DISCLAIMER: I was on my way to put the deed in the mail, when I got tripped up by a fox Not Nick unfortunately. This one was being chased by a pair of dogs and a crazy man waving around a shotgun. I got the heck out of there and haven't seen the deed since.
Special Thanks to GusTheBear and TheoreticallyEva for editing this chapter!
"So, are you going to be OK?"
Marian's concern for her son and his mate was genuine. They'd been put through the ringer last weekend, first with the attack on the districts, then with the raids and Judy's subsequent injury. Outwardly, they looked fine, if you ignored the occasional wince when Judy moved the wrong way, or the strained way in which she sometimes spoke. It wasn't pronounced, and if you weren't listening for it, you wouldn't notice it.
It set all the vixen's maternal alarm bells screaming. She'd started thinking of Judy as the daughter she never had not long after their first meal together, a feeling reinforced by watching how the two interacted with each other. Seeing the doe occasionally struggling with some of the most basic tasks, including breathing, the vixen just wanted to take the rabbit's pain onto herself.
All told, however, Marian was glad for the company. While she loved the time Bert and Elizabeth spent at the safe house, ostensibly to keep her safe and looked out for but also to chat with on a more personal level, she missed being able to take a walk in the park or even just visit her son. MuzzleTime was OK, but it lacked the genuineness of a face-to-face meeting, something Judy had been quick to agree on when the vixen mentioned it.
"We'll be fine, Mom. I'm just not looking forward to the mandatory therapy sessions or the psych evals. Neither of us are." Nick frowned.
"What about Judy? She…She killed a mammal. That's not something to be taken lightly, Nicky." The vixen turned her worried eyes on the doe in question, and she couldn't help but notice that after a few seconds, Judy averted her gaze.
"We talk about it every night, Mom. It's… I hate that I can't really know what she's going through right now. I mean, I know that Ramses was a piece of croc…I mean, a piece of scum, but, well, you know Judy."
Marian nodded. She did know Judy. Rather than respond with words, she pulled the doe into a gentle hug, careful not to put any pressure on her and cause her pain or discomfort. She held Judy there for a long time, then pulled back and stared her in the eyes. A small part of her brain was still impressed that the doe didn't even blink, meeting the larger predator's piercing gaze with her own. Marian moved her paws up to cup the doe's face. "If you ever need to talk, Judy, please, I'm here for you. Just like Nicky. You aren't alone in this, no matter how much you might feel that way."
Judy nodded, but Marian could still see the emotional pain in the doe's eyes. After a while, Judy excused herself to visit the bathroom, leaving Marian with just her son for a few moments. "Are you doing OK, Nicky?"
The fox tod's shoulders slumped. "I don't know, Mom. My instincts are kicking me for not protecting her, and now she's hurt. On the flip side, I know she was the one that protected me, and we're both still here because of that."
Marian nodded. "That's the important part, Nicky. You're both still here. Judy will heal, and you'll both be back in shape in no time."
The tod nodded. "That is, assuming the Internal Affairs investigation doesn't decide to throw us to the crocodiles."
Judy returned at that point, sitting down at the kitchen table with the other two, in her fox's lap. Marian smiled at how easily they fell into that kind of affection. When she was dating the fox that would eventually become her husband and Nick's father, it took months before she was ready to show the kind of affection in front of others that seemed to come so naturally to her son and his doe. Of course, once she'd broken that barrier, they could barely keep their paws to themselves at times. They'd married a year later in a humble ceremony with only her family and Jonathan's, as well as a couple friends from both sides.
Idly, Marian wondered what kind of ceremony Judy and Nicky would have. She'd looked up rabbit marriage customs online, but the information had been surprisingly contradictory. In some families, it was customary to invite the entire extended family. On the other paw, some rabbits only invited their parents and closest siblings, and their siblings' families if they were married.
Knowing Judy had over three hundred siblings, Marian suspected her family of being in the latter group. She couldn't imagine paying for three hundred siblings, likely a quarter or more of whom were married, plus aunts, uncles, grandparents, and cousins. Just the thought of all that had made the vixen lightheaded at the time.
Still, even with such a daunting wedding prospect, she would gladly be a part of it. Before Judy came along, she'd given up hope of ever seeing her only kit get married to the female he loved. Just another way the doe currently running her paws through her son's tail had changed the lives of the Wilde family… A family to which she would welcome the doe.
"How's your case going, Mom?" Nick's voice jarred the vixen from her thoughts.
Marian shook her head. "I'm not actually sure," she sighed. "Mr. Ford thinks defending the charges against me will be a bit of an uphill battle. He said something about any potential jury or judge being poisoned, metaphorically speaking."
Nick and Judy both winced at that, before Nick voiced what they were both thinking. "It's because your name was smeared, wasn't it?"
Marian nodded. "Mr. Ford said that by doing that, mammals are going to judge me before we even get to the hearings."
Both the younger mammals made equally disgusted faces, though Nick's also held a note of unsurprise. It was a well-known fact that foxes weren't treated well by the court system.
"The plan is to counter the charges with lawsuits of our own backed with the police evidence." Marian turned to her son. "Mr. Ford tells me that it's a very good thing that Judy was with you when I handed it over and that you both immediately turned it over to your detectives. Otherwise there would be a question of compromised chain of custody."
That made the mammals faces perk up, but Marian decided to change the subject. "So, what have you two been up to all week?"
Judy rolled her eyes. "Vegging out in front of the TV, mostly. I can't do much of anything else. Not without the fox police getting all worried and protective." She sent a glare at Nick, though Marian could tell the doe was only teasing.
Nick put his paw over his heart. "I'm crushed, Carrots. The fox police only wanted what was best for you so that you could be back in top fighting shape in no time, and the fox police could become the fox-and-bunny police!"
"Offering to help me brush my teeth? Really?"
Nick cringed. "OK, that may have been a little much."
"And slicing my carrots into bite-sized chunks?"
An affronted look now crossed the fox's face. "The recipe called for it! You can't blame that on me!"
"And what about the time you—"
Nick's face turned to one of horror, and he held up a paw. "OK, I'm going to stop you right there, Fluff!"
"—insisted you change the disc in the movie player instead of me?" The doe grinned.
The horror turned to relief. "Oh, OK, that isn't what I thought you were going to say."
Judy laughed quietly, even wincing at that as her chest disagreed with the action. Marian, meanwhile, had been looking back and forth between the two, her head going left and right like she was watching a tennis match. It ended up making her dizzy, and she dropped her head into her paws. "You two are ridiculous."
Nick made a funny face. "Oh, come on, Mom, you can't tell me you and Dad didn't goof around."
Marian's face turned contemplative. "Well, one of us did. The other was the strait-laced one."
Judy giggled. "That sounds a lot like us, Slick." She punched Nick in the thigh.
"Yeah, except I'm the straight one, and you are the goofball." The fox rubbed the spot she'd hit and winked at her.
"As if! If anything, I'm the straight one!" The doe made an adorable pout.
It obviously didn't work on Nick, because he burst out laughing, and Marian was quick to follow. Much as she might have tried, the mock-pout look didn't have the effect the doe wanted, and eventually, she, too, broke out into a fit of giggles that she tried to subdue after a few seconds.
After the trio had calmed down and the giggles subsided, Marian got up to head to the refrigerator. "Can I fix you two anything for lunch?"
Judy shook her head. "I think we'll be OK, Marian."
No sooner had she said this, though, then a loud growling sound reverberated through the room. Marian turned to stare in shock at the younger two mammals. Nick was staring at the doe in his lap with an expression that told Marian he was doing everything he could to hold in his laughter, while Judy's ears were flat down her back, the insides flaming red.
Marian adopted a serious expression. "That beast sounds horribly dangerous. I think we'd better feed it."
Nick couldn't keep the laughter in any longer, and neither could Marian. Both burst out in side-splitting peals of laughter as the doe did her best to hide behind her large ears and pretend she was invisible.
Bogo felt like he was walking into a foreign world as he walked back up the drive to his house. It was the first time he'd been home since the crisis had started, having taken to camping out on the sofa in his office. It seemed everything, everyone, everywhere demanded his attention, and nothing he did would lessen the load.
After dealing with the report from that IA agent, Charles Bucks, Bogo had decided that he needed some time at home, and he had left his deputy chief—the captain of Savannah Central's Precinct Three—in charge of operations for a while. Bogo would still be required to sit in on any city-wide decisions, but Deputy Chief Captain Raymond Stuart could handle the day-to-day responsibilities for a few hours, under the orders that officers were to continue focusing on search-and-rescue missions. With every building in the Rainforest and Canal Districts swept, the operation had shifted entirely to finding the roaming mammals that had escaped.
Bogo was under no illusions, though. He knew that that was the largest, most difficult part of trying to bring an end to all this. A savage mammal could be lost in the districts for weeks, even finding their way out into other districts or out of the city entirely.
One of the other tasks the Cape buffalo had given his deputy was to obtain the cargo manifests of all the ships still anchored offshore and all road and rail deliveries that were held up. Once he had that, the police and fire chiefs could work on a strategy to start allowing some trade and commerce to resume. Top of the list, Bogo knew, would be medical supplies, with hospitals already running low on many of the high-use items, and, of course, Night Howler antidote was nowhere to be found, having run out days ago. Even under pressure, though, Furston had refused to release the antidote formula, and several families and corporations had threatened to take their concerns and grievances concerning that to their lawyers.
Bogo suspected that Furston was not going to enjoy the outcome of this whole debacle, and some part of his mind wondered if the company's insurers were already looking for a way out.
The chief made his way up his walk to his front door, all the thoughts of the last week bouncing around in his head. He barely had time to pull his keys out before the door was unlocked and flung open, his wife enveloping him in her arms.
"I didn't know if you'd be coming home today, Adrian," she said. "Is everything OK at the station?"
The two stepped into their foyer, Bogo hanging up his jacket and then following his wife into the living room. "Things are as bad as ever, Emily. Honestly, we aren't going to see the end of this for a while." He sighed. "Even if we manage to find all of the mammals that have gone missing, and no one else is hurt, you've seen the economic projections for the city."
Emily nodded. The city's stock market had plummeted, and economists predicted that the fallout of the attack would last for months, or even years, and that unemployment would soar. She'd been one of the mammals to make that prediction for her own workplace, the Fairview Resort on the outskirts of Savannah Central, where she was the general manager. The resort was generally catered towards the rich and famous and relied heavily on tourism. Celebrities, business tycoons, big-shot executives, and rich socialites who rode on their fathers' fortunes were their clientele, and that had all but disappeared.
Bogo looked up at his wife. "What are your mammals saying at the resort?"
Emily shrugged. "Pool and spa facilities are closed indefinitely. The demand for pool servicemammals is apparently astronomical right now. Everybody is trying to get their pools cleaned and decontaminated. The large mammal golf course is also closed. The sprinklers were on when the attack happened, and we need to have an environmental assessment done before we can reopen it. We've also lost sixty percent of our bookings for the next year, just in the last week." She sighed. "I am going to have to lay off at least half my staff and close half of the floors in the hotel just to keep it afloat." She shrugged. "Maybe this could be a good time to do the renovation that the owner wants."
Bogo chuckled quietly. "Right now, spending money on hotel upgrades doesn't really seem like a wise choice, but if the owner is so intent on it, that's his decision." The Cape buffalo police chief lost any mirth he felt. "Honestly, tourism is probably going to be one of the slowest to bounce back. You remember how slow that was to recover after the gang wars."
Emily nodded. "It took about five years."
"Right. This is probably going to take a lot longer. It's…pretty bad out there." The last part was spoken so quietly, Emily barely heard it.
"I know the news is awful, but what's it like for your mammals?" Emily reached out her hoof to lay it on her larger husband's forearm.
"Bad doesn't begin to describe it. I have officers working twenty-four-hour shifts, medical supplies have run out or are dangerously low, companies pushing to open things up, and even mammals protesting the lockdowns." The chief sighed. "I've lost a few officers, too. None at headquarters, but around the city. And quite a few in the hospital all over the city."
"I know you told me about Benjamin. Who else?"
"At headquarters? Francine Pennington. They both just got out. Pennington should be clocking back in right about now, but Clawhauser has some rehab to go through."
Emily Bogo just shook her head, trying to wrap her head around the events of the last week. She only knew what the news told her and what little her husband shared, but of course, that was more than enough to paint a horrifying picture. Adrian didn't often talk about the cases that went through the ZPD, but he did occasionally let things out.
She knew why, and she didn't blame him. She wasn't a member of the department, and if he was ever caught having shared information with her that she wasn't supposed to know, she knew it could jeopardize whatever case it happened to be. Still, she was able to fill in most of the blanks on her own, and she never pried.
Even so, something tugged at the back of her mind. "What's bothering you, Adrian?"
The chief of police let out a long sigh, staying silent for a long moment. "I'm worried about the effect this is having on my mammals. Everyone that's fit for duty—and quite a few who aren't technically fit but are still out there—are pushing themselves past the limit. How many am I—are we—going to lose to a breakdown? Or quit because they can't cope? How many are going to get discharged because some psychologist deemed them mentally unfit for service?" He paused. "How many are going to decide that life just isn't worth living anymore?"
Emily shuddered at that thought. She'd met many of Adrian's officers at various gatherings over the years. Most recently, it was the ZPD staff Christmas party, where she'd met the tiny bunny officer in his charge. She didn't want to think of any of them giving up on…everything. "You'll do what you can to help them, though, right?"
Her husband's look became intense. "Of course. Even if I have to pry the funds out of city hall. I won't let my mammals be forgotten in all this."
Francine Pennington stared at her badge, wondering if she even deserved to wear it. The whole raid had gone sideways on Saturday, and she couldn't help but blame herself. She hadn't been paying enough attention, and they'd gotten her with a dose of Night Howler. The last thing she remembered was feeling uncontrollable fear and rage before everything went red.
Her colleagues told her that she'd trashed a few cruisers and civilian cars before someone had hit her with a tranquilizer dart. Flashes of memory occasionally invaded her consciousness, mostly involving her colleagues yelling something incomprehensible or diving out of her way, or the crunch of metal and glass as she hit a car in her path.
The last week had been torture for her, recovering from the Night Howler and street drug exposure while being bombarded with the most depressing news coverage she'd ever seen. She still didn't know all the details—just what the news had released and what she'd been able to pick up in the day leading up to the raid that had taken her out. The scope and scale horrified her, though. Tens of thousands, dead? Untold numbers missing or wounded? And all because some small group of mammals didn't like predators?
The idea was completely alien to her. She'd been around predators all her life and never had any reason to treat them as anything other than the individuals they were. Of course, she did have to admit that her size gave her an intimidation factor that most other mammals didn't have, so most mammals simply steered clear of her.
A knock on the locker room door shook her out of her thoughts, and she looked up to see Liz Fangmeyer standing in the doorway watching her. "You doing OK there, Francine? You've been staring at your badge for the last five minutes. I know they're shiny, but they aren't that mesmerizing, are they?"
The big elephant shook her head. "Just trying to wrap my head around all this, Liz. The idea that someone could hate a group of mammals so much they'd murder so many."
The tigress shook her head. "Don't even try to figure that out, Fran. I tried and I almost ended up in the hospital with you. Heck, I had to listen to their reasoning and their inane rambling, and it made about as much sense to me as quantum physics."
The elephant broke into a small smile. "You mean you don't understand quantum physics? I always thought you were smart."
The tigress rolled her eyes and walked over to the bench, sitting down next to the much larger mammal. "Well, if you ask the group that did this, I'm just a stupid murderous predator pretending to be a civilized mammal. Apparently, I'm not capable of love or any other emotion other than basic instinct, either, so I guess I might just try and eat you." Liz's tone of voice told the elephant that she was mostly kidding around, though there was more in it than that.
"What about you, my favourite tigress?" Francine asked. "I sense some anger there."
"We've been working around the clock here to try and find all of the missing mammals… All of the savage ones…. God, there are so many things from this week I wish I could unsee or forget. I keep seeing this one house, though, that I visited right after the attack… The whole inside was smeared in blood, and the whole family killed, except for the baby. She's OK now, but she'll grow up without her parents or her siblings. They're all gone. And that was just the start of this." Elizabeth was silent for a few seconds. "Part of me wishes I had gone 'savage' on those monster's asses when we brought them in Saturday morning."
The elephant blinked at that, shocked that the normally kind, empathic tigress was wishing such harm on someone else. Then again, if the news was to be believed, the number of deaths they'd caused went well beyond anything anyone had experienced in recent history. She stared down at the smaller mammal. "You'd just make martyrs of them."
The feline nodded. "You're right. It did give me a sort of morbid satisfaction to imagine it, though, after what I'd seen up 'til then."
Francine sat for a moment and processed that. "It would, but that kind of satisfaction would probably only be temporary." She fiddled with her badge again. "I guess I should be glad I spent most of my time in the hospital. First from exposure to Rage, then Night Howler. The doctors said the latent effects of the Rage was why they kept me in—they wanted to study the aftereffects of the double exposure. There were so many researchers that visited me." The elephant let out a small sigh before continuing. "The whole time, I wished I was out here helping out."
Fangmeyer shook her head. "The best place for you was in the hospital getting healthy. From what I hear, a whole bunch of officers have been benched after a savage encounter." The tigress shrugged. "Maybe the information the doctors get from you will help save civilians down the road, or even develop a cure or immunization or something."
The elephant had to concede the point. If there was a way for mammals to be made completely immune to Night Howlers, then a few days in the hospital wasn't so bad, she figured. She wasn't a scientist by any stretch of the imagination, but if there was a possibility, then someone would figure it out.
Francine stood and shut her locker before pinning her badge on her chest. "What's on the docket today?"
Fangmeyer stood as well, straightening out her uniform. "Probably more searches for missing mammals. For most of us, that's just about all the brass have us doing, but then again, you're fresh on the force after being in the hospital, so it's possible they have you doing something else. Assignments are in our mailboxes, though, since Bogo actually took part of the day off."
"Wait, what?! Bogo took a day off?"
"Shocking, isn't it? He's been here non-stop since the crisis began, a week ago. He told Sergeant Higgins that he needed to see his wife after all this. He'll probably be back this evening."
Francine snorted. "That's a first. I was certain the chief would have just moved into his office permanently. What about everyone else?" She gestured to the smaller mammal that they should talk while they walked, and she headed out of the locker room.
"Most are on missing mammal searches during their shifts. Third shift's on road patrol, and second shift's on blockades, for the most part. Everybody's pulling some crazy hours to try to get this all under control. The only ones from our precinct that weren't were Delgato—he just got back yesterday and he's working with the second shift—Clawhauser, who was hospitalized—and Nick and Judy. Judy took a bullet in the chest plate and is out for the count for a while, and Nick's taking care of her."
That last fact alarmed the elephant, and she stopped right in the middle of the hallway. "Judy got hurt?"
"She'll be fine. The mammal that hurt her didn't like her retaliation, though. One-way ticket to the coroner's office."
"Was that mammal one of the…?"
"He slipped out of our warehouse raid, and WildeHopps engaged him in a chase all the way to Tundratown, complete with bullets flying wild-west style." The tigress was careful about her choice of words, not wanting to imply that anything was Francine's fault. It wasn't.
"Wild-west style? You mean, erratic driving while shooting, ridiculous amounts of spent ammunition, bullet holes everywhere style?"
Fangmeyer laughed. "That's pretty much the gist of it. You should have seen their cruiser. It looked like Swiss cheese. I'm actually shocked Judy kept it going as long as she did. It died when she and Nick finally stopped the getaway vehicle."
"Wow. I'm glad they stopped them, though. I'd hate to think what might happen if they got away and started up someplace else."
"That was what the detectives in charge said. They'd organized everything on Saturday in an effort to bring the whole organization down all at once."
The two continued chatting about the events of the prior weekend as the elephant pulled her assignment envelope out of her mailbox, opened, it, and read the contents. "Looks like I'm on road patrol today. Catch you later?"
The tigress waved to the elephant as the larger mammal exited the room to head down to the garage. Fangmeyer herself was left alone in the mail room with her own thoughts. The dark thoughts she'd had earlier about going savage on the terrorists were amplified in the case of Doug Ramses, and she knew that the department therapists were going to have a field day with that.
Pulling out her own envelope, she read the contents, sighed, and headed out for another very long shift of finding and chasing savage mammals. It wasn't that she didn't like the work, but it was incredibly depressing and a constant reminder of the evil that had lurked under the city without anyone knowing. It was up to her and her colleagues—her extended family—to fight back that evil.
Less than one week in, and Felicity Stang already hated her new station in life. When she wasn't being seen by the attorney the city had provided, she spent most of her time mopping floors, emptying the kitchen muck buckets, or other cleaning tasks. Welcome to the life of a felon.
One of the first things she'd been asked by the other inmates was what she was in for. When she answered terrorism and mass murder, it seemed to trigger something in the other inmates, and most gave her a wide berth, while others looked on her as some sort of idol. She suspected there was some unspoken prison hierarchy that she had yet to understand. It hadn't even occurred to her to research that at any point, since, until recently, she never thought she'd end up here.
One thing she for which she was thankful, though, was the fact that no one seemed to recognize her. She'd been the only female in her cell and had never interacted with any of the other cells—she wasn't even sure how many there were—so the chances of meeting another inmate who knew her were slim at best. What worried her most was whether the ZPD had gotten everyone. She knew that hits had been ordered against mammals with loose lips, and she was one of them. If any of the higher-ups were still out there, and they knew she'd talked to police, she was a dead mustang living on borrowed time.
In an effort to shorten her stay in the prison system and at least give her a chance at freedom later in life, her attorney was going to formulate his defense plan around the fact that she was integral in bringing down the group of which she'd once been a part. At 30 years old, she'd need to have an insanely lenient judge and jury to be able to get out before retirement age. Her attorney was at least a bit more confident about that than she was.
As she emptied yet another muck bucket, she couldn't help but lament on how far she'd fallen. She'd been a neurologist at Zootopia General, and after being fired for refusing to see or treat predators, it had begun a long slide downhill for her. Hindsight is 20/20, and while she knew now that being fired was the right thing for everyone, what she did next was inexcusable—joining what was now branded as a terrorist group as a way to justify her beliefs at the time. As a result of that, here she was, dumping mouldy, smelly, spoiled food into a larger container for disposal, her every move watched and analyzed by the hundreds of security cameras scattered all over the building.
Her brooding was interrupted by a guard calling her name. She shook her head and turned to the voice. Apparently, she was being summoned to the visitor's room. The mare handed her supplies over to another inmate without saying a word and turned to follow the guard. She'd learned very early on not to bother asking guards anything, because you'd just get stoic silence or a rude comment in reply.
The two made their way through the security gates to the visitors' room. Upon entering, though, the mustang let out a sigh, seeing her attorney and not looking forward to yet another session of regurgitating the details she'd already given several times already.
A/N
Well, another one back on the force, and Bogo finally has a moment to let his mask drop. Marian, Nick and Judy seem to be doing well too.
Thanks to everyone who wished me well work wise. Things are still coming, but slowly, and I can still balance my checkbook, so long as I don't spend all my money on a vacation XD.
Check AO3 or DeviantArt for a link to this story's official Discord server!
One person got the reference in the last chapter! Can you find any in this one?
Coming up on October 30: Many Happy Returns!
Questions? Critiques? Did Amos Slade try to shoot your tail off? Leave a comment!
