What if Hermione ALSO lived on Privet Drive?

What if Hermione Granger also lived on Privet Drive? Let's explore the depths of it in the video. This summer Hermione Granger turns six. A removal lorry pulls up outside number four, Privet Drive. The day is hot and still. The Granger family steps out, suitcases in hand, and the curtains of number four twitch like clockwork. Petunia Dursley appears within the hour, casserole and oven mitts. Vernon Dursley behind her in his Sunday tie. Appearances must be maintained on Privet Drive, and a new family represents an opportunity. The greeting is rehearsed and pleasant. The casserole still warm. The smiles fixed in place. Mrs. Granger thanks them. Mr. Granger shakes Vernon's hand. Hermione hovers behind her mother's leg, already studying everything. The symmetrical hedges, the polished door knocker, the boy hiding behind Vernon Dursley's bulk. Dudley Dursley, also six, sticks his tongue out at her. Hermione narrows her eyes. She has met bullies before. This boy feels like a bully. Then comes the warning. It is delivered in the kitchen over biscuits when Hermione has been sent to play in the garden with Dudley, who is currently torturing a beetle with a stick. Petunia leans across the table and lowers her voice to the conspiratorial whisper of suburban gossip. >> There's something you ought to know about my nephew. He's troubled, disturbed, really. We took him out of charity when his parents died. Drug addicts, both of them. Killed in a car crash. The boy has problems, outbursts, tantrums. We do what we can. >> Best to keep your daughter clear of him for her sake. >> The Grangers exchange a look. They are dentists by trade and trust people by habit. They have no reason to suspect their new neighbors of inventing any slander against an orphaned child. They thank the Dursleys for the warning. That night over dinner they tell Hermione gently to play with Dudley if she likes, but stay clear of the dark-haired boy at number four. Hermione, who has already decided Dudley is a horror, says nothing. She nods at the warning. After all, her parents said it's so it must be true. Five years pass. Hermione grows into a clever, lonely child whose primary friends are library books. She sees the dark-haired boy through the windows and across the pavements. He is small and quiet and never seems to be wearing clothes that fit him. The warning stays with her. She keeps her distance, but she keeps watching. Hermione's 11. Two letters arrive on Privet Drive within a fortnight of one another. One slides through the brass slot at number five and trembles in Mrs. Granger's hand. The other is shattered about, locked away, multiplied, and finally delivered by a giant in a tweed coat. Hermione's parents take the news with dazed practicality. How could they not when their daughter is, in fact, magic? There is a quiet evening of tears and tea. Then Mrs. Granger rises, wipes her eyes, and announces that there is research to be done. By the end of the week, Hermione has a book of History of Magic twice. She has annotated Hogwarts: A History. She's compiled a list of names and events that recur with frequency, and one name appears more often than any other. A boy who survived a curse that rebounded, a scar, a boy who happens to live across the street. Hermione sits very still for a long while. Then she gets up, smooths her skirt, walks across Privet Drive, and rings the doorbell of number four. Petunia opens the door, and her face does something complicated. >> Good afternoon, Mrs. Dursley. May I speak to Harry, please? >> Harry is busy. >> I'll wait. >> She does, on the doorstep, with a book, for 40 minutes. Petunia, who has spent 11 years cultivating a reputation of normality on this street, eventually surrenders. Harry is summoned from the cupboard under the stairs, blinking, holding his too-large glasses against his nose. Hermione looks at him. The clothes that hang off him, the thinness of his wrists, the careful, watchful eye of a child who had learned that attention is dangerous. She thinks, troubled, disturbed, outbursts. She thinks, liars. >> My name is Hermione Granger. I live across the road. I'm a witch, so are you. We're both going to Hogwarts. I have a thousand questions, and I think you might, too. Would you like to come and have a sandwich at my house? >> I'm I'm not allowed to leave. >> Mrs. Dursley, my mother has invited Harry to lunch. We'll have him back by 4:00. >> Petunia, who has spent her life terrified of being judged by the neighbors, allows it. She nods stiffly. Harry is bundled into shoes that are too big. Hermione marches across the road like a small, determined general. They sit in the Granger kitchen with cheese sandwiches and orange squash. Hermione asks her a thousand questions. Harry answers what he can, which is almost nothing. He has known he was a wizard for 10 days. He had read none of the books. He thought, until very recently, that he was simply strange. Hermione watches him eat his sandwich as though he expected to be taken away. >> They told my parents he was disturbed. >> They tell everyone that. >> They were lying. >> How do you know? >> Because disturbed children stop saying thank you for sandwiches by your age, and because I've watched you for 5 years across the road, and you spent every minute of it trying to disappear, and because the Dursleys are, in my opinion, the worst people on Privet Drive. >> Harry laughs. It is small, surprised, rusty-sounding. It is the laugh of a boy whose laughs have been rare for a long time. Hermione hears it and decides, in that moment, with absolute conviction of a clever, lonely child who has just found another, that this boy is hers to look after now. They were both different because of magic. They were never weird. They were never wrong. They had simply been waiting all this time to find one another. The rest of the summer becomes the foundation of everything that follows. Mrs. Granger, alarmed by what she pieces together from Harry's quiet answers, opens her home like a gate. Harry eats meals at the Granger table. He sleeps on a camp bed in the lounge when his cupboard becomes too much. Mr. Granger teaches him chess. Mrs. Granger teaches him how to ask for second helpings. Harry learns that families are given freely. He learns it slowly, but he learns. Hermione learns something quieter. She learns that her cleverness has a use beyond marks and good gold stars. She watches Harry flinch at sudden sounds and resolves to be the kind of friend whose presence is steady. She reads ahead in textbooks so she can explain things to him gently. She practices the Latin pronunciation in her mirror so she can teach him without feeling foolish. She does this without telling him. He knows notices anyway. On the 1st of September, Mr. and Mrs. Granger drive both children to King's Cross. Harry has been staying at number five for the past week. The Dursleys let him go in silence. They were, if anything, relieved. Platform 9 and 3/4 opens to them like a held breath. They find a compartment near the back of the train and set up their books like a small library. The compartment door slides open an hour into the journey. A red-haired boy with a smudge on his nose looks in, takes in the books and the parchment, the heads bent close together over a passage on a basic transfiguration, and quietly closes the door again. He goes to find his brothers. The compartment remains theirs. >> It says here Ravenclaw values learning above everything else. Wit beyond measure is a man's greatest treasure. Gryffindor sounds like the brave one. Dumbledore was in Gryffindor. You could be like him from any house, Hermione. Be Hermione Granger. Be yourself. Where do you want to go? Wherever you go. >> They pick Ravenclaw together, sitting on a swaying train somewhere between London and Scotland, 11 years old and already certain of one another. The Sorting Hat is older than memory and harder to fool than most things. When it settles on Harry's head, it speaks slowly and only Harry hears it. >> Plenty [clears throat] of courage. Oh, yes. A thirst to prove yourself. You do well in Slytherin, you know. Greatness, real greatness. >> I'm like to go where my friend is, please. >> A clear mind, a clear choice. Loyalty given freely is its own sort of power. Very well. Ravenclaw! >> The blue and bronze table erupts. Hermione awaits him, beaming so hard her cheeks hurt. They sit side by side at supper and eat their first Hogwarts meal shoulder to shoulder, which is how they will eat most of the meals for the next 7 years. Year one passes like a quiet symphony. Harry and Hermione live in the library. They live in the classrooms. Live in the Ravenclaw common room with its bronze eagle door knocker that asks riddles instead of demanding passwords. They are good at riddles. Harry receives an invisibility cloak at Christmas with no signature on the note. Hermione is predictably scandalized that he intends to use it for unauthorized exploration. She is, less predictably, the first to suggest where they ought to explore. They find the Mirror of Erised together one cold January night. Harry sees his parents standing behind him, smiling. He sees Hermione next to him in the reflection holding his hand. He keeps the second part to himself. Hermione sees herself with a wall of books taller than she is and Harry beside her, alive and well and [music] laughing. She keeps the second part to herself as well. They visit Hagrid for tea every other Sunday. They learn about Norbert and listen with mild interest. Hagrid would need adult help. Adults in their experience were a separate species. They tell Professor McGonagall about the dragon. McGonagall handles it. Norbert is collected by Charlie Weasley's contacts and ferried to Romania. Hagrid weeps, but the world keeps turning. Harry never tries out for Quidditch. Madam Hooch privately tells Professor Flitwick that the boy is the best natural flyer she's seen in decades. Professor Flitwick passes the comment on. Harry shrugs. He has a home, a friend, and a library that is bigger than any house he has ever lived in. He has no need for crowds chanting his name. There is a troll on Halloween. The professors handle it. No student is harmed. Hermione hears about it the next morning at breakfast and is briefly indignant that she missed an academic opportunity to observe a mountain troll up close. They learn in passing of Nicholas Flamel. They read about him in a library book on alchemy. They find him interesting. They leave the matter at curiosity. They have exams. Deep below the castle one night in June, unbeknownst to them, Professor Quirrell attempts to steal the stone. Despite no opposition, he is unsuccessful in his attempt, stumped by the last protection long enough for Dumbledore to retur- return and drive him away. Year one ends with both of them at the top of their year. Professor Flitwick is delighted. Harry goes home for the summer. Summer is spent at the Grangers whenever possible. It is the happiest Harry has ever been. He learns to ride a bicycle. He learns to swim. He helps Mr. Granger with the garden, Mrs. Granger with the washing up, and Hermione with absolutely every piece of summer reading the school sent. The Dursleys host a man named Mason and his wife for dinner one evening, secure their drill deal, and depart for Majorca the following week. Harry watches their car pull away from the Granger lounge window and feels nothing at all, which is, in its way, a kind of healing. Diagon Alley before the second year contains Gilderoy Lockhart. The man stands on a podium in florid blots and blond and beaming, signing copies of Magical Me. Hermione's eyes light up the way they do for new books. Harry watches Lockhart for 30 seconds. >> He's a fraud. >> What? Look at him. He's looking at every camera. He skipped past every face that's bought a book. He's posing. People like that never do stuff they say they did. >> Hermione looks again. She looks longer this time. She watches Lockhart fluff his hair before each photograph. She watches him sign without reading the names. She watches him and hand a book to a small boy without acknowledging the small boy at all. >> Oh, sorry. No, you're right. I should have seen it. Thank you. >> She buys his book anyway because they're on the school list. She skips the autograph queue. By the time the term begins, her admiration has cooled to professional curiosity, which is worse for Lockhart because Hermione's professional courtesy is a wand looking for somewhere to point. Year two begins with a small first year named Luna Lovegood being mocked at the Ravenclaw table for wearing radish earrings. Harry stops mid-stride. Hermione is already moving. They sit on either side of Luna and start a conversation about magical zoology that leaves the bullies confused. Within a week, Luna is theirs and they are hers. The duo become a trio. >> I think you two are going to be very important. I've been having dreams about it. Be at ease. They're nice dreams. >> She's deeply odd. Most things people dismiss as odd turn out to be true. Magic, for instance. >> Hermione concedes the point and never raises it again. Then, the writing appears on the wall. The heir of Slytherin has opened the Chamber of Secrets and the cat of the caretaker hangs petrified above the words. Mrs. Norris is followed by Colin Creevey, then by Justin Finch-Fletchley, then by Penelope Clearwater. The school panics. Lockhart preens uselessly. The trio set up in a corner of the library and treat the question as a research problem. Hermione builds a timetable. Luna draws diagrams. Harry pulls volumes on Salazar Slytherin from the restricted section under the cloak. They cross-reference creatures. They cross-reference Hogwarts plumbing schematics and Hermione found in an obscure architectural treaty that she is very pleased about. And then, in the middle of November, the Dueling Club happens. Lockhart pairs students with a flourish. He selects Harry to demonstrate. Lockhart gestures grandly towards Neville Longbottom. Snape steps forward with the soft menace of a man who has had enough of Lockhart's existence and substitutes with Draco Malfoy. Draco raises his wand. Harry raises his. They duel. It ends quickly. Harry has spent 18 months reading every defensive spell in the second year library and many in third year. He sidesteps, disarms, shields, and counter-jinxes with a fluency that draws a sharp inhale from Snape and a yelp of astonishment from Lockhart. Draco's face goes the color of a beetroot. Then, he snarls and conjures a long black snake. The snake hisses and curls toward a Hufflepuff boy in the front row. Harry steps forward without thinking and speaks in parseltongue, telling the snake to stop and come towards him. The snake does what he says. It stops. It turns its triangular head toward Harry. It slithers across the polished stone floor and coils almost docilely at his feet. The hall goes very quiet. Snape vanishes the snake with a flick. The students look at Harry as though he's grown a second head. Hermione's hand under the dueling table finds his and squeezes once. Luna behind them beams as though something has just been confirmed. Later in the Ravenclaw common room, Luna explains Parseltongue, the ability to speak to snakes, rare, inherited, Salazar Slytherin's signature trait, associated in popular suspicion with dark wizards. >> But you're not a dark wizard. So, either popular suspicion is wrong or you got it from somewhere else. >> Voldemort tried to kill me when I was a baby. >> That would do it. Soul magic is very absorbent. >> Soul magic? What? >> Right. Library. Now. We have a chamber to find. >> By February the trio has the answer. The monster moves through the pipes. It petrifies through reflection rather than direct gaze. Roosters kill it. Parseltongue controls it. The chamber's entrance is, according to Hermione's plumbing schematics and Luna's influence, in a girl's bathroom on the second floor where a girl named Myrtle was murdered 50 years ago. They write it up in three feet of parchment complete with footnotes. Hermione, on the way to deliver it to Professor Flitwick, makes the mistake of going to the library alone to fetch one last reference. She is found two hours later in a corridor near the library frozen. A small mirror clutched in her petrified hand. In the other hand is a torn page from a library book. The word basilisk is circled. Below it in her neat urgent handwriting, pipes. Harry stands beside the hospital bed for a long time. His eyes stay dry. He shakes once very slightly then studies. Luna takes his other hand. >> She'll come back. The mandrake potion is almost ready. We'll finish what she started. >> Yes. >> They go to Professor Flitwick that evening. They show him the parchment. They show him Hermione's torn page. They show him the plumbing schematics, the rooster references, the Slytherin folklore. Flitwick reads it in silence. When he looks up, his eyes are bright. >> This is exemplary work. Hogwarts thanks you. Now, please remain in your common room. >> With respect, sir, the entrance opens only to Parseltongue. >> Flitwick stops. He looks at Harry for a long moment. He looks at Luna. He nods once. >> Well, then you will accompany the staff to the entrance and not 1 inch beyond. Do I make myself clear, Mr. Potter? >> Miss Lovegood. >> Yes, sir. >> They lead the staff to the Moaning Myrtle's bathroom. Harry hisses at the snake on the tap. The sink swings open. Flitwick, Snape, McGonagall, Sprout, and the headmaster himself descend in a tight grim line of older magic. The children are sent back to the Ravenclaw tower under guard. It takes the staff 3 hours. They emerge with a basilisk fang the length of a sword in McGonagall's hand and and a scorched leaking diary in Dumbledore's. Ginny Weasley is found alive in an antechamber exhausted and weeping but uninjured. Hermione is unpetrified 2 weeks later when the mandrake draft is ready. Harry is in the chair beside her bed. He stayed there through every waking hour outside meals and lessons. She opens her eyes, sees him, and smiles before she fully remembers how to speak. >> The pipes. >> The pipes, Hermione. We got them. >> Ravenclaw wins the House Cup. Flitwick weeps openly at the leaving feast. Lockhart resigns under unclear circumstances after a private meeting with Snape, the contents of which Snape never discusses. The summer between the years 2 and 3 is interrupted only by the visit of Aunt Marge to Privet Drive. Harry is forced to attend a dinner during which Marge calls his mother a name that goes far past every line a woman ought to keep. The wine glass in Marge's hand explodes. Marge herself begins to inflate gently like a slow balloon. Harry in Harry in dawning horror runs out of number four across Privet Drive and rings the Granger doorbell. Hermione opens the door. She takes in his face. >> Inside, tea. What did you say? >> Harry tells her. Hermione's jaw sets. Mr. Granger listens from the table, picks up the telephone, and rings the Dursleys to inform them that Harry will be staying at number five until term begins. Thank you. And that ends the matter. Mrs. Granger writes a polite letter to the ministry about underage magic and accidental incidents involving difficult relatives. The ministry presented with a polite Muggle parent and a clearly extenuating circumstance decides the matter rests there. Sirius Black escapes Azkaban the same week. He sees in a copy of the Daily Prophet given to a guard a photograph of the Weasley family in Egypt. On Ron Weasley's shoulder sits a fat grey rat with a missing toe. Sirius' mind, after 12 years in Azkaban, sharpens sharpens to a point. He breaks out and goes north. The wizarding world goes on quiet alert. Harry stays at the Grangers and the Dursleys are happy to have one less mouth at the table. Diagon Alley produces a fluffy ginger-faced cat named Crookshanks, perfect her for Hermione. Year three at Hogwarts is dominated for most students by Sirius Black. For Harry, Hermione, and Luna, it is dominated by the Marauder's Map, which Fred and George Weasley sell to Harry for 10 galleons after observing that he and his friends are the only students interesting [music] enough to deserve it. The map is glorious. They use it to walk to Hogsmeade through a tunnel behind a one-eyed witch. They drink butterbeer. They visit Honeydukes. They sit by the frozen window of the Three Broomsticks and Hermione's hand brushes Harry's for the third time in an hour and neither of them mentions it. Sirius Black, meanwhile, is finding his own way to the truth. He reaches Ron Weasley's dormitory in Gryffindor Tower one night in October. There is no orange cat to disturb the rat in the in his bed. Sirius transforms, seizes the rat in his dog jaws, and is gone before the school knows what has happened. He carries the rat directly to Remus Lupin in the defense office. Remus, who had been quietly grading essays, nearly hexes the dog as it enters, but the sheer shock of what is happening freezes him in place long enough for Sirius to explain. Peter Pettigrew is forced back into human form on the defense office floor at midnight. He weeps. He confesses. Lupin holds him at wandpoint, the only thing stopping Sirius from killing him. They take him to Dumbledore at dawn. Pettigrew's trial is held in the Wizengamot within a fortnight. Sirius Black is publicly cleared. He stands on the steps of the Ministry with his godson on one side and his one remaining friend on the other. What follows is a question on where Harry should stay. Dumbledore insists that Privet Drive is necessary for Harry's safety. Sirius demands his godson go where he will be happiest. Hermione comes up with a compromise. They concede Harry is to spend at least two weeks per year at Privet Drive to maintain the wards as a safety net and the rest of his life elsewhere. The two weeks become a quiet civil arrangement. The Dursleys stay out of his way. He stays out of theirs. Hedwig delivers letters to Hermione daily. The cupboard under the stairs stands empty. Year four arrives. Harry skips the Quidditch World Cup because Harry has always found Quidditch dull. He spends August at Grimmauld Place with Sirius and the Granger house with Hermione and he is therefore far away from the Death Eater riots that follows the final whistle of the Dark Mark that is conjured in the sky over the campsite. Harry reads about it in the Daily Prophet over breakfast the next morning. The Triwizard Tournament is announced at the welcoming feast. The Goblet of Fire produces three names and then a fourth. Harry Potter rises from the Ravenclaw table to a hall that has gone silent. >> We'll work out who did this. Stay calm. We're with you. I'll bring books. >> Harry walks to the front of the hall as though they are walking with him because in every way that matters they are. The first task is dragons. Hagrid fills Harry in Harry in turn tells Cedric because that is the kind of person Harry is. The two of them prepare together. They become the kind of casual friends who nodded at each other in the corridors. Hermione drills Harry in the Conjunctivitis Curse and the Summoning Charm for three weeks. On the morning of the task Harry walks in the arena with a plan. He casts the Conjunctivitis Curse at the Hungarian Horntail's eyes. The dragon screams and rears blind. He casts the Summoning Charm at the eggs, all of them, and they fly to him in a heap safely away from the thrashing dragon. He lifts the golden one high and leaves the others safely behind a stone outcrop and walks out of the arena to a roar of applause that drowns out the dragon's confused roars. He scores higher than any other champion. Sirius shouts himself hoarse in the stands. Hermione cries very briefly and pretends she has something in her eye. Luna braids a small dragon scale into Harry's hair when he gets back to the Ravenclaw common room. He keeps it there for days. The Yule Ball approaches. Harry spends two week working up the nerve. He finally asks Hermione on a cold Tuesday in the astronomy tower at sunset with a sort of cheerful seriousness he uses for everything that matters. I'd like to take you to the Yule Ball if you'd like to go with me. >> Yes. Obviously yes. >> They dance. He has practiced. She has practiced more. Victor Krum stands by the punch bowl and watches her wistfully and keeps his distance because Hermione's laughing at something Harry has said with her whole face and there's a kind of orbit that even an international Quidditch player recognizes is closed. They kiss at midnight in the corridor outside the ball with snow falling outside the leaded windows. Neither of them is surprised. They've been moving toward this since they were 11. The second task is the Black Lake. The hostages, of course, Hermione. He takes the gillyweed that Dobby slips him and dives. Harry locates Hermione, severs her bindings, and swims her to the surface leaving the others to their own champions. He knows the staff won't let anything actually hurt them. Harry's spell repertoire by this point is the broadest of any fourth year in living memory. The false Moody has been quietly removing obstacles in his path all year. Harry reaches the Triwizard Cup with 20 minutes to spare. He looks around for any of the other champions. He sees no one. He picks up the cup. It is, of course, a Portkey. He arrives in a graveyard. Lucius Malfoy is waiting with a bundle in his arms. The bundle is Voldemort, withered and twisted, more baby than man. Lucius binds Harry to the headstone of Tom Riddle Senior in the moment of disorientation that follows the Portkey. The ritual proceeds. Tom Riddle's bone, Malfoy's hand, Harry's blood, Voldemort restored, rises naked and serpentine and laughs at the night sky. >> You have been kept from me for 13 years, Harry Potter. Look at you. You look like your father. >> Harry says nothing. He's calculating. He knows he's likely no match for Voldemort, but he knows that if he can buy an opening, he can reach the cup. The Death Eaters arrive in a swirl of dark cloaks. Voldemort circles. He gloats. He calls Harry a child. He summons his wand and bows mockingly, and the duel begins. Harry opens up with a flurry of spells more meant to distract Voldemort than harm him. He moves swiftly to cover. Voldemort bats each spell aside with ease before returning fire himself, laughing at the game he is now in. Harry works his way around the graveyard, making his way towards the cup's location. He can just make out when Voldemort cuts him off. >> Not bad, Harry. I am [clears throat] impressed. However, the game ends here. >> Their wands lock. Golden light arcs between them. The Priori Incantatem effect engulfs them both. Echoes spill from Voldemort's wand. An old man, a young woman, then Lily and James Potter. They circle Harry. They tell him to hold on. They tell him to break the connection and run. >> The cup, Harry. Behind you. >> Harry breaks the connection with a snarl of effort and dives. He summons the cup with a desperate flick of his wand and grabs it. The graveyard dissolves. He arrives gasping on the lawn of Hogwarts alone, alive, and screaming Voldemort is back. Fudge tries to deny it. Dumbledore presents Harry's pensive memory to a closed session of Wizengamot. The pensive speaks plain truth. Fudge denies it as the mental illness of a boy who has come from harsh beginnings. A boy with such trauma could not possibly be trusted regardless of what his memory show. The summer before year five is held at Grimmauld Place. The Order of the Phoenix has reformed. Sirius is its anchor. Harry and Hermione are made Ravenclaw prefects and couldn't be happier. Luna joins them for August. They scrub the house clean alongside the Weasleys, with whom they have gradually become friends. Ron Weasley turns out to be funny once he stops being intimidated by them. Fred and George turn out to be willing to teach a clever girl how to defy authority creatively and Hermione to the shock of her parents accepts the lessons. Year five brings Dolores Umbridge, the Ministry's pink cardiganned enforcer arrives at the welcoming feast and announces her intention to reform the school. By Halloween she has banned practical defense lessons. By Christmas she has issued 32 educational decrees. By February Harry Potter is teaching a secret army of students in the Room of Requirement because the official curriculum is no longer adequate for a war. He teaches disarming, stunning, shielding, the Patronus, and conjuration. He teaches them well. He teaches them with Hermione as his teaching assistant and Luna as his best student. By the end of the year the DA is the most capable group of student duelists Hogwarts has fielded since the last war. Umbridge targets Harry. She targets Hermione almost as fiercely because Hermione is his girlfriend and Umbridge knows it. The blood quill scars both of their hands. They wear the scars like a vow. Harry takes Occlumency lessons with Snape. Snape is, as always, a difficult teacher. Harry, with his analytical mind, his stable home life, his loving partner, and his living godfather has a steadier foundation than most 15-year-olds asked to wall their minds against a dark lord. He has a long road still to walk, but the connection between him and Voldemort thins where it might otherwise have stayed open. Voldemort feels it dim and frustrated starts to plan. In June Voldemort plants a vision. Sirius is being tortured in the Department of Mysteries. Harry sees it in the middle of an exam and gasps. Hermione is in the seat beside him. She sees his face. She knows that face. >> The mirror, Harry, the mirror Sirius gave you. Use it first. >> They run to the Ravenclaw common room. Harry pulls the small mirror from his trunk. He says Sirius's name. There is a long terrible silence, then Sirius's face appears, confused but real. >> Harry, how it's the middle of the afternoon. Are you all right? Don't you have an exam right now? >> Harry sits down hard on the floor and starts laughing. He laughs until he cries. Hermione sits beside him and holds his hand. >> It's Voldemort. I had a vision of you in danger. He's trying to lure me to the Department of Mysteries. Stay where you are. Don't move. I will tell Albus. We will handle it. >> The Order is alerted within an hour. The Department of Mysteries is staked out by the most dangerous wizards alive. When Voldemort, frustrated by Harry's failure to take the bait, comes in person, he walks into Dumbledore. He walks into Sirius Black, Alastor Moody, Kingsley Shacklebolt, Nymphadora Tonks, Remus Lupin, and the entire reconstructed Order of the Phoenix. The duel that follows lights the lower levels of the Ministry in green and gold. The prophecy orb shatters in the chaos and is lost forever, which suits Dumbledore very well because he had decided long before that he would tell Harry himself and as such the orb was just a liability. Voldemort escapes. Bellatrix Lestrange stays behind. She is captured alive and bound, screaming, and dragged back to Azkaban under triple guard. Three Death Eaters lie dead. Two Order members are wounded, but all of the Order survives the night. The Ministry sees Voldemort. Fudge resigns within a week. Rufus Scrimgeour takes his office. The Wizarding World finally is at war with both eyes open. Sirius, alive, takes Harry into a quiet drawing room at Grimmauld Place a fortnight later and after learning it from Dumbledore tells him the contents of the prophecy. "Either must die. Neither can live." Harry listens. He is 15. He looks at his godfather and his godfather looks back. >> Then we'll work out how to win without me dying. >> Yes. We will. >> Year six happens fast. Harry and Hermione have been a couple for two years. They hold hands in corridors and pretend not to notice the gossip that inevitably follows. Dumbledore takes Harry into private lessons. He shows Harry memories of Tom Riddle's youth. He shows him the orphanage, the cave, the diary, the ring. He explains Horcruxes. He explains that Voldemort has split his soul into seven pieces. >> One was a diary, destroyed in your second year. One was a ring, which I have retrieved and destroyed. The others remain. Locket, cup, diadem, the snake, Nagini, and one other, which we will discuss when the time comes. >> Slughorn teaches potions, to which Harry has earned the out stand outstanding in his AWL, even without the Half-Blood Prince's old book. He never needed shortcuts to do well. He was far more brilliant without them. Draco Malfoy paces the corridors with the haunted face of a boy who's been given an impossible task. Harry watches him on the Marauder's Map. He sees Draco vanishing into the Room of Requirement for hours. Hermione checks the map and frowns. >> He's working on something. Something big. A pair. Two or something. Twins. >> They tell Dumbledore. Dumbledore, who already knows what is happening, is nevertheless impressed by their detective work. He promises he will handle it, and Harry has no reason to doubt him. In June, Dumbledore takes Harry to the cave. They drink the potion, retrieve the locket, fight off the Inferi, and return to Hogsmeade. They Apparate to Hogsmeade and fly into the Astronomy Tower. They are met by Death Eaters, by Draco, by Severus Snape, bound to this moment by an unbreakable vow Harry and Hermione will only learn of afterwards. Dumbledore is disarmed by Draco. The Elder Wand's allegiance in that moment slips invisibly from the Headmaster to a frightened boy caught up in a situation out of his control. Snape arrives and kills Dumbledore as planned. Hogwarts grieves. Harry grieves. Hermione holds him for 3 days. Luna braids small white flowers into the wreath at Dumbledore's tomb. Sirius stands at the funeral with one hand on Harry's shoulder and one hand on his wand. They stay away from Hogwarts. The trio establishes operations at Grimmauld Place. Sirius is their fourth, their guardian, and their access to a generation of magical knowledge the Order has been quietly cataloging. Phineas Nigellus Black sneers at them from his portrait and gradually, over months, begins to be useful. Bill and Fleur are married at the Burrow. The wedding is interrupted. The Ministry falls. Pius Thicknesse takes office under the Imperius Curse. Voldemort owns the country in all but name. The trio goes underground. Their position is stronger than most resistance fighters could dream of. Grimmauld Place gives them a stable base. Sirius gives them a generation of dark magic scholarship from a family library of mostly oars and would burn it on site. The locket already rests in a drawer upstairs, retrieved from the cave with Dumbledore weeks earlier. Basilisk fangs are within reach as well. Harry slips back into the sealed Chamber of Secrets one quiet October night with Hermione waiting outside Myrtle's bathroom, wand raised, eyes on the corridor. He returns with six fangs wrapped in velvet. The roll goes to Hermione's braided bag alongside everything else they own. After finding the real locket thanks to Sirius and Creature, they destroy the locket on the kitchen floor of Grimmauld Place. It tries to tell him that Hermione would never love a half-blood orphan, that Sirius blames him for being alive while his parents lie in the ground, that Luna is humoring him out of pity. It speaks to all the things he had spent seven years putting to rest. He listens. He smiles. Then he drives the basilisk fang through it. The locket screams, then goes silent. >> What did it say? >> Lies. Old ones. None of them landed. She kisses him. They move on. The cup in Bellatrix Lestrange's vault. Bellatrix is in Azkaban. Bellatrix Lestrange is, however, not the only Lestrange. Rodolphus Lestrange is at large. Rabastan Lestrange is at large. The trio plans for weeks. They settle on a hybrid plan. Bellatrix sits beyond reach in Azkaban. The Lestrange family house-elves, however, are reachable. Sirius, through a long grapevine of pureblood domestic servants, locates one, an elderly elf, Creature's cousin, Pokey, dismissed years ago for out of clumsiness, now living free in a hidden corner of the Hog's Head pub. That before Dumbledore is, as ever, a quiet alley. Pokey, presented with kindness, a job and the chance to spite the Lestranges who beat her for 40 years, gives them everything. Vault details, the location of the vault, the defenses inside the Lestrange vault itself. They infiltrate Gringotts on a wet morning in March. Harry, under Polyjuice, is Rabastan. Hermione and Luna huddle under the cloak. Sirius waiting outside as their getaway with a borrowed broom. They reach the vault. Harry, doing a surprisingly good Rabastan impression, demands access. The goblins are suspicious, but the key is genuine and that is enough. They reach the vault. They retrieve the cup. They escape undetected. Sirius meets them outside and they apparate themselves to Grimmauld Place, exhausted but triumphant. They destroy the cup that night. Hufflepuff golden cup screams and falls silent. The three Horcruxes down. The diadem is at Hogwarts. Harry always suspected, but the vision he received that night when Voldemort learned of the cup's theft confirmed it. But before they can return to Hogwarts, there is a question that has been growing in Hermione's research for months. She has been quietly cross-referencing soul magic texts from the black library. She had been speaking with Phineas's portrait and with Mrs. Black's portrait, who, threatened by with being blasted off the wall, has become surprisingly forthcoming about old family magic. Luna has been having dreams of a piece of something dark and something bright. Sirius has been quietly furious because he can see where the research is going. One night in April, in the kitchen of Grimmauld Place, Hermione lays it out. The seventh Horcrux, the unintended one, the one Voldemort had never meant to make. >> It's you, Harry. The seventh Horcrux, the one Voldemort never meant to make. I've been working out what to do about it. >> How sure are you? >> Sure enough. The dreams, the connection, the way your scar acts when Voldemort is near, the Parseltongue. It all fits. >> Harry sits with it. He had suspected it since Dumbledore talked about an additional Horcrux they'd discussed later. >> I think part of me has been waiting for someone to say it out loud. How long have you suspected, Hermione? >> Since the locket, 4 months. I needed to be certain before I said it, and I needed a plan before I made him sit through hearing it. The good news is he can survive it. >> Hermione spreads the parchment on the table. There are diagrams. There are runic arrays. There are six volumes of cross-referenced research. She has, in the way she's done every difficult thing in her life, simply out outworked the problem until it submitted. >> Voldemort tied his soul to objects of cultural significance. Hogwarts founder relics. He chose them for legacy. The piece in Harry was an accident. Untethered to any meaningful object, it lives in Harry because there was nowhere else to go. Soul fragments, unanchored to its chosen vessel, can be drawn out under these conditions. A place of saturated magic, an act of willing release by the host, and a destruction agent applied at the point of separation. >> Seems simple enough. Why didn't Dumbledore think of it? The Black family library has books you won't find anywhere else. Albus was smart, not omnipotent. >> The Room of Requirement, after Fiendfyre has been used in it, is the most magically saturated chamber in Britain. Dark fire leaves residue. We destroy the diadem with a Fiendfyre in there. The room becomes, briefly, a soul-permeable space. Then Harry, in that space, willingly pushes the fragment out. We catch it with a basilisk fang in the moment it leaves him. >> Willingly? What does willingly mean here? >> He has to want it gone. >> That part's easy. What's [snorts] the worst-case scenario? >> If the fragment refuses, then Harry is no worse off than he is now. If the fragment leaves, but the fang misses, it could possess someone in the room. We can deal with that with proximity and timing. If Harry, in the moment, hesitates, nothing happens at all. He has to mean it. >> When do we do this? >> At the last possible moment. Voldemort will come to Hogwarts. He has to if he knows we're destroying Horcruxes. The battle will give us cover. The Room of Requirement will be reachable. We do it during the fight, while everyone is busy. Sirius goes with you. Luna and I go separately to find the diadem and prepare the room. >> We need to be careful with the Fiendfyre. Enough to destroy the diadem and cleanse the room. Not so much that the room is destroyed. >> Yes. >> And Voldemort's snake? >> Sirius and the Order will deal with Nagini. Once the fragment is out of you, if Voldemort has only Nagini and his own life left, we sever them both and he is mortal. >> They sit at the table for a long moment. The plan is on the parchment. The plan is brutal and elegant and absolutely the kind of plan that requires four sharp minds and a warm kitchen to build. This plan exists because four people who love each other have been allowed to think together with time and food and books and trust. >> All right. Let's win. >> The call comes from the 2nd of May. Voldemort marches on Hogwarts. The Order responds. The DA, the staff, the Order, the Centaurs, the house-elves, and the assorted resistance pour into the castle through every passage. The trio comes through the Hog's Head tunnel with Sirius half a step behind. The battle joins. Curses tear stone. Walls fall. The sky is sick with green light. Harry, Hermione, Luna, and Sirius cross the grounds and enter the castle. They split. Hermione and Luna go to the Room of Requirement to start the fiend fire. Harry and Sirius go to the Great Hall to give the >> Order >> Nagini's location, which Harry has been seeing in his dreams for weeks. The snake is curled at her master's feet in the courtyard, sheathed in a magical cage Voldemort thinks is impenetrable. [music] >> The snake, she's in a cage in the courtyard. She has to die for this to end. >> On it. >> Sirius and Harry turn back toward the seventh floor corridor. They run through corridors that are half collapsed. They duel a pair of Death Eaters in the trophy room and leave this them stunned and bound. They reach the seventh floor. The Room of Requirement is open. Smoke pours out. Hermione and Luna are inside. Such street, the diadem and a melting ruin of black slag at the center of a charred floor. It's location convenient for the plan. The fiend fire is gone. The runic array is drawn in chalk, salt, and silver dust around the circle on the smoldering stone. >> The room is saturated. We have maybe 10 minutes before the residue dissipates. Harry, in the circle. Now. >> Harry steps into the circle. He kneels. Hermione kneels in front of him with a basilisk fang held in in hands like an offering. Luna kneels behind him with a hand between his shoulder blades, anchoring him. Sirius stands at the edge of the circle, wand drawn, watching the door. >> You have to want it gone with everything you have. It'll fight you, but you have to live. >> I want it gone. I want to live. I want to marry you. I want a Sunday roast at your parents' table next month. I want to be old. I want this thing out of me. >> Hermione's eyes fill with tears. She holds his gaze. >> Then push. >> Harry closes his eyes. He pushes. He pushes the fragment of soul that has lived in him for 16 years toward the saturated air, toward the room that was being opened by fiendfire, toward the basilisk fang waiting at the threshold. He has only one method available to him, and it is wanting. He wants it gone more than he has wanted anything except the woman holding the fang. Something tears. Black smoke leaks from his scar. It hangs in the air for half a second, screaming in a voice borrowed from somewhere far older and uglier than Harry, looking for a vessel, finding only a fang. Hermione strikes. She strikes with all the fury she feels for this thing and all the love she feels for Harry. The fang takes the smoke through the center. The smoke screams and dissipates in a burst of foul smoke. Harry slumps forward and Luna catches him. He breathes. >> Harry! Harry! >> It's gone. It's gone, Hermione. I can feel it. He's not in my head. >> Glad to hear it. Now get up, godson. We have a Dark Lord to finish. >> The battle has reached the Great Hall. Nagini is dead. Kingsley took her head off with a cutting curse after a concentrated effort from multiple Order members before broke her protective cage. Voldemort, raging, broken, mortal for the first time in 17 years, faces Hogwarts in the dawn light streaming through the broken windows. Harry strides into the Great Hall, his head held high as the crowd parts before him. Voldemort sees him and laughs because, despite the loss of his Horcruxes, he believes he is the master of the Elder Wand and thus is unbeatable. >> Harry Potter, come to die at last. >> No, come to finish this. >> They circle. Voldemort raises his wand and the duel to end the war begins. The air fractures before the first spell is even cast. Harry moves first. His wand flicks in a tight arc and a razor-thin line slash of blue light tears through Voldemort. It meets a silent, effortless counter, a flick of the Elder Wand and the curse dissolves into harmless sparks. Voldemort doesn't step back. He advances. A lance of green erupts from his wand. Harry twists aside, cloak snapping, and retaliates mid-motion with a Confringo that detonates where Voldemort stood an instant ago. Stone explodes. Dust clouds the battlefield. Out of it, Voldemort emerges untouched. Harry's wand becomes a blur. Chain spells one after another. Expulso, Glacius, Reducto. A storm of color and force. Shards of ice stream through the air. Explosions ripple across the ground. A transfigured spear of stone launches from the earth itself aimed to skewer. Voldemort answers everything. A conjured shield booms like liquid glass catching and redirecting spells with terrifying efficiency. Fire becomes ash before it reaches him. Ice shatters mid-air. The spear twists, liquefies, and collapses into sand before it could touch him. He retaliates with something darker. The ground beneath Harry's feet warps, black tendrils bursting upward, clawing, grasping. Harry reacts instantly. A sweeping arc of white-hot flame that incinerates the shadowy growth before it can bind him. He pivots, sends a concussive blast back to force distance. But Voldemort is already moving. A flick too fast to be seen shatters Harry's shield. The impact throws him backward, skidding across broken stone. He rolls, comes up on one knee, his wand raising again, but Voldemort presses harder. Curses come like a barrage, green, violet, sickly yellow, each one lethal. Harry blocks, deflects, counters, but the pressure is making him slip. A cutting curse grazes his shoulder. Another blast slams into his guard forcing him back again. Voldemort advances, calm, inevitable. He raises his wand. Green light begins to form. A streak of gold intercepts him. Hermione, [music] her spell forces Voldemort off balance, not harming him, but just enough to divert the curse wide. She doesn't stop moving, already casting again. Binding chains of conjured steel lash towards Voldemort, not meant to hold him, but instead to keep him occupied. Harry gets back on his feet the moment Hermione bought him enough to catch his breath. They begin working in tandem, taking turns attacking and defending. Voldemort adjusts instantly. He pivots, forcing Hermione onto the defensive. A slicing curse tears through her shield, but is stopped by another. Luna's Protego dissipates under the force of the spell, but draws Voldemort's attention. Harry capitalizes. A brutal chain of spells, Reducto into Expulso, into a transfigured barrage of debris, forces Voldemort to give ground for the first time. Hermione reinforces him, launching whatever she can to up the pressure. Then a fourth presence crashes into the fight. Sirius fires a curse like a thunderclap. The black spell, a token of overwhelming force. He drives straight in, forcing Voldemort to divide attention fully now. And as powerful as he is, he isn't good enough. With a flash of four simultaneous spells, the Dark Lord crumbles. He stays down. The hall is silent for one whole heartbeat. Then it erupts with celebration. Harry stands in the wreckage of the Great Hall, sweat running down his face, shaking with exhaustion. And Hermione is running across the rubble towards him. She reaches him. He catches her. Luna and Sirius join them. They stand in a knot of four, soot-stained, blood-streaked, and unbroken. And Harry presses his forehead to Hermione's and breathes. >> We did it. I love you, Harry. We did it. >> The repairs to Hogwarts take a year. The trials take longer. Sirius, finally cleared of every old slander, is invited to lecture on Defense at Hogwarts and accepts on one condition, that he can decline any week he wants to take Harry fishing. Harry returns for an eighth year alongside Hermione and Luna. They take their NEWTs. They do well. Luna, predictably, scores higher in Care of Magical Creatures than anyone in the history of the subject, including the textbook authors. Harry returns the Elder Wand to Dumbledore's tomb with the simple ceremony of a man returning a borrowed book. He was never its master and didn't even truly know it was special until Hermione did some researching. In the end, it didn't matter. No wand, regardless of power, could match the bonds that had won the war. He paid it no further thought and instead he walked away with Hermione's hand in his and kept his eyes on the road ahead. They marry at a great the Granger house in the summer after the eighth year and a marquee in the back garden of number five Privet Drive. Mr. Granger walks his daughter down a grass aisle. Mrs. Granger weeps prettily. Sirius is the best man. Luna is the bridesmaid in robes the color of stars with radish earrings. The Dursleys at number four watch the proceedings through their kitchen window with expressions that communicate dignified disinterest and which fool no one. Petunia, alone in the kitchen late at night, cries once, just once. Then she dries her eyes and goes to bed. Across the road, the marquee glows with fairy lights. Harry Potter dances with Hermione Granger, who is now Hermione Potter. Sirius Black, three glasses of champagne down, leans on Mr. Granger's shoulder and tells him a wildly embellished story about James Potter at 17. Luna Lovegood dances barefoot in the grass. A small magical bird, uninvited, has turned up and made itself at home on her shoulder. The night is warm. The war is in the past. And a clever, lonely girl who knocked on the door 11 years ago has knocked finally into a life with room for her. A boy named James with his messy black hair and his grandmother's eyes. A girl named Lily with brown curls and her mother's frown. They never visit number four Privet Drive, but they wave at the elderly couple in the kitchen window when they pass on summer evenings because their parents have taught them because their parents taught them to be kind. Sometimes in the kitchen at number five, Hermione looks up from her reading and finds Harry watching her with the same careful, watchful seriousness he gave to everything important for the first time she met him. She raises an eyebrow. >> What? >> I was just thinking about how lucky I got the day you knocked on door. >> You got lucky every day after Harry Potter. >> I know. That's our theory. The Wizarding World is a place filled with exciting stories and possibilities and we love exploring them. If you want to accompany us on this journey through Hogwarts, Diagon Alley and beyond, then please like, share and subscribe to our channel.