Hogwarts Assignment 11: Transfiguration Task #1: Write a BodySwap!AU.
Set at the beginning of Luna and Ginny's Seventh Year.
Ginny stepped onto the Hogwarts Express, which was just as crowded as ever. She would be lonely without Harry and her other friends a year older than her who had decided to not take an eighth year, but she still had friends in her own year.
As she walked down the train aisle, one of the compartments slid open. "Are you the Ginny Weasley? Is it true that you're dating Harry Potter?" asked the brown-haired fifth-year who then jumped out of the compartment to try and stop Ginny in her tracks.
Ginny scowled, and tried to push past the girl. "No, we're not a thing anymore, he's busy with Auror training, now let me bloody through before I hex you."
The girl gave Ginny a half-hearted glare before she stepped back into her compartment. Her hexes had become well-known, and not for a positive reason.
She pushed away more annoying encounters, trying to find the one person she was searching for on the crowded train. Finally, her eye caught on an almost-empty compartment towards the back.
Ginny stepped into the compartment and smiled when her suspicions were confirmed that it was Luna. She still had no idea why everybody wasn't lining up to be friends with Luna. She was one of the most kind, generous, honest, caring, and pretty people that Ginny had ever met. At least Ginny was lucky enough to be friends with Luna.
"Oh, hello Ginny!" Luna said, putting down her copy of the Quibbler to greet her. She was wearing her usual radish earrings and had put up her blonde hair in a bun with silver tinsel that made Ginny's heart melt. "I wasn't certain you would be coming to sit with me, since you're really popular now, and Harry's your boyfriend."
"Luna, I will always sit with you. You're my friend, after all. And, uh, Harry's not really my boyfriend anymore," Ginny said.
There was a short pause between them. "What's in the Quibbler this week?" Ginny asked, breaking the silence and gesture towards the magazine between them.
Luna flipped through the pages until she got to one with one word and a simple diagram. "They've started this new section where they add a new spell each week, and you're supposed to test it out and see what it does," she explained.
Ginny held back saying her skepticisms out loud. Before she could think it through, she said, "Sure, let's try it."
Luna smiled. "Okay." She pulled out her wand, said the spell, and there was a loud popping sound that Ginny instinctively flinched a bit at.
When she recovered, Ginny looked up again, but only found herself staring at a mirror. "Luna, has there always been a mirror in here?" she asked, but her voice came out higher-pitched than normal.
But to her surprise, her reflection moved. "Ginny, there's no mirror in here. I think we swapped bodies."
Ginny cursed loudly, then picked up the Quibbler and flipped through the pages deliberately. "What are we going to do, Luna? Neither of us have changed into our Hogwarts robes yet, and there's no counter charm in the Quibbler."
"I don't know. It's probably best to just wait it out and hope it wears off."
With some awkwardness, Luna and Ginny had managed to change into their robes and exit the Hogwarts Express. They rode in a chariot with just them and two random younger witches. It still felt immensely weird to look over at Luna as she always did but only see herself.
"Should we tell McGonagall?" Luna asked, whispering to Ginny.
Ginny shrugged. "I don't know if it's worth just losing points for messing up. Plus, like you said, it'll wear off soon." Even so, she couldn't shake off the fear of being stuck in her friend's body forever.
She wasn't certain if they were more than friends, though. Ginny liked Luna in that way, but it was extremely unlikely that Luna would ever reciprocate. Either way, she was content as they were right then, if they were in the right bodies.
Finally, the carriages came to a halt. The two students that had been accommodating them stepped out and towards the castle. Ginny started to follow, but Luna grabbed her wrist.
"Ginny, wait. I think I figured out a way to reverse the spell."
Then Luna pulled Ginny towards her and kissed her on the lips and Ginny's brain short-circuited. She wondered if hallucinations were a side effect of the charm.
Luna pulled back, and Ginny just stared at her. The first thing she noticed was that Luna was back in her beautiful body. But her mind still couldn't function enough to say anything.
Luna averted Ginny's haze hesitantly. "Sorry, Ginny. If you want, we can forget this ever happened. We can go back to being just friends if you don't like me—"
Ginny cut her off with another kiss, more passionate than the first one. "Luna, of course I love you. You're amazing."
The couple walked out of the carriage hand-in-hand with blushes on their faces.