(A/N: Okay, so Racereff and I just MARATHON'D season 2 of this show – I'm not kidding, we did it all in one night. It kind of felt like doing drugs. At any rate, that finally kickstarted me into writing this thing. It comes pretty immediately after Sleeptalking, so read that one first!)

Headspace, pt 1

Had class always been this boring?

Or did it just seem incredibly dull by comparison after all the shit he'd done as spirit detective?

Yusuke was starting to think that it actually was the former, at the rate Ms. Hijiri's monotone voice was putting him to sleep. No, there was no way that algebra had ever been interesting. If it weren't for the fact that he had all this damn paperwork to fill out, he'd have passed out already.

Of course, that didn't mean the paperwork was interesting either. Despite how quickly it had been resolved, his latest case had left a bunch of strings. Yusuke had gone up against a giant bug-demon creep called the Dream Lord, who had a nasty habit of trapping people in his dream realm and forcing them to experience eternal torment. When he and Kuwabara had escaped, they hadn't realized it was going to be on them to crawl back into the dream realm and free a ton of other people. Yusuke hadn't even realized they were there at all. It had been up to Kuwabara, who had sensed all of them as low-level demons rather than human beings due to the dream realm's weird ass-backward aftereffects. Once freed, the random people showered praise onto the two of them, thanking them for their salvation. Kuwabara ate it up, but Yusuke was already sick of the case, and he just wanted to go home. He had better things to do.

He and Kuwabara had better things to do.

As he sat there scratching Xs through little check-boxes and filling out disinterested, one-word responses to all the standard mumbo-jumbo post-case questions, Yusuke tried very hard not to think about the other stuff that had happened in the dream realm and afterward. Because if he got to thinking about it now, it wouldn't go away. There would be a constant buzz in the back of his mind - and a faint ache in the back of his throat - and the only cure for it would be a stupid guy with stupid orange hair and a stupid spirit sword and a stupid, sexy way of kissing the hell out of him...

"Urameshi?"

Shit. It was too late. The buzz was already there, and the cure was three classrooms away. And now Ms. Hijiri had called on him and he absolutely, positively did not have any idea what they were talking about.

Yusuke squinted at the chalkboard from his position at the back of the room, trying to nonchalantly shove his spirit world paperwork out of sight as he did so and act like he'd actually been following along. He could trace the problem up until the second step, but from the third part onward he was totally lost. Ultimately, the only answer that would come out of his mouth was "Two out of three?"

"Were we actually discussing odds and statistics, Urameshi, I have no doubt that your answer might at least be a relevant one, if not the correct one. However, these are polynomials, and while I can see how you would be disinterested, as they have nothing to do with gambling, I would pay attention if I were you. Heaven forbid you actually learn something."

One kid in the front of the room had the gall to laugh at him. Yusuke glared up at the punk, making sure he memorized his face so he could beat him up later. He shut up pretty quickly, jumping a little and turning to face the front again. Yusuke scowled, mumbling a little bit to himself, and pulled out his paperwork again. He was desperate to finish it before the buzz got too bad.

Of course, it was easy to find the question he'd left off at, because it was a scale question, and he'd circled 2 out of 3.

Suddenly, worse than he'd felt it all day, Yusuke couldn't wait for this day to be over. Everyone always said how much they hated Mondays, but Yusuke thought that Fridays were pretty horrible too, because you had to sit there and anticipate the weekend all freaking day. And what he needed more than anything right now was a weekend, some time to chill. If he skipped any more class except for the strictest emergencies (also known as spirit detective cases) he was screwed, and he'd end up failing this year. He couldn't afford to just take off in the middle of the week, as much as he wanted to. So instead, everything had been building up. The classwork. The casework. That damn buzz. Yusuke just didn't know how he had enough room left in his head for all of it.

When the bell rang, Yusuke collected up all of his stuff as best he could, shoved it into his schoolbag, and bolted from the school. He wasn't going home - the buzz had guaranteed that - but he just needed to get out.

He did stop long enough to beat the snot out of that kid from math, though.

-xxx-

Okay, it was official: Yusuke hated Fridays. And he especially hated today.

He poured on the speed all the way to Kuwabara's house, racing against the buzz in his head. By the time he got there he was hot and sweating from exertion, so he squirmed out of his uniform jacket and paused for a minute to catch his breath before he rang the doorbell. As he heard feet shuffling to the door, he started to grin...

And then the person that opened the door was Kuwabara's sister.

Yusuke stuttered, trying to cover his frustration and still be polite. "Oh, uh, hey Shizuru..."

"Bro's not home yet, Urameshi," she said with a hint of apology. "Remember? He got that detention for fighting? I'm amazed you managed to escape it."

"Oh yeah," said Yusuke, recalling it suddenly - though honestly, it was no wonder he'd forgotten. Then something else occurred to him. "Hey, what are you doing here anyway? Don't you have to work?"

"Fridays are only half-days now," said Shizuru with a smile. "They changed the office hours. It's nice to have an afternoon a week to sit at home and not have to go anywhere."

"Uh-huh. Nice," said Yusuke faintly. Damnit! If she was gonna be here... "Tell you what, when Kuwabara gets home, can you just tell him to come over to my place instead? Tell him I uh...I got that new tape that he wanted to listen to."

"Okay, sure," said Shizuru. "I guess I'll see you later?"

"See ya," Yusuke said, and then he turned and headed home.

He couldn't remember the last time half an hour had taken so long. He had planned on chatting to his mom a little, as a distraction, but when he got home she wasn't there. Yusuke couldn't decide if he thought this was a good thing or a bad thing. Instead he shut himself in his room, prepared to just space out until Kuwabara came around, but the ticking of his clock was too loud and along with the buzz, he figured he'd probably crack. So he prowled around the kitchen, got a snack, fidgeted, talked a bit to his mom when she finally got home, and was just deciding to sit in his room after all and throw the damn clock in his sock drawer when there was a knock at the door.

"Oh, hey there!"

"Hi, uh, Urameshi's mom. He's here, right?"

"Sure, sure, come on in! He's in his room, I think." Yusuke was impressed with her keeping her voice relatively steady, drunk as she was. He sat on his bed and braced himself for the buzzing to stop.

Kuwabara walked in. "Hey, Urameshi," he said with a bit of a smirk as he shut the door behind him.

"Hey yourself," said Yusuke.

"So..." Kuwabara said, stepping closer to him. "You have that tape I want to listen to, huh?"

"Yeah, I got your tape."

"So where is it?"

"It's right here." Yusuke pointed vaguely in his own direction.

"Where?" asked Kuwabara, closing the distance between them even more. "I don't see it."

"Closer," said Yusuke, "closer...here!"

Kuwabara had finally gotten close enough for Yusuke to reach around to the back of his head and pull their lips together, for the smallest fleetingest kiss first before diving completely in. The mouth he was kissing was smiling at him, laughing into his own, but kissing back pretty solidly once things got going. As they became more engaged, as Kuwabara pushed him further back and further down onto the bed, Yusuke started to realize that the buzz wasn't really going away - it was just turning from a bad buzz to a good buzz. He felt like he could work with that, especially if it meant Kuwabara would keep kissing him like that. The pressure of Kuwabara's tongue against his own was sweet, insistent, in a way that had made Yusuke give up worrying about Kuwabara's Y chromosome a long time ago.

At least when it came to the two of them and the kissing part. When it came to the "telling other people" part, neither Yusuke nor Kuwabara had been too enthused. Yusuke was pretty sure that it was not okay to like other guys. Sometimes he would almost come to terms with it - after all, he didn't really like guys, he just liked a guy - but then he'd see a couple (a boy/girl couple) holding hands in the halls at school, or catch his mom hanging out with her gross drag-queen friends, and the whole process would be reversed. And clamming up was hard for Yusuke - though conveniently, the upside to secretly making out with your best friend sometimes was that you didn't have to keep it a secret from your best friend - but he just didn't think the time was right. And he didn't know if it ever would be.

Of course, the time was right for actually doing the secret making out.

"Mmf, Urameshi," Kuwabara murmured, nudging at him. He'd slackened up a little lost in thought about stupid shit. Kuwabara's hand curving around the side of his ribcage snapped him back to reality, and he leaned into the touch and started kissing back hard again. Even after ten minutes or so Kuwabara wasn't losing steam, and every second was awesome. Shit, thought Yusuke, I think I had a dream like this once...

However, his dream definitely didn't include Kuwabara suddenly tensing up, opening his eyes and freezing motionless.

"Hey, whassa - "

"Sorry!" hissed Kuwabara, which didn't make a lot of sense, but then he socked Yusuke in the jaw and it started to add up.

"What the hell are you doing, dumbass?" Yusuke cried, and just about had Kuwabara in a headlock when Botan popped through the door.

She eyed them skeptically. "You know I'm glad to have caught both of you at once, but I certainly hope I'm not interrupting anything."

"Oh, no, Urameshi here just felt the need to exert his masculinity over a dumb argument, nothing new." Kuwabara squirmed out from under his arm while Yusuke was still dumbstruck. "Man, I told you that tape was gonna suck."

Something finally clicked and Yusuke managed to fumble out a response just in time to keep Botan from getting too suspicious. "I think it's your tastes in music that suck, pal."

She sighed and rolled her eyes. "Do the two of you ever resolve anything without resorting to your fists?"

Yusuke and Kuwabara didn't even look at each other before answering in tandem. "Nope."

"Ugh, boys."

"So hey now, what are you doing here anyway?" Yusuke asked Botan. "I'm not quite done with that paperwork yet, if that's what you're here for - "

Botan instantly looked sheepish. "Ahh, not exactly. Although if you could have it for me soon that'd be great."

"Oh yeah?" Yusuke raised one eyebrow. Why did he already not like the sounds of this?

"Yeah, because, ah...what I really stopped by for was to prepare you for your next case." She squeaked the last couple of phrases out rather quickly and was already wincing.

"Damnit, already?"

"Well, sometimes the crimes you have to go up against aren't perpetrated at times that are convenient to you, Yusuke!"

"Hey, if I recall correctly, the last crap I had to go through wasn't even a real case - it was just, oh, a threat on my life!"

"Uh, no offense, Urameshi, but a lot of the stuff you do threatens your life and you usually don't take it all that seriously," Kuwabara piped up. Botan nodded emphatically.

"Damnit, Kuwabara, you're supposed to be on my side." He glared, and Kuwabara glared back, and the back of his head went buzz.

"At any rate, don't take your issues up with me," said Botan. "Take them up with Kouji and Jikou, the twin brother and sister that dug up the Great Swan's Tooth and plan to use it for their own purposes."

"Swan's tooth?" echoed Kuwabara. "Hey, swans are birds, they don't have teeth!"

"Not any more," Botan agreed. "And certainly not in the human world. But a long time ago, the Great Swan became infected with a terrible poison. One of the side effects was that all its teeth fell out. Of course, the teeth were just as infected as the rest of the swan, so the poison was contained within them. All but one of them was destroyed. King Enma used the last one as a deterrent for a forest full of crazed demonic trees. By burying it in the soil in the center of the forest, the poison spread into the ground and kept them all from growing."

"So lemme guess, I have to get back this poison bird tooth thing?" said Yusuke, unimpressed.

"Bingo," said Botan. "The forest is under control - we've sent Kurama to deal with that, as you might expect - but it's up to you to track down the twins and get the Great Swan's Tooth back before they destroy entire cities with it!"

"Okay, so correct me if I'm wrong, but if they're just terrorizing the demon realm, isn't that okay? How does this affect me at all?"

"The demon realm is used to small skirmishes, it's true, but any sort of widespread unrest could have repercussions on spirit world and the human world as well," explained Botan. "Especially if it's to the scale that these two intend it."

"What scale is that?" asked Kuwabara.

"Genocide."

"Geez, really?"

"Really. Kouji and Jikou are the last of their kind, after a long-standing clan feud turned into a large-scale war. They intend to use the tooth to exact revenge on the rival clan for what they did. Unfortunately, that's one of the biggest clans in the demon realm right now, and if they were to use the poison on all of them..."

"Shit would go down. Yeah, I hear you," said Yusuke.

"Then you'll do it?"

"Do I really have much of a choice?"

"Well, no, I guess not. Well, good! Then there's absolutely no backing out now!"

Yusuke's eyes narrowed. "This is the part where you're gonna tell me I have to do something really stupid, isn't it?"

"Ahaha, well, stupid isn't exactly the word I'd use - "

"Spit it out, Botan," he growled. "Might as well get it over with."

"Well, you see, Kouji and Jikou's clan was known for two specific traits that they possess, to a degree that's probably higher than any other type of demon. First of all, they're incredibly good at eliminating any signs of their own presence. They can slip through empty fields in broad daylight and still go practically unseen - and unsensed," she added.

Kuwabara grinned. "Aha, so you're really gonna need me on this one, aren't you Urameshi?" he said with a laugh. "Never fear, I got so much sixth sense that I might as well have a seventh sense too!"

Botan cringed at his enthusiasm. "See, that's the other problem. The clan's other distinct attribute is their incredibly keen sense of smell. Their olfactory sense is especially attuned to sniffing out human presence - up to miles away from their own location."

"So wait, doesn't that rule me out too?" asked Yusuke, a little confused.

"Not exactly," said Botan. "Technically, you've already died, and though your body is human your soul is not. As far as a demon's concerned, you don't smell like a true human ought to."

"So I need to go in 'cause I've got the spirit awareness - "

"But only I can go in, because you smell bad," Yusuke finished with a snigger. Kuwabara punched him in the arm and pouted. "How's this supposed to work?"

Botan reached into her pocket and started to tug something out. "Well...this is where the 'stupid' part kicks in."