I made a mistake in the initial draft of this section, but I've managed to fix it in the redraft. There are always going to be situations like this in a story, especially when dealing with time travel. You have to be careful with the timeline.

It's just part of the genre, I think.

One.

Sirius sat on his heels, waggling his wand in front of the baby. "You see this, Thomas?" he asked, brightly, like he was putting on a show. "This is a device of unparalleled violence. I can burn down buildings with this. Now, people always say that you shouldn't do that. But here's the secret: people have been telling me what I should and shouldn't do for my entire life, and I'm a very bad listener."

Merope watched her companion with a studious expression, bordering on something deeper than confusion. "Um . . . Mister Black? What, exactly, are you doing?"

Sirius glanced over his shoulder and winked. "It's important to talk to kids," he said. "It doesn't matter so much what you say, at least at this stage. He doesn't understand what I'm saying. All he knows is that I'm talking to him. Pretty soon, he'll start mimicking us. About the time he's four months old, or thereabouts, you'll notice him making his own sounds back at you when you talk to him. That's the sign that he's starting to work out how conversations work."

Merope tilted her head; she looked like she was trying to figure out if Sirius was pranking her. "Really? Is that . . . how I learned to speak?"

"Almost certainly," Sirius said. "Babies are little sponges. They absorb everything around them." He gestured. "Thomas is going to pick up that conversation is give-and-take. Take you and me for example, right now. While I'm talking, you're listening. While you're talking, I'm listening. He's going to figure out, all on his lonesome, that that's how talking is supposed to work. He'll pick up that it's bad to interrupt people while they're talking, because that's listening time."

Merope clearly wasn't sure about any of this, but she didn't have the knowledge base necessary to refute any of it, so she stayed silent.

Sirius stood up, flipping his wand through his fingers. "For the record," he said, "when and if you get a wand for yourself, Miss Gaunt, you absolutely should not do what I'm doing with mine right now." He held the little device up, then set it down on a table across the room from Thomas. "Never point a wand at something you don't mean to cast a spell at. I am not a good example of proper wand safety or etiquette."

"How . . . does a wand work, exactly?" Merope wondered.

"Wands are . . . focus objects," Sirius said. "They help us take the innate magic that we use naturally, the sort of magic that we don't have any real control over, and they confine it into something more specific." Sirius stepped over to his wand again, picked it up; with a flick, he summoned a little pocket mirror into his hand.

He approached the nearest window.

Holding the mirror just so, Sirius said: "You see how the light from the sun bounces off this mirror? Look how it hits the wall there." He pointed; Merope nodded. "It's like that. A wand is like this mirror. It gives us control over the magic. It lets us guide the magic."

"And . . . Hogwarts is where you learned all these things."

"Mostly," Sirius said. He nodded. "That said, a lot of wizarding families still teach their little ones basic magic before shuttling them off to school. Mine did. I'm guessing your lord father never bothered with any such thing."

"I think he taught my brother," Merope mused.

Sirius nodded again. "That . . . does not surprise me."

"You went to Hogwarts?"

"I did." Sirius stepped back over to the table, where he'd placed his wand before, and set it back down. He placed the mirror next to it. "My parents were just as . . . toxic as yours, I think, but mine expected me to bring honor to our name. To do that, I was to do a proper job in school. Prove myself worthy."

"Did you? Prove yourself worthy, I mean."

"Not in the slightest." Sirius laughed; it almost wasn't bitter. Thomas was watching him; so was his mother. "I was a gifted student, yes, and that ought to have counted for something, but it didn't. Not for my parents. I was a fundamental and irredeemable disappointment as soon as I was sorted into Gryffindor."

"That's one of the school's houses," Merope said.

"Correct."

"What sort of people get into Gryffindor?"

"The brave, the reckless, the stupid." Sirius grinned. "The sort of people who'd use time travel to save someone they never met, on the off chance that it'd make for a better future. You know. That kind of thing."

Merope smiled.

Thomas babbled wordlessly.

Two.

Fists pounded on the front door. A snarling, hissing, growling sound pushed its way inside, and Merope went as pale as a sheet. Sirius didn't understand what she clearly did, but he was no stranger to danger; he knew what it sounded like. He whirled on a heel as his wand flew into his hand.

"Go!" he hissed at Merope. "Grab Thomas! Into the master bedroom! Shut the door, hide!"

Merope didn't ask questions; she scooped up her son, who was starting to whine—he was clearly upset by the sudden noises—and vanished. Sirius had a thought crop up in the back of his mind: this must be what James felt that night.

A young mother, too young, hiding herself and her baby boy from a threat to their safety.

And he was the only thing standing in the way.

Sirius squared his shoulders. "All right, Prongs. Let's do this." He apparated onto the snow-ridden porch; as he set his eyes on the hunched, angry, feral body of Marvolo Gaunt for the first time, it crossed Sirius's mind that he'd never been less surprised in his life.

"Hello, there," Sirius said lightly, as he pressed the tip of his wand against the back of Marvolo's skull. "Such a nice surprise to have guests this time of year. How can I help you, sir?"

Marvolo sounded like nothing so much as a wild boar as he whirled around and made ready to tackle Sirius to the ground. He was a big man, corded over with muscle and driven by a kind of fury that Sirius would never understand; however, he was out of practice. Sirius was no stranger to the way that Azkaban sapped a man's strength, not anymore, and he was sure that Marvolo was still feeling the aftereffects of his imprisonment.

Even accounting for how short his stay had been, compared to Sirius's, anyway, it was still enough to hold the man back from who he'd once been.

Sirius danced out of the way. "Let me guess," he said, face blank and free of sentiment; no fear, no anger, no amusement. "You're here selling encyclopedias."

Marvolo pulled himself up, laboriously, onto his feet.

He spat in Sirius's face.

Three.

Merope Gaunt watched out a window in the master bedroom, holding Thomas to her breast, as Sirius Black nimbly avoided her father's lunging, furious attacks. She felt fear—of course she did—but more than that she felt vindication. Never before had she seen her father's anger directed at someone who could stand against it. Sirius Black wasn't a helpless Muggle; Sirius Black wasn't a wild animal; Sirius Black wasn't her. He was a man grown, tall and broad-shouldered; while he had a scruffy look to him, he was more than up to the task of dealing with a filth-streaked feral man like Marvolo Gaunt.

"Filthy pretender!" Marvolo was spitting in Parseltongue, loud enough for his daughter to hear him even though the window was latched shut. Sirius didn't respond; clearly, he had no idea what his antagonist was saying. All the same, Merope thought she could see familiarity in his bright grey eyes.

Sirius didn't know the words that Marvolo was throwing at his feet, but he knew intimately the feelings behind them. It was this reaction, more than anything, that told Merope the truth of what Sirius said about his own family. She didn't know the Blacks—Sirius was, in fact, the only wizard aside from Marvolo and Morfin she'd ever met—but all the same, didn't she?

"I'll put an end to this charade! You think you can hide her from me?! She's mine! She belongs to me! I'll rip that spawn's head clean off and feed it to her! See if I don't!"

At some point during the scuffle, Sirius slipped his wand into a pocket; he decided he wouldn't need it, he didn't need it, and he wasn't about to sully the art of magic by using it against a man like this. So it was that he ducked and spun and whirled around, never bothering to strike out himself, his long coat and hair flying about him and making it almost impossible to follow his moments.

Then Sirius whipped around, quick as greased lightning, and sent a boot cracking against Marvolo Gaunt's jaw. Merope watched her father sail through the air, slam against a postbox, and crumple to the ground in a heap; he was, quite thoroughly, unconscious.

Thomas was still sniffling, but he'd stopped crying for the moment.

Holding her son, Merope knew what she had to do now.

She couldn't allow a threat to her boy, no matter what that threat's name was. Not after all that she'd seen, and gone through, to see him born.

Merope stepped into the kitchen, found a knife, and found her resolve.

She slipped outside, onto the porch, into the cold; Sirius was waiting for her. He saw the blade and didn't ask about it. He took Thomas from her and retreated inside, leaving Merope to her grim work without comment.