"We... are not particularly near land, no." Here, bottle of water, now to make some soup. "Sea creatures are fine, yes. Sharks are my personal favourite."

“Okay.” She carefully sips her water. “So that’s probably for the best, and we should stick to it. And if we need to turn me you can teach me how to hunt sharks.”

"You sink your teeth into them," he explains helpfully while starting on the soup at vampire speed where possible.

“Thanks, love, I’m so enlightened.” She rolls her eyes, fondly.

"You will acquire technique with practice."

“But I want to be graceful and elegant, damn it! Can’t you run me through the basics very quickly so I don’t embarrass myself with my clumsiness in front of my mate?”

"Not realistically." Chop chop chop not quite at the speed of sound. "It is almost entirely muscle memory. So to speak. You would be underwater so the problem newborns usually have with getting drenched in blood will not apply, that is already a plus."

“That’s true. But the muscle memory wouldn’t transfer very well to hunting on land. So I suppose for the first couple of hunts I should do so in the nude!”

"I expect anything that fights back would probably destroy whatever you were wearing anyway. Probably sharks are not sufficiently agile for this, but a bear or a large cat would be, I think."

"See! I'll just have to do all of my hunting while stark naked until I get a good grasp of table manners. Stalking through the woods at super speed, pouncing on my prey, getting help cleaning the blood off of myself..."

"I am not going to be distracted by your transparent attempts at temptation until I am done with this soup," he singsongs.

"Spoilsport. But insatiable honeymoon antics aside, it does sound fun."

And she can almost imagine it, like—

—looking at the world through painted glass, the colors brighter and sharper and prettier than she has the words to describe, senses leading her onwards to her prey to sate the horrible charcoal that is her throat—

—Yvette blinks, and frowns a little. Uh? Uh. Was that a hallicunation of some kind??

He has his back to her so he does not immediately notice it but there's a pause and a hitch in her breath and he's at her side. "Love?"

Oh, damn, and she'd just gotten him to stop fussing. Okay, fine, since he's here he can hold her.

"I'm fine. Ish. Fine-ish? I might want to go lie down, though, I had a weird moment of, of. I don't know, vertigo, or falling a bit too deep into my imagination? Like a very vivid daydream."

She can be quickly but carefully swept and then taken to her bed. "I will bring your soup here."

"Okay, dear," she sighs. Yeah, that's not a husband that can be argued with on this topic, is it. Fair enough, she guesses. "Can you also bring a book and then your lovely company so I don't get too bored by being terribly responsible?"

"Yes, ma'am."

Zip zap.

She gives another very dramatic sigh and consents to the indignity of being confined to their bed. In an entirely nonsexual way. Damnation. Maybe she should just be turned early, but...

... she doesn't...

... feel like she should? That's probably the fear of turning talking. She still doesn't want to make herself do a hard scary thing while she's sick, that's probably it.

(Why doesn't it feel like it, though?)

He cannot comment on her sense of foreboding when he returns a couple of seconds later with a book.

"Thank you, love," she says, smiling a little when she sees him. Ugh. Thinking is hard, the whole wedding was just a marathon of thinking, thinking, thinking. The whole point of this thing was to not do any kind of thinking at all. Can't she just be held instead??

"Hold me for a bit?" she requests, because obviously the answer is yes.

Obviously the answer is yes.

Mmmmm being married is so nice.

Being human is less nice. Whatever she has does not go away in a couple of days. It's not obviously debilitating, it just involves more of a ravenous appetite, and tiredness, and some odd but on the whole pleasant trips of imagination that would make much more sense if she was on some kind of drug regimen, and some very vivid dreams. One of those drives her to wake up in James's arms in tears about, about - she doesn't quite know, some shadow of an impossible life that she and James couldn't have, where they have a child and she's beautiful. She flips between feeling too hot and too cold and it's not even clear that she has a fever right now. Probably it's just that James is fussing endlessly and it's making her self conscious about her own body, but. But. What's going on...?

When she has a - a very vivid imagining of the taste of blood, of how delicious it would be and how much she needs to drink it, she sits up. What? That's not the first sort of hallucination in the vampire vein that she's had, but something about it feels very real.

".... James, love, I think I have a request of you."