Disclaimer: I don't own Super Smash Brothers: Brawl or any of the characters, and this piece of fanfiction is for the sole purpose of entertainment.

Pairing: IkeMarth
Genre: drama
Rating: PG-13
Words: 1438
Warnings: language, homosexuality

A/N: Despite my age and both my father's and boyfriend's insistence, I know diddly squat about stocks. I seriously have no clue. Whenever my boyfriend talks shares and dividends, I do a very good impression of an owl hyped up on caffeine. So I haven't the slightest idea what possessed me to write a fanfic based on Wall Street. I don't even know. I need to stop experimenting with my writing. In my defense, I tried to research how the stock market works halfway through writing this thing… but I may not have actually understood it correctly. So sorry if there's any glaring and horrendous mistakes regarding the financial world. I am not grown-up enough for this.

There is a 20+ year age gap between Ike and Marth. This is your fair warning if George Clooney-esque Marth scares you (though why, I can't imagine—he looks good in salt and pepper in my mind). Also, this thing is all sorts of ridiculous and unrealistic, but it's all for the sake of drama! I never thought I'd be writing drama. Next thing you know, I'll start writing hetero pairings (gasp!).

Brokering Disaster
Chapter 1: Ike Greil, Most Notorious and Unwanted Trainee

Marth isn't one to beat around the bush. He never saw much point; why bother with sugar-coating the words and lessening their implications? If anything, it was a disservice to the person doing the beating because it demeaned their words and made a mockery of their intentions. If Marth had an opinion, he was going to say it—and if anyone was offended, then that was due to their own intellectual and moral shortcomings. He didn't get to the top ranks of Wall Street by being concerned about everyone else's feelings.

And so he spoke bluntly. "You're fired."

The entry-level pencil pusher stared at him with a look of dismay plastered across his face mixed with just a dash of repentance. Marth was pleased to see that the fool at least had the decency to look ashamed and recognized that his job loss was due entirely to his idiocy. How and why Human Resources hired him in the first place was a still a mystery. He had half a mind to fire the manager responsible for selecting this applicant out of all possible applicants, but then HR staff are always so hard to find.

When the young man continued to stand riveted to the floor of his office with a dumb look on his face, showing no inclination of leaving, Marth's irritation grew.

"As of now, Mr. Greil. Go pack up your desk. I expect it to be vacated within half an hour."

"Y-yes, Mr. Lowell. I understand," his ex-employee managed to stutter out, a noticeable pallor taking over his face as he began shuffling backwards out of the office. He was about to shuffle straight back into the doorframe if his current trajectory didn't change. Marth felt his tension headache worsen. This wasn't an uncommon effect for him to have on his underlings in general.

He was struck suddenly by just how young the boy was—and that's really what he was. Probably fresh out of undergrad and full of hopes and dreams and foolish decisions. He'd be, what, twenty-two years old? Twenty-three? It was a child that caused him millions in asset loss and an outraged long-term client through a single, unspeakably stupid action.

As the boy made an audible impact with his doorframe, he squeaked in alarm. The other's face was now rosy with embarrassment as he straightened himself out before bowing ever so slightly in Marth's direction, hands wringing together in a blatant display of nerves. Finally, he spoke quietly under his breath, and if Marth wasn't so good at reading lips, he may have missed it entirely.

"I'm truly sorry, sir." And with that, the kid was racing out his office door, the 30-minute window for him to be nothing but an unpleasant memory on the company's history already one-fifth gone.

Ike wanted nothing more than to curl up into a ball on the floor and just disappear. If only he could shrink himself down into a small enough ball so that all his cells would regress into hydrogen and carbon and oxygen molecules. Then he'd be gone and he wouldn't be here in the most uncomfortable shame he'd ever experienced in his young life.

It was an amazing opportunity; hell, the opportunity of a lifetime for a finance major. He somehow managed to land a position as one of a legion of junior floor brokers undergoing in-house training at The Famous Lowell Investments, a premier broker-dealer in the New York Stock Exchange. Within a year, he would be ready to take his Series 7 Exam and, if he passed, earn his official spot as stockbroker on the exchange floor. It was all he'd ever wanted to do with his life from the very first moment he learned about financial analysis and the stock exchange in his introductory finance classes.

His friend, Link, two years his senior in school, had passed his Series 7 last year and was working the hectic grind at Lowell. It was thanks to him that he even knew about the available broker trainee opening. Maybe Link also had something to do with helping his application find its way to the top of the pile in HR, because he sure as hell hadn't graduated with honors from an Ivy League school with all the trappings.

Now he had completely and irrevocably blown it. He had been working on a fairly low-key trade—shares for a failing fast-food giant. It was a generally harmless exercise to help him practice his buy and sell setups and trade timing. Up until this afternoon, he was doing a spectacular job with the training. In fact, he was the favorite of his floor manager and had high hopes of being put on salary once he passed his exam in two months' time.

And then he had to go and mix-up a single letter on the NASDAQ symbol, and suddenly he had lost the client $273 million because he'd closed the shares for $2.93 when they were worth $538.79.

He didn't even realize the mistake until it was too late. It wasn't until the closing bell had rung at 4 o'clock and his manager was looking over his activity for the day. It wasn't until his manager suddenly clutched his chest as if in severe pain, and then slumped over without restraint against the nearest desk, knocking paperwork and folders willy nilly—that he knew, with distressing finality, that he had done something seriously wrong. And when his manager told him just exactly what he had done, he found himself collapsed on the floor in a heap to mimic his boss.

Ike knew that McCloud had to tell Mr. Lowell. He knew it better come sooner rather than later; because there was no way in ever-burning hell that this gargantuan of a mess could be covered up. Ike didn't exactly have $273 million spare lying around to make up for the loss. Hell, at this rate, he would never make up the $104,000 he had remaining on his student loans.

He knew he was going to get fired. He had already come to accept this fate in the harrowing hour after the Biggest Mistake of His Life was revealed. But he hadn't expected to be fired by Mr. Lowell himself. You know you have really fucked up when the head honcho of one of the most successful broker-dealers in New York calls you, the smallest of the small shrimp in his company, up to his penthouse office so he can fire you personally.

The thing that disturbed Ike the most, he belatedly realized as he rushed to throw all his meager belongings from his desk into a small box, was how preternaturally calm Mr. Lowell was as he fired him. He expected the older gentleman to be red-faced and livid, screaming at him to get the hell out of his company. That's what Ike would have done in his designer shoes (although probably with much more physical violence involved). But he didn't once raise his voice at Ike; didn't even move from behind his corporate throne to lord over his lowly self. Rather, he had merely looked intensely into Ike's eyes before telling him he had thirty minutes to be gone, and it was this cold, restrained anger that frightened Ike more than anything.

It probably also didn't help that he found the company head strikingly handsome and refined for a man in his late forties, and the utter inappropriateness of those thoughts did nothing to help with the mortification he felt throughout his very quick firing.

When he was done shoving all his stuff into the box that once held copy paper, he straightened up and made a bee-line for the exit of the building, ignoring everyone along the way. He couldn't bear to see their judgmental stares. By now, he was sure the news of his utter idiocy had spread from the trading floor to every other department within the building. No doubt he was now Ike Greil, Most Notorious and Unwanted Trainee. News of his idiocy may have even traveled as far as other broker-dealers by this point.

The full weight of his situation finally hit him hard just as the elevator doors shut, whisking him downwards to the lobby. Releasing a shuddering breath as he slid down the back wall, he realized with abject horror that he would never, ever get another job on Wall Street again. He was, for lack of better word, ruined—ruined before his career could even begin.

He no longer cared about propriety as he buried his face in his hands and cried. I'm an idiot.

-tbc-