Here is a fact about Judy Hopps: she was a mammal who felt strongly, deeply, and intimately. She had a big heart. It's what made her want to dedicate her life to justice and safety, to making the world a better place. The ever present swell of emotion in her chest made her want to do right. She wanted to make a difference— she wanted to be a hero. Seeing mammals in danger, hurting, or unsafe, she leapt upon them; figuratively and sometimes literally. It was hard for her not to get involved and to empathize with the world around her. Judy did not see it as a bad thing. She always appreciated this sensitive side of herself. She felt proud that she had not become hardened and scared of the wide world like her parents, like so many of the mammals in her hometown.

It could be a good quality for a cop. Seeing a fox just wanting to buy a popsicle for his dreaming child, she felt for him with a strength that required her to intervene. She was a righteous advocate for equal treatment, if only for one little fox who wanted to be an elephant. She saw a sweet little otter longing only for her husband in her arms, for a father to her pups, and she could not even think of restraining herself from providing aid.

It could be a bad quality for a cop. Her emotions got her into trouble sometimes. In a field where one can be witness to the most heinous of crimes, it is not exactly ideal to be so emotional, to be so swayed by what happens in the world around you. What she saw the horrors of what other mammals could do, she was affected much more than her fellow officers. At times like that, she saw her feelings as a sort of weakness. She felt like those who discouraged her for all those years may have had some truth in their hateful and ignorant words. Bunnies, so dramatic, right? When she was happy, her whole world lit up, it was like a song, perfection was attainable. Nothing could bring her down. Conversely, sadness, the occasional feelings of worthlessness, they drained her completely. Her heart would eat her up and drag her down until she wished she was in a sort state where she felt nothing. In her line of work, it was rough. When you feel so acutely, it's hard to cope. It's hard to compartmentalize.

Judy Hopps was very bad at compartmentalizing. Her feelings, her thoughts mixed themselves up like a hard-to-stomach drink, twisted themselves up like a sticky piece of taffy that stuck to her teeth. Her peers and coworkers, they did a much better job of it. They could separate their work and their lives. They could see truly gruesome things, things to make the stomach turn. Then they could drive home at five o'clock, singing along quietly to the radio and acting like they were coming home from just any old office job. They were calm and sober on the scene, going about their work diligently. They did not take pleasure in it, but they were not horrified like she was. They could handle it just fine. She could move around a crime scene, but it always left its mark. It would keep her awake at night, flashing behind her eyelids as she listened to her neighbors fight and felt the building creak and groan and settle around her. There were bruised, mangled bodies. Dead ones too. There were pups, kits, and cubs abandoned by their parents. Walls pockmarked with bullet holes, splattered with red and grey. And her fellow officers could just go on home, afterwards. They could kiss their spouse, their children, and keep on living because it happened every day, and they were accustomed to it.

Nick was like that. Nick had lived a rough life, mistreated, abused, isolated. He could handle it all. He was able to stomach some horrible things, Judy thought. He could push through it, because he had experienced some of it himself. He was bothered by it, of course. He was not entirely callous. He would walk around with his ears laid back flat, the brightness of his eyes absent, that sense of brewing mischief that kept his limbs loose and tail swaying gone. But he could still sleep at night. He could rest well enough that it bothered him when Judy called him at three in the morning, needing to hear a voice and not be left alone with herself. He was her best friend, she felt for him like she felt for no other, but it frustrated her endlessly. He took it all in stride, calmly if not happily. He took notes when questioning, and his eyes did not ache, tears did not threaten to well up as whatever terrible event had occurred was explained. She had to bow her head, rest her forehead against the steering wheel after being called in to end a domestic dispute. Nick would restrain and reprimand the accused, throwing them in the backseat. All Judy could think of was the mark of a paw on skin. An innocent mammal being hit with enough force that the blooming bruise could be seen even through fur. Red tears leaking through a swollen shut eye. Nick just kept soldiering on, and she envied him somewhat. She hated it somewhat. She loved him, and tried not to despise him for being so desensitized to what went on around them.

His name was Bryan Starkey. He was a mole, an unassuming little guy. He had small squinting black eyes that strayed toward nearsightedness. His nose was squashed, strange shaped, and it quivered even more than Judy's. The smoothness of his brown fur, the immaculate quality of it, made it even more pronounced. He was fidgety, nervous, but Judy found this true of many burrowing animals: she could be twitchy sometimes as well. His voice was steady. His claws were neat, Judy had never seen him outside of a dress shirt, even when she at last caught him, even at his trial.

The Nighthowler conspiracy had been cracked, but Zootopia was not at peace. There was always something going on in the city, and her parents might have had good reason to be afraid for her. In the following year, over the course of about five months, the butchered bodies of three young mammals turned up in the Meadowlands. All female, all prey. That was the case with most homicides the ZPD investigated, so that in itself wasn't surprising. The victims were also all rodents. A squirrel, a chipmunk. A bunny. Each was killed by strangulation. Whoever murdered the victims dismembered their bodies after death, disemboweling them and leaving them in public places, locations that saw a lot of foot traffic. Two had been found in public parks, by children at play on Saturday mornings. For a first murder case, it was a doozie. Much as the Zootopia Police tried to keep the story under the wraps, it got out to the public. It caused a panic that neither Judy nor the department could quell. Other mammals blamed the victims, blamed the ZPD, blamed young rodents for somehow attracting the danger. Young mammals all around were put under curfews.

She was on the police force for a reason. She had some strong beliefs: eventually good would always triumph over evil. And that was how it looked like the case would turn out. She found the murderer, at least. Yet, catching the bad guy was not everything. Sensationalized in the media, name repeated on the radio, face on the television, Officer Hopps once again solved the case. A sly and smug fox was smirking over her shoulder on the front page of every paper in the area. She was interviewed on the evening news, called in for press conferences where journalists praised her endlessly and bombarded her with all kinds of questions. Of course, this was all a little preemptive. The mole was being tried, not necessarily convicted. Not yet.

Judy did not exactly live by the handbook, but she followed it to the best of her abilities. She was supposed to believe the accused were innocent until proven guilty. But she did believe the mole had committed those terrible crimes. She was convinced. She hated the mole with the entirety of herself. He was her first murder case, and those were always the hardest, especially for Judy. He had hurt the city, hurt mammals like her. Young females who were rodents, and she wanted justice. She craved it, needed it like water or air, and pursued the case relentlessly. Once he was caught, however, she did not gloat. She wanted out of the spotlight, now. She did not want the murders to touch her further than they already had. Judy was still made to do more interviews, more press conferences, despite her feelings on the matter.

Her family had grown to be so proud of her work: one of the front page articles was laminated, hung up over her parents' vegetable stand. It laid out the whole investigation beautifully, somewhat romanticizing Judy's powers of intuition. In truth, Judy had actually stumbled upon the perpetrator; Starkey owned a few laundromats throughout the Meadowlands, where young students in the area often went to do their wash, and to socialize. Judy had looked hard, and he was eventually the only link between all the girls that had not already been debunked. His information was run through various databases, and mole DNA was found on the clothes the victims had been wearing when they were killed. He had a pattern to who he killed, why he did it, but Judy did not care to learn what it was. There were certified officials who could do that, others who could do a better job at separating themselves from images of cut up mammals. She was unable to do that. She gave what statements she needed to give to the public, to those arguing over Starkey's fate in court, and that was it. She wanted no part of it.

Judy Hopps was very bad at compartmentalizing.

She saw these dead animals, and she saw herself. Her friends, her co-workers. Her sisters. Young rodent families. What else was she supposed to see? It was her first murder case, and as Chief Bogo told her, as everyone told her, those were always the hardest. But Judy had a feeling she took it much worse than her peers. Nick stomached it, asked whichever coroner was on hand about the disembowelment, about how long she had been dead once she had been found. Judy would stand apart from it all, fist over mouth as she looked upon a bunny whose life was snuffed out, a bunny who she could have grown up with, a bunny who could have lived down the street from her. She would meet with the victim's parents for questioning, leave their houses with a lump in her throat, a burning in her eyes. She empathized, and she felt the worse because of it. She was passionate, and sometimes it felt like it could ruin her career. She almost couldn't handle it all.

Bryan Starkey was acquitted.

All that work she had done, for nothing. All she had been through, for nothing. The murderer got off free. He was proven innocent in a court of law, but Judy could not see why. Once she cracked the case, it seemed obvious that it had been him the whole time. It could have been no one else. The jury felt otherwise, as reported in all the papers. Her parents delicately removed the article proclaiming their daughter's investigative prowess and bravery from their little wooden stand, off the fridge door. The evidence Judy, Nick, and the detectives of the ZPD produced was considered inconclusive by the jury. Judy felt like screaming, grabbing each juror and shaking them, repeating the letters "D", "N", and "A" until they realized the evidence against the mammal was damning. But the mole had hired a decent lawyer, and as Judy had learned since the Starkey case, the law did not always work towards making the world a better place. Not everyone believed in that goal as ardently as she did. It hardly mattered in the end that he had not been proven guilty, however. Regardless of the verdict, his reputation was destroyed. Starkey's life was essentially ruined by the accusation leveled on him.

His laundromats went out of business fairly quickly, and he disappeared out of the Meadowlands. The mole vanished in a way that Nick had once been well practiced in. The fox offered to look into his name, see where he went, for Judy's sake. But Judy was done with the case, done with how terrible it had made her feel. She had done her best work. She had powered through the investigation as she was expected to, only letting herself being seen compromised by Nick. She had gone through it all for nothing, believed with all her heart that Starkey was a monster who murdered these young animals, and been disappointed. Betrayed by the system she had believed in so utterly. The acquittal crushed her. She was done. Nick understood, and eventually let it alone. He stopped bringing up the weighty subject, instead reverting back to his regular jesting self. Judy liked life most like this. Maybe she wasn't ecstatically happy, but she was somewhat content, she had her partner by her side and the easy and non-emotionally compromising task of filling out paperwork, or watching out for speeders near busy intersections.

Nick was a good friend like that. He knew how Judy sometimes let her emotions get the best of her. He had experienced it firsthand, especially during the search for Emmett Otterton. He had seen her consumed with righteous anger, ruled over by frustration, overwhelmed with disappointment, and dominated by shame. He knew that it took things out of Judy, to feel the way she did sometimes. When she needed it, he kept things light and happy. He would drop his witty comments, waiting for her to smile before letting his lips curl up as well. He was good at impressions, and reserved his Chief Bogo for whenever Judy was feeling really down, grinning as the bunny's mood visibly lightened as she lifted her ears and smiled that wide smile she was somewhat embarrassed of, the one that showed all her teeth. He was always there for Judy, a smile always quick to show itself for her, a snide comment to make her snort and embarrass herself in the Bullpen in the mornings. It was that time after the Starkey murders (for they would be nothing else for Judy) that she was most grateful for Nick's friendship, the most grateful that he had conned her out of a popsicle.

Months passed, and life went on. It does that. Nothing very dramatic happened, and Judy was grateful for it. Things were essentially peaceful for Officers Hopps and Wilde. They went to their jobs every morning, sometimes offering to work evenings and night, if only to give Nick's nocturnal eyes a break, to give Judy an excuse to not call and check in with her parents that night. There was always a need for the police, always disturbances and occasions of violence, but nothing that equalled the scope of Bellwether's plot, or the deaths that Judy was convinced were the actions of Bryan Starkey. Judy could not tell herself that she was the same as she was before her first murder investigation, but she was almost back to normal. She spent her work hours with Nick, sometimes getting dinner with him, sending ugly selfies to her friends on the force and feeling an acute sense of betrayal when they screenshotted them. Lonely nights, empty bed. Same old, same old.

And then things changed, got more exciting. Or more worrying, depending on your viewpoint. An envelope turned up for Judy at the station. She had gotten a great deal of thank you letters and kindly worded notes after the had discovered the truth about Dawn Bellwether and revealed her to the public, but it had been a year and several months since the Nighthowlers had been a legitimate issue. Judy could see why no one really thought to question what was inside of the letters, even though it had been a long time since she had received anything. Several appeared over the course of a few weeks. They were addressed in her name in a neat hand, with no return address. They were thick and yellow, the kind that pinned close instead of with adhesive. She was slightly suspicious when she first saw it in her inbox at the office, and was more confused than horrified when she opened it up.

They were numbered on the back. Inside there were pictures of a young bunny. The photographs like any other, the type someone would get developed at a drugstore.

The bunny's fur was light brown, dusted darkly on the ends in patches. Almost golden. Judy would come to be very familiar with this young lady. Just as the sender of the pictures tracked her, Judy was able to follow her life as well. She was a college student, studying biochemistry. She knew this from the many photos of her with different textbooks tucked under her arm. She worked hard in the library most nights, judging by all the pictures she saw of her sitting in front of a screen full of words, sheets of paper with numbers, symbols, and abbreviations written all over them. There were a few pictures of her in some dive bar. The picture was blurry, taken from across the room through a cloud of smoke. All the pictures were like that, taken from a distance, hard to recognize the bunny depicted except for that distinctive golden-ish fur. It was a little sketchy, a little suspicious, but she had nothing much to say about them, other than that. Maybe this bunny followed her work, found her interesting. She had a girlfriend, a bunny much plumper than her, with lop ears that had gold studs around their tips. Judy thought of how uncomfortable that would be, metal always clicking somewhere within her hearing range. She flicked through the first set of photos idly, confused as to why someone would send her these pictures of a strange bunny. That is, until she got to the last photo in the stack.

It was a picture of her. Judy Hopps, ZPD uniform on her back, coming out of her apartment building at night, car keys held like claws between the pads of her paw. She always hated walking to her car when she and Nick had night shifts. Judy was well trained in close combat, taught only to bring down her opponent, not seriously injure them. But she was small and alone in the dark, and she liked the reassuring weight of the keys clutched in her paw, the coldness of the metal against white fur, her pink skin. She felt like there were eyes on her, sometimes. Walking out to the squad car parked on the street, only sometimes lit by streetlights, she would feel the skin on the back of her neck prickle, the fur stand somewhat on end. Not ready to flee, but anticipating some sort of danger. Nick said it was just a bunny thing, nervous and emotional. Turns out, she had a reason to be a little paranoid. Someone had been watching in the dark, at least once. Close enough to take a picture, far away enough so that her sharp hearing would not detect them.

She turned the photo over, where the rest of the pictures had been numbered. The one of her was numbered too, a "14" in black, encircled to keep it separate from the rest of the writing. Judy felt her breath hitch, her heart skip a beat as she saw what it said.

Sometimes, going over to Nick's apartment at night meant watching dramas. He watched to the news most of the time, ZNN, steering clear of sitcoms and occasionally tuning into one of those TV stations that just play music, shifting colorful background the only thing on the screen. If nothing else was on, reality TV could make an appearance. Judy saw more of Tygra Banks at Nick's apartment than she ever expected to. She got way more invested in Zootopia's Next Top Model than was normal. At any rate, sometimes TV at Nick's meant dramas. They would watch cop dramas, law dramas, popcorn bowl between them as they pointed out all the inaccuracies, finding a lot of humor in doing impersonations of the hardened officers that characterized the shows. The situations were so over the top, so dramatic, that sometimes she couldn't help laughing at them. Police work was walking the beat, sitting in a car for so long that your tail fell asleep and you walked funny for the rest of the day. It was walking in through the door of the station, coughing because everyone insisted on smoking outside the back entrance. Police work wasn't melodramatic reveals, criminals on the force, officers being harassed by past cases and quickly written-in ex-spouses. It could be dangerous sometimes, but it was nothing like the police life that was on the TV, the stuff her parents watched that made them so scared for her to become an officer.

Until now. On the back of the photo, written in a steady hand were the words: "I'm watching you". Nick heard Judy's breath hitch. He worked on the other side of her cubicle, and quickly rolled his chair over to wear she was sitting. He looked curiously at the photographs on Judy's desk, reaching forward to take a closer look. He flicked through them slowly, silent as Judy was when she looked through them.

"Cute bunny," he said, after he had gotten through them all. "A fan of the great Officer Judy Hopps?"

"No," Judy said absently, still looking at the photo in her paws. Nick peeked over her shoulder, and took in the words.

"That can't be good. Who is she? What is she?"

"A victim." She turned over the process, and though she knew no camera was on her now, she sort of felt like it. If it wasn't the watcher, then it could be a video camera, because she felt like she was in some campy crime scene investigation show, more than she felt like an actual cop. She knew there was danger, for herself and the bunny in the photos, but it almost didn't feel real in the clinical whiteness of the station. With Nick's weighty presence at her side. The fox's breath hitched like hers did when she first looked at the photo. Almost absentmindedly, he rested one of his paws on Judy's arm. A sign of support, maybe. Perhaps a preemptive protection from whatever and whoever had snapped the shot.

"We better tell Chief," he said.

They did, and the buffalo was much less affected than them. Hopps didn't like how he took it in stride, looking blandly upon the photos. He had gloved his hooves, not wanting to get more marks on the processed paper. Judy had no right to feel that way against his disinterested gaze, as she had been the same way when first looking at the set of pictures. But even as he reached the picture of Hopps herself, he did not have much of a reaction. He snorted softly, and Judy felt Nick tense up next to her. But the absence of physical emotion did not mean he was completely unfeeling. He had seen stuff like it before, with all his years on the force. He put the pictures back in the thick envelope they had come in, pulling off his plastic gloves. He balled them up and placed them beside the picture, likely expecting either Wilde or Hopps to throw them away on their way out of his office. He sighed, not much emotion in the gesture, and finally spoke.

"The most we can do right now is send these into the lab, see if there are any prints, any trace amounts of DNA. But even then, that will only be relevant when whatever material we find matches another criminal in the database." Here, he gave Nick a scathing look. The fox looked blandly ahead. "And we will have one of these pictures up in the station, just to see if anyone knows this bunny."

"Why do you think we are being watched, sir?"

"I don't have a clue, Officer Hopps. It might be a stalker, it might be someone much more dangerous. This might just be a one time occurrence. But we will ask around about this brownish one here, just to keep close watch on her. We wouldn't want anyone getting hurt."

"Is that all we can do?" Nick asked. He seemed genuinely agitated. Suffering another glare from Bogo, he added on a reluctant "sir".

"That is all you can do, Wilde. We'll keep our eye on what Hopps receives in her mailbox, maybe intercept whoever put this there. We might find out more once the results get back. In the meantime, you two will do your regular jobs, and you will not go off and do your own private investigations. I won't hear of it. Do you understand me?"

They both nodded, and Judy did not appreciate that Bogo only looked at her as he finished up his little speech. Go rogue one time, and you get an eternal stink eye. She could understand it, but she didn't like it. As they both stood up to go, Bogo grunted and gestured towards the envelope and the gloves. Judy tucked the envelope under her arm, and Nick grabbed the gloves. He threw them in the trash can by the door like he was free throwing a basketball, barely making it into the actual receptacle.

"You alright?" Asked the fox as they descended back to the first floor of the building, to where their shared cubicle was. He moved his paw almost like he was going to put it around Judy's shoulder, but aborted the action, his arm hovering in the air for a moment before he brought it down again. He clicked his claws together. "It's scary stuff."

"I've been better," Judy told him, "but I can handle it, you know? And it's not like I can do anything for the time being. I'll just sit it out, see what happens." She knew her ears were droopy, her voice tired, but Nick didn't bring it up. He was always good like that. He tapped his claws against his pant leg as they walked, a nervous gesture while he talked to Judy about some funny video Clawhauser had sent him the night before. When they got back to their desks, he stretched his back, yawning hugely. He flicked his tail against Judy's leg, and asked what she wanted to get for dinner.

"It's not even twelve o'clock, and I can't even think of food right now, Nick. Do a better job at distracting me, please."

"Gladly," he said.

More envelopes appeared in her inbox, more pictures. The same dark, gold-furred bunny, living her life, not knowing she was being watched. She looked happy, even with tired eyes, her nose dry above her smiling mouth. The second group of pictures was almost all photographs of her and her girlfriend, sitting close together on the same side of a booth in some poorly lit restaurant, talking and looking at each other, a vegetable platter untouched in front of them. These pictures were of a worse quality than the first group, taken with a phone camera, most likely. There were no pictures of Judy this time, just the back of the victim's head. She was sitting on a park bench, part of her looking translucent with the sun shining through the thin skin of her ears.

Nothing was found from the pictures being sent to the lab. No DNA, no trace amounts of any sort of skin, hair, body fluid. No prints, claw or hoof marks. No spit on the envelopes, since they were the kind that you pinned close with a little brass brad. Whoever was doing it was being very careful. Looking through the station's cameras, there was nothing suspicious that Judy saw. The envelopes just ended up in her mail, and she knew the little capybara intern that usually handed out what mail the officers got had no part of it. There were no leads, just pictures and a feeling of discontent in her chest. Judy grew frustrated with the elusiveness of whoever was doing this, and their persistence.

There were more pictures, not every morning, not even every week. But they came often enough that they were always on her mind, always bothering her in a way that not even Nick could distract her from. Sometimes there were pictures of her, sometimes not. In her old, worn pajamas, carrying down her garbage on Saturday mornings where she didn't have to go into work until noon. Sitting by a window at her and Nick's favorite sandwich shop, laughing at something the fox had just said, rain outside and the flash of the camera ruining any chance she could have had at noting anything about the animal taking the picture through their reflection in the glass. She wondered how she had never noticed the flash when this picture had been taken, maybe two weeks before she received it in her inbox. Walking out of the library with her face down, looking at something on her phone, smiling slightly. Someone was watching, and they were watching often enough. She wondered what they wanted, why they liked making her so uncomfortable and paranoid.

Judy Hopps was very bad at compartmentalizing. She could not help but think about this other bunny, think of her life and how she lived it. She could not help but let it dominate most of her thoughts, even while doing other work, even when she was with Nick. She thought about the other bunny, how she likely didn't even realize she was being watched. She wondered why they were being targeted, why she was the one receiving the photos. But then again, the golden bunny could have been thinking the same thing. Wondering if this little rabbit police officer knew she was being tracked.

It was bothersome, and it made her curious, but it seemed like ultimately, nothing would come from the pictures. It had been eight months since she had first gotten photographs, about six weeks since the last group of them. It was the longest time that had passed between getting the thick envelopes, and she had lately been hoping that she had seen the last of them, several shots of the mysterious bunny studying in a coffeeshop. Judy had wondered how the photographer could get so many pictures in two totally different places together so quickly, wondered if they had an accomplice. But some time had passed, and then she hardly wondered at all. Her and Nick had celebrated with a drink after the first month without receiving a single snapshot, and she had been considering making it a tradition to get a drink like that every month, if only to spend more time with the fox. They walked into the station one morning, however, and Judy was greatly disappointed to see a thick, yellow envelope sitting in her tray. She groaned loudly, ears flattening against her head as Nick patted her back, saying "there, there, Carrots".

"I thought we were done with these," she complained, sitting down and grabbing the envelope, more out of duty than of actual interest. She contemplated why she had not handed them straight off to Chief Bogo every time she received one, why she kept insisting on seeing them for herself if they just frustrated her. She pulled them out, turned around to look at Nick to say something, and then stopped as Nick said quietly, stunned,

"Oh, my god."

A/N: Sorry about the cliffhanger, y'all. I should have chapter two up by tomorrow, stay posted!