Work Text:
Sometimes she wondered what they were doing it all for. To tear the body apart a thousand different ways, until every atom was understood… and then what? Their work had no place in the mortal world, and revealing the nature of it to their own kind would leave them useless and stranded, abandoned for older, more powerful creatures who had witnessed the birth and maturation of natural science itself.
Humanity had failed them, and the Tzimisce of Los Angeles had been their salvation. Viv thought it might have been easier for her than him to recall where they had started, watching as Vex’s artistry warped into the blood-splattered rapture it was for him now. She supposed he must have seen the same from her, as she splintered bone and wrenched apart their specimens with cold intensity. But she had understood what was happening to them. Psychology wasn’t her speciality, but with the ticking clocks leading to their deaths now frozen in place, she had nothing but time. She knew what they were becoming and welcomed it. Now she was too cold to know if she regretted it.
It was clear how things would end. It was the way every Kindred went, eventually. No amount of intelligence could stand in the path of the Beast forever. Viv and Vex would tear everything around them to shreds before they lay just as mutilated in the middle of it all, all that frenzied drive to mean something rendering them nothing. They would labor at their desks and operating tables until they rotted into the dirt they were bound to. She knew this. And every night, she worked still. Shaking hands and signing contracts and twisting their commissions into shape...
Who would remember them? They had sought fame and settled for infamy, and even then they had a fraction of the renown they could have had as a scientist and artist who changed the world.