"He does have that practice with a bird," she points out to James, amused. "And he teleports, he doesn't have to have the same hunting style. Why doesn't he show us how to eat a bear, hm?"

This is a smug smile if they've ever seen one.

"Very well, maybe we will be the ones learning."

"We'll just have to see! Aurene honey do you want to be carried so you can watch?"

Is it maybe questionable parenting to let her small and impressionable child witness violence? Yes. But also, her small and impressionable child is half vampire and hunts and kills birds herself, so uh. Some level of constant background violence is sort of expected at this point. Also her daughter is extremely good at having preferences, even now. Possibly especially now, actually.

"Nyeh!" pronounces the dhampir, who firmly stays up in the trees. She wants to try to see if she can keep up on her own!! She doesn't care about killing techniques in the slightest.

Strange small person is strange.

Well, they can find said bear easily enough, and Alexei immediately teleports on top of it.

Then James realises, a second too late, what the result of Alexei's inexperience with the bear will be.

Yvette as well. Fortunately for her parenting sensibilities, not only does Aurene have trouble keeping up at top vampire speed, but the bear is not in fact focused on defending itself against Alexei's pants. So. Sigh. It's just going to be a bit of a mess. Animals tend to be messier than humans, efficiency of killing is not quite the same as efficiency of eating, nor efficiency of keeping one's clothes intact.

Alexei is... not particularly dismayed by his clothes getting ripped to shreds like that (mostly his shirt, as mentioned, his pants get rips here and there but are mostly fine) but the way large carnivorous animals react a lot more messily and loudly to being eaten than humans is very irritating.

It... does taste better than the bird, he guesses? And if the bird isn't toxic the bear probably isn't either? If he can't trust his literal soul mates to tell him the truth about what is or isn't toxic he might as well die.

But at the end of it the bear is drained dry and Alexei is standing by it shirtless (he got rid of the few tatters that still clung to his body) and bloody, and... Well, his eyes are definitely no longer red, but also he's sort of not moving at all and has an intent look on his face.

....

oh no he's hot.

No, no, bad Yvette, fix his shirt, you're a transmutation witch, dealing with mending family clothes (and in many cases making them) is one of the many facets of your self-assigned responsibilities. She'll just, uh, get to picking up and putting together the torn bits of his shirt.

James has no such responsibilities and can just stare, at least until his two-month-old daughter is close enough that he should pretend to not have a sexuality.

"This feels different," he says after a few seconds, apparently oblivious to his mates' horny.

"James and Blair said the same thing," says Yvette conversationally, about halfway through shirt repairs and trying desperately to distract herself. "It's one of the reasons I'm not going to cheat and make human blood for myself to drink. The, um, brain stuff? What's it like?"

(Aurene has just about caught up, and is probably going to pout about not being as fast as her parents at the age of two months. Because of course she is.)

"...more space. More things. More..." He spends a second thinking. "Me."

"I'm so glad," she says, beaming. She returns his now perfectly mended and unstained shirt to him, averting her eyes a little shyly instead of taking in the view.

Aurene arrives! She flings herself into her daddy's arms to wail about how it's not fair, she was trying her hardest, why can't she be as fast as they are!!!!

"I'm sorry, sweetheart, it's just that you are so amazing that the universe had to do something, otherwise you'd be too powerful and take over the world."

He blinks at his mate as she's handing him the shirt and—something new in him suggests she is feeling some emotion but he does not know what it is. He gives her a quizzical look.

Aurene understands what he's saying, but nonetheless does not find his argument compelling. At her age she does not have any particular rebuttal. Just this very loud tantrum.

"Oh, I, um." It's not hard to avoid being heard by Aurene, since Aurene is kind of in the middle of having a screaming tantrum, but she changes her pitch regardless. "... You're very pretty, and also my mate, and you were very... you looked more like yourself. I find that appealing." Her mouth twitches a little to indicate the direction she found that appealing.

"Oh." He... supposes it makes sense that his mate would find an expression of personality attractive given how this is meant to work? Maybe this whole "having a personality" thing is not without its merits.

He idly observes, also, that that thought was... he's not sure how to describe it. It was sort of like it felt like he should've found it harder to think than he in fact did?

...he's finding he likes this a lot lot lot more than he hates the taste of bear. Even though humans taste so nice...

"Okay."

"I hadn't really been in any kind of position to judge before, all vampires had gone gold by the time I'd turned. I don't think I even properly met any of them with human blood in their system while I was human. I'm the closest example I've got, really, and honestly I already feel very all over the place emotionally? I really don't want to see how it'd be worse. Apparently I'm doing fantastically, but really it just feels like I've gotten better at pretending," she babbles, at the pitch she's at, because she's not allowed to tackle her mate who is very clearly feeling more like himself, but she is allowed to babble.

"When did you turn. Again."