Title: Heart Like Three Snakes
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Pairing: Harry/Ginny
Content Notes: AU (Slytherin Ginny and Harry), underage kissing, Dark Ginny, Dark Harry, violence, angst, animal sacrifice
Rating: : R (for violence)
Wordcount: 4800
Summary: Harry's not exactly thrilled with the idea that he's going to die fighting Voldemort, but he doesn't know what he can do about it. Trust Ginny to come up with a solution.
Author's Notes: This is one of my "Songs of the Stormy Season" one-shots being posted between Halloween and the winter solstice. Diasybe asked for a story where Ginny and Harry are both Slytherins and Harry becomes Darker under her influence.

Heart Like Three Snakes

"You know that you're never going to defeat him unless you embrace the Dark Arts."

Harry just turned around and cast another spell at the target on the wall of the Room of Requirement. It flattened and pulsed for a second, absorbing the curse, and then turned back into its normal self. No sign at all that Harry had hit it.

Harry shook his head. He was the one who was at fault for that, for asking the Room to use targets like this. He found the ones that split open and shed blood and screamed like a human too upsetting.

"Did you hear me, Harry?"

"Yeah. I hear you."

"And yet…"

"Look, you keep telling me that I could be skilled in Dark Arts, and I keep telling you that I couldn't," Harry said, staring at the wall. He could hear Ginny's footsteps behind him well enough, given that she was walking on bare stone. The whole room was bare stone except for a fireplace, one couch near it, and the targets. "Because I freak out when I cast them or see someone bleeding. Isn't that a good enough indication that I wouldn't be good at them?"

"I wasn't once, either, Harry. But now I am."

"Right, but you survived a possession by him. All I ever did was survive the Killing Curse."

"And Quirrell, the basilisk, the graveyard…"

Harry turned around with a snort. "That was only because of luck."

"And your ability to overcome tremendous pain." Ginny leaned forwards, her eyes wide and dark. Harry sometimes wondered how no one else in their common room, or in her family, had ever noticed the way her eyes could get. Maybe she didn't look like this with them, though. "That's the only way that you could have conquered the basilisk and fought your way through the Cruciatus."

Harry sighed. "Also no indication that I would be good at Dark Arts."

"So you're resigned to dying?"

Harry took a deep breath. "Honestly? Yeah, I am."

Ginny's face went pale in the way that made her freckles look like dots of blood, and then she drew her wand and blasted a Bone-Breaker Curse at him. Harry raised a shield and swatted it away without thought, and she followed it up with something he didn't know, yellow and crackling. Harry dodged and raised the shield again when she might have struck at him.

But Ginny just stood where she was, fingers fumbling over her wand, and whispered, "You've never said that before."

"No, but I've thought it. I just decided to be honest this time."

"Why are you resigned to dying?"

"Because I'm not good enough! I can't use Dark Arts, I can't fight someone who's older than me and a hell of a lot more magically powerful, and I can't—I can't, Ginny. Everyone believes that I'm a hero—"

"Not me."

"Right, but you're still surprised that I'm going to die when I face him?" Harry shook his head. "That sounds a lot like believing I'm a hero."

Ginny paced back and forth and fumed in silence. Harry watched her in equal silence. He suspected the conversation would end with her storming out. Most of theirs did, lately. Harry mourned the death of their friendship, but Ginny was just so much stronger than he was. It was probably always going to come to this.

She finally spun around to face him. "How long have you felt this way?"

Harry blinked. She wants to discuss reality? Fine. "Since third year."

"But you beat those Dementors!"

"Yes, but just barely. It made it clear that I would lose when someone or something harder to beat came along. And I only escaped the graveyard because he was foolish enough to give me my wand back and then our wands had that connection. Not because of something I did. Not because I was smarter than Cedric. Just luckier. And he's stupid, when you come right down to it."

"Then—"

"But he doesn't have to be smarter. He just has to be stronger. And he is."

Ginny stared at him, her hands clenched. She was coiled like a spring, who could explode. Harry kept his shield up.

"I am going to solve this problem," Ginny said, her voice pitched low. "You're one of the only people who's fighting himinstead of pretending nothing is happening or looking to you to save them. I'm going to solve it."

"Feel free to try," Harry said, and finally dropped his shield. "But I don't have any ideas."

Ginny nodded, eyes so distant now that she looked as if she was staring across some far landscape at looming mountains. Then she turned and walked out of the room.

Harry exhaled and closed his eyes.

"It's not going to be long until the Dark Lord has your head."

Malfoy had taken to whispering similar words across the space between their beds most nights. Harry, safe behind the wards and shields wrapped around his curtains, ignored him and kept working on his Transfiguration essay. Yeah, he wouldn't be able to survive Voldemort next time, but the spells he had looked up kept Malfoy out just fine.

Malfoy's latest hex slammed against Harry's shields and dissipated into spitting sparks on the floor. There was a sound of displeasure from Zabini.

"Draco, if you burned the new robes my mother sent me—"

"Sod off, Blaise!"

There were discontented grumblings from Crabbe and Goyle, probably because they had run out of food again, and Theodore Nott kept silent, reading on his bed. Harry ignored them all. There had been a time that he'd wished he was a part of their friendships. They called each other by their first names, mostly (except for Crabbe and Goyle, forever condemned to last ones), and they teased and shared memories and had friendly duels and helped each other with their homework.

But that wasn't the way it was with Harry, and at least he had survived his first few years in the Slytherin dormitory, long enough to meet Voldemort in the first place.

The dormitory door banged open, but Harry didn't pay much attention. It was probably Pansy Parkinson, coming to fling herself at Malfoy again. Malfoy never seemed to know whether he should be flattered or horrified by—

"I'm here to see Harry."

That was Ginny's voice. Malfoy sneered and started to say something, but Harry twitched his curtains back enough to nail Malfoy in the arse with a Stinging Hex. He yelped and clapped his hands to it, and Harry got out of bed, smirking at him.

They could taunt him and try to hurt him all they liked, but they weren't allowed to hurt Ginny. Not after what Malfoy's dad had already done to her.

"Yeah, I'm here, Gin," Harry said, studying the reactions of his roommates to her. It was the first time he'd had a chance to look at it close-up. He noticed the way that Malfoy frowned at her, Crabbe and Goyle stared dumbly, and Zabini gave her a little nod that might have indicated respect. Nott looked at Ginny once and then hid behind his book.

They recognize someone Darker than they are.

"Good. Come on, then. Merlin knows there's no one worth staying here for."

Harry managed, with difficulty, to conceal his laughter in his fist, and followed Ginny. She led him across the common room to a small alcove in the far wall near the windows that looked out into the lake. Harry actually thought it might have started life as a crack in the walls, but it had widened or been helped to widen over the years, and he and Ginny had moved two chairs into it a long time ago. No one else was anxious to compete for a place so dim and so far from the warmth of the fire.

Ginny sat down and turned to face him, leaning her arm on the chair's arm. Her face was cold and still and pale. "I know a way that you can overcome your fear of the Dark Lord and gain the magical ability to face him."

"What? How?"

"It involves a sacrifice."

Harry swallowed. "I don't think I could do that, Ginny. I told you, I'm not Dark enough. Even Malfoy or Snape—"

"Oh, not a human sacrifice," Ginny said, and gave him a smile that, even tinged as it was with something that frightened him, made him smile back. "Those rituals are possible, but they would make you pay too great a price. An animal sacrifice."

"What kind?"

"A snake." Ginny spent a moment rubbing her finger over a carved wooden snake on her chair, humming quietly. "It has to be symbolic of your enemy, you see. And even though you have Parseltongue, snakes belong more to him."

Harry nodded. "You're right. It would have to be a magical snake?"

"Yes. It would be for the best if you could get his familiar, but I don't think we could sneak into wherever he's hiding and grab it." Ginny sighed a little and let her head fall back against the chair. "A basilisk would be second best, but same problem about us not being able to do it."

"Oh, good. I was afraid you'd suggest we hatch one."

"Too many roosters on the school grounds now."

Harry eyed her. There were lots of times like this, when he thought Ginny was joking but he couldn't be sure. "I assume that you have a good candidate in mind."

"Yes." Ginny smiled. "I chat to Hagrid sometimes about how much I just want to feel normal and not an outcast like a Slytherin Weasley inevitably is, and he told me there are Runespoors in the Forbidden Forest. They escaped from a previous gamekeeper's collection, I reckon. We need to find one, and it'll work best if it has all three heads. Then you can ask three favors."

"I only need two, don't I? To lose my fear and to become more powerful?"

"But I want something from this, too, Harry, if I'm going to help you."

Harry nodded. "Fine. When do you want to do this?"

"The ritual has to be performed on the dark of the moon. I wouldn't try going into the Forest the night we have to perform it. At least one night before." Ginny ducked her head and watched Harry through the curtain of her hair. "You're sure that you want to do this?"

Harry wanted to say that he wasn't sure, at least in the way that he wouldn't have done it if he'd had a choice. But he didn't have a choice.

And if there was the slightest chance that he would survive Voldemort…

"Let's do it," he said.

Harry hadn't been in the Forbidden Forest after dark since that disastrous detention with Malfoy and Neville and Hagrid in his first year. That was what he got for trying to help a man who sometimes seemed to like him because of his parents and sometimes seemed cautious because Harry was a Slytherin. At least the dragon had got safely away.

Now, the main thing Harry noticed was how silently and confidently Ginny strode into the Forest. She was moving along with the moonlight in some places, but in others, she simply ducked into the darkness and ran along a path Harry didn't see until she pointed it out to him. Then she stopped and lifted her head like a deer scenting the wind.

Or a wolf, Harry decided, watching the expression on Ginny's face as she turned back towards him in the slight illumination of the Lumos Charm. It's hard to think of her as prey.

"This is the place," Ginny whispered. "You should call in Parseltongue. And Harry?"

Harry, who had been opening his mouth, closed it again. "Yeah?"

"Remember how much you want to survive. Infuse that into your voice, if you can't convince the Runespoor to come to you purely for the sake of sacrificing it."

Harry nodded grimly and took a moment to rearrange his mind, strongly picturing a snake. It was always easier for him to speak Parseltongue when one was in front of him, but he'd spent the last few days practicing with mental images, and he was fairly sure he could do this.

"Come to me, child of dreams."

Harry blinked as the words emerged. He had thought that he would call for a Runespoor, or for a snake willing to share company with him. But it seemed that his mind had other ideas.

Of course, one head of a Runespoor was called a dreamer. Maybe that had something to do with it.

He and Ginny stood waiting in silence. Harry was staring into the Forest, straining his eyes so hard to see into the darkness that he jumped when Ginny's hand gripped his. He glanced at her, but she was staring down the path, so Harry went back to doing the same thing.

The darkness stirred just when Harry had thought he should try calling again. "Who calls the dreamer from the darkness?" asked a strangely accented voice that reminded Harry of nothing so much as the basilisk speaking to Riddle.

Harry licked his lips and ignored the way that Ginny's hand had tightened on his hard enough to force all the blood out of it. "I speak to you. I ask that you share darkness and dreams with me, child of dreams."

"Say not child, but master."

"Master of dreams," Harry repeated obediently.

There was a stirring noise in the leaves, and then a Runespoor loomed into the edge of Ginny's wandlight. Harry smiled slowly when he saw it. It had all three heads, although two of them were arguing with each other in a furious, wordless hissing that Harry only thought was an argument because of the tone.

"Why have you called me?" asked the third, the planner.

"To share darkness and dreams, as I said. I needed one that was a master of dreams, and you could not be that if you had lost one of your heads."

"Let the others bite the master of criticism off. We know what we are." The Runespoor turned all three heads to focus on Harry. "You will tell us what darkness you have to share, and we shall judge it worthy or not." From the way the Runespoor lashed its necks together and hissed the last words, all three heads speaking them at once, Harry was fairly sure what would happen to someone judged unworthy.

But he wasn't afraid. Maybe it was just because he was so afraid of Voldemort that everything else was minor. Harry inclined his head. "I seek to conquer a great enemy of mine. He is much older than I am, and stronger. But I cannot cede my territory to him. He has declared that he wants my death, not only my territory. Will you help me?"

"You wish for us to plan a defense for you?"

"To dream, and criticize, and plan," Harry said. It was the first of the bindings that Ginny had told him he would have to speak, and he heard Ginny's breath coming short next to him. "To call you in from the darkness and have me taste of the darkness in my veins." Those words were the second binding.

Two of the Runespoor's heads had frozen in place and were staring at him in apparent enthrallment, but the third one, the critic, was snapping back and forth, hissing angry nonsense.

"To permit me to taste the darkness of yours."

The third head froze. Ginny shifted next to him and whispered, "Pick it up."

Harry nodded, his heart going crazily. To show that he had trust in the magic of the ritual and his own power, he had to grasp the Runespoor with his bare hand, and take it to the place where they would sacrifice it tomorrow.

He reached out.

There was a twitch and a tingle of power up his arm that nearly made him drop the thing, but it went quiet a moment later. And then Harry was holding an enthralled Runespoor. He stared at it until a soft sound from Ginny made him turn around.

She was clapping for him there in the darkness of the Forest at night, her eyes wild in the light of the Lumos Charm.

"Well done," she whispered, and at the moment, Harry could smile at her and agree that it was.

"There's no going back once we do this."

Harry bit his lip and nodded. They were standing by an altar they had built of black stone in the Forbidden Forest, two longer slabs laid on the third round rock; Ginny had found the stones, but Harry had floated them into place with sweeps of his wand at her direction. The Runespoor, still frozen in place by the spell or ritual or binding Harry had enacted last night, lay on the altar.

"Build the fire wherever you feel comfortable."

Harry started and looked at Ginny, because so far everything had been pretty precise, and he didn't know if he should be reacting without a direction. But she only folded her arms and stared at him. Harry swallowed and nodded and walked slowly around the altar.

He didn't think he would feel anything, at first. Ginny was great at Dark Arts. He was apprentice-level at best.

But then something seemed to unfold from the altar and reach towards him, an invisible tendril of power. Harry halted and let it twine slowly around his leg. When he reached down and petted it, the tendril unfurled equally invisible mouths to snap at him.

Harry followed it back and knelt down directly beside the altar. "Here," he said quietly. "As if we were roasting it."

Ginny nodded, and this time she was the one who gathered the wood they needed and piled it at Harry's direction. Then she stood back and closed her eyes as if meditating. Harry waited, the invisible tendril of power caressing his throat.

"Ignis."

Harry barely kept himself from flinching as the powerful fire spell bolted from Ginny's wand and drenched the wood beneath the Runespoor. But a second later, as the flames rose and wreathed around him, white with an edging of black, he knew this was the way it was always going to be.

He closed his eyes and knelt there for a few moments. Ginny didn't need to tell him he had to. He felt it the same way he felt the magic reaching from the altar, caressing him, sliding around him.

And then he knew.

He knew how to do this, and he knew how changed he would be once he had done so.

Harry took a deep breath and opened his eyes. Ginny was kneeling across the altar from him, and she smiled when he looked at her.

"Begin the burning, and ask for your favors," she whispered.

Harry nodded. He was unafraid, now, as if one of the Runespoor's heads was already gone, its favor already granted. He reached out and put his hand on the body of the snake, writhing his fingers. It was promptly released from the binding and began to jerk and convulse on the altar, hissing wild threats.

But it couldn't move off the altar. Not when their intent to sacrifice it was already there.

"I ask for the favor of losing my fear of the Dark Arts and the Dark Lord."

There was a long, silent puff of black smoke from the fire. Harry watched as one of the Runespoor's side heads—he thought it was the critic, but he couldn't be sure—snapped to the side, biting at an invisible foe, and then burned.

The same fire seemed to take hold in Harry's belly and bowels. He fell back, gasping, his hands clasped around his chest. He knew something was burning, something was going, and he knew that he was losing—

He was losing what he could stand to lose.

"Harry?"

Ginny's voice was low. Not concerned, because she wouldn't display an emotion like that, but fraught. Harry managed to sit up and nod at her. "I think it worked," he said.

He thought of casting a Dark Arts spell, one that would blast someone to the ground and tear bones and blood through the skin. It was one that Ginny had always managed to cast on human-like dummies in the Room of Requirement and Harry had never managed. He'd always turned away, sick.

Now, he wondered, What in the world was I worried about?

Similarly, he thought of Voldemort, and then laughed a little.

"What is it, Harry?"

"Just wondering why I feared to face him," Harry murmured. He could see the Killing Curse that had slain Cedric in his mind's eye. He could see the shade that had come out of the diary and commanded the basilisk, and the face that had snarled at him from the back of Quirrell's head. "He reduced himself to nothing trying to kill me. And when he came back, he didn't manage to kill me, either." Harry smiled, a tide of bloodlust rising in him. "It's kill or be killed, right? What good does it do to fear him? I have to kill him, or I'm not going to survive."

Ginny's face shone like the fire beneath the altar. "Good, Harry," she breathed. "Now you understand."

"Now I understand," Harry echoed back, and turned to the altar again. There were two heads left, and he found himself wondering if he should let Ginny ask for her favor after all. He was the one who had caught and bound the Runespoor. Surely he should ask for something for himself?

But then he told himself not to be greedy. After all, he hadn't found the ritual to bind the Runespoor himself. That was all Ginny.

And he couldn't think of anything he wanted much after his second favor. He would have all he needed to defeat Voldemort, and the thought of living, when he had resigned himself to dying in their next confrontation months ago, was almost unbearably sweet.

"I ask for the favor of becoming more powerful."

There was a longer pause this time. Harry narrowed his eyes. Maybe they should have chosen a stronger sacrifice, he thought. Or maybe the favor of becoming more powerful was too much to ask of a Runespoor sacrifice, when it would have to give him more magic and the other one had only been an attitude adjustment—

Force hit him like a hammer.

Harry bent over, wheezing. There was so much radiance in his body that he thought he could feel his blood boiling. He knew—he knew he should have been more specific, he thought, his head hazy and dreamy. This was too much, and he was—

There was something unfolding in him, like a heavy, smoke-choked flower.

Harry opened his eyes. The night was cut by gleaming lines of white brilliance, but there was also the sensation of something growing up and through his eyes. He blinked and then staggered back as he saw the actual plume of dark fog in front of his face.

"What is that?" Ginny breathed.

"I don't have any fucking idea."

The smoke writhed back and forth, bending and swaying as though blown by a wind that Harry couldn't feel. Then it abruptly straightened and spiraled up into the heavens. Harry watched it go, baffled, and then reached for his wand.

If he was really powerful, and no longer afraid of the Dark Arts, there was only one way to test it.

"Can you conjure me a target, Gin? One of the ones that the Room of Requirement gives you when you ask?"

Ginny shot him a long glance, as though asking him why he'd want such a thing, and then shook her head and gestured with her wand. A target sprouted from the ground as if they stood in the Room of Requirement now, and it looked as though it was filled with the magical equivalents of blood and muscle Harry had flinched from so often.

"Brilliant, thanks," Harry said, and whipped his wand at the target. "Confringo!"

The air around him blurred, and Harry found himself lying on the ground. He blinked and sat up slowly, feeling around for his glasses, before he realized that he was wearing them. It was just the sensation of power that had flung him from his feet.

And the target was cleft open from head to sternum, blood and fake organs lying on the ground.

Harry stood up, shivering in awe. That was the way he had felt when he saw Ginny cast a spell like this, but he had never been able to do it himself. And he didn't feel the overwhelming fear and disgust that he had before, either.

He laughed aloud.

"Well done," Ginny said, her smile parting the darkness like lightning. "Although I would recommend skipping the step where you fall down next time."

Harry laughed again and turned towards her. "And what are you going to ask for your favor?"

Ginny's smile vanished. Harry stopped laughing, too, as he felt the tingle of power forming around Ginny, as though her moods had the power to affect how the air flowed.

She stepped forwards and leaned down to clench her hand around the last remaining head of the Runespoor. Maybe it was the dreamer. Harry thought that was appropriate given what she said next, but she had no real way to be sure.

"I ask for the favor of Parseltongue."

The Runespoor's head burned alive in the next moment, anguished screams, or what sounded like them in Parseltongue, issuing from the parted jaws. Harry continued to stare at Ginny, to watch as she arched her back and shivered. Magic must be making its way into her, although Harry couldn't see it.

Ginny looked down at the now-headless body of the Runespoor and then up at him. Her smile was wicked and taunting, and Harry felt a part of himself that had never been awake stir to life as he looked at her.

"How does it feel to hear someone else speaking the language?"

Harry shivered. He took a step forwards, then stopped. The altar was between them. "Why did you ask for that?"

"It was the only thing I missed from Tom's possession. I spoke with the basilisk a few times, and I still have memories of communicating with some snakes on the grounds. It's a language of power. Of being different from others. Of having the strength to be a hunter." Ginny brushed her hair over her shoulders. "I know that I'm different from the rest of my family because I was Sorted into Slytherin, but they've spent the last three years trying to convince themselves that was an aberration, or just because I already had the diary then. Now I can prove it."

Harry swallowed and stepped around the altar. Ginny was there to meet him halfway, gazing up at him as defiantly as if Harry were one of her brothers.

He wasn't. He didn't want to think of Ginny as a sister, either.

He bent down and kissed her.

Ginny made a muffled noise, but of anticipation more than surprise, as if she'd been waiting for him to do that. Then she wound her arms around his neck and kissed him back.

They staggered, and Harry came down with his back on the altar. He gasped into Ginny's mouth, and she gasped back, and their tongues touched, and it was the most exciting thing that had happened to Harry this evening.

Harry reached up and grasped hold of Ginny's elbows when she tried to lean down and kiss him again. "Why—why did you think that you needed Parseltongue to prove yourself to me?" He was suddenly sure that was part of it.

Ginny's eyes glittered. "You kept seeing me as different, too—but stronger and more Slytherin than you are. You kept admiring me without thinking you could stand with me. Now I've shown you that that's bollocks."

Yeah, Harry thought as he reached up to touch Ginny's hair, tumbling around her like strands of dark fire. He had thought that. The same way that he hadn't been able to cast Dark Arts, the same way he'd been resigned to dying. Just thoughts without a lot of substance behind them, but he'd been so convinced they were true that there was no way he would have changed his mind without outside influence.

Now he knew better.

"They won't see us coming," Harry hissed at her. "Not Voldemort, not your family, not the rest of them."

Ginny laughed like a Runespoor, and kissed him, there on the black altar with the fire shimmering beneath them.

The End.