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At first, she does it because her hands hurt. Looking back, it is a foolish reason to do anything--pain is a part of any martial art, an expected consequence of training and fighting. But she is six then, bright eyed and hopeful. Life up until this point has been isolation, living in Bao Gu Orphanage, existing as something feral and unlovable. Shifu’s mentorship, guardianship--it seems new and beautiful. Finally, someone sees something in her.
A month into her new life, she re-evaluates. Kung fu is hard, and so is her master (not her father, not her parent, not her guardian. She is his student--she is an echo, quieter and less brilliant than the original). She wakes with burning muscles, breaks her nails, her teeth, her bones. She is six, and she is learning what real pain feels like. It is not stubbing your toe--it is screaming in agony at the bottom of a hill, arm bent at an awkward angle, mud splattering her shirt.
So yes. At first, she does it because her hands hurt. Punching the wooden training dummies stings--like touching her palms to ice. She’s already so sore all the time, this little indignity feels so much more poignant. At every smarting punch she thinks--You are too weak for this.
Tigress examines the ironwood trees. They are tall and thick, bark more grey than brown. She is almost sure they have a different name--a real name, and not just one Oogway made up. Still, she knows them as little else, and it is an apt title at least. She has heard that the Jade Palace hires out special workers whenever ironwood is needed--only the sharpest and toughest blades can saw and cut through them. She is tiny in the face of their might.
The first punch hurts. It hurts so much she hops from one foot to the other, making a high-pitched hissing noise all the while. When she recovers, she cannot help but look helplessly at her task. The goal is to toughen herself up, make it so she can strike with her palm without pain--how is she supposed to do so when even the fist hit feels like nettle on her paw pads?
She goes back to the Jade palace, discouraged.
The next day, Master Shifu looks away when she fails to strike fast enough, to bounce to her feet with grace. Embarrassment and shame rush through her body--she is a failure, she is wasting her master’s time, she doesn’t deserve the kindness she’s been given. She doesn’t deserve anything, not until she makes her Master smile with pride.
Tigress ends up standing in front of the Ironwood trees again. She is supposed to be asleep, resting for her next day of training, but the desperate feeling in her gut keeps her sleepless. She punches the tree, and it hurts as much as it ever did. She curls her smarting hand towards her chest, panting from the rush of adrenaline. It hurts, it hurts--but not as badly as her own failure today. Tigress stands straighter, ears bent against her skull, and slams her palm into the smooth bark once more.
In the coming months, her paw pads crack and bleed. She strains her wrist, cracks a tooth because she keeps gritting her teeth in agony. Master Shifu scolds her recklessness but does not ask where she received her injuries. He does not tell her to stop. Oogway smiles at her in the hallways, invites her for tea, teaches her how to garden. He is trying to help her, somehow, but Tigress cannot make out how. If he really cared, he would help her train, help her please Shifu.
(She goes to him anyway, when he asks her to walk with him, to eat with him, to watch a play down in the village with him)
At the sixth month mark, she expects her hands to be made of stone. She is bitterly disappointed that they hurt more than ever, a collective of old injuries screaming whenever she strikes out on any surface. Still, she cannot give up. She is still not fast enough, not strong enough, not balanced enough for her master. She is still an unworthy student.
At the year mark, she has left scars in her practice tree. Nothing more than scrapes really, but there is some pride there, knowing she can mark a tree that needs the sharpest blade to cut it down. Her hands still hurt, but it is a normal hurt now. She wakes, and her arms pulse with pain. She strikes, her scarred paw pads sing with old injuries. She sleeps, but only when she stops focusing on the soreness that emanates through her hands.
Two more years pass. She is nine now, and every year feels heavy with her growth. She is beginning to move with grace and stealth, beginning to understand the more complicated theoretical subjects she is taught by her tutors. She practices balancing on wooden boards suspended high on ridges and cliffs. If she falls, she risks serious injury or death if Master Shifu cannot save her. Her heart pounds with fear and her muscles tremble, and she cannot seem to get through the two hours she is supposed to stand on them, unmoving. Master Shifu says he must adjust her lessons to be more thorough--she understands now that he has had other students than her, all who must have moved at a faster pace than she. She begins to punch the ironwood trees with force, without the goal of merely surviving a light hit, but instead breaking the tree in half. She imagines she is made from something unforgiving and unyielding, that one day a single strike from her will cut through anything. She breaks her left wrist, slowing down her progress even further.
By the time she is eleven, she has stopped going out with master Oogway. She is polite when she declines, and she never makes up an excuse. She respects him too much to lie to him.
“I’m sorry, Master, I must decline. I have training to attend to.” It is always true, as she is always training. Master Oogway smiles gently, pats her on the shoulder, and tells her that he will ask her next time. It is this year that she learns of Shifu’s son, Tai Lung. A warrior so skilled that even her own master could not defeat him, a warrior whose power is so mighty that a whole new prison is constructed simple to contain him. The servants say that he was soft with his child, that through his training he stopped to spend time with him, to praise him, to talk with him. Her heart aches for her master. She can see now, that he has been in pain for a long time. It is not only her incompetence that makes him stiff with anger and bent with something heavy--he has lost a son and gained nothing but a student who cannot reach his expectations. She stops hoping that her success will make him smile. She does not know if he remembers how.
At fourteen, she recruits the rest of the Furious Five. It is a mistake on her part, but one Master Shifu seems to accept. Perhaps he has grown used to her making such errors. He even allows her to change her fighting style to something that fits her more natural instincts, but that is no success. She cannot achieve the same skill her master has, so allowances must be made.
The Furious Five are strange. She has always been the youngest in the Palace, but she has never felt it so strongly. Viper is the closest to her in age at eighteen, but even that marks her as an adult to Tigress’s adolescence.
There is something even more incomprehensible--she is the most skilled of all of them. It is no little feat--Mantis had been a mercenary long before he was a doctor, Crane had managed to impress his own masters despite only being a janitor--Viper had taken down a foe many times her size and age at fourteen. Yet she outpaces them all--she is faster, her hits stun or put down the other members, she can best any of them in a fight--even able to win when fighting multiple members.
Shifu does not seem perturbed by this. She knows he is aware of her lacking abilities, yet he seems to regard it as normal that they lag behind her. Tigress feels awash in confusion--she does not know how to act around her Master, nor her fellow apprentices. Crane asks her for tips when his legs cramp. Viper invites her to go to a festival in town. Monkey tries to bake food for her.
It is unprofessional, it is distracting. She barely answers Crane, she declines Viper, she ignores Monkey’s gifts. She does not spend time with them after Shifu’s lessons. She does not talk to them in the hallways before breakfast.
She goes to the Ironwood trees and continues her training.
When she is sixteen, she can balance easily upon anything, no matter how high or for how long. The feeling of danger is like an old wound--it does not surprise her, nor make her unsteady. It affects her, but she has held its ache so long she can anticipate when it will rise, and how she should deal with it. Crane spends a lot of time hovering nearby whenever she meditates upon a thin branch sticking out from the cliffs. He pretends he is painting, or sweeping, or doing his own meditation. She suspects he is actually expecting her to fall and is preparing to fly in to rescue her. She finds this mildly insulting.
This is also the year Monkey finds her training at the Ironwood forest. He is at first impressed with her dedication, and she allows herself to feel a brief flicker of satisfaction, before submerging the emotion. It is only after she invites him to try as well, thinking to be helpful and feeling high off his acknowledgment, that things go wrong.
“Why the hell are you punching those things?” He asks, cradling his hand in the infirmary. Tigress’s tries to quell the guilt that swirls in her chest when she thinks on his broken fingers. She cannot answer him. She had started on the naive assumption that with practice, the pain would fade. Then she had done it to improve her own lacking skills, then it had become habit, become meditation.
Monkey does not speak of it to the others, and she does not know why.
The Furious Five force her to celebrate her twentieth birthday. Viper claims it is a milestone of adulthood, and Mantis says she must go to repay him for the time she broke his teacups. Tigress sits awkwardly between them, holding a cup of sake but not drinking it. They order takeout from some noodle place, and she can barely eat it despite the amazing aroma that drifts from the meal. She should not be here, surrounded by warmth and laughter, opening presents and listening to Viper’s off-key singing. She should be out by her Ironwood trees, feeling the cold of night and submerging herself within her training. The next morning, she cannot even look at Master Shifu, the guilt is so great.
As she is approaching her twenty fourth year, Master Oogway reveals that he is going to announce the identity of the Dragon Warrior in the coming years. As if scripted, the Furious Five begin to refer to this as something she will soon achieve, an eventuality. That it is somehow expected. Master Shifu does not shout them down for their foolishness, either--he seems almost in agreement.
Tigress cannot comprehend it. Her master believes her capable enough to be the Dragon Warrior. She had not ever thought such a thing possible, not in another twenty years. She expects to feel pride, maybe to even feel happiness. Instead, she cannot sleep, cannot meditate. She is not worthy.
When the time comes a year later, there is a part of her that in unsurprised when Master Oogway points to a different person. She is less calm when it is revealed that the Dragon Warrior is a joke, an untrained Panda who has never practiced martial arts in his life. He is learning things at twenty-six that she learned at six with more competence. He jumps and yowls whenever he is thrown or hit, and every word that comes from his mouth is stupid and unobservant. Master Shifu hates him, and as his oldest student she cannot help doing so as well. Who is this idiotic creature that thinks himself worthy of her master’s praise, of China’s defense?
Only, apparently, he is worth such a thing. Po proves himself a quick learner when her master takes him on individual training--he even deigns to use food as a motivator. Tigress is left with an emotion she did not think she could feel. Rage. She is not Tai Lung, who thought himself so powerful that he had a right to the Dragon Scroll, but she cannot contain the emotion when she sees her master smile at Po. It feels like she is punching the Ironwood tree for the first time--she is again a cub figuring out that her previous hurts had been nothing to this new, worse one.
She fights Tai Lung, and she fails, again. This time she has no patience for the thorns of shame--if Tai Lung makes it to the valley, he will kill hundreds. Po is the only hope any of them have left, and she cannot be bitter about that, not when it means innocent lives will be saved.
When she bows to him in the dusts of his success against Tai Lung, she means it. He is the Dragon Warrior, her new master, and she will serve him with the same faith she had Shifu.
She prays to the peach tree of heavenly wisdom. It is not the same as sharing a cup of tea with Master Oogway, but then, it has been years since she has one so. They valley has been saved, and she has seen the wisdom of his decision to choose Po. She pretends the feeling within her is peace and not grief.
Living with the Dragon Warrior turns out to be worse than living with the Furious Five. He is immune to her cold silences, and her brush offs. He is seemingly unaware of her moods, pestering her when she is meditating, when she is eating, when she is exercising. She still spars with him, and mostly still wins, to her confusion. She is not sure how she could lose against Tai Lung but win against Po, who defeated Tai Lung. Po seems unbothered by his defeats, only trying harder. His explanation seems to be that he is built to fight someone like Tai Lung, who ‘took himself too seriously’ and not her. Does she take herself easy? Monkey laughs himself silly on the sidelines of the fight, and she thinks maybe he disagrees.
It is very odd, to be teaching her own master things. But she must, as Po has only had a relatively short time to learn. Every new skill is amazing to him--he does not grow arrogant despite his own impressive accomplishments.
She is trying his new noodle concoction when she realizes with horror that she is spending time with him and the others--time not spent training. How has this happened, and how can she avoid it?
Even worse, she finds herself sometimes enjoying herself. Tigress has not felt truly joyful since. Since some point, perhaps when she was very small.
She forgets to hit the Ironwood trees for the first time in twenty years. The next day, she sits with Oogway’s ridiculously named peach tree and prays to him.
Is this better for me? She asks, eyes closed tight. The breeze blows pink petals lazily-she does not receive an answer.
She notices, for the first time, that she has not felt the pain in her palms for years.