She cries
Miss Alma LeFay Peregrine was not a very emotional person, by nature and certainly by choice. After what she'd seen and experience, to produce emotion was connected to a risk of pain and suffering that was in no way worth it. She loved her children, yes, and there was an infinity amount of space for them in her heart, but she couldn't and wouldn't show it as much as some of her sisters would have liked.
Yet tonight, at this very moment, the emotions flowed easier than anything else. There was tears and screaming and begging, words of anger and sadness and concern falling off the top of her tongue before she could consider their meaning.
For the first time in her entire life, Alma faced true dispair. Her entire life she had been sure she knew the feeling, but now that it faced her for real, she realised she didn't. Not at all.
She begged for her brother to stop for hours at end, but they continued, forcing her to watch them beat and torture her sisters and mother figures until neither she nor the Ymbrynes seemed to be able to take it anymore, and they'd leave them alone.
They'd leave them alone to hours of watching each bleed and cry and sometimes even scream in pain and agony.
It is a horror that keeps her trapped no matter how many times she tells herself that it's just a bad dream, and when she feel the tiny hand tapping on her shoulder she scream out of pure instinct.
Her brothers had finally come to take her so they could torture her, too.
Before Alma knows what's happened, her eyes shot open, and she doesn't even know what's going on. She's lying on her back in her room, her breathing rapid and her heart beating panefully in her chest as the panic slowly started to leave her mind. Her hair has escaped from the braid she normally put it in, and her muscles are aching just like her chest, stiff from lying in a twisted and uncomfortable situation, but Alma could never have been happier to be in such a situation.
It had all been a huge nightmares after all.
A horrifyingly real nightmare filled with memories and flashbacks, but a nightmare nonetheless.
"Miss Peregrine" The voice is soft, a tiny hand tapping on her shoulder in a rhythm that felt oddly soothing. She doesn't know who of her children it is that have found her, only that one of them obviously has, even though they shouldn't, and she should chase them away. But she doesn't, because the comfort is too needed and the pressure of taking care of her children in the new home along with sleepless nights that exhaust her more than anything lay so heavy on her shoulders. She doesn't have the courage and energy to chase away what little comfort there was for her.
"Miss Peregrine." The rhythm being tapped on her shoulder increase, the raps harder and more frequent, and suddenly Ama recognise them. She had used to do the same thing herself, on Horace, when he was little and the fears that filled his dreams was far beyond his own capabilities and he'd become unresponsive as a result. Isolating himself from everything so he wouldn't have to deal with what he couldn't.
She'd tapped on his shoulder in various rhythms, more intense the closer to a conscious reaction he came, and now he was doing the same for her.
"Horace" She whisper his name as she rolls over on her side, carefully stretching her aching legs and watching as the blond haired boy comes into view. Her voice is hoarse and raw and she feels as though she's been screaming for hours.
Getting a short flashback to one of her dream sequences, she shudder, not certain that she hasn't been screaming for hours.
Lying beside her in the king sized bed, is a blonde, blue eyed thirteen year old boy in a red silk pyjamas. Horace had chosen it himself in a fancy dress shop, and despite the price tag compared to what his siblings wore, she had bought it. His siblings were satisfied in their cheaper clothing, so it didn't really make a differences to Alma. As long as everyone was satisfied she was happy.
"It's alright." Horace says it with such conviction, his blue eyes giving away a soul and brain far more matured than his physical appearance lets on, not only spending so many years in the loop but also his unspeakable nightmares having groomed him into something so much more than the thirteen year old boy any random person off the street would see.
"yes" She answer breathlessly, trying to smile for his sake but finding tears rolling down her face instead, and Horace is quickly approaching her, crawling across the bed until he is resting next to her chest, his scrawny arms wrapping around her waist.
"I love you." He says and now he doesn't sound nature at all, clinging to her and desperately trying to make her feel better. Alma's entire mouth taste like salt as the tears keeps falling, but she tighten her arms around him too in fake reassurance.
"I love you too. " It's not a lie, and it feel so comfortable to say, to express a truth that they all knew of but which was rarely voiced out loud. She was afraid to come closer than her children wished, to overstep their personal boundaries that they established between them, and therefor she keep it to herself.
Tonight, though, she can't be bothered with fear, or trying to figure out how Horace, whose room was right across from hers for convenience but still, and she just enjoys the comfort and the warmth of the boy beside her.
Other people could say what they wanted, but to her he'd always be her son. Her son which she loved and which provide all the reasons she needed to feel okay when nothing felt as though it was.
Alma wasn't good at expressing emotions, not by nature and certainly not by choice, but tonight she was crying and smiling simultaneously with one of her beloved children pressed to her chest in a tight embrace.
Tonight all the emotions were there in her head and in the room around her and tonight it didn't feel like a bad thing.