A/N: Written for the 5Ds bingo - the non-flash version with #050 - left, and for the Advent Calendar 2015,

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A Radiating Thought from Beyond

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It won't be possible. Remember, I know the future. It destroyed you - and, in the end, it didn't save mankind at all.

By choosing this path, you've thrown your own life away.

You made that decision once already, by coming to face me in the sky.

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Two years after we met, you stabilised the reactor, or so you thought. Science can predict a little of the future but not nearly as much as someone who's lived through it himself. So you and your team - or maybe just your team, if you kept my words in your heart - thought it would last forever and I knew it wouldn't.

It was a shame it would do worse, because, as I wound up proving to what remained, you were a very valuable part of the world.

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Synchro summoning continued. New summoning methods started to come out, but they didn't remove the old. And the reactor was improved - faster output, less waste - but no matter how slow the upward climb became, they'd hit the top eventually. Just not in your lifetime.

You never were the sort of person who could sacrifice a world for your own bliss, but in refusing to accept a future set in stone, you did it anyway.

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One year later, your friends have been gone for a while and all you know is a somewhat lonely feeling in your heart, and not for long. Because they drop by to visit, they phone every week (or sometimes more frequently), you see a few of them on television featuring in pro duels and they see you as well, defending your title as the King of Riding Games, in exhibition matches - and most of those are against Jack because it's the perfect time for him to try and beat you again, isn't it?

He'll never beat you. His name will fade out of history far more quickly. You on the other hand will be immortalised. And not just because you die the undefeated champion, but because the record of you defeating me was captured by the cameras, by the reporters, by the legends aching to be formed.

You'll die first though. Ever since you flew up to meet me, you've known it will come...but you still have no concept of when, or how, or what you've done to beckon death to you.

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Five more years. Your friend Aki has graduated from medical school but she's still inexperienced, still new, and suddenly you find yourself in need of a doctor.

She's visiting anyway, and she takes a look at you and doesn't find much out of the ordinary. She won't. Not at this point. Some more years down the track - and it will be too late by then.

Or haven't you noticed how few scientists from the reactor project live to a ripe old age?

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Your old word colleagues are almost dead, and you try and find a way to help them but they slip away nonetheless. You don't realise it's not something a doctor can cure - not now anyway, so long after the fact. You still don't realise...but even if you had, it's already too late. Already five years too late.

You also don't realise the dizzy spells and the general lethargy that clings to you has the same cause.

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You finally pull the pieces together. Actually, Aki was the one to do it, wasn't she? But the world won't remember that. They'll only remember your connection, because you're the only immortalised one.

And, perhaps, the only reason Aki worked it out to begin with was because of you. Because of you, the Signers, your father...and the reactor.

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It's too late now. You're sick and you're never getting better and maybe you're starting to understand what you've done to yourself, what time you've wasted, what lives you've unintentionally cut short. And it's the last of those that grate on you the worst, isn't it - although you're well aware the reactor would have blown away the world without that intervention.

A necessary evil. Like the Dark Signers were a necessary evil. Like the four of us were a necessary evil - but we're not. We're different, because, in the end, you haven't subverted the future at all.

It's a closed loop, and you've acted out your role perfectly.

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I heard your legend. I thought you, the real you, might have been able to save the world.

I'm sorry. I tried to save you.

I thought we might actually accomplish something if it was you.