"I expect she will tell me if she wants me to know."

"Fair enough!" he agrees. Then he sits down to start forging letters.

"I don't think I'm ready to trust myself to be around her yet. My control's pretty good for my age but that's... not really saying much?"

"When I was that new I was much worse," he agrees, "but you'll know when you're actually safe to be around."

"Any tips? Ways I could practice my self control?"

"Start small. If you can get human objects, particularly clothing, and especially if there's blood in them, and be around them until you feel under control then that helps. Heartbeats are also an important part of it, though, so you should be around humans before attempting anything more sophisticated. Don't do that unless they are easily disposed of, because you will fail sometimes. Doing it while full for the first few times helps get into the right frame of mind, but eventually you should test your control while hungry."

He nods.

"All right. Thanks. My power gives me something of an edge, I can lean on it to help stop myself, or steer myself if I can't resist, but... My self control is too tenuous for my sister, I think. It's mostly a product of forward thinking and having an outlet to direct myself at."

He nods. "I think control is easier after eating animals, too," he adds as an afterthought.

"Really? I'd have thought it'd be the opposite. I can console myself with getting to eat a serial killer later instead of a mother of four."

He nods. "Really, yeah. So should I take these letters to Yvette and say there was some mixup, or...?"

"Or drop them outside her door like they arrived in the mail, if you don't want her asking inconvenient questions of you," he offers, slightly amused. He does not expect James to do this, but he might. "Blame it on the Germans. Maybe get some of them stamped with obnoxious red stamps with things like 'for review' or 'return to sender' in German, or something. Have a couple get forwarded to Belgium and then sorted out there. I vaguely recall bureaucracy as a terrifying amorphous thing, it can have plausibly held up some international letters for a couple of months. Don't say it was the English that screwed it up, it is both easier to verify and she's more likely to go yell at them so someone else doesn't have to lose their letters."

Wow. She sounds really adorable. Also hot.

He nods. "I'll remember that," he says, wryly.

"Luckily we did actually go through Germany, so I can make this pretty believable." Write write write, he has gotten through many letters very quickly, having a vampire boosted everything is awesome.

"Impatient to get back?" he wonders, mildly, as he writes.

"Somewhat," he admits. "But not enough that I'll rush you."

"I'm not happy about keeping her waiting either. I don't imagine worrying about me is all that much fun." Write write write.

"It's not."

He nods.

"In my latest letter I'm going to say that I'm going from Germany to, uh. Poland, I guess. So that the postage will not obviously mismatch the forgeries like it might if I tried sending anything from Germany again through channels that actually exist."

He nods. "...what's even happening here?" he wonders.

"Short version: they lost the Great War, and so everyone agreed that it was definitely all their fault in the first place. Because of this, they had their economy gutted and have steep war reparations to pay for all of the damages. This has overall made the country very miserable."

"Oh. Sounds terrible."

"Pretty much. The idea was to make it so that it would be impossible for them to ever conduct another war again."

"Or conduct anything else at all, it appears."

"Yeah. I get the impression there was an element of vengeance to it. Someone to blame for all the death and destruction." He shrugs. "Anyway. I could take a week to get all of these airtight, but I think I don't want to keep her waiting any longer. Even if she notices they're forged, she's going to know that no one but me could have forged them, which is the important thing."

He finishes the final letter and seals it. It disappears into his coat, and the rest of the stack goes to James.

"This one I'll send from Poland the normal way, I'm going to pick right back up on sending regular letters from here on out. Please pick up German stamps for all of them, and try to make them look like they've seen some kind of bureaucratic Hell. You saw the letters she got, you're going to be better at forging the outsides than I would be."

He nods. "Will do. Good luck with control."

"Thanks. Good luck with being heroic for pretty people, it was nice meeting you."

"Nice meeting you, too!"

...and he zips away.

The trip back is significantly shorter—he's not tracking anyone, just running. He stops places to make the forgery look more real—stamps and whatnot—but doesn't dawdle. He really wants to get back. Who knows what else Yvette got up to in this month away. She could have decided to come track Blair herself, and that would be a terrible, terrible idea for a human. He puts that thought out of his mind.

And he arrives, a few days later. He has a bundle of letters, an overcast day (thank you, England), and a fist with which to knock—

—wait, first, is Yvette in?