This one is... strange. It came out of nowhere and was written in less than an hour, but I like the way it came out even if it's too short. Five hundred words is not much, but it's five hundred words better than nothing. Call it snapshot-fiction if you will.
Disclaimer; I do not own any of the characters or placenames depicted herein, and I am deriving no money from this work of fiction.
What Greed wants, Greed takes.
The Devil Nest was aptly named; a deep, dark place where the sickly-sweet smell of sins lingered in the corners. The shadows housed more than darkness, hiding secrets and faces and names, the amber liquid filling glasses held by hands with more scars than fingers. In a place like this, the drinkers never spoke and the barkeep never asked; the card-games in the corners were played with no rules and the dealer never stopped smiling.
All in all, it was a place that Greed liked to call home.
There was a home-like quality in the air, achieved only by the fact that the people littering the the place had nowhere else to hide. In the shadows of the Devil Nest, scaly skin and the unfortunate habit to chase after thrown sticks could be forgotten and ignored, bull-like strength was approved of instead of looked sideways at, and, Greed reasoned, that was the way he wanted it.
There was a recent addition, however, that looked quite out of place even in this odds-and-ends company. Pale skin, burning eyes, filthy hair, at such an unmanageable length that he looked like an escaped prisoner – which, in fact, he was. His deliverance had been brought about with a little help from one of the seven deadly sins; sometimes, greed could be beneficial.
"We've never had an Alchemist before," he said, pouring himself another glass of the best liqour that was to offer, and smiling that shark-tooth smile.
"What's it you want with me anyway?" the bedraggled man asked, voice hoarse as he spoke.
"Better personal hygiene I wouldn't object to," and the shark-tooth grin turned even sharper, "but what I could really use is someone who – what was it they said? - can make people go 'boom'. I have it on pretty good authority that you're my man, for that."
The man, however filthy and worn, lit up seemingly from the inside, sparks of flame lighting up his eyes in a morbid sort of fireworks. Even Greed, said by himself to be unflappable in these moments, was forced to swallow the mouthful of alcohol a little harder than expected; there was psychosis in those eyes, but a cheerful sort of madness – here was a man who would gladly light a house on fire just to warm his hands.
"Bombs are what I'm best at," the man said, grinning to wide that his nose crumpled up, turning his entire face into a monster-mask, "just tell me who to point it at, and I'll burn you up a town in a merry little fire."
There; that spark of ecstatic insanity, the mind's eye already seeing the flames and the ears ringing with the memory of explosions, that was the kind of devotion Greed needed. Against six deadly sins and an empress of lives that had lived forever, he needed all the help that he could get, be it madness in the eyes of a prisoner-Alchemist or the undying devotion of a dog in a chimera. He had snakes and bulls and dogs against people that weren't people, just like him, but here in the sweet-scented darkness where the secrets of the shadows resided, he was the suicide king with iron skin and nothing to lose.