#correlating the cat to her tennis career is such a high concept

[diyasgarden]

How's she supposed to survive with no heart?

Someone figure out and tell me how because this concept has ripped out my heart and i don't know how to go on.

Best Friend - based on @diyasgarden's betting on loosing dogs cats and her cat headcanons. definitely go check them out if you haven't yet!!

the story of tashi and her childhood best friend (1.86k words)

tw: i have not seen the movie so all my knowledge is via osmosis. writing some of these scenes was cathartic. enjoy me working through my own grief and know my tears wet the keyboard. i may have forgotten about art a little bit but this is tashi centric so im just going to say whoops and move on

Tashi was a lonely child. It was just a fact. Even with siblings wrapped around her and hanging off her arms, she swept through her childhood with few permanent attachments.

She was vibrant, regardless of her seclusion. The bounce of her curls and the seemingly infinite energy she possessed endeared her to teachers and classmates. Bright, sparkling curiosity filled her eyes. The librarian saw the most of her, incidentally. With clumsy fingers and boosted toes, she tipped titles from higher and higher shelves, thicker and thicker books filling her arms and her Princess Aurora backpack.

After playdates, summer camps and schedules packed high with unfamiliar names, her parents finally acquiesced. There would be no friend for their daughter, not one she wanted.

Instead, that Christmas, she received two very special presents. An oddly shaped thing with one blunt, cylindrical end and, on the other side, a curved, flat plane; the other was a larger, rectangular box that mewled periodically, its princess wrapping paper massacred with pinholes. She anguishes when she sees a prick right over the left side of Aurora's shimmering pink dress.

Her parents initially direct her towards the oddly shaped gift, no matter how the mewling box draws her ears. Under the light of the rainbowed tree, the LEDs reflecting their colors over her full face, she unknowingly, and with youthful gusto, unwraps her future.

Her very own tennis racket. The gift included the promise of lessons, starting after her holiday break. She'd been curious about her parents' rackets, the handles much too big for her young, soft palms. Now, she can try it all on her own—emulating the fierce girls she revered on TV.

A whine from the larger box draws her attention again, and eyes shining with anticipation turn to her parents. A single nod, and little legs are scampering across the hardwood as she runs to delicately peel off the paper.

The cardboard box under it is as pricked as the wrapping paper, the top untaped. Reaching past the unassuming packaging, she's jolted when something touches her. Soft, with points as pokey as the needle that made the holes. She's nothing if not fearless, however.

As the cardboard flaps are peeled back one by one, the thing, no, paw that reached out to grab her tugs on the last one. It's small, orange, with tiny claws puncturing shallowly. Her fingers, larger and without as sharp nails, gently pries it off so she can finally open the box.

A kitten. A kitten sits, dwarfed by the size of the box. When she reaches for it, it retreats—sniffing her fingers before deciding her a worthy companion. It's all but eager now, pressing into her hands until she picks it up and cradles it to her chest. Its teensy chest starts to rumble with a crackly purr.

"She's yours." Startles her out of her revere, so absorbed in the little body against hers. Her mother's words are said with a smile. She finally found a friend, one that didn't live in pages. "All yours."

Her father chimes in not long after.

"What's her name, Natasha?"

A pause. Tashi blinks, contemplation in the set of her pout and in the subtle furrow in her brow. Her eyes don't stray from the yellows of her newest companion.

"Serena," comes, the resolve in her tone sounding odd in the heightened pitch of a six-year-old.

She'd grow into it.

She'd soon learned her two favorite sounds: the thwack of a tennis ball and the thundering of Serena's purr.

They were familiar, and borderline ordinary. She heard the first over and over, for hours at a time, multiple times a week. Serena's purr, in the same vein, was the thing that greeted her with the sun and lulled her into sleep. Yet, she thought them spectacular. Whenever they reached her ears, that golden smile appeared.

She was always good. Always spectacular at tennis. Sweeping through matches flooded her veins with sweet adrenaline, sweat that dropped to the court marking her path to the stars. Even when she'd left them all behind, flown far away and was weightless in her tennis shoes, it'd say: I, Tashi Duncan, was here. I won.

The thing that brought her back to Earth was simple. Even with the lure of the stars, the rumbling, crackling purr and sweet meows, like the quake she experienced at eleven and the cracking boom of thunder she'd once feared, grounded her in her emotions. Her feelings, not for boys but for Serena overflowed from her heart and spilled out like a split dam, widening her smiles and filling her mind, motivating her game and keeping her present.

At seventeen she was up-and-coming. Her birthday fell a few days after the US Open, so on her last few days as a child, she bundled up with her familiar friend and boarded the metal plane. It would be her wings, giving her that taste of future freedom, of the sky she reached for.

Her transcendence faded in sleep, leaving just a girl and her cat, sleepy and covered in shed hair and so, so young.

She won. She won the Junior Open.

Everything's set in stone now. She can see her future playing out—at Stanford, tearing through the competition and tearing through the pages of novels (she never quite lost her love for words; instead it evolved from Junie B. Jones to Mary Shelley.) Then, she'd go pro, breaking out into the Grand Slams like a comet blazing by.

Art and Patrick were the unexpected twist.

Zweig and Donaldson. Fire and Ice. The perfect duo. One would be joining her at Stanford. The other? Leaving for the intense performance of the pros with her number stashed in his mobile—left sweating under the stage lights of expectations states away.

Whether he'd buckle under the intensity was to be seen. At least his green crash pad was well in place, waiting to be fallen back on.

Practice was routine.

Art was routine.

Serena was at home, with her parents.

The separation was killing her. Some days, especially hearing the thwack of the ball, she felt the ache of her halved heart. She knew she wouldn't go home to her second (first) favorite sound.

Red. There's a lot of red at Stanford, Tashi noticed. Even in her dorm room, the banner on her wall and poster above her bed, the jacket strewn over her chair and the sweaty shorts discarded on her floor. The red apples of Patrick's cheeks and the pinkening to his lips. She let her eyes close and welcomed their press and the darkness behind her eyelids.

They were good. They were fine. He was fine. Then they weren't.

Tashi always knew her heart was fragmented. Tennis, Serena, Patrick. Each one beat independent, for the most part. When they synced was euphoric.

One of her best memories was during her spring break. Patrick had a break before his next tournament, and they packed up in his dingy car to putter back to her parents'. Spending the week there, lounging like house cats, lobbing lazy forehands back and forth and falling asleep every night to Serena's crackling purr and Patrick's heavy arm over her.

It was the most alive she'd every felt.

The game. The game was all that mattered. Not Patrick flaking. Not the absence of her friend. Just the game. That was the piece of her heart still intact.

Then her knee pops sickeningly, releasing out from under her and all she could see was red.

Stanford fans in the stands and her opponent's flushed cheeks, Art's crimson shirt and the pain red-hot behind her eyelids.

The darkness when her eyes shut was a comfort once again. It hides the sight of her swelling, purpling knee. It doesn't stop the pain.

Maybe she'd slip into a blessed unconsciousness.

100 years, Maleficent proclaimed. The princess shall sleep.

She'd never play tennis again, that much was clear. The doctor been almost certain.

Art tried to make her feel better. All she could think of was a familiar rumble she ached for.

She was released to spend a few weeks at her parents, away from the worry of school and her emotional turmoil. A few weeks with Serena, to get back to their routine, to the purrs on her chest and the weaving beneath her feet.

Serena was a bit more careful staying underfoot after her first smell of her braced knee and the sight of her white crutches.

Maybe she'd log her as an emotional support pet, just so she wouldn't loose her whole heart when she went back.

She didn't get that far. She didn't even have the time to get the paper.

Serena fell from Tashi's bed and broke her pelvis a week in. The howl she made was a new noise. One she never should have made.

They spent the whole day at the emergency vet. Tashi's eyes had never been so red-rimmed. She cried, in that sterile waiting room, as they took Serena back and cooed sadly.

She fell into an exhausted sleep, buried in her mother's side with her lip still caught between her teeth.

The doctor's thought the break was suspicious. Cats are usually springier, the vet had said. Even the older ones, like her. She was kind, and caring. Her green scrubs, pattered with paw prints, slowly became orange with Serena's fur. Her hands were warm when they handed her the lab papers.

Bone cancer, the plain black text said, in it's painfully ordinary font. The type that, apparently, had crept through Serena's body and made itself a home in her lungs. It burrowed, unwanted, in the place that held her life. It infected the space right above her heart. Waiting longer, says the vet, would be cruel.

She didn't even look at the amount of tumors they found. Once she saw the double digits she shattered, just that bit more.

The vet gave her time to say her goodbyes. It was all they really could do.

Thirteen years. Thirteen years they'd grown together.

Serena was once bundled in too-big cardboard, clawing energetically at the walls and sinking pinprick claws into her shirt.

Now, she's swaddled in a soft blanket, looking fat and warm but so, so tired.

Tashi holds her on her aching knee and weeps. She presses warm lips press to the forehead of her first friend, her favorite thing. Slender arms cradle this beautiful baby cat to her chest. Serena is sedated, a little medicine for the pain. Her purr's crackling now, muted and rattling. A soft, small paw presses to Tashi's tear-streaked, tawny cheek.

It's time to go, she hears faintly. It feels like she has her head underwater. Her throat and lungs and fingers squeeze as the needle slides in, past fluffed, orange fur. Serena doesn't even flinch. Yet, Tashi feels like she's drowning.

Her form (little, so little. Her baby—) goes limp in her lap.

How's she supposed to survive with no heart?

The next morning arrives with silence. Not even the chirping of the birds.

She curls tight in a too-empty bed and feels her heart wither in her chest.