Chapter Text
Yusuke feels like he is always hearing about the past.
It must have started with Genkai, though that didn’t really feel like a big deal, at the time. She was old, and he was a cocky little asshole who’d just been conned out of his entire summer vacation. But people really just wouldn’t shut up about what a powerful psychic she was, as if she wasn’t still alive and kicking his ass on the daily.
Then he’d found out about her and Toguro, and how she’d been the Dark Tournament champion fifty years prior, and by rights, shouldn’t even be on his team. But she’d gone and done it all for him anyway, knowing that she was going to die trying.
In all the chaos, Yusuke hadn’t paid too much attention to the details. He’d learned what he needed to learn to survive, and win, and he knew that Genkai did her best to give him everything she had in the short amount of time they had together. But years later he couldn’t help but wonder why she had stopped trying, after the tournament.
It was clear to him now that he didn’t know everything. He had been her apprentice, sure, but now that Genkai was gone for good, he could hardly call himself a master, in her stead. It just didn’t feel right. And there were things she had mentioned, during the tournament, that Yusuke knew for sure she had never tried to teach him. That purification technique she’d used on the three human members of Team Ichigaki? She had explained to them that it was one of the penultimate techniques of some fighting discipline that she’d never even bothered to mention to him before, or after.
He remembered being grateful, for the break in training, after the tournament was over. And perhaps that was Genkai’s goal in the beginning. But then the thing with Sensui had happened, and his whole world flipped upside down. It seemed like Genkai had just kind of… given up, after that.
It hurt, to think about, and there were some days Yusuke took a trip out to the old woman’s land just to sit in front of her gravestone in silence, wondering what it all meant. Sure, he had the Spirit Wave now, and the immense store of reiki would be more than enough for any human. But he wasn’t human anymore.
Genkai had been young, in her twenties she’d said, when she was at her peak. Yet she’d barely reached eighty before she’d left them for good.
Yusuke knew he was young too, in human terms, in his twenties now himself. He could continue to develop the Spirit Wave technique, and the reserves of reiki that Genkai had passed down to him. But it didn’t take a genius to figure out that he was nothing more than a child in demon terms, and his newly awakened youki was quickly outclassing his reiki by leaps and bounds, year over year.
It was distressing to think that Genkai could have gone through so much, and given him everything she had, just for it to mean so little. He thinks about Toguro, too, and wonders if the man would envy or fear him, now that he understands what true power feels like. To think that the psychic had given up everything he had, in his life, and they couldn’t even manage to make him an A-Class.
In the end, it is Kuwabara who changes Yusuke’s mind.
He never would have expected the man’s newly acquired study habits, of all things, to come in handy, but that’s exactly what happens the first time Yusuke mentions his concerns to the other psychic. Kuwabara is immediately surprised that Yusuke is unaware of all the training manuals Genkai has left behind, along with her estate. But before Yusuke can get too embarrassed about it, Kuwabara offers to read them to him, since Yusuke clearly doesn’t know how, and Yusuke wastes no time dishing out a healthy dose of ass-kicking. He was clearly asking for it.
So, he learns from Kuwabara for a while, after that. Because it turns out that, despite not having the Spirit Wave, Kuwabara had been curious enough about his own psychic abilities to go looking for more. And of course the intuitive son of a bitch always managed to find exactly what he was looking for. There were some techniques that Genkai had described, that Kuwabara couldn’t quite manage, but came to Yusuke easily. Just as often, though, there were a few neat tricks that Kuwabara could do that Yusuke couldn’t even begin to wrap his head around.
It was fun, figuring it all out, and Yusuke was exceptionally pleased to have such a good excuse to monopolize just a little bit more of Kuwabara’s time. He had been so fiercely proud to hear that Kuwabara had been accepted into the high school he’d chosen, when he’d gotten back from Makai. An engineering school, no less. But he couldn’t deny that it’d hurt just a little bit too, to realize that it might be the beginning of a drifting friendship, and that the strange, undefinable distance he once felt between himself and the two demonic members of Team Urameshi, might now be growing between himself and Kuwabara instead.
Besides, Kuwabara was a pretty good teacher, in his own way, and Yusuke found himself wondering on more than one occasion how the hell it managed to work out that he was Genkai’s apprentice and not the other way around. The guy clearly had a knack for this.
Yusuke wasn’t quite sure when he finally made the decision, but he found himself staring at Kuwabara late one day after they’d finished up another round of experimental training, and were sitting out on the porch, cooling off and sharing a couple of beers. He wasn’t listening to a single word the guy was saying about whatever technique he was going on about because, he realized, he'd already made up his mind. One way or another, the next Spirit Wave master was going to be a Kuwabara.