Author's Note:

Here is the first installment.

I included a brief rundown, from Nick's perspective, which means it is what he knows. I will add other versions from different characters as we move along.I hope you enjoy Part Two of this story.

Let me know what you think.

7:05 AM

Waking from nightmares in the middle of the night was the price of doing something really stupid, like chasing an unknown subject with a long head start down a dark, rainy alley, or mouthing off when they have the drop on you until they shoot you.

Or both.

Finally coming face to face with that unknown subject, over a month later, appeared to have given Nick enough closure to sleep through the night for the first time since he was shot. Of course, going to sleep at 3:00 AM might also have something to do with it, the yawning fox mused. He sat, looking down at his mate sleeping next to him, her nose twitching adorably.

They were in Judy's room at the Hopps Farm in Bunnyburrow, sunlight creeping in through the curtains, bringing up the last few days to mind. Yep. Only a few days ago, Nick had no idea how strange the world could truly be. He was just a con-mammal who had gone—was going—straight because of a beautiful bunny doe named Judy Hopps, and now he had to find a way to save the world. He sighed. Definitely not your typical work week, even for a ZPD officer on the fast track.

He smiled. That stupidity had also brought immense joy, reuniting him with the closet thing he had to a sister, Cynthia Big, the adopted daughter of Antonio "Mr." Big, who now went by the mononym, Skye. She worked at the ZIA, with her... mate... Wow. Little Cynthia, mated—to a bunny, no less. Guess I did have an effect, after all, Nick thought with amusement.

Skye and Jack Savage, co-heads of the ZIA's Independent Operations division, had been monitoring activity at a building where Nick and Judy responded to a break-in that fateful night he was shot. Reading the ZPD after-action report, they realized Nick had come face to face with a mysterious figure they had only theorized existed from analyzing mountains of data. Someone who had been systematically working behind the scenes for years, manipulating scientists, politicians, and others, towards some unknown end. But this manipulation appeared to many governments as a plot to advance the interests of Zootopia and its allies, straining international relations to the brink of world war.

Seeking out the police couple for leads, Jack and Skye visited ZPD headquarters, where Nick and Skye saw each other for the first time in more than ten years. Nick had thought her dead, and she had thought Nick long lost—certainly not a police officer. Their emotional meeting was interrupted when they found themselves under surveillance, so the four agreed to meet at Jack Savage's apartment that night.

On the way there, Nick had to shake two raccoons following them by ducking into the infamous Frisky Kitties Night Club, the only way out of which was for couples to... perform... in front of a discreetly hidden audience (he was still on thin ice with Judy over that one.) Making it to Jack's apartment, Nick saw a replica of a painting, where the mammal who had shot him stood exquisitely depicted by one of Mammaldom's most famous artists, Lionardo DaVinni—four thousand years ago. Their unknown mammal's name was Kataiahs Lysander, a lynx they now knew was more than ten thousand years old... Nick shook his head, still coming to grips with that.

They spent that tense night at Jack's apartment because of the tail Nick and Judy had shaken, with Jack and Skye insisting their apartment needed to be checked for security reasons before they could return. The following morning, a newspaper photograph of Kataiahs sent Skye to the Plainsville Institute of Technology while Nick and Judy came face to face with their tails from the night before, when morning call at the precinct identified two raccoons that had been beaten and roughly delivered to Canal District Memorial Hospital. The raccoons invoked Diplomatic Immunity and refused to speak after they saw Nick and Judy.

Judy's trusty carrot-pen had recorded the encounter and they took the device to the ZIA's Zootopia Field Office for Jack's mammals to translate. While there, the team Jack had dispatched to check out Nick and Judy's apartment triggered a bomb meant for the ZPD couple but managed to get out and evacuate the building with no casualties.

In the meantime, Skye had drawn a blank on her lead at the Institute, then been called into the office of the local ZIA head, Operations Director Arthur Foxworth, an old supervisor and almost lover. The older fox had been agitated at her presence, eventually revealing alarm at her investigating the Institute, and tried to have her captured. Skye escaped, sending a message to Jack that the branch was compromised, and she needed covert extraction. She spent the rest of the day desperately evading pursuit.

Her message reached Jack right after the explosion of Nick and Judy's apartment, sending Jack into crisis mode. Caution made him question the integrity of anyone not in his immediate circle, so he called Mayor Lionheart and ZPD Chief Bogo to inform them of the situation. It was decided to let the public believe Nick and Judy perished in the blast so they could flush out anyone who might be working with the Baratean Intelligence Ministry.

With few mammals available that either Jack or Skye could trust, Judy and Nick were left to lead a daring nighttime rescue of the vixen off the Plainsville coast under fire of the local ZIA reaction force. They returned their friend, not to Zootopia, but to the one place no one would soon look: Skye's estranged father's, Mr. Big's, estate. A tearful reunion brought added information, as Mr. Big had paid a... business call... on the two raccoons in the hospital, revealing the bomb in Nick and Judy's apartment had been planted, not by foreign spies, but by rogue ZIA agents, reinforcing their idea of widespread ZIA corruption.

In a panic after Skye's escape, Arthur Foxworth issued an alert naming Skye as a rogue agent, leading to a Commonwealth-wide shoot-to-kill order for the vixen. This meant the Big's estate was no longer safe and Skye would need to go into hiding. Judy had a plan: Take Skye, along with herself and Nick, to hide at the Hopps Farm in Bunnyburrow.

Skye had actually been feeling unwell for some time, possibly pregnant she thought during her escape (although several pregnancy tests had been inconclusive.) Once safe at the Hopps Farm, the vixen suffered from a severe hemorrhage that could have been a miscarriage, so Judy and her sisters took the vixen into Bunnyburrow to see the doctor. The doctor they ended up seeing turned out to be Skye's regular doctor visiting from Zootopia, and none other than Kataiahs Lysander, himself, hiding behind a hospital mask.

Kataiahs revealed the vixen was, indeed, expecting kits, and that he had secretly preformed a procedure on Skye allowing her to get pregnant from Jack. While angry at having the procedure done without her consent, the vixen was still incredibly happy to be expecting Jack's kits. This prompted Judy to invite the lynx to the Hopps Farm to explain the newfound possibilities of interspecies couples to bear young to the other members of her family involved in mixed-species relationships.

That had been last night.

Just before Kataiahs revealed the truth about Mammaldom's origins. Before he revealed intelligent mammals were quickly becoming extinct. Before he let them know that, at any moment, some Prehistoric Doomsday Killer Robots could wake up and annihilate all living things on the planet. Before they realized someone had a device out there guaranteed to wake those robots up. And now they had to find him and recover the device: A virtually undetectable thermonuclear bomb.

Oh, yeah, Nick thought. What a great morning...

8:10 AM

Stu Hopps was furious. Finally, a morning he could... sleep in... with Bonnie and the phone starts ringing off the hook at the crack of dawn. Which he wouldn't have minded so much except that they were all reporters, asking all sorts of questions that they shouldn't be.

But mostly he was heartbroken that one of his brood would have betrayed the Clan in such a manner. Watching the early news broadcast on their TV, the picture displayed with the story could only have been taken by a family member.

Bonnie recognized the picture. Now she was left with the decision of what to do about it as she watched her husband pace about the room, fuming. Stu caught her expression and thirty years of marriage revealed what it meant.

"You know who did it," he said, crossing his arms.

Bonnie fidgeted. "I might recognize the picture," she said, evading the question.

"Margaret," Stu huffed, closing his eyes and shaking his head. "That doe has a mean streak in her. I thought it was just bad feelings with Elena, but this goes beyond that."

"Now, Stu," Bonnie said, trying to soften things, though she knew it was pointless. "We don't know she sent in that picture."

"This is serious, Bonnie," Stu said, not having any of that. "You saw what they said. They could have shot Skye! They could have destroyed this Clan for harboring a fugitive!"

"Skye isn't a fugitive, Stu," Bonnie reminded him.

"They didn't know that!" he said, waving at the TV. "The Feds could have laid siege to the farm looking for her!"

"Oh, don't be so melodramatic," Bonnie said.

"Melo—Bonnie," he said a bit too loud, a sign of how angry he was, then toned down his voice. "Sorry, hon. But, don't you think the other Clans will know it was one of our own who did this? What happens then? Who will trust a Hopps after something like this?"

He had her with that one. Clan loyalty was one of those sacred things to rabbits since the mythical First Clan. The Clan whose members were not loyal to it was not trusted by anyone, so strict discipline was expected to be enforced. The Hopps Clan's entire social standing could be jeopardized by a betrayal on this scale, where even a guest under their protection had been betrayed.

Bonnie hated to admit it, but Stu was right: Margaret had gone too far and jeopardized the entire Clan. She hung her head down, tears clouding her eyes. Stu sighed, coming over to the bed to give his pregnant wife a warm hug; she was a sensitive doe, despite the tough-as-nails facade.

"We'll let the Clan decide, sweetheart," he said, tenderly stroking her downturned ears. "She'll get a chance to say her peace, then we'll act as a group and accept whatever outcome is decided."

Expulsion was the most severe punishment in this enlightened time, though the occasional killing had been known to take place in some of the more fundamentalist Clans in the boonies. Bonnie sobbed, nodding her head. It was a fair path to take.

8:30 AM

"Morning, Jack," came Matilda's voice over his secure phone. "About time you woke up."

"Morning, Director," Jack said, yawning. "What time is it?"

"Not late enough, apparently," the sheep laughed. "Did you get any sleep?"

"I guess a couple of hours," he said, looking down at Skye, snoring softly. "I'm going to be a father."

"Congratulations!" Matilda said, surprised. "Who's the lucky doe?"

"Skye," Jack said. "We're having kits."

"...How is that... possible… Jack?" came the skeptical question. "Not that I don't believe you," she added, quickly. "I know better with you two."

"It was a very interesting evening, Matty," Jack said.

Matilda laughed. "You have no idea," she said. "Wait until you see the Morning News."

Jack cringed. "How bad?"

"Pretty much all out," she told him. "Even got a picture of Skye and Judy together taken yesterday at the Hopps farm."

"Bloody hell!" he exclaimed, waking Skye up.

"Gets better," Matilda said drolly, while Jack put her on speakerphone for Skye to listen. "Labtierre Provincial Police reports they have the murdered body of Arthur Foxworth at a tourist hotel right across the Bunnyburrow border."

"Murdered?" Skye asked, stretching. "How?"

"Stabbed in the back and set on fire in a rental car," Matilda said. "I hear congratulations are in order, Skye."

The vixen smiled. "Thanks, Matilda," she said. "You will come to the wedding, I hope."

The sheep chuckled. "Wouldn't miss it for the world," she said. She gave the waking couple a rundown of the night's events and a summary of the news reports. "Now, what do you call 'serious trouble' compared to all that?"

Jack sighed. "I guess you officially still work for us until Monday," he said. "We don't believe Arthur is dead. Has Rammstein made it back yet?"

"About two hours ago," Matilda said. "I'm told he locked himself in the break room to get some sleep."

"Well," Jack said, chuckling, "I might as well let you know, then, since we are going to need your help more than ever."

"You're not making feel warm inside, Jack," she said.

"We have a Fifth Protocol violation," he told her, eliciting several choice words from the sheep. "Yes. Apparently, Arthur was seriously involved with this Tonya Ryzhaya vixen, and arranged for her to use the High Energy Lab at the PIT. Two undetectable thermonuclear devices were produced, one of which is missing with Arthur, who we believe is taking it to Baratea."

"Damn!" Matilda exclaimed. "Octavio and what we now believe is his family just boarded an airship for Aurora!" She briefed them on what had she had just read from their Baratean Embassy contact concerning Octavio's suddenly-large family circle.

"Good for them," Skye said, smiling. "We might even be able to trade for the device."

"With what?" Matilda asked.

"Kits," the vixen said.

8:35 AM

Chief Bogo stomped into the precinct, making a beeline for his office. Having heard the various news broadcasts, most of the officers on duty could guess why the water buffalo was in on Saturday and stayed out of his way. Clawhauser sat at the dispatch desk, having been called in by the Chief an hour ago, looking a little apprehensive as the Chief passed by.

"Wasn't me, Chief," the cheetah quickly said. The chief huffed, mumbling under his breath as took the stairs to his office.

"Clawhauser!" Bogo called from the top. "My office!"

The portly feline waddled up the stairs, stopping at the midpoint landing to huff and puff, then made it to the Chief's office, paws on his knees, catching his breath. The Chief waited patiently for his officer to recover.

"You really need to get in shape, Benjamin," the Chief said. The cheetah nodded, panting. "Going to be a busy weekend for us, unfortunately. Feds should be stopping by soon to coordinate more arrests and searches, so get everyone with Detective training in here. The Mayor has already authorized the overtime. Get the District Commanders on a conference call ASAP, since I only want to do this briefing once. You have all the notes arranged?" The cheetah nodded, having been privy to the situation from the beginning. "Good. Get them out to the Commanders. No one talks to the Press. Got it? Mayor's already in a tizzy over the leak about the WildeHopps. And get me those two on the secure phone."

"Should I... cancel the... funeral?" puffed the cheetah. The Chief stared at him, impassively. "Cancel, it is," the feline said, waddling away to get his work done.

The Chief thought about asking him for a cup of coffee, then decided it was faster to get it himself, reaching for his cup. Inside his bottom desk drawer, the scrambling device Jack had left him flickered, then glowed an ominous red, making the Chief catch his breath. Somebody was hacked into his office's surveillance camera, watching him.

The Chief gave no visual indication he was aware of this, gruffly getting up to go fill his quart-size mug with whatever disaster might be masquerading as coffee on a Saturday morning.

This case was far from closed.

8:40 AM

Judy lay panting hard against Nick's chest, clasping his fur tightly in her paws, eyes wide with surprise. His knot held them together for their mandatory cuddle time as Nick stroked her back tenderly, nuzzling her head absently, more than a little shocked at the intensity of their unplanned tryst. Judy had taken one of the pills Kataiahs had given her last night, after reading the simple instructions:

One pill, every other day, after waking, for one month. Best when used with mate nearby.

She had laughed at the last part, showing Nick the instructions. Nick had already been awake, stroking her ears, and raised his eyebrows at the words. Five minutes after swallowing the innocent looking pink pill, she became a bunny possessed, pouncing on her mate with blind lust, a fire Nick desperately had to quench-twice.

"Are you back?" Nick asked, gently with a hint of anxiety.

"I think so," Judy panted. "Did I just..."

"Mercilessly ravage me?" Nick chuckled. "Twice. Didn't know you had it in ya, Fluff. Coulda warned a guy, you know." She punched him lightly.

"Did you..." she asked, timidly, "enjoy it?"

"... she says, locked on my knot," he teased, nuzzling her. "I doubt I could handle this for more than a month, Fluff. It was really intense. How about you? You didn't seem aware of anything but my... you know."

"It was like being on fire," she said, quietly, mesmerized almost. "With only one way to put it out. It was... frightening... then, when you put that fire out... wow... It was a relief, like nothing I've experienced before..." She cuddled closer to her mate for reassurance.

"So," he said, stroking her ears, "you enjoyed it."

"I endured it," she said, shaking. "If you hadn't been here... I... don't know, Nick. I think I would have found another male. Any male. All I could think about was putting out the fire, you know?"

"I'll always be here for you, Fluff," he said, tenderly, then chuckled. "But I think I had better hang on to those pills. Can't have you confusing them with aspirin at the precinct, then jumping Clawhauser or the Chief after PT." She slapped him playfully.

"You know you love me," he said.

"Not with one of those pills in me, Slick," she said. Their secure phone rang, and Judy reached in vain for it. Nick winced as her effort yanked on his knot, still lodged in tight. "OK," she said. "You get it."

Nick chuckled, reaching over for the phone. He showed the number to Judy before answering it on speakerphone. "Hey, Chief, miss us?" he said, cheerfully.

"Can it," game the buffalo's gruff voice. "You're on TV." Judy tried—and failed—to reach the remote, still tightly bound to her mate. Nick chuckled, handing her the control and, sure enough, there was the picture of her and Skye taking up the entire display. Judy surprised both the Chief and her mate with her choice of words.

"I take it you know where the picture came from," the Chief laughed.

"My soon-to-be-dead sister," Judy said.

"Do you want us back in Zootopia, Chief?" Nick asked.

"No," Bogo said. "It's going to be a three-ring circus for a few days around the precinct, especially if you two are here, and we're busy wrapping up this Ryzhaya/ Packland mess. What I want you to do is head over to Labtierre and work with the Provincial Police in recovering the body of Arthur Foxworth and whatever evidence they might share with you."

"I doubt it's him, Chief," Judy said. "From what we've heard about him, it's a decoy."

"That's why I want you over there to bring back what you can," the Chief said. "Nobody who knew that fox believes it's him, but we need the evidence back here to say for certain. They won't let ZBI or ZIA across the border, but they'll let ZPD send a team. That's you two."

"We don't have our Detective badges yet," Nick reminded the Chief.

"You finished the training and passed the exams," Bogo huffed. "That's good enough for me."

"When do we get the pay raise?" Nick quipped. Bogo laughed.

"You're still officially dead," he said, drolly. "You'll be lucky if you even get paid this month." Nick's ears went flat.

"We still have our uniforms and IDs, Chief," Judy said. "It's all we have, really."

"Expense out some clothes," Bogo told them. "I'm sure Lionheart will sign off on it—if you keep it reasonable."

"No Armandi suits, got it," Nick said.

"And tell Savage that jammer was glowing red in my office a short while ago," the Chief said. "So, we'll keep using the secure phones."

"Got it, Chief," Judy said, frowning at the news about the jammer. "We'll keep in touch." The phone went dead.

"We all thought Kataiahs was the one surveilling us," Judy said, "and he's here. So, who hacked into the Chief's office camera?"

Nick shrugged. "Let's go ask the Ancient One," he said, ominously, while ruffling her ears. "I'm getting hungry, anyway. Been working hard all morning, you know."

"Har, har," Judy said, moving tentatively to be sure they were unstuck this time. She looked at the remains of the bedding set. "What a mess."

"What do you expect when wild bunnies attack?" he teased, tickling her. She squealed and hopped off the bed, heading to the shower.

"You know you loved it," she purred, blowing him a kiss. He laid back on the pillow, arms crossed under his head.

"Yes," he murred. "Yes, I did."

Author's Note:

There it is.

The first installment. Hope you enjoyed it. I was going to add more stuff, but it was taking too long and I wanted to just get started.Let me know what you think.

As an extra: What was your favorite chapter in Part One?

Until next time,

Thanks for reading!