My psychology class is about lifespan development and the other day we were going over how peoples abilities change as they move pass their prime. Nearly every kind of physical thing declines except one. Fine motor skills are only just reaching their peak towards the beginning of forty. Also, in order to compensate for the decline in abilities, people begin to make adjustments in their lives, working harder and longer to maintain the strengths they have and using more mental capacities to pick up the slack in the other physical areas. Kuwabara's still human and has to go through the same changes as us.
Forty- five.
He was already forty-five. Pushing forty-six soon.
He looked good for his age. His hair was still the same vibrate orange it'd always been. The sharp angles of his face had hardened out around his early twenties; giving him a raw, rugged man look that had flocks of woman vying for his attention. His voice was more or less the same gravelly tone, only now it was so deep it made Keiko giggle about how she could feel it in her bones when he spoke. He'd also managed to keep up his musculature build he'd had as a street punk teen greaser, though now-a-days he went without gel in his hair, letting the long curls fall around his face.
In his abilities, Kuwabara could tell he was slacking. Had been for a few years now. He used to be able to go days on end fighting demons without sleep, alongside his dearest friends; Yusuke, Kurama, and Hiei. Now he could barely pull a single all night. If he wanted to go on par with the guys during a mission, he had to take crazy amounts of stimulants to keep himself going.
Kuwabara's physical strength had already begun its wane. No longer could he rely on the power of his brute muscles to heave a demon twice his size threw a stone wall. Instead he had to boost his abilities with little spurts of spirit energy when throwing about a demon the same size as him.
The pains of battle seemed to linger longer. A fall from a cliff twenty years ago would have taken maybe an hour to completely shake off. Hell he could have gotten over such a fall in a day or two ten years ago. At forty-five he would be layed up for a week minimum.
The one thing that seemed to be continuously growing with him was his spirit energy. The sheer amount of energy he had at his disposal was absurd. He could take on Yusuke and probably win the fight if he gave it everything he had. In another decade he'd be able to beat the bastard hands down. He's powers. It was like he was only just now beginning to realize what he could do with his spirit energy. He wasn't just a swordsman anymore. His arsenal was ever expanding. Mostly he used a more subtle kind of weapon; wielding no weapon at all. The closest he could come to describing it would be like if he had telekinesis. It was an attack and defense all in one.
His spirit awareness was unmatched by any other. For him, there was no such thing as death. He could still see his sister when he wanted, looking better than when she'd kicked the bucket with lung cancer. On more than one occasion Kuwabara'd gotten in trouble with Koenma traversing from one world to the next. His dimensional sword allowing him to rip through worlds in a manner only the Gods were supposed to possess.
Kuwabara used his strengths only to balance his shortcomings. In his older age he'd come to realize he couldn't live forever. He couldn't protect forever. And he couldn't let his friends, friends he loved to dearly, be the only protectors. They were demons. Demons who fought to protect humans (for the most part), but demons nonetheless. They could so easily forget what it was to be human. No matter how much he loved and trusted them, he could not allow humans to fall back on needing demons to protect them.
He hid his powers as much as he could; restricting his abilities until he could go about them privately. In the meantime, Kuwabara took young minds under his supervision, training them to be strong in their own way. In every group of youngsters he'd get, he made sure at least one was fully human. They, the humans, were the reminders that underdogs are not to be underminded. They show the full range of emotion. Fear where needed, trust when earned, determination at every step of the way, and an unwavering sense to support their teammates, who need to be needed in order to remember to do good (mostly).
Yusuke always scoffs at how Kuwabara teaches his mentees lessons in life and death. Kuwabara always responds, "I'm not going to live forever, Urameshi. I goot pass on what I know, so they can think of something more."
At age forty-five, Kuwabara wonders if he's got another forty-five left in him. And he begins a count down.