*
Greed has seen childbirth. He has never been inside a hospital, but there are corners of society in which shit happens—that is to say, every corner of society. People, he knows, are all the same in unplanned birth, as in unplanned death.Greed likes people.
He likes babies most of all because they remind him of himself. They're uglier, not as charming, but they know, they truly know what it means to need. Greed appreciates their honesty in wanting nothing more than to do nothing and nothing less than to have everything. Screaming in frustration, grabbing blindly at the world for anything they can grasp, biting Mother's breast in their desperation to be sated—this, Greed knows, is what every human is, and it is what he is as well. It's a shame that only he and babies are honest about it.
Greed was never a baby himself. He knew what it was to be an adult before he knew what it was to be alive; nothing that has ever been human, including his dear little brother Wrath, can compare to his experience. Two hundred years is a very long time to be an adult—but not, Greed would hasten to point out, not nearly long enough.
But his very earliest adulthood was a type of childhood not unlike a man's, he supposes. Greed remembers his birth, and that is a difference; he remembers an agony of want, want, I want, I WANT that would never leave him but would become manageable with time, and this is a similarity. He remembers needing whatever he saw even before he knew what it did: shiny things, small animals, breasts. And he remembers learning from his older siblings what these things were, how to get them, what to do with them when he had them, which things were worth having.
This last he did not understand, and it seemed to him that his siblings, although older they may be, were very stupid for not grasping the most essential truth of all: that anything was worth having. And Greed wore an adult form, as did Lust, Envy, as did they all but their oldest brother, and yet they would fall to bickering, and Pride would scold them in his small clear little-boy voice, and in essence—in essence, it was childhood. In essence, it didn't last.
*
They say money isn't everything in the world. Greed learned quickly that it was true; he could never be as satisfied with mere money as he would be with everything. But as a symbol it functioned quite nicely. He gathered it, hoarded it, spent it when he pleased, used it, made it work for him, fulfilled himself with it, chewed it up and spit it out and guarded it jealously—mine, mine, mine.Money was not the world, but it made him feel a little closer to owning it.
Power, women, they were the same; they were the new toys for the big boys to scream and cry and grab at. Oh yes, they told him, you're an adult now, and you will never have everything you want. Take us instead. Take us and use us. Dream of having it all. Maybe it will be you. Maybe it will be you who is never stopped.
Greed decided it would be him.
*
He is a few weeks old when he follows the woman out of the bar.This new toy attracted him with her hair like gold and her breasts like little planets, like the whole world twinned and soft and capable of fitting in his hands, exactly the way he knows it will be. He forces her into the alley and presses her up against the wall, and the birth-agony of want, want, I want, I WANT is with him again as it is on the face of every newborn thing in the world that he will someday, when he is older and has seen childbirth, find himself fond of because they remind him of himself.
The woman struggles, tries to cry out but is silenced by him; she seems to swell up with puffy red crying and fear until she is the whole world exposed and helpless and ready for Greed to take. They, the woman and the world, they belong to him, they are his to break and bite and claw at as he pleases because it is he who will never be stopped. The woman is very lucky, Greed decides. Any man in the bar would have done the same to her if they knew they could get away with it. It is not given to Greed alone to want. Everything he represents is the lot of all people, dishonest people who are only too weak and afraid to admit that they are the same as he. She is lucky she was chosen by the unstoppable one, who will not abandon his dream of having it all.
He will take the world in his hands like this, he may have told her, and squeeze it into a ball, put it in his pocket exactly like so—he will throw it against the wall and watch it bounce back to him, its master—he will stretch and twist it here, right here into a chain and wear it around his neck and at last, at last he will be satisfied for eternity, as he is for a bare second with this beautiful, beautiful, lucky girl.
When Greed is finished, the woman is very still in his arms.
"You still with me?" he chuckles hoarsely.
But she is not. Her eyes are open wide and staring at nothing; she is gone; she has gone away to some other place, some human place that Greed realizes suddenly he is afraid of, tries to tell himself he will never see as she falls to the ground.