“When we hurt, we live, for the blood that flows in tributaries down our temples remind us of the heart that continues to beat as it is being torn apart.”
.
A young Tigress waits nervously outside Shifu’s quarters and gathers enough gumption to rap on the wooden frame of the door.
“Father? I’ve made a new domino pattern, just for you.” She flushes with excitement, doesn’t let him see.
“Tigress,” he replies gently, reproachfully. She still does not see him, only hears his voice from within the room. “Remember that I am first and foremost your Master, and I do expect you to refer to me as such as long as you are my student.”
“Yes, Master Shifu.” She bows, shamed, and retreats to from where she came to pick up the tiles she has painstakingly set up. This is the master she knows. He doesn’t remember any dominoes.
.
In some way she knows that it is selfish, but desiring unconditional love (from a parent, no less) isn’t a crime. The day Shifu adopted her it should have become somewhat of an entitlement, not something that had to be earned. As the seasons change and the flowers fade she sees nothing at all but immutable, cold indifference. Oh, how she hates him, resents him for it.
A month after Tigress leaves the orphanage she decides that she can’t take it anymore, so she tries to run away. Tigress hides among the iron-wood trees in the garden until the moon is pure and white in the sky, then she tires of her escape and lowers herself to the ground. At the foot of the tree she stares at the luminous moon and thinks about their first meeting, the lessons with the dominoes. She can still recall the soft clack of the wooden tiles as she turned them over in her paw, pressing into her paw pads as she slowly set every domino. Tigress tries to recall him smiling, and then realises that you can’t recall something that isn’t there.
She balls her paw into a fist and punches the tree trunk, sending spasms rippling down her arm. Tigress barely stops herself from crying out in pain, bites her lip until she tastes blood and then punches with her other paw. On the sixth punch her skin finally breaks open, lacerating on the coarse bark of the tree, allowing the blood underneath to ooze from between her fingers. She doesn’t see the microfractures that start to form in the bones of her fingers but will feel them in the months to follow. Tigress doesn’t stop punching, doesn’t try to staunch the blood; she endures the harsh sting of wood on her paws, because it hurts less than everything else.
.
Shifu watches Tigress carefully as she performs several contrasting martial arts strikes consecutively and hits the training dummy forcefully, driving it into the wall opposite. At a perfunctory glance, her forms are nearly immaculate, perhaps a hair or two out of place. Taking a closer look, Shifu realises with a start how much has changed – he notices the way she breathes resolution, how steady her inhalation is for a substance so heavy. The fabric on her paws and ankles are bound tightly, constricting muscles and cartilage, yet she moves fluidly, melting from one form into the next. A sudden impulse – he wants to reach out and pat her on the shoulder, commend her effort. If only he could shape his pride into consonants, spoken phrases; you did excellent, great job done, I love you –
Then he remembers Tai Lung, and he stops. You shall not face the truth. You will not.
He reaches out with his cane, corrects her balance on her left foot and lowers her arm an inch. Pride tells lies, love fools his vision. This is the reality of both in their entirety and he had cast them aside a long time ago; his heart is stone. He knows that he owes her (and himself) this much. Shifu leaves her to continue her training, to wonder where exactly she went wrong, what she could have done differently to receive his scarce praise.
.
If only she could pull her soul out of her chest, condense it into something with form; she would bash it against the thickest of iron-wood trees as hard as she could, for as long as it took, until she could finally look Shifu in the eye without the twisting in her gut, her muted consciousness desperately pleading for some semblance of endearment, begging for acceptance.
He chances upon her crouching form while walking the grounds of the Jade Palace one night, her tiny fingers broken and useless, dried blood crusting her knuckles. He kneels low enough to hold her eyes – she catches the smell of incense and jasmine on his robes – and cradles her small paws in his. She sees him mouthing words she can’t hear, words she always wanted to hear: What happened to you? Shifu will discover the bandages entombed in the garden shed and bloodstains on the iron-wood trees a few days later; when he runs his fingers over the stories she has painted for him he will finally understand.
At the very moment, this is more than enough for her; she closes her amber eyes as he touches her with all the care in the world, and she slowly begins to heal.
.
The day Tigress finally strikes the tree with enough strength to shatter bone and feels nothing beneath her paw, she doesn’t celebrate her accomplishment. She doesn’t laugh, she doesn’t cry. It has taken twenty years to finally lock the orbit of her pain, but it’s a hollow victory; there is now one less thing in her life that hurts, and she isn’t exactly sure if it’s a good thing.
After all, what use is ending one cycle of pain if it only starts another?
.
One day, she pricks her paw on a thorn as she picks a rose from the garden. Tigress stares at the small red bead forming on her middle finger, aware of the emptiness filling her palm. She thinks about how this is supposed to feel – the heat rising around the corners of the puncture, the discomfort of the foreign object buried in her flesh…
(She cannot remember.)
.
It is impossible, in the end, for one to become completely inured to pain. You can grind your teeth down to the enamel and proclaim defiantly that it doesn’t hurt, even as the searing agony betrays your tongue. You can pump your body full of chemicals until it shuts down nerve endings and dulls the pain, erasing it along with all other sensation. You can condition your body brutally, until the torture becomes something completely indistinguishable from the wind fluting over your skin. It is not that you cannot feel any pain; rather, you have most likely absorbed it to a point where it has become a sort of nothingness. In any case, just because you can’t feel pain it doesn’t mean that it isn’t there.
.....
I really should be doing something more productive than writing more KFP fic, but I just can't help myself. As Dominic Cobb nicely puts it, ideas are indeed the perfect parasites, and I really get far too many about the fandom every day (which is obviously not a good thing). And yes, I've finally watched Inception.