Zetsu.
Disclaimer: I suppose since these are required, I must say, "I do not own anything of this fic but the idea!"
xxxiv — natural
She is a filthy child, perhaps filthier and more pitiful than any other being he has ever laid his eyes on before. Her brown tunic more resembles a discarded potato sack than anything else; it is damaged beyond repair with frayed edges and uneven holes and dirt smothered all over what might have once been white fabric. Long, unruly strands of raven hair sprout from her tiny skull, streaming south as a torrent black river to linger at a stop right above her barely covered bottom. Various parts of her, such as her exposed forearms and everything below her kneecaps, are marred with red-lined cuts and dark bruises—the marks that authenticate her as a child of the wilderness.
This one is hopeless, he muses.
Her eyes are bright and inquisitive as she examines his inhumane characteristics, a thin finger hovering over her crusted lower lip.
It would be of good service to put this lowly creature out of its misery.
His golden gaze intensifies.
"I will devour you whole, little girl," he tells her with a sharp grin before his darker half joins in for a more malicious effect. "…alive."
She blinks at him, and when her hand descends to rest at her side he believes she might have understood him.
But when her naïve, innocent eyes acquire an even greater sheen and her lips curve into a smile—
—he knows otherwise.
Adapt or perish, now as ever, is nature's inexorable imperative.
—H. G. Wells
Author's Note: This was something I was considering for the next chapter of My Courageous Shinobi. Not necessarily romantic, but you know.