She lied to Puck the day she slept with him.

Yeah, it was kind of a fat day. It was one of those days she spent trapped in her head, thinking about Lucy. How she used to play in the backyard, climbing all over the swing set they had set up, building up a huge pile of leaves and then launching onto it from one of the swings. How she would make forts in her room and rule as king over her stuffed animals, and how they didn't expect anything from her, so it was okay with them if she was king. And how they loved her no matter what.

She got rid of all her stuffed animals after the nose job. Those were for kids. Not for girls who wanted to survive high school with dignity. Not for girls who had to be perfect for their parents. Not for a girl who wanted to be love

She couldn't like herself, so she changed until someone else would. Someone real.

Finn would've been understanding. He would have tried to comfort her in his own sweet, but ultimately dumb way. Some days she was certain he was the only person in the world who got her. He would never say it because she scared him most of the time, but at the very least, he always made her feel safe and wanted. Almost like a person, instead of some perfect fantasy of a model Christian daughter.

But she didn't want to be comforted. She just wanted to feel like a normal sixteen year-old girl. So she called up Puck and asked him to come over in that voice she perfected over the summer, the one that had every guy at school wanting her. The one that got her what she wanted. And right then, all she wanted was to feel how she was supposed to.

Puck came over and brought wine coolers (she didn't even get a buzz, but she at least had to pretend that she didn't want this as badly as she did) and told her she wasn't fat. Then he fucked her until she felt how she was supposed to again.


This body had not belonged to her in a very long time. Bits and pieces had been bought and sold, traded for years. She belonged to her parents (and to a lesser extent, her sister, Ann), to Coach Sylvester, Santana, Brittany, and the Cheerios, to Finn, even if he didn't mean to take it. There was a part that the Lutheran church her family went to had been offered when she was very young. Before almost everyone else wanted to stake a claim. And for one night, she belonged to Noah Puckerman.

After that, her body belonged solely to the child growing in her. An alien being she didn't understand and didn't want. And even after being split in so many pieces for so long, this was worse than she could even comprehend. She finally got most of herself back, at an incredible cost, and in the same moment it was immediately ripped from her and given to a person growing inside her. It was a reminder every second that she didn't belong to herself, and that she never, ever, would.


When Rachel told Finn that Puck was the baby's real father, the last big piece finally was snatched out of her fingers. Every one of them belonged to that child, and it was torture that they were so close. Realistically, she knew that there was no way she could keep it, raise it (with who? Puck? Her parents if they ever let her back in the house?) but sometimes that felt like it was the only way she would keep from disappearing completely once it was was born.

She was so, so tired. She was a ghost.


One night in March she sat on the bed of a boy she had never met, Mercedes' older brother. It was a small space, with blue walls covered in posters of rappers she'd never heard of and basketball players Finn used to go on and on about. She heard Mercedes and her mother laugh downstairs, over who knew what, and it was so warm. It was beautiful.

Sitting on a stranger's bed, in a house only a mile and half from her parents', she cried harder than she had in years. She cried because there was laugher in a house that didn't feel like a museum, because there was a family downstairs that could laugh together, because she was sitting on the bed of a boy she had never met, but who she felt more connected to in that moment than anyone else in the world. Because whatever this was felt more like home than anything since blanket forts and kingdoms of loyal subjects.

She cried because there was something horrifically wrong with her, and she had no idea what it was.


The day they lost Regionals her body was taken away by her mother, Puck, Shelby Corcoran, and a tiny child with a tuft of blonde hair and hazel eyes.

This time she was sure she'd never get it back. But she didn't know if she even wanted it anymore.


By the time summer came, she had been living back in her mother's house for a couple months. It was quiet, and lonely. While she was gone, her mother had taken up mysterious new hobbies that required a number of weekend getaways and heavy drinking. This left her alone with the thoughts that had haunted her since that night in Mercedes' house. That something was wrong, her body or her mind or-

She. That she was wrong.

And that thought was so foreign and bizarre (and wrong, because it had to be), that there was no way it could be real. She had just given her child up for adoption. She was missing something, because that baby girl took everything she had left. She couldn't be wrong. It was just emptiness, and that would fade with time. To what, she didn't know, but it would go away and she would be fine again.

August came and she still wasn't fine. By August she was drunk almost as often as she assumed her mother was, they only saw each other once or twice a week, and since kicking her father out, she had taken to vodka tonics instead of scotch, and vodka was much easier to replace with water and have no one be the wiser. While Judy sailed down the Ohio on booze cruises and spent weekends at retreats, she sat in her mausoleum of a bedroom and googled until her eyes refused to focus. She never looked for what she feared the worst.

A week before school was set to begin, she was well on her way to blacking out thanks to her mom's liquor store run the day before. She was exhausted, and just hated herself so fucking much, and knew that when she typed "am I transgender" into the search bar she wouldn't remember it the next day. She was way too drunk to be able to read anything that came up, so after a few attempts clicked on a video called "Coming out as trans" and a guy with a name she didn't catch started to talk.

As soon as he said that he had always felt like he didn't belong in his own body, she slammed her laptop shut, sending her glass to the floor and spilling vodka everywhere. She stumbled over to her bed and laid awake for hours, through the stupor wearing off and into a hangover she prayed would be bad enough to numb her mind, so scared she could barely breathe.


A/N: This is my first attempt writing something with chapters, so constructive criticism, especially regarding characterization and pacing, is very, very welcome. Also, this will be AU after the events of season three's first episode, because the writers saddled Quinn with a level of crazy I am nowhere near talented enough to realistically tackle.