headcanon that started as a joke and is now too elaborate for its own good:
for various reasons, not the least of which is the anniversary of the KaibaCorp takeover and Gozaburo’s death, Kaiba does not care to make an occasion out of his birthday. so what if he’s a year older? entropy is irreversible, no one escapes the arrow of time, etcetera. only nerds care about this
But one year, with Mokuba’s help, Yugi tries to take Kaiba out for a surprise (and very low-key) birthday dinner, but Kaiba catches wind of it about five minutes before Yugi arrives (Yugi sent a snapchat from the subway and Kaiba’s internal alarm bells immediately started to ring) and he fucking vanishes. just nopes out. his NOT-FRIEND??? on his BIRTHDAY? absolutely the fuck not! when Yugi and Mokuba get to Kaiba’s office, it’s empty. there is only an abandoned folder of marked-up duel disk schematics on the desk and a flurry of confused messages on the KaibaCorp internal chat channels, leaving a breadcrumb trail of fleeting, cryptid-like Kaiba sightings throughout the KaibaCorp campus (marketing intern: hey Kaiba just told me this press release needs more dragons? how do I do that, it’s a press release?) With these clues in hand, they find him an hour later, sitting under a desk in the R&D department with his laptop, and like the ungracious loser he is, he bitches for ten minutes before Mokuba makes him go out for birthday dinner.
next year, Yugi is prepared for Kaiba to refuse birthday dinner - Mokuba gives him a key card that lets him search most of KaibaCorp, and access to Kaiba’s calendar a week in advance - and Kaiba is prepared for Yugi’s preparations. he filled his calendar with fake meetings. his three assistants have each been told something different about his ~REAL~ schedule for the day. However, he leaves Yugi two (2) clues: a math problem, which is a red herring that takes Yugi to the R&D department again (Kaiba isn’t dumb enough to hide in the same place twice, which is what he wants me to think, which is why he’s probably there – ) and a word problem, which leads Yugi to the legal department, where Kaiba is on a conference call in a broom closet. it takes Yugi two hours and 43 minutes to find him. Kaiba, recognizing that the jig is up and Yugi rose to the challenge as usual, grudgingly goes out to birthday dinner.
the same thing happens the year after that, and the year after THAT, to the point that Kaiba’s birthday is no longer just “Kaiba’s birthday” but the Annual Hunt for Kaiba, a non-lethal Greatest Game where both of them start making preparations weeks in advance and Mokuba flips a coin to figure out whose side he’s on THIS year. Kaiba has handicaps like “you can’t leave KaibaCorp, you can’t take the elevators, you can’t make any of the interns lie for you” and he crashes the chat channels to prevent people from leaking his hiding place and Joey and Tristan have kidnapped Mokuba at least once to blackmail him into putting trackers in Kaiba’s coats but Kaiba knows they did it so he kept a change of clothes hidden in his office but Yugi flipped Roland a week before the Hunt so he knows what the new outfit looks like and on and on and ON, to ever-greater levels of scheming, and by Year 5 some new employee is like “hey… I think the boss just rappelled past the window” bc someone leaked Kaiba’s hiding place on the 11th floor and Yugi’s on the way and someone else is like “oh it’s his birthday” and the new guy is like ……?????????
Anyway, that’s how Kaiba’s birthday stops being a miserable anniversary of bad shit and instead becomes an advanced, high-stakes cat-and-mouse game of hide-and-seek with Yugi & Friends that he somehow loses every year, after which he is dragged out to birthday dinner. He claims to hate the whole thing (what a waste of time!!!) but when he sends Yugi a text in July asking for this year’s handicaps, that’s when Yugi fucking knows he’s lying. got ‘im
areudirty
titsay
