"Oh."

Yep, clearly no idea what to do at all.

Then she seems to come to some kind of decision, and her jaw sets and she carefully puts her stack of very precious letters down on a nearby table. This task completed, she slides across the threshold to stand on her toes and gently press a small kiss to his cheek.

"Thank you," she repeats.

He touches his cheek, lightly—it's warmer now that she kissed it, if only temporarily—and says, "Anytime." Then he notices this is weird. "I suppose I should go now."

Her kiss bestowed, she retreats back to the other side of the threshold, smiling awkwardly.

"Um," she says. "If I were a better host I'd invite you inside for tea, or, or something, but, um." She looks at her stack of precious letters, then back to James. "Forgive me for being terribly rude?"

"There's nothing to forgive. I will leave you to your letters. I hope your brother is well." He nods respectfully and moves to leave.

"Thank you," she repeats, for the third time, then: "Oh, wait, um—what's your name?"

"James," he replies automatically. "James Orland." He dips his head politely again. Back on his game, there he goes.

"Bye, um. James."

And then she closes the door and goes to read her letters, hug her father, and tell him the good news.

And he...

...hangs around near the roofs for a while. Just to make sure everything's alright and she's actually happy.

There's some crying! But it is the good kind of crying, and she doesn't seem unhappy.

... But there's a thoughtful pause, after she reads the letters a second time once her father's gone to bed. She retrieves Blair's previous letters and compares them to the new set, and hums thoughtfully to herself.

Yeah, that's not gonna hold forever. Hopefully Blair will be back soon enough? ...hopefully she won't disbelieve that the letters are from Blair?

He sticks around a while longer.

The next half hour is devoted to cleaning her desk up and organizing all of the information she has into some kind of tidy filing system. Then, she rereads the letters again.

"What are you up to...?" she muses aloud, sitting at her desk and tapping her fingertips against it thoughtfully.

She goes to retrieve a pen and something to write on—

—then stops, and very deliberately puts both right back where she got them from.

Did she... decide to not write him that letter?

But she probably believes it's his. That... sounded right. Okay. So she won't be unhappy. Probably.

Good.

...and he has a package to collect.

.......he'll stick around for another minute or two.

Yvette retrieves a book from a shelf, and makes it through a couple of chapters before she goes to bed.

Yeah okay.

He goes to the post office—ah, drat, it's closed now, he'll have to wait until the morning. So he goes back to his place—oh, it's kinda dusty, isn't it, he hasn't been around in a while. He cleans everything and reorganizes everything and then stops and—

—doesn't really know what to do now. He's kinda hungry, maybe he should—well, he should not get some random human, Blair advised him against that, but he's sure he can find a terrible person. Maybe in prison? Prison should have terrible people, right?

It probably does, though the one near Lancaster seems to be based around more minor criminals instead of the more irredeemable people Blair tended to eat. They all have sentences of a couple years. It's also significantly more monitored than James might be accustomed to.

Maybe he can find terrible people... being terrible? Maybe in Manchester. He has all night.

He does!

Here is a man who is beating and then forcing marital relations upon his wife, does he seem edible?

Ooh, very edible!

...but maybe not while his wife is looking, James doesn't want to blow his cover. When he's asleep.

They're asleep in the same bed, but it's not all that difficult to slip into their bedroom and steal away the abusive husband without anyone noticing or getting awoken by his screaming. He didn't need that windpipe, anyway, not for his new purpose as 'dinner.'

He very much didn't! But James doesn't want to make a mess, so he's very careful not to break skin until the man is safely unobserved.

The man is easily killed, his blood easily consumed, and the body easily disposed of.

And thus sated, James returns to Lancaster at a more leisurely pace, enjoying the sunrise when it appears.

Eventually he fetches his package from the post office and starts organizing his place with its content; he's going to be a dentist. It doesn't take too long to rearrange furniture and separate out an area to be a waiting room and somewhere else to be the actual practice room. And then he has to post an ad somewhere for it, so that people will know to come to him. That... would be in the post office again, he guesses?

The post office cannot personally help him in his quest for better teeth for England, but they can point him in the right direction, where some people would be delighted to help him begin practicing dentistry!

Does he have an ID and his certification for his new profession?

Of course he does.

(It's forged, but, you know, he did study a lot and watch a few classes and has perfect memory and motor control.)

Excellent! Everything looks to be in order, then.

Then if he could just pay this very reasonable (expensive) fee, and then this other (more modest) fee for his name to appear in this book and then this other (expensive) fee for him to get an ad in this paper, that'd be great.