Winds of Change

By Rhino7

Disclaimer: I don't own Yu-Gi-Oh!, its characters or storyline. This oneshot is mine, as is the character of Burt. This is my first delve into Yu-Gi-Oh fiction. I've tried my hand at it before, but never posted any of that mess. So I decided to post this mess instead. Seto Kaiba is probably one of my favorite anime characters of all time, for his sheer jerkass-itude. So, I hope this to be the precursor to more YGO stories that will be Kaiba or Mokuba focused. Constructive feedback is welcome and appreciated! Please be gentle.

..:-X-:..

In the corporate world, these sorts of things are not uncommon.

Buy-outs, bail-outs, mergers, espionage, reorganizing, takeovers, stock plummets, stock ascensions, company restructurings. As a veteran of the world of business, it was theorized that a company was a self-correcting system. Like an organic body, it would only take so much abuse and so much tolerance of a virus, a cancer, an intruder, until the body would finally build up the momentum and the strength to lash out, strike back, and erase the threat.

Sometimes the threat would overpower the body. Sometimes the effort spent against it would cause the body to self destruct. It was a risk; but what is life without its risks?

Only the difference of multi-billion dollar net worth.

And the first person outside the situation who caught on was a timid little assistant to Kaiba Corporation's head chief financial officer named Burt Hanson.

KaibaCorp had been a publicly-traded company since he had been hired over ten years ago. Shares were issued, purchased, sold, and exchanged in rapidfire transactions in all sorts of package combinations. Monitoring the ownership of the business was an impossible task for the large department of financial analysts. It changed every day. Percentages and dividends and claims were enough to keep the department in over its head on a daily basis.

But something had been changing over the past few weeks, and it was Burt who spotted it first.

At first, it looked like a miscalculation. Some clerical error in the bookkeeping offices. He was a fully licensed and practicing certified public accountant, specifically assigned to KaibaCorp finances for the past ten years. So he was familiar with the cyclical ebb and flow of the shares of the company. In and out, up and down, back and forth. It was like the ocean tides.

However, rogue waves occur occasionally.

For the past few weeks leading up to the takeover, Burt and some of his colleagues in the department began to notice a more…directed…movement of the shares. Instead of the normal ebb and flow, they were all just…flowing…Out of KaibaCorp.

Through numerous small charities and independent organizations, the shares of the international weapons manufacturing company were being bought up. Publicly-traded meant just that: traded publicly in all viable sectors of the market, but this…this looked…orchestrated.

It was highly unlikely that so many different organizations and businesses would suddenly all begin to buy the authorized shares of KaibaCorp. CEO and founder Gozaburo Kaiba was the largest shareholder with 25 percent. The board of directors had among them 20 percent. After adopting those two boys, four percent had been distributed evenly between them. That left 51 percent available to the public for purchasing. And it was all being eaten up by these charities.

That was Anomaly One.

Anomaly Two began some weeks later, when larger scale businesses and organizations began to buy up the shares of the weapons juggernaut just as rapidly. One of the assistants who worked with Burt noted that it looked like a game of tug of war…only there was no clear reason for this sudden competition, and the opponents were a mystery.

Anomaly Three hit just days before the takeover. The entire board of directors abruptly sold their shares—under the radar but not hidden from the analysts' eyes—to some unnamed investor. Then, just as abruptly, all of the buying by the charities and international organizations stopped, as though that 20 percent changing hands had detonated something…something massive.

The countdown had officially begun.

"Six hours and no change at all." An employee on Burt Hanson's right exclaimed.

"How is that possible?" Burt stared at the frozen figures on the computer monitor.

He grasped the sides of the computer and shook the screen, but there was no change. This was no glitch.

"How can no one be selling or buying the shares?" He felt himself begin to sweat.

"There are no more left." His associate, a petite woman named Carol, looked startled. "Mr. Kaiba himself holds 49 percent total, and aside from the four percent under his sons, the other 47 percent is just…spread out."

This wasn't possible.

As soon as the data was pushed out of the printer, Burt snatched up the report and hurried toward the door to the main office.

"Burt—" Carol sounded surprised at his sudden urgency.

"This isn't theoretically possible." He threw over his shoulder, "Something must have happened. I have to tell Mr. Kaiba about this."

For over 100,000 shares to remain stalemated in the same hands for so long—or at all for that matter—was about as imaginable as the world turning backwards on its axis. Businesses simply didn't operate this way. Either these companies holding the ownership shares of KaibaCorp were all, as one, in a collective, simply holding onto them…or they were being instructed not to sell.

And the kind of force that could keep hundreds of companies from making common business decisions was a force that the CEO and President of KaibaCorp needed to be aware of.

Burt barely reached the lobby of the main department.

It was comparably darker outside than it had been that morning. Even though it was nearly two o'clock in the afternoon, the clouds were compressing together and casting a shadow over Domino. The drought that had overtaken the city and surrounding areas was in its sixth week. No rain, no storms, and no real relief that was material. The sudden storm that was building that day only added to the other worldly atmosphere of the situation.

Under normal circumstances, coming across a 16 year old kid was nothing interesting. The same situation in KaibaCorp wasn't exactly earth-shattering either. Mr. Kaiba had taken to having his elder adopted son Seto accompany him during business: conferences, meetings, supervising. The teenager had even been put in charge of a few small projects as managerial tests. So it wasn't unusual to see Seto Kaiba around KaibaCorp.

And, if anything, most of the employees welcomed the idea of having him present around the business. Departments were just better if he had gotten his hands on them. Inventory turnover doubled. Marketing tactics became sharper. Public relations did a small climb between the dips and falls when Mr. Kaiba's dominating and snarling personality didn't garner much public approval. Where Gozaburo's voice was harsh and growling, his adopted son's was smooth and icy. Above and beyond that, the kid was just smart. Brilliant even. One could tell that just by looking at him.

And spotting him entering the lobby now, Burt stopped short. An idea clicked into place.

…Holy…God…

That was it.

None of the other employees reacted as Burt did. A casual 'good morning, sir' or 'pleasant surprise to see you this morning' was tossed here and there as Burt stood, struck dumb, while Seto Kaiba walked across the lobby toward the elevator. He acknowledged them with the same emotionless professionalism that he always did.

Burt tore his data report open and hastily scanned the figures.

Five percent here.

Ten percent there.

Six percent on that exchange.

Another six percent from that other transaction.

Figure in the board of directors' twenty percent.

Add back the two percent that Seto had begun with…

Forty nine percent.

He switched sections of the report to the other end of the corporate tug of war.

Fifteen percent purchased.

Another four percent here.

Additional five percent there.

Combined with Gozaburo Kaiba's original twenty five percent…

Forty nine percent.

If his instincts were telling him right, and this report wasn't lying to him…then both Gozaburo Kaiba and his son Seto both owned equal amounts of the company.

"Mr. Hanson?" Mr. Kaiba's secretary looked at him strangely. "Are you all right?"

Burt ran a hand over his face and shook his head. Not in answer to her question, but just to try to make sense of this. Over a decade of experience was screaming at him that it already made sense, but the rest of him was trying to catch up.

"Hillary." He looked at the secretary. "Is there a director meeting today?"

The woman blinked for a moment and then pecked a few keys on her computer board. Glancing across the monitor, she looked back to him. "There's a meeting starting in five minutes. How did you know that?"

Burt looked at the closed elevator doors. "Oh…shit…"

"Burt…" She pressed. "You look like you're about to be sick."

"Not sick." He shook his head again and looked to the minute hand on the overhead clock, inching toward the '12' on the top of the face of it. "I'm about to get better…We all are."

"Burt, you're making me nervous." She looked leery of him.

KaibaCorp had been sliding for months now. The death of Mr. Kaiba's biological son had earned some sympathy and support from the general public, but the man's handling of the situation and his apparent unfeeling and lack of detectable grief had raised suspicion among investors and shareholders, who became wary and untrusting of him.

Stock prices had suffered, sales had continued to push on—Noa or no Noa, war went on around the world and weapons were always needed-, but company morale had been down, lay offs and employment termination had become real threats across all departments and offices. The branch companies in America, England, and Australia had been bowing under the same kind of financial recession.

Media and the general public simply were becoming uninterested in KaibaCorp. The morbid enthusiasm with which Gozaburo Kaiba carried on his dealings of weapons of war and destruction put a dent in the company's armor, and continued to rust and weaken it to the point that expansion had all but ceased.

Mr. Kaiba may have been an expert on business and politics, but he had almost no power in the field of human relations and approval ratings.

And the self-correcting system was about to erase the threat.

If young Seto had just gone up to that board meeting to do what Burt surmised he was about to do, then there was just one problem.

Forty nine versus forty nine was still a stalemate. With no majority shareholder, this was to become a cold war. There was no dominance here. Two equal and opposing forces would merely cancel each other out. Though, from Burt's personal perspective, the father had much more to lose than the son.

The front doors of the lobby opened again and this time everybody was startled. Because while Seto Kaiba had become an almost expected presence in the building, the younger Mokuba Kaiba was almost never seen. And when he was at KaibaCorp, it was always trailing after his older brother like a shadow. Never alone. Never like this.

"Where did he go?" The child skidded to a stop in front of Burt and Hillary, who were clutching the data report and looking confused respectively.

"Wh-who?" Hillary cleared her throat. "Sweetie, what are you doing here?"

"My brother. Where is he? I know he's here, and I have to find him!" The little boy looked adamant.

For a moment, Burt spotted that rare commonality between Mokuba and Seto. The two boys looked almost nothing alike, hardly looked related, but that unyielding, intense look in the child's eyes at that moment definitely linked him to the teenager.

"He…went upstairs." Hillary blinked again. "But—"

Mokuba took off toward the elevator.

Hillary lifted a hand, but didn't pursue him. "It's a confidential meeting, Mokuba!"

But he was gone, and both adults just stared after him.

"What…" Hillary slowly turned her head to look at Burt. "…was that?"

Burt swallowed and looked at the clock. "That was the two percent."