It was Sunday morning, that depressing time when the weekend is on its deathbed and the next day will bring a new week of work.
As per Lust's declaration, Kimblee had received his room reassignment the day before. The plus side was: more space, less noise, more privacy. The downside, however, was that he owned no furniture. At the moment, his new home consisted of a few dishes, a stack of clothes, a stack of books, and a mattress.
More disconcerting than the emptiness of his new abode, or even the impending doom of Monday on the horizon, was the silence from his new employers, namely Envy. When they had last spoke, he had gotten the impression that Envy had intended to return rather soon. And yet days passed without a word.
The anticipation was beginning to drive him insane, as Sunday led into Monday, led into a new week, and the foreseeable weekend after… To be given a hint at the mystery, only to have the suspense drag out indefinitely, was torture. Unease grew in him as time went on in silence. He could not stop himself from wondering if something had gone wrong. What if Father had discovered that Envy had shared confidential information? All children keep secrets from their Fathers, Envy had said, and Kimblee could only hope Envy knew what it was doing. Lust had said Father would not kill Envy, that it was too useful. Yet that had been concerning a mistake, not a deliberate transgression.
He was not accustomed to feeling concern towards others, and he found he was not fond of it at all. He supposed that was the inescapable downside of having someone you wanted to see again: the possibility that you might not.
.
At work, he drank coffee in keeping with the rest of Amestris, but on his own time he was partial to a dark tea that didn't have a name in that country as far as he knew. The teapot on the stove whistled. As he was removing it from the stove and adding a strainer of leaves, there came a knock on the door. He frowned. He didn't know who it would be, but, given Envy's demonstrated ability for letting itself into his place of residence, it likely wasn't the person he wanted to see.
"Morning."
He almost dropped his cup in surprise when he opened the door.
"I thought you had a key."
"I did." Envy said. "Then you moved. And I lost my 'outside privileges' so I haven't been keeping up on things."
"What happened?"
"Fighting with Wrath. Nothing that unusual but I was on thin ice anyway." Envy grimaced. "Can I come in?"
"Oh – right, sorry." He stepped aside to let Envy enter, shutting and locking the door behind it. "Am I allowed to ask who Wrath is?"
"You can ask, but I can't tell you. Not even Greed knows that." Envy said it smugly. Kimblee assumed the secret was a point of contention. Then again, from what he had seen of their relationship almost anything was a point of contention, even himself.
"So, in keeping with the seven deadly sins motif," Kimblee said, walking back into the kitchen, "am I to assume you have six siblings?"
"That would be a logical assumption." Meaning it couldn't say. "But I didn't come here to talk about my family."
"Right. I would invite you to take a seat, but…" He gestured vaguely at his lack of fixtures.
"Yeah, what's the deal?" Envy asked, standing in the center of the living room with its hands on its hips, surveying the emptiness. "Your roommate demand alimony?"
"All the furniture was his." On a whim, he filled a second cup and with tea.
"Oh." Envy frowned. "But you're an alchemist. Can't you just make a couch or something?"
"Out of stone and dirt, or other such inhospitable substances. Anything more and I'd have to find the materials, and then figure out how they went together and so forth. I've never had any patience for that sort of thing. I don't want to be the Interior Decorator Alchemist."
Envy snorted, taking a seat on the floor beside the window. In the absence of a desk, reading materials were spread on the carpet, mostly archaic alchemical tombs and documents from Central's archives, interspersed here and there with hand-written notes and sketched diagrams. There were also a few texts composed of Xingian ideographs, which Envy could tell at a glance had not come from Wrath's neat and tidy Amestrian archives.
"So, what is this visit concerning?" Kimblee asked, setting a cup of tea on the windowsill beside Envy, before taking a seat himself.
"I don't need things like that." Envy said, glancing at the cup. Envy was unused to being shown courtesy when not acting a human role, and it caused an odd little flurry of unnameable emotion.
"No one needs tea," Kimblee said, taking a seat across from his guest. "It's a preference."
Envy lifted the teacup to its lips, but the contents were still too hot for comfort. For some reason, Envy noticed Kimblee's hair; how this was the first time it had seen him with it down, and then, involuntarily, recalled how it had felt between its fingers –
Scowling, Envy took a gulp of the scalding tea, feeling its mouth blister and subsequently heal.
"For one thing, you'll be getting your first assignment this coming week. The first from us, I mean. The order will come via your current job, so we felt it was best if you knew what was really going on. In general, much of what you'll be asked to do as a State Alchemist from here on out will come from us."
"Good."
There was unspoken competition among low-status State Alchemists; in general, they all wanted assignments which were important, exciting, and, by extension would earn them recognition and therefore promotions. Kimblee hadn't had the best luck in that regard, and it was beginning to sting his pride. Yes, there were explanations: military status, like any other kind, was often as much about who one knew as what one was capable of. His lack of family connections coupled with his total disinterest in forming personal connections of his own put him at a disadvantage there. And of course there was always the issue of his less-than-pure pedigree.
Nonetheless, just because he could understand his lack of progress didn't make it tolerable.
"Anyway," Envy went on, "I expect you want to know…well, everything. The grand plan."
"Yes."
"...I've never been in a position to explain before." Envy said, after a moment, staring out the window pensively. "My siblings know, and no one else is allowed. The heart of the matter is this: Father intends to overthrow humanity. All the power which your kind has, individually, he will consolidate and unify. That is his goal: the raw potential of mankind, refined and utilized behind a single will."
It was not often Kimblee encountered something he had difficulty wrapping his mind around. This was one of those moments.
"What will he do with that power?" He asked, finally.
"Quite literally anything he wants." Envy smiled. It was slight, yet still the first genuinely happy expression Kimblee had seen thus far. "He could create worlds. Solar systems. Imagine the power of a single alchemist, then imagine the power of every alchemist – excluding yourself, of course – combined and unified."
"With the exclusion of myself. I wonder if I'm not naïve to take your word on that."
Envy shook its head. "You won't be used. The difference of one human life won't have an appreciable effect."
"How does Father plan on doing this?"
"I will tell you, but not yet. The general consensus is to ease you in."
"Whoever decided this doesn't seem to have a high opinion of me."
"Father doesn't think much of humans. And Pride doesn't think much of anyone at all."
There was a long moment of silence. Envy tried more of the tea, which had cooled somewhat. It was bitter, but pleasantly warm going down.
"You look tired." Kimblee ventured.
"I am." Envy closed its eyes.
"Do you sleep like humans do?"
"Not really. I don't need to sleep – not often, anyway, and I don't dream like humans either. I once went for a year without sleeping, but I got really strange towards the end of it."
"A year? What happened?"
Envy opened its eyes again, grinning crookedly. "I kept grabbing all this random trash off the ground and asking Greed if he wanted it, and then calling him a liar if he didn't say yes. I don't remember what happened after that, but I was told he punched me in the face and I was out cold for four days." Envy shifted, allowing itself to lie down on the carpet, on its side, facing Kimblee. "Is it alright if I stay here for a while?"
"As long as you want."
"I dunno about that, but I'll stay as long as I can."
"Are things bad, at home?"
"Not exactly." Envy shrugged with the shoulder it wasn't resting on. "I've lived in those tunnels longer than a human would live. You'd get tired of even of paradise, after that long." Envy closed its eyes. It doubted it would be able to sleep, but it was nice just to relax.
Silence fell again. Kimblee was content to let the moment last. He'd never considered it before, but it had to be hellish, not to sleep and dream regularly. Or to live in a place where you couldn't see the sky for days at a time. How paradoxical. Envy was a superior being, and yet there was nothing superior about the life it lived, going without these things that humans took for granted.
After a few minutes, he picked up one of the books and resumed his place in reading it.
"I have to ask." Envy said after a long while. Kimblee, who had assumed Envy was asleep, looked to find it watching him intently. "Are you're really…okay with all of this? Turning against your own kind?"
"The condition of being human is always being against your own kind."
"You mean waging war against each other and stuff?"
"War is one aspect of it, but it's so much more pervasive than that. Consider all the Amestrians who look down on me for being of mixed blood. Consider my grandmother, who looked down on me for the same reason but from the other side. Consider men who believe women are stupid and weak, or women who think men are all unfeeling neanderthals. Consider all the religions that condemn to hell anyone who follows a god other than theirs. The idea of kinship between humans as a species is a myth."
"I don't disagree with you." Envy's voice was strangely soft. "But you won't just be turning against the Amestrians or the Xingians, against the men or the women or the Christians or the Letians. You'll be turning against all of them. Are you prepared to do that?"
"I am."
"Do you hate all other humans?"
He shook his head. "I don't view a single man, woman, or child as deserving of my hate, and that goes for collective groups as well as individuals."
Envy's brow furrowed slightly. "Then why?"
"Why not? More species have gone extinct than are alive today, a hundred times more. Some would say it's a tragedy, but that's the course of nature. And if it happens, when it happens, I want to be on the front line watching. Most people say that life is based around love, but when you look at it, life is characterized by struggle. Its the conflict that makes life what it is, and I want to live."
"What about afterwards? Won't you be…lonely, without any others?"
"…No less than I am now. The presence of other humans has never changed that. Things like hate and love, I don't feel these strong attachments towards anyone, and that sets me apart from everyone." He tilted his head slightly. "Do you feel companionship with your own kind?"
"I –" Envy gaped, clearly never having considered such a thing. "I don't know." Another pause. "With Lust, I do, I guess, but one in six is pretty abysmal…"
Kimblee grinned. "So there are seven of you."
"W-damn it!"
"I'm not going to betray you. Certainly not on the basis of that piece of information."
Envy sighed, curling in on itself. "Why do you ask me these things? What's it to you if I feel companionship with the others?"
"...Because I can, I suppose." He said, after a moment contemplating the question. "Anyone else, I would make an enemy of them in a moment if I were to share my true thoughts."
"Considering how stupid most humans are, I can why you won't miss them."
"I will miss them though. That doesn't mean I'm going to save them."
"I understand. At least, I think I do." Envy closed its eyes again. It was a good example of how Envy had felt about Greed, once, when it had realized the older sin's days were numbered. Nowadays it didn't care.
.
It woke suddenly, in darkness, to the feeling of darkness touching it. Envy jerked upright.
"Pride!"
There was no answer. Envy stared into the questionably empty darkness. Either it had only dreamed Pride was there, or he was there but silent. Who ever knew?
Regardless, it was time to go. Long past time, in fact. Envy had only meant to stay for an hour or so. Hopefully there wouldn't be trouble about it. Envy climbed to its feet, feeling even wearier than before somehow.
On a whim, it retrieved the cup of tea from the windowsill, now long cold. It drank the tepid liquid anyway, although it was disgusting.
.
(A/N: Some stuff:
'Letians' is a nod to the followers of Leto. Not sure how prevalent they actually were in the FMA verse, but I felt I needed something to balance the references to specific real-world religions.
I'm a tea addict and Kimblee reflects this.
I don't see Kimblee as hateful, which is why he's always struck me as an interesting villain. He actually seems to me like one of the least conflicted characters of FMA. Both these things also make him an excellent contrast to Envy, who is both hateful and deeply conflicted, poor li'l bug. Again, I'm not arguing that this makes the horrible things he does tolerable or excusable, I just like that he differs from the typical villain prototype. In a way, you could say he's worse than many other villains, because while they might have insane rationales for taking lives, Kimblee needs no rationale at all. He is the closest I can get to writing a true sociopath, but given the tags for this story, obviously I don't render him completely lacking the ability to form attachments.
And, as always, thanks for reading!)