Hey all! To the four people who reviewed (especially Ninja, who reviewed twice!) thank you! I like hearing what people think, whether it be good or bad, long or short.

To anyone who read the original first chapter, this is going to look very familiar. Don't worry, the next chapter is already written and only needs some tweaking, so it won't be long until it's up. The short chapter lengths are still annoying me, but I suppose that will work itself out. Anyway, enjoy!

Harry Potter was bored. Not that that was so unusual, it being the summer holidays, but this was worse than usual.

Surprisingly, Harry was starting to actually miss the Dursleys. Sure, they were the worst guardians ever, but at least they gave him some human interaction. Since Hedwig had left two days before Harry had had nothing to do and no one to talk to. Even the list of chores the Dursleys had left him had looked promising in staving off boredom, but he'd done most of them already and there wasn't much point in cleaning the majority of the house until the day before they got back or he'd just have to clean it all twice.

Now Harry was lying on the ratty mattress in his bedroom staring out the window. Thankfully the Dursleys hadn't replaced the bars on his window, but it did nothing to lessen the fact that he was still a prisoner in this house. To him, the wide, open sky was painfully taunting as it was beautiful.

Unable to escape, Harry had turned to letting his mind wander instead. After ringing Mrs Figg on Saturday (a few hours after the Dursleys had left, but she hadn't minded) he had been content to work in the garden and do homework, eventually surfacing from his room again to make himself some dinner from the scraps the Dursleys had left him. He had made a note to go shopping the day after and had retired to bed early.

The next day passed in much the same way, though by lunchtime Harry was already starting to develop the signs of going stir crazy. Now so used to Hogwarts, with all its mystery and magic, Privet Drive was so very mundane and uninteresting that Harry had started to worry he might go mad over the holidays.

Hence, on the third day of his 'freedom', Harry was laying on his bed staring up at the sky, his mind slowly and lazily ticking over. Still stuck on Riddle's and the Headmaster's words, Harry's mind had come up with several questions. By how much were Riddle and he similar or different and what had made Riddle turn out the way he did? What could have happened if Harry hadn't chosen Gryffindor right back at the start? How much control did one have over their own choices and what choices had he made that he wasn't aware of?

If choices made one who they were, did one's choices also affect other things, things that couldn't choose for themselves?

It was that last question that had plagued his thoughts the most. It reminded him of his parseltongue ability and how the school had reacted to it. He had never chosen to be able to talk to snakes - according to Dumbledore it was Voldemort's fault that he could - but it was the other students who had chosen to stigmatise him for it. It wasn't a choice they consciously made, but Parseltongue was something which already had a reputation - the students had just gone along with what was expected of them because of that reputation. It was interesting how the choices of a few witches and wizards in the past who used parseltongue for evil purposes had so much bearing on the present reaction to it.

Harry had gradually begun to apply this question to more and more things - spells, potions, certain magical creatures, even brooms - and had realised rather quickly that there was no easy answer. So many things could be used for so many purposes and yet most were classified quite strictly.

He had remembered a Charms lesson near the beginning of first year when Ron had used wingardium leviosa on a book only for the spell to fail halfway and the book to fall onto the floor. Imagine, then, if it had been something else - a rat, or any of the other animals that they practiced with so often. Ron could have done quite a bit of damage, even broken some of the animal's bones. What if instead of a rat and a desk you had, say, a person and Hogwarts' several-hundred-metre high walls? Harry could just imagine some first years going up the Astronomy Tower to duel, one levitating the other then accidentally dropping them over the edge. In fact, Harry was surprised it hadn't happened before. Perhaps there were spells on the tower to prevent that exact situation from ever happening.

Such morbid thoughts had eventually reminded Harry of the few times he had heard people mention the Dark Arts - spells and potions supposedly focussed on causing pain and suffering. Here he had brought his thoughts to a stop, fearing where this train of thought was going. He remembered the fear people had of the Arts and the few things he had heard or read about them, and he refused to even contemplate them. No matter what he did not want to turn out like Voldemort and avoiding the Dark Arts was one choice he could make to ensure that.

A knock on the window caught Harry's attention and he dragged his mind from his thoughts, glad of a distraction. A flash of white outside had him scrambling up to open the window, a smile spreading across his face as Hedwig soared in to settle on the desk beside her cage.

"Hey girl." Harry left the window open, rushing over to welcome Hedwig back with a gentle scratch and pat. "Where have you been?"

Hedwig just blinked up at him in what could have been satisfaction - honestly, sometimes it was a little hard to tell - then clacked her beak a few times as she held out one leg. Harry, only just realising that she had been standing on one leg, reached to take whatever she had brought him. It took a moment and his hand meeting something that definitely wasn't paper before he realised it wasn't a letter.

A mostly-brown snake with black stripes and a white belly was clutched in her talons. There were two wide white and black stripes just behind its head, like some kind of collar, but otherwise its colouring was quite uniform for all of its half-metre length. Its eyes - round, not slitted - were open and its jaw hung slack. All in all, it looked quite dead.

"Uh, Hedwig?" Harry glanced from the snake to his owl, surprised and confused. "Why did you bring me a snake?"

Hedwig just clacked her beak and dropped the snake onto the desk, hopping away and into her cage with a few beats of her wings. Harry stared after her for a moment before returning his attention to the snake. He had no idea what was happening. Hedwig did occasionally bring back mice and such from her hunts, showing them off to him before feasting, but never before had she brought back a snake or- or- presented it to him.

Reaching out with one hand, Harry gently ran his fingers over the snake's smooth scales. He had always considered snakes to be beautiful creatures, having had more than his fair share of encounters with them while gardening. A second later he pulled his hand back in surprise - not only was the snake still relatively warm but he could have sworn it had twitched.

Thinking quickly, knowing a cold-blooded animal needed heat to survive, Harry carefully picked up the snake, pooling its long body into his hands, before carrying it across the room to the window. He tipped his hands, letting the small body slide off his hands onto the window sill, then closed the window so that, if the snake did wake, it wouldn't slip out the window and fall two stories to the garden below.

Rather than collapsing back onto his bed, Harry dragged a chair over to the window, sitting just outside of what he assumed would be the snake's range if he decided to lunge upon waking. He was determined that if this snake really was still alive, he'd do his best to look after it. It was, after all, something to do, and helped with alleviating his boredom.

Besides, having someone to speak to, snake or no, would hopefully make the holidays pass a lot quicker.