Duke Devlin

Name: Duke Devlin

Age: 16

Nationality: Japanese-American

Special Skills: Inventing games

Likes: Classic cars, dice, Serenity Kawai-Wheeler, David Tanaka

Best Friend: His store manager, David Tanaka

Image Songs: Human by The Killers

Where Will You Go? by Evanescence (non-EP version only)

Fallen by Sarah MacLachlan

Background: Duke comes from a union between an American man and a Japanese woman. His mother went back to Japan when he was a young child, unable to take the madness of her husband. She left Duke with the man, and he grew up being poisoned by the man's illogical hatred against Solomon Muto and his insistence that friendship isn't real.

The only normalcy he enjoyed was when he escaped next-door to David's house. David welcomed him as a friend and brother, but Duke could not bring himself to acknowledge David as either one due to his father's teachings.

He spent a lot of time creating a game using the characters from Duel Monsters and tried to go into partnership with Pegasus. This was delayed due to Pegasus's illness after the loss of the Millennium Eye. Bitter and angry from that and his father's influence, Duke briefly tried to break up Yugi and Joey's friendship when he met them, but soon abandoned that when he started to realize they truly did care about each other.

His father had been grooming him for years to take revenge against Solomon Muto's grandson Yugi, which he reluctantly went along with despite David's concerns and protests. During the Dungeon Dice match against Yugi, however, he found that he could not hate the kid and his father angrily disowned him and shattered the Millennium Puzzle. When the father tried to take revenge on Yugi himself, a malfunction with the Devil's Boardgame aged the house into a collapse and everyone had to flee. But, overcome with hatred, Mr. Devlin refused to be rescued by Duke and Yugi and allowed himself to fall with the house.

Duke focused on rebuilding his life with the new store he had opened and trying to open his heart to friendship. Finding himself inadvertently excluded by Yugi's group unless he invited himself or the bad guy decided to involve him, he mostly hung out with David, although he also worked on getting Serenity to fall for him. He succeeded in that, although they recognize they're too young for anything serious quite yet.

While trying to stop drug smugglers who had started operating from the game store, Duke and David got in over their heads and David was killed. Duke could not deal with it and eventually tried to find a way to bring him back to life. He finally succeeded, but the experience changed them and Serenity. They came out of it much more mature and serious. Life is finally getting back to normal, but the next weird thing is always just around the corner....

Personality: Duke is smooth and cool. He previously flirted a lot with the girls, but it was a facade for his loneliness and he stopped that after meeting Serenity. He is generally one of the most realistic and cynical of Yugi's friends.

Duke is also quite a forgiving person. He always saw the good man in his father and not just the madness and hatred. He applies the same feelings to Pegasus, and still cares about him despite not idolizing him anymore. David has noted it's an odd contrast with Duke's cynical nature, but he likes it. Duke is a far kinder and more vulnerable person than he generally ever wishes to appear as.

Differences between the timelines: The old Duke was based solely on the anime version, but only because I was unfamiliar with the manga intro. I never liked the cheerleader nonsense or the dog suit cruelty and was thrilled to find Duke very different and more sympathetic in his manga intro. It's just about the only thing I like better in the manga.

Since his family life was not known in the anime version, the old timeline had me give him a backstory that was pretty dark, with his father being an abusive man who eventually killed his wife while Duke tried and failed to stop it. Duke was then raised by two aunts. I always felt there was more to Duke than the anime intro led us to believe, since otherwise he was a fairly mature person and was often the realist on the adventures.

Briefly, when I initially wrote Lead Me Through the Fire and Close Your Eyes, Clear Your Heart, I'd aged the characters up slightly so Serenity wouldn't be as young as in canon. But I really prefer the canon ages, so in the current timeline, they're aged back down, although those stories have still happened. Within the verse, it seems to be a side-effect of Duke's tampering with time and everyone's memories are sketchy of much of what happened that was erased in the first timeline aside from David's death.