So the anniversary movie sort of took over my brain, and Paradox had been bugging me for a while to write fic, so I obliged.

Disclaimer: I do not own any part of the Yu-Gi-Oh franchise.

Warning: Spoilers for the whole of 5D's and the Yu-Gi-Oh 10th anniversary movie.

Lineage of Destruction

It had been Antinomy who'd first brought up the idea of time travel, in the kind of wistful voice that said he didn't actually believe it was possible, but hey, wouldn't it be nice? They'd all laughed a bit sadly and moved on to other subjects, eventually forgetting about the topic altogether. Back then it had been just the three of them, and they'd still hoped there might be other survivors out there who could help them rebuild the world. After all, the human race was resilient. Surely it had survived far worse?

But as the years passed it became clear that it was just them: three men with no hope of ever saving the ruined world they lived in, unless they somehow managed to change the past. What had begun as a remnant of long-forgotten fairytales suddenly became the last hope to save their world. Even with all the technological advances of the last few centuries, no one had ever managed to travel through time. And now, with only two scientists, a pro-duelist mechanic and next to no information they had to build a functioning time travel device. Impossible, yet so incredibly necessary.

Theoretically, there were several ways to travel through time, and a lot of those involved just being faster than time itself. They tried to find a way to go faster than light first. It was almost possible with Delta Accel Synchro, and for a while they thought they would succeed, until Antinomy succumbed to the gravitational forces, and only the numerous failsafes and protective measures they'd created for Delta Eagle prevented him from dying. It still left him in a weeks-long coma and left a permanent scar on his head, where his skull had split open during the fall. From that point on, Z-ONE vetoed faster-than-light travel and forbade Antinomy from ever running the experiments again. That only led to several blazing rows Paradox tried his utmost to block out.

"I know he wants to protect us," Antinomy confided in Paradox one day, when Z-ONE had left their shelter to find more supplies. "But we all have to work if we want to succeed, and I'm the best person to do the tests."

"You won't be doing anything in this condition," Paradox said. Antinomy had only recently woken up after the crash, and while he seemed to have suffered no brain damage, he still hadn't regained full mobility.

"Don't you start too." Antinomy rolled over and tried to catch a glimpse of the outside world, only to stiffen when a door opened on the floor below them. Z-ONE had returned. Antinomy said quietly: "Tell him I'm asleep," and closed his eyes, waving Paradox out of the room. Paradox shook his head and went to intercept Z-ONE.

The falling-out lasted a few more days after that, until Paradox, in an unexpected stroke of luck, managed to reactivate the Neo Domino University library mainframe and access all the books in its database. The sudden flood of information was enough to get both Z-ONE and Antinomy working together again. More importantly, it provided them with an alternate theory on time travel. It took them several more years of work after that, but finally, after several experiments gone wrong, they succeeded in building a functioning particle accelerator and managed to create an artificial wormhole in a controlled environment. It would have been cause for celebration, if their bodies weren't slowly giving out on them. Time hadn't been kind to them, and they weren't immortal.

Soon enough it became clear that they wouldn't be able to complete this mission by themselves. It wasn't easy to face the prospect of their own deaths, but they had to prepare for it, find a way to ensure that all their work hadn't been in vain. Z-ONE was the one who came up with a solution: copies of themselves, with all their memories, but the strength to do what they couldn't anymore. These mirror images would accomplish what they hadn't been able to do themselves. But not yet. All in due time.

And then, when they were preparing to make the experiment reality, they found Aporia.

He upset the balance they'd so carefully crafted between the three of them, but at the same time he brought hope. It really was possible to survive in this world, and Aporia had proven it. Aporia had no head for science, but he worked tirelessly under their guidance, until their lab was completely operational and all of them could safely travel back and forth in time.

Everything seemed to be going fine, until one day, barely three months after Aporia's arrival, Antinomy fell gravely ill. The symptoms got worse with every passing day, and Paradox, who'd been researching a possible cure, soon found himself experiencing the same symptoms.

(He didn't find a cure, but he did find what – or rather who – had infected them. He didn't tell anyone. Carrying diseases wasn't unusual. Aporia didn't deserve the guilt.)

Neither Z-ONE nor Aporia accepted Antinomy's death, and Paradox watched with regretful eyes as they ignored the copy completely, even though it was clearly still Antinomy, only in a different body. The younger Antinomy confided in him, but by that time Paradox himself was already too sick to do much. He died barely a week after Antinomy himself.

When he woke up in the copy they'd made of himself, with all his memories fully intact, Antinomy's younger version was gone, sent off on a mission in the past. Z-ONE refused to give the full details, but Paradox knew it involved the legendary Fudou Yuusei in some way. If all went according to plan, his and Antinomy's paths wouldn't cross. Paradox would go back further, to prevent the development of Momentum.

His first attempt at stopping Momentum failed.

So did the second one, even though he tried his hardest to erase every existing copy of the plans. Paradox was a scientist, not a computer programmer, and the operating systems of the past were unfamiliar to him. He could've really used Antinomy's help there.

He tried a more subtle method during the third itineration, and spent a full year infiltrating the lab developing Momentum, in the hopes of changing the plans in such a way that Momentum would no longer be reliant on human emotions. Unfortunately, when the lab became strapped for time and funds, and human emotions turned out to be the most efficient power source, they went ahead despite Paradox's protests.

Trying to prevent the creation of Synchro Monsters failed so spectacularly that he ended up blowing up an entire building and had to make an emergency temporal shift just so Z-ONE could fix what was left of his body.

"People are dying for this," he told Z-ONE with no small amount of desperation. "There were people inside that building and I killed them."

Z-ONE looked away. "Sometimes a person needs to die for another to be saved. Don't you think it's worth it, Paradox?"

"Become a murderer?"

"This stopped being about us a long time ago. One person to save billions. Don't tell me you're stopping now."

They had tried their hardest to save the world without actually harming the people of the past, yet none of their attempts ever worked. If there was a way to save the world by just killing one person… Paradox made his choice. They'd come too far to be stopped by morals. Morals were for people who still had something to lose.

The solution seemed so obvious at first. If Momentum couldn't be halted, then the next step was to stop the creation of Synchro monsters. And to stop the creation of Synchro monsters, the easiest way was to go back to the very beginning and kill the creator of Duel Monsters before he could create the game. So Paradox went back in time to kill Pegasus J. Crawford, the child history books told him would one day bring on the destruction of the world.

He succeeded.

Yet his hopes for a triumphant return to a world full of life were dashed when the place he came back to was as desolate as ever. The history books had changed, but not by much. They now told the story of a millionaire who had made a fortune in weapon manufacture, then spent all his money on hiring artists to create Duel Monsters after a business trip to Egypt, where he'd lost his eye in an unfortunate accident. The game had become more popular than ever.

Only now did Paradox realize that time itself was their enemy. It didn't want to be changed, and would do anything it could to stay on the track it had deemed right. There were forces at work neither he nor Z-ONE could explain, no matter how hard they tried. They had an enemy, and it was an enemy no one had ever beaten.

But no one had ever traveled in time either, and Paradox'd be damned even more than he already was if he let all their work go to waste. So he tried again, this time in the early 21st century, to prevent Pegasus from creating Synchro monsters. Once again he was stopped, this time by a boy who claimed to be darkness incarnate and had the powers to back it up. Yuuki Juudai made it onto the list of people he'd need to get rid of if he ever wanted to accomplish anything.

"With our luck, we're going to have mystic forces coming out of the woodwork," he complained to Z-ONE. "How do you fight something like that?"

Z-ONE was distracted. Aporia had died not too long ago, and ever since Z-ONE had been paying less and less attention to him. Paradox knew that Z-ONE wasn't really listening to him anymore. Just like he hadn't considered Antinomy's younger version worthy of his attention, he didn't consider him important anymore either. If only he could convince Z-ONE that he was still the same person as before, only in a different body…

"Fudou Yuusei," Z-ONE said after a while, almost as an afterthought. Paradox made a questioning noise.

"It is said that his Stardust Dragon possessed powers beyond human comprehension."

"You want to fight fire with fire," Paradox concluded. He was a scientist first and foremost, so dueling wasn't his forte, even though Antinomy had tried his best to teach him how to duel properly. (Antinomy's definition of dueling properly had somehow involved speeds that couldn't possibly be healthy.)

"There are other monsters," Z-ONE said. "Monsters that can break through the barriers of dimensions. I've watched the timestream," he added by way of explanation. "Find them and bring them under your control. Use them to defeat time."

They didn't have much of a choice, did they? Paradox set to work on creating a deck that would be able to control the monsters he needed. He made Solid Vision so solid that it made the monsters almost real. If he was going to be a thief on top of a murderer, he needed to do it right.

He said goodbye to Z-ONE and realized that Z-ONE wasn't expecting to see him again. Whether it was because Z-ONE expected him to change the future or because he expected him to die, Paradox didn't know. He told himself it was the former.

He went to the Neo Domino City Fudou Yuusei lived in first, planning to work backwards in time while maintaining some semblance of chronology. The place was bursting with life, and against all better judgment, he went to explore the city. In any other place, he probably would've stuck out like a sore thumb, but Neo Domino was hosting a tournament, and no one paid much attention to another duelist in a strange outfit. He entered a store and wandered through the aisles aimlessly. There was so much choice here that he didn't even know what to get. He rounded a corner, still focused on all the food filling the aisles, and walked right into another shopper.

Paradox lost his balance and stumbled back against the shelves. The other person only barely managed to keep his balance, but quickly straightened up and reached out a hand.

"Hey, are you okay? Did you get hurt?"

Paradox looked up into gray eyes. For a moment he was back fifty years ago, when he'd discovered that he wasn't alone after all.

"Antino-" he began. Then he looked. The concern on Antinomy's face wasn't for a friend, but merely for a stranger he'd just bumped into. His eyes were completely devoid of recognition.

Paradox ignored the outstretched hand and brushed past him with an abrupt "I'm fine." He only looked back long enough to see another person enter the aisle.

"Bruno?" Fudou Yuusei asked. "Something wrong?"

"No, it's fine," Antinomy said, smiling a far too familiar smile. Paradox left the store as fast as he could, just so he didn't have to see them anymore. Antinomy was here and Antinomy didn't remember him. That, more than anything, truly made him feel like he was stranded in a world that would never be his own. Suddenly the world felt fake, empty, like there were far too many people to be real. Cardboard cut-outs and faceless masses, like a picture book with a lazy artist.

But no, he couldn't dwell on it now. The sooner he completed his mission, the sooner their world would be fine again. And if his first target had to be Fudou Yuusei… Well, he hadn't had a way back since Antinomy first mentioned time travel.

Comments, questions and concrit are always welcome!