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“It’s a terrible thing, getting old,” Bradley said musingly.
Far away from the dais, among the soldiers gathering to hear his victory speech, was a very young man in an officer’s coat, staring at him. It was remarkable, the staring: no one else was even trying to meet his eyes, too busy patting each other on the back and letting out ragged cheers, or else looking at nothing in sheer exhaustion.
His aide, next to him, was also quite young and already beaten; Bradley was a favorite son and always provided with toys he liked. It had only taken a few nights to break this one.
“Sir?” the aide said, blank terror edging into his voice.
“I said I’m getting old,” Bradley insisted. He had nothing else to play with at the moment. “Look at these men who fought so bravely for our country. I’m as good as useless to them.” He paused, then said, “Well? Aren’t you going to contradict me?”
“Sir,” the aide panicked, “I thought—I didn’t mean—”
“Yes, thank you,” Bradley said sharply.
It was too easy now, torturing him. But that boy looking up at him from the crowd…
“Who’s the dark-haired officer staring at us?”
“That’s—that’s Roy Mustang,” the aide said with an audible wave of relief at knowing the answer. “The Flame Alchemist.”
At me, Bradley thought. He’s staring at me. No: beyond me. To the future.
It genuinely pleased him. Finally some quality entertainment.
*
Now that he was fast approaching seventy, Bradley cultivated the easy image of a fatherly officer who liked to handwave his duties away. It made it easier to carve out his weekly time under the watchful eye of the gold-toothed doctor. Stretches and warm-up, swordfighting routines, medical examination. All of it naked, so the doctor could see how the toughened, leathery muscles moved under the skin. To keep one’s clothes on for this would have been as absurd as a surgery patient going on the slab fully dressed.
The doctor took notes, occasionally speaking into a tape recorder. Depending on his observations he made millimetric adjustments to his meal plans or his training practice. As he left he usually patted Bradley’s bare shoulder, saying, “Very good, boy. Very good.”
*
Bradley’s aide was blue-eyed and dark-haired, like all his predecessors. After the third identical-looking young man in a row, it had become clear that this was deliberate. Doll versions of himself, on which he could take out his frustrations. Probably doctor-ordered as well. Because the doctor kept an eye on his anger like he kept an eye on his lungs, his heart, his liver and his prostate. A series of aides looking just like his younger self; an invitation to replicate what was being done to him, to exorcise it, to vent his rage.
In case it pushed him to rebel like the previous incarnation of Greed, perhaps? This only went to show that for all his careful, surgical observations, the doctor did not understand how he worked. If King Bradley vented his anger he would collapse, ragged and hollow like a scarecrow off its pole.
Still, he took was he was given. He always did. And it was satisfying to break them. It comforted him in his position. This was all he had to his name, or lack thereof—he was the one who wasn’t breaking. He was bent and twisted and warped, yes. But not broken; not like the piled-up corpses in the next room that day, the ones who couldn’t cut it when the true test had come. Very good, boy. It was the anger that kept him going. He saw it in some of his aides, when he began to hurt them: a surge of incredulous rage, a firm decision to resist him, to show him that he couldn’t get to them so easily. But then he kept bending them, increasing the pressure until they snapped. They always did.
He didn’t snap. He was better than them, taking the constant revenge of the old over the young. His anger could not burn out. In the privacy of his mind he liked to believe it was his own. This was why he was Wrath: because he had surged to meet Wrath, just like that Xingese prince had surged to meet Greed.
The psychological: always make them feel like they were speaking out of turn, asking them impossible questions to which one could find only insulting answers. Make them know that they were ruining their careers, their lives, just by daring to be mediocre in his vicinity. Make them feel that they were nothing, and see them begin to believe it. The physical: insist there was a flaw in their training, and insist on personally training them. Then make them repeat the same move, over and over, how could they not get it, was he not being clear enough, were they simply that dim? And what now, were they getting tired already? The youth had no stamina these days. And making them try again and again until they literally collapsed in exhaustion and he turned away in calculated disgust. Then, the sexual: first a hand on their thigh during a meeting, his old man fingers gripping hard into their youthful flesh. He liked to see them freeze up; he liked their hunted look. He liked to make them wait, for a few days or a few weeks, to let them get used to the idea that it would happen and they couldn’t stop it. And then he had it happen, in his office or late at night. He summoned them for a report, let them stammer and sweat in blank terror, then he went impatient: well? Why were they still dressed? Had he not made himself clear? Would they keep on being slow to the very end?
When they were broken he lost interest. He never notified anyone, yet he always found himself assigned a new aide within days, fresh-faced and full of conviction. Always looking so much like him.
*
Roy Mustang didn’t have blue eyes, but he did have dark hair. He probably fancied himself unbreakable, too.
*
Thelma Bradley was the perfect wife, from the perfect family, imbued with a sense of feminine duty that meant she kept a good home and a supportive front and exhibited no political opinions whatsoever, other than the pre-recorded party line. She also had a complete lack of curiosity that some would have called sheer stupidity. In decades of marriage, she had never asked to see the eye of her husband; neither had she ever noticed the elongating shadows around her son. In fact, she had once thrown herself in front of a car to save dear Selim’s life, a gesture so dramatic that it had privately convinced Bradley, deep down, that she knew very well something was wrong and had determined to carry on regardless, out of practicality or self-interest or—it was possible—love.
They had never discussed this together, either because she really was that blind and there was nothing to discuss, or because they both knew that if they did he would be ordered to kill her, and he would do it.
He never discussed it with Pride, either. But that was mostly because he and Pride didn’t speak as equals. To be proud meant to despise everything that wasn’t you: Pride despised humans, despised weakness, despised old age and failing bodies. He despised Wrath, but with a gentle, patronizing kind of contempt that only meant he constantly questioned his actions, prodding at everything he did, reminding him he was his guardian, not the other way around. He did not understand what it was, to be old; he would retain the foolishness of youth for all of his immortality.
Anger was also contempt, and Bradley was nothing but anger. Of course he was enraged at his creators; but he was also enraged at his detractors. These people daring to protest. What was there to protest? They were free. They had their own life; their own soul; their own deaths. Every single one of them had it better than him, which meant they had no right to complain. He hated everyone he had ever met, but some had power over him, and others he had power over. So this meant he took pleasure in the Ishbal War, and in the cleansing of Dublith, and in the riots in Lior. He took pleasure in raping his aides, in executing dissenters, in crushing his political opponents. Even as he fulfilled the orders of people he hated, he did so by hurting other people he hated just as much. This was what made his existence possible; this was why it was absurd to imagine him rebelling. There was only wrath for him, in his every action.
*
He despised humans, but humans knew how to obey orders, and he had been born human. This quality made him the favorite son; the flawless student. This meant his father would occasionally ask for his opinion, when he couldn’t be bothered to have one of his own. And so when the time came to wonder what to do about Roy Mustang, Bradley said he would take care of it. He had been waiting hungrily for Mustang this whole time. And father said he could have him to do as he pleased.
He told Mustang everything about him, to make sure he understood what he was dealing with. Then he made Riza Hawkeye his aide. He knew she was an essential piece to Mustang’s schemes, but more importantly, he knew Mustang loved her. And he hoped rumors of the way he treated his aides had reached Mustang. He wanted him to imagine her bent over his desk.
Of course he did nothing of the sort, because hurting Hawkeye wouldn’t have hurt Mustang—she would have hidden it from him entirely, so as not to make him suffer. Just having her there was enough for Mustang to torment himself imagining all she must be going through, all that she wasn’t telling him. And Hawkeye was an excellent aide, hard-working and conscientious with very little imagination, which made her eye all the sharper. Bradley could appreciate a good eye.
In only a couple of days she had discovered the true nature of Selim.
Mustang and Hawkeye could not communicate, or she would die: that was the rule. Yet Bradley knew for certain they would. He felt the same thing he had felt all these years back when he had felt Mustang’s eyes on him at the end of the war: something close to jubilation. An interesting player at last, not because Roy Mustang could truly challenge King Bradley—in fact he’d only been losing from the start—but because he kept fighting. He would not break. Not yet, in any case, and the anticipation was everything.
Pride had his eye on Bradley, as always. He kept asking what Bradley was playing at, letting Mustang run free. He came very close to accusing him of betrayal. For all his centuries of existence he was just a brat, with a youthful manicheism in his reasoning. If not with us, then against us; that sort of thing.
“Don’t you think our father would have acted already, if that was the case?” Bradley pointed out.
Pride said nothing.
“Have you found Scar yet? Speaking of people allowed to run free.”
Pride scowled. Yes, he was young at heart. And Bradley knew how to hurt the young.
*
He knew Promised Day would not go smoothly. Deep down, a voice said: you ensured it wouldn’t. He ignored it, because it simply wasn’t true. He had always obeyed orders.
The train was clearly a trap, but he had to go back to Central, hadn’t he? When it blew up, he only had to take off his eyepatch, and the eye highlighted the evidences of the world. Go here and here and you’re out safe. He let his men plummet to their deaths. Another batch who had it better than him, and who never knew it. They only knew how to complain.
Then he started moving towards Central.
*
He had commandeered a car to get to the city, but once he was there he kept going on foot. No one would expect King Bradley to walk alone and without escort through the streets of his burning capital. He did not need to be appraised of the situation. He knew it was Mustang. They had an appointment years in the making.
But he was getting old, and his body was failing, despite the doctor’s constant and watchful care. In his efforts to walk into his palace, he was wounded, almost to death, and fell into the moat. The water smashed into him; the pain blazed through his senses—another human failing. Of course, he had been taught to ignore what hurt him. His entire existence amounted to that exercise.
After he climbed out of the water, he knelt there, dripping water and blood, to catch his breath. There was something with him in the dark tunnels of the sewers; a slithering presence along the walls. An eye opened, bright white, then a hundred others, all focusing on him.
“Wrath? Is that you?”
Bradley wiped his face, then got up. He still had his swords, and he didn’t have his eyepatch: he could see clearer than day. Pride was standing in the middle of the corridor, his child’s body very still while the giant eyes on the walls rolled in their shadow orbits, trying to catch some light.
“How did you know?”
“You reek of blood.” This, with contempt. “Even if I hadn’t consumed Gluttony I could have spotted you by smell.”
“Quite.” More blood came from his mouth. It trickled from his stomach, soaking his uniform. He wiped his face again.
“Well? Lead the way,” Pride said impatiently. “It’s time.”
Bradley touched the child’s upper back with the pommel of his sword as he walked past him, pushing him gently forward in the dark. Pride moved, and the giant shadows all around moved with him, scraping against the concrete walls. They walked in silence for a while, or they would have if not for Pride’s mutterings. He was furious at Mustang, at Scar, at both Elrics; he thought he knew what anger was.
“What about the fifth sacrifice?” Bradley asked, if only to stop his yammering.
“The doctor said we could use Mustang,” Pride snapped. “I’ll make the circle. You’ll have to pin him down.”
Bradley’s body felt like it would break soon. He had a lot of experience spotting these things, and no desire to break now, now that Mustang was so close, finally. His father had even handed him the perfect torture for him: to make him the very instrument of his country’s demise. It would have been too frustrating by half, to miss that.
A homunculus had a Stone for a heart. That was what differentiated them from humans. But Bradley had to start off human, because they needed human imperfection in their figurehead. To grow old, to be mortal. His Stone only had one soul, that screaming soul which had replaced his, or had always been his—was his, now, either way. Pride’s Stone had a thousand lives, and he had only used a fistful of them living through the four centuries since his creation.
“So you ate Gluttony,” Bradley said. Then he coughed violently, and more blood came up.
“I needed a good sense of smell. And I was almost out of lives.”
“Indeed?”
They had moved fully into the sewers, now, far away from the weak daylight. It was pitch black. No more light: no more shadows.
“Wrath?”
Viscera were the hardest thing to grow back—quite fussy, with a lot of complex chemical processes going on. So Bradley split his son’s stomach open first thing, and heard the wet noise of his entrails falling out. He pushed him down, stabbed him in the forehead—the sword went right through, and deeply into the concrete underneath. Then he knelt atop his body with a slight groan of pain, in deference not to his own dripping wound but to old age.
Blue lightning flashed at him, twisting frantically like a wounded animal, catching in the wide eyes of his son underneath.
“What are you—doing—” the rest of Pride’s words were lost in a scream when Bradley reached inside his sternum and pulled out a fistful of flesh. He crammed it into his mouth, barely chewing before he swallowed. His mouth already tasted like blood, so there was no difference. More lightning outlined the torn-apart body under him, like a cut-up animal in the palace kitchens.
“Almost out of lives,” he said, “was that your excuse? Well.”
“Stop—stop—stop—”
Another grab into his insides, and he felt something like a heart under his fingers. He pulled it out, swallowed it whole, juices dripping down his chin. Still nothing. With his other sword he sliced open the sternum then pulled the ribs apart, with a sharp crack which prompted a renewed scream and another burst of white-blue lightning. With every flash he could see giant shadows on the walls, mad rolling eyes, snapping teeth, but they weren’t fast enough to get at him before darkness fell again. In the cold light the blood looked ink-black, the guts like a pile of mud-soaked clothing.
He reached once again into oozing, flesh-soft ruin, and found something hard and smooth under his fingers. When he ripped it out the screams stopped for good, and he swallowed it before they could start again.
*
He walked, father and son both, through the hallways. After a moment he felt a shockwave; alchemical energy washed through the walls, illuminating the path. This was not the god-making array, or it would have carried him off, too. They were missing a sacrifice anyway.
Around the corner he found the doctor, his gold tooth glinting under flickering neon lights. “Bradley!” he screamed. “Where have you been! They’ve broken the barrier!”
“I’m here now,” he said.
“You’re late! This is a disappointment! A failure! A dire—”
Using the shadows came naturally to him. They engulfed the old man, and he let him scream for as long as possible, before the screams stopped again. Knowledge flowed to him; he knew how to make the circle. He knew what he had to do to Mustang.
And, as if on cue, there was Mustang, appearing at the end of the hallway.
He had come with a lot of unlikely allies who all froze for a moment. Then he sent them ahead, to find father; he was raising his hand, his white glove, looking at Bradley, his fingers poised to snap. Go ahead; I’ll be quick. He must have sensed it, too, that Bradley wanted it to be just the two of them.
The eye they had burned into his skull sliced time into precise fractions. There was always a moment to act, an open window. With the shadows at his command it was almost too easy. Mustang jumped when they moved under his feet like the ground coming to life; they wrapped all around his body, cutting through clothes and flesh at they went, then slithered between his fingers like a lover’s hand, held tight, and broke both his hands at once.
“Finally,” Bradley said, coming closer, the better to hear him scream. His body was slow to heal, the Stone unused to work with such imperfect, elderly flesh, burning through what few lives Pride had had left, but his worst wound had almost closed. “I’ve been waiting so long for this.”
Mustang had slumped on the floor, trying to catch his breath. Roiling shadows turned him over on his back, held him down with his arms by his sides. His tattered shirt had fallen open, and Bradley observed with an almost clinical interest his heaving, straining chest, gleaming with blood and sweat. There was a bleeding wound in his left shoulder; Bradley stepped on it and applied pressure with the reinforced heel of his boot, watching his expression carefully, the way his face twisted, the way his spine arched, the sounds he made.
He was wasting time, he knew. Without a fifth sacrifice the gate couldn’t open, and he held within him all that was needed to make one. But father had always granted him toys, and he had told him to do with Mustang as he pleased. He was just following orders, just like he’d always done.
When the shadows started curling around his thighs, Mustang’s eyes snapped open. It was like watching a play a thousand times rehearsed. The disbelief. The refusal. The struggle. And then—it didn’t always happen, but in Mustang, surely—ah, yes, there it was: the anger. Mustang meeting his eyes, with his own burning dark gaze, pain and humiliation forgotten in the rush of it.
When the violation got too great there was only refuge in anger, something Bradley knew well.
“Are you—” Mustang hissed, jerked, “are you quite done—”
“When you break,” Bradley said, and pushed further in.
Mustang started laughing, disjointed laughter, even as his body twitched and spasmed, his legs straining to close, to push him away, to push him out. “Break?” he gasped, “break?”
Bradley hurt him, and watched him scream. The screams were always different, with a sexual element involved. Then he started working on his body in a different way. When he could force the body to react, that was what truly made it sink in, when they started to sob in horror at themselves. Mustang was young and full of adrenaline, powerless.
“You think you’re like me,” Bradley said. He made him scream again, then gasp, quartering him ever further open. “You think you can’t break.”
Mustang’s gasps devolved back into laughter, convulsing laughter that sounded like sobs. “You think you didn’t break?”
Bradley narrowed his eyes. “I told you—”
“You told me yourself,” Mustang could only speak in bursts, “you told me—they broke you—took your soul out—you were broken—at the start—that’s why—you can’t break—anymore—”
Bradley hurt him again, without thinking, forcing him open, but Mustang didn’t seem to feel it, gasping out, “And you think—I’m not broken—you think—I didn’t—already break—were you not there?” he screamed suddenly, “Did you not understand Ishbal—did you truly understand nothing—this whole time—”
Bradley unbuttoned his pants.
Mustang jerked at that, instinctively, his eyes widening, but the shadows were holding him fast. He couldn’t move away, couldn’t do anything but turn his head away, look desperately aside, the way they all did the first time. Bradley was old, and wounded, but quite worked up by now; he had no problem burying himself to the hilt, in a sudden thrust that made Mustang gasp.
“Can’t break anymore?” he echoed, and seized Mustang's jaw to turn his face. “Look at me. No? You can’t?” He wiped a tear that had squeezed out of Mustang’s eye. “Are you going to enjoy this?” He shoved deeper in. “I think that would break you.”
Mustang’s breathing was so chaotic now he had to try several times before he could speak.
“Like—I—said,” he finally gasped, “you—understand—nothing.”
Bradley had been prepared for an array drawn in blood, or even a secret one tattooed in advance on the man’s skin. He had been watching for the possibility of a second pair of gloves, or more prosaically for a hidden knife. He was no fool: he had him spread-eagled, defenseless. He had broken all of his fingers.
When he came inside Mustang’s broken body, the pleasure was so absolute he couldn’t help but close his eyes; which was when Mustang lunged up and quite simply sank his teeth into his throat.
He jerked back, losing his grip. Blood was pouring out of him, an incredible quantity of it. He saw Mustang scrambling away, retrieving, indeed, more gloves from his pocket, slipping them on without regard for his broken hands, moved by the frantic, enraged energy of the desperate. The eye said: strike now. The eye said: you have time. But the body would not move. The body was, perhaps, remembering what the soul did not. They wanted him not to break, and his soul couldn’t break, but now the body had broken, it seemed, in revenge.
And he felt in the ground the vibrations of a fight below, Mustang’s allies fighting his father, and when the spark came he realized in a sudden, beautiful rush of clarity that this was it. All of it lost. Late; a disappointment; a failure. Overcome by his human urges in the end. Through him, through his humanity, all of it lost.
Very good, he thought, just before the flames came.
Very good, boy.