GOD you choose the cheesiest shit for these two and I love it
a sappy fic for a sappy dude:
He doesn’t want to call her a nag.
It’s unfair to her, because every time Keiko reminds him of
something (no matter how, well, forcefully she does it) it’s
because he legitimately forgot. Sometimes Kuwabara will say stupid things to
him like “Urameshi, you’d lose your head if it wasn’t screwed on already”
and as much as that shit pisses him off, he’s totally right. Being a
high-ranking demon descendant changed Yusuke in a lot of ways, but it certainly
didn’t make him any better at chores or finishing his to-do lists in a timely
matter.
He also won’t call her one because he’s pretty sure she’d
kill him.
“When was the last time you did laundry? This place is a
mess!”
That’s how Keiko greets him the second she comes
home from university to visit him.
“Missed you too, babe,” he says casually, trying not to let
the comment needle him.
She rolls her eyes, but there’s a fondness in her smile that
means she’s not really upset. She tips her face up to give him a quick kiss,
and Yusuke marvels again at how tall she’d grown while he was away in Demon
World. Whenever he’d fantasize about kissing her (which he didn’t do that much,
shut up) he’d always imagined her reaching up on her tiptoes and him bending
down a bit to meet her halfway.
But literally everything about kissing Keiko is better than
his fantasies. He chases her kiss with another one, just because he can,
because he really did miss her. It sucked that he’d only been
back to Human World for a short period of time before she had to leave for
school. He didn’t realize how horrible it felt to be left behind until he was
the one left waiting. The thought makes him kiss her a third time, for good
measure.
“Someone sure is affectionate today,” Keiko says
good-naturedly.
“How long are you home for?” Yusuke asks.
“Three days. We got a long weekend.”
It still has him frowning. Three days isn’t long enough.
“Where’s your mom?”
Keiko asks, looking around their apartment and noticing the not-untypical
absence of one Atsuko Urameshi.
“Out,” he says with a scoff. “‘Living her thirties the
way she should have lived her twenties’ or some shit like that.” It certainly
wasn’t his fault she got pregnant as a teenager, though
sometimes that was the impression he got from his mother’s bad attitude. If he
thought about it more he’d probably be angry with her, but it’s not like she’s
the person Yusuke wants to spend time with right now anyways.
Keiko practically reads his mind. “So we’re alone?”
He grins wide. “Yep!”
He leans in to go back to his favorite recreational activity
involving Keiko, but he must have misread the room somehow because instead of
being met with her lips, Keiko’s slipping past him and leaving him grasping at
empty air.
“Good! That gives us plenty of time to clean this place up.”
Yusuke can only blink, a bewildered look stuck on his face.
She’s not serious, right?
But she’s picking up dirty clothes from the living room
floor. Like, yeah, they probably shouldn’t be there, but is that really their
biggest concern right now?
“Uhh, Keiko?” Yusuke asks, trying to keep the bite from his
tone.
“Hmm?” she says. She looks up at him and looks so innocently
confused that he only wants to kiss her more which makes this
whole thing even more exasperating.
“Do we really have to do this now?”
Her hands are on her hips now, and Yusuke feels like he’s
somehow done something wrong even though his reaction seems extremely logical.
“The only way this place gets cleaned up is when I’m around,
Yusuke! Excuse me for caring about your health and well-being enough to want to
clean up this pig sty!”
“You’re only here for three days, Keiko! You just said it
yourself! Are you really gonna spend the entire time you’re here nagging at me like
we’re still in middle school?”
Her expression turns even more cross. He’s said the word
that he’s been trying so hard to avoid and now she’s mad and
this isn’t supposed to be how this weekend was supposed to go. He wants to back
to kissing her but he can’t do that now that he’s pissed her off because
that’ll only make her even more mad.
“Did I ever tell you how beautiful your eyes are?” he says
weakly.
Her expression doesn’t change.
“I’m serious!” Yusuke says, following this train of thought
because it seems safer than reminding her that she’s nagging him just like she
would when they were kids. He needed the nagging then, too, but it’s not like
he can admit that to her.
He reaches out and takes her hand, still fisted and resting
firmly on her hip. She lets him, which feels like a start.
“Most beautiful eyes I’ve ever seen,” he says, thumb grazing
her knuckles and looking at the eyes in question, which are still looking
royally pissed at him for being a slob and an asshole on top of it. “They
were all I could think about when I was in Demon World trying to get shit in
order.” He squeezes her hand. “They’re all I think about when you’re away
at school.” He lets himself smile crookedly. “They’re even beautiful when
they’re glaring at me.”
Her eyebrows waver for a moment, and then her expression
loses its heat. She rolls her eyes again and her smile returns.
“You’re such a jerk,” she says, which probably means ‘I
love you.’
“You’re my favorite nag,” he says, which definitely
means ‘I love you.’
She snatches her hand away from him to flick him in the
nose.
“We can go get something to eat first.” She concedes. “Then we
clean this place up.”
This sounds like a decidedly better plan. But there’s
something that needs to happen first. When he pulls her in to kiss her this
time, he doesn’t stop at one, or two, or three.
i love that, at the end of the day, yu yu hakusho is a story about identity. not just who you are, but who you were; how those facets are changed by the people around you, good and bad; how you have to find the balance between them to discover who you will become—who you can be.
every decisive battle in the final demon world tournament is the ultimatum for the main characters to decide on who they really are: kurama has no choice but to decide if he is yoko or shuichi, and to negotiate which makes him stronger, or is it an impossible union of both?; mukuro urges hiei to use his jagan to “end [his] search—the real one—and find [himself],” and to find his reason to keep living when he’s told himself his whole life that he deserves nothing but death and suffering; yusuke’s whole fight with yomi hinges on a sudden internal crisis that renders him catatonic: he’s forgotten what he’s fighting for. and if fighting is all he’s ever done—if it’s the only way he’s ever expressed himself, and felt like himself—then what does that make him, now that he can’t remember what it was that made him do it in the first place? moreover, is he mazoku or human? (he’s both—this is obviously symbolized by the fact that his spirit gun becomes a blend of his spirit and demon energy; he is strong enough as one or the other, but at his strongest and most true when he accepts both.)
even kuwabara, who’s barely present in the last arc, has to make a choice about who he is; is he going to follow in yusuke’s footsteps forever, fighting for any reason, or is he going to grow up and fight for what matters to him, and to do it in his own way? the times when he does the latter are when he shines brightest—when he fights for love, he wins his dark tournament match against an unstoppable foe; when he fights for his friends, he unlocks his greatest power (the jigen-tou); where yusuke might have busted up seaman or even killed him, kuwabara shows him honor and faith, and this brings seaman to their side and makes him a valuable ally! it’s by NOT fighting in the demon world tournament that kuwabara demonstrates how much he has learned about himself and his values, and how very much he’s grown.
after it all, after all of the cool fights and saving the world and typical shounen stuff, yyh is about change, and growth, and identity. kurama discovers that, yes, he can be shuichi minamino, soft-spoken and loyal and noble and kind; AND he can unify that with his past as youko, cruel, calculating, capable of betrayal and hatred and murder (and worse—see elder toguro!), prepared for anything because he plans for everything, loveless, thinking only of himself. he can balance these, and become something new, someone stronger.
hiei must look inside himself and accept that, yes, the hatred and violence in his burning heart make him strong, deadly, unmatched in battle; but it is his capacity for that single flickering ember of something like hope that unlocks his greatest potential (he is never more powerful, many in the show say, than he was when he was willing to die for someone besides himself). shunned by his own people for something he could not control, shunned by his adoptive family for something he could but chose not to, he belongs to, and is loved by, no one, so he resolves to love nothing in this world that has shown him nothing but hate—but what drives him is not hate: “it’s longing—you just want to belong to something.” in the end, hiei defies his curse: he lives.
kazuma kuwabara comes to save the world in quieter, gentler ways; he detects earthquakes, he studies hard, he raises his cat, he makes his sister proud. (but still steps up to the plate for the next demon world tournament, battling alongside his friends for a better world.) yusuke urameshi finally learns who he is: something new, and different; something entirely his. and even after all that, he comes home.
they fight. and they learn. and they grow. and then, perhaps the most monumental accomplishment of all: they find a reason to live.
im ROLLING genkai came back and was like “hey toguro the best way to make this fight not feel like a shit show is just killing one of yusuke’s friends and making sure he sees it” and then it does one of those classic cutaways to everyone’s reaction and kuwabara and hiei react exactly how you’d expect them to but KURAMA’S,,
“really bitch. really. we’re out here dyin and u come rolling back (FROM THE GRAVE) and offer up this piece of shit advice u fucking flamingo penguin ass bitch”
bullshit central 