Disclaimer and notes: I don't own Fullmetal Alchemist. This is set in the mangaverse, seeing as it has the Xing characters. Spoilers if you haven't read past 54. With a few small exceptions, anything post 54 is just speculation.
This was a challenge from my good friend and student, known on ffnet as Kimichizuchan. She requested something drabble-ish with Greed/RanFan in it... I hope you enjoy it, Rin-chan!

--

Avarice

--

Ling was a pretty greedy fellow, and Greed had a lot of respect for that.

It made his host feel like a brother—more so than those other bastards Father had birthed in any case—or at least a kindred spirit. He could relate to Ling. He respected his host.

But just because he respected his host's greed didn't mean he was going to play nice and share.

He didn't like to share.

No, Greed wanted everything: money, women, power, land, fame... He wanted everything in the world to be his. He wanted more than he had, more than the guy his body once belonged to had, more than Father could hope to offer.

Father... He was still testing the waters when it came to Father. He was grateful to the man, sure; without the old man, Greed would have never been born. For now, he'd stick close—not that Father was giving him much choice—and see where it got him, but he knew he wouldn't stick around too long. He could be patient, but with a body that aged, he was greedy for a means to become truly immortal. Father would never offer him that.

No, for now, Father was just a tool to him, a stepping-stone to bigger and better things. And even though he was young, newly born, he knew there were bigger and better things out there.

He had his host to thank for that.

He couldn't have asked for a better body: the boy was a prince, of all things! A prince who had given himself over to Greed so easily, risking everything for a chance to win himself a kingdom, to become the next emperor...

Such a cunning prince... Such strong will...

He would break that will, that fighting spirit. The prince, like Father, was merely a means to an end. He wanted to take for himself everything the prince wanted, everything the prince already had: his title, his kingdom, his money, his power, his subordinates, his woman...

Ah yes, the prince's woman... RanFan, wasn't it? He found her loyalty to his host nearly as admirable as the prince's greed.

He wanted that loyalty for himself.

He'd save her for last, though. Once he'd seized for himself everything else that had belonged to the prince, he'd take her. That would, he knew, be the final straw, the one that broke the camel's back, as it were. He would gain the girl and her loyalty and perhaps even her love, and that would break the prince's magnificent will.

And then, their shared body, the body that the prince was fighting so hard to hold on to, would belong to Greed.

In the end, it hadn't gone according to plan.

He met the prince's woman far sooner than he'd hoped. And she was so loyal, so feisty... He could understand why his host kept the girl around.

But she was far too easy to manipulate. Greed was a straightforward kind of guy, and it was his policy to never lie, so it wasn't like the girl had even been misled...

He figured that she must've been pretty greedy, too. She'd snatched up the chance to be with the prince, or at least his body if not his soul. She gave herself and her loyalty and her love blindly.

He was certain his host would give up his vigilant struggle for their body.

He was wrong.

Maybe the girl was every bit as cunning as the prince. Maybe he'd underestimated her loyalty. Maybe she knew exactly what she had to do to get the prince to fight back even harder...

Well, all the "what ifs" and "maybes" didn't matter; it was all idle speculation. He knew one thing for certain: his host's fighting spirit wasn't broken so easily.

And in the end, he had to respect his host all the more for it. They really were two of a kind: the prince, it seemed, didn't like to share.

-Fin-