Work Text:
Gugugugu.
Papapapapa.
Kata… Kata…
Zusha! Dosun! Gasshan! Shi —
Wait.
Gintoki squinted. Was that a “shi” or a “tsu”? He pulled the magazine up to his nose, too close for his eyes to focus. Then he held it away as far as he could, too far to make out the tiny, cheaply printed words. He clicked his tongue. Damn young manga artists, with their perfect eyesight and ant-sized sound effects. Damn lazy Jump editors, doing the bare minimum as usual. Didn’t they realize they were alienating a whole demographic of older readers by letting this impossible handwriting go to press?
Great, now he’d lost the flow of the chapter — maybe it would help if he re-read it from the top. Bringing the magazine to a reasonable reading distance, flipping back a few pages, Gintoki cleared his throat and took a deep breath.
“Gugugu — guh!”
With frightening velocity, something cold and hard nailed him in the forehead before clattering onto the desk.
“What the —”
Gintoki slammed his Jump down, sprung out of his chair and glared at the man on the sofa. “What the hell was that for?”
“Shutting you up.” Hijikata returned the glare over the top of his newspaper. “No one needs to hear you read manga aloud and hear you whine about your failing vision.”
Oh. Oops. Had Gintoki been thinking out loud this whole time?
“If you’re having such a hard time reading, put those on,” Hijikata continued, and Gintoki glanced down. The thing that brained him just a moment ago — the spare reading glasses Hijikata kept in the Yorozuya living room — glinted up at him in all its oval-lensed, steel-rimmed glory.
“Reading glasses?” An incredulous laugh burst out of him. “No, no, no.” It wasn’t that Gintoki had anything against the presbyopic community, per se, he just… wasn’t one of them. Refused to be one one of them. Because…
“Aging is a process, y’know? First you start to wear reading glasses, then your pillow begins to reek, then your nose hair grows out of control, then your stomach turns into a double burger, then you can’t get it up without Biagra, then your unsatisfied wife has an affair with a virile younger man who can barely speak Japanese! Fine!” He stood up and slammed his Jump onto the desk, “Go and leave me for Taka-tin, why don’t you!“
A glasses case caught Gintoki in the mouth, and he collapsed back into his chair with a limp yelp.
“I’d sooner commit seppuku before I slept with Taka-tin,” Hijikata ground out. “Just shut up and wear the glasses!”
“No, I’m not ready yet! I’m not ready to be oh-oh-old!” Gintoki threw an arm over his face as he blubbered and drew the last word out in an affected sob.
“You’ll get old with or without glasses, idiot! You’ve got nose hair sticking out right now.”
“Oh shit,” Gintoki straightened up instantly, pressing a probing finger to his upper lip. “Huh, you’re right.”
A vein pulsed at Hijikata’s temple.
“I’ll just tuck this guy back — up — ” Gintoki shoved a pinky into his left nostril, chasing the offending hair, “There.”
His pinky withdrew, crowned by a piece of snot that he promptly flung at Hijikata. “Ha! Do I look ten years younger or what?”
“You wish. You were born looking like a geezer.”
“All the more reason not to wear those reading glasses, then!”
“I wear those reading glasses,” Hijikata finally snapped, his eyes dangerous behind his current black-framed lenses, the newspaper pulled taut between his hands. “Is this your way of saying you’re unsatisfied with me?”
Gintoki’s little brain stumbled, stopped. Backpedaled as fast as it could. Sure, Hijikata’s words were ninety percent borne of his frankly unrealistic desire for Gintoki to shut up, but that remaining ten was enough to condemn Gintoki to a cold and lonely night on the sofa if he didn’t choose his next words with the utmost care. So, he went with: “Ahaha, nooo, but you look good in glasses!”
Hijikata really did, to Gintoki’s eternal chagrin — no matter how old he got, the damn bastard still looked good in anything short of a full-body mayonnaise costume, and in glasses he looked, well,
“Like a sexy sensei in a reverse 3Z doujinshi!”
For some reason, Hijikata seemed to grow angrier. Instead of blowing a surly-but-secretly-pleased plume of smoke Gintoki’s way and returning to whatever article he was reading, Hijikata’s jaw clenched down on his precious, once-a-day cigarette like a tetanoid hydraulic press. “What the fuck are you talking about?”
“This is why I didn’t want to bring it up,” Gintoki sighed, changing tacks and, in case that failed, began to wonder which sofa was the one with a broken seat cushion — sleeping on that shit was hell on his lower back. “You ikemen types could never understand.”
“Understand what?”
“The struggle of aging gracefully!”
Hijikata slapped his newspaper onto the coffee table, cursing out his terrible taste in life partners under his breath and muttering something that sounded suspiciously like “And all the shippers make me out to be the insecure one.”
Louder, listing out on his fingers as he went, he spat, “Your pillow already smells. Your nose hair is always sticking out. You’ve been tubby ever since the timeskip. Your dick is the only reliable part of you.”
“Tubby…” Gintoki mouthed. “Tubby?!” He pointed an incredulous, “Me?” finger at himself. “I got broader, thank you very much. Those were gains from carrying the weight of the world on my shoulders!”
Hijikata crossed his arms and resolutely ignored Gintoki’s outburst. “You’ve never had a graceful age in your life. And yet — somehow —“ He rolled his eyes like he couldn’t believe himself either, “I haven’t left you for Taka-tin. Do you really think reading glasses can make you any more of a madao than you already are?”
Gintoki resented the implication that he was already at peak madao while Hasegawa was still out there, but otherwise… the man had a point. Heartened by Hijikata’s ever-blunt words of reassurance, Gintoki finally picked up the glasses. Staring down at them, testing their weight in his hands, he ignored the sense of foreboding that came with becoming the first Jump protagonist to need reading glasses, ignored the little voice that told him there was no going back if he put those glasses on and found himself able to read the nutritional facts on strawberry milk cartons again.
Gintoki wore the glasses.
The metal arms were cool where they rested against his temples, the plastic pads snug upon the bridge of his nose. He raised his head and asked, “How do I look?”
As Hijikata scrutinized his face, Gintoki refused to make eye contact — eye contact would imply he actually cared about what Hijikata thought — so he fixed his gaze on Hijikata’s salt-and-pepper hair instead. Absently, he noted it was more salt than pepper these days. He kept that little observation to himself, though, because he knew the damned hypocrite was just as “insecure” about his greying hair.
“You look…” Hijikata cleared his throat after a beat, and Gintoki finally deigned to meet his eyes. “…Like a sexy sensei in a 3Z doujinshi.”
Oh? Ohhh? Maybe Gintoki’s night wasn’t going to be cold or lonely after all. “A-ha!” he crowed, “So you do know what I’m talking about!”
For the third time in five minutes, Hijikata told him to shut up. Gintoki did not shut up — when did he ever? He flashed Hijikata a smarmy grin instead. “Hey, let’s be old men together?”
“Tch.” Hijikata readjusted his reading glasses, as if a hand could hide his smile from Gintoki’s view. “Like we aren’t already.”