Urameshi Yusuke was pretty sure that he had never been this exhausted in his entire life.
He knew that what was coming up was big. Bigger than anything he'd ever done, or at least bigger than anything he'd done in a good long while. And he understood the need for training - a lot of training. But at some point when he wasn't looking, Kurama and Hiei had gotten a lot better. And this really hadn't been what he'd expected. His only consolation was that Kuwabara appeared to be in the same boat.
With the last ounces of strength he possessed, Yusuke flopped stomach-first onto Kuwabara's sofa. He heard Kuwabara land just as heavily in the chair to the sofa's left, accompanied with a soft "ow." For some reason, this made Yusuke start to laugh.
"What are you laughin' at, Urameshi? That really hurt, my back is so - "
"No, don't - it's nothing personal," Yusuke assured him, though he was still snickering. He waved an arm limply back toward the other boy. "I'm just - I'm at that point where you're so totally dead that everything is funny."
Kuwabara's silence seemed to indicate that he was thinking for a minute on this, and then he chuckled as well. "Yeah, I guess you're right!" Now he was laughing almost full-force, and his dumb-sounding laugh made Yusuke laugh even harder, too. He laughed so hard that he had to roll over onto his back on the sofa, to clutch at his spasming stomach and to gasp for air that wasn't filtered through a layer of musty cushion. Soon both of them had tears in their eyes.
Between gasps, Kuwabara tried to speak. "You - y'know I had this - this crazy idea, back during - during the training?"
"Yeah?" Yusuke choked out.
"I thought it would - it'd be really funny to try and - like, if I did the - " he made a gesture with his fingers like firing a gun - "and you did the - " now his clenching hands pantomimed holding a two-handed sword.
"Oh, like - pffffhahahah!" As Yusuke realized what Kuwabara meant - a switch-up of their attacks, with Yusuke wielding a spirit sword and Kuwabara trying the spirit gun - it just set him off laughing again. "That's - that sounds - ahahahaha!"
"Yeah, I guess you're - I guess you're right, it's just funny," said Kuwabara, still laughing too.
But as the two of them laughed themselves to sleep in Kuwabara's living room, it occurred to Yusuke that Kuwabara maybe hadn't meant for that to be funny.
The next thing Yusuke was conscious of was the phone ringing. It didn't sound like his phone sounded - he realized then that he wasn't home, that he must still be at Kuwabara's house. That made sense. What didn't make sense was why the phone was ringing and ringing and ringing and no one was answering it.
"Kuwabara..." he groaned, reaching around and jamming a sofa pillow over his head. Every muscle in his whole body was sore, and he was pretty sure he didn't want to be awake yet.
"I'm gettin' it, I'm gettin' it," Kuwabara assured him, though from the sounds of it he was in a similar state. Yusuke heard him drag himself out of the chair, wince and hiss a little when he discovered the muscle cramps he'd obviously gotten from falling asleep in an armchair, and then hobble through to the kitchen to answer the phone. During the conversation, he heard the thick steady rumble of a voice speaking but he couldn't make out any words. Kuwabara had to come back and tell him what was going on.
"That was your mom," he told Yusuke. "She was wonderin' why you didn't come home last night like you said, but I explained to her how beat we were and she said it was okay." He paused, scratching his head. "I still feel like crap."
"Ditto," said Yusuke, wondering if it was okay to sit up yet. A shift in his position told him no, and he only made it about halfway, his head propped half-up on the arm of the sofa. "I can't remember the last time I got my ass kicked that hard on purpose."
"I kind of want to take a shower, y'know, get some hot water...but I don't know if I can stay standing up that long."
"Maybe we could...make it out onto the roof," Yusuke said, surprising himself. He didn't quite know why, but he had a distinct memory of the two of them laying next to each other out there, the sun baking the roof which in turn warmed their sore backs. He remembered them laughing, too - though after last night Yusuke didn't know how much laughing he was keen on doing in the near future.
"That...doesn't sound too bad," Kuwabara agreed. And before he knew it, Yusuke found himself trudging up the stairs to the place where they could crawl out of Shizuru's bathroom window and onto the roof, the bright sunlight (they had obviously slept in longer than they'd planned) blinding them briefly before they adjusted. Yusuke sat down again almost instantly - Kuwabara hadn't been kidding about that "standing up for too long" bit - but Kuwabara paused for a moment to tug off his school jacket, leaving him in only a white tank top, standing silhouetted against the brilliant sun. Then he too slid to the roof, wadding up the jacket to use as a pillow as he sprawled out on his back. But the image of the silhouette, like the other memories he had of this rooftop, stuck in Yusuke's mind.
They lay for a while without speaking, letting the hot, solid presence of the roof against their backs soothe the stiffness of their overexerted muscles. Yusuke found himself spacing out again, thinking back to yesterday's training. As usual, he'd forgotten how ruthless Kurama could be. It was hard to get his brain to associate "ruthless" with "looks like a chick." He supposed with all the effeminate demons he'd had to take on in the past that he should probably have taught himself to make that connection, but it wasn't working yet. As a result of that he knew he had at least one enormous welt on his side from a certain rose whip. Hiei had been less sneaky, more sportsmanlike, but still vicious. They'd taken turns ganging up on either him or Kuwabara, both at once. It had taken almost all of what Yusuke could muster up within him to stay on his feet until the end.
Yet Kuwabara had managed it, too. If Yusuke were perfectly honest, the lunkhead was really learning to hold his own. Though at times he'd barely been conscious when it was Kuwabara's turn, Yusuke had at least seen parts of it, and Kuwabara was constantly impressing him with his own bag of tricks - especially his super-sensitive spirit awareness, a skill Yusuke had always reluctantly admitted to lacking. He'd anticipated a large number of the blows - Hiei's straightforward techniques especially - and dodged around to avoid taking more damage than he could handle. Yusuke always claimed to be the toughest at Sarayashiki, just that tiny bit ahead of Kuwabara, but they really were almost completely neck-and-neck.
That was when he remembered something else about the previous evening. "Hey!" he said suddenly, and if his neck hadn't hurt so much he'd have sat up suddenly with the realization.
"What is it, Urameshi?" asked Kuwabara. From the sounds of it, he'd almost been asleep again.
"Last night...was I hearin' things, or did you really suggest that maybe we try switching spirit weapons sometime?"
Kuwabara actually did sit up, casting a swathe of shadow over Yusuke's face. "Uh, yeah. And you know, I wasn't really joking - "
"Yeah, I kinda figured that now that my head's on a little straighter," said Yusuke. "When'd you get that idea?"
"I dunno, a long time ago I guess. I just thought it'd be fun."
"It'd be a good sneak attack is what it would be," Yusuke pointed out. "Do something no one's expecting from us, switch things up, psych 'em out. Might work in a pinch, against...well, you know."
"Yeah?"
He sat up, too, slowly. "Yeah." He turned to look at Kuwabara, face-to-face. "Well hey, it's your idea, you try it first. Lemme see your spirit gun."
Kuwabara looked sheepish for a moment - not nervous, but more like embarrassed, which Yusuke didn't really understand. "Uh, okay, here goes..." He braced his right wrist with his left hand, index finger extended, and lined up his shot with a trashcan down in the street. A look of intense concentration screwed up his face, and then - bam! The metal can rattled loudly with the force of the impact.
"Hey, how are you so good at that?" Yusuke cried, excited more than anything. "That was totally awesome for someone who's never done it before!"
Now Kuwabara's ears were flushing red, and he looked even more embarrassed. "Uh, yeah, about that...maybe I've kind of tried it before, okay?"
Yusuke raised an eyebrow at him. "What?"
"I've kind of, I've practiced doing that," Kuwabara admitted. "I just - I thought it was cool, and it is cool! I can't put a whole lot of power behind it, 'cause I'm used to my sword, so I just stick to that, but...yeah. I can do a spirit gun. Sort of."
"Well gee, I've got a lot to live up to now," Yusuke jeered. "Don't take it personally, but I don't exactly sit around practicing your move set."
"Well I'm sorry my awesome attack just isn't quite awesome enough for the great Spirit Detective Urameshi," Kuwabara shot back.
"Okay, okay, geez. I'm going for it, just gimme a sec. How do you start this thing off, anyway?"
"It's kind of - " Kuwabara lifted his arms toward Yusuke, like he was going to give hands-on help, but wavered and drew back at the last minute. "If you need to you can kinda hang onto your arm with your other hand. It gets all the spirit energy flowing in kind of a circle, all going to one place."
Yusuke did as he was instructed, though he couldn't help feeling like an idiot. Still, he did start noticing the tingle of a handful of spirit energy, pooling in his right palm.
"Okay, now what?" he asked, skeptical.
"Well...there's just kind of a shape there, like the handle of a sword. It should be there, anyway. You can't feel it?"
"I just feel a big giant blob."
"I guess you kind of need to...visualize the sword, or something? I don't know, when I do it it just sort of happens."
Yusuke tried to picture himself wielding a spirit sword like Kuwabara's. It gave him a dumb visual of himself in the middle of Star Wars swinging a light saber around, and he snorted a little, almost losing the sword's presence completely. Quickly he tried to recover. He was not about to get showed up by Kuwabara, even if he was at an obvious disadvantage.
"That's totally not working," he said instead.
Kuwabara turned and looked away, not even meeting Yusuke's eyes any more. "Uh, well...when I did the spirit gun...it kind of helped if I thought about you a lot. Like, you and the way you do it. So maybe if...?"
Yusuke mentally completed the sentence, and instead of imagining himself with the spirit sword, he tried to picture Kuwabara instead. This was a lot easier, as he had actually seen it happen before. He saw in his mind Kuwabara doing exactly what he was doing now: gripping one arm with the opposite hand and calling to him the energy blade, a nearly-solid golden yellow thing that he then used to stab demons or...whatever. He thought about fights where he'd stood back-to-back or side by side with Kuwabara, kicking ass and not even bothering to take names...
But then, accidentally, Yusuke found himself not really thinking about the sword at all. Instead, he just saw Kuwabara: in fights they'd had against each other, back before they were really friends; or laughing on the sun-warmed roof of his house while Shizuru scolded them for messing up her bathroom; or standing silhouetted against the sun, the solid shapes of his musculature obvious after a long hard day of training...training where he and Yusuke were just about equals. And Yusuke realized that the days of them being "friendly rivals" were pretty much gone. It went way beyond that now.
Without warning, the handle was as solid as a real object in Yusuke's hand, and as soon as he gripped it the blade shot out, silvery-blue and totally battle-ready. He held it up between himself and Kuwabara, in awe of what he'd managed to do - and of how he'd managed to do it.
"...Oh," he finally said.
Kuwabara laughed a little, but it was nothing like the laughing from before. "Yeah."
"Do you...I mean is that always how you...?"
"Somethin' like that, I guess."
"So...you think about me - "
"Every freakin' day, Urameshi. Are you happy?" By now he just sounded completely humiliated.
So in that moment, Yusuke made up his mind.
"Yes," he insisted, and even as the spirit sword in his hand was dissipating, that same hand was reaching around to Kuwabara, and Yusuke just prayed (to anyone but Koenma) that he'd read all these signs right, because he was still really tired, and he wasn't sure that his head was on much straighter yet after all.
Kuwabara kissed him back, though, so he couldn't have been too far off.