Tulip

✿✿✿✿✿✿ Tulip ✿✿✿✿✿✿

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When the pink dawn seeps away and the morning sun climbs, Tulip doesn’t waste a moment. As her companions settle around her, she bounds to and fro, straightening manes and plucking burrs. She perks her ears for those who need them and never hesitates to bestow a much-needed cuddle. When everyone rests easy, only then can Tulip steal away to her precious garden to rest herself.

The marshy path to her haven would have the average lion balking, but even among her hydrophilic pride mates, Tulip boasts a unique veneration for the water that marks the journey. Her sleek mottled fur streams by the time she slips into the balmy grove sheltering her most prized possession: her rainbow tulips. The rustling life in the trees and undergrowth pauses only before it recognizes the gentle leopon. Its lively presence serves as a vitalizing backdrop while she gingerly tends to her flourishing garden. She speaks to her precious flowers in dulcet tones as she caresses, deadheads, checks their health, and assures they have access to water—perhaps a strange fret in the marsh, but she can never be too sure! Under her care, the marvelous flowers almost seem to scintillate, and they’re warm to the touch under her paw, soothing like a ray of sun in the waning hours. Tulip feels truly at peace among them, all the weight of the world sloughing off her shoulders as she tends to the buds.

When Tulip first stumbled upon the grove, tripping over her own paws and lost in thought, the flowers were nothing but wilted, sad stems surrounded by parasites and thorns. She painstakingly cleared the area, plucking the life-suckers and discreetly redirecting the pricking plants. She returned day after day to dote on the wilted stems, and, a few weeks after first discovering the grove, Tulip caught the first gleam of a rainbow. Now, her tulips are her lifeblood. Whenever King Acho invites a particularly tortured soul among their ranks, she gifts the newcomer one of her precious flowers right from the garden. Though she promises nothing but a welcoming gift, the tulips almost seem to ease the pain from their eyes.

Tulip almost loves nothing more than doting. If she’s not fussing over her garden, she tends to be fussing over another lion in her pride. Because she struggles to hunt, she strives to establish her use in other ways despite everyone reassuring her that she doesn’t have to prove herself. Her nurturing nature inherently inclines her to seek to care for her family—not by hunting, but by unadulterated love. She has a reputation in the pride as a go-to listener (always with permission!), and even with newcomers, she seems to emanate a welcoming aura. Tulip listens to her friends’ hardships keenly—the sources of scars, their fears, their rotten parents, their grueling past. She always responds with appropriate kindness and advice, and lions leave her lighter than they came. However, despite Tulip’s willingness to soothe other’s past hurts, she is not forthcoming about her own. Her pride mates have neither a whiff of her origins nor her own deep-rooted struggles, and most know better than to pry now. As much as she denies their impact, the fragments of her history reappear in alarming visages in her dreams, curling her claws and spiking her fur in fright.

Tulip has no memory of the name that her mother whispered to her. Sometimes that remains the case; other times, it comes to her, but it pangs and she forgets it once more. However, she’s never forgotten the warm, milky scent wreathing in the den nor the gentle rasp of her mother’s tongue. Young Tulip didn’t know at the time that she was any different; with her eyes sealed shut, she only worried herself with milk. And as her eyes finally peeled open and absorbed a snug, dim den, her leopon mother was her only indication of normalcy. When she was introduced to the rest of the pride, though, she realized quickly she and her mother were two of a kind.

Tulip, tiny as she was, didn’t feel the impact of this distinction at the time. She frolicked with the other cubs who quickly grew out of their furtive stares and generally acted like an average child with a caveat—more than anything, Tulip was curious. Her mother scooped her up too many times to count on the many occasions that she had ambled off, and no scolding, no matter the firmness, could shake the dangerous desire to know from the cub. And one day, her poor mother simply awoke from her nap too late.

It’d been a muggy morning after a night of pouring rain, and her pride slept to avoid the misery. Not little Tulip, though. Just before she could slip into her butterfly dreams, something caught her attention: a brilliant glow of light in the sky.

She’d never seen anything like it before. Dazzling colors arced in the now-clear sky, and she thought she could just barely discern its end in the distance. Pouncing to her round cub paws, Tulip raced to reach the end of the rainbow. Unfortunately, she never made it before it faded, and when she turned for her mother, her familiar surroundings were nowhere in sight. Her mother’s instructions rang clear in her head. “If you ever know not where you are, stay put, and I will come.”

Tulip, at least, heeded those words and hunkered in a bush for days, lapping water from dripping leaves before the claws in her belly grew too fierce. From then on, with a heavy heart, Tulip wandered.

She thought she hated many things in the span of her early wanderings. She hated the rain for making the rainbow, she despised the rainbow for not having an end, and, above all, she loathed the water itself, not only for being wet but for causing all her problems in the first place. Her little heart felt full of hatred, so much her body could scarcely contain it. What made matters worse was her gnawing hunger, fed only by bugs that couldn’t jump from her claws fast enough to save their lives. Finally, her weak legs could take her no farther, and she lucked to collapse in exhaustion beside a waterhole still fat from the wet season.

Tulip, paws and heart sore, sought to create a home next to this waterhole, for as much as she thought she abhorred the water, she knew it brought life. Despite the prey that walked right into her home, though, her only quarry was the frogs that failed to out-hop the little leopon. She’d decided she also hated frogs after her first few meals, but they were all she could reliably feed on.

The turn off the dark path for Tulip was, interestingly, two of her least favorite things—frogs and water. She had once again squared up to pounce on her dinner when she misjudged the distance… and plunged right into the pond. As water rushed around her and over her head, she felt not an ounce of the panic she expected; rather, a sense of calm she hadn’t known since the milky den washed over her. When she surfaced, drenched, she didn’t even realize the frog had escaped her clutches. She exhaled a huge sigh she hadn’t known about holding, and all the tension in her shoulders rolled off. Her problems weren’t all cured—she was still a lost cub with no home. She knew this waterhole couldn’t be it—not on her lonesome. She stayed a while longer to recover her strength further, experimenting with her newfound peace, but finally pressed onward when an encroaching pride evicted her after mistaking her for a leopard.

Though this event planted one of the earliest concerns about her hybrid status, Tulip carried on her wandering with a much lighter, happier heart that shunned the childish spite from before. She faced many dangers along the way, of course—terrifying hairless apes with moving boulders and boom sticks, tantruming elephant feet, crocodiles who figured her an easy meal, and vipers furious at being disturbed. She’d never know how far she walked, and despite the warmth in her heart, she felt that her feet would go no further. In another bout of splendid luck, she stumbled into the paws of a grand lion.

King Acho, his fuchsia mane brilliant with the morning light, blinked down at the young creature who had collapsed before him. For a moment, the mottled spots along her scrappy fur gave him pause, but he recognized her nature with a jolt just as she came to. In a fright, she scrambled back and made to run for her life, but King Acho paused her with a delicate voice. And when he offered a meal, she could not decline.

Tulip had grown used to her thin fur and how the ground disturbed her protruding ribs when she slept. Queen Rose whined when she caught sight of the little leopon and promised she would never know hunger again. And that was a promise duly upheld.

Her wanderings feel distant, and Tulip doesn’t oft prod them to the surface. She’s found her true love in the marsh. Her dappled pelt gleams with health and her ribs are nowhere to be seen. Her family promises she’s just as important as the hunters, and her leopard heritage only makes her even more special. Sometimes, though, she still longs for that milky cave with that gently rasping tongue. She wonders if her mother misses her, remembers her, if she’s still alive…

Tulip finds solace in her garden, stroking the rainbow petals.

writing and html done by #208511 / tovleon