Roll over Walt Disney...
August 2005

Written for the Fairy Tales challenge for Naruto100.

Challenge: Fairy tales
Length: Turned out about 1200 words. (So I'm genetically drabble-impaired. Comes from too many years of being paid by published inch of text...)
Rating: Crackitty crack crack. Oh, and probably PG 13, but beware of brain damage.
Once upon a time, in a small village dripping with ninjas, there was a child born with hair black as coal, skin white as snow, and eyes red as blood. (Unfortunately, this was nothing new, since there was an entire clan of them.)

Under normal circumstances, the new baby would have been named Snow White, or at least Yuki, but his father protested that there had never been a self-respecting ninja named Snow White, so he decreed that the baby should be called Sasuke instead. Nice traditional ninja name and all that. (The father still blamed the elder son's deviance and abnormal nail-polish fetish on being named after small woodland vermin, and was determined not to let the same mistake happen twice.)

A few years later, when Itachi had massacred his parents and taken his rightful place as evil overlord of all he surveyed, he had the manufacturers of Sandaime's crystal ball come up with a custom job just for him. It was a tall silver mirror (with gills as a fashion statement).

Every day, once Itachi had finished his morning rituals of eating breakfast, painting his nails, and kicking any available puppies, he would put on his swirly cloak and stand in front of the mirror and say "Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who's the most psychotic of them all?"

Most of the time it was a bit of a toss-up between himself and the snake-pervert a couple fairytales over, but the mirror knew when to lie through its sharp little teeth.

So after placating Itachi's sense of evil overlord-dom, the mirror usually proceeded with the daily stock report, weather forecast, fashion trends among the gothically depressed, and other news items of general interest to psychotic bishounen who wore nail polish. (Hey. Sandaime's crystal ball is a goooood piece of work. The company always throws in a little extra service for their patrons.)

Most of the time, Itachi's little brother never made it into the "fashion trends among the gothically depressed" list, because let's face it, the boy was almost as severely fashion-impaired as he was emotionally-impaired. All right, full-body tattoos were fairly gothic, but they kept migrating. Indecision in body decoration is a major fashion no-no. And one-piece black rubber wetsuits that don't even fit properly? Just don't look good on anybody.

One day, though, Itachi's little brother actually made national fashion headlines. Granted, it was the "Top Ten Worst Fashion Ideas of All Time" list, but apparently Sasuke subscribed to the theory that any press coverage is good press coverage. Between the peroxide, the purple lipstick (everyone knew purple was best reserved for nail polish), the facial tattoos, the full-eye contact lenses, and the couldn't-make-up-their-minds hand-wing things attached to the back of the outfit, Itachi simply stood and stared for a good ten minutes.

No, this would NOT do.

Not at all.

If word ever got out that the country's most elegantly-dressed goth evil overlord bishounen's little brother had outdone even Oscar stars in a quest for the ultimate sheer eye-gouging couture nightmare... he'd never be able to hold his head up in a gathering of his peers again.

So Itachi calmly had the boy sealed up in a barrel and shipped off to the snake-pervert a couple of fairy tales over. Let him deal with the fashion nightmare. Maybe Sasuke would be considered his apprentice rather than Itachi's brother, so that the fashion-nightmare cooties would rub off in that direction instead.

Unfortunately for Itachi, several of the little woodland creatures took issue with his plans, and set off to rescue Sasuke. The caterpillar-eyebrowed green thing was more a laughable nuisance than anything else, but the little fox was living up to his trickster name far too well. They got Sasuke out of the barrel and even dragged him back to the village for a while.

In utter exasperation, Itachi took matters into his own hands. He stormed in, mocked the boy's weakness for a while, broke some disposable parts including his mind, and gave him a good helpful nudge towards the snake-pervert's fairy tale, then left dusting his hands off and muttering about good riddance.

The exasperating little fox just couldn't tell when to leave well enough alone, though. He actually tried to get that walking couture nightmare back. Voluntarily. When any rational creature would have been blinded by the experience. On the other hand, the fox thought that eye-blinding orange was a good fashion statement.

The two of them deserved each other, Itachi thought in disgust.

So he decided it was time to catch himself a fox pelt for his floor just so that his promisingly psychotic younger brother could finally go learn something approaching fashion sense from the normally very-well-dressed snake-pervert.

The duel with the little fox didn't go as well as he'd hoped. In addition to being so agonizingly ORANGE that he scarred Itachi's retinas even secondhand, there was something just as blindingly PINK this time. Flipping on a pair of shades just to deal with the visual assault, Itachi threw his hands in the air.

"Take him," he said with a sigh. "I quit. I'm going to go get drunk with Sakurazukamori over there in the universe that keeps shedding feathers all over everything. At least they have some sense of style."

"Uh," the fox said. "Have you seen some of the outfits the girl puts on her poor brother?"

"Shut up!" the pink thing said, and turned a sickly grin on Itachi, who was looking suspicious. "Never mind him!" she said brightly. "Look what he considers normal clothing."

"Hey!"

"You have a point," Itachi granted, a palm to his forehead to try to further blot out the retinal trauma, because the shades weren't enough by themselves.

"Right!" the pink thing said encouragingly. "Go get drunk with whoosit over there. We'll keep your mirror polished and everything while you're gone."

"Excuse me," said Sasuke. "He's the evil overlord. He killed my family. I'm going to kill him now."

"In your dreams," the pink thing said. "Go on," she told Itachi. "Bring back a bunch of feathers. We'll make you a nice down pillow."

"...If I didn't know better I'd say you were trying to get rid of me."

"Well, duh," the fox said, keeping Sasuke in a squirming and thrashing headlock to keep him from interrupting the conversation again. "You're an embarrassment to society. You walk around with a LAMPSHADE on your head. And NAIL POLISH. Talk about tacky..."

Itachi opened and closed his mouth several times, and then decided there was no hope for the entire civilization and stalked off toward the road signs that pointed toward the CLAMPverse, where people understood how to revere and drool over brooding dark bishounen with angst-ridden pasts and hair and cloaks that fluttered in the wind. And there wasn't a thing wrong with his nail polish, dammit.

And so (once the pink thing and the fox had sicced the Queer Eye team from the third fairy tale to the left on Sasuke, leaving him without any clip-on wings or peroxide in a closet newly filled with burgundy silk shirts on wooden hangers and charcoal-gray linen suits), FINALLY they all lived happily ever after.