For a long moment Kaiba merely stared at Yugi, wondering if he should be surprised, or if he should have expected this. Something of the same confusion he saw in Yugi's older face, as if even prepared for this moment, knowing who he was about to confront, he hadn't figured out himself how he should feel about it. But then that was how it always was with him and Yugi, mirrors set facing one another; to look at him was to see his own distorted reflection, what might have been, what could be. Even now, with thirty years dividing them, and so much hatred, that hadn't changed.

"This way, Seto-kun," Yugi said, after a moment that could have spanned another three decades, and he walked to the arcade's doors, gesturing Kaiba to follow him. Kaiba did, before anyone at the security desk paid them any heed.

They found a dim corner of the arcade, away from the noise and lights and people, concealed behind the bulk of an old machine that looked like an early dueling stage but obviously could not have been. Not here. In the gaudy glows and shadows, Yugi studied Kaiba's face again, then ducked his head in a bashful manner more fitting to a boy than the man he had grown into. "It is you," he said, with a strange hoarse catch in his voice, or maybe that was just the rasp of age. "Hiroto-kun described you exactly, your eyes, your coat, and he swore you had shown him a Blue Eyes. It could've been no one else. But I still...after so long, I didn't think I dared believe anymore. Dared to hope."

"Hope," Kaiba growled. "Is that all you're doing now, Yugi?" Suddenly he knew what he was feeling, and it was neither surprise nor expectation, but anger, finally, vicious and overwhelming. He shoved the smaller man back against the wall, hard, and Yugi didn't resist, didn't even raise a hand in defense as Kaiba's fists knotted in his lapels, almost lifted him off the ground. "How could you let this happen?" Kaiba demanded. "You could have stopped it. You could have beaten--him. You were never afraid of me, you never hesitated to challenge me, you never lost to me--how could you let this happen?"

Yugi didn't try to break away, but nor did he look away, his head tilted up toward Kaiba, his eyes fearless, and grieving. "I'm sorry, Seto-kun."

"Sorry," Kaiba spat, and dropped him, pushed him away, as if touching him further might contaminate. "Why? You must have seen what was happening. You must have understood, even before anyone else did. That time before, what I was before, you saw that clearly enough, and you didn't hesitate to crush me then, to destroy what I'd become. Why'd you lose your nerve this time?" You must have known this time was worse...

"I tried," Yugi said, and that Kaiba had not expected to hear. Yugi straightened up to all his meager height, and while the regret in his expression was predictable, it changed his face in ways Kaiba wasn't prepared for. Not a new, ready remorse, but an old sorrow, a guilt long lived with, permanently etched into the lines of his face. This was the meaning of age, to see your mistakes imprinted upon you, the history of all your faults written out on your skin.

"I tried once," Yugi said. "Years ago. Right after--Hiroto-kun told you what happened to his parents. I was angry, I was mourning. I thought I could do it then. I thought I was angry enough, righteously so. And I thought it might be the only way after all; I thought--I knew--that in some way he wanted it over as badly as any of us. I thought I could do it. But when I was finally facing him--in the end, I couldn't kill a friend."

"A friend?" Kaiba laughed, harshly.

But Yugi just looked at him with all the patience learned over thirty years. "I know why you came to this building, Seto-kun, and I know what you're feeling. But could you really do it, at the last?"

Kaiba thought of the Blue Eyes, how the three dragons would look, rising up around him, with the blinding brilliance of the Burst Stream pouring from their open mouths. The cards might be destroyed, as the Time Wizard might have been. But to see them live, truly live, for that moment--and to remind Kaiba himself, at the last, what he had done, what he had ended. So that he would realize what he had become, if he had forgotten; so he would suffer, if he remembered, in that final instant.

"I will do it," Kaiba said, and almost laughed again. "Yugi, do you really think I'm too weak to be able to kill myself?"

"No. I wouldn't think that. Though you'll never be weak, Seto-kun," Yugi said, shaking his head. "But even so, I don't believe that you could kill Mokuba."

"Mokuba--" It caught in Kaiba's throat, but he forced it out, "Mokuba is dead. In this time. My experiment killed--"

But he stopped, because Yugi was looking at him, staring at him, wider-eyed than any adult, any old man, should be able to be, and it wasn't shock so much as sudden flooding understanding, so compassionate it might be pity. "No," Yugi said. "He told you, didn't he, Hiroto-kun told you what happened. Everything that happened."

"Kaiba," Kaiba rasped, "he said it was Kaiba, who destroyed the cards, who--it was Kaiba--"

"It was Kaiba," Yugi said. "Kaiba Mokuba. President of Kaiba Corporation, which he inherited after his older brother was declared dead. God, Seto-kun, I'm sorry. Hiroto-kun wouldn't have told you, he didn't know who you really were, he didn't understand."

"Mokuba," Kaiba said. "Mokuba didn't die."

"No." Yugi shook his head. "He didn't. He was injured in the explosion, but not severely, he got himself out of the hospital the same day to go back to your lab. He was waiting for you, Seto-kun. He told us about the experiment you had been doing with the cards, with the Time Wizard. And he knew you should have appeared again, by then, but you hadn't, so he waited.

"He kept waiting for you, long after you were officially declared dead, and he was acting president of KaibaCorp--he refused to accept the formal position until years after that. He was so young, but the company trusted him, and he managed it, he knew what he was doing, right from the start."

Of course he did, Kaiba might have said, if he could have found his voice. His brother had been beside him from the first day he had become CEO; he knew everything Kaiba did.

"It was exactly a year and a day after the accident, that Kaiba Corporation bought Industrial Illusions. Mokuba bought it, and gave the orders to shut it down. I think that might have been the day he decided you weren't coming back. I don't really know; by then he wasn't speaking to any of us much anymore. And everything that happened after that, Hiroto-kun told you already."

Had told him, but Kaiba hadn't heard. Hadn't understood, but it had to be a lie, now that he knew. A hoax, a trick, a joke. "No. He wouldn't. Mokuba couldn't--he's not me. He'd never do that. Become that."

"He won't," Yugi said, simply.

Kaiba stared at him, surprised to see the shallow lines of Yugi's face fold up into a smile, small but genuinely felt.

"That's why I'm here, Seto-kun. That's why I had to find you. I've been waiting for you, all these years. Hoping that when you appeared, I could find you, so I could give you this."

From his pocket, Yugi withdrew a small, flat, metal case, almost identical to the one Kaiba had brought. "Even Hiroto-kun has never seen this. I've never told him or anyone else. Only his father knew I had it, because he gave it to me. Less than a year before he died--he knew the danger they were in, and asked me to keep it safe."

Sliding up the metal lid, he thumbed out the card inside, his hands still moving with a practiced player's dexterity. For a single instant he gazed down at the card. Maybe the last one he had seen in years; his expression was so wistful it was painful.

Then he handed the card to Kaiba, who took it with barely a glance at the picture. He didn't need to read its name. He knew it could only be the Time Wizard.

Kaiba held the card so tightly between his fingers he almost bent it, resisting the urge to crumple it into a worthless ball and throw it down. "This was your hope? Everything was riding on this? It's useless. It will only bring me back to where I was," he told Yugi. "To the lab, in the middle of that accident. Back to the beginning of this. It won't change anything."

"No--it will change everything," Yugi said. "Seto-kun, don't you understand? This is the world you made. The future you brought into existence, by coming here instead of being there. You didn't die in the experiment--you just never returned. Because you haven't returned yet. You're here instead, but you need to go back."

"How do you know--"

"Kaiba--that is, Mokuba told me. The first months after, he was so hopeful. He explained the whole experiment to us in detail. He was sure there had just been a glitch, he thought it might have been a bug in one of the simulation programs. He was positive you'd be back any minute." Yugi shook his head, the motion slowed by sorrow. "He never lost faith in you, Seto-kun. Don't think that he did. I think even now he still believes in you. He just forgot how to believe in anything else. He couldn't blame you, so he blamed the cards instead.

"At the time none of us believed it. We thought you were gone for good. But later I started to realize what could have happened, what could have gone wrong. If you'd lost your Time Wizard, and had no way of getting back, then there would be a way to help you. It was the best chance, our best hope. Though after so long I'd almost given up--but then Hiroto-kun told me you were in his shop, and I knew the time had finally come.

"The moment you use that card, the instant you go back, then none of this--none of the last thirty-two years--ever happens. That's the hope in this card, that's why Jounouchi-kun entrusted it to me. This is what we've been waiting for, all this time. To make sure this time isn't, at all."

Kaiba looked down at the Time Wizard clasped in his fingers. "You think this all can be ended. Wiped clean." He shifted his gaze to stare past the card at his old rival. "Yugi, in Battle City, didn't you tell me that I couldn't truly create my future if I destroyed my past? The road we walk to the future is built on the past we've lived. But you've waited thirty years to destroy the future, for the sake of changing the past."

Yugi nodded. "You've never believed in destiny, I know, Seto-kun. I don't know if I do myself, even now, if I really can believe that there's anything that's truly meant to be. But I do know this--that there's some things that should never be.

"You said it yourself, that it never could have happened. You asked me why we did nothing. Why I didn't stop this. I couldn't stop this. I couldn't stop him, Seto-kun, not what he became. We tried, all of us. We all did we could for Mokuba, but in the end it wasn't enough. None of us could be what he needed. None of us could be his brother."

"Yugi..."

But as Kaiba spoke, the colored lights flickered, and then overhead lights clicked on, bathing the shadowed nooks and corners in bright harsh spotlights. The storm of electronic noise died abruptly as screens and holograms across the arcade froze, all paused at once, and then that silence was overwhelmed by the voices of all the gamers swelling in protest.

"Hurry, Seto-kun," Yugi said.

"What is this--"

"He knows I'm here. I would've been marked the moment I entered this building," Yugi said, not nervously, but urgently. "This is already longer than I was expecting it to take, he must have been busy."

"What do you--" Kaiba realized the buzz of the crowd was abruptly falling quiet around them, every complaint and question going mute, one by one, but for a few whispers, a few fingers pointing to the entrance.

"Use the card, Seto-kun," Yugi said, in a way that was neither commanding nor begging but demanded all the same. "Use it now. Go back to where you belong. And see that you make sure this now never is, and never will be."

Kaiba stared at him, stared at the Time Wizard. He raised his wrist with the card disk, and Yugi nodded, naked relief in his eyes.

"Yugi," said a voice behind him, a man's baritone that Kaiba didn't recognize.

But the look on Yugi's face, staring past him toward the arcade's doors, that sorrowing look he couldn't mistake. Even as Kaiba fitted the card into the slot, he turned around.

A man had entered the arcade, stood spotlit in a bright perfect circle. A tall man, Kaiba's height or close to, though with broader shoulders under his white double-breasted suit. Short black hair, pure sable not yet started to thin or silver, and a handsome, square-jawed face, though the illumination picked out a faint scar marring one cheek, the plastic sheen of an old burn.

A stranger's countenance, and yet in some ways it might have been the face Kaiba saw in the mirror. Or rather the face he used to see, the mask that had been shattered at Death-T that he had never tried to restore. Not quite the features themselves, but the uncompromising set of his chin, the calm brutality of his smile, that he couldn't help but recognize.

But gray eyes, instead of blue, and he knew that particular shade better than his own. Those gray eyes moved from Yugi to fix on him, and narrowed as his own would, and then widened, opened enough that even meters away, Kaiba could see the disbelief in them, and the madness, and the anguish.

It froze him, paralyzed him, to have those eyes stare at him like that, and for there to be nothing he could do, nothing that could make right what was wrong in that man's dead smile.

"Seto-kun," Yugi said, behind him, loud enough to carry throughout the unnaturally still arcade. "Please."

And the face of the man staring at him changed, subtly. Still a stranger's face, but suddenly in that stranger's too familiar eyes, desperate, helpless, overjoyed, there was hope. The same hope Kaiba had seen in Yugi's smile, that had been in the voice of the blond man at the shop; the hope that he now held between his fingers, pushing into the slot to activate its power.

As the card slid into the disk, and the bright fire flickered up around him, Kaiba saw the gray-eyed man open his mouth, saw his lips begin to shape the cry--

"Nii-sama!"

White tongues of flame. White walls. And gray eyes, staring, huge with worry.

Kaiba tore the burning duel disk off his wrist, threw it behind him as he dove forward. He caught Mokuba up in his arms and rolled with him, tucking his little brother's head against his chest and curling around him to shield him from the explosive blast. Against his back he felt a burst of heat and pressure, and a thud like a giant's stomp shuddered the walls of the lab.

Then it was quiet. Kaiba opened his eyes, as Mokuba struggled from his arms to sit up, then grabbed his shoulder, shook him urgently. "Nii-sama! Nii-sama! Are you okay? Nii-sama!"

Kaiba forced himself up onto his elbows, fighting back disoriented nausea. "Mokuba?"

"I'm fine, Nii-sama," Mokuba said, "I'm not hurt--are you okay?" He tugged at Kaiba's sleeve where the disk had been strapped, the material now a little scorched, flecked with ash. "Your coat! Did you get burned? What happened?"

Kaiba looked over his shoulder. The disk was mostly intact, insofar as it was still in a single piece, but the metal had been twisted like a dog's chew toy, a plume of smoke spiraling up from the remains. He wondered if there would still be a card--or two--in the middle slot. Probably not. A reaction that violent was what he would expect of simultaneous dual occupation of a single space and point in time. The two Time Wizards canceling each other out, like matter and antimatter.

He supposed he owed Yugi's mediocre duelist friend an undamaged card. Though the gifting of it might be difficult to explain. Maybe he should wait and make it a wedding present.

"The readings went crazy, as soon as you started putting the card in. There was this super-huge energy spike," Mokuba explained in a rapid patter, pushing up Kaiba's sleeve to check his arm for injury and sighing with relief when he saw there was none. "None of our computer simulations predicted anything like that, maybe I missed a variable somewhere. Your theory has to be right, I know it is."

Most of it had been, except for the parts that were entirely wrong. But he could blame that on modern science's flawed hypotheses concerning the immutable nature of the time stream.

Kaiba resisted the urge to take out his deck and see if the cards would be recognized. Mokuba already looked worried; no need to make him further doubt his brother's sanity. It was going to be hard enough, the next time he saw Yugi, to try not to think of the last time. Of that hope vivid in his aged man's face.

Odd that he could so clearly remember several hours that had never occurred. Would never occur. Will never occur.

There's some things that should never be.

"What happened, Nii-sama?" Mokuba asked again.

Kaiba took hold of Mokuba's shoulder, studied his face, flushed with excitement, but unmarked. No burns. Just bright gray eyes in a round young face, watching him as closely as he watched them. No pain or anything but eager curiosity tempered by concern, though that fear was fading as he met his big brother's eyes.

"Nothing, Mokuba," Kaiba said, and smiled at his brother, putting the last of it to rest. "Nothing happened at all."

Thank you so much for reading, and reviewing, those who have - my sis and I had great fun hearing your reactions, we would love to know if the story satisfied. Hope you enjoyed the ride, and please do join me in my next venture!