Follow on from my fic Nothing.
"It's good to feel something… right?" He asked.
For as long as she'd known, all Tigress wanted was to feel something.
Nothing was sparse, bare, lonely, empty, numb, tiring, monotonous… something seemed like it would be different. The grass had seemed greener on the other side, and she was naïve to think it would be as lush as she'd imagined. Something was the opposite of nothing, but not in the way she'd dreamed.
Where something was concerned, the grass was steeped in dry soil, absent of water to keep it alive and green. Each blade concerned the yellowing colour, wilting and drooping enough to flatten easily from contact. It was a perfectly accurate image of how it felt to feel something.
Delicate, if she put it lightly. Something was complex beyond anything she could imagine and it frustrated her immensely that it made her so delicate. Some days she'd blow away like a leaf in the wind and buckle under any sort of pressure. Other days she'd crumple like paper, and find herself squashed and torn in the palm of her heart. Something, she found, came from her heart, but wrapped vines around her mind. Nothing had left those absent with empty, lonely and numb.
Overwhelming would be a word her pride wouldn't dare let her say out loud. Finally feeling something hit her like a dagger to the chest and it was unmistakably jarring. The day she realised she felt something was the day she ran to the Peach Tree with closed eyes and screaming lungs. Her mind was working overdrive and something hurt deep inside her heart. Tearing, shredding and taking apart. The amount of emotions shot through her were enough to put the weight of living on her shoulders. Weight that was so much heavier than nothing.
Terrifying she'd never admit. Something was so strong, so much stronger than she was ever trained to handle. Her emotions ran wild and free, infecting every part of her day and breathing life into the parts of her she tried to bury the most. It was terrifying how much it affected everything in existence to such a horrifying extent. It caused her to slump her shoulders down and hide her trembling body and snatched gasps. Crying, as the nothing had taught her, was not to be indulged. Something took that discipline away. She couldn't remember a time she'd ever felt more worthless.
Nothing had allowed her love. The one mercy becoming her saviour from demons hiding in the depths of her earliest memories. The friends she loved so much had started to notice the change in her demeanour. They held concern for her, they cared in that effortless way she wished she could care about herself. Though they'd been able to help lift the weight of her nothing, their mere presence could not stop the something creating her into a shell of who she once was. And how badly she wished she could articulate the pain she wasn't used to feeling, the pain caused by what something gave her.
A double-edged sword.
Introspection.
It was good, she supposed, to know where these emotions came from, to find the root cause. But finding that cause didn't make her feel better – it only heightened the severity of everything in her something. The newfound knowledge that her something, her previous nothing, were borne out of treatment she faced in her younger years was terrifying. All she'd ever known was turned on its head and blurred messily to illustrate her demons in a way that was too overwhelming. Bringing to the surface what she hated most about herself. And worst of all, it made her delicate to the thoughts clouding her mind in blinding black scribbles.
"Something is not… not what I wanted." She said.
Po blinked at her in clear confusion. "But is it better than nothing?" He asked, innocent to the tsunami of darkness behind her eyelids.
Tigress shook her head.
"Oh," His expression turned sombre and he looked at her in undisguised pity. "why is that?"
She cast her eyes down. "It seems I am still affected by what I faced when I was younger." She attempted to sound nonchalant, monotonous, dry… anything different to pained.
"Oh Tigress…"
"Please don't – I don't need pity." She bit out in a mutter.
Po's voice cracked with all the emotion something made her capable of. "But who? Do you know who affected you?"
"Yes," Tigress swallowed, the answer had been hard to accept, taking sleepless nights of staring at the stars with a dry mouth and wet eyes until she finally melted the frost detaching the connection between heart and mind. "yes and he would never understand."
Something was the worst thing that happened to her.
Some people shouldn't be parents.
Going from being emotionally detached to suddenly getting hit with sadness is really hard. Then finding where that sadness has come from is like going through the pain all over again. That causes anger too, especially if it's a parental figure - it just heightens everything and life becomes really scary.
hmm, this got pretty personal, sorry about that.