Hermione went to sleep at lunch, and awakes in time for breakfast. She's surprised she was so tired. So time does pass in the land of the dead, at least for those who are merely guests.
She can have breakfast at the hotel, she learns, and though she's no longer starving, Hermione finds herself picturing the food in her mind. She's been on the run so long, to her the thought of a real breakfast only brings back memories from before the war, Mrs Weasley's kitchen, and all the plates and all the sausages and all the people, Fred was telling jokes, at the time Hermione had disapproved because he was laughing at Ron, but then there had been a Fred to laugh and a Ron to be laughed at then, and it makes it retroactively a much happier moment. The Weasleys were quite poor, much poorer than Hermione's own parents, and yet there had always been food.
At Hermione's house, nobody could eat breakfast until everyone was seated, and all ate alone except on Sundays, where they had large plates with eggs and hash browns and fresh bread and five varieties of jam, and only one person could talk at a time, even on Sundays.
Though the ingredients were perhaps not as healthy, Hermione's favourite breakfasts had been at Mrs Weasley's, and she shared with Harry a secret smile whenever they would sit at the table, a kind of unspoken gratitude. Look how lucky we are, she would think, and he agreed.
All that good thought and memory is quite wasted, however, because Harry's smile never comes and the hotel's breakfast does, with only one egg, but, thankfully, a decent amount of good bread.
The other hotel guests start to trickle in, and Hermione realizes they're all in fairly expensive clothing compared to the Muggles she passed in her Apparition stops. Her meager gold from fifty-five years in the future makes her one of the elite here. It must be inflation. Hermione's father is very knowledgeable about inflation, but because it doesn't happen in the wizarding world, Hermione never quite got around to reading about how it worked.
There's a book on Hermione's knees. It's a new book, or an old book, depending on whether time's ever stopped, and then started again, for the observer. It's a first edition, not that there are any other editions, yet. Hermione seldom reads novels, let alone Muggle novels, but she can't imagine 40s non-fiction would have any useful information for her, and she'd rather remain discreet.
She hasn't read two pages when a smiling man with short blond hair and a peculiarly long face sits besides her.
Philip is a writer. He's not any writer, he tells Hermione, he's a published writer, and as a lover of the arts, perhaps she's read his debut, The Boys Who Always Die. Hermione hopes she never hears anything about this book again.
He doesn't seem eager to leave, and so Hermione lets herself be distracted by his company. The hotel, the single egg, the long-faced Philip, the streets of London, the people with resigned faces, all of it is an invisibility cloak draping itself around the dead and the murder and the obscure schoolteacher without a case. Hermione, of course, can still feel the shape of those memories when she reaches for them, but here, in the Muggle world living in fear of a Muggle war, everything is refreshingly mundane. Like it was before she left home – though her home now has never seemed so far away.
"And then," says Philip, "there's the war. It is a major source of inspiration, do you know? There is something about this hardship, a hardship that threatens all of us-" he makes a gesture with his arms as though encompassing the room in a giant embrance "-that quiets the spirit and brings the words out of the soul. Do you not think so?"
Hermione feels singularly unthreatened by their hardship, and if her soul has ever talked, she believes she might never wish to listen to it again. But she remembers their present circumstances had made history in the Muggle world, and to them, in the instant, everything must be as uncertain as Hermione's last year. Then she realizes what has seemed so odd, caused her a slight detachment, since the beginning of their conversation.
"You aren't going to war yourself?" asks Hermione. She says it so casually, she knows he must have detected something. Accents have changed in the past fifty years; perhaps he'll think she's not from here. Perhaps this will stop him from even going down the path of thinking she's not from then.
"Oh! No," he says. "No, I do not believe in murder. I have the utmost appreciation for the brave who defend us – but myself, I could never feel my soul again. I used to write about that, but the public wasn't very interested. Very sad. I keep telling myself, if it wasn't for my father, I would have been most at peace in the church. Yes indeed. I believe the Christ showed us the way, by refusing to let the barbarism of his enemies corrupt him, and teaching his disciples about faith, and hope, and -"
Hermione can't believe she didn't see that one coming. After a few more minutes, she learns that Philip's father is some lord from Someplace-in-the-moor, ill and old. But all men of suitable age and constitution have been called upon. Such a pity for Voldemort's father, thinks Hermione. If he hadn't gone out of his way to not be serving his country, he may have saved his own life.
Hermione stands near the fallen body of some government official, whose detour to the archives will take rather longer than expected. It's not so bad. She's used the Imperius before, on wizard civil servants, but he's only stunned. Third time's the charm, she thinks. The memory alteration might just take.
At first, she thinks she can't do it again, not without her own memories affecting the process. But she has to – it's how she brings Harry back, it's how she gets rid of Voldemort, it's how she ends the war that won't happen. It grows easier. When the subject isn't someone she knows, Hermione finds concentrating on the details and the process of memory alteration much more comfortable. She hasn't had to hurry like that before, though. She's efficient, but not sloppy. She surprises herself, wishing Flitwick could see her. To think she technically never sat her N.E.W.T.s!
When Voldemort gets the letter he laughs.
It makes sense he thinks it's a joke, because it's not his war. Even Hermione's war isn't his war, not really, not so much as it's his game.
But when the reminder comes, and then the Muggles come, Hermione's people, she reminds herself, that Voldemort hates so much, and she sees him argue, talk to the orphanage matron, demand they talk to the other kids, she grasps how brilliant her new plan is.
In and of itself, the idea of tricking the Muggles into thinking Voldemort's avoiding his part in their war, rather than merely too young to fight, seems a step toward Voldemort's own path. Isn't dragging children into battles they aren't prepared for and never fathomed his thing? Hermione still remembers a pale, shaken Draco Malfoy in his parents' dungeon, looking almost a prisoner in his own childhood home.
But Voldemort, Hermione thinks, is unlikely to die in any Muggle war. Besides, while her knowledge of the future isn't the best, she's fairly sure the worst is over. The point isn't to kill Voldemort, merely to trap him. Hermione knows, Hermione remembers every single time she thinks, that all wars you take part of you cannot entirely escape, and Hermione hopes his makes Voldemort quite unlikely to return to Wizarding life.
Besides, just like her, he'd have no N.E.W.T.s. That shady shop in Knockturn is unlikely to hire some Muggle-raised no-name who left school early, no matter what his teachers used to say about his potential, and by the time he returns, his charming little club of school chums will belong to the past, with their future lying with new wives or new careers – and a Voldemort without his influence should be about as powerful as a Dumbledore without his.
