Write a fanfiction chapter? I'm not just gonna write a fanfiction chapter. I'm gonna write TWO fanfiction chapters. Before Monday.
Yep, as promised, here's another. Some reviewers have pointed out that the ending to the last chapter bore an uncanny resemblance to the Dog Whisperer, which, while I didn't intend for that to be the case, I do find pretty amusing. Hopefully the events of this chapter will dispel that similarity, though. Enjoy.
Now, I don't want to say anything too prematurely, but: Bob Iger was just on the phone with my agent. Really. Still not sure whether he was suing me or handing over the rights to Zootopia, but I'll keep you posted.
Silence rang in Judy's ears as she screwed her eyes shut.
She was dead.
She had to be.
There was no way she could still be alive.
And yet she still felt the gentle breeze drifting through the forest against her cheek. The damp, cool mud beneath her feet.
The warmth of Nick's fur pressed up against her paw.
She opened her eyes and found herself staring straight into his. The by-now familiar black voids, wide and closer to her than they had ever come, hovered before her muzzle; the fox having turned his head to face her. A lump formed in her throat, and she hastily swallowed it back down.
The monster hadn't attacked – indeed, the only sign it had acknowledged her contact was a slight recoil - for which she was eminently thankful, but the difficult part was yet to come.
The serene babble of the stream beckoned her to lower in a paw, and she answered the call, dampening the hand she intended to use. As if to remind her that, on its terms, their dynamic had not changed, the beast bore its teeth, tinged yellow with two weeks' worth of unchecked plaque; but made no sound. Whether this was due to pain or confusion, Judy couldn't tell.
She flicked her paw a few times to shake off the excess moisture and raised it to Nick's eye level to allow him to observe what she was doing. This was not an area in which she had zero expertise: in her youth, her father, in his infinite paranoia, had gone to great lengths to teach her how to handle an encounter with an aggressive fox, and had even made her try out some defensive manoeuvres on a few of her siblings, much to their chagrin.
Nick's eyeline followed her paw as she began to reach towards the largest cuts on his back to clean them, prioritising the ones she had seen him licking. Those were the ones most likely to be infected.
Police officer, conductor, and now a doctor? There really isn't an end to your talents, is there, Carrots?
A playful grin. She whispered under her breath. "Well, to be fair, I did crash the train."
True. Come to think of it, your career with the fuzz didn't exactly go out on a high note, either.
Judy stiffened. Even her subconscious was betraying her now, spelling out her inadequacies in the voice of her friend.
Still, two out of three ain't bad.
The rabbit snapped herself out of it and continued searching for the first cut to address. "Says the popsicle hustler."
Hey, at least I held down the job for 20 years. That's what you call commitment.
She located her first target. "No, I'm pretty sure that's what you call desperation."
I think you're forgetting who's supposed to be the savage one here.
Judy chuckled and, parting what remained of the fur surrounding a particularly nasty gash on his torso, finally pressed her paw, slick with the cold liquid, to the injury.
The result was immediate. Something snapped inside the monster, which, having clearly decided it needed to reassert its dominance, let loose a resounding, guttural snarl and slashed a paw in her direction, claws bared. Judy, thinking fast, tumbled backwards onto the leaflitter and allowed the blow to swipe safely overhead. Her body might have been damaged, but she wasn't going to let the same happen to her reflexes.
The snarl diminished into a gentle rumbling noise, not unlike a purr, albeit more hostile, and Judy, her confidence bolstered, snapped upright again, fixing the fox with a steely glare.
"Hey, whoa. Easy."
The gaze was returned by much less expressive eyes, but ones which still burned with a fiery contempt. The beast's fangs remained visible and its hackles raised, but this time there came no objection, or at least a very negligible one, when she resumed daubing the wound. An infrequent snap of its jaws punctuated the otherwise silent atmosphere as she continued, moving from cut to cut and removing the dirt and sediment from each. Whenever her paw dried, she bent back down over the bank's edge and rewet it in the flowing brook.
She applied the same level of care and tenderness to the process that she had done when, way back in her childhood, her mother had laid weak and bedridden after her brother Terry had taken a chunk out of her arm, having been infected with Night Howlers. She'd brought Bonnie endless bowls of steaming carrot stew that she had made herself and sat by her bedside whenever she could, telling her mother stories about how she was going to make something of herself, how she was going to make the world a better place. Bonnie had always looked on with a warm, encouraging smile, contented that, out of her hundreds of children, she'd been blessed with just one like Judy.
If only they could have known what a crucial significance that whole ordeal would have over a decade later.
With every affliction she dealt with, Nick appeared to become gradually more comfortable with her presence, a fact which amazed her; she couldn't believe her luck, how receptive this volatile creature was being to her touch.
Maybe we can bump that up to four, Fluff. Officer, conductor, doctor, and now a masseur. You're running the gamut.
By now, she was onto the last few cuts. "Five, actually, if we're keeping count. Before you and I made up, I was a carrot farmer for a while back in Bunnyburrow."
Uh-huh. So I was right about that. Called it.
She sighed. "Yep. But you were wrong about something else."
Now this I've gotta hear.
"I did end up being a real- " She stopped herself. Had she been a real cop? Sure, she'd found all fourteen missing mammals and won the respect of Bogo...
That's kind of an achievement in itself, really.
... but when it had really mattered, when the fate of the city hung in the balance, she'd failed to catch the person responsible. She and Nick had made it out alive, but at what cost? Her closest friend since coming to Zootopia had been turned insane and committed, Bellwether was still running around, above suspicion, and she herself had wound up almost incapacitated for a while. Some cop you turned out to be, Judy.
Hey, don't sell yourself short, Carrots. I didn't see any other officers following up on their leads with as much dedication as you. Or any of your colleagues pushing through in the face of prejudice and a harsh 48-hour time limit. Or anyone at all sticking by me.
She sniffled, but didn't allow this to develop into tears, aware beneath the surge of emotion that she was still only hearing a figment of her imagination.
But she'd have been lying if she said it didn't help a little.
Fifteen years ago, if someone had told me that one of the most dependable, caring, understanding people I would ever have the pleasure of calling a friend was gonna be a cop, and a bunny too, I'd have laughed them off. Now, it doesn't seem so crazy anymore.
She wiped something out of her eye and smiled. "Whatever happened to 'never let them see that they get to you'?"
Well, you can't see me, can you?
Unable to fault this logic, Judy finished up, dipped her paws in the stream to dispel the clots of dried blood which had accumulated there, and turned to Nick, whose gaze had not fallen from her face throughout the whole thing.
The two simply sat there for what felt like an eternity, amethyst orbs reflected in glassy black. A faint echo of tension threatened to bubble up at the back of her mind, but she suppressed it and maintained eye contact.
And then, without a sound or the slightest acknowledgement of what had just transpired, the fox stood, turned, and limped off deeper into the woods. His tail, she noted, was no longer being held erect; it drooped downwards between his back haunches.
Judy was mildly affronted by this indifference. She muttered to herself. "You're welcome, slick."
Well, I don't know about you, Carrots, but if I were in your position, I'd have thought the fact I was still in one piece would be thanks enough.
Brushing a few strands of loose fur, both orange and grey, from her shirt, she staggered to her feet and stretched. She hadn't realised how long she'd been sitting in that awkward position, nor that the bottom of her shirt was soaked with water, but it clicked once she felt her lower body ache in protest. The bunny yawned and scratched her back, before turning her thoughts to her friend. It was, at this point, likely that he wasn't planning on returning to the cave anytime soon, and she wasn't about to lose him after coming this far. Thus, she was suddenly struck by a snap decision: she was going to follow him. At a safe distance.
She looked around her, and saw that Nick had left similar forensic evidence behind him as he'd slouched off – a clear trail of dried pelt hair, standing out garishly against the drab hues of the forest floor. Judy gave it a minute or so to be absolutely certain he'd had a head start, and started off in the direction he'd left in.
Twigs, fallen branches and the like snapped and crunched underfoot as she pressed onwards, her route unmissably marked by her partner's fallen coat. Eventually, she came to a series of bushes, at about waist height, that Nick, being quadrupedal, had evidently had to crawl under – the mud and dirt beneath the shrubbery was more dislodged here. Judy, however, despite her bad leg, was easily able to push them aside and climb over. This deposited her at the outskirts of a clearing, lined by rocks and with what appeared to be a slight incline at one end, and it was here that she saw him.
Judy crept over and, hiding herself behind a sizable boulder, stuck her head round the side cautiously. Her nose twitched curiously and her ears stood upright.
It was a pitiful sight. Far from the possessive, predatory gait with which he had chased her through Zootopia and picked her up from the crash site, Nick walked back and forth across the clearing in a manner which, had he been his usual self, Judy would have interpreted as denoting anguish. Her heart dropped as she caught a glimpse of his otherwise emotionless face as he paced: mangy, disorientated and, much more subtly, afraid.
Against her better judgment, she began making her way around the edge of the clearing, from rock to rock, in order to get a closer look. The underbrush suddenly became a minefield as she took considerable care not to tread on anything which might elicit a loud enough noise to tip Nick off to her presence.
Judy came to the rock nearest to where he was, at the end of the clearing where the incline lay. She looked behind her and examined the fall; while not especially steep, it still appeared to be a fair way down, and at the bottom lay an unpleasant assortment of thorny briars and bracken. She gulped, but swivelled her head back around to observe her friend again.
He continued to pace incessantly, pausing only to pick up a dislodged piece of tree bark unfortunate enough to be lying around and thrash it about in his jaws. Had it been prey, this would have been done to break its neck, but Judy, in a desperate attempt to anthropomorphise the monster, suspected that this outburst was down to frustration.
The rabbit squinted to focus her line of sight on his face, and found herself choking up when he turned round one more time for another length. She could have been mistaken, but the angle of the sun's rays falling onto his body made her almost certain. She saw something she hadn't seen in his eyes for weeks. Something which caused a swelling, soaring sensation somewhere deep inside her.
White.
In her excitement, Judy took a hasty step forwards. She didn't look where she placed her foot.
Snap.
Although in reality it was probably much quieter, the simple noise of the twig breaking seemed to resonate for miles. She gasped in horror and shrank down into the foetal position, praying to God that Nick hadn't heard.
He had.
Within seconds, the monster was up against the other side of the rock, clawing and swiping down at the terrified bunny who cowered below. She chanced a glance up, and it was instantly plain that any goodwill she had forged with it from cleaning its wounds had been vanquished.
And then she felt it again. Just like in the hospital parking lot, red sparks danced behind her pupils, and a powerful rush of adrenaline, combined with the bizarre sensation of weightlessness, washed over her. It was as though she was blacking out – being consumed by an inexorable force, slipping away from herself. Her uninjured leg, joined now by her neck, throbbed insistently. What the hell was wrong with her?
The sensation subsided, but not quite as fast this time, once the beast began snarling, about to climb over the boulder. Judy felt utterly boxed in, her escape routes to the left and right constituting hiding behind rocks that wouldn't hold the fox for a second. No. There was only one way out from here.
She closed her eyes and, for the second time that day, allowed herself to fall backwards.
The rabbit tumbled and cascaded down the hill, an agonising jolt of pain shooting up her thigh with every bump. Regardless, as she neared the bottom, she couldn't help but feel a slight note of satisfaction at her quick-thinking and intuition. That even though she was at a natural disadvantage, being prey, she hadn't lost her smarts or guile.
Then again, she wasn't the one unable to think clearly, still reeling from being juiced up on Night Howler toxins.
I'm not complaining. To be honest, these past few days I'm pretty sure I've had more exercise than I've had in total over the last 32 years. Sure does a body good.
Judy braced herself for impact, but was relieved to discover that, thanks to her light weight and supple build, the briars didn't hurt her as much as she'd thought they would. Instead, she crashed gently into the briar patch and rolled out from underneath it, only receiving a nick or two from a couple of well-placed thorns. And speaking of Nicks...
She scrambled to her feet and looked up, seeing that the monster was already halfway down the hill, its more agile form allowing it to sprint down the gradient with ease.
Not wasting a second, Judy turned and began to make a break for it. She had no clue where she was going, but so long as it was away from an untimely demise, she didn't care.
Until she heard him.
Piercing through the air, as clear as it had been that night in the police cruiser.
Nick was whining again.
She whirled around, forgetting her escape attempt entirely, and the sight made her eyes widen, her stomach clench and her heart seize up.
The fox thrashed wildly, ensnared in the thorns and branches, whimpering as the cruel jagged plants dug ever deeper into his already-weakened flesh.
But as morbid and upsetting as this image was, Judy's gaze, now misted over, was drawn to his face.
To the branches that, due to the force of his impact, had wrapped themselves tightly around his snout, rendering him unable to open his jaws.
And now, time for a little ditty I like to call: 'Painfully Dragging Up Traumatic Childhood Memories.'
He'd been muzzled.
I'd teach you the words, but you clearly already know them, Judy.
Without a second thought, she was at his side, valiantly fighting back the flood of distress that threatened to burst her dam of stoicism. He growled a little in warning, but this soon gave way to further yelps of pain, which only fuelled her determination.
Ignoring the stinging in her front paws as the thorns penetrated her skin, Judy tugged at each branch, snapping them with difficulty and slowly freeing Nick. He snorted in tandem with each removal, in very obvious relief.
Finally, she came to those restraining his jaws. If she was being honest with herself, she wasn't completely sure she wanted to do this. If she did, she'd be a sitting bunny for him if he decided to continue the assault.
One last whimper, the sincerest one she'd yet heard, made the decision for her.
With an almighty heave, Judy pulled, and the branch fell away, but not without first scraping the top of Nick's snout, leaving a deep gash. She backed away immediately and clasped a paw over her mouth as she watched him disentangle himself, blood oozing from the wound she had just created. Oh, God. What have I done?
Let me answer that one for you, Carrots. You did the right thing.
The fox shook off the remaining briars and limped over to her, evidently having lost all interest in the chase. He made no attempt to lick or address the new cut, but instead simply adopted the usual glassy expression, sat down, and stared straight into her.
It took her a few moments, but then it hit her.
Judy rolled up part of the lower hem of her shirt, still moist with the stream's water, and, bunching it up into her fist, fashioned a small handkerchief of sorts. Something told her Nick wouldn't lash out this time and, without a moment's hesitation, she began to clean the gash. No reaction.
She wiped away the blood, reducing it to a dribble, and tenderly extracted a couple of wayward thorns lodged in the surrounding area. All the way through, Nick refused to break eye contact.
With one final wipe, she finished the job, and allowed her shirt to unfurl itself back down her torso. The fox continued to stare and Judy, testing her luck now, gingerly stretched out one paw and rested it on his head.
He and the bunny stood motionless for a minute or so, her paw making light back-and-forth motions atop his crown, until eventually he stood, shot her one last glance, and trudged off into the wilderness.
Judy, awed by what had just happened, watched him leave.
His tail no longer hid between his legs.
So, in other news: we've hit over 100 followers! Ain't that a thing of beauty? Seriously, though, much gratitude to all of you. I know I say it a lot, but that's only because I mean it. Short of getting sappy on everyone: thanks. It makes my day to see that number crawl ever higher.
As ever, reviews are appreciated! Hope you enjoyed this instalment, and see you in the next one. Whichever decade it happens to be written in, amirite? I'm kidding. I hope.