have you ever thought about what protects our hearts?
just a cage of rib bones and other various parts

 
His face is unreadable as he finds his way through the forest, a mask that he does not let slip.

It is not that Zai is a cruel soul, or even a particularly unkind one, but he has simply learned the benefit—the undeniable strength—in playing cards close to your chest. And so he does, his russet face as blank and smooth as slate, his grey eyes peering out from beneath the thicket of his dark forelock. 

It had been some time since he’d sought out the company of others, and while he was not particularly looking for it, he was also not avoiding it. He was, after all, putting himself into a position where there were others around him—even if they were sometimes too close, pressing into his personal bubble.

He has not always been this way.

In his youth, he had been as children are: bubbly, exuberant, buoyed by a life surrounded by family who loved for him. A network of support—a shield. But then the Reckoning had happened and while he had eventually found them again, it hadn’t been quite the same. His father had urged him to go out and seek himself, to hunt for that scrap of meaning, and so he had. He had sought and traveled and explored.

And, all too often, what he had found had been lacking.

So Zai was not particularly bitter, but he was disillusioned. The world was not the same kind warmth that he had always assumed; it did not envelop her children with love, it didn't to embrace them with kindness. It stripped powers (his coat was largely stagnant, the rest of the world stubbornly stagnant despite the promptings of his mind), it pulled apart families. It broke down even the strongest of backs into rubble. 

His approach was just pragmatic. It was just logical. Or at least that was what he told himself as he aged, as he built up walls around his heart, as he buried around key pieces of himself. He was just being smart about it all. Still, it did not ease the ache that sometimes burned in his belly, that faint stirring when he saw families collide, the pure joy in reunion. It did not ease the longing he felt at night when he tipped his head backward and studied the stars, the constellations brilliant and burning, their star fire blinding.

They were things he kept to himself though; fierce wishes he himself even ignored. 

She came out of nowhere as he walked, the curve of his powerful shoulder colliding into her slight frame. His mask slipped, for a moment, in surprise and he took a step backward, his grey eyes zeroing in on who he had hit. “Ah,” his voice was slightly rusty from disuse, but mostly gravel regardless—the kind of voice that had rooted in his chest and never left, echoing up into his throat. “I didn’t see you there.” For a moment, he considers providing more (a name, an apology), but they all die on his tongue, leaving him stiff with the silence. Instead, he just shifts and snorts a little, waiting for what, he didn’t know.

so it's fairly simple to cut right through the mess
and to stop the muscle that makes us confess