Day 9

"What are you so damn happy about?" Finnick grumbled at Nick as the two heaved the ice cooler out of the back of the van.

"Hmm?" Nick mused as he looked at his aviator-wearing business partner with the smug grin he had been wearing all morning.

His smile wasn't a cover for anything; it was the genuine result of how good he was actually feeling. In the days since he had remastered his emotions, not a single unwanted micro-expression had leaked through his mask. For the most part, it wasn't even an act; the memory flashbacks, emotional cascades, and the silly longings to be something more, all of it had finally stopped.

Realizing that he was not nearly as complex as he used to pretend he was made remaining in a state of detached complacency all the more easy. It was a lot harder for something to get to him when there wasn't that much of him to get to in the first place.

Work had been a lot easier, too. He'd stopped pretending that he was doing this for any reason other than that it made him feel good to rip-off mammals who hated him. The fantastic amount of money he was making doing this wasn't half bad either. He'd made more in the previous week than he had the previous two months, and that, that felt very good indeed.

"What's there to be sad about, Fin?" he said slyly as the cooler reached the ground.

While some mammals found a way to remain at the protests nearly the whole day, most didn't start showing up until mid-afternoon, and the gatherings seemed to hit their peak around the end of the business day. This timing corresponded almost perfectly with Nick and Finnick's original schedule, and they'd had to do very little to adjust their normal routine in compensation for it.

Slightly more consistent than the schedule were the locations that attracted the congregations. The biggest groupings were in front of The Palms Hotel and Casino in Sahara Square and at the fountain in Savannah Central; the protesters' resolve was apparently not strong enough to weather the more inclement climates of the city's other major districts.

Climate had been the prime factor for Nick and Finnick's choice of venue, as well. While heat was at the top of a rather lengthy list of reasons for Sahara Square being the best location for their operation, a close second was that the proximity of the fountain to City Hall and ZPD HQ meant that security would be more tightly monitored there. Nick still had all his permits for street vending, but there wasn't a lot of point in pushing the matter.

Another key reason that hadn't made it on the list, or even out of Nick's subconscious, was that avoiding city center would be the best way to avoid her. Having a specific reasoning for wanting to avoid Judy would have required him to give the matter conscious thought, but not having had a sufficiently good motivation to subject him to the despair that would follow the analysis, his subconscious kept the matter suppressed and presented it to him only as an anonymous drive to stay away from locations where she might be encountered.

That drive, even though Nick didn't know it, had been his deciding factor on where to go. If the motivation had been absolute, he likely would have dropped the hustling all together, but the much more conscious desire for more cash was still a fair bit stronger, leaving The Palms as an equitable compromise between the competing potentials.

"Pawpsicles!" The sunglasses-wearing, bright-blue shirted red fox called out gleefully as he started up sales for the day. "Get your pawpsicles!"

While it took them as many as three hours to sell two hundred pawpsicles in the old days, the protests had made it so they could go through nearly six hundred in half that time. So far today, the sales of the last hour had held true to that rate and there was little reason to doubt that by the end of the next, the pair of foxes would be back in Finnick's van, counting their earnings.

The crowd had naturally self-segregated into predator and prey zones and while Nick and Finnick were not exactly scared of a possible confrontation, it had still made sense to stay among the predators for as long as sales remained strong. Even so, they had set up shop near the border with the prey crowd, just in case any of the grazers took an interest in acquiring a refreshment. The division between the two groups that everyone else seemed so excited about was actually getting more and more laughable each time Nick thought about it; both groups had always hated foxes and the events of the past week had done very little to change the circumstances for any member of his species.

In stark contrast to the orderly lines that the Lemming Brothers formed, the patrons here ambled around the makeshift kiosk in chaotic hordes. Nick did his best to keep some organization as he continued swapping his icy treats for bills, while Finnick kept out a glaringly watchful eye for any sticky paws taking interest in their excess inventory.

Nick was in the zone of salesfoxship; making eye contact, keeping his smile wide, but not fanged, and engaging in occasional small talk with any mammal who solicited it. His focus had been so enthralled with the speed at which he was selling, that he had failed to take notice of the slowly shifting demographics around him.

"Three dollars," Nick said with a smile. He accepted the bills, and handed the jaguar a pawpsicle. "Pawpsicle?" he asked the next mammal.

The ram looked down at Nick with a harsh, bar-eyed glare, and left his question unanswered. Nick returned his glare by narrowing his own eyes smugly behind his tortoiseshell sunglasses. He then turned to his right to try another potential buyer. He didn't make his pitch again because this patron looked suspiciously like the one he had just confronted. They were even wearing the same t-shirt; black and featuring a graphic of a long horned ram's skull, with a three-tined crown floating above it.

For the first time in nearly a week, Nick's instincts panged fear hard enough to send the sentiment to the forefront of his mind. It wasn't overwhelming, but he could already feel his body going through the preflight checklist for an adrenalin burn. Foxes may have evolved as predators, but fight was not their traditional primary survival strategy. Even with his amped-up aggression, Nick really wasn't prepared to dish out or accept anything more than a verbal assault.

His mask held his smirk firm and he turned to his left. A third ram had joined the group and was wearing the same shirt and facial expression as the other two.

With some effort, Nick tamped down his revving instincts. These sheep looked pretty serious, but this was about as public a venue one could be in, and he still had a few cards he could play before something as primal as fight or flight needed to be considered.

Nick forced his grin a little wider, and then spoke in a tone that was meant to be knowing and understanding of a customer's plights, using his paws and body language to articulate the light, jovial mood he hoped to create. "Ya' know, I bet you three…" his façade shook but didn't falter as his eyes found his current count to be outdated, "you four, are pretty warm in all that wool." He grinned but could tell that they weren't buying it. "How about I make you a deal?" He kept his smile wide, but not toothy, as he looked around with sly eyes. A fifth was approaching now and none of the ones already here had made any reaction to his offering yet. He lifted the back of his paw up to his muzzle as if to make it a secret, saying, "I'll sell em' to ya, two for five." He cocked his head, widened his eyes and opened his paws, pads up, to show his eager interest in receiving their answer.

They were in the middle of a crowd of thousands of screaming, protesting mammals, but the uncomfortable silence he was met with seemed to drown out all the other sounds around him. His instincts, however, could still hear everything, and they began to articulate his ears in such a way as to allow them to keep a sonic eye on the places he couldn't see. The fur on his tail began to bristle first, but he could feel the follicles in other areas starting to tense as well. Clearly these five...no, now six, rams were not here for pawpsicles, so he moved on to his next strategy.

He took a slow step backwards. The movement served the simultaneous purposes of getting him closer to both the cooler and to Finnick, as well as keeping his posture non-dominant. While his body language feigned a lack of aggression, the lessening cheer in his face and tone of voice did not. Showing his annoyance he said, "Look, if you're not here to buy a pawp, then you're holding up the line. Let's move along, now." He made a shooing motion with his paws.

In a voice unexpectedly deep for a sheep, the one that had arrived first on the scene finally broke his silence. "We'll stand where we want, red pelt."

Nick's adrenal gland recognized the term a fraction of an instant before his mind did, and it sent icy volts through his veins, out through his extremities, and into the tips of each of his digits; every claw on his hind and forepaws contracted ever so slightly, as if to test their readiness for continued threat escalation.

The insult was old, very old. Many thousands of years ago, predators had eaten prey as food, but the violence had not been as entirely one-sided as the meek species liked to think it was. While the history books were all consistent in their identification of predators as hunters and murderers, barely any of the texts conceded that prey were the same. The distinction for what did and did not make it into the curriculum was, by all objective measures, motive; predators had killed because of the savage urges that came from their survival instincts, prey had killed because of the civilized urges that came from their fashion desires.

The First Treaty had been lauded through the ages as a masterpiece of diplomacy and progress, and during the steep incline of Zootopian society over the last century, the presumed efficacy of the covenant had become a pervasive cultural trope, and a rallying cry for any wishing to virtue signal their tolerance and openness to diversity. But like so many other legacies, this one didn't even come close to living up to its legend. The fabled ancestral declaration that anyone could be anything and the promise that predator and prey could live together in harmony had, in reality, done very little to affect the lives and deaths of the species not present at the meeting, and subsequent arrangements had followed a similar trend.

The initial non-aggression pact consisted of only the strongest species from each side, but prey mammals had been quick to assemble a more unified and inclusive front to represent all their members during negotiations. This contrasted with the often overlooked fact that during the savage era, predators ate other predators, too. That minor detail worked itself into the fabric of all the earliest legal and political frameworks.

From the disconnected perspective of over eight millennia, the progress during this period of enlightenment seemed practically instantaneous, and for most species, it was an undeniable truth that they would need to go back several hundred generations to find an ancestor who had been consumed for their flesh or skinned for their pelt. However, the pervasiveness of concessions and compromises, mostly on the part of predators, on behalf of their subordinates, throughout this enlightened time, meant that this lineage statistic was less true for lower predators, and least true for red foxes.

It had still been a very, very long time since the last Vulpes vulpes had been killed for his pelt, but the time between that latter murder, and the initial gathering at the watering hole, had been an even longer time.

The epithet was meant to remind Nick that red foxes had always been seen as the least important of all the mammals, that his species would always be last invited to the negotiation table, and that, out of his entire existence, the only thing of value he had to offer this world was his red pelt.

Even at his most core level, Nick was indifferent to the status implications; they would have to do a lot better than that to make him feel like a lower, more worthless creature than he already believed himself to be. The thing that had frightened him (and yes, he had to admit it to himself now, he was indeed quite frightened), was the casual ease with which the slur was spoken.

It was satirically accepted that just killing a red fox outright was far less offensive than calling one that. Even amongst themselves, foxes, of every variety, never used the term. It was a sword with no handle, delivering its wounds not just to the target, but to the ancestral shame supposedly carried by all mammals for having let the practice continue for so long. The callousness that was required to wield it so freely and in such a public place (along with several other clues) told Nick that this herd might very well be prepared to use something a little more visceral the next time they wanted to express their attitudes towards him.

"Do we have a problem, Nick?" came a voice that was, to Nick's delight, even more unexpectedly deep and growling than the ram's had been.

Nick had been smiling this whole time, but his eyes, always the first to betray him, were beginning to falter and widen from their half-lidded contempt, making him thankful for the added protection his sunglasses gave in obscuring his eyes from the view of his accosters. Nick's ears tracked the approaching sound of a bat being dragged across the pavement, and the knowledge that he now had backup, steeled his doggedness for more verbal fight.

Nick looked down to smile at his partner, who had just come to a stop beside him, aviators glinting dangerously in the bright sunlight, and said with a light casualness, "Oh, no problem, Fin. These lovely little lambs were just interested to know if we had any coats for sale." Nick turned to look at the gathering, narrowed his eyes at them, and in a steadier version of the voice he had just used, said, "They were just leaving."

"What makes you chompers think we have any interest in leaving?" said the ram evenly.

"What the fuck did you just call us?" Finnick asked with an incredulous malice as he pulled the bat to rest in front of him; the business end was still on the ground, but the fennec's paws were gripping it in such a way that its idle positioning would not be a hindrance if its immediate use was required.

Nick had been taken aback, on the inside, by the word as well. He was pretty sure he'd never heard it before, but the connotative definition that his mind had derived from the context clues was decidedly negative. Even so, if they were still in the verbal stage of this confrontation, it was Nick's job to do the fighting, not Finnick's.

"It's okay, Fin," Nick said, not breaking his narrow-eyed contact with the lead ram. "Someone probably told them to say that." Nick let his smile form wide enough for his fangs to show, and he pushed his voice into a more gleefully sardonic register, "After all, sheep are followers; they're not smart enough to come up with that sort of stuff on their own." Nick could see that he had finally succeeded in eliciting a rise from the mammal and it was his intention to capitalize on the momentum. He pointed out into the crowd that he'd nearly forgotten they were surrounded by, and said with as much dismissive deviousness as he could, "Ah, there's a nice goat. Why don't you go follow him instead of herding around us?" He waved his paw in a shooing motion again. "Go on, flock along now."

The lead ram took a step towards Nick, causing his hair-trigger instincts to surge him another dose of adrenalin. The brute wasn't that much taller than Nick, but he was definitely a lot thicker, and Nick's mind began to regret his earlier brashness while his body geared up in preparation for flight; he wasn't so aggressive as to take on six…no, seven now, rams at the same time.

Damn flocking cowards.

"I think we'll do just fine following you," said the ram with a note of amusement in his tone.

Nick swallowed a little harder than he'd meant to show and a nervousness began to tarnish the polished smug smirk on his face. He wanted to look at Finnick, in hopes that the fennec was showing more bravery than he was, but something instinctual impressed upon him the importance of not breaking eye contact with a predator.

Nick didn't have to make the choice, though, as the lead thug broke eye contact to look at one of his comrades. He called out, "Hey Lenny, go check if that cooler has anything interesting on the bottom of it." He looked back at Nick and chuckled.

Nick hadn't been expecting a witty remark and most of the usually sharp parts of his mind were busy calculating escape routes, so the double meaning of the command was not immediately grasped. Its significance correlated at approximately the same time as the sound of plastic scraping against the plaza concrete reached his ears.

His brow furrowed as he spun around. Along the way, he saw that Finnick was doing the same, and both foxes had done a full one-eighty just in time to see their cooler of pawpsicles being dumped on the ground by a black-shirted ram.

"Nothin' here, boss," the vandal called out dopily as he examined the bottom of the now-empty cooler.

It was apparent that Nick had just lost the rhetorical battle and it was now Finnick's turn to take a crack at it. Growling as viciously as Nick had a few days ago, he reared the bat above his shoulder; his determined posture made it clear that he intended to swing. He took a step towards the upended cooler while Nick shifted his weight to the tips of his hind paws, and turned slightly so that his stance would present a smaller target when the fight started. He mentally noted the positioning of each ram and more adrenalin fortified his readiness to have Finnick's back now that things were undoubtedly going to get ugly.

"Is there a problem here?!" shouted an imposing female cheetah suddenly. The cat was wearing a dark blue ZPD uniform with a shiny badge adorning her chest and was watching them all with an authoritarian glare.

Finnick quickly lowered his bat as all the mammals directed their attention towards the officer.

"No, ma'am," said the lead ram with resolute confidence. "We were just helping this fox here clean up the mess he made."

The officer looked skeptical. Leveling a stern gaze at Nick, she inquired, "Is that true, fox?"

Even with the city on the brink of outright flames, he still couldn't catch a break, even from another predator. Ignoring that she had said 'fox' the way he imagined she might expel a hairball, he felt a little calmer in knowing that the immediate danger had passed. In deciding how to respond to her question, he re-remembered the way she had just said 'fox' and decided that attempting to change the narrative already established by his assailant would at best, leave him with another example of how highly the ZPD regarded foxes, and at worst land him and Finnick in the zoo for some obscure vendor's ordinance that he'd overlooked. With the pawpsicle markets clearly closed for the day, he just wanted extrication from this place as soon as possible.

Nick forced his face from shocked concern to a cheeky, sardonically guilty, smile. "Yup, just so clumsy, I guess." He chuckled a bit, shrugged his shoulders and drooped his eyes and ears for effect. "We'll just be getting out of here, then." He smiled and didn't break eye contact with the officer as he put a paw on Finnick's back to guide him towards the emptied cooler.

"Be more careful next time," the officer said in a tone that Nick identified as an unwarranted reprimand.

"Sure thing, officer! Have a good day now!" Nick said with as much nonchalance as he could forge.

He rolled the cooler back over, onto its wheels, and dragged it behind him as he and Finnick made their way back to the van.

The two foxes sat quietly in the van for several minutes before either could think of anything to say. Each one was quite embarrassed at his own performance, and each was not quite ready to face the other's criticism for their failure just yet.

Nick's silver tongue still had a lot of ego to repair when Finnick finally found his.

"Maybe we should just go back to the lemming place tomorrow," he said with an uncharacteristic caution.

"That… That's probably a good idea," Nick said flatly as he continued to stare at the folded paws in his lap.

"Alright then," Finnick said with a roughness that was more familiar to Nick's ears. He turned the key, and the van rumbled to life.

.I.I.I.I.I.I.I.I.I.I.I.I.I.I.I.I.I.I.I.I.I.I.I.I.I.I.I.I.I.

Notes:

Every nation has a history they don't talk about, founding documents that arose from questionable intentions, and heroes who were anything but. Cultural amnesia is something pervasive in every land of our world, and it is likely a keystone feature of every civilization wherever and whenever they find themselves.

eng050599 had some thoughts on this subject:

Those who fail to learn from the past are doomed to repeat it. -Santayana

There will always be a need to examine the past, and it's something that we do through archeological and anthropological methods. History may be written by the victor, but the truth can still make itself known centuries after the fact.

Sometimes you do need to take a step back before you continue forward.

Thanks eng050599. Your commentary is always helpful and insightful.

Fox Tip: Don't forget your past, lest you repeat it, but don't dwell on your past, lest you invite its return.

Canon Check: The ram's skull with three-tined (point) crown is an image that appears several times in the actual movie. Most notably it is on the shirt of Walter/Jessie, one of the rams helping Doug at the lab. It also appears on shirt behind Judy when she gets off the train the first time, on a rhino in line at the DMV, and as a small chest emblem on the ram blocking the door at the Natural History Museum (he's the reason why the duo had to run left and hide, instead of going out the door to the ZPD). The symbol has some weird meanings in our world, but forgetting my tin foil hat for a second and not wondering why a demonic symbol made at least 4 appearances in a kids movie, this symbol does make the perfect marking for an anti-predator movement (in addition to the Fox Away logo of course. In fact, there may even be a reason there are 2 symbols now. Guess you'll just have to keep reading to find out).

I hope that you have enjoyed this latest installment of 3 Months a Fox. I don't want to upsell too much, but I am very excited about what is going to happen in the next chapter, so hang onto your tails!

I really want to thank all those who have been leaving reviews, they really warm my heart to read them and encourage me to keep this going. Thank you, your words are appreciated.

Another big thanks to eng050599 and Highwing for editing this!