Disclaimer – Vesperia and Madoka Magica are completely not mine.

A/N – I saw somewhere a short story putting Flynn in Madoka's place and Yuri in Homura's… but I wanted to do it the other way around. ;)

Inspiration – If Flynn's fancy armor and Yuri's super pretty armor were Magical 'person' outfits (Estelle's would be her Magical Girl outfit from the coliseum, Rita's would be the one she gets for the Miska degree, and Karol's is the golden armor that Nan gave him)

Revisionist History

Timeline One

Yuri peered into the room hesitantly, frowning when he saw that, just like the nurses had warned him, there was no change. Letting out a sigh, he slipped into the room and settled on to the chair by the bed; his backpack was dropped carelessly beside him, not quite yet ready to start his homework. Instead he simply sat there, staring at the person lying in the bed.

Flynn is too still, his hair flat and his eyes shut. There's an IV hookup and a soft 'beep beep' from the heart monitor. It's been nearly a week and the doctors clearly aren't expecting Flynn to wake up any time soon.

Or at all.

There had been a car accident. They'd been on their way home from a party late Saturday night and Flynn was driving. They were seniors this year and Finath didn't mind them staying out late on weekends anymore. But one drunk driver later and… Flynn was in a coma, Yuri's right arm had been sprained, and the driver of the other car was barely scratched up for all that he was behind bars.

It wasn't fair.

Not for the first time, Yuri found himself burying his face against the sheets on Flynn's hospital bed and began to cry.

"I just wish you'd wake up..."

Outside the hospital room, a small white creature watched in satisfaction.

Timeline Two

Yuri peered into the room hesitantly, expecting there to be no change, just like the nurses had warned him. He wasn't expecting Flynn to be standing in the middle of the room, very much awake.

"Flynn!" Yuri exclaimed, his backpack dropping to the ground as Yuri rushed in to throw his arms around his friend's shoulders.

"Yuri?" Flynn's voice shook as he returned the hug. "Oh, god… Yuri… Yuri, you're alive..." Flynn sobbed.

"I'm fine," Yuri assured him. "Barely banged up by the crash at all."

"Crash? Right… the crash..."

Timeline Twenty-Six

"I know this sounds crazy," Flynn said, racking his fingers through his hair, leaving the strands sticking up everywhere. "But I've been rewinding time over and over, trying to stop us all from dying when this witch attacks the town."

"Okay..." Yuri bit his lower lip nervously. "I honestly want to believe you, Flynn. I can tell you believe all this, but..."

"But what if its all in my head, something my mind came up with while I was comatose?" Flynn filled in.

Yuri nodded, feeling miserable. Flynn waking up was a miracle, but at the same time the blond was still suffering. This wasn't what Yuri had been wishing for at all.

"If I show you a witch, then you'll believe me," Flynn responded, confident.

Timeline Twenty-Seven

Flynn's ability to stop time (or rewind back to a certain point, apparently) is wonder to behold. It almost looked like Flynn was teleporting out of the way at the last second when really he was freezing time and walking away.

Flynn is amazing. Yuri always knew that, but watching Flynn fight the witch… it's something else entirely. He's clad in white and blue armor and is utterly beautiful, dazzling… and Yuri wants to hide his eyes in fear. Flynn shouldn't be shouldering these burdens on his own.

Yuri wishes he could help.

Timeline Thirty-Three

Kyubey explained to Yuri that his race re-purposed the Grief Seeds to power a machine capable of delaying the heat death of the universe. Which, admittedly, made very little sense to Yuri.

"The universe isn't going to die for billions of years, right?"

Oh, millions of billions of years. I'm not sure your species even has a word for a number that big. Kyubey responded absently.

"Right. So, how much time have the Grief Seeds added to the universe?"

Nearly a million years so far. Kyubey tilted his head to the side, most people don't think to ask these questions.

"Well, I've got a few more to ask. Where do the Witches come from?"

Timeline Thirty-Four

Yuri's stomach flips over and he has to run for the bathroom when he learns where Witches come from.

Someday Flynn will give in to despair and become a Witch, just like every Magical before him. Like every other Magical in town will one day. Estelle, Rita, and Karol…

It's selfish of him, he knows, but as sad as Yuri is for the others, it's Flynn's fate that makes Yuri sick. He cares about the others, but he loves Flynn.

Timeline Forty

Yuri taps the Grief Seed against Flynn's Soul Gem. "You have to promise to keep going. I know it's hard and I've put so much on you… but every time around we learn something new, something important. I know it seems impossible, but we're going to make it."

"I'm just so tired," Flynn whispered, curling up against Yuri's side.

"I know." Yuri dropped a kiss on the top of Flynn's head. "I'm sorry. This is all my fault, isn't it? You don't say it, but… I must have made a wish, the first time around..."

"It's not your fault," Flynn insisted. "It's not. If it's anyone's fault..."

"Too bad shooting him won't make a difference."

Timeline Forty-Seven

"Is it just humans that are being forced to sacrifice our teenagers without our consent or are you fucking over other species too?"

Yuri figures he probably shouldn't be interrogating Kyubey while drunk – he shouldn't be drunk at all, he's too damn young for this – but Flynn will reset everything and his first hangover will wind up disappearing into the realm of never happened soon enough.

Very few species have the emotional capacity to create Witches, Kyubey eyes Yuri warily as he finishes off another beer. He'd tried to correct Yuri's 'language' regarding whether or not Kyubey was actually being exploitative earlier and got treated to an explanation about 'lying by omission' and how, whether or not Kyubey liked it, he every time he left out information a potential Magical needed to make a genuinely informed decision, he was lying by omission. By claiming he wasn't a liar because he only lied by omission instead of through the actual words, Kyubey was also lying to himself.

Kyubey gave up arguing not because he agreed, but because he figured that arguing was pointless by now.

"So how many species are you exploiting."

Twenty-seven.

"That million years you've com… comp…" Yuri frowned and sighed. "Is that from all of those worlds, or just ours."

All of them.

Yuri picks up a kitchen knife and stabs Kyubey to death. When another Kyubey comes by to eat the corpse, Yuri stabs that one to death too.

When Flynn comes home from collecting weapons to fight Walpurgisnacht with, he pretends not to see the dead bodies on the floor.

Timeline Fifty-Four

Estelle is killed fighting a witch. Rita's there and witnesses the whole thing.

Technically Rita kills the witch… by transforming into a witch of her own.

Flynn has to kill Rita.

Yuri watches and wishes that wishing could bring something other than suffering.

Timeline Fifty-Nine

"You actually believe that, don't you?" Yuri asked with a mocking smile. "That's kind of pathetic, that you've lied to yourself so much that you actually believe it now."

I don't follow.

"Well, first, you do feel emotions, Kyubey. Perhaps not as strongly as humans, but you do feel them. You feel fear. You're afraid of the end of the universe." Yuri snickered. "So you've come up with this convoluted system to sacrifice other races to put off that heat death for as long as possible. But your fear blinds you to the fact that by creating more and more powerful witches, eventually you'll create one capable of destroying the very universe you claim you want to save, thus shortening the universe's life instead of prolonging it. Your species actions are ridiculously self-destructive and if you weren't so terrified of entropy, you'd have seen it for yourself already.

"Only emotion can blind a person to facts that run contrary to their preferred world view so thoroughly."

A witch of such unimaginable power is a possibility… Kyubey conceded uncomfortably. We should be able to contain the threat before it gets that big.

"So you say," Yuri murmured. "I think you've deluded yourself so thoroughly that the witch with that sort of power could be staring you in the face and you'd still never see them coming." Kyubey didn't respond, so Yuri shrugged and moved on to his next question, writing down for Flynn anything relevent he'd need to remember for the next loop.

Timeline Sixty-Five

Yuri asks Kyubey, "you have to fulfill every wish made as part of the contract, right? No take backs just because you dislike the wish?"

Once we've offered the wish, we can't take that offer back. But if the wish is unreasonable then we cannot grant it.

"Define what you mean by unreasonable," Yuri tells him, knowing that he has to ask and ask and ask to get anything useful from the damned thing.

It has to be something doable using the power of the Magical's innate power. Flynn's love for you made him powerful enough to bend time, and even transcend it to some degree. You… your potential is amazing, Yuri. You could do so much more than him.

You could be a force of nature.

Timeline Seventy-Three

You could affect your solar system.

Timeline Eighty

You could change the entire galaxy.

Timeline Ninety-One

You could remake the universe.

Timeline Ninety-Three

Yuri waits until Flynn is distracted by Walpurgisnacht and then approaches Kyubey.

"I have a wish."

Very well. What is your wish?

"I wish that your race had chosen a different method for extending the life of the universe that didn't involve exploiting species capable of feeling emotion and instead made Earth a protected world safe from the manipulation of any species not indigenous to it, including your own."

What? No! But Kyubey cannot stop the process. He had already given his consent for a wish, after all.

Any wish.

The contract snaps into existence, compelling the creature to reach into Yuri's chest. This is treason against the wish! Kyubey shrieks, frustration actually showing through the creature's expression, the first change in him that Yuri's ever seen.

Yuri thinks seeing that look on Kyubey's face is worth the pain of having his soul extracted. "It could have been worse," Yuri informs him coldly. "I could have wished your race had never existed. Consider, for a moment, what a highly emotional species will do to survive when being manipulated towards self-destruction? If you're willing to kill us for the sake of your own survival, why shouldn't we consider the reverse a viable option?"

We never should have come here...

Reality is already unwinding as Yuri glimpses his gleaming red Soul Gem and the armor in golds and reds and dark grays that would have been his Magical outfit, if there had been any time for him to be one.

"Yuri! What did you do?" Flynn demanded, breathless as he breaks away from fighting the witch.

"I made a wish that would make it impossible for any human to have ever become a Magical. Even us," Yuri smiled tiredly, reaching over to take Flynn's hand in his own. "I'm sorry it took me so long. I was just so afraid of losing you. But even a world where you never wake up is better than making you continue to suffer for my selfishness."

Final Timeline

It takes several months before Flynn finally wakes up from his coma. But he's not the same and Yuri doesn't know what to do.

At first he's okay with Flynn's constant clinging; Yuri's clingy too, after months of wondering if Flynn was even really still in there. But there's something about Flynn's clinginess that… doesn't sit right.

During the first big thunderstorm after Flynn comes home from the hospital, Yuri gets the story out of Flynn.

"It wasn't real, though," Flynn says, curling up against Yuri's side. "It couldn't have been… could it?"

Yuri wonders. "Every time you'd tell me everything we'd learned about the system the last time around; what worked, what didn't, what the consequences of the different wishes I could make were… that I was getting more potential power with each run through..." Yuri wants to say it sounds impossible. But somehow, he's not sure.

"If it were real, I may have altered the projected heat death of the universe by a million years," Yuri finally says. "Do you think that was the right thing to do?"

"They were exploiting us without our permission," Flynn murmured tiredly, jolting at the sound of thunder.

Yuri wishes he could ease Flynn's fears, but he knows that's going to take time.

"Every life is important," Flynn added quietly. "They had no right to deem ours as worth less than others just because we think differently from them. Just because we have emotions doesn't make us obligated to use those emotions the way they think is best."

Yuri doesn't know what to say to that. "So, out of all those timelines… did I ever tell you why I wished for you to wake up?"

"No..." Flynn sounded puzzled. Probably thinking that, with their friendship, the answer was obvious. And maybe it was, but there was more to it than that.

"Good." Yuri smiled and held Flynn tighter. "I did it for the most selfish of all reasons. I did it because I love you and I wanted to be with you again."

Flynn's wide-eyed look of shock giving way to a joyful smile and reply of 'I love you too' makes Yuri hopeful that, whether those events were real or the result of Flynn's time in a coma, Flynn will recover from his trauma.

Yuri will be with him every step of the way.

That planet is off limits.

No one dares ask why.

A/N - Yuri's more ruthless and logical than Madoka, so he's less likely to buy Kyubey's BS about Magicals being necessary for humanity's evolution and more likely to find it both ludicrous and insulting. He's far more likely to assume they're exploiting those who have an impossible desire and a good balance of intelligence, imagination, and desperation. Also, he's likely to be utterly pissed that anyone has ever had to put up with this and want to put an end to the whole thing. Not just create a universe without witches, but a universe without the system that leads to witches. As to what the new system Kyubey's race came up with to prolong the life of the universe, well... *shrug*