Written for 31 Days on Livejournal.
Title: Oxymoron
Day/Theme: July 9, 2011 - Punctuated with "I, I, me, me, I."
Series: Fullmetal Alchemist (manga version)
Character/Pairing: Greed
Rating: G
Author's Note: Not my best work, but I still feel confident enough to post it.
People who met Greed and thought of him as selfish were missing the whole point.
Of course he was selfish; the trait literally embodied him. However, the pure volume of it that he possessed had long ago reached a kind of critical mass.
Without even noticing it, he had become a much different kind of being to the one Father had created all those years ago.
He had passed through the extremes of selfishness, arriving by a roundabout route at a sort of selflessness instead.
Everything belonged to him (or should, in his mind) so in turn everything had a value. Everything and everyone mattered to him, even though his behaviour didn't change much from the days when he had seen other creatures as nothing compared to his needs.
To Greed, the entire world revolved around his desires, his goals. In turn, the world itself gained importance.
Although of course he told himself that all the effort he took was merely to ensure his own well-being, it became harder and harder to regain faith in his narcissism.
Particularly when he was dying for a world he didn't rule, and never would.