.

Nearsighted

Does Erza really need glasses just because she pulled a sword on the wrong lady once or yelled at a tree? She thinks not. It's not as if she can't tell friend from foe. She's hardly blind.

It started off small. Things grew a little fuzzy around the edges even when they weren't sporting fur, or they became just the slightest bit blurry for no good reason.

When confronted, Erza shrugged it off. "It's a heat wave," she said. "Like when it gets too hot and the conditions are right and the air seems to shimmer a little?"

Gray looked at her as if she'd sprouted a third eye right in the middle of her forehead. "It's not nearly hot enough for that."

"It's starting early this year," Erza said, nodding sagely.

She didn't worry about it too much. It seemed harmless enough. So maybe she had once accosted a woman in the market who she thought was Lucy, but she'd only seen her from behind and the blonde hair was the same. And maybe she had burst into the guild one morning demanding to know who had defaced the Fairy Tail sign hanging outside because their name was illegible now. She didn't believe it was the same as always until Elfman got out a ladder and pulled it down to show her up close. But what did that really hurt? Those were small, easily forgivable mistakes.

"Maybe you should think about getting some glasses," Lucy suggested.

Erza scoffed. "Why would I do that?"

"Don't you think you might be becoming a little…nearsighted?"

Erza snorted loudly to show what she thought of that. "My eyes are perfectly fine," she said.

And that was the end of that, or should have been. At least, her friends left it alone until she pointed a sword at a woman outside the train station.

"It looked like she was drawing a sword on that poor man!" she protested.

"It was an umbrella!" Happy cried.

"But it could have been a sword," Erza said stubbornly. "People shouldn't carry things around that look like swords unless they're prepared to duel."

"People shouldn't carry around swords if they refuse to get their vision corrected," Gray muttered.

Natsu just cackled. "I thought it was hilarious!"

They stopped just short of a full-scale intervention when Erza made some choice threats about drawing a few more swords to skewer nosy friends. Even though they subsided reluctantly, their eyes began following her everywhere, wary and watching. She did not like it one bit, and resolved not to make any more silly mistakes around them. They were overreacting about every little thing these days.

A few days later, Erza was cutting through the park and caught a glimpse of brown clothes, green hair, and a lanky frame across the river. She had thought Freed had gone on a job with Laxus and the rest of the Raijinshuu, so naturally she drifted down the bank to call to him and see what had happened. He had the gall to ignore her entirely, even when she got frustrated and started yelling. When she finally gave up and turned to storm off in a huff, she found her team standing farther up the bank, gaping at her.

"Erza…" Lucy said. "Why are you yelling at a tree?"

Erza blinked back at them, and quickly deduced this was a situation that could lead back to the conversation she had been so assiduously avoiding.

"It offended me," she said.

Although her friends exchanged looks, they were too cowed by her vehemence and previous threats to offer more than token resistance.

Some weeks later, the guild was stormed by a second-rate wannabe dark guild angry that some plan had been previously thwarted and too stupid to understand who they were challenging. Erza took one look at the clumsy ambush and smiled.

"I'll take care of them," she said, requipping into her Heaven's Wheel armor.

Someone squeaked like a mouse as a hundred swords fanned out in the air around her, and she had the strangest feeling that it wasn't one of their attackers.

"Don't do it!" Lucy wailed. "You can't tell us apart from them! You'll skewer us all!"

Erza scoffed. "Oh, please. I keep telling you, there's nothing wrong with my eyes."

Sure, everyone was a little blurry, but she could surely tell her guildmates apart from a dark guild. She was hardly blind.

It was only in the aftermath, as Gajeel munched on the sword that had pinioned his hand and Gray gingerly pulled his skewered shirt off the wall and Mira went around bandaging up minor flesh wounds, that the Master came over and put a hand on her arm.

"Erza," he said, "you are suspended from active duty until you get glasses."

As it turned out, glasses weren't that bad after all. Erza found a pair with stylish tortoiseshell frames that brought the world back into crystal sharpness and looked good doing it. Everyone complimented them, and she wondered if they were looking more relieved than usual or she'd just forgotten what their normal features looked like when they weren't blurred at the edges. The team even agreed to go on jobs with her again.

On one such job, after she'd neatly apprehended a handful of bandits with some skillful requipping—with a little help from her friends, of course—she caught Lucy giving her an odd look.

"What is it?" she asked.

"Oh, nothing," Lucy said. "Just… Did you requip your glasses along with your armor?"

Erza grinned and tapped her finger against the thin black rims of her glasses, careful not to smudge the lenses. "Of course!" she said. "I bought a pair for every armor."

She cycled through a few, each more stylishly outlandish than the last, to demonstrate her genius.

"They're very nice," Lucy said appreciatively. "You have great style. But doesn't that seem like…?"

"Like what?" asked Erza.

"Well, like a lot."

Erza failed to see the issue. "Of course. I have a lot of armor and swords too."

"Well, yes, but…"

"Maybe we should've introduced you to contacts instead," Gray said. "Much simpler."

Erza's face lit up again. "I have those too!" she said, requipping into a pair of contacts that colored her eyes electric green with the suggestion of catlike slits for pupils.

Gray sighed. "Forget I asked."