Where She Sleeps

"It is not your destiny to defeat Tai Lung, it is his!"

-Master Shifu

Tigress regained movement in a sticker bush. Her muscles flickered to life twitch by twitch, until she felt her chest unlock and she drew breath through a freshly loosened jaw. She rolled over and hacked. She had landed face down, with her mouth open, so she'd spent the next three hours inhaling dust.

She rose and stumbled up the side of ledge where Tai Lung's strike sent her flying. At the last possible moment of the fight she'd lunged for him without an endgame in mind. In the three hours since she'd chastised herself harshly for this. Leaping without a plan directly into the strike range of a murderous giant was effectively suicide. Adrenaline and the desire to protect her friends caused her to act without thinking.

He tossed her above him. She flipped in the air and landed on his back, claws out. She sank them into his flesh and tore them out again, trying to do as much damage as possible before he murdered her. He roared - that sound, so close, shook her to the floor of her being. He tore her off him and jabbed his fingertip in her lower chest, hard. The next thing she knew she was flying frozen through the air, flung away from the ledge where her friends were surely dying.

She stumbled back to them. Her heart plunged into her stomach. She imagined having to tell Shifu the team was dead. The heartbreak in his eyes would destroy her - ah, but why worry about that when Tai Lung would kill her Master in the midst of destroying the Valley of Peace. If she didn't stop Tai Lung, instead of being destroyed by heartbreak in her Master's eyes she would be destroyed by having to bury him.

She stumbled faster towards her friends, her chest burning. Crane was a white pile of fluttering movement, his feathers jostled by the breeze - it was just the breeze, that was all, she was sure, but suddenly there was a larger movement and his wing lifted, then his head.

"Crane!" she tried to shout, but her lungs were full of dust. She sprinted and dropped to her knees beside him. "Are you all right?"

"I'll recover," he said. "They're alive."

"Are you sure?" Tigress checked on them. Frozen, but alive. "Do you know how to undo this?"

"I don't. Mantis might, but…" he gestured to Mantis, fraught with rictus.

"Can you fly?"

"Um. Yeah, nothing broken. Give me a minute." He gingerly put his hat back on.

"Take them home and warn Shifu. I'm going after Tai Lung."

He looked taken aback. "Tigress - "

"Crane, don't argue with me!" she snapped. "He must be stopped. Take them home."

She took off on all fours without looking back.

o

He was not hard to track, being so huge, but he was incredibly fast and had a three hour lead on her. She ran at speed, so if she did not find him soon she'd have to stop and rest for the night. No use finding him if she was too exhausted to fight him. As she ran she played endless scenarios in her head on how to exploit what few of his weakness Shifu had named.

Having finally fought him her terror for her home and her Master was magnified. She'd expected Tai Lung to be huge, fast, and strong, but she hadn't expected him to be that huge, that fast, that strong. When he leaned so casually on the broken bridge her insides went cold.

I cannot defeat him.

There was no use arguing the point. In the best of circumstances she might get close, but she was no match for his hitting power. One solid strike and the battle would turn from a real fight to a slow and sorry death spiral on her part. Her only chance for victory would be a surprise claw across the windpipe, if she could jump onto his back and execute the move with enough speed. It was a mercenary tactic with very little honor. She decided to be at peace with that.

After a long time she leapt up a tree to get a better view of the surrounds. Her brain saw him before she did, and she did a double take. Tai Lung, surveying the terrain on a nearby treetop of his own, looking as surprised as she felt. His surprise gave way to a smug grin. He gestured for her to follow and backflipped off the branch.

"Oh, you son of a -" Tigress said under her breath. Her heart pounded as she leapt to the ground.

He ran ahead of her - fast, so fast. He paused briefly before a cool white mist that obscured everything. He turned to glance at her and vanished into it.

That's right, run, Tigress thought, growling.

All sound stopped when she entered the mist. Her fur stood on end. The silence was so complete that her ears felt full, as they sometimes felt when she climbed a mountain. After another second sound returned to normal and she emerged into a green, rolling valley which she did not recognize, with lush fruiting trees and the beginnings of a beautiful sunset.

She scanned for Tai Lung. Nothing. Suddenly she was flying through the air. She crashed through a wooden fence and rolled into a vegetable garden. On the way her head hit a rock hard enough to stun her useless.

She hadn't even seen him. He snuck up on her before she'd gotten anywhere near him, much less his throat. That was a bad plan to follow through with considering her element of surprise was lost and the execution depended on it entirely. The day's exhaustion compromised her judgement, so now she would die in a bed of cabbage feeling stupid.

"How did you do it?" Tai Lung asked in a jarringly conversational tone. He leaned against a broken fence post and examined his claws.

"How did I do what?" Tigress muttered. There were two of him.

"How did you recover so quickly from my nerve attack? You should have been immobilized until Shifu released you."

She tried get into a defensive posture but her body refused to cooperate. A sharp ache cut through her skull and with it came a wave of nausea. She didn't reply.

He gave her a bored look.

"Perhaps it was my mistake. I'm out of practice. It's been twenty years, you see." He crouched down next to her, close enough for her to smell his fur, to look directly into his eyes. "Remind Shifu of that, will you? Twenty years." He gave a low, rumbling chuckle and lifted her chin with his index finger. "Have you even been alive that long, little thing?"

She knocked his hand away. "Don't toy with me," she spat. "Get it over with, you arrogant coward."

He growled. Rose his great paw to strike.

"Excuse me," came a pleasant voice.

Tigress and Tai Lung turned. The voice belonged to a tiny white lizard wearing a green and red checkered robe. It carried a small gold staff. The look in its gold eyes was both curious and disappointed.

"Who are you?" Tai Lung demanded.

"I am the owner of this vegetable patch you've wrecked," it said. "Couldn't have had your lover's spat elsewhere?"

Tai Lung chuckled. "Lover's spat? She's trying to kill - "

"Quiet," the lizard said softly and made a cutting gesture towards Tai Lung.

Tai Lung's voice stopped as though torn from his lungs. His hand rose gingerly to his throat.

"Thank you," the lizard said. "Now sit down, please. Not on a cabbage."

Tai Lung took two puppet-like steps away from a cabbage and fell soundly onto his behind, a look of bewildered horror on his face.

"What - what are you?" Tigress croaked at the creature, trying to back away.

The little lizard smiled as wisps of white light suddenly snaked around it, solidifying into the great golden crest and long tail of a dragon.

"I am a god," it said. "And you've destroyed my cabbages."

o

It dawned on Tigress that she might already be dead, seeing as what was happening here could not possibly be happening. Dragons did not exist. They could not drop a warrior like Tai Lung with a mere word, and they certainly did not grow cabbages or speak to her. Everything in her wanted to run, but her limbs were numb and heavy.

"These are my prize cabbages," the dragon said. "Thirteen hundred years I've been growing these! And now you've gone and torn them up. You, Spots, why are you picking on her?" He pointed at Tai Lung. "You ought to be nice to her, she's a nice girl.

Tai Lung blinked, seemingly unsure if the dragon actually wanted an answer. He opened his mouth but his voice was still absent.

"You! Stripes!" it said, shaking its finger at Tigress. "Why do you chase him? Hm? You don't chase boys, they chase you. And what in the world are the two of you fighting about? This ridiculous - some sort of - scroll?" He cocked his head, as though listening through the ether for their history. After a moment he gave a dismissive wave of his hand. "Bunch of nonsense. You're willing to die for this? Mortals, always blithely throwing about that which should be most precious to them. I've never seen a sillier pair of cats," he tutted. "Now then."

It strolled between them, tapping its chin like a parent making a big show of deciding how to punish his naughty children. It considered them each in turn, and deeply. Tigress had the singular and violating sensation of her entire heart and mind being examined without her consent. She winced, her guts going cold.

Please don't hurt us, Tigress thought meekly.

The god glanced at her, hearing her thoughts. Smirked.

"Stop hurting each other," it commanded.

As it spoke bright white lines of energy crept out of their chests and crawled into it's upturned palm. As the energies reached it's hand they mingled together.

"You grow gardens, you do not destroy them. Understand?" It closed its palm and the glowing energy disipated. It bent down and picked a dandelion. "Ugh, weeds. You do everything and they keep coming back. Now," it said to the two of them. "Be gone."

The god blew on the dandelion. Tigress felt a horrible tingling strangeness overcome her. Something hooked into her chest and yanked her into the wind, and into the black.