A few months ago I watched "Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood". I'm not very much into anime, but words can't describe how much I loved it. It's phenomenally good.

As I often do when I fall in love with a new fandom, I started checking out some fics here and there, and while I managed to find some pretty good stuff, I also began to feel the itch to write something myself. One thing I really liked about FMA were the villains. Styled after the concept of the Seven Deadly Sins, the Homunculi made a strong impression on me, especially Greed (the original one; Ling was cool and I love him, but I'm not interested in writing about conflicted good guys at this point) and Envy.

This is somewhat of a crack pairing. I'm aware of it. In canon Greed and Envy seemed to actually have a very strong dislike for each other but... for some reason my brain decided that it didn't care and that it wanted to try and ship them. So I wanted to see if I can get into their heads and make something out of it while keeping them at least somewhat in character. The last part is probably doomed to failure, btw.


"And if I were to ask you to return and work for me again?"

Father's voice was calm as ever. In all his existence Greed had never managed to sniff even a smidge of emotion when his old man spoke. Even Lust, with her dead, cold stare, was capable of conveying feelings. All the same, though, Greed heard the real question Father was asking. Will you submit or will you die?

And as he hung in the air, chained to the slab of granite, he knew that this death was going to be final. There was only one person in the world who could truly and utterly destroy the Homunculi, and that person was their damned father.

It was so... tempting.

To tell the old man to shove it, to spit in his wrinkled face one last time before he plummeted in Hell.

With everything he was, Greed wanted to snarl something defiant, to try and bait the old man's ire into revealing itself. He was Greed the Avaricious. He was meant to own the world. Everything belonged to him. Maybe not in the strictly... political sense of the word, Greed supposed, but that would be boring anyway and was merely a charade for the silly humans. No, Greed owned it in a more primal manner. People were indistinguishable from objects, which were the same as memories, experiences and emotions. He desired every single thing. He was made to want. To take.

If something existed, then it was Greed's property. It was simply a matter of time and whim. And he had always had plenty of both. That's how the Universe was.

How can he bow to someone else? Fucking again?! It was ridiculous. In his own grandiosely fucked up way, Father was acting as if the last century had been some sort of juvenile sabbatical for Greed. And now he asked his unruly son to, figuratively speaking, get his shit together, clean his room and get down to have dinner with his siblings.

His mouth almost itched with the need to refuse this insult. Homunculi didn't take well to being humiliated – that all six of them had had in common, for all the uniqueness of their vices and quirks.

Then he angled his gaze and looked down at the rest of them.

Lust was impassive, arms crossed in front of her ample bosom, sizing him up with her cool, amethyst gaze. She seemed calm and collected as always – in that regard she resembled Father the most out of all of them.

Right next to her, as he had done for as long as Greed remembered, stood Gluttony the dimwit. Greed had his doubts as to how aware of what was actually happening his chubby little brother was. If he was to judge from the blank look in his beady eyes, not much.

Pride was nowhere to be seen, but that was to be expected. The old voyeur was probably watching everything from the shadows as he always did; God only knew that there were plenty in the underground lair.

Sloth wasn't around these days, as Greed's dear sister had explained, but if he were, he wouldn't give a damn. Sloth didn't give a damn about anyone or anything.

Wrath, standing there with a hand resting on the hilt of his sword, was the only one Greed had never seen before, and the thought that this one-eyed little upstart had been the one to slice him up into a comatose state back in Dublith – not to mention of butchering his possessions! – made his jaw clench. To add insult to injury, Father had made Wrath the ruler of Amestris. The nerve of this mongrel runt! As if the country was his to rule. Amestris belonged to Greed, just like Creta, and Xing, and Drachma and all the rest. And he damn well didn't intend to just hand it over to a whelp who hadn't been alive for even a third of Greed's life.

Then he looked at Envy. They were watching him with a sour expression on that little face, strands of spiky long hair framing it and falling way past their shoulders.

Not how you pictured a reunion, eh, freakshow?

It was funny, but it wasn't like Greed had pictured it either. Sometimes, back in the Devil's Nest, when he had had a little too much to drink (and it really wasn't easy... nor cheap... to get a Homunculus into such a state), he had entertained fantasies of finding a way to make himself truly immortal, then finally taking out Father so he could take his rightful place.

Which was on top. Naturally.

And after that all his siblings would grovel for his favour, even Pride and Lust. He wouldn't withhold it too harshly, of course.

He wasn't going to be a cruel head of the family.

But not Envy. The little one was feisty. Touchy. Headstrong. Greed knew that the two of them would have come to blows. It would have been a glorious fight. The Ultimate Shield against Envy's endless forms and unorthodox methods of killing they were able to invent on the spot. It was going to be like the good old days.

Greed would have won, of course. Greed always won.

And then they were going to fuck. For weeks. Just like the good old days.

Envy was one of Greed's most prized possessions. Of course, he had never seen the need to spell it out for them. They thought that this whole thing between the two of them, the odd half-adversarial, half-incestuous relationship, was simply a product of Greed's sick, self-contradictory mind – and, driven by their own perversion and internal contradictions, Envy had long ago consented and began to play along. Greed had spent some effort to arrange it to seem so.

It wouldn't do for Envy to find out exactly what he meant when he called them a freak – or some derivative of it. All they heard was an insult to their appearance. Because, really, underneath all their disguises, Envy was downright hideous. They didn't even remotely resemble anything human. Envy knew it, of course. And they hated it. That's why their favorite form was so alluring and pretty.

Not that Greed minded.

But what Envy didn't see, what Greed didn't want them to see, was that – for all their ugliness – they were unique. Sure, every miserable, small, pitiful, shit-filled human that walked the earth was more beautiful than Envy's true form. Every single one, even those that the humans themselves considered unattractive beyond hope. But they were all the same. Boring, and predictable, and really, when you've been around the block for nearly two centuries, you started to see that there was almost a flaw in the design. After a while it became difficult to muster the strength to bother to tell them apart. These days, someone had to be truly exceptional to even catch Greed's eye. Like the chimeras that Wrath killed. Or that loud woman that had kicked the living daylights out of him back in Dublith.

And there was nobody in this world who was more exceptional than Envy. Their nature alone elevated them. There were only six of them – well, alright, seven if you counted the fucking usurper with the mustache and the eyepatch. That was enticing for Greed. Yes, he owned everything, but he didn't really give a shit about most of it. Most of it was not worth the effort and it was enough just to know that it's there and it's yours. But the exquisite things, the finer things... the unique things...

Was there ever anything more unique than an artificial human that looked more like a dragon and could change its form on a whim? And that didn't even factor in their delightfully wicked personality.

Of course, Greed couldn't have Envy finding out about this. It would go to their head, and their ego would become even more difficult to live with.

And then the realization hit him, as the thoughts were chasing inside his skull and he was staring at Envy's sullen face.

"Well, Greed?" Father's voice finally broke him out of his reverie and he looked back at the decrepit figure perched on its white throne.

A part of him still wanted to snarl "Never!" or something like that, but that would mean death. And death would mean an end.

An end to Greed's quest to own the world.

An end of any possibility of revenge against Wrath.

And an end to everything he had experienced with Envy.

Right there and then, Greed decided that he didn't like endings.


So this is it, a different ending of Episode 14. Join me next time when we see the actual face-to-face reunion between the two Sins, this time from Envy's POV.

Peace!