.

Today Ginny looks into the mirror, and she doesn't like what she sees in it - the girl in the mirror is too soft, her cheeks are too round, her red hair too long.

She ties it back, and it's a little better. Like this, if she binds her breasts, she could almost pass as a boy. Her face is angular enough, she thinks, if she angles it right. She undoes the tie with a sigh, but she tucks it into the pocket of her pajamas.

She slips back into her dorms, silent as a ghost, and grabs her pillow. When she steps onto the stairs, they turn into a slide and it feels right, like so few things do these days, to ride it down to the Common Room, where the last embers in the fireplace are only just dying out, a dim glow in an otherwise dark room.

It feels right, too, to climb up to the boys' room and slip into her brother's bed.

"Gin?" Ron asks sleepily, even as he moves away to make room for her on the mattress. "What are you doing here?"

Ginny rests her head on her pillow and breathes it in deeply. It smells like her shampoo.

"I couldn't sleep," she says, because she can't find the words to explain how she dreamed about Tom again, about him using her body like it was a tool and forgetting that Ginny lived there too. She can't tell him how lovely it felt to hear him call her Gin instead of Ginny, because the latter is undoubtedly a girl's name but the former is a little more ambiguous.

This is normal, she tells herself. You are perfectly normal.

That's what the Healers had told her, when her parents had brought her to see them after her first year. They had talked about brain chemistry and gender identity and about how Ginny might be confused for a while, and sure, Ginny had listened, but she hadn't really understood what they'd said.

She'd been too busy feeling like Tom had scooped her soul out of her body and poured himself in instead, and even though he's long dead now, sometimes she feels like he's still there.

What other explanation is there, after all, for the way she doesn't quite feel like a girl some days?

"You're safe, Gin," Ron mumbles, already falling back to sleep. His eyes shine in the darkness, reflecting a sliver of moonlight that comes from the window and passes through the gap in the drapes Ginny left when she crawled in, before they flutter shut and Ginny is alone with her thoughts again.

She misses Bill. Bill would know what to make of this, she thinks. But instead, she only has Ron and the twins, and Fred and George laugh too much for her to trust them with this when Ginny herself doesn't know what this is. Ron simply wouldn't understand why it matters to her.

She lays there for the rest of the night, focusing on her breathing and listening to Ron's, counting it down. It helps, and slowly the panic that had been bubbling in her chest since she'd woken up starts to recede, ebbing away until she can lock it up and pack it away in that little corner behind her heart where it's found its home.

When Ron's alarm rings and the other boys start to wake up, she leaves, ignoring the various "Hey, was that your sister?" that ring out after her.

The stairs still won't let her back up and she ends up asking Hermione to bring her down her toiletries. She waits until she's sure the boys have left to sneak back into their dorms, and this time she grabs some clean clothes of Ron, shrinking them until they fit her.

She puts on one of his robes too, and when she goes down to get breakfast, she feels almost human again. She makes a beeline for the Ravenclaw table, for the flash of blonde hair she can see there, because this morning she's not feeling up to listening to how loud the Gryffindors can be.

"Hello," Luna greets her, whimsical smile firmly in place. She looks pleased to see Ginny, like she always does, and she doesn't remark on Ginny's attire or complete lack of make-up. Ginny thinks she might love her a little for that.

"Hi, Luna," Ginny replies with a smile that doesn't even feel out of place on her skin, and she pulls in toward her some scrambled eggs and bacon while Luna hands her a tall glass filled with cold milk.

They eat in silence, but it's nice, to be next to someone who understands and doesn't judge, who doesn't ask more of Ginny than she's ready to give, who asks "Have you figured you out yet?" and takes "No, not yet" for the answer it is, simply nodding like it's the best possible answer Ginny could give.

Once they're done and part to get to their classes, Ginny feels a bit more human - but still not like the girl she thinks she should.

In the afternoon, they have Defense Against the Dark Arts. Moody's a great teacher, but he's also kind of mad. Still, Ginny loves to learn everything he has to teach them.

She's especially good with curses and hexes. Moody praises her for them a lot, and today is no exception to that.

Sometimes, when she's feeling particularly cynical, she wonders if she'd also have been so good at this offensive magic if Tom hadn't spent all of her first year encroaching himself into her mind like a leech, burrowing himself inside her soul until she couldn't even tell which thoughts were hers and which thoughts were his.

She thinks so.

She hopes so.

The day drags on. The pain in her stomach returns, and Ginny hates it. She doesn't want it - knows that even if she wasn't feeling like her body was wrong she'd still hate it, if in a different way.

Her potions are still in the dorms she can't access, so she goes ask Mrs. Pomfrey, before wandering off to an abandoned classroom to practice her spells.

This last week, she's been trying out the Bat Bogey Hex. She's liked it ever since she first found a reference to it in her History book - an incantation scribbled in the margins of her secondhand book, saying that it's good to 'make people stop talking and listen to you, but in a forceful way' - and all the research she's done since has only made her love it more.

She hasn't managed the spell yet, she doesn't think, though telling that is a bit hard when one doesn't have a living target to practice at.

Still, she's cast enough spells to at least be able to tell when a spell was done properly, and so far this hex hasn't worked. She's close, though. She can tell.

She casts the hex again and again with an abandon that hinges on desperation, watching as the sickly light of the spell splashes violently against the wall she's practicing on.

This is going to be her favorite spell - vicious and mean but not dangerous, with a hint of the kind of humour the twins would be proud of. Maybe, if she can get it right, she can finally feel like herself again.

And well, if that doesn't work, at least she'll have a great hex to use in self-defense against the many, many idiots that inhabit this world.