Po's very favourite thing about his daughter was.. - well, to be fair, there's really not just one thing. It's more of a list. A long list.
Of everything about her, basically.
After over a decade married to the love of his life and raising a number of orphaned panda and turned their life around, it was finally their turn to taste another facet of parenthood.
Ping Ying Yue - as the name meant: the reflection of the moon - she was a revelation to him almost every day. He saw his father's kind eyes, his mother's selflessness, his own regrettable clumsiness, and, most endearingly, the sparkling intellect of his wife, Tigress, all packed into the small form of his daughter.
She's also so amazingly herself, somehow - a four-year-old dynamo that exhausted him more than most of the things he'd faced during his time serving the valley. Ying Yue wasn't the natural Kung Fu Master that Tigress was at her age, but she loved the art anyway. She'd got his curious nature, an irrepressible energy level, and her mother's fierce ability to focus when she's doing something she loved.
Like right now.
She was on the floor, adorably folded in half so that she could colour the picture of grandpa Shifu she'd drawn for Tigress. His fur was - unfortunately - discoloured into blue and green - the colours of crayons she could find, and his ears appeared massively disproportional to his body (well, it never was!). Ying Yue was so intent on her work that she didn't hear the door open, or the familiar pad of Tigress paws as she approached, offloading her sack, training vest, and house keys as she went.
Po looked up from his spot on the couch, grinning as his wife reached the living room doorway and stepped out of her shoes, continuing towards them on bare feet. She's wearing a flirty blue qipao that showed off her curves (slightly snug in the right places), and Po let his appreciative gaze linger. She still seemed troubled, some days, by the changes to her tight figure after childbearing, but Po saw her strength and the creation of their child in her body and was at least as attracted to her as he'd always been. She's still sexy as hell, but he's even more worshipful now that he'd seen her carry his child - the child that he had never thought would ever arrive after ten years of their marriage.
Tigress approached, dropping down beside him with a groan. "Hi," she told him softly, leaning in for a lingering kiss. It's not until she settled in beside him and raised her voice that Ying Yue noticed her presence. "Hey, kiddo, come give your mom a kiss."
Ying Yue's little stripey head whipped around, traces of dumpling still bore evident around her maw. "Mommy!" She pushed herself up, literally leapt to the small empty gap on the couch only to rush flying back to grab her drawing. She ran full tilt around the edge of the coffee table, ignoring her parents' admonitions to slow down, and hurled herself for the second time onto the couch. With a giggle, she settled in against Tigress, her arms around her mother's neck. "Hi, Mommy. Miss you."
"Hi, baby girl," Tigress answered, and Po grinned at the pet name. It was both funny and endearing to see the fearsome Master Tigress used that kind appellative on anyone. He thought he would never live to see that day.
"How was your day?"
"Good, Mommy," Ying Yue chirped, climbing over Tigress's lap to resettle between her parents. "Daddy and I went to the park and played on the swings, and there was a really loud fight between the croc bandits..-" She dropped her drawing in favour of broad hand gestures meant to, Po assumed, sketch just how big the croc bandit was- "and daddy was about to stop them when grandpa Shifu suddenly appeared and froze them with just one finger," she beamed with pride. "One. Finger. I bet the stick he used for walking was just a fake," she concluded to both Po and Tigress' amusement. "And then I draw you this!" She picked the picture up and presents it to Tigress proudly. "Perhaps you can give this to him tomorrow?"
"Of course," Tigress' eyes light up, and her smile was delighted as she accepted the slightly crumpled paper with a rough sketch of big-eared creature - that was Shifu alright. "Good job, Yue. Is this…-?"
"It's nerve attack!" Ying Yue interrupted, "pointing at the yellow blob she coloured on the tip of Shifu's finger. "Daddy said he used chi, the power to one's soul. So even when grampa is small, his chi can be as big as an elephant! That's how he beats Daddy and throws him all around the Training Hall like a rag doll. So, if I meditate more to make my chi stronger, I can beat Daddy too!"
Po rolled his eyes. Ying Yue had always had a crazy way in deriving and analysing phenomena around her; it fascinated Po, even when she's asking twenty minutes' worth of absurd questions that made connect to each other only in that amazing brain of hers.
"Oh," Ying Yue breathed, her eyes wide, "I need to show my picture to grampa Ping! Who knows he would want me to draw him too."
She wriggled out from between them and scampered off to her room to grab her drawing supplies.
Tigress huffed a laugh, leaning more heavily into Po as she traced the lines of Ying Yue's drawing. "This is pretty good," she observed.
She's not wrong - Ying Yue had trouble colouring in the lines, but the basic shape was recognisably a red panda, featuring large ears, small body, bushy tail, and four semi-proportional limbs. It's the fact that Shifu was gliding in the air with a gigantic ball of chi on his skinny hands had really made it clear that this version of Shifu had sprung from the bright imagination of a four-year-old. Tigress smoothed the paper a bit. "Shifu would be glad if he could fly."
"He almost could fly," Po remarked at his Master's gravity-defying ability. "I can't imagine what will happen if he were born with wings. And so were you."
Her forehead crinkled. The "Am I?" was silent, but he saw it plastered on her face.
"You flew from the Jade Palace rooftop to the ground and zipped right across Valley of Peace to the Thread of Hope. That was..-"
"Awesome?" she finished with a chuckle.
"Yep," he nodded. A large grin split his face when he caught a glimpse of Ying Yue dashed in impossible speed crossing the living room to the bathroom and back into her bedroom. "And you know where our feisty princess got her energy from, see?"
Tigress tilted her head and crossed her arms in faux annoyance.
"She's your daughter," he said as an explanation.
Tigress scoffed but snuggled closer. "She inhaled for a bowl of dumpling yesterday - literally. She's your kid, Po."
Po laughed, but before he can argue, Ying Yue came tearing back into the living room, a sack full of painting equipment clutched in one hand and Tigress action figure that she inherited from her big sister, Lei Lei. "Mommy, Mommy, Mommy, can we fix Daddy's marks now?"
Po leaned forward, and Ying Yue redirected, launching herself at him. She grinned up at him. "Hi, Daddy."
"Hi, Little Dumpling." Po dipped his head to kiss his daughter's tiny nose, which made her laugh and wriggle in a fake attempt to avoid him. She loved the scratch of his rough panda stubble but liked to pretend she didn't.
Her hand landed on his cheek, and she patted his jaw. "Daddy, can we fix your marks now?" She's grinning up at him, and her enthusiasm made his chest ache.
He glanced at Tigress with a wordless question. He could tell she's had a long day - the Valley had suffered from a few bandit attacks and she's been putting in long, tough hours to try to make sure the situation and normalcy rebounded quickly. It won't surprise him if she's not up for taking care of him tonight.
But Tigress was already scooting forward on the couch, reaching for Ying Yue. "Let's go get everything ready for Daddy," she told her, and Ying Yue went eagerly into her mother's arms.
Po watched them head upstairs, then pushed himself up with a little groan and made a detour for the kitchen. He grabbed some Camomile tea for Ying Yue, brew a large pot of Oolong for Tigress, and refilled his water jug before heading upstairs. He could hear their voices, Ying Yue narrating everything she's doing for her mother ("I did a split kick, Mommy!"), and Tigress praising her and occasionally correcting her as needed.
Pausing in the doorway to the master bedroom, Po watched his daughter crawling around on the bed, carefully straightening the clean bath sheet they've laid down to protect the red and grey duvet. Tigress had the hot herbal patches and the jar of solvent for his scars on a small hand towel to the side. Ying Yue tended to need more cleaning up than Po after each "mark fixing" session. It was a ritual these days, now that 40 was fast approaching and his years of injury have started to make themselves known in the form of aches and pains, for his girls to spend an hour every couple days easing his pain and healing his scars.
He couldn't believe, some days, that this was his life. Becoming Dragon Warrior was merely a small part of the adventure - a beginning of many things. He couldn't believe he had Kung Fu. He couldn't believe he made friends with his idols - the Furious Five. He couldn't believe he became the Master of Jade Palace. But mostly he couldn't believe he deserved the kind of love his daughter and his wife give him so effortlessly.
Before he could get too maudlin, Tigress spotted him and reached out her paw. "C'mon over here, mister." She noticed the Oolong tea in his paws and grinned. "I knew I married you for a reason."
"Bet ya," he said with a smile that he forced because the thought of his life without her nearly squeezed the tears out of his eyes.
Tigress handed her the cup and Ying Yue's Camomile tea - they learned early that Ying Yue - just like Tigress - was not a particularly good multitasker when she spilt scalding hot tea down Po's spine. He deposited his water jug on the bedside table, tugged off his shirt (which he wore because Tigress insisted he needed to stop being shirtless in front of other people - she was his only exception), then climbed onto the mattress, settling on his stomach. He pulled his pillow closer, then craned his neck to see Ying Yue kneeling by his ribs. "Okay, Little Dumpling."
She patted his back twice and put Tigress action figure right beside his face, making Po laugh. "Relax, Daddy," she directed. "You can snuggle with my Tigress if you need to," she added, then turned her attention to her mother. "Mommy, can I have the Wonder?" Po grinned into the pillow at Ying Yue's butchering of the complicated, pharmaceutical name of the scar cream's component.
"Of course, darling," Tigress answered.
And they got to work.
Tigress knew his tight spots, the deep tissue aches and pains that responded to the patches, so she methodically applied them. She took a few moments to work on his muscles, too, massaging when she felt a knot.
Ying Yue, meanwhile, fingerpainted the white lines and raised skin of his scars with the healing cream. She was so careful and so gentle as she worked. The first time they'd done this, by the time he'd flipped over to let them work on the scars on his chest, the sight of little Ying Yue leaning over him, her tongue between her teeth as she concentrated on soothing his old injuries had brought Po to tears. His baby girl - who barely graduated from wearing diapers - hadn't noticed the tears slipping down the sides of his face, but Tigress caught the way his breath hitched, cupping his face with her paws and pressing a soft kiss to his lips to ground him.
He didn't cry every time these days, but he felt it just as acutely. Ying Yue was as openly protective as Tigress, and as deeply affectionate as he was - and they both told him at least once a day that they love him. But something about these moments, something about the way he could feel the love in their careful touches, in the time and attention they put into making him feel just a little better, it hit him hard every time.
"Thank you," he murmured into the pillow, and he's honestly not sure whether he's thanking his girls, or whatever deity or fate brought him the two great loves of his life: Tigress and Ying Yue.
His wife pressed a kiss to the back of his shoulder, and his daughter patted him again. "You're welcome, Daddy."
Po smiles. "Thank you."