Sanctuary

A Piece Of Fiction Set in The ZooDystopia Universe

Greywolfe, 2016


Disclaimer

I do not own Zootopia or the characters found in Zootopia. Zootopia is the property of Disney, and is not my intellectual property. There is no financial gain made from this nor will any be sought. This is for entertainment purposes only.


WARNINGS!
This is a not-at-all happy piece of fiction. LOTS of Seriously Depressing Content Within.
This piece of fiction contains concepts of segregation.
This piece of fiction deals with bullying as a child.
This piece of fiction hints [very broadly] at general police brutality.
This piece of fiction hints [very broadly] at a kind of government conspiracy.
This piece of fiction features a drug addict.
This piece of fiction features gay lovers. [spoiler: there's no sex.]
This piece of fiction contains a pair of suicides.
This piece of fiction depicts a bonfire burning of a body [but not in great detail.]


Chapter I: A Case Of Mistaken Identity

I don't remember being knocked out.

More to the point, I don't remember being knocked out, plunked into a car, put on a boat and ferried to God knows where.

The last thing I really remember was walking from the Fruit Market to Hill Street. I was, as the Zootopia Police Department politely put it, "following a mark." This, of course, isn't actually the case. I was on my home from work after a busy day, trying to buy a couple of things for a soiree I was planning to host for some close friends. It was going to be a very lazy Friday night. Good friends, good food and some effortless conversation.

Apart from the itch around my neck - from whenever I remembered that my collar was there - it wasn't going to be a weekend out of the ordinary at all.

But then some bastard tried to steal my groceries. And some other bastard called the Police Department. It's not too much of a stretch to figure out what happened next: I ran after the thief, my heart rate picked up, my collar went off and I was laid to waste within seconds, falling flat on my back while simultaneously trying to clutch at my throat to get the Goddamn collar off. The Goddamn collar that was frying all my motor neurons while the punk with my groceries sped off into the night.

There were witnesses. Lots and lots of them. And all of them might attest to the fact that I was minding my business. But most of them were prey. And I'm a predator. And when you're chasing after someone and your fangs are bared and you're dripping saliva because you're angry, well...

...I was chasing a mark. That's how it comes out.

So when I wake up, hours later in a quiet, white looking room with fluorescent lights beaming down at me and an ancient doctor's face looming in my field of vision, it catches me a little by surprise. But what catches me even more by surprise is the fact that that itch is...gone.

Experimentally, I reach my paws up to my throat, feeling for the collar. The ever-familiar, impossibly honed bit of precision engineering that isn't exactly as precise as it should be. But it is not there. My fingers find bare, ragged fur, instead. Fur that hasn't been able to breathe for nearly forty years at this point. The doctor - a stag of some renown, just looking at his antlers - looks down at me with a worried sort of face.

But as soon as I move, he nods, as if everything is in order.

It takes me a moment to realize a couple of things: the first is that he isn't absolutely terrified of me - not scared witless like most normal prey animals would be. The second is that my hands aren't somehow strapped down to prevent me from doing something...stupid. And the third is that my collar is off.

My collar.

Is off.

In what feels like slow motion, I bring my paws up to my face so that I can stare at them. And I realize that I can't properly see them, because of the refraction and reflection of light.

There is that one final thing I realize:

Because the collar is off, I am weeping.

In truth, I am not weeping because the collar itself is no longer around my throat and I am not being eternally monitored. No. I am weeping because this moment of freedom will be fleeting. The doctor is going to inspect me. He is going to find that - apart from burns and perhaps mild trauma from where the collar shocked me, I am otherwise healthy and hale and, with due haste, he will have one of his subordinates walk over to me, have another, larger subordinate pin down my arms and legs so that I cannot fight back, and they will slip the device around my neck once more and I will be a prisoner.

A robot.