What Harry Potter Did Next - A Sequel to the Deathly Hallows

You can't work outside when it's raining so I recently re-read “The Deathly Hallows”, to extract the maximum from the many plot links and references to previous events. I think it's the best one of the Harry Potter series. But after all their adventures what did Harry and his friends do next?

Harry didn’t want to go back to Hogwarts, where he would always have fingers pointed at him and constantly be a focus of attention for the younger girls, but neither was he keen to continue brooding at Grimmauld Place with Kreacher. He was besieged by book offers but turned them all down! He felt that he no longer had a role in life. Recent events were still too raw in his mind and he felt guilty concerning his friends and acquaintances, and all the others, who were killed by Voldemort and his Death Eaters whilst he solved the puzzle of the horcruxes. If only he could have worked it out sooner!

Hermione eventually persuaded Harry that he needed to finish his schooling because, as he freely admitted in later years, “there were just so many things I didn't know”! The opportunity to be with Ginny for the school year was the deciding factor. Or was it Quidditch?
Having finally completed his N.E.W.T.s and then his Auror training he took Ginny and set off on a world tour, giving lectures about how he defeated You-Know-Who, and with Hermione’s help, making enough galleons in a couple of years so that he didn’t have to work at all if he didn’t want to. His message was always the same; “I am not anyone special and I had a lot of help! Voldemort himself picked me out and marked me as his equal; and he made lots of mistakes because he didn’t value love and self-sacrifice”. Harry was granted honours wherever he went and was voted a special pension by the American Ministry of Magic in exchange for the occasional week of consultancy concerning special relations with Muggles. He was awarded Witch Weekly International’s award for the most eligible bachelor but Ginny refused to let him go to the presentation ceremony saying “If you want to be part of that nonsense I’ll never marry you”! Harry didn’t need any more persuading.

Harry also started a charity called Youthwatch whose principal aim was to locate young wizards in the Muggle world and help them to avoid being subjected to child abuse by frightened and ignorant parents.

Only Rita Skeeter managed to find anyone with any harsh words to say about Harry and that was of course Malfoy. Ms Skeeter, glossing over the fact that he still bore the Dark Mark, quotes Draco Malfoy as saying, “Harry Potter was always obsessed with power. At Hogwarts he even set up his own army! He thinks he’s going to be Minister of Magic one day”. To be charitable, it was thus revealed how little he actually knew about Harry.  He was also still very angry over the recent death of his father. By the way anyone carrying the Death Eater’s Dark Mark, if they survived their sentences in Azkabhan, was banned from any form of public office and refused entry to the Ministry of Magic. Many of them went to live abroad in one of the smaller countries of South America, where they took over some of the established drug cartels.

Of course for Hermione there was no choice. She had to take her N.E.W.Ts.so that she could go on to do her P.h.D.D. (Particularly hard and Difficult Dissertation) which was on the subject of the mastership of wands and how they interact with their owners. Later, having acted as Harry’s manager for a few years, she married Ron and after she had established her academic credentials by publishing various articles and papers in prestigious wizarding journals, she wrote the definitive biography of Harry Potter. This was, of course, a worldwide best seller in many languages. She was invited to teach at Hogwarts but turned the offer down preferring to be with Ron, to write books and to bring up the kids. Apart from her family there was something else of which she was most proud.  After a long campaign her "Charter of Rights for House Elves" was finally passed in the Wizengamot.

Ron was deeply affected by the loss of his brother Fred and stayed at home recovering for a while. He didn’t go back to Hogwarts but joined his brother George in the joke shop business, opening the Hogsmeade branch while Hermione studied for her exams. Later, after he married Hermione, he ran the sales and marketing side of the business while George progressively concentrated more and more on product development. At one stage he bought an ice cream van, and told everyone that he was going to sell Bertie Bott’s Every Flavour Ice Cream. In reality it turned out to be a mobile joke shop, which he asked Reginald Cattermole and his wife to run.

As JKR says in the postscript to The Deathly Hallows, Neville became the herbology professor at Hogwarts and kept in touch with the members of the DA. After Luna’s father died Neville married her and, during the school holidays, they went on happy and successful trips all over the world looking for, and finding, rare specimens of magical plants to include in Neville’s book, which Luna illustrated. As Luna said to a smiling Hermione one day “looking for rare things with her father was very good but it is even more exciting to actually find them with Neville”!

Read JK Rowlings interview for NBC about what the characters did next http://today.msnbc.msn.com/id/19959323/ and in the Scotsman http://news.scotsman.com/scotland/JK-reveals-what-Harry-did.3606806.jp