Work Text:
Twenty years, Tai Lung found, gives one quite some time to think.
About things that were, and things that were not.
About things that are, and things that are not.
About stone, and how it feels against your knees.
About grass, and how it felt beneath your paws.
About air, and how it can stagnate and choke, even as you breathe it in.
About wind, how it seemed obvious it will always be there to experience, and how it is difficult to remember, exactly, the way it sifted through your fur and tickled the turfs at the tips of your ears.
About the way your heart keeps beating even in the short periods of time when you wish it would not (and during the long periods of time you wish it, too).
About how fickle time becomes when there are no skies above, when there is no sunlight or moonlight or stars to guide one’s time on this earth. Time seems both too short and too long. You can count your own heartbeats, and get lost in their rhythm, only returning briefly to your consciousness – then pulled back to the predictable lull of it all.
You can only find reprieve in your sleep for so long. You try different emotions for size, to see if they will pull you through this torturous existence where even your own body betrays you as it forces you to bear it – and realize it is a futile endeavor.
No matter which emotion you wear – it all still ends up with you entombed alive in a grave in all but name.
In his mind, Tai Lung escaped this miserable place ten thousand times.
First, he ran to his memories – but they gave him little reprieve, tainted, as they were, by the present. He ruminated, bitterly, on his foolishness; if things had been different, had he not been blind to Oogway’s determination to keep the Dragon Scroll forever sealed, by which the cost of Tai Lung’s freedom was worth nothing more than a burnt-out candle among countless others.
Was it an ill-placed respect and trust that kept Tai Lung from seeing things clearly? The haze of his boundless rage that muddles his memories of that time makes it difficult to ascertain.
When his own memories fail him, he turns to his imagination – where he escaped the prison in ten thousand different ways.
He dissected each and every puny guard – Xiao Huang and Wen Kun and He Zan and Zhang Zhi and Lin Xun and Peng Ru and Cui Yong and Sun Rong and Tian Huan and Mo Jianhong and Zheng Wuying and Shen Tu and Ding Shun and Kong Peng and Tian Tian and Huo Fang and Gong Yin and Chen Chun and Cai Su and Yao Xuegang and Cai Dong and Yan Cheng and Su Guanting and Han Jia and Wan Mu and Gong Xue and Zhu Chin and Cui Yong and Hou Ling and nine hundred and sixty-four others, some nameless, some faceless – these cowards, free to taunt him when he was brought to his lowest.
He climbed the walls, claws digging through the rock like they did when they ravaged the prison guards’ flesh and bones.
He kicked down doors.
He punched through locks.
He cracked open gates.
He smashed the chains.
He broke –
He opened his eyes
and remained as he were.
(Beneath his knees, through the thin, worn fabric he wears, the stone is ever so cold.)
The day it happens is not any different than any other day.
(Or maybe it is.)
Tai Lung goes through the motions of training, picturing it in his mind, when he realizes he has been in Chorh-Gom prison longer than he had been out of it.
It is a jarring, startling realization.
Nothing in him indicates it but his own thoughts, safe inside his head, covered behind his closed eyelids.
He only ever kept track of the passage of time through the snide remarks of the guards.
He’d already been here a month
a year
three years
“an awfully humid summer, with all of these bugs – ”
five
“all that blooming has him constantly sneezing – ”
six winters
“they’re expecting a son this coming spring – ”
seven summers
“a winter with hardly any rain, like the one before last – ”
thirteen springs
“his wife just gave birth to twins –”
eighteen autumns
nineteen
then
twenty
years.
All this time, they would taunt.
All this time – and not a single visitor.
It was a fact that had not escaped even the short-sighted eyes of the dull-minded prison guards.
Tai Lung was basically already dead to them all, in all but the inconvenience of his own persistent, traitorous heartbeats.
Shifu had forgotten about him.
It is hard to let go of the bitterness that spews from this realization.
Tai Lung should have known better by now.
Abandoned at birth and in life.
Unwanted by his own Mother, and by the one he considered as a Father.
In a brief, painful moment of reflection, Tai Lung wonders what had he done to have wronged the Heavens so.
His unleased rage he has no remorse for, and he understands, clinically, that such an act will earn one with the Heavens’ scorn.
But as a cub, surely, he could not have committed any equivalent of such a grievous crime.
Even if his own Mother turned him away, why would the Heavens be so callous as to deliver him to the door of another parent who will only forsake Tai Lung yet again?
‘Are the Heavens truly so wicked and cruel’, he wondered, ‘that we bear the weight of sins not commended or commenced by our own paws?’
Do the Heavens care nothing for ones such as himself?
Has there none among his ancestors – not even one – who will look down kindly at Tai Lung?
Who will grant him any favor, ever so small?
If there was such an ancestor, Tai Lung thought, surely they would have given him a sign by now.
Any sign.
Tai Lung kept looking for such, however small.
At the bottom of the pit, that day, Tai Lung truly feels bereft of all connection, and his heart is heavy.
Then, suddenly, a small, distant squawk.
At first, Tai Lung thinks he imagines it.
There are no sounds in this tomb but for the rattle of chains and the loathsome ones by the prison guards.
Then, the unexpected rattle of the platform chain – too early? Too late? – Uncharacteristic, Tai Lung is certain; he is being fed every other day, and despite his tenuous grip of time in prison, he can still taste the stale rice he was given on his unwashed tongue.
Now is not the time.
The wooden platform is being lowered sooner than it should be.
And upon it – his ears twitch as he picks it up, before he wrenches back into stillness – more soft, small gasps.
“Behold,” the grating voice of the prison warden, Vachir, speaks. “Tai Lung.”
“I’ll um...I’m just gonna wait right here.”
It’s a small, cautious voice that trembles. Weak, Tai Lung immediately thinks.
Weak.
Weak and also.
New.
“It’s nothing to worry about.” Vachir gloats. “It’s perfectly safe.”
A thud made with the clash of Vachir’s paw on a soft and small body.
Tai Lung keeps his tail from lashing out.
He had a lot of practice, through the years.
“Crossbows! At the ready!” Vachir hollers.
“Crossbows?!” The small voice squawks.
Tai Lung is unsure, as well. Why would his mind taunt him so?
A scent tickles at his nose; of burnt out candles, and incense, and grain.
Of wind.
Of fresh air.
Of warm blood.
The scent –
He could not have come up with this scent.
“Hey, tough guy, did you hear?” Vachir taunts. “Oogway’s finally going to give someone the Dragon Scroll, and it’s not going to be you.”
This burns.
Tai Lung keeps as still as a statue.
“What are you doing?!” The weakling who smells of freedom squawks. “Don’t get him mad!”
The fire stills, for a moment.
It had been –
No, it had never been.
No one ever stood at Tai Lung’s side.
(Then, the fire burns ever brighter)
“What’s he gonna do about it? I’ve got him completely immobilized.” Tai Lung can hear the smug smirk on Vachir’s face before the warden stomps down on his tail, trying to crush one of the bones with his fat, useless foot.
But every bone in Tai Lung’s body was already crushed and healed tens and hundreds of times under Shifu’s relentless training, before he was ever forced under Vachir’s eye.
The bone merely cracks.
Tai Lung can hear the small, soft visitor as he gasps and shudders.
Vachir chortles. “Awww,” he mocks, “did I step on the witty kitty’s tail? Awww.”
But Tai Lung pays him no heed.
Tai Lung realizes, for the first time –
For the first time, in twenty years –
Tai Lung has a Visitor.
“I’m good,” his Visitor says, “I’ve seen enough. I’m gonna tell Shifu he’d got nothing to worry about.”
Tai Lung can not make sense of this sentence. He is too enthralled by this Visitor. He wants to look, to see, to affirm –
But he is also –
He is also —
He is also afraid.
Afraid that the Visitor is not really there.
That, when he opens his eyes, no one will be there.
That the wooden platform would be when it always is.
(it would not be the first time such things have happened.)
“No,” Vachir snorts, bringing Tai Lung back from his straying thoughts. “He doesn’t.”
“Okay,” His Visitor says, meekly, voice wavering. “I’ll tell him that. Can we please go now?”
Tai Lung does not want His Visitor to go.
He does not even know His Visitor’s name yet.
‘Please’, Tai Lung asks, silently.
He does not know what he is asking, nor whom.
But he asks, anyway.
Tai Lung feels the vibrations thrumming through his knees and legs as each of the pair makes way back to the wooden platform – Vachir’s heavy strides and stilted gait; His Visitor’s hurried scurrying, the sound of thin, dainty nails scrapping against the stone.
The creak of the chains as they pull the platform upwards, and away.
But then –
He hears it as it sways, as it makes its way down to him.
A single feather lands – perfect, whole – before him.
A shining bronze flight feather, unbroken.
His tail sneaks to gently wrap itself around the feather before Tai Lung even realizes it.
His eyes take in as much as he can before he hides away his prize.
His Visitor is a goose.
This goose, sent here by Shifu –
This goose had just gifted him one of his feathers.
Among the ten thousand ways Tai Lung broke out of Chorh-Gom prison in his mind, being gifted a feather did not ever come to be.
But he is holding this gift in his tail.
(this was real)
With His Visitor’s Gift safe in his grasp, Tai Lung has only one way to escape Chorh-Gom prison.
One way woven with ten thousand different strands made by twenty years of despair and of hope, coalescing and crashing against reality like a tsunami, so much so that Tai Lung moves without knowing if his body is truly following his thoughts along or if this is all but a figment of his own mind, that drove itself too far in this endless cycle of deprivation.
But that filthy warden is holding Tai Lung’s goose in his grabby, meaty paw.
Holding Tai Lung’s freedom by the throat.
And Tai Lung does not care if it is a dream or if it is not.
The world explodes
into silence.
There’s smoke.
And gust, peppered by the chill and snow.
Tai Lung takes a deep breath.
Then lets it out, slowly.
His head feels like it’s spinning, but he remains steady.
This cold is different.
It is fresh.
Tai Lung notes, belatedly, that he is grabbing the goose around his throat.
His Visitor.
His goose.
It’s a thin, delicate throat.
Tai Lung can feel the erratic heartbeats through the thin short feathers around the goose’s neck, beneath his paws.
It’s been a long while, since Tai Lung touched anything so soft.
“I’m glad Shifu sent you.” Tai Lung tells the goose, still somewhat dazed. He raises his other paw, then halts, and, being very mindful of his strength when bloodlust is still pumping through his own veins, brushes a lone paw pad against the goose’s head with great care.
The feathers tingle against his skin.
“I was beginning to think I had been forgotten.”
In another world, at another time, at the same very moment, vengeance will surge through Tai Lung. He will cling to It fiercely, using it to fuel himself until, eventually, he burns out, snuffed like a candlestick that had melted away. No different than back in this prison.
The flames that the Dragon Scroll stirred in him will be his downfall.
But in this world, Tai Lung thinks of his own lone ancestor.
Whichever ancestor that heard his plea.
Whichever ancestor that was forgotten, just like Tai Lung himself were.
Whichever ancestor that did not frown upon his existence.
That did not cast him aside.
That did not leave him to rot in a well-guarded coffin.
Whichever ancestor that asked for no tributes –
The wind ruffles through Tai Lung’s fur.
– but gave him everything.
He feels the warmth of the gift sent to him by the Heavens, pulsing against his paw.
In this world, Tai Lung decides differently.
Tai Lung decides he will not squander this blessing for the past.
That he had spent too much time ruminating in a barren wasteland, as if the time he wasted there will nourish the ground and yield fruit.
That he will not earn the scorn of yet another ancestor, not when the bright, peculiar feeling warms him – the knowledge that he had not been abandoned by all.
(He had a Visitor, right there in his grasp.)
The foreign, smothered giddiness he buried in his youth – the very same one that claws itself up as it emerges in him after knowing he had been heard – replaces the flames with a heady rush, making him recall the first breath he took after drowning, so many years ago.
The goose, unscathed by the fire Tai Lung unleashed on his way to freedom, is warm in his paw, when the chill of winter whips all around them; for Tai Lung, the wailing mountains winds feel like silk ribbons brushing against his body.
The skies, he thinks, look even more beautiful than he remembered.
(His eyes burn, unused to the light – but he will not turn away.)
“I don’t believe we were properly introduced, before.” Tai Lung can’t keep the purr out of his voice, when he turns to His Visitor.
(In the past, he had trained himself out of it; purring, he was told, was not considered proper.
Instead, it feels right.)
“It seems you are already aware of me, when I have not yet had the honour of learning your own name.”
The goose swallows.
Tai Lung feels the muscles of his throat as they contract against his paw.
“Well?” His paw spasms, and the goose makes a small, choked sound.
“Zeng! It’s Zeng!” The goose – Zeng – finally says.
“Zeng. Well met.” Tai Lung approves. “Well then, Zeng. Wherever shall we be headed? South? North? Any preference?”
“We?” Zeng squawks in inquiry.
(Tai Lung likes that sound.)
“Of course.” Tai Lung purrs. “We only just met. I’d be loath to part ways so quickly.”
Behind him, Tai Lung’s tail lashes to and fro, as exhilaration slowly creeps from within, jarring his carefully constrained urges.
Zeng seems indecisive, sputtering, eyes skittering about, but this is fine. Tai Lung does not really care either way.
The skies are wide and open, in every direction they may be headed.
“Never you mind, Zeng.” Tai Lung says. “How about I put you down? Would you like that?”
Zeng gulps a breath again ( – so pleasant, in Tai Lung’s paw – ) and nods his head. “Yes, thank you.” He replies, meek again.
(Tai Lung does not want to put Zeng down.)
(It’s His Visitor.)
Tai Lung carefully sets Zeng down on the snow.
“Do remember, Zeng – ” he makes sure to note aloud, “– it will not be wise for us to part ways.”
Zeng was sent by one of Tai Lung’s ancestors, after all.
And one should not invoke the wrath of the Heavens.
“You understand, don’t you?” Tai Lung looks down at His Visitor to confirm.
(Tai Lung will catch him, if Zeng tries to run.
But Tai Lung would rather not break Zeng’s wings.
Not these wings, brimming with dozens of beautiful bronze feathers.
He will, if needs must – but it will be a shame.
Broken wings rarely ever heal well, he remembers from his youth.)
“… Perfectly.” Zeng confirms, and Tai Lung purrs at the affirmation.
“Good.” He says, and it is so, for the first time in a very, very long time.
They head West.
If it is good enough for the sun to head there at the end of each and every day, Tai Lung thinks, it is good enough for him.
For them.
(Tai Lung has a Visitor.)
(But a Visitor is for when one is in prison.)
(Tai Lung is no longer in prison.)
(So now – )
(now –)
(He has – )
(Tai Lung has – )
Zeng is an odd travel mate.
Slow.
Breathes too loudly.
When he collapses, panting, Tai Lung merely raises a brow at him.
“I – I’m sorry, b– but –” he wheezes. “Can – can we take a break?”
Tai Lung assumes it cannot be helped.
He is the one preventing the goose from flying.
Geese can walk, but they are not built to march.
To prowl.
Or to climb mountains, either up or down.
Not Zeng, at least.
“It would be a shame to lose sunlight, Zeng.” He explains, enjoying the shudder that follows; Zeng’s feathers ruffle ever so slightly in an endearing manner. “But you can catch your breath.”
“I – I can?” Zeng pants, sounding puzzled.
“Of course.” Tai Lung nods. “I’ll just have to carry you.”
He picks Zeng easily enough, and it’s very much like the goose weighs nothing at all.
(Such thin, hollow bones, Tai Lung marvels.)
(It’d be nothing at all –)
Ignoring the sputtering and the muffled, feeble protests, he rests Zeng’s weight in the crook of his left arm without breaking stride.
(Zeng’s feathers have such a lovely shine to them, in the sunlight.)
Zeng keeps blabbering about, but Tai Lung does not mind.
“Nonsense,” Tai Lung purrs in response. “It’s no hardship.”
It’s a comfortable enough weight.
(it’s warm.)
(and Zeng’s feathers are so very soft.)
Tai Lung has an odd feeling nagging at him as they keep heading West, past rocks and gravel and thorns and creaks and roads no one trod before them. The air seems different, and not just since it is fresh.
(The cracked tip of Tai Lung’s tail tingles.)
(He tries whipping it a few times to dismiss the sensation and cast it away from him, but never quite succeeds.)
He finds food for Zeng, and water, too. He is careful to eat sporadically and slowly; his body is no longer accustomed to digesting food.
(His tongue does not know what to do with all the flavour that bursts from a single, lone berry.)
The feeling persists as he watches Zeng eat.
When he watches Zeng drink.
When he watches Zeng drag his body along, pushing himself to his own limits.
It is, Tai Lung notes, an admirable quality.
Zeng is less talkative as nighttime approaches, but Tai Lung does not mind.
He enjoys the sound of Zeng’s breath as it leaves his lungs, his beating heart within his chest, the occasional hitch in his breathing.
By nightfall, they find solace among the thick, secure branches of the trees.
After two decades that were spent being soldiered onto the ground, Tai Lung can finally enjoy the serenity he had always found in heights. He keeps from clawing the trees surrounding them, despite wanting to, as not to belittle their hospitality.
He tucks Zeng to him, clasping the small feathered body against his own chest under one careful paw.
“It’d be an awful shame if you were to fall,” Tai Lung tells Zeng, and lets Zeng’s ever-racing heartbeats lull him to sleep.
Each night, they sleep among the tree tops.
(Tai Lung no longer dreams.)
After their initial meeting, Zeng does not talk much, which suits Tai Lung fine.
The world is brimming with sounds around him.
Leaves rustle.
Butterflies bat their wings.
Mushrooms nudge out of the earth.
Bark breaks and crumbles, falling down.
The wind pokes and prods at the world, and Tai Lung listens to it.
(Zeng’s heart beats on and on and on and on —)
Tai Lung’s world is filled with so much sound.
The goose does often mutter or mumble, which Tai Lung enjoys, too.
Zeng is resilient – he offers no complaints, even when tired, and puts little resistance when Tai Lung picks him up when he tires himself out.
(Tai Lung knows Zeng is terrified of him, and that’s fine, too.)
(It only means Zeng has some sense in him.)
(It does not bother Tai Lung.)
(It does not bother him at all.)
(A branch breaks off a tree.)
(Not a flinch.)
After fourteen nights (– Tai Lung relished in knowing that – knowing that by himself, spending each and every night under the stars –) they come across their first meeting with civilization.
It’s a wrecked carriage, plundered by bandits.
The blood in the air smells relatively fresh, not yet completely soaked through the ground, though there are no bodies.
Tai Lung goes through the wreckage to see if there is anything left that they could use.
“We – we should pay our respects.” Zeng says.
“Our respects?”
“To the dead.” The goose gulps, loudly, as he does. “So they can pass on peacefully. Someone ought to do it.”
Tai Lung hums, as it had not occurred to him. “How commendable, Zeng.” He purrs approvingly. “How noble.”
He sees now, even more so, the boon granted to him by that one lone ancestor of his.
Gratitude fills him so wholly, he is barely aware of anything else other than this huge, stifling emotion, and of Zeng’s wet, dark eyes.
“Of course. Let’s pay our respects.”
Zeng builds a small monument from rocks and stones he picks and arranges to a neat little pile, with a longer stone used as an improvised tombstone, with some flowers and berries he gathered as an offering. Tai Lung watches Zeng as he offers the wandering souls a prayer to find peace, and joins him, clasping both paws and bowing his head silently, seeing no reason to earn the ire of those already gone, surely not after the first merit he had ever experienced from the Heavens.
Tai Lung realizes he had not yet given his ancestor any offerings as thanks for their benevolence.
He should have.
It should have been every so clear to him.
Only –
Bowing further, he silently apologizes for his oversight, and assures his ancestor an appropriate offering, when they come before their first shrine.
Finishing the impromptu ceremony, Zeng dejectedly waddles to the broken cart, muttering to himself; Tai Lung can hear him mostly berating himself for not carrying any incense sticks.
Tai Lung follows, nudging some of the broken loot that is strewn about, thinking that perhaps –
A loud, startled honk rips the somber atmosphere like rice paper.
Tai Lung coils and springs to Zeng’s side in the blink of an eye, claws drawn, ready to put down any threat that dared cross their path, only to see Zeng’s eyes widen at the sight of –
“A child,” Zeng says, sounding part mystified and part reverent.
“… It’s an egg,” Tai Lung replies, baffled, as he drops his stance.
“Yes, that’s what I’ve said,” Zeng tells him distractedly, without turning his eyes away from the egg, white and whole, nestled between torn fabric and shattered wooden crates.
Slowly and with great care, Zeng picks the egg between his feathers, stroking it.
“It’s oddly shaped, for an egg.” Tai Lung observes; it is too round and spherical, unlike other eggs he had seen in the past.
“Shh!” Zeng hisses and turns to glare up at him with a sudden fierceness. “Don’t talk this way in front of the child!”
The meek, squawky bird is gone, replaced with a tenacious and intense spirit.
“There there, he meant nothing by it,” Zeng reassures the egg, petting it. “How about we get you more comfortable, mhmm? Would you like that?” Zeng coos. “I bet you would.”
Tai Lung watches as Zeng frets around, picking discarded fabrics, rope and garments to create a makeshift sling he wraps around his body, tucking the egg until it is safely cushioned and cocooned against Zeng’s chest.
Zeng persistently insists they check if there are any other children left to fend for themselves, and Tai Lung, amused, indulges him by checking through the wreckage and the surrounding area. Zeng’s taciturn nature changes, too; suddenly informing the egg of each and every one of their actions, telling it over and over not to worry, and that the Heavens are surely looking after it.
Tai Lung wonders about that, tail swaying.
If the Heavens did care for the egg as Zeng fervently seems to believe, why was it abandoned here, in the first place? With its parents meeting a probably gruesome and brutal death.
Left to fend for itself.
If Zeng would not have found it when he did, how likely it was for the Heavens to have sent yet another adult that could be bothered to even pay any mind to a stranded, lost egg?
(It could not be that the Heavens sent Zeng for this egg.)
(Because it was Tai Lung’s ancestor that sent him His Visitor.)
After turning over every pebble and fallen leaf in the area, they find no more eggs.
Zeng seems crestfallen.
Tai Lung is not sure as to why the goose cares so much.
These were not even his eggs.
“Surely someone will be looking for this child,” Zeng insists. “Some relatives, or –” Zeng trails off, eyes looking away, before picking up a misplaced resolve once more. “Someone.”
Tai Lung does not ask Zeng what makes him so sure.
Tai Lung does not tell Zeng there are plenty of children no one is looking for.
Tai Lung does not tell Zeng the misshapen egg is not even a child, and that it may well never hatch.
Tai Lung keeps his thoughts to himself, and Zeng keeps his egg.
Zeng gives the egg more care than Tai Lung thinks is strictly necessary.
He talks to it, and touches it, and laughs with it.
He insists Tai Lung slow down his pace (– which he does –) and that he talks to the egg, too.
“What should I tell it?” Tai Lung asks.
Zeng, still fussing over the egg, turning it in its sling, hums thoughtfully.
“Whatever comes to mind.”
It’s an odd thing that Zeng suggests.
Tai Lung had spent the few years barely speaking to anyone other than himself.
But it seems important to Zeng.
“I am looking for a shrine, Little Egg.”
“A shrine?” Zeng inquires.
“Yes.” Tai Lung responds. “I have a tribute to pay to an ancestor.”
“An ancestor?” Zeng frowns. “But you’re –”
Tai Lung merely quirks a brow at the goose, watching him fumble and try to walk back on his words.
“Ancestors are important, Little Egg.” Tai Lung tells it, seriously. “Remember that.”
Zeng does not make him talk to the egg, after that.
That night, nestled between them both among the rustling leaves, the egg feels rather warm.
They come across a village.
Zeng seems hesitant to approach it, but Tai Lung nudges him along.
“Come now, Zeng. What about Little Egg?”
That seems to strengthen Zeng’s resolve.
Zeng’s robes are no longer the offending, glaring gold they were; time spent on the road softened their glow to a muted, sensible yellow.
They still garner attention, strangers they were.
They come to a tea house, seeking information.
Zeng inquires after report of missing children, gesturing at the egg, or of bandits, or of travelers – but none seem to know much about it.
He spares them a few copper coins, from a small cloth satchel he carried with him.
The same goes for the next village.
And the one after that.
(Zeng hisses at some pig, when he comes too close, and asks to take a closer look at the egg.)
(Tai Lung did not know Zeng could hiss.)
By their fourth village, Zeng barely has any more coins to spare.
He invites Tai Lung to share a pot of Jasmine tea with him.
(It’s delicious.)
They find a shrine, eventually. A roadside shrine, but a shrine nonetheless.
Tai Lung does not have much to give – he offers one of his own whiskers, some fruits, some flowers, a bunch of incense sticks he asked Zeng to purchase for him, a piece of cloth from the only garment he owns, and his sincerest thanks.
He cleans the shrine to the best of his ability, as Zeng chatters away at the egg.
“It does not look like someone is looking for it.” Tai Lung tells him, from between the tree branches, staring at the sparkling, clear skies.
“Someone might,” Zeng argues, rather weakly. “No one would just abandon their child like that.”
Startled, Tai Lung laughs before he even realizes why his chest is rising and falling.
It had been more than two decades, since he had last laughed.
(It is a good feeling.)
“You really are rather precious, aren’t you?” He purrs at the goose, who sputters, then squawks.
(Tai Lung knew that for a long while, already.)
Zeng is certain that the egg is about to hatch.
As such, he insists they remain on the ground, to provide the child with a stable environment.
Tai Lung indulges him.
They remain in their improvised camp among the woods for five days, which is longer than Tai Lung would have liked.
It makes him restless.
He trains, to distract himself.
(It does not work.)
Then, on the morning of the sixth day, Zeng squawks.
Tai Lung hears the egg shell, as it cracks open.
Egg shells, Tai Lung finds, take a long time to crack open.
Zeng is ecstatic – running in circles around the egg, cooing at it, cheering at it encouragingly.
“You can do it!” He tells the egg with zeal. “Just a little bit more!”
Tai Lung, exasperated, nonetheless keeps watch.
By noon, the crack has widened substantially.
Zeng’s enthusiasm has not waned in the slightest.
Tai Lung watches, and wonders, suddenly, if this is all how things should be.
“Tai Lung!” Zeng calls, before dawn breaks on the seventh day. “Tai Lung, come quick! The child!”
Tai Lung flies to Zeng’s side immediately, only to find Zeng motioning excitedly at the egg, wobbling between its makeshift nest on the ground.
Tai Lung watches as the egg finally splits apart.
It’s —
“Hello there,” Zeng coos. “What a lovely thing you are!”
“It’s a turtle,” Tai Lung says, flummoxed.
“He’s a turtle, you mean,” Zeng says, already swaddling the child in cloth before picking him up.
Tai Lung never knew turtles could be so small.
The child is barely the size of one of Zeng’s webbed feet.
The child gurgles a sound, and Zeng practically melts.
(Some eggs are not rotten, if only one takes care to notice.)
Zeng names the child Lǐwù.
It is a good a name as any.
“A child needs stability,” Zeng tells Tai Lung, serious, over the campfire.
(Zeng’s feathers are radiant, even at night.)
(The fire flickers and dances, painting pictures Tai Lung could never tire of looking at.)
So Tai Lung builds them a house.
The house is small, and wooden, made of a single room.
The roof does not let in any rain.
The cold remains behind the door, when it closes.
And it is theirs.
Lǐwù is slow.
Slow to talk.
Slow to think.
Slow to walk.
Slow to move.
Perhaps, it is because he is a turtle.
Perhaps, it is because he is who he is.
Zeng is concerned, but Tai Lung finds that this is fine with him.
He is in no hurry.
One day, when Tai Lung is making his way back home from the nearby village, he finds that the nagging, prickly feeling he had, the one that crawled all over, up to the end of his tail – is no longer there.
“Oh, good! You brought cabbages!” Zeng squawks happily as he pushes his beak into the bag in Tai Lung’s hand, before grabbing the entire thing and carrying it over to the cooking area.
“Cabbages!” Lǐwù squeals in agreement, excited.
The sunlight spills from the doorway, and for a single moment, in Tai Lung’s eyes, Zeng shines gold.
“There are turnips, too.” Tai Lung says, and Zeng smiles, excited, like Tai Lung knew he would.
“Those are my favorites!”
“Favoeites!” Lǐwù squeals again.
“I know,” Tai Lung purrs, just to watch Zeng’s feathers ruffle in embarrassment.
Zeng speaks as he cooks, telling Tai Lung about all the many great achievements Lǐwù has that day, about him walking more steadily on his feet, about helping around the house, about the new words he picked up, and other mundane, small and insignificant and inconsequential things.
Tai Lung had never been happier.
(And despite never asking, Tai Lung thinks Zeng is, too.)