Disclaimer: The original manga Naruto is the work of Kishimoto Masashi. Characters, settings, and events have been adapted without authorization or approval, and I am making no profit from their use.

[Spectacles]

As if having to admit to failing eyesight weren't bad enough, Sasuke had one other problem helping to make his afternoon unbearable. That problem was sitting two stools over, wearing orange and making noise. Like always. "No, not those," said the persistent idiot. "Those make your face look fat."

He turned away from the mirror and removed the glasses frames, which he had noticed perfectly well on his own were less than flattering. "Oi. I let you stay, so just sit still and shut up. You're a jounin, not a kindergartener."

"Eh, Iruka-sensei says there's not much difference anyway," Naruto answered with a shrug. "I figure, why sweat it?" Sasuke tried the next pair, a set of slightly rounder frames than before. When his companion made that now familiar disapproving sigh, he had to forcibly restrain himself from using the mirror to bash Naruto's head in. "No, those're no good. They make your eyebrows look funny."

"I didn't ask for your opinion!" he yelled, tearing off the frames.

"I'm not wrong. Besides, I'm the one who has to look at you. My vote should count double."

The optometrist's staff had made the wise decision to keep busy on the other side of the store. He couldn't believe Naruto had actually managed to track him here after they'd finished training for the afternoon. He'd done his best to keep everyone from following precisely because he didn't want any unnecessary commentary while he was trying to pick the damn things. He'd done without for as long as he could, insisting that he could see well enough with no correction, but his vision kept degrading even when he didn't push his ocular ninjutsu. Apparently, trying to see when your vision was blurry could make it worse. Who knew? And with all the crap flying around in a battle and all the shit you'd have to carry, contact lenses just weren't an option. It was now time to advertise his impairment.

Maybe the fact that he needed glasses in the first place explained why anyone could have been able to follow him, but that didn't clarify why Naruto had been the only one to manage it. With Sakura, Ino, Sai, Kiba, and half a dozen other people all planning to 'help' him shop when his training ended, how the hell did he manage to lose everyone but Naruto? There was no question that the class dunce had improved since grade school, but he was still far from the best tracker in the village. Sasuke was already planning ways to make Naruto tell him what method he'd used -- when they got home. The middle of a public shop was hardly the place to discuss secret techniques.

"I'm the one who has to wear them, idiot. I'm the only one who gets a vote."

"But since you respect my opinion and don't want to face the ridicule of your peers, you'll definitely take my advice!" Naruto replied with a huge grin.

Sasuke blinked, mildly stunned. "You just used the word 'ridicule'," he said with some confusion.

"Yeah. So?"

"Correctly," Sasuke continued. He narrowed his eyes at the blond. "Did Sakura tell you that?"

"Nah, Ino said it, and then Sakura was saying that we'd all grown out of that, until Kiba and Akamaru ran by on the rooftops and said Sai was having a match with Fuzzy-Eyebrows and they both got ink all over themselves and looked like idiots so everyone had to come see. Then she just sighed and said maybe I should come with you after all."

It wasn't even anyone's business which visual handicap sign he decided to wear. He could manage to ignore a day or a week of Kiba thinking glasses were funny, and if it went on longer than a week he could kick some sense into the shithead.

"I don't need your help. Go home."

"Ah, but all the ones you picked out looked stupid!"

"That's why I said I don't need your help, jackass!" Sasuke yelled, the heat of the moment getting the better of him like it always did when a certain blond was involved.

"No, that's why you need my opinion. Duh."

"In your dreams, retard."

"Bastard."

"Meat-head."

"Smart-mouth."

"Numbskull."

"Four-eyes."

Sasuke grabbed the rounded frames in his stack of rejects and stuck them on Naruto's face. "Look in the mirror," he said, and was sadly unsurprised when his friend did just that and forgot all about arguing. Distracting Naruto was always too easy.

"Hey!" Naruto called out, pushing the glasses in and out of his line of sight. Sasuke noted with some bitterness that the frames looked almost hot on his friend. He made the strangest things look good. Luckily, the wide-eyed, vacant expression on his face canceled that out 95% of the time. Like now, as he whipped his head around and started stammering, "B-b-but they're not doing anything! I thought these were supposed to make you see better!"

"Now look, you..." Sasuke let his sentence die, shaking his head with a sigh. If Naruto didn't understand how glasses worked already, he probably wasn't going to get through to the idiot now.

Then his friend laughed and hit him on the shoulder. "Just kidding! They have to make the glass special, right?"

Well, at least he did understand.

"You want a gold star or something?" he asked, putting on the last pair in his stack.

Naruto just made a dubious expression.

"What?"

"You know those look just like Kabuto's did, right? Like, completely."

He turned to the mirror and leaned in close enough to see. Then he let out a defeated sigh, and pulled the frames off his face. The most annoying thing about Naruto's opinions was that they were spot-on far more often than they had any right to be.

"Fine. You want to have an opinion, you go pick something out. But if they look like shit, you've got to leave. Deal?"

"I'm on it!" Naruto yelled with a thumbs up while springing from his stool.

Sasuke turned around on his own seat, leaning back with his elbows on the counter and thinking about how he'd missed being able to see clearly when Naruto was running away. Glasses were definitely going to have their benefits. In battle, there were a lot of ways to compensate. Sure, glasses were going to help there, too, but so far most people didn't even realize he had problems. However, when it came to a detailed inspection of Naruto's ass, there was no substitute for 20/20 vision. That ass was worth seeing properly. If it weren't, he wouldn't have called dibs. But what was the point of having a nice, tight view running around when your stupid eyes made all the lines go blurry? Not that he'd ever admit that it was even the smallest factor in his decision to finally invest in corrective lenses.

He stifled a laugh when the village's most unpredictable ninja (to his friends, the ninja most likely to try something unthinkably stupid) suddenly turned into thirty copies of himself. The civilian customers and staff jumped when the dust cloud appeared, but went back to their business with reasonable speed. They all knew better than to ask questions about ninja.

There wouldn't have been enough room for thirty people browsing, but it looked like the clones were formed up in five tight regiments of six -- one group for each display -- with one Naruto grabbing glasses and the other five taking the frames from him. Then the ones holding the glasses all transformed into him and a raucous, confused profusion of Narutos calling "No good!" from every direction ensued.

He couldn't quite make out if his friend was picking things out at random or if he had some method, but he definitely wasn't taking every pair off the displays. The clones transformed to look like him, meanwhile, were trying on anything their Naruto handed them and stacking the 'no good' frames on the shelf underneath their display as soon as they got the word.

"Hold on to those," the second Naruto from the left told one of his 'Sasuke' clones, and the clone tucked a pair of frames through the belt on his pants.

From the other side, he heard, "Oi! We only get one chance to keep that bastard from looking like an idiot. Stop messing around!"

The displays weren't gigantic and the Narutos were moving fast, so all told the freak show only went on for a couple minutes before every frame his friend had wanted to try had earned a "No good" or a "Keep that".

"All right, line up!" the Naruto in the middle called out. Eight of the Sasuke clones distributed the saved pairs so that they had one each and stepped forward into a line. One clone stayed behind at each display to put back the glasses that didn't make the cut, and the rest of them disappeared.

"Okay, men!" Naruto yelled from where he was pacing in front of the row of Sasukes. "Now scowl! All right, and frown... Not bad. Not bad. Okay, look down your nose at something."

The line of clones all crossed their arms and said, "Retard," in chorus. Naruto's voice mimicry was apparently improving a lot, and it had already been annoyingly good.

Of course, he heard that comment every day.

"Right, okay. And show me angry..."

Sasuke scratched his head, wondering exactly how long this was going to take. He might as well just walk up to the line of clones, see what the shortlisted frames looked like, and pick one himself. There had to be at least one satisfactory pair, and Naruto would have no right to comment on his taste.

"And smile. Pfft... Right. Ooh, and try this. Hah! That's great! Oh man, now do this one!"

"Oi, Naruto!" The riotous laughter from the grand marshal of the clown parade in front of him definitely meant that this was over. "Make up your mind so I can send you home already."

"Huh, what?" he said, still doubled over with his own amusement as he turned around, to the point where he could barely get out the words. "Oh right. Just a sec."

His friend pulled a pair of frames off of one of the clones, and the rest turned around to deposit theirs on the display racks before disappearing. Naruto folded them up and set them down on the counter by the standing mirror, grinning ear to ear.

"There you go. One pair of glasses, Naruto approved."

They were fairly solid-feeling metal frames. Of course, all stores selling eyewear to ninja upheld rigorous standards for construction. They had what looked like a gunmetal finish, but the wires were too thin for him to be sure. Lenses were squared off, sitting mostly below the earpiece, with the frames only outlining the bottom and sides. The top was bare glass.

Sasuke ran his finger along the top of the lenses and sniffed to make it clear that he had no faith in Naruto's decision process. He was certain that his friend would have chosen something wearable (well, almost certain), but the whole exercise reeked of Naruto's trademark lack of finesse. If the glasses were stupid, he would definitely kick the jerk out. If they weren't stupid, he might kick Naruto out anyway, just for fun. Of course, it might not be worth the pain he'd endure later. Kicking Naruto out and then wearing the frames he'd picked anyway was sure to earn him snide commentary for life, not just a week -- and if these were even halfway acceptable, he was ready to be done looking.

"Just tell me one thing, Naruto," he said, and turned to face his friend before looking into the mirror. "Did you have clones of yourself hide outside every optometrist in the village and wait for me to show up?"

"Well, yeah." Naruto sounded confused. "There's only five."

He'd probably have done that if there had been five hundred. "Figures," Sasuke muttered, and looked at his reflection in the mirror.

Well, those sure are glasses.

"Not bad," he said after a moment. No funny eyebrows, no huge lenses, not too heavy. He stood up from his seat, primed to leave. "They'll do." Now he just had to order the damn things.

Unfortunately, Naruto grabbed his sleeve to stop him from taking off the frames. "Wait, there's one more thing I have to check!"

"I'm not going to make any faces for you," he said as he turned back around. "So just--"

That was when he got a mouthful of Naruto's tongue and had to grab the counter to keep from falling into a stool. One of the nosepads on the frame dug into his face and he could feel the earpiece on the other side lifting up. Making out was fine, sure -- at home. There was a time and a place for that, and besides, the way the bridge on the frames pinched was distinctly uncomfortable. When he finally managed to shove his friend back, Sasuke noticed there was spot on his left eye that was even more blurry than everything else. He grabbed a tissue from the box next to the mirror, pulled the frames off his nose, and wiped the lenses clean.

"What the fuck was that for?" he asked. The shop assistants in the back were starting to put down the papers they'd been using to block their view. Sasuke wished for a second he were blind enough to not see them blushing.

"No good. They get in the way."

"They're glasses!" He waved his arm at the wide selection of frames displayed on the wall. "They will all get in the way!"

"Eh!? You didn't tell me that!" He could guess the exact expression of disbelieving shock on Naruto's face from the tone of his voice. "That's bullshit! What're we supposed to do?"

"Naruto. I can take them off. It's not like they'll be welded to my head."

"But I thought you were going to need these things to see with!"

"Yeah, and I don't need to see for that." He shook his head and walked to the register, setting his chosen frames down in front of someone who started filling out some paperwork as quickly as she could.

"I bet you need to see for some stuff," Naruto said, getting in his face and sliding the frames across the counter, away from the furiously scribbling employee.

Sasuke slid them right back, muttering, "You weren't complaining last night." Could Naruto possibly believe that possessing glasses would render him incapable of things he could manage perfectly when he was already blind enough to need them? When his friend reached for the frames again, Sasuke slammed the numbskull's wrist against the counter while the employee grabbed the glasses, put them in a box, and closed the lid. There were limits on stupid, even for Naruto. "Oi." He pushed his friend out of his airspace and pointed to his forehead protector. "Ninja? Anything you want me to do, I can do blindfolded, with one hand tied behind my back, hanging upside-down from a tree."

"Oh yeah?"

"Well, I just said so."

"So prove it."

"Fine. As soon as we get home, just name it and I'll do it."

"Blindfolded?"

"Blindfolded."

"No trying to untie your hand?"

"If you insist."

"Which tree?"

"You pick."

"Well, fine then."

"Fine."

"Fine!"

"Excuse me..." the shopkeeper interjected quietly.

"What?" Sasuke demanded, pausing halfway through turning for the door with Naruto's collar bunched up in his fist.

Her pen was shaking slightly over her paper, and her face was bright red. "D-did you want the UV and scratch-resistant coating?" She gulped audibly when he raised his eyebrow at the question. Sasuke counted down slowly from ten so that he could remember that this person wasn't Naruto and that he probably shouldn't shout, 'What the hell kind of question is that!?' By the time he was nearing the end of the countdown, he was very nearly calm.

3... She seemed to have stopped shaking, having determined that he wasn't going to attack.

2... He breathed deeply and shook his head.

1...

"Yes. Thank you," Sasuke replied. Then he resumed dragging Naruto out the door by the collar. "Let's go."

[The End]