Title: Thanatopsis
Characters: Po, Shifu, Viper, Crane, Mr Ping
Summary: It never occurs to him that these sorts of things allow generous room for vacillation, for transition, unlike the concrete demarcations between life and death, the living and the deceased.
The flight of years began, have laid them down
In their last sleep-the dead reign there alone.
So shalt thou rest: and what if thou withdraw
In silence from the living, and no friend
Take note of thy departure?
- Thanatopsis, William Cullen Bryant
.
He chooses his garment simply; nothing garish that may have made her wrinkle her nose in distaste, but an article of clothing she saw him wear once before during last year's Winter Feast, because he knows that she would probably appreciate his attempts to dress up in something familiar, even with her economy of compliments regarding formal wear. The gossamer fabric loops a hangman's noose around his neck and flows down over his shoulders, lilting gently as he moves to adjust loose threads. Po steps back to examine himself in the mirror. Saddened eyes ringed with black fur gaze woefully at his own body, ebony black and greying white in the receding daylight. Funeral colours, he realises, sullenly. How maddeningly appropriate, how ironically prescient, that he is made for particularly this moment.
"Po." Crane's voice floats through the exposed doorframe, feeble and measured. "You ready?"
No, Po thinks. Never, but this is his spoken reply: "Yeah. Let's go."
.
If anything, the aftermath of death is a beautiful thing, as though a meretricious display of grandeur and fashion could ever make the sobering pain of loss abate in any way.
If anything, these atrocious proceedings serve to distract, a formal reason to congregate over the one thing no one wants to commemorate.
The Gongmen City Kung Fu Council had helped to recover enough of the body to construct a ceremonial pyre, one in her honour. A burial was dismissed prudently as they would not have been able to reconstruct any recognisable features anyway. Even the best mortician requires more than a couple of limbs and a torso to engineer some semblance of a cadaver. Grand Master Shifu would been the one to take up the task of lighting it at the full-moon syzygy, his face shadowed and solemn by the demented glow of the torch that he clasps in his hand. For a moment, he hesitates, as if he's not going to proceed, and then lowers it.
Whatever that remains is consumed in the fires of cremation, flames lapping tiredly at the air, just like the rest of her except with time to watch her leave slowly and sparing the ungracious metallicity of a fired cannon. Po and the rest of the Furious Five watch as Shifu looks skywards and returns his daughter to all that exists, and all that ever will. Ashes into ashes, so the saying goes, like a childhood story told one night in the years forgotten, but now it's indisputably real and happening right in front of him. The abrasive grief raw and tangible; if it could take form it would all but eclipse the moon, blot out the midday sun. Later, standing before the incandescent foundations of their heroine's final bonfire, they will linger into the early hours of tomorrow. Po thinks about embers and phoenixes, rebirth and the reborn, and he waits long after everyone else has left. He waits a while longer – for what exactly, he does not know.
(Please, please, give me the strength to cry.)
.
Offering condolences sounds horribly like the equivalent of pleading guilty, he finds. Wrenchingly difficult, but it's a necessary gesture; healing isn't autocatalytic. Far from it.
Right after he returns to the Jade Palace, Po enters the Hall of Heroes. He would be there, naturally, and there are things to be said that couldn't have been spoken of the previous night. Now would be the time.
Grand Master Shifu sits stoically at the Moon Pool, clad in his jade-green shawl and with his legs crossed in the lotus position. From behind, it's impossible to tell if he's meditating or grieving, if his eyes are open or closed.
(It never occurs to him that these sorts of things allow generous room for vacillation, for transition, unlike the concrete demarcations between life and death, the living and the deceased.)
How do you address a father who has lost both of his children?
Trudging up to him, Po opens his mouth, readying what he has rehearsed a thousand times over…
"It wasn't your fault." Shifu continues to face the crystalline water. He inclines his head at an angle, and continues to speak. "You couldn't have prevented it; there was nothing you could do. I…" Shifu flinches; the tear does not fall, an obdurate cling to dignity.
Po shivers. "Master Shifu…"
Shifu turns around, a touch of surprise in his drooping eyes. "Po? I…I didn't notice you there." Abandoning his position, he stands in one torpid motion and brushes the moisture off the fur on his flushing cheeks. "What is it?"
With that, realisation suckerpunches him in the stomach; Po feels sickened at his untimely incursion, defiling Shifu's privacy. "It's…it's nothing," he stutters, wishing only to have never accosted Shifu in the first place. Of course he would want to be alone, who wouldn't?
The red panda drifts past Po, who remains shell-shocked and immobile, and murmurs barely audible instructions about training and breakfast before disappearing into the world outside that hasn't ended and stuns them with its cruel indifference.
No one is immune to the leprosy of guilt.
.
Viper, of all people, finds him just as he manages to stumble out of the Hall.
"You're back."
He nods slowly. "Yeah."
It dawns on Po that maybe he's just new to this – undoubtedly the others have been scalded by death before and are probably conditioned to it by now. More than he is, at least.
"I'm sorry," Viper whispers.
Po tries for an incredulous smile, receives a grotesque grimace for even attempting. "For what?" he quips, still in the middle of processing what she has said. Sorry. Accidentally ate your lunch. I kicked you a little too hard in training. Not…
"I should have fought harder. I could have saved her. It's just…" Viper starts to choke, her verdigris eyes laminated with the shimmer of sea salt tears.
They're face to face, and he takes a step forward; maybe there will be strength in unity, in the two of them sharing this burden of contrition for the rest of their lives; the real death. He wants to tell her the same things Shifu was telling himself, but he doesn't have the authority to absolve anyone, least of all himself. That would be her prerogative, and no one else's. Do the dead remember? Would she then breathe a benediction upon them from the heavens?
She would, wouldn't she? But would that be enough?
"No, no," he replies, a low susurration. "I'm sorry too."
(Sorry – the word trembles aimlessly on his lips, and suddenly he's not sure what it means, if anything at all.)
.
There are many things he misses about having her around.
A week after the funeral, he tries to compile a list all about her, as if love is something to be quantified, strung up and observed arithmetically; something to be put into recondite terms for which empiricists could pore over and debate endlessly.
(It's not so much for attaining comfort and solace in remembrance, but rather he knows that living memory is notorious for effacing even the most benign of recollections, and he wants to consecrate the parts of her that he knew to be immaculate in ink before it all becomes tainted somehow, inevitably.)
It takes two hours before the scroll is nearly filled, not only with her physical features – her strength, her willpower, her beauty – but also everyday minutiae shared in the months leading up to their last mission together: thieving contraband cookies from the pantry after hours, their disputed peach seed spitting contest, tiresome training sessions together where he's exhausted and can hardly keep his face off the floor and she grins endearingly in that way only she is capable of and makes him follow suit as brightly and toothily as he can –
The list finds its place in the trash by the next hour; eventually, Po decides to think of her as an entirety and not a piece of paper that could be torn and yellowed and sullied by the years – he doesn't want that. Certainly there will be things he'll forget, but there's an odd sense of closure in thinking that anything and everything attributed to her would be worth remembering, perfect or otherwise. That, and it becomes clear that the task is too herculean, for he'd only be able to complete it with all the scrolls and time in the world, and he has neither. All he has is his own childish stationary and the years left of his mortal lifetime, and even then all of the latter already belonged to her, forever.
.
"Dragon Warrior Po?"
Po blinks hard at the goose servant in front of him. Has he seen him anywhere around the Jade Palace before? It is a big place, and probably has many more servants than those he actually knows by face. "Um, yes. What is it?"
The goose reaches behind his back and pulls out a worn-looking scroll. He bows and hands it to Po with both wings extended. "Master Tigress instructed me to entrust this to you if anything were to happen to her."
Po's heart jolts. "Tigress left me this?" There wasn't any mention of this in her will, read out by that stern goat steward who did it so detachedly Po wanted to snatch it out of his hands and do it himself. "But why –"
"Orders from ma'am. I'm afraid I can't answer that." Bowing one last time in respect, the goose leaves, disappearing around one of the palace's many corners. Po never sees him again.
.
Po,
If you're reading this, then we both know what's happened.
I've always envisioned dying in the midst of combat. Not to grow old, with muscles atrophying, mind growing duller, heart fibres disintegrating – the slow kind of death. Warriors are taught to live and die for what they believe in, and I have no regrets in following this credo, all up to the day you'll receive this. If I should have died on the battlefield, I hope it was an honourable death.
There're some things which you won't hear at the funeral because those are the things you won't want to hear. There'll probably be a eulogy from one of the Five, or Shifu, if I'm lucky. Maybe a nice elegy if the Artisan Village elders are feeling particularly kind. But the things you won't hear – things you need to hear – will all be written here. I'm asking you as a friend and comrade to pay heed to these words and not disregard them in favour of pithy laudations.
I'm not proud of how I treated you when we first met. There's no excuse for my behaviour, and I'm not sure if I'll ever forgive myself. I know you accepted my apologies readily because you're the kind of person I've always wanted to be – grudgeless, optimistic, and hopeful – since the day you finally became the Dragon Warrior. You taught me things I'd never have learned from studying the Thousand Scrolls of Kung Fu or decades of meditation. I've punched ironwood trees for twenty years to dull pain, and in twenty minutes you made me realise how many bean buns a panda's cheeks can hold. I'm incredibly grateful and humbled to have fought alongside you, for all the life you've brought here.
I just know that you'll tell the most wonderful stories of the fearless Tigress and her valiant adventures with the Furious Five and the Dragon Warrior. I ask only that you also tell them of the Tigress who regarded you as a monumental failure, a quitter, and a disgrace to Kung Fu. Remember me as I was, not just for the good and the better, but the bad and the worse. Nothing less, nothing more. Let them know how I hurt you and those around me, and how I made them smile. If this is accomplished, then I will be at peace.
I don't know when you'll read this or if you ever will. If you do, I'm sorry that it had to come to this. Truthfully, a long life doesn't sound as bad, now that we've met. I used to think that ageing was a form of nothingness, and that solitude was an unwilling choice. Now, I'm not so afraid anymore. You may not ever receive this, but that would mean that I'd be with you and the rest – Master Shifu, Viper, Crane, Monkey, Mantis – always, and I wouldn't have it any other way.
And…since these will be my last words, I guess it won't hurt to admit it. I was a little bit in love with you, after all.
Yours,
Tigress
.
It's the middle of the night, and there's a knock on the door.
Mr Ping tiptoes down the stairs, arms himself with a frying pan (goodness knows what kinds of people walked the streets at this hour) and opens the door cautiously, peering through the fissure made in his wall.
"Po?"
His adoptive son is standing in the street, sniffling and crying with mucus streaming out of his nose in the unglamorous manner of a child. Po's eyes are red and wet, his expression so terribly lost and hurt and beyond melioration that Mr Ping drops the pan and wrenches the door wide open to draw him closer in parental reflex. Never since the turnip crate has he felt this urge to protect before. "Are you alright, Po?"
"Dad…" he whimpers, lumbering forward, like a baby taking its first steps. "Dad…" The rest is incoherent; there's no language to hold this much sadness. No words to possibly comfort a fear so scarifying, and for this, Mr Ping understands so much, yet quivers at the extent knowledge of his powerlessness. So, he does what is always the right thing to do. The only thing a parent can do.
"Oh, Po. Come here," Mr Ping says as consolingly as he can, and he sticks himself against Po, failing yet again to get his arms more than halfway across Po's massive body. He holds him so tight that he feels like he'll never let go, and his grown son's large arms encircle him in kind. His affection will not save Po from himself, but feeling secure and loved is what he needs now more than anything else. Po continues to sob into Mr Ping's pajamaed shoulder, the two of them caught in their unyielding embrace in the middle of a doorway breathing candlelight, and outside it is starless and blinded and infinite night.
.
And remember
the truth that once was spoken:
To love another person
is to see the face of God.
A/N: Nope, not proselytising. I just happen to like Les Misérables.
Improv elements – 'Code of Hero', Beast Wars; 'The Road', Cormac McCarthy; 'Les Misérables', Victor Hugo; 'Les Misérables', Schönberg/Boublil. If you're curious as to why my returns are twice as angsty (or at least try to be), trust me, I don't know either.