"What I don't understand, Carl," Nick says, leaning an elbow on the seat separating the front of the squad car from the back, "is why you ran."
Carl shrugs. He seems supremely unconcerned with his recent arrest. "Instinct, I guess."
"Okay, yeah, I get instinct," Nick says. "But really. You've heard the expression quick as a bunny? Or rabbiting away? And my partner?"
Carl shrugs. "She's a bunny."
"That's right, she's a bunny," Nick says. "And you're a porcupine."
"We porcupines are a lot quicker than most people give us credit for," Carl says, shifting in the seat in an attempt to get more comfortable. A futile effort; Nick had placed the cuffs at an angle sure to secure Carl and cause no lasting injury, but he maybe didn't put too much effort into making them comfortable. "I had a legit shot to get away, so of course I ran. I was a track star in high school, you know."
"No kidding," Nick says, looking over at the spot where Judy is talking to the beaver whose purse Carl had lifted. She'd promised him it would be just two seconds, Nick, I'm fine, and you know there's no substitute for a fresh memory but at least five minutes have passed and all Nick can see is the funny way she's holding her right arm, and how half of her face has puffed up from the quills Nick pulled out a few minutes ago.
"Seriously," Carl says. "All-county my senior year in the mid-sized rodent division."
"I'm trying to imagine why you think that would impress me, given what you've decided to do with your talents," Nick says, still watching Judy, who appears to be trying to end the conversation without much luck.
"No need to be a jerk about it," Carl says. "I know you used to be one of us."
"I was never one of you." Nick rolls down the window and leans out, doing his best to take the edge out of his voice when he says, "Carrots, you almost done there? We'd better get this one back to HQ."
"I'll be right there," Judy says.
xxxx
Chief Bogo tells them he can find another pair to cover the midnight shift of Snarloff and Higgins's stakeout, but Judy balks.
"Chief, I'm absolutely fine," she says, which might have been more convincing had the swelling on the right side of her face not caused it to sound more like, "Eeef, em abwowootee hine."
"Come on, Chief, can't you tell?" Nick says, in a tone that shows how utterly unconvinced he is.
Judy shoots him a look, and resorts to texting via her phone. "I won't sleep much tonight anyway, so I may as well help out."
Before showing it to Bogo, she thinks better of it, and tilts her phone toward Nick, who reads it with a thoughtful expression on his face. He's been funny ever since they took down Carl Pineslow earlier today; maybe he's not feeling great and wants to go home himself.
When he doesn't answer right away, she taps a few more letters out. Ok with you?
Nick looks over at her, and while he still doesn't look thrilled, he says, "Yeah, sure."
Judy erases the last three words and shows the phone to Bogo, who looks grim for a moment and then says, "It would be difficult to find replacements on short notice, what with the canine flu making the rounds through the wolves. All right. I'm trusting you to be up to the job, Officer Hopps."
Judy gives a smart salute to Bogo's back, which is made slightly less effective by the ice pack sliding out of the bandage on her arm.
"Come on, Carrots, let's get some more ice for that," Nick says, leading the way to the break room. Judy sits down at one of the tables and watches him pull over the ladder they both use to reach the freezer. While he fetches the ice, Judy unfastens the bandage on her arm and looks; the arm seems fine, maybe a little swollen.
"Holy smokes, Carrots," Nick says, sitting down in a chair across from her. "Your hand's about to match your foot, at the rate it's going. And you know that's saying something."
"Shut up, Nick," Judy says, or tries to. The look Nick gives her makes it clear he understands.
Maybe it's more than a little swollen. But nothing permanent, or dangerous; Judy babysat for a neighboring family of porcupines growing up, and had gotten quills in her face more times than she could count. Nothing to worry about.
Judy watches Nick carefully unroll a new bandage and look down at her arm with a concerned expression. "I don't know, I think we should have the EMTs look at this again –"
Judy forgets, sometimes, what a worrier Nick is. She reaches over with her uninjured hand and flicks him on the ear, not hard enough to hurt, just enough to get his attention. When he looks up at her, the teasing thing she'd been about to say flies out of her head. It feels wrong to make light of this when he looks so concerned, so she just says, "I swear, I'm ok. This happened tons of times when I was a kid. It looks a lot worse than it is."
Halfway through, she realizes it probably would have been smarter to tap out a text, but Nick seems to have understood.
"You keep insisting on your childhood as this ideal experience, but I don't know, the stories you tell me sometimes," Nick says, shaking his head as he wraps the ice in a soft cloth before laying it on her arm. "Makes me glad I grew up a city mammal."
Nick continues on about the merits of his childhood (many) versus hers (few), and normally Judy would defend Bunny Burrow, but she finds herself unexpectedly quiet. It's a little tricky to talk with the swelling in her face, for one thing. But more than that, something about the quiet of the after-hours break room, the adrenaline of earlier finally leaving her body, the careful way Nick manipulates her arm while wrapping it, and when he finishes, how he holds her injured arm between both of his hands so carefully. Something about all of it has her feeling funny.
He looks up at her, and that makes her feel even funnier. She holds her breath and feels almost dizzy – could that be a side effect of the quills? Adult-onset allergy? – which only gets worse when Nick reaches out to hold a hand over the side of her face, not quite touching.
"That looks bad," Nick says. "Not sure what we can do about it, though."
Judy sits as still as she possibly can, because the one thing her deep subconscious came up with as a way to make to better - You could kiss it – is so surprising that she doesn't know how to process it. It's the fact that they were just talking about their childhoods, she decides. That's what it was. Nothing more than that.
Nick drops his hand and snaps his fingers, "Hang on, maybe I do have an idea."
xxxx
"How many is it so far?" Nick asks.
Judy shifts the laptop over for him to see: a list of twelve, with identifying details beside each.
"Hmm," Nick says, and goes back to watching the apartment building.
Stakeout duty usually doesn't bother Nick much, but usually his partner says more than two words to him during the duration. Nick complains about it sometimes (For the love of blueberries, can a guy get five minutes of peace and quiet? Nick had said as recently as this morning, when Judy started their shift with a detailed rundown of the night shift's reports; Judy had taken this the way she always took Nick's early-morning crankiness: in stride, with a smile and a look to her watch, saying, Five minutes? All right. Clock starts now.), but the truth is – he likes hearing what Judy has to say. Having her so quiet for so long feels wrong, even if Nick knows the reason.
Nick catches movement out of the corner of his eye and looks over to see Judy running a finger under the elastic band Nick borrowed from Clawhauser earlier; it's emblazoned with Gazelle's image, and was worn on Clawhauser's forearm ever since the recent concert, and fits perfectly around Judy's head, keeping a cold compress in place against the right side of her face.
"We probably should have taken Bogo's offer," Nick says, tapping his fingers on the steering wheel. "He could have found someone to cover for us, and I know you said you wouldn't sleep anyway, but you should probably be resting."
Nick looks over at Judy. She looks murderous, which somehow makes the car feel less quiet, and the stakeout less uncomfortable. He continues on, "Come on, Carrots. You know you'd be saying the same thing if our positions were reversed."
She still looks irritated, but it's a different kind of irritated: the kind when Nick's said something true that she doesn't want to admit. After a moment, she shrugs, which Nick takes as agreement.
"You know what that Pineslow said to me in the cruiser while you were talking to Mrs. Beverton?" Nick says.
Judy shakes her head.
"He said I used to be one of them," Nick says, and he means it to sound ridiculous, as in hey-can-you-believe-this-nut? kind of thing, but instead it comes out sounding uncertain.
Judy gives him a sharp look, her nose twitching.
"I mean, I know I was never like him," Nick says, looking back toward the apartment building. "First of all, in broad daylight? With us twenty feet away? Did he even try to case the scene?"
Nick hears the tell-tale thump-thump-thump of one of Judy's feet tapping against the car's interior.
"I mean, it's an insult, really – hey, Carrots, don't take that off, don't you remember how long it took us to get that thing to stay in place?"
Judy wrestles the armband off and the compress away from her cheek and says, "Nicholas Piberius Wilde. You are being ridiculous. You would never steal a woman's purse in your life!"
"Well, not now-"
"Not ever!" Judy says. "You would never do that. I mean, maybe if there was, I don't know, a bomb in it or something."
"That's a troubling image."
"That's how far I had to go to come up with a situation where you would do what that Pineslow did today. You are nothing like him," Judy says. "Nothing at all."
Nick stares at Judy in silence for a long moment; she still looks a little funny, the right side of her face puffier than the left, but her eyes are as clear as ever, and looking at him with the same sure belief he sees in them every day. "You seem pretty sure about that."
"I'm absolutely sure," Judy says. "You know, decisiveness is one of my key attributes."
"Oh really? I hadn't noticed," Nick says.
"Haha," Judy says, twisting the armband in her hands. "And, you know, on that note."
"On what note?" Nick says, when Judy doesn't continue. "Are you sure those quills didn't do something to your brain?"
"That should stop me," Judy says, in a quiet voice that seems to be directed more to herself than to him. "But for some reason, it's not going to. All right. Decisiveness. What are you doing tomorrow night, Nick?"
"Me? I don't know, maybe watch a game, no real plans. Did you volunteer us to cover another stakeout or something?"
"No, nothing like that," Judy says. "I was thinking maybe we could get dinner together. You and me."
"You and me," Nick says, because he wants to be sure he understands exactly what Judy's saying. "Like, as partners, buddies, pals."
"Sure," Judy says. "Or, you know. Possibly as something more."
Nick still can't quite believe what he's hearing, but he can see that Judy means it. She's looking right at him, gaze steady, chin firm. She's always been the braver one.
Nick smiles and can see from Judy's expression that she knows what his answer is. He can't help having a little fun with it. "Does it have to be tomorrow night? I'm thinking it'll take at least two, three days for that swelling to go down, and –"
Judy tosses the armband at him; it's absorbed some moisture from the cold compress, so it hits him pretty solidly in the shoulder. "You are such a jerk."
Nick reaches over and takes Judy's uninjured hand in his. "You know I'd take you out anytime, anywhere."
.end.