have you ever thought about what protects our hearts?
just a cage of rib bones and other various parts
Zai would have been appalled if he could have read her thoughts.
Him?
Lead?
The idea was atrocious—terrible by its very nature. To be a good leader, you needed to know how to deal with people. You needed to be able to care about them, invest yourself in them. He could barely bother with engaging in normal conversations, let alone trying to help carve their path into the future. The idea that he would, in any circumstance, be capable of leading them, caring for a brood, was laughable at best.
Dangerous at worst.
Thankfully, the boy cannot read her thoughts and can only focus on the pain of her words. His family, his bright and joyful and happy family, was gone. “All of them?” His brow creased, his lips folding into a severe frown as he dragged his gray eyes from her to look to the horizon. “They have all left?” It was almost more than he could comprehend—the thought so completely and utterly foreign to him. He had been the one to leave, to look for meaning. But to be abandoned? To be alone? That was entirely new.
He shook his head, the ache of it spreading across his chest. Finding her face again and smoothing out his mottled expression with something smoother, something hard and unyielding. “I am glad that you stayed to look out for the kingdom,” he finally offered, the trees hanging around them not entirely home but also not foreign. There was a comfort in being here, in knowing he stood where his family had stood, even if they were but ghosts now. “I know that is what mother and father would have wanted.”
His handsome, severe face breaks for a moment into a slip of a smile,
“After all, there are few hands as capable as your own.”
so it's fairly simple to cut right through the mess
and to stop the muscle that makes us confess
