Headcanon: What if Kaiba had found the Puzzle?
@bifca
Sorry for the delay. It took me a while to come up with a headcanon.
Mokuba was with his brother when they found the box.
Seto Kaiba had taken over Gozaburo’s office along with his corporation. He’d moved in immediately and started cleaning house, his scowl growing deeper, more firmly etched into place with each file he opened. Mokuba watched him in silence. His brother was too busy to talk and even when he wasn’t, he was distant, as though he had moved into a different time zone without leaving the room.
Mokuba’s attention had wandered when he heard Kaiba’s sharp intake of breath.
“Nisama?” he asked, turning his brother’s title into a question.
Kaiba grunted. He was leaning over a small box, poking at whatever was inside.
“I found this thrown into the bottom of a drawer. I wonder what Gozaburo wanted with it.” He held up a letter, read it and grunted again. “One of his public relations gimmicks was funding an archeological dig. I guess we put him off orphanages for good.”
Mokuba came over and peered inside the box. “And they gave him some sort of puzzle as a thank you? It looks like gold, it must be valuable… but I never saw him play with anything before… well, except for chess. I wonder what it’s supposed to be.”
Two pieces were stuck together. The rest lay in a heap at the bottom of the box. “He didn’t get far, at any rate.” Kaiba picked up the conjoined pieces and turned them over. They’d been rammed together awkwardly. Kaiba threw back his head and laughed. “He only got two of them to stick and they don’t even belong together.”
Seto worked on them for a moment. There was something satisfying about undoing his adoptive father’s handiwork, about the way the pieces sprang free.
“There’s something engraved on the inside of the lid,” Mokuba said, tracing the hieroglyphs with his finger.
“Whoever puts this puzzle together will be granted his deepest wish,” Kaiba read slowly, wondering why he instantly knew what the unfamiliar shapes meant as though he’d breathed in the knowledge with the air. “That’s stupid. Wishes are for children.” Kaiba threw the pieces back in the box and slammed the lid. But Mokuba noticed his brother kept the box on the top of his desk.
Over the next few days, Mokuba caught his brother twisting the pieces together after particularly difficult board meetings. On the day that Kaiba Corporation’s weapons factories closed their doors, Kaiba managed to put the first two together. More followed, matching each milestone in the new Kaiba Corporation that his brother was building.
As as the puzzle came together Kaiba looked less haunted. But that wasn’t enough for Mokuba. His brother still didn’t look happy. He looked careworn and creased and defeated by his new responsibilities in a way that Gozaburo had never managed.
Then finally, months after they’d found the box, the day came when there was only one piece left. Mokuba looked at the almost completed puzzle. It was easy to see that it was an upside-down pyramid now. He couldn’t help but remember the words on the inside lid, the words his brother had discarded and forgotten.
“Can I help you put in the last piece?” Mokuba asked.
“Of course,” Kaiba answered with a smile. “I was waiting for you. It’s only right that we do it the same way we do everything else – as a team.”
As their fingers slid the last piece in, Mokuba closed his eyes and whispered, far too softly to be heard by his brother, “Please, all I want is for Nisama to find a friend…. someone who’ll look after him the way he does for me.”
Mokuba smiled as he heard the last piece click into place, as if the Puzzle itself, now gleaming in his brother’s hands, had nodded in answer.
