The first thing she sees is light.

Warm golden light with shifting hints of blue and silver, filling the air with spectacular dazzling beauty.

And not just light, either - it's almost alive, this light, spilling over her and soothing away her thirst with its gentle touch. There is a sense of self in it. Boundless energy wrapped in an unshakeable will. Curiosity, integrity, intelligence, compassion; if you are in trouble, this person wants to help you, and they probably can. If you are causing trouble, well, they'll offer you as many second chances as they can afford to, but they won't flinch from war if war is what it takes to keep people safe and happy and okay.

Also she's standing on the roof of a castle looking out over a once-beautiful city now fallen somewhat into disrepair. The whole town is flooded with light; it seems to be centered on the castle itself. Whatever's making it, therefore, is probably inside.

Oh.

It's - it's beautiful. It's the most beautiful thing she's ever seen, could ever imagine seeing. Can she mate to light, because she thinks she just did. She doesn't have the words to describe it, doesn't have the thoughts to piece together what exactly's happening, so she just stands, awestruck. Overwhelmed and swept away by the light and its life. If she could cry, she might be tempted.

A billow of blood-red flame shatters a window somewhere below her and roars out over the city. This, too, has life; but of a rather less pleasant kind. It says: this is someone who wants to hurt people, who considers it a right, almost a duty. This is someone who loves violence and abhors mercy, who craves power and disdains affection. Impulsive, angry, cruel, a blaze that burns everything in its path.

She flinches as if bitten. What the fuck? What was that?

... Is it threatening the source of the light? It may or may not be threatening the source of the light, it's certainly thematically opposed to the light. She and it are going to have some problems if it's threatening the source of the light, of the murderous variety.

If it came down to it, could she outrun fire blasts like that? Yeah, definitely. That's good enough for her. This is probably really stupid, but she can't just leave it. She has to know what's going on in there, right now, and if she gets a little bit set on fire she has copied every single part of her own body, and is completely capable of recreating it.

She goes to investigate.

The recently destroyed window offers her a view of two people facing off across the wreck of what may once been a throne room.

The shorter one stands with his back to the window, wrapped in intense golden light. As she peeks in the window, he's saying something in a totally unfamiliar language.

The taller one has a strange amulet hanging around his neck on a silver chain, a dark slash of red wrought in a substance as much like glass as the light-threads were like spider-silk. It broadcasts the same sense of personality as the red fire.

When Yvette looks in the window, he gives her a quizzical look and sends a blast of red flame in her direction. (Curiously, the fire doesn't seem to have actually... burned... anything. It did blow out the window, but with force, not heat.)

She dodges, then after the flame has dissipated, lands and moves away from the window. So she can attract line of fire from - the person that's probably her mate. By process of elimination and his association with the light.

With crossed arms, the shimmering golden-eyed woman fixes the blood-associated man with a look. In sunlight she looks like crushed diamonds; spectacular and breathtaking, a thousand twinkling lights that outshine the sun that lit her. The sparkling is more subtle, shifts with the fluid light from her mate. Her skin catches the light and redirects it in a quieter, more understated fashion. She still glimmers brilliantly and gorgeously, and the effect compounds with her flawless face to make her breathtakingly beautiful, but does not overpower all else.

He looks at her mate, gestures to her, and asks a question that sounds rudely phrased even though she can't understand a word of it.

Her mate spares her a glance and shrugs an 'I got nothing' shrug, with a verbal response presumably affirming this sentiment. (The language they're speaking is very pretty.)

He has an amulet, too, the counterpart to that slash of red: it's golden like his light, with the same shifting hints of blue and silver, and formed in the shape of a stylized bird with wings outstretched in flight. Now that she's gotten a good look at his face, he looks about sixteen or seventeen, although very short for his age.

The man with the fire-and-blood theme lets out a snort of laughter.

She takes a break from glaring at the man with the fire-and-blood theme to look at her mate. Not to bask in his splendor, she can do that later, but to attempt to ask him what he'd like her to do. She has a language barrier to deal with, but she thinks she can get the point across by tilting her head at fire-and-blood man and raising her eyebrows at her mate.

His attention is focused on the fire-and-blood man, but he catches her looking out of the corner of his eye and gives her a confident half-shrug that seems to communicate 'don't worry, I got this'.

He says something else in the language she doesn't speak.

The fire-and-blood man snarls and holds out a hand toward the teenager, sending a blast of red flame roaring toward him that's big enough to swallow him whole.

(AAAAAAAAAAAAAAA.)

If it were her, she would not appreciate a lovestruck stranger getting involved and killing someone over her while she was busy. He seems to be busy, and he implies he has a handle on this. That light's his, and it doesn't strike her as belonging to someone who takes risks lightly. If it were her, she'd want the lovestruck stranger to trust her. That's what love is supposed to be, trust and mutual respect and, occasionally, compromising. If she loves him, if this is more than just crazy mating mojo, then she damn well needs to act like it and have an iota of self control. Her mate would not find the situation improved by an ignorant stranger bursting in with superpowers and meddling. He would not.

She does not do the first thing that comes to mind, which is ripping the fire-and-blood man's head clean off. She does not do things two through ten, which involve interference with varying degrees of violence to this man's person. She does not do the things that come after that, all of which involve more flavors of personal violence, and in one instance, throwing his stupid amulet out of the window.

Instead she decides the most expedient way to distract herself from meddling where her mate doesn't want her is to bite her hand. She does that. It hurts. Which is nice and distracting. Not as distracting as the mate-focused screaming that's going on in her head, but something else to focus on.

(She hisses, softly.)

There are pained noises just barely audible under the crackle of flame. Being engulfed in that red fire sounds like a really unpleasant experience. Fortunately(?), it also sounds like it is continuing to be a really unpleasant experience rather than immediately ending in death.

Perhaps relatedly, the golden light is healing her hand fast enough that she's having noticeable trouble getting her teeth into it.

She does not move, instead staring at the fire, making a noise that is the unholy lovechild of an angry hiss and a pained whimper. Self control, self control, come on...

The fire-and-blood man glances at her and makes a shooing gesture, and the flames reach out in her direction, though slowly enough that even a human could probably run.

...

She does not actually have infinite self control.

Right, let's go with the plan involving tossing the necklace out of the window. That seems like the plan that will fuck everything up the least.

She zips behind him, reaches to snap his necklace off at the clasp -

—and he turns with speed equal to hers and grabs her by the throat with a flame-wreathed hand.

The touch of the red fire feels like turning.

That's alarming, and she spends half a second checking to make sure she is not actually burning, but - that's it. It just hurts. She's otherwise fine.

The bright side of having been through turning is that everything else kind of pales in comparison. Sure, this feels like turning, but not everywhere. She can still use the space she has to think - clearly she's working with something she doesn't understand, but she thinks there are some things she has that could catch him off guard, too. But how does she manage to use them?

She's dealing with someone who loves violence, abhors mercy, and who loves hurting people. Okay. She can work with that, actually. Being hurt needs to look like it matters to her more than it does.

Vampires have a bit of trouble with 'emotional control,' at least when young. She's very young. It's not very hard to let the impotent, agonized anger bloom in her very emotional mind. She probably already has the expression of a vampire who just witnessed a human keeping up with her, but she can play it up a bit if she works at it. A pained whimper here, helpless grasping at the hand at her throat there - she doesn't need to breathe, but she can pretend for his benefit.

He snarls. Her flesh cracks like stone under his hand, and heals almost immediately in the golden light.

And then he throws her across the room, and turns and stalks toward her mate at still-vampiric speeds while she's sailing through the air.

Well, that clearly didn't help.

She lands easily and - does not immediately leap at him again, when it's obvious he's just going to loom ominously in front of her mate instead of ripping him to pieces. He gained that speed from her, does it fade if she just - doesn't - attack him?

Well he's not moving around much at the moment, so it's kind of hard to tell.

He lets the flames fade, except for a lingering aura of fire clinging to his hands and rippling over his skin.

(Everywhere the fire touched her, she is painfully oversensitive, almost as far above her normal sense of touch as a vampire's senses are above a human's.)

Her mate is clearly shaken, but just as clearly not letting it slow him down. He gets up and shoves his hair out of his face and looks up at the fire-and-blood man and says something which, from tone of voice and body language, almost certainly translates as 'are you fucking done?'

He laughs, and says something with no such obvious translation.