Chapter Text
“It says here the official practice is called ‘nyotaimori’,” Nick read to Judy from his phone. “Says you have to be naked.”
Even though she wasn’t facing him, Judy practically felt the wink and smirk aimed at her with his delivery, which still produced a smile on the rabbit. She turned away from the fish and patiently deadpanned, “Nick. We’ve been over this. If you ever want to see me naked, all you have to do is ask. Or use those claws and teeth of yours to undress me.”
The fox feigned surprise, putting both very clawed paws up at his face. “Really! It’s that easy?” Judy heard him pad over to her, stopping at her back. She inhaled and stopped her meal prep at feeling his lips, then his teeth, smooth out against the back of her neck. Right against the raised ribbing of her spine.
“C-careful,” she warned with eyes shut, “wouldn’t want to slip and cut myself, would we?” Judy held up the knife in one paw, still dripping with fish blood and viscera, for demonstration.
“Hmmm, so you say, my bunny, so you say,” she heard from him as he took a small lick from the back of her neck up to between her ears, “But something tells me you wouldn’t mind a little knick. Always one for ‘sharp ends,’ aren’t we?”
Judy giggled in guilty confession and continued sawing open and pulling apart the tuna. Nick’s apartment was beginning to smell strongly of fresh meat and blood, and it smelled so . . . appetizing. So comfortable yet exciting. Both of their stomachs growled as Judy began laying out several strips of ruby red tuna, still wet and somewhat swollen with blood.
Running a cooking brush over the cuts and coating them in sesame oil, they had finished preparing sashimi for their dinner. All they needed now was a serving plate.
“So,” Judy said, setting down the knife, licking the viscera from her fingers with enthusiastic greed and turning to face the fox, “tradition ‘dictates’ I go in the nude?”
“Well, wouldn’t want to get any more of your robe dirty,” Nick shrugged. But again, the grin on his face betrayed how thrilled he was that he was getting to see her naked.
That, and it was just part of their game. Of course she was going to get naked. It still excited him all the same.
Judy, the grin splitting across her face to a wider and wider cut, rolled her shoulders, and down fell the bathrobe. Underneath, her entire body was slicked down and still dripping in sesame oil, so much so that she was leaving small bunny footprints of oil around the kitchen. One of the perks of being a small mammal in a big city was having access to things like ‘elephant-sized cans of sesame oil.’ Plug the tub drain, start pouring, and you had yourself an easy way to marinate a rabbit.
Something both of them made private note of.
Sitting at the kitchen table, Nick lightly tapped the countertop twice in lieu of saying ‘come on over.’
Bringing the small tray of filet cuts over with her, Judy handed them off to her partner and hopped up on the table, lying down and face up, legs and arms barely spaced away from her body.
“Tradition also says that you aren’t suppose to move at all,” Nick said as he began laying the strips of fish on top of her fur, putting two strips over her nipples, one strip over her belly button, and the thickest piece over her mons and down across the barely visible pink lips of her sex. “Also says you can’t speak, but where’s the fun in that?” He dangled one piece of raw fish over her mouth, which opened at the prompt, and he gingerly fed in the ribbon.
“So I think it’s fair to say that if you move anything more than your mouth, game’s over, you get dressed, and we eat like normal, civilized mammals. Deal?”
Her hesitation at the strict set of rules showed in her face and in her tone. “What if I start getting ticklish or whatever, even for a moment, and then go on to keep pretending to be your serving platter? I get at least one free pass, right?”
“Nope.”
“Well, I don’t think you’ll call it quits if I – ”
“I will walk right out the door and go to the diner.”
Judy looked absolutely scandalized by his threat. He sounded completely serious. “You wouldn’t . . . ”
“I would. I’ll even save you a seat at the counter when you come trudging in after me, stinking of fish and oil,” Nick taunted back. “A predator must be strict in his eating discipline, Carrots. And the prey must remember that sitting still has been a tactic to avoid hungry predators for all of our brief time on this rock.”
Judy huffed and crossed her arms, making sure to leave space between the cuts of fish currently lying on her chest. “Still . . . what kind of deal is that?” she pouted. “If I didn’t know any better, Junior Detective, I’d say you get a kick out of tormenting me.”
In one moment, the joking, too cool for school Nick Wilde vanished. The fox that replaced him was the far more dominant kind. The predatorial archetype of a fox that favored sexual prowess and utilized natural predatory strengths.
“You are right, Officer Fluff. I do get a kick out of watching my prey squirm.”
Judy opened her mouth to retaliate, but went completely rigid. The rigidity included the breath stopping midway out of her lungs on account of her windpipe being squeezed.
An open muzzle, one full of beautifully white and extremely sharp razors, clamped firmly on her neck. Not enough to completely force her throat shut, not enough to break the skin, but enough that her body momentarily responded as if it were. Within a moment of no breathing and no further aggression, Judy found the will to force her inhalation to happen. She practically choked at feeling the muscle of his tongue smooth over her neck, examining how much fur there was until he’d meet skin. Her fists clenched and her toes curled hard enough to buckle up her knees.
Mumbling against the taught sinew and short fur of her neck, Judy heard Nick tell her, “No more interrupting. The fox is hungry.”
So Judy canceled out any thoughts of rebuttal and stayed motionless, her heart starting to hammer a little harder against her ribs and a little louder in her ears. With the releasing of the pressure around her throat came a halfway controlled exhale, followed by the
now quickened
sounds of her breathing. Staring up at the ceiling, and knowing that moving her head would count as an automatic FAIL, BACK TO REGULAR BORING AS HELL DINNER, Judy chanced swiveling her eyes, following the head of her partner as he slowly gazed up and down her body.
Her fur briefly parted and smoothed away with each bat of air as he inhaled and sharply exhaled against her, as if searching for something.
“While the oil will make the sashimi better,” he told her, not once sparing a glance to meet her limited range of vision, “I am starting to wish I had you go and work up a sweat.”
Of course, she thought, sweat to make the fish saltier. And to taste like prey. To taste like me.
“Next time,” Judy whispered. “Definitely next time.”
“Next time, we will do something more mutually satisfying,” he said.
“What could be more muAHHHHH!” Again, her yell tapered off into an immediate silence at feeling something painfully sharp stab into her thighs. By instinctive reflex, she looked down to see Nick biting her. Again, not enough to break the skin, but more than enough to let her know he, a hungry predator, was there.
The sensation spread out across her skin with static ferocity. When he slowly released her, strands of translucent spit briefly connecting his canines to her fur, she asked, “Why did you do that?”
“Because I wanted to see how much stress I could put on the fotableware.”
Judy almost missed it. But a moment later, replaying the last word in her mind, she got it.
Food. He was going to say food.
It should have made her worry. It would have made any sane mammal, any sane bunny, worry past the point of anxiety and into true fear for her life. Should have, but did not. It produced a nervous and exciting tightening in her stomach that spread and dissipated through her sex, a smile on her face, and a buzzing sensation in her temples.
Nick moved his head back up her body, eyes darting up down left right center this way that way looking at every crease, every curve of her body and the patches of hair that stood up as the oil receded down from the follicles and towards her skin. The light scent of the oil was beginning to mingle against the more powerful scents of her sex, her sweat, her anxiety.
The aroma sent something erotic and borderline horrific across his psyche and down through his flesh, a maddeningly strong pull of
Hunger
arousal. His muzzle came up to the small mound of one breast, where one piece of rosy red tuna was draped. His tongue snaked out at the base and began to drag upwards, catching the tuna and smoothing over the erect teat.
Judy’s response was more of a gasp and swallow than a moan. She wanted to move, to twist her tit into his muzzle, to offer more of her to him and tell him to pay her more mind than just a serving platter for his food.
You’d want to be his food.
A quick and small shake of the head to banish the thought when she heard Nick say, “I didn’t just see you move, did I?”
Now sure to move only her mouth, eyes locked forward and to the ceiling, Judy responded, “I thought foxes were supposed to have keen eyesight. You tell me.”
He didn’t reply. His breathing stopped. Still staring up to the ceiling, not wanting their game to end, Judy could only hear the minute sounds of the fabric of his shirt moving against his fur. Nick had stopped breathing.
Because he knows bunnies have acute hearing it’s in his design to vanish from his prey like that.
A painfully sharp and thrilling sensation splintered out from her nipple, and Judy could not help the anxious gasp or her body from slightly bowing up towards the stimulus in order to reduce its ferocity.
Nick growled at her as the pearly razor blades in his mouth slowly pinched down on her nipple. With each ounce of pressure applied, her body inched higher and higher off the table. The moan that crawled out from her mouth was more desperate and pathetic than empowered and confident. More like prey than predator.
Without warning, Nick suddenly released her from his captivity, and her body, still humming from the electric wave of strident pleasure she was riding, came back to the tabletop. Her chest, and one other piece of sushi on her other breast, heaved up and down as she struggled to maintain her breathing and cease the urge to shake and start running her paws to her sex to keep the rhythm going.
But the desire to keep the game going longer
Further
kept her body still. The other piece of sashimi on her bust was picked up, this time into thin air and away from her sense of touch. The piece came into view as Nick lowered it into her open mouth.
Yup, has a bit of a salty taste to the one side of the cut. I should have tried leaving the bones in for a bit of crunch.
“Because you’re being such a good serving platter, I just can’t bring myself to call it quits because you flinched,” Nick told her, claws trailing across the fur on her taut stomach and drawing loose crop circles in the oil-soaked fur. “Tell you what, I’m willing to give you leeway, and if you twitch because you just can’t help it I won’t take my business elsewhere.”
“What a kind fox,” was her sardonic reply. “I’m half tempted to say that hurt.”
“A part of me tells me that you’d like it more if it did hurt. You can always tell me to stop. You know I will.”
Why on Earth would I want that?
“Can you feed me another piece?” Judy asked instead. Again, she felt the cool air flutter against her stomach as another strip of tuna was pulled off her abdomen and craned over to her open mouth.
As the piece slid across her tongue and her teeth began tearing apart the tuna, Judy saw Nick staring, eyes not watching her face, but her mouth. His lips were beginning to peel back over his teeth.
She knew – not thought, knew – it was a sign that he was about to do something predator-esque. Something dangerous.
Nick picked up the second to last piece of sashimi that was draped across her navel, pushing down lightly to coat one side in oil and sweat before picking the piece up.
“What would you think of me if I made this piece taste more like rabbit?” Nick asked, examining the cutlet with unblinking eyes.
Her thought and response matched.
“I would only love you more if you did.”
She inhaled at feeling something foreign, something kind of like a cold and lifeless tongue detached from the skull, press into and against her folds, rubbing upwards and barely massaging her bud.
Judy couldn’t stop the scandalized look she gave Nick as he slowly opened his mouth and fed in the strip of tuna a la rabbit. The wet sounds of his lips smacking together, combined with the sound of his teeth so effortlessly dicing and tearing apart the strip, sent a tense shudder of arousal through her body.
“Would it scare you if I told you how you taste?”
They both knew that this question had only half to do with their sexual preferences.
“You certainly wouldn’t scare me,” Judy breathed. “I probably taste good?”
“‘Good’ comes nowhere close,” Nick whispered back, pupils thinning and head dipping back to her body and now staring at the last cutlet of meat. One piece draped right across the top of her venus.
Judy chanced looking down between the small hills of her cleavage and over the even smaller tuft of her dewlap at the predator, now motionless, staring at the last piece of food.
When he spoke, it was a decibel above a whisper, a dark secret meant only for her to hear. “I wonder what it would taste like . . . if this was attached to you.”
Her mind came to a white noise filled blank, devoid of reasoning. She didn’t have to ask for clarity – she fully knew what he meant – but did anyway through a now very panicked breath. All other thoughts except for him and his design were gone.
“Attached?”
“To your body,” Nick muttered almost to himself, “strapped to your bones with your sinew. Filled with your blood and your life.” Head still above her pelvis, his emerald slits rolled up and locked onto her eyes.
Her answer should have shocked them both. It would have absolutely horrified any other party, predator or prey, that could have heard it. But it didn’t really surprise either of them. Both knew, on some level, that this entire exchange, the way their entire relationship was headed . . . this was the direction it was only going to go. Maybe it was just eventual. A rhythm evolving into a dance known only by the two dancers.
“It would probably taste even better,” Judy muttered, “if it was attached.”
“ . . . Probably?”
Looking at each other’s reflections in the dark pools of their pupils, both clearly saw the only answer.
Definitely.
Nick snarled and, in a frighteningly quick motion, bit down on the tuna sashimi above her sex and tore up, bringing the cut of meat with him in his shaking maw. In the sudden ferocity of his lunge, he miscalculated the distance. His front canines went clear past the tuna, to her body.
The sounds of sharp teeth ripping apart flesh filled the room.
Judy convulsed and screamed. And continued screaming his name. A moment later, her body began vibrating as an orgasm as slick and hot as boiling oil washed through her entire body.
After a few minutes, as something barely akin to passable calm settled over the pair, they would realize three things in rapid and finalized succession.
One. While his canines had passed the sushi and gone to her body, they hadn’t pierced the mound of her venus, but had instead grazed past the fur and across the skin, hard enough to leave four, light red lines etched into the surface. Sharp enough to scratch the skin, but not enough downward force to draw blood. Marks, but not scars.
Two. The sounds of Nick ripping apart the cut of sashimi was a napalm bomb of aggression and sexual adrenaline for them both.
And three. On top of points one and two, point three summarized that they both were now very, very hungry.
Their design was becoming something more.
~
The raccoon dog called Itamae by his family and ‘chef’ by every other mammal who bothered to ask watched with piqued interest as two of his best customers entered his restaurant. A petite female rabbit and a slick-looking male fox. Tipped with generosity. Sometimes asked for preferential treatment, including buying out a table or two to ensure an empty house. Preferred privacy (see previous note). Came in around the middle of the night (again, see previous note). The raccoon dog suspected their consistent desire for their dining arrangements went paw in paw with the noticeable bond of intimacy between the two.
But he never asked or inquired. Wasn’t that kind of relationship. Not that the chef ever sought conversation with any of his patrons. Waste of everyone’s breath, in his opinion. Most were lucky to hold his attention beyond taking their orders and observing the initial taste to ensure satisfaction. But these two? They were good customers. Paid well. Consistent. Polite. Never bothered him, except to offer compliments or even criticisms.
Which, strangely, he enjoyed their criticisms. Never an attack of his cooking – he would have long seen them out with knife in paw if that had ever happened – but suggestions. Questions. Ponderings. Things he only answered with careful consideration and either nods or shakes of the head. Criticisms that only made him think.
Itamae liked that. They were the type that pushed and questioned. They tried to read between the lines. They were novel. They had such novelty in their designs.
The fox, Nick, was dressed in a fitted three piece. Tie looked to be worth an entire meal’s cash equivalent. He had cunning eyes. Eyes that saw an uncomfortable amount. Eyes that made others uncomfortable. The reynard also looked hungry, pupils thinning then filling and nostrils flaring as he scanned the empty restaurant floor.
The rabbit, Judy, was in an elegant small dress that hugged her body enough to show off the curve of her hips and a shawl that came down the arms to her wrists. Upon the first time she entered Itamae’s restaurant, UMI, the raccoon dog noticed the typical prey expressions. Caution. Worry. Hesitation. But there was also something new with her, something so very novel to her kind.
Curiosity. Genuine interest to explore.
Tonight, Judy looked reserved, mouth held in a lady’s kept line and eyes ever so slightly hooded, but the rabbit held the same gaze as her partner. Confident. Knowing. In control. Hungry. Both were holding paws.
Itamae noticed that particular aura about them. For a rabbit that was clearly fucking a fox, and doing God knows what else, she seemed exceptionally okay with the arrangement. No outward signs of paid affection, abuse, or worse. And judging by the way the fox sometimes fed her, in front of Itamae no less, the chef found it difficult to believe that a rabbit who was so eager to eat from the canid’s paw could possibly be there against her will.
The duo sat directly in front of Itamae at the sushi bar. Nick reached into his jacket and summoned a dark bag, filled with liquid. A bladder with a sealed release valve.
The chef took a guess on the contents, and said nothing.
Along with passing the bag to the chef, Nick included a small wad of rubber-banded cash.
“We are trying something new tonight,” the fox whispered to the chef, nodding to the bag. “Turkey blood. Harvested earlier. You wouldn’t mind gently mixing that with soy for dipping, would you?”
Itamae looked at the bag, then at the couple. He nodded, pocketing the cash. He also noted the wide manic smile that split across the rabbit’s face when he agreed to use their provided material. The fox, somehow, looked even more enlivened with the agreement.
“Excuse me, Chef?” the rabbit piped up, her face now looking anxious on top of excited. “There’s something else we’d like to try tonight. Are you trained in serving fugu?”
There was a resounding silence. The chef’s brow furrowed at processing the challenge. He issued a snort, went into the back, and returned with a now very agitated and still swelling puffer fish, seawater dripping from its rounding body.
Placing it in front of the clearly pleased couple, the chef summoned a special carving knife and began working.
Was he trained in serving fugu . . . ? Ha. Was the Pope Catholic? Does a bear shit in the woods? Well, he couldn’t really say the latter phrase anymore, speciest views and derogatory sayings being so unpopular and all.
Again, had the clear goad been accused by anyone else, he would have been showing them the door with said knife. But not them. Not the first couple that had just asked to dine on the meat of the most poisonous animal on the face of the earth. Not an interspecies couple with such beautifully carnivorous appetites, and the ones that were trusting him and him alone to prepare one of the most challenging of dishes.
Any small nick of the flesh, any microscopic drop of clear toxin from the fish that spilled anywhere it was not supposed to go, and the chef would be forced to speak – one of his least favorite activities – to an operator. A mistake would mean he would need the operator to contact two separate families about the passing of two mammals.
The raccoon dog did not want to bother wasting the effort to speak. He’d rather use that energy to display his talent. Itamae began preparing their meal.
Something more peculiar about them. Both took an avid fascination in meal preparation. The fox Itamae understood. It was their nature to enjoy such things, their predatorial nature to enjoy and relish in the acts. But the rabbit? That was new. She was the same as the reynard: just as much vested interest in watching every stroke of the knife and part pulled and cut out and sawed away.
After an hour’s worth of delicate prep work, making sure that neither of his best customers would die under his watch, Itamae presented their dish to them. The white meat of the fish had been cut into two dozens slices, the corners a milky white and the centers so thin they bordered transparency.
The cuts were arranged like flower petals, partially overlapping in tightening circles. A deadly orchid of the flesh, carved opened and laid bare for devouring.
All three gazed at the culinary dare with reverence.
Then Itamae saw something entirely new. Entirely unique to the dining pair, its complete and full meaning lost to Itamae but hinted enough for him to grasp the sudden tonal change of their evening.
Both rabbit and fox, taking one slice of fugu in their chopsticks, looped arms and presented the other with their food. They locked their eyes in an unblinking gaze.
“Don’t call the ambulance if either of us gets the unlucky piece,” the rabbit told the chef. Itamae looked from the rabbit to the fox. Neither met his gaze, nor deterred from their partner’s, nor blinked.
A dare over eating and dying. Till death and upon the act of death. How exciting.
Itamae shrugged, then nodded once. Up, then down, and back to center. He watched as both fox and rabbit bit down on the fugu and began chewing, all while holding each other’s gaze.
Two waited, and one watched.
The vastly pared down effects of the remaining poison, the lethality of the toxin removed by Itamae’s vigilant attention, began to seep through the pair. A cold shiver prickled across both of their bodies. And after a minute of watching their hairs stand on end, the fox and the rabbit smiled at each other. Death would not be tonight. At least not for them.
Itamae opened the bag they had given him earlier, intent on adding a few drops of soy and wasabi. The smell that filled his head upon opening the bladder froze him. It both confirmed his suspicions and made the hairs on the back of his ankles and neck go rigid.
It was blood. But . . .
The chef looked to the pair, who both sensed his stare and met him, smiling. Through the grins, the fox told him, “Like I said. Taken from a turkey. You understand, don’t you.” Not a question. A statement. A statement that almost carried the implied weight of a threat. Almost. It certainly conveyed a desire for understanding.
Itamae understood that it was blood, but it was not turkey blood. It smelled more than bird blood ever could. This smelled more . . . alive. Far more intoxicating and salty and, in some terrifyingly similar manner, familiar.
Far more novel.
The chef opened the valve and poured a small puddle into a cup, adding a small drop of soy and barely a shred of wasabi. Just enough of both secondary ingredients to only add strength to the blood’s profile.
Nick and Judy took another piece of fugu each and dipped the edges in the dark liquid. Again, they held eye contact and fed each other their respective pieces.
Their faces, their bodies, changed upon feeding each other. Something so private and so intimate, that for a surprising change of his normal demeanor, Itamae actually felt the skin of his face heat up at seeing them, feeling almost embarrassingly voyeuristic at witnessing something so reserved and meaningful between them.
Both Nick and Judy sighed, as if realizing a harrowing divide was passable, as if realizing the strength of their bond. Both of them licked their lips upon tasting the cuisine and Itamae actually heard both of them moan. The kind of moan that was reserved for very blissful and very private pleasures.
For the first time in his career, Itamae averted his gaze and looked at the tabletop as the pair slowly leaned into each other and kissed. The chef made no move to interrupt. He knew that in a minute they would polish clean the platter of toxic fish.
While making a point to not look at their heads, he could still see their arms. Judy’s one arm snaked up to pet the side of her lover’s face, and in doing so, the shawl that covered her arms slipped down and away.
There was a padding of white bandaging over the crux of her arm, where her forearm pivoted into the elbow. It was the same kind of puffy, white bandaging with tape used to patch over a wound.
The ideal spot to draw a bag’s worth of fresh blood from.
Itamae watched as they stopped kissing and resumed their eating, each dipping the fugu into the blood, making sure that each piece was dripping crimson. They looked almost manic while they cleared the plate. So incredibly happy. Ecstatic. The couple didn’t speak with words, but with looks, too engrossed in eating and not wanting to waste a single moment speaking when they could be living up to their designs.
Itamae knew there was a reason he liked them so much.
It wouldn’t surprise him when a little later they asked for the bag back and poured themselves two glasses until the dripping from the valve stopped. It would only mildly surprise Itamae that the rabbit finished her glass just before the fox did. But just by a single gulp.
Itamae, rare for form and only for a moment, smiled.
How . . . novel. How exciting. Like an artist’s beautiful design becoming something more.
~
Judy sat on a downed tree in the middle of a forest, someplace between the unknown and the uncared for, hours from the city of Zootopia, and well away from any other mammals; living, moving, visiting, or otherwise. In front of her, a small fire warmed her outstretched paws. With her, a small cooking kit that had been previously used.
Overhead, roosting in the branches, a dozen or so crows waited with solemn patience. They had finished picking apart the carcass Nick and Judy had left them from over an hour ago. What remained, what little edible parts remained, was now for the insects.
Nick had gone back into the forest, disappeared into the canvas of lines and parallels that was the trees and scrubs. He left the rabbit by herself, approximately three miles from the campground parking lot and their rental. Left her in such an old forest, with its silence and its bottom feeders.
He left her alone with the fire and the still dripping skeleton of a turkey, feathers strewn about and ants shaving off whatever bits were left from its bones and inedible organs. So it was only her, the crows, and the ants. From predator to scavenger, awaiting the return of a fox.
Listening to the ruffling of the crows’ feathers and the crackling of the fire devouring the kindling and wood and the ghost of the wind slithering through the branches and trees, Judy eventually picked up the sound of something trampling lightly through the underbrush towards her.
Nick came to her, out from the green and brown color palette of the forest, orange with accents of cream, naked as the day he was born, with two grotesquely ugly things hanging and kicking from his mouth.
Two young turkeys, chicks that had begun to put fat on their bones and started growing muscle around their legs, squawked and squirmed in his mouth. Nick was completely unperturbed by them and their efforts to escape.
Coming to a stop in front of her, he skillfully dropped one on the ground and immediately pinned it to the earth with one paw. In his jaws, with a few well-timed pull-ups and readjustments with his teeth, Nick bit down on the other chick’s head until teeth met teeth and the second chick’s head was only tethered to its body by a few thin and stubborn filaments.
Blood began pumping from the severed arteries, running down his maw and the bird’s body.
He dropped the dead – or nearing dead – turkey chick in front of her, next to her feet. The smile he gave her when he looked back up at her – bright, cheery, proud – made her heart swell to the threshold of almost making her want to cry in joy.
Her mate, so happy and relieved to provide for her, delivering her one of his kills, fresh from its mother’s once vigilant watch. Only the calculating part of her mind wondered if the mother was the pile of bones, sinew and feathers that the crows were now finished with. The emotional part of her physically displayed itself as she leaned forward and connected noses with him, humming in bliss as way of thanks for the food. Nick’s snout smelled like cinnamon and raw meat.
“This is for you,” he told her, motioning to the screaming chick still wriggling and trying to escape out from under his clawed paw. Her eyes went wide and the excited feeling ricocheted around in her gut. Nodding his head to the chick with the growing circle of crimson around it, Nick further clarified, “And that’s for me.”
Ahead, the crows began churring and yelling at each other. They knew what was going to happen.
So did Judy, to her silent delight as the thrill of anticipation bolted through her bones.
Without any prompting, Judy knelt down, coming almost to eye level with the kicking chick, the ugly matting of its immature brown plumage frayed in all directions from sheer stress and terror.
Judy doesn’t move, except for her eyes. They watch as the head whips left and right, twisting and trying to turn to attack the orange paw holding it flat to the soil.
She waits, and waits, and waits, and waits, and strikes. Her teeth, aided by her enthusiasm and strength from the muscles of her jaws, allow her buckteeth to easily split past the skin of the neck. Its flesh is hot. Within moments, even hotter blood, salty and tasting akin to cinnamon, began gushing down her throat.
With a hearty CRACK!, she effortlessly broke the chick’s neck. Its pudgy body went limp under his claws. Within a few moments, basking in her mate’s proud approval of her kill and with a desperate, almost choked sound of pure joy, Judy held the body down with both of her paws while she hungrily dug into the kill.
The adult turkey they had earlier had been great, but it was missing the one key ingredient. It had been dead when she sunk her teeth into its body. Now, her metamorphosis was
almost
complete. For now, the taste of life being torn free with her teeth and swallowed into her body sufficed plenty.
Nick smiled and followed suit with his own catch, ripping off the entire left leg of his bird, skin thinning and parting like stretch plastic. Blood splattered over the pine needles. Overhead, the crows observed the feeding in silent and greedy approval.
Far later into their evening, as the sun was nothing more than a fiery orange glare across the horizon and spilling through the tops of the trees, the pair walked in silence, paw in paw. After cleaning her face of blood and viscera with eager laps from the much longer fox tongue, Nick told her that he had discovered a small clearing. A patch with only shrubs and weeds, a loose circle where nature had yet to completely fill in one of its abhorred vacuums.
The hunting pair came to a stop at the ring, partly on instinct’s cue, and partly on complete and total surprise. It was never advisable for predators to openly announce their presence to the world, even if they were, for the moment, full.
In front of them, in the sky above the clearing, a black miasma was shifting and warping against the red tinted evening. Nick had absolutely no idea what it was, and was only planning on showing Judy this previously vacated spot because he wanted to watch the moonrise with her. Judy, to even her own mild surprise, actually did know what they were witnessing, and said it aloud.
“Starlings.”
“What?”
“Those are birds called starlings,” Judy said in a lowered voice, as if normal speaking volume would scare off the immense and otherworldly show happening before them. What the behavior was called was slowly coming to her, slowly and with grinding impatience and irritation.
“And what they are doing, what they are . . . is called a murmuration,” Judy completed, giving a nod of the head at feeling the word dislodge from the cognitive cobwebs. “A murmuration of starlings.”
“I’ll take ‘words I never knew existed for one thousand, Alex’,” was her partner’s remark. But the humor and verbal know-how was instantly re-eclipsed by them being engrossed in the rare spectacle.
Nick made a small sound of disbelief and amazement next to her. They watched the mass warp and fill and spread and thin and thicken in all manners of shapes and without any discernable endpoint or cause. Both watched as a noticeably larger black speck, one that flew with a steadier course than the smaller starlings, came into the fold.
The murmuration formed a hollow bubble around the intruder, and the flock, staying within its relative bubble, tried to keep the larger speck bullseyed and away from any other starlings.
This time, both mammals knew what it was.
“One hawk going up against what has to be about a few thousand starlings,” Nick commented. “I like his moxie.”
“You think he’ll catch any?” Judy asked.
“Don’t know. They’ve got him tagged as the threat and they’re all doing a really good job at keeping him at wings length. If a fox and a rabbit can catch and kill turkeys, I don’t see why the hawk won’t be able to catch a measly little bird.”
The pair watched the hunt unfolding.
“Do you think the hawk would be more successful if he had a partner?” Nick asked her.
She felt her body go numb. It felt like soon she would float away, up and away from who she once was. The smile that split her lips conveyed something otherwise. Something beyond what she may have once felt. That was no real surprise. Judy Hopps was now an entirely different mammal than the bright-eyed creature that arrived to Zootopia by train.
“Yes,” Judy answered slowly, “although that would be going against its nature. Hawks are solitary hunters.”
Her partner laughed, a brief and hard exhale of air. “Yes it would and yes they are. But becoming a hunting pair would only benefit both hawks, wouldn’t it?” Nick turned to her, pupils beginning to dilate. She could see her reflection in the onyx pits of his eyes, a rabbit in a dark sea she was going to soon completely drown in. The sea she would happily just drop into, to command her arms and legs to stop kicking and just drown.
“Imagine,” he purred to her, “all of the tasty starlings the hawks could eat. They would even be able to take on another hawk.” The word ‘hawk’, and his issuing of the word, produced a thin line of drool from the edge of his maw. It was allowed to flow with the cresting of his wide smile at seeing the unbridled joy in her face.
She turned to face the spectacle still taking place in front of her, all of the hairs on her body standing on end and her mind spinning and running forward in full force with what her mate had just offered.
On some level, at the most basic template of her id, Judy Hopps knew that this was only eventual. It was the only way their relationship could have possibly progressed. Someone very wise and very odd once said that everything’s eventual. It was only just. Whatever remained of her dead prey conscious had transformed into a warped and permanently static white noise that hummed and vibrated whenever Nick and her ate, whenever they let their designs take the reigns on their behavior.
Always, in all of their past carnivorous endeavors, the both of them had one paw on those reigns. Keeping some ounce of civility within their fingers. Now, they were going to let go entirely.
The thoughts began pouring out of her. The mind began calculating. The predators planned.
“This can only be between us and the prey,” Judy stated.
Nick nodded.
“We have to be efficient.”
Nick nodded.
“There cannot be any room for error. No mistakes. None whatsoever.”
Nick nodded.
“No matter what,” Judy told him, taking his paws in hers, feeling his paw pads and his claws, “we have to – ” Judy paused, trying desperately to find the right word, the best word, the only word that could describe how to . . . “ – covet. Regardless of what happens, Nick, we must covet them.”
With a carnivorous grin and predatory eyes, Nick nodded. This time, with a little more enthusiasm in his agreement with her. “I agree completely. It’s only just,” he whispered back, the honesty and truthfulness dripping from his voice.
The look he gave her was both familiar and foreign, traces of something established and something new. The look of deals made between mates that was sealed with much more than just verbal promises. Within moments, they were naked and rutting under the stars and the rising moon, the rabbit on all fours and the fox mounting over her. No words were exchanged, no ‘you are wonderful’s’ or ‘I love you’s’. Just moans and yelps and growls and screams as she came, the fox finishing their mating by tying himself to her.
The crescent moon above them looked on, like an eyeless grin, a Pagan God of the Hunt approving of them, their partnership, and their pact.
Their design was becoming something more. Something more terrifying than ravenous crows and grinning moons. Their design was going to become something insatiable.