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The woman turned to her, and she froze, becoming for a moment the creature who's skin she had donned. Rounded eyes of Lapis Lazuli gazed unblinkingly into those of a striking amethyst hue, and the strange woman's gaze met her own easily and without abandon. There was a deep calmness within her eyes - an entrancing quality that, for a long moment, held China spellbound.
At her voice, the girl jolted, brought to life from her stonelike stillness by the accented tunes breaking the forest's eerie silence. She was right; Darkness was all throughout this land. She had been foolish to ignore it. Foolish to leave Itachi's den. She was vulnerable out here, weak and beautiful and shattered by her misfortune.
It was easy to accept the woman's words as a command, for although they were voiced as a question, the timbre to her voice echoed with a power that China had sometimes felt tremors of, deep within her. Once, the music she had made had sounded like that power - Women's power. But that had been stolen from her. In a habitual gesture of nervousness, China's delicate blush-colored hand lifted to the small laced scars over her throat, hiding them from the all-seeing eyes of the stranger.
However, she obeyed docilely, drawn towards the woman by the motherly coo to her words. Instinctively, the girl sought comfort, and perhaps this dark woman would provide it. But she was not ignorant of her shortcomings, and her sweet gullible nature had been stolen along with the songbird's song. 'Suspicious' was too cunning a word - 'Fear' was what China knew, and what drove her now.
She moved, and hesitantly squatted nearer to the fire, unwilling to sit in case she needed to leap up and run from here. Her shadowy eyes darted from the flames to the woman constantly, as her small hands were held palm-out to the fire. In her nervousness, China did not notice the fingers on one hand get too close to the open flames - They were numb with the cold, and she did not feel it for a few moments as the fiery tongue licked at a few of the digits. Then, with a sharp inhale and an expression of terror, China recoiled from the fire, clutching her hand to her breast and crumpling her sweet features into a picture of pain.
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