Kimblee's steps echoed across the emptiness of the tunnel. The light from his lantern guided the way, and the chill of the air seeped down to his bones.
At the edges of his vision, the shadows followed him. They were quiet, and Kimblee felt the pressure of a thousand eyes on his back. The silence and the stillness weighed down on him, merciless, and the echoes of his steps and of his restless humming weren't enough to cut through the weight of it. His palms itched to fill the quiet with beautiful, soothing noise.
Still, he walked on.
In the end, it was Pride who made the first move. A shadow crept before Kimblee's feet, and he came to a stop.
"Is there anything else you want, Pride?"
"We appreciate your service, you know. You will be well rewarded, when the time comes."
"Thank you," Kimblee said, blandly. "That's good to hear."
"Tell me, Red Lotus." Pride's voice was soft, echoing through the stillness. "Why exactly is it that you want immortality?"
"Immortality? Is that what you think I'm after?"
Pride's shadows expanded, filling his vision with leering eyes and spirals of teeth.
"Is it not? Are you telling me you're not interested a chance to ascend to a higher existence, to become a superior life form? It's what everyone else involved in this wants, after all."
Ah, yes. Those like General Raven, who thought they would be handed the world while sitting back in their command chairs, without putting their lives on the line to prove themselves worthy of it. What a shame that Kimblee had missed his departure. The Northern Wall of Briggs could be so ruthless, he'd heard. "And is that what they'll be getting, once this is all done?"
A pause. "Well. You're certainly clever." Amusement rang in Pride's voice. His shadowy tendrils reached out, lapping at the edges of Kimblee's shoes; Kimblee glanced down for an instant, then raised his eyes to keep his gaze fixed steadily ahead. "So tell me," Pride continued, "why exactly are you here, then?"
Kimblee breathed in, then, slowly, out. "Because there is nothing quite as beautiful as conflict. The clash of wills, of ideas—and this, the ultimate test, with all of humanity's fate on the line..." The cut on his palm throbbed with pain, in time with the drumming of his heartbeat in his ears. He felt his lips twist into a smile. "How could I not want to see how the world will change?"
An inhuman chuckle echoed through the air. Shadows swirled around him. "Oh? Well, I can certainly see why Envy is fond of you."
Could he? Envy's fondness was a double-edged thing, but one Kimblee had found worthwhile over the years. Perhaps it would be interesting to see where this would go.
"And how about you, Red Lotus?" the shadows whispered. "How do you think this conflict will end for you?"
Kimblee dug his nails into his wounded palm. Pain cut through his hand, and he felt blood flow down his fingers, warm and thick. He closed his eyes and imagined the ecstasy of battle.
"I intend to find out."
After the delightful symphony that carving the crest at Briggs had been, Central was a bit of a comedown. Everything about the city had a certain lifeless quality to it: the buildings, the weather, the people. It was a perfect bubble of comfortable urban life, with no war or bloodshed or conflict to prove them worthy of it. That'd change, soon. But not yet. Not yet. For now, what little work his employers had for him was dull and prosaic, and even with years of alchemical journals, treatises, and periodicals to catch up on the boredom still began to settle down on him like a thick, heavy fog.
"I do apologize for the lack of interesting work," Wrath told him one day. "I understand the feeling of being cooped up very well. But Promised Day is coming; you'll just have to be patient a while longer."
"As you say, sir," said Kimblee, mildly.
He could be patient, of course. He had no idea why others tended not to think so—hadn't he waited six years for this? Promised Day was coming: he could see it with the same clarity he'd only ever had in Ishval, with the utter, all-encompassing certainty he'd felt when he'd looked at those officers and seen his course of action laid out before him. He could wait a little more.
Something useful at least came out of the meeting: he had the honor of meeting Wrath's little pretend family when they walked into his office to visit him. Mrs. Bradley, he found, was a kind, pleasant woman with a steely strength hidden beneath her eyes. Selim Bradley—now there was a curious boy. To all appearances he was nothing more than a normal, cheery child, bouncing excitedly into the room gushing about how nice it was to see his beloved father. And yet the moment the others' backs were turned Kimblee could feel Selim watching him. His wide, piercing eyes had a strange hollowness to them.
Now that was quite interesting, wasn't it?
The boy turned away, instantly morphing back into the small, excitable child he'd been, and tugged at his mother's skirt. "Mom! Mom! Can I go for a walk while you're here?"
"Oh, honey, our bodyguards need to stay here. It'll only be an hour or so."
"Then Mr. Kimblee here can take me, can't he?" asked Selim brightly, turning to his father.
"Well, he certainly would be more than capable of protecting you," said King Bradley. "If he's all right with it, naturally."
Kimblee smiled. "But of course," he said in his most pleasant tone.
"Well, there you go, then," Bradley said, ruffling his son's hair—the perfect picture of a doting father. Selim squealed with delight then dashed away to grab Kimblee's hand, and that was that.
Selim was hungry. Insistently so. They walked to the nearest café, where Kimblee bought him a krapfen large enough he'd be sure to face Mrs. Bradley's wrath later and himself enough coffee to sustain him for the rest of the day. It was a nice morning, so they sat at a table outside in the shade of the nearby trees. The hour was too late to have breakfast but too early to have lunch; few customers sat at the tables nearby. In their corner, they were afforded a little privacy.
"So," Selim began, with the same sunny smile he'd worn all this time. "You've figured it out, haven't you?"
"I have. It's nice to meet your container at last, Pride."
"You're pretty smart, then! That's good. You're more useful to us this way." He set his pastry down. "So what do you think of my disguise?"
"It's certainly an effective one. Do you have much trouble maintaining it?"
"No. Most humans are stupid and unobservant. It's not exactly hard to fool them. Though it does get a bit tiring sometimes, pretending to be a normal, boring child."
Kimblee supposed he could understand that. As a boy, it had been clear that he saw things differently than most other children. He'd worried quite a few adults in his life before he'd learned to hide his heresy from others.
He took a sip of his coffee. It was quite good, nothing like the vile concoction he remembered from his time in the military. Such a shame. "It's strange to think of a being such as you living an average family life," he said politely, as if this were just everyday small talk.
"It is a little strange, at times. I've always had a Father, of course, but it's not the same thing as having normal parents. It's... odd." He toyed with his pastry, an oddly ordinary, innocent gesture, then raised his head to pin Kimblee with his piercing gaze. "What were your parents like, Mr. Kimblee?"
Kimblee shrugged. "They were good, I suppose. They always wanted the best for me. They died in an alchemical accident years ago."
"I see." The child's eyes were an abyss, utterly devoid of pity or sympathy. It was quite refreshing, Kimblee found.
Such fascinating creatures the Homunculi were, vortexes of wailing souls given flesh. Would wielding their power feel like the heady rush of a Philosopher's Stone, or would it be an entirely new experience, one he had no frame of reference to even begin to comprehend? Certainly it was an intriguing thought. He supposed that he could see, intellectually, why men like Raven had let themselves be seduced by promises of such things. But Kimblee had never wanted to be anything other than what he was.
He felt something brush against his ankle, softly at first, then growing insistent. It coiled like a snake underneath his clothes, slithering up his leg and around his knee. Before him, the boy took a large bite of his krapfen without a care in the world. A little dollop of jam spilled out and fell red like blood against the whiteness of his plate.
"So, Mr. Kimblee," he said, "have you ever studied human transmutation?"
"Only very briefly, when I was younger. I suppose I've always been drawn to the taboo and the sacrilegious. It was merely intellectual curiosity, of course. I never had any intention of actually performing it."
A laugh. "Don't worry, I'm not asking because of that. I was just wondering how much you understood of our plans. We've already got our potential sacrifices lined up."
"Of course," Kimblee said. Casually, he dropped a hand onto his lap. The shadow was insubstantial; he felt nothing out of the ordinary when he brushed his fingers against his knee. And yet the tendril pressed into his skin, an invisible presence commanding his attention. He kept his face impassive, his gaze on the simulacrum of a child before him. "I imagine preparations are nearing completion."
"They are. There's no doubt that we'll come out on top in that ultimate conflict of yours. We're the superior beings, after all, created to be the next dominant life form on this planet." The shadow around Kimblee's leg shifted, tightening. "But of course you already know that. That's what you're here to see, is it not?"
"Hmm." Kimblee smiled, pleasantly. "Perhaps it is."
The thing that pretended to be a boy licked the sugar off its lips, staring at Kimblee as if it wanted to swallow him whole.
Pride came to visit him that night.
It was hard, sometimes, to tell one hour from the next with the stillness gnawing at his palms. The days had begun to meld into one another as they had in the darkness of his cell. As such, it wasn't a terribly unusual occasion to wake up to find that he'd dozed off on the couch of his hotel room with an alchemical journal on the theory of combustion on his chest. It had gotten dark out while Kimblee hadn't been paying attention. The street lamps outside the window cast a rectangle of light onto the darkness of the floor. Its shape appeared to twist and writhe; as he watched, little black tendrils sprouted from the shadows and crept across its surface, like vines.
"Hello, Kimblee," his nighttime visitor whispered. "I see you're awake. Turn on the lights."
Ah, thought Kimblee. Now that was interesting. And even more so that Pride was willing to display such a weakness before him. Did he think Kimblee wouldn't make the connection, or did he simply not believe that a lowly human could hurt him even if he did? Either way, it was appropriate. He filed the information away in the back of his mind, to be examined properly at a later time, and reached over to turn on the lamp.
As soon as the light flooded the room so did the shadows. Eyes bloomed on the bare walls; sharp silhouettes of teeth closed around him like a trap.
"Do you have any new orders for me, Pride?"
"No. Not yet. I suppose you could say this is a social call."
"I see." Kimblee lifted the book from his chest and placed it on the coffee table. "And to what do I owe the pleasure?"
"I've been thinking about some of the things you said." Pride's shadowy fingers spread like unearthly ink, circling him, closing in on him. "Don't get up. This is only a friendly visit, after all. There's no need to stand at attention now, is there?"
"Of course." Kimblee settled back, hands behind his head. He didn't flinch when the shadows crept up the couch to wrap themselves like ribbons around his ankles.
"We've worked with hundreds of humans, over the centuries," Pride said. "They were all after the same things—money, power, fame... It's all so petty. They wanted so badly to be like us but understood nothing of what that meant. And here you are, claiming you have no interest in the immortality we offer."
"I've been frequently told that I'm different."
Pride laughed at that, an eerie chuckle that seemed to come from everywhere around them.
"Are you, now?"
The ghostly appendages stretched out, twisting around Kimblee's chest, curling around his neck, snaking down Kimblee's arms. And, ah, there it was: a stab of tension in his stomach, a tightness in his chest as the tendrils crept around his wrists and pinned them to the couch. No, he almost wanted to say. Not this. But he swallowed the objection easily enough. It wouldn't do to admit to a weakness, after all, and it wouldn't make a difference besides. The eyes on the ceiling leered down at him, unrelenting; Kimblee made himself relax, forced his breathing to slow. The shadows moved across his palms like a gentle caress.
"Don't move," whispered Pride, as if Kimblee even could. The eyes on the walls pinned him with their otherworldly gaze, as a spider might watch a moth trapped in its web. "Now, tell me. Humans like you are selfish creatures. You want to see how the world would change, but what's in it for you? You say you're not looking for immortality. What are you hoping to gain, then? Why exactly are you here?"
"To see if I'm worthy of survival." Kimblee's palms itched. He clenched his hands into fists, dug his nails into his skin, but it wasn't enough. "It's our convictions that make us who we are, what separate us from mindless automatons, and we can't truly prove ourselves until we put them to the test—it's only when our wills and ideals clash that we can truly call ourselves alive. This is what I've put at stake: my entire being, the very core of who I am. If I survive this battle, it'll mean that the world has recognized my point of view as the right one all along. It is the culmination of my existence—and it's better than anything else you could ever offer me."
"And if you don't survive?" the shadows whispered.
"Then I won't deserve to."
"So you wouldn't."
The shadows curled around him, slowly, tightening until he couldn't move, couldn't breathe. Kimblee kept his face impassive, his gaze steady. Myriads of eyes watched him from the the abyss on the ceiling, with blood red irises and slitted pupils. He almost smiled.
"Are you afraid, Kimblee?" murmured Pride, and Kimblee wanted to laugh, because why would he be? But he couldn't, of course, not with his breath taken from him. Was Pride so insecure as to wish to avoid the risk of hearing Kimblee's answer? Or did he imagine he already knew, or simply not care what a lowly human had to say? That would be true to himself, at least—and perhaps a weakness, too.
Kimblee realized his eyes had slid closed. He remedied that; if this was to happen, then he would not look away from it.
The shadows around him grew tighter and and tighter. He fought to keep still, pushing down the instinctive panic when his body tried to draw air and found nothing. Pain coursed through him. his blood sang beautiful melodies in his veins until everything else faded away. It was the only time he felt truly like himself, dancing on the knife's edge between life and death, when all pretenses fell away and only true will remained. It was the beauty of the explosions blooming in the sky, the symphony of screams reverberating in his chest, the exhilarating agony of an iron pipe sliding through his insides—
"Look at you," the shadows whispered in his ears. "A little human, so weak and fragile. I hold your life in my hands. According to your worldview that makes me your better, does it not? What makes you think you could ever be worthy of survival, when I could kill you so easily like this?"
But he wouldn't, Kimblee knew. Not when Kimblee was still useful to the Homunculi. The knowledge cut through the haze like a knife, and the threat sounded unfittingly hollow in Pride's confident voice.
Kimblee felt his chest constrict and realized that he was trying to laugh.
He couldn't stay still, after that. He thrashed and struggled in Pride's grasp until his strength began to fade, until his vision began to grow dark at the edges. His heartbeat hammered a beautiful crescendo of noise in his ears. He kept his eyes open through it all.
He'd gone almost completely still by the time Pride's grip finally loosened. Air flooded his lungs, an overwhelming, disappointing relief. He turned onto his side, tried to curl in on himself, but his limbs didn't seem to want to cooperate. He was shaking, for some reason.
He barely noticed the tendrils slide away from him, leaving him lying there limply like a discarded toy. His limbs felt so heavy, his body a dead weight, and still he couldn't stop himself from shaking. He shifted and saw blood staining the whiteness of his sleeve, red and warm and beautiful; he looked down at himself to find more, seeping into the upholstery of the couch. Kimblee hadn't noticed it happen. A shame, really—and his suit was ruined, too.
It was a struggle to keep his eyes open, but he watched blurrily as the shadows bled away from the walls to coalesce into a small, dark figure, lurking at the edges of his vision.
"I look forward to working with you more closely, Kimblee," it said. "It'll be interesting to find out whether or not you're worthy."
And how about you, Pride? Kimblee wanted to say. Asking questions you think you know the answers to. So certain of your superiority that you won't even acknowledge any other possibility. Will you prove yourself worthy in the end? But it was probably a good thing that he couldn't find the breath for the words to leave his throat; he only lay there smiling as he watched the shadowy figure recede from the room.