Chapter Text
You're on the bounce at 6:30, twisting the rusty knob of your burner till blue morning flowers blossom underneath a huge pot of water. You boil up breakfast and a bath, not always in that order, lack of quality sleep is evident in the amount of instant coffee that makes its way into your sponge bath, or the amount of soapy water and "musk-mask" that you drink down, seldom do you realize it's an industrial cleaner before you've had your first cup.
The collar itches the worst. Some days it feels too tight and tugs at your gentle fur. Not today though. Today is all blue lights and sunshine. You turn to yourself in the mirror, all gussied up and groomed for the day ahead. The smile says "fuck yeah!" The clothes say "low income."
Better smile some more.
You dump the pans collecting watershed. Then it’s 7:00 a.m., you’ve got boots on the pavement, the sun crackling just over the tops of low income high rises, the sleepy-soul drifters not yet done with their morning cuppa don't bother to nod as you twist and turn past them. A rhino grunts in some dim acknowledgement as you skip between his legs. There’s something miraculous about today. Maybe the Musk-Max you drank this morning is making the dew sparkle like sprinkled diamonds on the small thrust of weeds in the pavement, maybe your apartment is growing some kind of mold- maybe, maybe today is your day. You didn’t put too much stock in luck, but you put stock in feeling and premonition. A sixth sense, if you will, and as you approach the gargantuan van all cuddled up next to tight alley-walls, your sixth sense begins tingling something fierce.
The van is low on gas when you twist the key in. Old girl flickers to life, sipping down on her meager stock, needle encroaching on the big "E".
Your tail swims, your paws close down upon the wheel and you crank with the feeble tendons of your arm to haul this boat of a vehicle onto the road. She's slow to get going, but with some mouthy encouragement she guns along. The smile on your face widens just a little more as traffic becomes thicker, as pedestrians start to dress nicer. You can’t hear over the throaty purr of the engine, but you imagine fat wallets jingling with cash.
Right now, the weight around your neck is gone. The emptiness in your pockets is far more pressing, and only when settling in for your morning commute do you realize that your wallet is sitting in the drawer at home.
Along with your license.
You twist your rear-view mirror into use. It’s swarming with cars, but none of them white-and-black glittering-red-blue like a low income and out of place Christmas tree. You sigh in relief.
"Alright Wilde." You turn the mirror onto yourself, narrowing your eyebrows a little. You let the fangs flash. You let the charm ooze like it was sweat. Speaking of sweat, you swipe a snort under your pits, declaring that they are indeed ‘fresh and clean’ like the packaging on the deodorant promised. Not even your dollar store personals are lying to you today.
"This is game time. Absolutely no shenanigans. You hear me, you gorgeous fox?" You heard you. You nod at the smug vulpine in the mirror, who nods back his approval. You're untouchable.
He reacts before you do. The van jumps forward and then halts, shaking gently.
Mirror Nick turns a little pale. The collar around your neck starts to feel heavy again, you start to recall the idea of a traffic light and the function of breaks on a car, but you have only a vague notion of these things forming in your frantic skull when the lights begin to flash, a siren begins to whoop.
You peek from behind the wheel to see the top of a meter maids cart, still strobing a red and blue death screech. "Thank God," You remind yourself that meter maids are virtually powerless. More like the janitors of the police force, really.
You're waiting outside of the van, feet bouncing against the pavement like you don’t have time to run over a meter maid's toy car. There’s an honest grin across your face, because by God you got lucky today. A pseudo-cop.
The machine gunning of little feet onto the hot tar fills your ear. You cast your gaze down and draw a sly smile as a bunny-rabbit dressed like an officer impatiently glares at you.
"License and registration, sir." She extends a wanting hand towards you.
You bend down to her level. "Aren't you just the cutest little bunny. Are you a police officer?"
Her quartz purple eyes remain firm, her expression carved from in her stiff face. "Actually, sir, I'd like to have a copy of your license and registration, we can chat and you can explain why you just rear-ended an officer after I check your papers.”
You pause for a moment, and though you continue to smug down upon her, inside your head you're frantic. Does she even have the power to arrest you? You ask yourself. Her feet beat against the tar like milliseconds on an over-clocked stopwatch. “Listen, officer, I left them in my den. Get it, den? Because I’m a fo-” If looks could kill.
“If you don’t have your license, you’ve been illegally operating a vehicle.” She seems almost excited while she’s releasing a pair of cuffs off her belt. They look just barely big enough to clasp around your wrists. “And that means a trip downtown.”
Your eyes shoot wide. “You’re kidding, right?”
“Hands behind your back.” She deadpans.
You reluctantly turn your back. “Come on, handcuffs? Officer, be reasonable.”
“I am being reasonable. Reasonable people leave their ‘dens’ with their licences’ to operate vehicles.”
Shackled and properly humiliated on the side of the road, you turn around and sneer. “How are you gonna get ‘downtown’, because I flat out will refuse to walk six miles to the precinct.”
“Familiar with the precinct are we?” It was her turn to grin.
You little shit.
“There should be enough room in my cart.” She says, spinning on a heel, only to stop, frozen in shock as the red-and-blue lights of her assigned vehicle swiftly depart from her, a haughty weasel craning his slender neck out the side to issue shrieking gales of dumb laughter. She stands frozen with statue-esque horror, mouth agape, brain still in conversation with your loathsome arrest. She thrusts a leg forward as if to break in pursuit, but is held back by the shocking reality of your present arrest. You jingle your loose handcuffs towards her as if to communicate a drastic change of logical priority.
The bunny is torn. The sun is beginning to climb into its’ afternoon position. You’re hungry. The fur under your cuffs is starting to get sweaty, but you know you’ve got her beaten. “Wow officer, that’s really, really unfortunate. I can’t believe he hot-wired your car- Oh, there’s no way he could have hot-wired your car that quick...Why...he must have had a key or something!” You tease her. Seeing her expression hardened with indignant frustration only spurns your childish desire to mock her even further. “But you’re not dumb enough to leave the key in the cart. No no, he probably had a duplicate.” You look both ways along the road. “Boy, we sure are a long way to the precinct, and you can’t make me walk six miles just for a traffic violation, so why don’t we just both stop making dumb choices today and you forget this whole thing ever happened.” You rattle your cuffs at her. She glares back at you, knowing the truth in your words but is unwilling to show that. And then her eyes fall upon your van, and a smile creeps across her face like you’ve just let slip a winning move in a game of traffic-chess. You can see your van reflected in her eyes and almost immediately move to strike. “Uhhh, no. No no no no. You can-”
“I CAN.” She cuts in, still wide eyed and giddy with herself. “Sir, I will be commandeering your vehicle for the purpose of completing an arrest.”
You can almost feel the electricity running through your collar as the words fall from her mouth. Your heart starts beating and your paws twist shut with suppressed anger. “This can’t be legal!” You reason deftly.
“Oh but it is legal!” Judy squeals with delight, moving past you and leaping into the driver's seat with unparalleled agility.
“I’m not getting in.” You declare.
“Fine. You can walk yourself to the precinct to the get those cuffs off then.” She smirks again as you resign yourself to the un-cushioned back of the van. Some lucky day this turned out to be.
Judy operates the van with hilarity, her tiny feet just barely able to compress the extended accelerator enough to stir the van into action. You slouch forward and peer through the spider-webbed front windshield. “You know how to drive this thing, right?”
“Sir, I drove a truck in Bunny Burrow. This is nothing-” Her head collides with the steering wheel as her foot overestimates the amount of give needed to activate the brakes. “What’s wrong with this thing? Why are the breaks so sensitive?” She says still smoothing the bump on her forehead.
“Bunny Burrow ain’t nothin’ like Zootopia sweetheart.” You chide from the back of the van.
She groans with frustration and eases the van back into traffic. You sigh and lay your head against the seatback, feeling the cold metal floor of your van biting into you. The ride is clunky as it usually is, but the silence between you and officer hippity-hop is worse than the trembling cage of the van’s backseat. You know deep in your heart this isn’t an ordinary traffic stop. This is profiling, based explicitly on the pointed crests in your mouth or the sheathed claws hiding in your fingers. The collar around your neck, the industrious odor of musk-max radiating off your contorted and defensive body, it all reminds you what a shit straw you drew in life. Lucky days don’t happen to people like you, and God never hands others more platitudes than they can handle.
Just when the day can’t get any better, you hear something that makes your eyes light up. A guttural scream from the hood of your car, like rocks being tossed into the maw of some unyielding machine. The ol’ girl, as unreliable as you are, begins to stutter forward, and you hear officer Hopps issue a “Cheese and crackers what now?” before turning the van, choking on its own fumes, into a small gas station parking lot. You’re on your feet almost instantly.
“What did you do to my baby!?” You force your most concerned tone of voice, pretending to not know that the old clunker was on its last legs.
She looks back at you with a dismayed expression. “I- It just stopped! I swear, I didn’t do anything!”
“What do you mean it ‘just stopped’? It was working fine this morning!” You prime your attack, working all the hustle you can muster with handcuffs on, arrested in the back of your own van. “This is absurd. This whole day is absurd! Not only have I been profiled, wrongly arrested, had my van stolen, but now it’s been destroyed under the care of Officer…” You lean in close to her badge. “...’Officer’ Judy Hopps,” you declare, going in for the kill. “I demand that the ZPD pay for the damages inflicted on my vehicle in the reckless pursuit of a petty criminal..”
“Reckless!?” She starts. “I just had my cruiser stolen! That’s a serious crime!”
“And who’s fault is that?” You ask, your final blow dealt. It’s exactly what she deserves, you remind yourself.
Judy begins to deflate, her eyebrows falling low as her ears droop with defeat. With half shut eyes, she sighs and hops out from the driver's seat to face your waiting smile.
The two of you sit outside the gas station. You tongue the straw of your blueberry frost Slurpee into your mouth while glancing around, catching eyes on you. You’re a strange sight, the two of you. A predator, cuffed, drinking a Slurpee with ZPD’s first (and likely only) rabbit officer across the table, nursing one of her own, looking like she’d just been kicked off the squad.
“Thanks for the Slurpee, ‘officer’.” You say with specific attention to her title of ‘officer.’
She sets her drink down and turns her body to face yours. “Not for long I’m not.” She sighs again. “I got so caught up in making a difference that I didn’t even get your name. Some officer I am.”
“Nick. Nick Wilde.” You draw another straw full of blueberry frost into your parched maw. “I don’t suppose you’ll be un-cuffing me and leaving me to my troubles, right?”
“I don’t even know what I’m gonna do.” She bangs her head lightly against the table, and somewhere deep inside, you feel a little sorry for her. The whole banging-your-head-into-things-out-of-frustration is a familiar sight. You continue to catch looks as you now sheepishly pull another mouthful of cold blueberry Slurpee into your mouth. Slurpee’s don’t taste as good when they’re not shared in good company. Or it’s her dreary mood that’s ruining this for you. Whatever the reason is, you open your mouth to speak but are cut off by Judy who grumbles loudly into the dirt. “This is a disaster. My life is a disaster.”
“Your life is a disaster?” You’re almost tempted to tell her how you drank soap this morning or how your whole damn apartment is one giant mold colony. It doesn’t seem the time though. You catch yourself before ranting.
You sit back and let Judy pound her head a bit while you work on the Slurpee. It was one of those days. Hot and sticky, like bad sex. Everything was wet, flustered and deeply uncomfortable. Cars of all shapes and sizes drifted in and out of the parking lot, each one stopping in for a cold Slurpee or a soda. The cups differed from the size of Nick himself to what one would barely consider a ‘shot glass’ worth of the good stuff, but the glares all remained the same; Confusion. The scene set before them was of Nick, a collared predator casually drinking a Slurpee and Judy, Zootopia’s first Bunny cop, pounding her skull into the table softly until the lights and noises of a sweltering summer afternoon faded and grew black in the distance.
“Mr. Wilde,” She sighed, finally pulling herself up to full height. She straightened her hat back on her head. “The ZPD will be happy to ‘fix your van’ in honor of your sacrifice in the pursuit of criminal justice.” Her tone was flat and dull. “Furthermore,” she produced a small key-ring from her belt. “I’ll be undoing your cuffs. You’re free to go.” With a resigned expression she slid the key into the hole on your handcuffs. You could physically feel the strain in her tiny paws as she pulled the metal key to the right, turning up the pins that bound your innocent hands together. With the cuffs off, you test your paws, their weightlessness is unfamiliar. Seems so strange that the short time the cuffs were on could have such an effect on you. It’s another grim reminder of the collar bound around your neck, however. Yet as you look into Judy’s eyes, you don’t see any fear of a rabid predator. You see a young woman who had to watch her dreams vanish before her in a puff of exhaust fumes. As for you, your van is getting fixed for free, and you got a slurpee out of it. It might not have been a perfect day, but it’s a hell of a lot better than you thought it’d turn out.
“Uhhh, officer Hopps?” You try and get her attention but she’s back to resting her head on the edge of the table. “Thank you for your service-” Your cheering up routine is as effective as your morning mirror gawking. Then something in your peripherals catches your eye. A small white blur coasting into the parking lot, no regard for oncoming traffic or pedestrians. You slowly turn your head to confirm what your imagination dares.
Son of a bitch. It can’t be. A small, bunny-sized police cruiser, the lights on but the sirens deafened. It cranks up to a ‘disabled’ parking spot and comes to a chuddering halt. A Weasel, a weasel by the name of Travis stumbles from the driver's seat with his hands stretched out towards the gas station like it was salvation from the good book. “HOTTTTTTTT” He yells, pulling away his already saturated collar from his fur. “Soooo hotttttt….” He lazily stumbles towards the building, but not before you begin tapping on Judy’s downward facing cap.
“Officer Hopps! Officer Hopps! Officer Hopps!”
“SIR.” She says with a touch of anger, rising to fix her cap. “If you need some assistance I suggest you find a real cop-” You point her towards her small traffic cruiser. “Sweet Cheese and Crackers.” You grin wide, showing your arrogant fangs at her. You feel like you’ve earned this one.
The two of you devise a simple plan for this: You’ll just wait for Travis to come back outside, and then arrest him. Take the cruiser back like nothing’s happened, put in a work order for Nick’s van and call it a day.
You post up near the entrance and peer inside. Travis is balancing a large Slurpee between his two meager paws and stumbling towards the door. You nod towards Judy, who leans happily against her cruiser, perhaps feeling some sense of security and safety with it back in her possession.
The arrest went smoothly. Were it not for your swift hands, Travis would have dropped his Elephant sized Slurpee onto the sizzling concrete when he saw Judy, but thankfully you managed to catch it from falling. Judy grabbed Travis and pushed him against the wall, already slapping a pair of handcuffs onto his thin and wiry wrists. You slurp deservedly on your new drink, while Judy reads Travis his rights and presses him into the back of the cruiser.
The bunny paused before taking off, and called you over to her. “Mr. Wilde,” She said with a grin. She extended a paw towards you, which required you to set down your titanous drink. The two of you shook heartily. “Just bring the van by the station, they know which one it is. The good folks of Zootopia owe you and that old beater a debt of gratitude, and I intend to see it paid.”
It was your turn to smile. “Thank you, officer. Today started pretty badly, but I think it ended on a pretty high note.”
Judy nodded and started backing up, only to stop once more and retrieve a small piece of scratch paper from her notebook and begin scratching something onto it. “Here.” She said, offering you the paper. “If the bozo’s at the station give you any trouble about the van, just call me. We’ll get it straightened out. And maybe we could get some Slurpee’s again?”
“I’d like that, if you buy this round.” You smile. She grins back.
“The least I could do. I guess it’s your lucky day afterall.”
You guess so.