He wakes up screaming, some nights. He wakes up in his luxurious bed with draping silk curtains and thin, patterned sheets tangled around him, almost dripping with sweat. He doesn't get back to sleep, and just tosses and turns. It's because he had a friend once.
Some days, a princess will come up to the palace with her demented and violent cat. He fondly musses up her hair, and calls her sister. They play for hours, on sunny afternoons. They run out to the fields, where there are tall grasses and smiling flowers to hide them, and play. Sometimes, they play with sticks and stones, or maybe with swords and strange knives with tassels and blue light, or maybe they just laugh. They play for hours, and he does so with only the faintest look of guilt.
And then, there are the days when he is alone with his shadows. He just stares out from his palace, to the sprawling, lazy empire down below, far below. This high up from the putrid cities and stagnant streets, he thinks, encased within stone walls and lavish ornaments, is he like nothing more than a god imprisoned in a filigree cage? Is he not a prisoner in a cell that has a diamond padlock and ruby key?
This is his country, he says. My country, in that strange, mother tongue of his where words flow like exotic spices spilling out of burlap sacks, like honeyed milk that pours from engraved glass pitchers. His shadows are kind enough (or maybe just stupid enough, like lifeless servants generally are) to say nothing when their lord suddenly screams and sends the precious porcelain vases smashing to the ground. They just pick up the pieces when he storms out of the room.
Do you regret? he asks himself. And he knows, truly, that his answer is no. He does not regret the power, the riches and luxuries, the experience. He does not regret alchemy, or soul stones, or false people.
But he does mourn. He mourns the grandfather he could have had, the friend that he lost, the friends that are too far away now, the little, naïve, idealistic him that died at the age of four when the first assassination attempt came just a little too close to succeeding. He mourns the country that he never got to fully appreciate, because he was too caught up in his own selfish goals. He was never in it to make Xing better, he knows. He was in it for the power.
And now he has that. So why does he still feel so empty when he sees all that he has now?
He never did achieve his goal in Amestris. He wanted immortality, to bring the secret back to Xing so that he would become Emperor. He brought with him the sister that he should have grown up with and the man who could have been a grandfather. The Philosopher's Stones, that's what he wanted. And what did he return to Xing with?
He returned with a girl with an inhuman arm and a discarded shell named Ling Yao. That's what he returned with.
But he still became Emperor. He does not know how he did it, but he still managed to claw his way to the very top. The girl he calls sister, the shadow with a gleaming arm, they all stood behind him, pushing him forward as far as their own fatigued limbs would allow. And he thanks them for it, truly. It's just...
He goes to sleep at nights, thinking of how he could have succeeded. He could have brought back those cursed stones, and his shadow, his dear, constant almost-a-sister and almost-a-lover companion would not have lost her arm for nothing. He could have had a real grandfather. His friend would not have had to go away.
The Emperor of Xing, the most powerful man in the country, lives in luxuries, in a palace that is kept constantly lit by expensive candles that drip fragrant wax, exotic flowers from every section of the world, antiques and artifacts at least a thousand years old. The Emperor of Xing goes to sleep at nights, and wakes up screaming. His shadows are kind enough to say nothing, except for that single girl who never takes off her mask and who knows what happened.
And his darling, faceless shadow speaks with a man with black hair that is going gray, who speaks Xingese with the vaguest of Amestrian accents. She worries, she tells him. She worries that her Emperor is becoming… (and this next word, she speaks as if she would be skinned, raped, and eaten for speaking such treason) unstable. She explains her worries, his outbursts, and says: is he still sad, after all these years?
That man, who is just a little on the short side, will pause for a moment, and then turn to a letter on his desk written by a man without a leg, who has two children and a beautiful wife in Resembool, who has a brother who has a Xingese girlfriend. He asks, Could you please read this for me? I'm afraid my eyesight isn't quite what is used to be.
And then, adds, almost as an afterthought: maybe he just wants to apologize.