B.L. PURDOM
aka Barb
(psychic serpent@yahoo.com)
2001
First published on Schnoogle.com and on the HP Psych Yahoo Group
Harry's fifth year
Part One of the Psychic Serpent Trilogy
Spoilers The first four canon books.
Summary In Harry's fifth year he gets a snake with the Sight; Hermione's torn between Ron and
Harry, who's torn between her and Ginny, who's torn between him and Draco Malfoy, who's
torn between her and loyalty to his father. Voldemort may be trying to recruit Harry now
instead of killing him, and there are giants and house elves and a Dueling Club, oh my!
Warning: sex, sexual tension, angst and tragedy.
Disclaimer This story is based on characters and situations created and owned by JK Rowling,
various publishers including but not limited to Bloomsbury Books, Scholastic Books and Raincoast
Books, and Warner Bros., Inc. No money is being made and no copyright or trademark
infringement is intended.
Typesetting This book has been typeset using LATEX and the Bookman font family.
- CHAPTER ONE -
Manual Labor
Harry had planned to sleep late on his first day of summer vacation. He felt as if he needed to sleep
for a year after what he'd been through during his fourth year of wizarding training. Harry Potter
was possibly the most famous wizard in the world, apart from the dark wizard who had killed his
parents. And now he was probably even more famous, having won the Triwizard Tournament just
a couple of weeks ago. But he was only famous in the wizarding world; in the non-magical, Muggle
world, he was just an annoyance to his aunt and uncle and cousin. He just wanted to sleep late
and try to forget everything that had happened to him during the previous ten months.
But instead, he awoke at seven-thirty in the morning to the shouts of workmen, the squeal and
grinding of a backhoe, and the shrill voice of his aunt shouting instructions to the workers who had
been hired to relandscape the garden at Four Privet Drive, where Harry felt about as welcome as
an arsonist in a paper factory. It was impossible to continue to sleep with all the racket, so Harry
resigned himself to it and threw back the sheet, sitting on the edge of the bed and fumbling on his
bedside table for his glasses. The room came into focus now, littered with wizarding paraphernalia
that was spilling out of his trunk, which he had not properly unpacked yet. He rose to walk to the
wardrobe and stood looking at his reflection in the mirror on the inside of the door.
He had grown several inches during the previous year, and the bottoms of his pajama pants
hovered around his shins. He'd been so busy just trying to stay alive through the Triwizard Tournament
that he hadn't even noticed that he now had a full-blown Adam's apple. He tried to sing
a little of his school's song, to see how his voice sounded. Traditionally, at Hogwart's School of
Witchcraft and Wizardry, everyone sang the school song to a different tune. He was partial to Loch
Lomond and started singing, "I'll take the high road and you'll take the low road...." but it came out
sounding rather like a cross between a garden gnome being sat on by a dragon and a rabid cat being
kicked about. He cleared his throat and tried again, managing this time to produce a recognizable
tune in a reedy tenor, causing him to be optimistic, but halfway through the first verse, his voice
cracked and made a noise that was so startling that his snowy owl Hedwig squawked in her cage
and flapped her wings agitatedly.
There was a sudden silence in the garden, and one of the workmen yelled, "What in the hell was
that?" Harry had hoped that the worker was referring to Hedwig, and not to him, but a second
worker now replied, "Cor, Dick, I think it was someone singing." Harry grimaced into the mirror;
he decided to drop the voice experiments for now and lifted up his hair, examining the lighteningshaped
scar on his forehead, a mark he'd received as a baby on the night Voldemort killed his
parents, and attempted to kill him. He let the hair flop back onto his face. He needed a haircut.
When he was younger, he'd always fought against haircuts (his aunt and uncle were endlessly
frustrated by his hair), but now he was thinking he needed something that made him look a bit less
like a scared little kid (as though it were standing on end because he was afraid) and a lot more like
a wizard that a powerful Dark Lord had to take seriously.
He also noticed that there was a dark, downy haze starting to appear on his chin and upper lip