HiNaBN: These quixotic notions

         Pairing: Cas/Fin
   Rating: R
   Genre: The kind where prostitutes get eaten by vampires
   Wordcount: 1029

It was cold--December, probably, but all the months had started to blend together by that point--and her clothing was falling apart. Her stockings had runs in them and her dress was hardly a dress at all anymore.

  She called herself Dahlia, and she was a prostitute--and leave it to Casimiro to always find the pick of the litter when it came to them. He seemed to have a preoccupation with ridding the city of its undesirables, one homeless human at a time.

  "We're not keeping her," I told him. It had become something of a game to him to keep a sort of pet around as a bloodbag, but I would have no more of it. "It's barbaric and uncivilized and overall inhumane."

"Why should I care about humanity?" he was quick to snap as soon as she was out of earshot. "What has humanity done for us?"

  I wanted so much to tell him that even we had been human once, but I held my tongue. Fine; the strumpet would be his to toy with, but I would find my own nourishment.

  How Dahlia ended up with us in the first place is another story entirely; however, it is not much of a story. She had sprained her ankle doing something or other, and thus was hanging about in the emergency room of the hospital that we stole from if there was no other source of sustenance. Casimiro was, had always been, and likely shall always be one for drama, and so her was quick to impersonate a triage nurse.

  A rather posh triage nurse. With an accent that sounded dangerously close to an imitation of my own.

  He was one for drama, a fact I cannot stress enough.

  "What's this, then?" he asked Dahlia (though then she was not Dahlia--then she was only a random streetwalker who might've made a good meal.)

  "Sprained me ankle."

  He made a big show of inspecting her ankle, then leaned in close to her ear and whispered something. Knowing Casimiro, it was most certainly something lewd and entirely inappropriate. I suspect it was around this time that Dahlia began to understand that he was not a doctor at all (for it was around this time that he decided to drop his mockery of my accent.)

  Whatever he told her, it was enough to convince her to come home with us.

  "This is Dahlia, Fin," Casimiro said to me as we walked her to our flat. She smiled coyly at me and clung all the tighter to his arm.

  "Good evening." I hoped that I sounded suitably impressed at her, but I never have been one to compliment.

  Not much was said the rest of the way home--if anything was said at all. I admit that the scent of the prostitute's blood was more appealing than it should've seemed to me. I had not consumed anything in what seemed like weeks, and here was Casimiro bringing home a meal with very few strings attached. Doubtless he would be eager to share her, as he always was, but there was a subtle repulsion in the way she spoke and the crookedness of her teeth that made me reluctant to think about the flesh of her neck rending between our own teeth. This reluctance seemed to me an entirely human notion which Casimiro would have laughed at, had I voiced it.

  It was about now that I expressed my discontent at keeping her around as a plaything, however.

  When we arrived at the place we were temporarily calling home, Dahlia wasted no time in inspecting the various trinkets and baubles which almost seemed to litter the place.

  "Are you hungry, dear?" Casimiro asked, ever the gentleman. I grimaced at the thought of what she might find to eat if she had a look in the icebox--nothing there, of course. What she would be fed depended entirely upon what Casimiro wanted to taste in her blood, and he knew it.

  "Oh, I'm not 'ungry. Ye needn't feed the likes o' me."

  "Nonsense, dear. We've brought you home; it's the least we can do for you."

  She smiled coyly again, fiddling with a music box which had long since ceased working on a shelf whose contents badly needed dusting.

  "Ye needn't feed me. It'll do no good. I knows bloodsuckers when I sees 'em, sirrah, and I knows when my lot's cast."

  You'd think Casimiro had been shot with the way he reeled back at her statement. I myself was taken aback as well; had she known the whole time, or had she just now divined this bit of information through some means of her own? In any case, neither of us were likely to just stand there.

  And stand there Casimiro did not. He sprung forward almost predatorily and pinned Dahlia to the wall (the thin plaster of which very nearly cracked at the force of the impact.) She smiled placidly, a deer resolved in the fact that everything must one day perish, and whispered something that I, hanging back from the scene that was unfolding, could not hear. Casimiro smirked (as was his wont; he never smiles, only smirks), kissed her delicately on the mouth, then tore into her neck without any pretense.

  If her blood had smelt enticing before, now it was almost unbearably tantalising. I could not resist stepping forward and having a taste, no matter how much her upbringing and profession had put me off before.

  "Knew you'd come around," Casimiro teased, backing away as I practically latched onto the dying Dahlia's neck. He had severed her carotid artery almost beautifully, and jets of hot blood spurted weaker and weaker as her heartbeat came to a stop.

  I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand when I was finished, and he gnawed rather boorishly on the trachea he'd torn from her neck.

  "Yes, well. I shan't make a habit of snacking on whores. Do try harder next time."

  "You've dribbled blood down your shirt."

  "You're insufferable."
  
  "I know. You wouldn't keep me around otherwise."

  "It's so tempting right now, the thought of getting rid of you."

  Casimiro just smirked.