15.9.19
Your lion spends an hour trying to unstick the feather from its tongue.
~ Phi's story. ~ (Warning, it's long!)
Phi came to Mididnes’ pride from Agent Daisy Johnson, as a young cub.
Under Mididnes’ tutelage, over time she’s slowly blossomed into a fine young adult. Despite most of her other pride members all being mostly snarky, Phi finds ways to laugh it off and mostly gets along well with everyone, though she knows she’s still more different than most of the others due to her visible mutation.
Not that that changes much within her pride, she’s still a good hunter and offers good advice in things from time to time. John Watson is her unofficial mother, and Phi still goes to her whenever she feels she needs John’s advice. Their bond is very strong, almost unbreakable – if anything dared to threaten John, Phi wouldn’t hesitate to take it out. (John tells Phi not to, like any good mom would.)
And likewise, when any male has stepped out of line, John’s always been there to warn him off fast with a warning... and Mididnes looming not far behind.
Phi mostly likes searching for random flowers and telling Mididnes what she’s found – he thinks sometimes she’s more reliable than either of his submales are. But don’t tell them that.
~~~~~~~~~~
One day, Phi ran into another lioness while on the hunt for a flower she’d seen before. Phi was shocked, instantly forgetting the flower she was looking for, instead… the eyes of the other lioness swam in her mind, though she’d only seen them for a few seconds at the most. Phi wasn’t at all sure what about them drew her in, but she thought she’d never seen such beautiful eyes before.
Phi couldn’t remember much else except that the stranger lioness’ fur was pure, blinding white. Not many other lionesses were white, but still…the ones that were were surprisingly hard to find. And of course, other kings didn’t like being questioned about their prides.
So Phi, still thinking of the lioness, decided to turn back to her pride. Not one flower caught her eye that day, or any day thereafter for quite a while. She wouldn’t answer any questions from her pridemates for what happened, nor respond to any threats to make her answer… Even Watson found it hard to get an answer from Phi, stalking back to Mididnes to report that Phi was even ignoring her, her “mother”…
After a lot of pressure from Mididnes, Phi apologised to Watson for ignoring her, but would still not answer the questions. Indeed, her behaviour was still not the same – Phi went out for her usual ventures, sometimes even longer but still… she found nothing. Well, she never told any lion whether she found anything or not… Kharon and Hubert grew more suspicious of her by the day, even going to Mididnes together to both mention how they were feeling about Phi’s activities.
Mididnes met Phi that day, which was unusual for him, Kharon and Hubert trailing behind, with Watson angrily following. They all confronted her… and she admitted it, though snapping at Kharon and Hubert to get them out of hearing range. Watson and Mididnes were both shocked, both at her infatuation with another lioness, and that Phi would keep something like that hidden from them.
Phi also shyly admitted that she’d also been asking lions she saw if they’d seen a lioness with the same colour of eyes that she was looking for, which was why she was always gone for longer than usual, and that she regularly ran back to where she saw the lioness in the first place.
Watson exchanged a look with Mididnes. This did not seem like a simple infatuation, especially given that it had been almost a full month since Phi started acting strangely. Eventually, Mididnes just sighed, shaking his mane and nodding to Watson to leave, along with Kharon and Hubert. Phi realised that was Mididnes’ way of saying that he wouldn’t bother her any more.
(As for Kharon and the others, John and Mididnes both made it very clear where Phi stood.)
Another few months passed… with even Mididnes’ occasional efforts proving fruitless… Watson had hinted to Phi gently that perhaps the object of her affections had either left the pride she had been in, therefore moving further away, or that she’d died. Reluctantly, Phi decided Watson was probably right. It was for the best to move on. Yet Phi was still dreaming about meeting the lioness almost every week… of course the dreams were never fully realised, they always just had her eyes, but it still affected Phi more than she wished.
Phi decided to take a slightly different route through Mididnes’ territory, where flowers usually never grew, and to her utter shock, there she was. The lioness of her dreams, emerald eyes blinking in the sun.
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