Transcend
by Rose Thorne
Disclaimer: Yu Yu Hakusho is the property of Studio Perriot, TV Tokyo, Yoshihiro Togashi, et al.
It had started innocently enough, really.
Kurama had always gotten along with Genkai pretty well, for the most part. She seemed to regard him with quiet amusement—at first, anyway—and though that had irritated him, the fact that she seemed to know meant that he didn't have to wear his carefully-constructed plethora of masks around her nearly as often as the others.
He'd always gotten the impression that it didn't really matter whether he wore them; she looked at him like she saw right through them. After a while, it hadn't been worth the trouble.
And, truly, it had been somewhat of a relief to be honest around someone.
With most of the others, there was a human façade to be kept up. With Hiei, there was a different sort of pretense. The young demon was distressingly prone to hero worship, and Kurama had eventually tired of the dance required of being the worshipped one. After Kurama had rejected the Makai—for at least the duration of his human life-span, though he'd carefully neglected to tell Hiei that—the fire demon had, thankfully, moved on to Mukuro, who was likely to beat that naivety from him at some point or another.
One thing Kurama had learned in his long life was that he didn't want to have others lay expectations on him. He had tired, long tired, of having intimate relationships; inevitably those expectations came into play, and inevitably brought about the end. He could see them, those ends, often when he first met people.
His friends had their own desires regarding partners—which thankfully had not fallen on him, for the most part. Yuusuke needed someone to protect; even though Keiko would die long before him she would work for now. Kuwabara either needed someone to compete with or someone to idolize, and he got both in Yukina—after all, with her he would inherit a brother-in-law he already tried to compete with. Hiei, someone to look up to, to idolize… which he would eventually get over, if Mukuro had anything to say about it.
Even others, some of whom had immediately indicated interest, had their expectations. Karasu wished for an unwilling doll to break and discard. Yomi desired the creature Kurama had been once, so long ago; the cutthroat who would betray at the first chance. The creature that had disappeared gradually after he had become human.
It was just so… tiring to see their desire to mold him, after so long having his own shape and being unwilling to bend. Tiring to be expected to bend them in return. Even more tiring to be reminded that he had once been like them, in his own way.
For a human doomed to a short life-span, Genkai seemed strangely content to let him be as he was—in fact, it seemed to amuse her. And he knew she had no interest in being changed by those around her, from the way she carefully avoided the expectations of the others; refusing to allow Yuusuke to protect her, easily beating the competition out of Kuwabara, and antagonizing Hiei out of his hero worship.
After Toguro, he could hardly blame her. That experience, instead of driving her into the mind-set that she could "save" people, had made her one of the more mature people Kurama had ever encountered, human or otherwise.
And so, for him, she was an ideal person to be around; her friendship was undemanding.
The good-natured barbs had started when he made the mistake of offering a hand to help Genkai up on a particularly cold day, when she seemed to be bone-weary. She had recognized the bit of pity in his action—after all, he didn't have to age and was rather relieved of that fact—and had called him on it.
"You're more ancient than me, milleniarian," she muttered, smacking his hand away.
After that, Kurama endured a variety of age-related jokes from her, from being served prunes and denture-friendly digestives with his tea—"to keep the sheen of those tails"—to serving him liquefied sashimi for lunch one afternoon—so it would be "easier to digest." (She, of course, had the non-liquefied version, which they wound up sharing due to his deft use of chopsticks; neither of them touched the raw-fish shake.) She even hid his shoes and commented that he must be getting senile.
Where he had once been a prideful idiot and would have bitten his nose off to spite his face by avoiding her, he actually found that he enjoyed the pranks. She didn't fear him, and respected him enough to treat him as a person.
Certainly, their relationship was bizarre. But it was still innocent.
Until it wasn't anymore.
That it took months for her to broach the subject wasn't exactly surprising; there was that respect between them, and the pranks escalated gradually.
But a comment about his libido was still a bit shocking. Perhaps Genkai wasn't a typical human being, but sex wasn't generally a subject that was discussed over tea. Though, perhaps with the spread of bananas, watermelon, pumpkin seeds, and almonds—and was that tea goji berry?—he should have expected it.
He was, after all, a plant master. And all of those were purported—with some degree of truth—to improve libido, especially among the elderly. He was halfway surprised she hadn't put out raw oysters, but that would have broken the plant motif.
That joke changed their relationship in a way that also changed nothing, adding no expectations or demands of one another while also adding a degree of intimacy that transcended what Kurama had experienced before in all his long life.
Genkai, it seemed, was far wiser even in her relative youth than anyone he had ever known.
This would be temporary; Genkai was mortal, destined to leave her body behind and transcend into the beyond in relatively short order. But in Kurama's experience, everything was.
I took a human sexuality class for my own entertainment a while back, and one of the issues discussed was lifespan sexuality, specifically sexuality among the elderly. In that it not only exists, but that nursing homes often have almost their own soap opera with how much sex goes on. Just because you're old doesn't mean you lose your libido! It just means you have to take your body's changes into account.
So even though the whole issue is stupidly considered a taboo, and I'm sure people will flame me for daring to write it (something along the lines of "ew, squick!"), I wrote it anyway. So nyah.
And, seriously, if any elderly anime character was going to sex things up, it'd be Genkai. It's Genkai.
Originally written sometime in 2011 (mostly), but I forgot about it and just rediscovered and finished it.