They landed inside the familiar office-lab with a soft thud, Siena teetering on her Victorian kitten heels due both to fear and tiredness. 

She kept clinging to James long after he steadied her, refusing to face the people who were bound to be waiting for them in the room, as she whispered again and again, "What if they caught us? What if we were separated?" 

Luckily, her shaking voice was hoarse from her unshed tears and muffled by the fabric of his frock coat, perfectly inaudible to both Albert, who had been pacing the room when they had appeared, and Alicia, who had been pretending not to be asleep in the armchair which someone had brought for her into the office. Only the mysterious man seated on a chair placed by the curtained window seemed to have overheard Siena's questions and scribbled something into the notebook he held open on his lap. The image made James think that the man might be a writer, and he pushed the idea at the back of his mind to analyse later. 

He looked down at Siena who was looking up at him, her hands closed in fists around his coat, and wrapped his arms around her in a quick embrace, whispering, "Hush, we'll talk at home." He was sure that the Bibliophiles would never let them leave immediately, should they gather that this quest didn't go quite as smoothly as the previous one, that they had been spotted, and almost caught. 

"Welcome back," Alicia said, walking towards them, voice thick with sleep, her eyes blinking against the ambient light filling the room. "It's... almost five in the morning," she added, looking at her watch. "Christopher went home a few hours ago; you've been gone for so long, we were beginning to worry."

"How long?" James asked. 

"Three days, almost four," Albert replied.

"Goodness, you must take her home, James, now. Are you all right, Siena? What happened?" Alicia interrupted, lacing her arm around Siena's waist, noticing her state as she approached.

"We're just tired, Alicia," James said, feeling the amount of time they had spent inside the book catching up with him too. It was the weirdest feeling; he had never felt this tired before, and yet, while he had been inside the book, he hadn't felt tired at all.

"He's right, Alicia, don't worry. I just need to sleep. Would you please bring our things from upstairs? We're running out of clean clothes. And could you call Jake, we'll tell you everything tomorrow..."

Alicia nodded, and the moment she vanished out of the room, Jake stood in the doorway. "I heard you arriving. The car is ready," he announced, smiling at them.

"Thanks, Jake. Goodnight, everyone," Siena said, leaning into James as he placed his arm over her shoulders and led her towards the door.

"We'll see you tomorrow," James added as they left the office, the two men's goodbyes trailing after them down the long, gloomy corridor. 

Alicia reached them just as they settled on the backseat of the car and helped Jake put their bags in the back. Siena forced her eyes to stay open long enough to wave at her through the window as the car started to move, the orange beams of the street lamps reaching the interior intermittently. Then she let her eyelids close and followed the men's conversation through a haze of sleep, her head resting against James' shoulder, her hand enclosed in his.

"I feel... like a zombie," she muttered as they finally entered the flat. The first silvery light of the day had already begun to spill inside through the glass sliding doors, banishing the night; there was no need to turn the lights on. "Like I haven't slept in a week."

"We need a good long sleep to recover," James said, yawning, dropping all their bags by the door. "I would never have said that we've stayed in that book so long."

Siena nodded, feeling sad. They didn't have much time left. She almost wished she wasn't so tired and didn't have to go to bed; there were so many things she wanted to discuss with James. But she couldn't. Neither of them was awake enough to focus; they both needed to rest.

"I need to take a shower first," she said simply, removing her shoes before walking further inside. Her hair smelled of sea, and she could feel the salt encasing her skin. She had never stayed so long without a shower; she shuddered at the idea of how dirty and dishevelled she must look...

He nodded. "And I'm hungry."

She realised she was as well when he said that. "Shall we have breakfast before we go to bed? There are some biscuits and chocolate in the cupboard above the fridge." 

James smiled; he greatly enjoyed learning little things about her. Chocolate seemed to be her weakness.

"You take a shower, and I'll put some breakfast together in the meantime."

"Thanks, James," she said, dragging herself towards the bathroom. 

She was out again ten minutes later, shrouded in nothing but her scent and a large towel. 

"The bathroom's all yours," she said, catching his look, which promptly set her cheeks ablaze, from where he stood by the kettle, placing tea bags into two cups. 

She was breathtaking when she blushed like that, James mused, smiling to himself as he filled the kettle with water and switched it on before he moved towards the bathroom. 

Inside, her clothes lay in a tall heap of dark skirts and bright petticoats by the door, and so he dropped his own on top; they could deal with them whenever they woke up. He stepped under the shower, breathing in her scent, realising how much he would miss it... She would be gone from his life in four days, he wouldn't see her again for months...

Pushing those thoughts away, he finished the shower quickly, not wanting to let her wait for him too long, knowing how tired she was. When he exited the bathroom, he found her sitting on the sofa clad in her nightdress, their breakfast set on the coffee table before her, a large, old book with pages yellowed by time open on her lap. 

He raised his eyebrows at her-- Was she already thinking about their next quest?-- and she smiled at him mischievously as he passed by, that smile and the towel wrapped around his hips making him recall their conversation about the Highlanders and their kilts, wondering if she was recalling it too. 

Just... what was it about her that being close made him feel so happy? How did he get himself into this situation, this... infatuation?Why did they have to live so far from each other? Many thoughts and questions whirled through his mind as he put his pyjamas on, but he pushed them all away as he joined her of the sofa. He just needed to be patient. Whenever she showed him that she would want to take their mutual attraction beyond this enchanted world created for them by the Society, he would find a way for them to meet before Christmas. Florence wasn't at the end of the world. 

The shower had washed most of their tiredness away and neither of them was suddenly rushing to go to bed as they talked about their adventure. Siena put the book away-- it was a copy of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, he noticed-- before she reached for her cup of tea and the chocolate bar he had found for her just where she had told him.

"We... They almost caught us," she muttered after a moment of thoughtful silence as if she had tried and failed not to bring that subject up again.

She shivered as she looked in his eyes and he wrapped the blanket they kept on the sofa over her bare shoulders, wondering why she didn't wear her dressing gown. The flat wasn't warm this early in the morning. 

"We knew that we might encounter complications sooner or later," he said, not sure what else he should tell her. "We were lucky this time, and we'll be more careful in our next quest. We are still learning."

She nodded, accepting his reasoning. "And should we ever get caught, we'll manage to get out of trouble."

"Of course," he promised, putting a second piece of chocolate into his mouth. He had never cared about chocolate before, but she was turning him into a chocoholic.

"I was curious about what you saw in that cave," he said to change the subject, recalling how shaken she looked when they got out of the water with the vial. 

Siena shivered again, recalling the Sea Witch's cave.

"It was awful, James," she said finally. "The description in the book, the place seen through the Little Mermaid's eyes, experiencing her fear and repulsion was bad enough but seeing it in person..."

"You don't have to tell me if you don't want to," James interrupted her, feeling bad for having asked.

She shrugged. "Maybe it will be easier to forget if I tell you. There were skeletons tangled among the arms of the polyps, both animal and human, and there was a Mermaid too, the sight of the... bones of her tail... was the strangest thing ever..." She dabbed at the corners of her eyes before she went on, wanting to prevent her tears from spilling. "There were parts of ships, and... a doll, ancient, Victorian doll that couldn't have been there for long, and I was frightened I'd glimpse a corpse... And inside... those snakes Andersen wrote as the Witch's pets were terrible, ugly, and enormous, and I hate snakes... So I closed my eyes and let the pendant pull me to the right vial; there were hundreds of them, all very similar."

She smiled at him through tears, happy to have it off her heart. He folded her in an embrace, feeling elated when she didn't pull away but let her head rest against his chest as he ran his hands along her spine for a long time.

"Let us go to bed, Siena," he said finally, "we need to recover some of our lost sleep."

She nodded, then stood up, her arm around his waist as he walked with her to the door of her bedroom. 

"I... " she said, standing in the doorway, then bit her tongue. She wouldn't mind if he slept in her bed; she would enjoy feeling him close... But she absolutely couldn't tell him that. "Good night, James."

She forced herself to walk into her room, away from him, leaving the door ajar. 

"Good night, Siena," he replied on a sigh, retreating towards his room. He needed to be patient.