Disclaimer: I do not own Blue Exorcist
Warnings: Mephisto being Mephisto
AN: Just read the volume where Mephisto is revealed to be Samael, King of Time, and I did not see that one coming. Upon realizing that Mephisto has mad time skillz, my brain almost immediately started thinking up all the things the crazy manipulative Time Lord could do with said skillz. This is the result.
Plot Revision
Mephisto Pheles, throughout his long and illustrious career as a Demon King, had imagined himself to have many roles in the grand scheme of things. His favorite flight of fancy was that the world was a chessboard and he a chess master, skillfully manipulating all the pieces around him in a duel against destiny, never stopping until he emerged victorious in the end. Another one was the fallacy that he was a playwright and all the people were actors on the opening night of his magnum opus, each one taking their cues perfectly as they performed exactly as he directed them to.
Of course, those were merely fantasies, nothing but castles in the air to ruminate over when things grew dull, as they inevitably did. In reality, the best metaphor for his lot in life was that the universe was a badly written manga serial, and he was its bored and weary editor. The mangaka who wrote it was absolutely awful, with no sense of pacing or timing, a bad habit of leaving plot lines open, and an inability to produce more than a few compelling characters at a time. Mephisto's job was to correct the mangaka's work, to add symbolism and intrigue, to make it look like there was actually method behind the madness.
It was all very simple, often enough too simple. He was the King of Time, after all. If he saw a plot point in desperate need of fixing, he merely willed himself back, whether it be by a second or a century or an epoch, and did whatever was necessary to improve on the mangaka's work. He didn't even have to do much most of the time. A butterfly flapping it wings in China can, after all, cause a hurricane in the Caribbean. He should know, he had caused such a thing to happen once or twice.
Of course, not everything was as changeable as he liked to believe. The mangaka was very stubborn about some events, and refused point blank to change a few of them, no matter how many times or ways he altered them. Archduke Franz Ferdinand had to die, the Mongols could never reach Japan, candy canes needed to be that uncomfortable hook shape, and he had no clue why. He was merely the editor, who was he to question it?
Mephisto sighed and rubbed at his temples, trying to stave off his rapidly-forming stress headache as the Grigori yet again sentenced Rin Okumura to execution. As Rin yelled and shrieked and burst into flames as he was dragged away to his death, Mephisto was already half way through figuring out where he went wrong and coming up with new revisions that would hopefully give this plot line a better outcome. He couldn't help but chuckle at the fickleness of the mangaka.
"Well," he muttered to himself midst the screaming mob of Exorcists and Vatican officials hungry for Rin's blood, "At least he managed to live through the Impure King arc this time around."
And with a smile and a thought, time rewound around him and he found himself in a church a decade and a half earlier, chatting with his good friend Shirou about the man's newly acquired children. Mephisto jumped into the conversation with ease, having already had it a dozen times before. This time though, this time would be different.
