Abigail Fredrickson

Rowan

Before I can register what’s happening, Tigress has somehow completely switched from lying on the ground in a twisted around position to being in the air and bringing her leg down on the samurai’s helmet.  He stumbles backward as she lands, grabbing hold of his sword between her hands, then kneeing it into the air by the handle.  The samurai shouts, taking his spear out.  The small group that just passed us suddenly turns, noticing what’s going on.  I jump to my feet as they charge toward us and look to Tigress.  In the short time I was distracted, she’s broken the shaft of the samurai’s spear and hurled him into a tree.  She picks up the broken spear shaft and throws it up, jumping after it in the same second.  She strikes it with her foot, sending it whizzing toward the oncoming samurai.

One falls over as she lands in a crouch next to me, her eyes narrowed and jaw set.

I step back with one leg, raising my fists to look at the samurai, but without weapons, it doesn’t seem like there’s much to do against armor.  “What do we do?”

“We fight.”  Tigress springs at the leader, sending the pair to the ground in a matter of seconds, where they grapple with each other.  Some of the samurai stop to try to help, others come towards me.  I take a deep breath, shifting my feet.  My best chance here is to be on defensive, with a healing concussion, there’s no way it would be aided if I went on offensive.

A flash of metal on my right as the samurai get dangerously near.  I tilt forward, the blade slashing harmlessly behind me.  I use the momentum to tuck into a roll, shielding my head.  As soon as I untuck, I sweep my leg under one of the samurai, sending him to the ground.  A spear aims downward.  I stand up, jumping to the side just as it buries into the ground where my foot was a moment previously.  I turn and kick the samurai’s stomach.  Just as I regain footing, a sharp pain runs through my shoulder.  The downed samurai had gotten back up and harshly grabbed it, points of the metal on the back of his hand digging into it.  I twist forward, grabbing onto his lower arm, flipping the warrior over my shoulder before he can put me in a chokehold.  Another flash of metal to the side.  I raise my hand, catching the wrist of the other samurai.  I twist it, making him drop the knife.

The samurai form a circle around me, drawing their other weapons.  But before any of them can attack, a feral roar and the simultaneous sound of a human screaming ‘Retreat!’ fills the air.  The samurai around me hesitate, then quickly sheath their weapons and run towards the others.  I blink, slowly lowering my hands and looking around.  The retreating samurai disappear surprisingly fast when they need to.  But that’s not what catches my attention.  A panting Tigress, face frozen in a vicious snarl, stands over two dead samurai, one lying in a growing pool of blood, the other’s neck at an odd angle.  I stare at the scene, still as stone.  Tigress slowly raises her head to look at me, still heaving from the exertion of having to fight several people at once, and for half a second I think she’s about to spring at me as well if the burning fire in her eye and bared teeth are anything to go by, but then her shoulders slump and her features relax.  She wipes at the hair sticking to her forehead and getting in her visible eye, leaving a streak of blood.

She glances at me before grumbling, “You can stop looking at me like that, I’m not gonna kill you…”

I let out the breath I hadn’t realized I’d been holding, my eyes traveling to the people at her feet.

Her lips purse, eyebrows lowering when she notices what I’m looking at.  “Come on.  We should keep moving.  It won’t be long before that troop comes across others.  We have to get as far away from here as we can.  We should change course too.”  She sets off in a direction a bit different from the one we’d been heading in, “Hurry up.  Unless you’d prefer getting caught.”

I numbly follow after her.  “Uh…yeah…right,” my voice feels distant as I glance back at the bodies.  I’d almost forgotten that look on her face before she knocked me out.  The one that made me sure I wasn’t going to be alive in the next two seconds.

Next to me, Tigress’s strides are sure and purposeful as ever, but there’s something about the way she moves, as if every limb was as unmoving as the mountains, that radiates some kind of emotion that I can’t put a name to.  It’s not exactly regret or guilt, and I’m not sure if that should be concerning or not.  It’s not really weariness either, there’s a pile of smoldering embers in her eye and stern set to her features that shows she’s not tired from the fight.  It’s not distrust either, but at the same time she shrinks away from me without seeming small, as if she’s trying to keep me at arm’s length.  Her brow is furrowed, as if from some kind of internal struggle, and her eyes resolutely avoid mine.  Shame?  I study her again and conclude that shame is definitely part of it, but I can’t tell for sure what exactly is wrong.

While I can’t forget the image of her standing over a pair of men she killed herself, it’s burned into my brain, most of the horror and revulsion I’d felt at the sight diminishes, moving to the side as a flicker of worry springs up.  I don’t know much about her, only that she hates questions and nicknames and is honestly terrifying, but I can tell she’s gone through something that changed her.  She’s not emotionless, she’s just as human as I am, and yet, something happened to turn her into someone who tries to hide emotions as much as possible.

Right now, a million alarm bells are ringing in my mind when I look at Tigress.  I stay silent for I don’t even know how long, preoccupied with searching for the missing puzzle piece.

She suddenly clenches her fist, and then grimaces.  It’s slight, like every other change of expression on her face, but it’s there.  “Tigress?”

She looks at me sideways, sliding into her completely impassive expression so effortlessly that it’s almost scary, “What?”

“Are you hurt?” I ask slowly, keeping a safe distance between myself and her fists.  Well, relatively safe.

“I’m n…” she pauses, then shakes her head, “It can wait till we stop for the night, it isn’t anything serious.”

I move in front of her, “No, tell me, what is it?”

She bares her teeth, her upper lip curling to reveal her canines as a flicker of the fire from the fight shines in her eye warningly.  After having to adjust to the subtlest changes in her expression, the ‘back off’ look is glaringly obvious, and I almost do, but then I give myself a stern mental shake and look her in the eye, waiting.

Time seems to drag on for hours; I could’ve sworn a bead of sweat even began to form on my forehead.  Then Tigress speaks, a low growl underlying her tone, “The longer we stay here, the more time we lose.  You can stay here for all I care, but I’d like to keep my freedom while I’ve got it if you don’t mind.”  She tries to shoulder past me, but I grab her arm.  I don’t miss the gasp she tried to bite back at the touch, her lip nearly bleeding in the effort.

I quickly loosen my hold on her arm and look at her sleeve.  It’s slightly ripped, showing a shallow wound.  Some blood is slowly seeping through the fabric around it.  “…Tigress.”

Her lips tighten, “Fine, just let go of me.”  I do, and she goes over to a tree, pulling off her knapsack and sitting down.  I follow and grab the bandages out before she can.

Tigress looks at me sharply, “I can bandage it myself.”

“Maybe, but it won’t be as good a job if you can only use one hand to do it,” I point out.  “Roll up your sleeve unless you’d rather tear it off.”

She visibly shrinks away from the idea of letting someone help her, but after a second she gives in and slowly pushes her sleeve up to her shoulder.  After rinsing the wound with a bit of the water in the waterskin, I wrap the bandages around her arm.

Somehow there’s absolutely no change in her expression while I do, which worries me further.

I pause for a second to search her face.  She just keeps looking at her knees blankly, eyes void of any emotion I can recognize.  It’s a stark contrast to before, when the air was so thick around her that a leaf could’ve withered at her passing.

“I’m worried about you,” I confess softly, returning my eyes to my hands and her arm.

I don’t really expect a response, so I almost jump when I get one.  “That’s a first…” Tigress seems like she’s trying to speak lightly, but her tone is far from flippant.  If anything, it’s heavy and filled with thinly veiled grief.

A pinprick of guilt nags at my conscience, “I’m sorry, I should’ve said it before.”  Like, as soon as I noticed something was off.

“No, that’s not it.  I meant that this is the first time someone said they’re worried about me,” Tigress smiles weakly, and it’s clearly forced, because it fades back into her emotionless mask nearly the second she makes it.  Oh.  I finish the bandage, but she doesn’t seem to notice.  I cautiously put a hand on her shoulder, looking at her face again.

A single tear rests on her cheek now, changing the mask into a look of sorrow on someone who’s forgotten how to express it.  I hesitate, uncertain, “Tigress?”

She shakes herself out of whatever stupor she’d fallen into and looks at me.  Whatever she sees seems to make her realize I’d finished and she’s…whatever that was.

After a second, the corner of her mouth turns upward slightly in what could possibly be considered the echo of a smile, but one again it’s gone in the same instant, and she’s standing, shrugging my hand off her shoulder, “Let’s try to get as far as we can before nightfall.  We need to make up for lost time.”

I nod, standing, “Alright.”

I don’t follow her right away when she starts walking, still disturbed.  From behind nothing seems wrong, her hands balled into loose fists like always, her shoulders back, steps steady and sure, another strong contrast to just a moment ago.  I’m going to be honest with myself: Tigress is the most confusing person that I’ve ever, ever met.

=

It’s dark now, Tigress found a more sheltered spot where the trees and bushes grew closer together, and now we’re sitting in it, neither of us asleep.  Each time I try, my mind pulls up the image of two dead bodies, and I jerk awake again.  Tigress is awake because she’s ‘keeping watch’.  Which makes sense, if some samurai came across us and we were both asleep, well, we’d be dead in two seconds flat.  But at the same time, I’d started thinking, and I realized that she probably hadn’t slept the other nights either.

I let out a sigh and sit up.  Tigress’s head snaps toward me briefly, her amber eye surprisingly bright for the darkness, then she turns her head away again, her face leaving my line of sight.

“Tigress…” I start slowly, not sure what exactly it is I want to ask, “…how did you get to Contra?”

The silence stretches for so long that I start to doze.  When she speaks, I jerk back to the present, “I was only a child.  Six.”

Encouraged by the actual response, I press, “When you were kidnapped?”

“Yes,” her voice is quiet, but also clear, like someone relieving a memory.  “It was back when he would take a young boy from each village who showed promise to be a samurai.  Except in mine, I showed more promise than any of the boys near my age.  So they took me instead.”

I faintly recall a raid on my own village when I was around seven.  My parents had hidden me in the cellar, so I hadn’t been taken, but it hadn’t lessened the terror of being found and stolen away.  The majority of my shaking then had been more from fear than cold.  “I remember that.  The raids.  What did Saber think?”

Her voice shifts to sound amused in the driest way possible, “Because I was a girl he wouldn’t accept me as a samurai, but apparently I still showed enough potential that he didn’t want me going back or dying either.  He had me trained alongside the boys, but pushed me harder than them, set harsher punishments for my failures, higher rewards for my achievements.  It was all so that I could be able to kill even the strongest and most skilled warriors I went up against.  He hung the threat of harming my family if I dared to step out of line over my head.  It worked, obviously, but after a couple years he let me make a deal with him.  I think he was just as scared of me as everyone else.”  The last sentence was spoken with unrestrained bitterness.  The brief moment of letting something through allows me to realize what one of the pieces to the puzzle that makes up Tigress is.  I recall the way she’d reacted to my own shock and horror at seeing she’d killed two people, even though it was samurai, or perhaps because it was because she’d been able to kill two of the most highly trained warriors in the land.

Tigress acts like she prefers to be isolated, and maybe she might, but that’s because everyone else is scared of her.  I try to imagine what it would be like to walk down a hall and have everyone, even people I care about, send me wary or even fearful glances, to always have people give me a wide berth, to know that people will blanch at the mention of me.  And suddenly I get it, sympathy spreading through my chest as I watch her tense posture.

But I know she would likely react negatively to any hint of said emotion, so I keep my voice void of it when I ask, “What was the deal?”

“That once I’d killed a hundred people for him in the arena, that he would let me go free, no other conditions attached.”

I start, “A hundred?”

The following silence between us thickens as though it’s forming a wall, so I immediately realize that was the wrong thing to say.  She’s had to kill so many people-  just to keep herself and her family safe… I again try to put myself in her shoes, trying to imagine what it would be like to have to kill a hundred people who may not have actually done anything wrong just to protect your family.  I shudder, squeezing my eyes shut for a long second, what seems to be a million horrors flitting through my mind.

They pass though, so I open my eyes to look at Tigress’s silhouette, “Where did you live before?”

“Kazoku,” she replies after a moment, saying it slowly.

“I’m from Ketsui,” I offer.

She’s quiet for a second, then glances at me, “I…went there once.  Before.”

“Really?” I blink and think back, wondering if we’ve ever met before.  Now that I think about it, I had met a visiting girl once, when I was really young, maybe only five, with auburn hair and amber eyes, although she’d introduced herself as Sheranee.  Something nags at the back of my mind.  After a moment of hard thought, it surfaces, Sheranee means tigress.

I raise my head, looking at Tigress.  Her back is turned again.  “…Sheranee?”

She gives a violent start, turning to stare at me with widened eyes, but after a second she turns away again, “It’s Tigress now.”

I nod, “Alright.”  Somehow the silence that follows isn’t quite as heavy or uncomfortable as the others.

“Have you been sleeping?” the words slip out before I can stop them.

Tigress just sighs, “What do you think?”

I frown at her back, “You should get some, you know.”

“You need it more than me,” she laughs dryly, “Don’t worry about it.”

“No, I feel pretty much normal by now, and you do need sleep, or you’ll pass out from lack of it,” I insist, “Come on, I can keep watch for one night.”

She starts to shake her head, then pauses and sighs again, “How about this, I watch for the first half, then I wake you up so you can watch the second, alright?”

I figure it’s either that or she stays up all night so I nod.  Then, remembering she’s not facing me, I add out loud, “Yeah, that sounds alright.  But you’re going to wake me up, got it?”

“I don’t break promises.”That’s reassuring at least, I allow, lying down and staring at the sky through the leaves.  The next thing I know, I’ve dozed off.