as;dlkfj that last reblog is absolutely something my friends would tell any child i could have they could even pull up the "pear is a tapeworm" google doc as evidence even
will there be more chapters for your potpurri au? no pressure, just curious!
hopefully one day!!! i did have a ginzura-themed draft set in the potpourri au (it's still there ahaha i just haven't added to it in a long while) which was titled something like actually the strawberry flavour in your strawberry milk is really just sugar and red dye. i only got so far as ginzura bullying haggard old man hasegawa-san before i lost the plot of it but i aim one day to finish it!!! actually here is a snippet ahaha
After a long day at work ferrying customers back and forth through the endless streams of urban traffic, Taizou slams shut the driver's door to his cab, rolls his shoulders back and his head up, and then nearly bursts into tears.
"Please stop sitting there," he begs to the demon perched on the wall outside his house. "Please. It gives me a heart attack."
Yoshida-san's devil child, the one that the man dotes on incessantly, the one that likes to wheedle snacks from Taizou's sweet, innocent wife, the one that has tormented Taizou relentlessly without him even lifting a finger at least three times a week ever since their paths had tragically crossed, stares down dolefully.
"Hatsu doesn't mind," says Gintoki. "Besides. What's it my fault if pathetic old men die early? An old man who dies from something as lame as a heart attack is like a piece of dog crap stinking things up on the boot of society. An old man who dies from a heart attack is probably dying from something else already anyway, like crappy convenience store cigarettes or the weight of their own failures or their sunglasses leeching out all of their braincells like a cursed object."
"That's Hatsu-san to you," says Taizou, for lack of anything else.
"Yeah, yeah, yeah. Anyway, old men like that are already like zombies anyway. Even if they die, they'll still get up and go back home and leech off Hatsu." Gintoki pinches around the outsides of his nostrils thoughtfully, probably in search of stray boogers.
Taizou drags his hands down his face. He heaves a large sigh. His blood pressure has been climbing upwards for years at this point. "Aren't you too old to be doing things like this? Don't you have to get home? Don't you have anything better to do? Don't you have too much homework to be bullying poor, working men just trying to get by? God help me."
"Pft," says Gintoki, twelve years old and mean as hell. "As if God would listen to dog crap like you."
ooo
The first thing to ask, obviously, is why Gintoki is here.
"It's because he's run away from home again," explains Katsura-kun, politely letting himself into the kitchen through the back door. He gestures over at Gintoki (rifling through Taizou's refridgerator shelves for sweet treats) and beams at Hatsu (heading out to the garden) when she pats him on the head, even though the kid's almost as tall as she is now.
"Yeah," says Gintoki. He settles down at the table with a cup of chocolate mousse.
Taizou gazes wearily at the scene.
"Don't just come into my house like that. Who even invited you? And you. I was going to eat that. I was going to have that for dessert tonight."
Gintoki's eyes go wide and he makes a noise of surprise. "Hm? Oh, this l'il thing? Sorry. It just looked so lonely in the back of your fridge. I thought I'd keep it company. Anyway, I'm a growing boy, so I need all the sugar I can get."
"I put it up at the front so I could take it out for dessert. I was really looking forward to that."
"It's probably better that you don't eat too much sugar anyway, old man," Gintoki adds. "I heard too much sweet stuff is bad for geezers."
"You know what. Fine. Go ahead," says Taizou.
"If you're hungry or peckish," says Katsura-kun, "then I'm not sure Hasegawa-san's pantry is the best place. It would really have been better for you to stay home and let Yoshida-san stuff you with, what's that he's been baking a lot recently? I think they were lemon rosemary cookies." He pauses and looks to his left, where Gintoki nods absently into his chocolate mousse.
"Yes, that's right. Lemon rosemary shortbread cookies. They were quite good actually. Yoshida-san gave me a container to take home. I stopped by their house after school, that's why," he says to Taizou, whose expression must be showing the confusion bouncing around his brain. "He even sat me down to discuss the symbolism of the ingredients he used. He said: half a cup of sugar for the sweetness of existence, half a teaspoon of vanilla extract, a quarter of a teaspoon of salt for the tears shed in existence, a cup of butter, smooth and slippery, like all the things that slip out of your grasp—"
"Hey, what do you mean my pantry's not the best place?," says Taizou after a moment of realisation. "I work hard to feed myself and my wife, you know that, you brats? This whole day I was driving around rude, shithead city people who smoke in my cab and spill disgusting sticky soft drinks on my seats, and this is what I come home to?"
"You're the shithead who smokes in your cab," says Gintoki. "If your car smells like smoke, then that's because you're stinking it up in the first place, so it's your own fault."
"Are you really a little kid?" says Taizou. "Why do you have such a crude mouth for a kid? Why is everything you say so mean?"
"Hey, you're the one who said 'shithead' in the first place. I'm just repeating what you said. I'm an impressionable young boy, so you should be watching your mouth, actually. You should be a good role model."
"Don't your neighbours smoke? I see Tatsugoro-san with his pipe around all the time, are you this mean to him? Are you this mean to Ayano-san? You aren't, are you? You're only this mean to me. I'm the only one you call a pathetic old man, aren't I? I'm the only one you unleash all of your insults on, aren't I? You only call me dog crap on the boot of society."
"—two cups of all-purpose flour, soft and bright, for all the things that are so delicate that they can be blown away in a single breath, rosemary for fidelity and remembrance, oh Gintoki, what have I done that I don't deserve your fidelity, oh Gintoki, remember me, won't you Gintoki, wherever you have gone to, away from me, preserve the memory of me in your soul, even when you so evidently can no longer stand to look at my face—"
"Shoyo has a dumb face," says Gintoki to Katsura-kun. "And I'm just going to stay at your house for a week or two. I go to your house all the time."
"Well, you forget that Yoshida-san is possessed by a thousand spirits of melodrama," says Katsura-kun. "Also, lastly, lemon for bitterness. That said, I have a container for you as well, Gintoki."
Gintoki wrinkles his nose. "I don't want it, thanks."
"I'll take it," says Taizou, having been demolished by a middle schooler. "I need a pick-me-up." The container is swiftly slid across to him. "Thanks."
He opens the lid to find resting on top of the pile of warm biscuits a small square note embossed with spiky leaves around the edge. It's covered with pen drawings of hearts and sad faces and reads: FOR MY STINKY LITTLE SWEETPEA WHO IS ALWAYS WELCOME TO COME BACK HOME AT ANYTIME HE DECIDES TO RETURN HOME MOST HOPEFULLY SOON. <3.
"I wonder what Hatsu's doing outside," says Taizou. If he arches his neck, he can glimpse through the window. She's tending to the flowerbeds, it looks like. She pulls out a couple of weeds. Katsura-kun looks as if he knows exactly what is contained in Gintoki's care package (kid probably watched the note be written) and is politely ignoring it. Gintoki's face is very bland.
"Looks like there's some paper in here. With some writing on it. And some little pictures." He takes a bite out of what really is a good biscuit, sweet and buttery and still warm. Yoshida-san seriously is a good baker. "So these are kind of like fortune cookies, yeah?"
"Huh, says Katsura-kun. "I didn't get anything in mine."
"Huh," says Taizou, with maximum discretion. "Weird. Maybe something happened at the fortune cookie factory and they had a mix-up. Welp, since I'm an old geezer and I've had enough of both sorts 'a fortune, good or bad, in my lifetime, I guess you kids can have mine."
Silently, he folds up the note. Gintoki's hand is already open and outreached, though he refuses to look at it. Underneath that note is another one, which is a mournfully calligraphed poem about the temporary nature of happiness and domestic bliss that has additionally been annotated. He passes that one over as well.
"Anyway, Katsura-kun," he continues, "what was that recipe? Can you say it again, or maybe write it down? Hatsu might like it. She's mentioned wanting to try her hand at baking these days."
"When everything is over," Katsura said, his hair draped over Gintoki's knee, "and we're old and grey, I would be happy living together in a house with you. Though I suppose you already are grey, so on your part, you would just be old. I would be the one who'd gone grey when I wasn't before."
[What happens when you have walked past the limit of what your eyes can see?"
excerpts from the mini gintama zine i made for Official_Biscuit_Moron on ao3!!
it’s inspired by that one post about the contents page of pictures & tears by james elkins, a history of people who have cried in front of paintings with the “crying no one can understand” and “weeping, watching the madonna weep” and “crying at the empty sea of faith”. these are the pages that i think i am proudest of!
i have re-discovered what it is to be deeply hinged on a single concept that consumes all of my waking moments to the extent that i have even cried on the toilet just thinking about it ahahaha. anyway my friend did impeccable gorgeous beautiful wonderful phenomenal outstanding stunning art of my oc and i became insane. i lost my mind. i lost my marbles. i wanted to engrave it into my bones. my pet project is no longer a pet it came loose and is running wild in my mind and soul and the essence of my being i am giggling about it while walking down the street (thankfully i have also made my friend insane about it too ahahaha) but yes anyway what was my point i cannot remember my point oh hmmmmm.
names of gintama characters transcribed into bataknese script as attempted by me (learned it from mixture of youtube videos and also wikipedia and also this site which is amazing and wonderful)
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shinpachi and katsura are a little harder, because the batak language didn’t originally have characters for “sh” and “ch” and “ts” sounds. i think there are characters for them now!! i’m just worried i’m getting it wrong ahahah.
