This chapter is so darn talky that it almost makes me cringe. But Sirius and Alma have a lot they need to talk about.

Sirius and the children splashed and floated and played in the water until Alma made them take a break for lunch. Swimming had worked up an appetite in all of them, and they sat in a circle on the sand and devoured sandwiches and fruits and vegetables, grown by Fiona, and biscuits. Sirius found out Claire's peculiarity then: it was only a sharp-fanged backmouth that she used for eating. She lifted her curls and held food to the back of her head and ate more that way than the rest of them. They all ate ravenously – all except for the two strange little ones, the twins, everyone else called them, as if they had no real names. They stayed down by the waterline, digging in the wet sand.

"What about those two?" Sirius asked, jerking his head towards them.

"The twins don't eat," Alma answered.

Sirius felt an prickling of unease. The twins hadn't spoken a single word, either, and their white costumes concealed them completely. Were they even human?

"And, er, what's their peculiarity?" he asked.

"They're borgons," Bronwyn answered around a bite of her sandwich.

"Gorgons, Bronwyn," Alma corrected, "and don't talk with your mouth full, please. Fiona, here, you need another napkin." She passed one to Fiona, who took it and wiped some mustard off her chin.

Sirius had stopped eating. "Gorgons?" he repeated, staring at Alma. Had she lost her mind to be taking in gorgons? "You think it's safe to keep a pair of gorgons around children?"

"They're children too, Sirius," she answered, and her black eyes flashed warning look at him over Hugh's head.

"They're dangerous," he argued. "They ought to be..." but he stopped. They ought to be... where? It occurred to him to wonder, where would two little gorgons have wound up in his magical world? As test subjects in a Care of Magical Creatures class? Outcast from society? He wasn't sure, but he knew that they would never have been cared for alongside human children, as they were here in Alma's loop.

Some of the children were looking at him reproachfully now, and Sirius realized that he'd been talking as if he were magical, instead of peculiar. As tolerant as he believed himself to be – hell, two of his best mates were a werewolf and a half-giant – some prejudices of the magical world had still crept into him. But Olive smiled at him and said with an air of smoothing things over, "Miss Peregrine says our peculiarities don't have to be dangerous, as long as we use common sense about them."

Lunchtime was followed by an unexpected bonus: time alone with Alma, something that Sirius hadn't hoped for until nightfall. She wouldn't allow her children to back to swimming right after they'd eaten, and she insisted they take some time to rest. The older ones didn't look happy about it, but they knew better than to argue with her, and they were tired from swimming so hard. They moved their towels to a shady spot further up the beach and laid down in a warm pile like puppies, their long, gangly limbs all entangled. Claire fell asleep with her head pillowed on Enoch's broad back, and Fiona's braids flopped in Horace's face, and Olive slept with one arm across Emma, which was necessary to keep Emma from floating away.

Alma watched over them until they were all asleep, while Sirius picked up a few crumbled napkins that they had left lying on the sand. She sat in the shade of the cliff, not far from her children, and gestured for Sirius to join her. He took a deep breath as he sank down beside her. They were alone at last – and on this beautiful beach, too. If her children weren't sleeping nearby, he would lay her down on the warm sand right now. But instead he said softly, "So... they think you're an ymbryne."

Alma hesitated, then raised her head and answered steadily, "Yes, it's better this way."

Sirius was rarely at a loss for words, but he didn't know what to say to that. He knew that Alma was very protective of her brood, but this was extreme even by her standards. She could only pass as an ymbryne because she had learned to imitate an ymbryne's powers – first by becoming an Animagus in bird form, then by learning to work a Time-Turner better than any witch or wizard in Britain. How could she not consider it lying to her children to let them believe that she was something she wasn't? And had she really never done any other magic around them? Merlin's Beard, giving up magic might be even worse than getting unjustly imprisoned in Azkaban for twelve years.

Alma pulled out her Time-Turner and flipped it open as she went on, "You know, other peculiars think being an ymbryne is about how well you can manipulate time, or what sort of bird you can turn into, but that actually has very little to do with it. Being an ymbryne is about caring for children."

"Don't you ever do magic around them?" Sirius asked, his voice raising angrily. "Don't you ever do magic at all?"

"Of course I do. I use my Time-Turner every single day. I become a bird almost every day, too."

"But you can do so much more than that!" he snapped, almost yelling. Her skills were going to waste here in this time-loop. She was going to waste, baby-sitting these peculiar children when she could be helping the Order.

But Alma remained strangely calm at his outburst. She looked away across the sea and said something that Sirius couldn't catch.

"What?"

"I said, there is nothing more," she repeated. Her voice was reverent, as if she were praying. "There is nothing more important than caring for these children, not for me. It is not the duty of an ymbryne, but the privilege. As long as I'm caring for these children, I am their ymbryne, in every sense of the word."

Sirius knew that he should back off, but he couldn't. He bared his teeth like a dog and challenged, "Yeah? What about defeating Voldemort? That doesn't strike you as more important?"

She turned her head sharply towards him like a falcon and answered, "Sirius, some of my children had to run away from home when they were much younger than sixteen."

That hurt more than he expected, and they fell into silence again. Sirius thought that he'd long gotten over his family disowning him, but being back at Grimmauld Place had stirred up too many memories. He hadn't learned until he returned to his old home that his own mother had burned his name off the Black family tree. He glanced back at Alma's children, sleeping on the sand. They all seemed so happy, so well-adjusted; it hadn't occurred to him that some of them must have unhappy pasts, too. They probably had hard-knock stories that could rival his.

When Alma spoke again, her voice was gentle, almost as if she were speaking to her children. "Did Remus tell you... well, he and I didn't really stay in touch, I'm afraid, after you... after..." But her voice faltered, and she stopped short.

Sirius nodded. "He mentioned that," he muttered. "He said seeing each other reminded you both too much of me."

Alma pressed one hand to her eyes and said, her voice trembling, "I feel terrible for saying this now, but it was like... like you'd died, Sirius – worse than if you'd died, because everything had been called into question, and magic... well, suddenly, it just didn't seem so magical anymore. I know it must be hard to believe, but giving up magic was actually quite easy for me."

Sirius's breath caught in his chest. Was she saying that she'd given up magic because of him? Had his supposed betrayal hurt her that much? For a moment, he couldn't breathe, but then he reminded himself: the reason why she had left the magical world for the peculiar one didn't matter anymore, did it? All that mattered was that she was never coming back. During his years in Azkaban, her children had surpassed Sirius in her affections.

"And you know, you'd be surprised," she went on, her voice steady again. "Peculiars are capable of much more than the magical world realizes."

"Yeah? Like what?"

She smiled smugly and bragged, "My children can resist the Imperius Curse."

Sirius stared at her, debating whether to believe this. Joking about her childrens' abilities wouldn't be like her at all, but how could this possibly be true?

"Alma, most witches and wizards can't even resist that curse. I can't, and I've bloody cast on it people." He had too, a few times during the first war. Mad-Eye Moody had taught it to him.

"I know. I can't either, but my children can."

"But how?" Sirius pressed skeptically. "They can't even do magic."

"The Imperius Curse is a means of controlling people. Giving them orders. And my children don't take orders from anyone but me. It's that way with all peculiar children and their ymbrynes."

"And what makes you so sure they could actually resist it? Has anyone Imperiused them?"

"No, of course not, but I assure you, the curse wouldn't work on them." She paused, then grinned at him and added, "I suppose if Dumbledore were here, he'd start going on about love and how it's the most powerful form of magic."

Sirius laughed. "Yeah, he loves waxing poetic about all that mushy stuff, the old fart." It felt good to be silly for a moment.

That was when Alma pulled her pipe from her dress pocket and lit it. Sirius's pulse raced, and the rich, warm smell of the tobacco nearly undid him. She still smoked a pipe, and thank God for that, for Alma's pipe had been one of the sexiest things about her. Often he thought of it when he needed to summon a Patronus – how the taste lingered on his lips and tongue, how the smell used to cling to his clothes after they'd made love.

"Alma, when I was in Azkaban, did you ever... I mean... was there..." He couldn't bring himself to finish the question, but Alma knew what he meant.

"Was there someone else?" she asked gently, and Sirius swallowed hard and nodded, bracing himself for the answer.

But Alma shook her head. "There hasn't been anyone but you, Sirius," she said softly. "I really don't have time for anyone but my children anymore." She paused, then raised one eyebrow and smiled sideways at him. "And besides," she went on, her voice now low and sultry, "I'm only interested in wizards whose Animagus form is a black dog."

Sirius grinned wickedly. "How lucky for you," he whispered, moving closer to her, "because I'm only interested in witches whose Animagus form is a peregrine falcon."

He remembered that years ago, before Alma left the magical world, one of her pet peeves was when anyone referred to her Animagus form as a bird. At Lily and James's wedding, he had introduced her to someone – he couldn't remember who now, maybe Emmeline Vance – saying, "And she's an Animagus as a b–" but she'd cut him off with, "As a peregrine falcon."

He had brought her as his date to Lily and James's wedding. He remembered dancing with her there, that heady, breathless joy of holding her in his arms and twirling her around. As proud as he was of being a Gryffindor, Sirius wasn't so brave at all, or he would've proposed to Alma when he'd had the chance. If only he had done it, if only he had married her then... Lily and James would've made both of them Harry's guardians, and Sirius would've told Alma when they made Peter their Secret-Keeper, and even if he'd still gone to Azkaban, Alma just might've gotten to raise Harry – she had such a way with children, even back then, and...

Sirius closed his eyes. It hurt almost as much as the Cruciatus Curse to imagine how different everything might be now.

These two have been patient, so I'm thinking about giving them some time alone in a more private setting in the next chapter. ;)