Chapter Eighty-Nine
Claustrophobic Catharsis

The doors to the CT scanning room pushed open, and a medical bed was wheeled inside, by a small team of medical staff. The front most of them turned and paced towards the waiting badger, nodding at him as she stepped close. "Doctor Dasse," Flo acknowledged to her superior, "nothing much to report. Some physiological and psychological stress, but on the whole: she's following expected recovery patterns."

"Thank you, Nurse. Do you think she'll be able to be brought back into consciousness briefly?"

"Yes, Doctor."

"Good. See to it. If she can't be woken up sufficiently, we'll have to give her a sedative. We can't risk her waking up in the middle of a scan if she's not been briefed. She could cause herself serious injury in her panic."

"I understand." The hare turned back towards the medical bed and the small, bandage-wrapped figure before her. She nodded at the medical staff scattered around. "Back to your duties," she said, "thanks for the assistance."

When the last of the unnecessary attendants had filtered from the room, Nurse Flo moved close towards the side of the rabbit's bed, softened her voice and lowered herself a little to Judy — even dropping her ears behind her head to make herself look less tall and imposing.

"Miss Hopps? Judy Hopps?" Clearing her throat, the hare raised the tone of her voice a few notches. "Carrots?" Hopps' expression flinched, her consciousness drawn from introverted roaming. Her eyes pulled open, and she focused on the figure of a hare with sharp, intelligent blue eyes leaning over her.

"Judy, I'm sorry for waking you, but we're here at the CT scanner; I want to just briefly run you through what it is and how it works, to try and avoid discomfort. How are you feeling?"

"I… I feel okay th-anks."

Flo smiled warmly. "Don't force yourself to recover more quickly than you need to," she whispered before returning to manners more professional. "The Computerized Tomography scanner is an advanced X-ray that can see bones, tissues and blood vessels. It uses a system of high-energy waves, similar to a standard X-ray, except much less dangerous, and usable for far more detailed iconography. The process is completely safe, though it will be quite discomforting. We're going to need to put you into a small tube with limited space, and the machine will make some very loud and unsettling noises. You will be given earplugs for the noise, and I'll need you to hold this."

Reaching behind herself with her paw, the hare showed the rabbit a small, hollow plastic ball connected to a long pipe to the rest of the machine. "Hold onto this," she said, indicating the ball. "If you want the procedure to stop, squeeze it tightly. The air pressure will go down the pipe and alert us in the control room, and we'll stop the procedure as quickly as is safely possible."

Judy nodded, softy, holding up a paw towards the hare — though only managing to raise her arm a short way — before the hare reached at her and slipped the plastic device into her paw.

"I will be unable to be in here with you. I, and Doctor Dasse, will be in the next room along monitoring you. The scanner will rotate around the area of your head, inside the ring-shaped machine, recording X-ray images and assembling them into a three-dimensional representation of your body, which will be examined by a consultant radiologist. For the noise, you will be required to wear these mufflers, through which you will also receive information as the examination progresses. It's also very important you stay completely still while inside, to ensure the images are as clear and useful as they can be. Are you ready to start the examination?"

"Yes. Thank you."

Flo nodded and lowered the mufflers over the rabbit's ears, smiling softly. She and the other remaining nurse stepped to the head of Judy's bed. The hare adjusted a setting which lowered the bed by a few inches; before, the two of them moved the rabbit's bed in line with a large piece of medical machinery.

It was a very bulky object, though it was protected by neat, clean-looking white-plastic panels. It rose up several feet off the floor, its top a large dome with a hole in its center just wide enough for the bed to wheel its way in.

"I realize this is alarming," the nurse added as the bed started moving inside the narrow stomach of the large device, "look straight up and out the other end." She did; it didn't help. The low, slim hole of the CT machine looming like a dark, all-consuming cloud around the rabbit's small, exhausted body.

Judy's breaths hitched, the large machine hissing a rhyme tune as pistons worked somewhere inside. She look directly up, focusing her gaze on the light at the other side of the small tube inside the machine, trying not to focus on the dark wall all around her or that her movements were now in the paws of a machine.

So vulnerable: too weak to really move; in too much pain to feel able to escape. Nurse Flo called something reassuring to the rabbit as the bed slid into its final resting place, and then Judy heard the door shut as the hare left the room.

"Okay," came a sudden male's voice over her earphones, "we're beginning the machine now. Please keep calm."

A glare-groaning reaction abruptly emerged, the deep sound all around the rabbit's body, far louder than the mufflers were able to cancel out. Judy's whole frame flinched at the sudden volume around her, the dark shapes of the inside of the machine intoxicating her calm. The groan became a low, angry tone which shook with jittering throbs, its pitch changing disorientatingly from higher to lower, and higher again.

A long minute passed for the rabbit; a strange tingling sensation grew in her skull, like small feet running around the inside of her mind; the fur around her forehead started feeling as though it was hot — though, Judy realized, she couldn't be sure if either of those sensations were real or just her mind playing tricks with her.

She closed her eyes and tried to keep her breathing natural, tried to keep her pulse down — reminded herself that nothing was of issue and tha—

The tone of the vibrating sound changed abruptly, and made a high-pitched noise which grated on the nerves. It was the same tone as a siren, exactly the same noise as a piece of equipment going very badly wrong to broken. Her eyes darting open again, her breaths heaving in suppressed anxiety, the rabbit's unsettled gaze flicked across the low ceiling which hung just inches above her face. The idea came to the rabbit's mind that the ceiling was lowering towards her, or that the bed was rising up, and that she was going to be suffocated by the cold, hard surface around her, its dark shapes casting a shadow over her body with the sensation of its mechanical pressure lowering towards her, swarming her mind.

She reached a paw out impulsively and pressed it against the surface above her. She knew she had to keep as still as she could, but the urge overtook her ability to reason. She pressed her paw against the surface, felt its cold, unmoving hardness and sighed a breath. She lowered her paw, her eyes fell shut and she breathed deeply and slowly.

The feeling of motion was just her mind playing tricks, just a small idea which had infested her mind into believing it to be true. The sound of the alarm — it couldn't be an alarm at all, the nurse or someone else would have come by this point if something was seriously wrong.

Holding herself still, the rabbit allowed her exhaustion to slip into something like trying to go to sleep, accepting yet ignoring the sounds that surrounded her, forgoing the fear of the enshrouding shadows for the darkness of her own closed eyes.

The vibrations were just a part of the scan. The sensation of movement was imagined. There was nothing wrong, nothing to be afraid of. A thin smile crept across the rabbit's face, spreading across her mind in the bloom of a soft giggle. "Just fear itself," she muttered, quietly.

She lay there silently. The pitch changed again to a mid-toned buzz. The two-tone sound of the frequency waves of the CT machine, the counterbalancing hiss of the pistons, the deep, monotone rumble of the whole machine itself… it all cajoled her body to turn off and her mind to drift into a peaceful, light sleep. The noise that surrounded her started to feel oddly… 'musical', or at the very least hypnotic.

Her breaths slowed. The sensation of movement didn't reduce, but felt as though shifting from the instilling a sensation of dread to one of relaxation — like rocking soothingly, softly in a crib.

Against all the anxiety and discomfort of a few moments ago, the rabbit's expression relaxed, her tightly closed eyes soothed to just simply being closed, her body released its tension, her breaths slowed, and she dipped smoothly, into a decent, shallow sleep.

…

The waiting room, to the everlasting surprise of Wolfard, was not, as the rest of Saint Bernard's had been, coated on every surface in white. The white walls and white ceiling with white strip bulbs were all still present, but the surface of this floor was fitted with rough, industrial gray carpet. There were a few works of classical artwork on the walls, fine-brushstroke paintings of a gentle sea, a forest of luscious green, a crystal lake… to the wolf's mind, it felt as though all the pieces had be chosen to keep the visitors-waiting feel calm and sanguine, to prevent them from worrying about what 'might be' or the goings on behind the closed, 'by-admittance-only doors'.

Talking of people worrying, he shifted from the painting of an old-style church in winter, and looked at the fox who sat alone in one of the few hundred chairs which lined the walls and corridored the floor. That all assembled, it turned the wide, empty room to almost a maze of columns and rows of chairs, all sized for medium-sized people such as them and Judy — the other sizes being in other wards of Saint Bernard's, the largest hospital in Zootopia, and probably one of the largest in the world, depending on how one measured it.

When he looked around to see the fox sat in a chair against the wall, he was glad to find him actually glancing about at the surroundings and the other people around them, rather than just staring into his lap worrying about Judy. Wolfard smiled as he saw this, pacing the few steps over to the fox and making to sit down. For an instant, he moved to take the obvious choice of sitting with one seat between them — just to give the fox a respectful distance; it was hardly like they were short on space — but he changed his mind in the speck of the moment, and sat down in the seat directly next to him.

The wolf glanced in the fox's direction, just to see if he'd get a reaction before gazing back out before them — joining the fox in his quiet observation of the lives going on about, with the main reception desk and the front doors into the hospital clearly visible from where they sat.

Wolfard was drawn from his inner thoughts a few moments later, sensing the fox beside him making an intake of breath and turning to him just as he began to speak, "Hey, Wool, you ever play— well, you won't have. I made it up, but you might know something like it… a game I call 'Observation'?"

"Erh… no? What's that?"

"Pretty simple, really, you just look around, look for some person who looks kinda interesting, and just… figure them out. Look at their clothes, what they're doing, what they're not doing, how they're interacting with the people around them and… just, try and figure them out. Mostly it's clothes and body language stuff, sometimes you can catch bits of what they're saying too if you're lucky."

"Isn't it, erh… like, 'dangerous' to make assumptions about suspects just based on what they're wearing? I mean, they said that back in the academy, about trying to guess everything about some guy just by how they look."

"Yeah-yeah, this ain't no Sherlock-Bones substitute to detective work, just a little game I used to play. Had a lot of free time back when I was young, lotta time spent in my room with the door locked… just watching the people go by, wondering who they were, what they were like, the lives they lived..."

Wool stared solemnly at the fox, the deeper meaning of his words sinking clearly into his mind. He'd assumed some time ago, after months of never meeting, seeing or hearing of his parents, that there was something down that line Wilde didn't like touching upon, but Wool thus gathered all he needed to know about Wilde's past from this small statement. "Erh," he said, shaking himself from his thoughts, "sure-sure, I'll give it a go. Don't know how good I'll—"

"It's not about being 'good' or 'bad', Wool. You can't be wrong. All you can do is try and figure out what the most plausible, the most logical conclusion from what you see. Take that cougar over there… you see him?"

"The, erh… one in the brown suit?"

"Yeah. What can you tell me about him?"

"Eh, mid… seventies? Maybe? Pretty nice suit, probably in business. Erh… can't tell if he's wearing a wedding ring or anything from here. Guess he's, kinda skinny? So, erm… that-that kinda the idea of what we're doing?"

Sitting forwards, the fox brought his paws together and rubbed them. "Kinda… I've never had to explain it before, forgot about it. Actually, only remembered it just now thinking about family and stuff. The idea isn't to just make logical assumptions and decide to leave it at that, it's more to try and find a string of conclusions you can make; always ask another question; always try and find as many reasons for something as you can. I mean, what he's wearing: Is there any kind of story behind that?

"He's in a suit, yeah, but does that mean he's a businessmammle? Maybe," Nick continued, "but maybe he's just come from a formal dinner or a wedding or something, maybe he's a manager, or visiting his boss and wanting to make a good impression. Isn't brown an unusual color suit for a formal occasion? You'd normally expect black or charcoal or blue, so maybe he just likes wearing suits, in which case he could just as well be retired. He's wearing it unbuttoned, but he's been stood up a while now. Is he hot? Is it too tight?

"If it's too tight, that's kinda interesting: from the looks of it, it's like a pretty decent-made suit, which suggests he was doing well for cash at one point. But if he's gotten older and wider and hasn't had it adjusted, maybe something happened and he lost his cash. Unless it's second-paw, his dad's or something, in which case he might never have had much money and maybe he's here to see his dad, wants to make a good impression by wearing his old suit. Though that kinda gives me the idea it's bad news, partly because, if he's around seventy, his dad's gonna be in the nineties. And also 'case why would you wear a suit to see your dad? Though, if it's not his dad—"

"Huh... maybe what happened is he had a good business and a fortune at one time but lost it all. Had to get a new job in business from which he's just come, explaining the suit and why it's an old-but-expensive one, and he's now here to see his boss in the hospital to try make him like him and give him a promotion, so he can earn a decent living and get his pension back."

Wolfard stared at the fox, his head slowly shaking with his jaw hanging open just a little. "That was pretty… really impressive."

Nick chuckled, leaning suddenly to the side to bump his shoulder against the wolf's. "It's nothing, probably none of that's gonna be true."

"It's still incredible! You looked at some old guy in a suit, and turned that one bit of clothing into a life story, like his journey of gaining and losing his fortune, seeking out a new job in business with his old suit, going to see his boss to try and get in his good books. Just… it's really just something I've never seen before."

The fox shrugged. "It's an illusion, don't get too excited about it. You do one, see for yourself how easy it is."

"Okay sure, but erm… who?"

"Whoever you want, really," Nick shrugged, glancing around. "But, erh… that young fennec in the green dress over there, what about her?"

"Oh, the kid? Well…" his gaze going once up and then down the child's attire, the wolf followed from the fox's example: "It's a very nice dress, like, probably something you'd just wear on a special occasion, like she's seeing someone special or just came from a party or something."

"Unless?"

"Unless? Well, erh— guess, could just be a wealthy family…?"

"Are you asking me or telling me?" the fox asked, grinning lightly. "There's no right or wrong answer, Wool, you don't have to look to me for approval. But, yeah, rich parents who like dressing their kids up like dolls ain't as uncommon as they should be. Carry on, you're doing well."

"It's not… not really practical… like, at all. So, I doubt she's gonna be out playing with the other kits or doing chores or anything like that. It's… very clean? Might be quite new, or it's well looked-after. She… her, erm…"

Spotting the wolf's waning, the fox offered a paw. "What's she looking at?"

"Eh, nothing."

"Oh," Nick taunted, "she's blind is she?"

"Huh— alright, smarty-fox, she's looking at the ground."

"Kinda odd, don't you think?"

"How?"

"All these people around her, all these new sights… if I were her age, I'd be looking about everywhere, not just gazing down at my feet. What does that tell us?"

"I… Wilde," he said, turning to the fox, "I don't know."

"Stop thinking about what you 'don't know', Wool," the fox said with a playful tone to his voice. "No one's expecting you to 'know' anything about these people, just say what you think's right." Leaning back against the wall, the fox eyed the wolf expressively. "It's confidence building, as much as anything. Stops you worrying about being wrong; sets you up to just… go for it, who cares if you're wrong; how're they gonna prove it even if you are?"

"Right. Okay, I'm sorry, I just—"

"It's that kinda mentality that'll let you do well in a city like this. You can become a very successful swindler and conmammle if you can carry off an attitude of knowing you're right even if you know you're not. Helps you along in policing too. Obviously it matters a lot more to be right, being a cop. But it stops you worrying about investigating the wrong lead."

"I get it, Nick, I get the idea; it's— it's really smart, actually, it's like, 'why did we never get shown this at the academy'?"

"Who knows, who cares," Nick said, his voice low and smooth. "I'd guess she's either looking at the floor because she's just been told off or because someone she cares about has just recently been admitted here. I doubt it's her who's about to be looked at, otherwise it wouldn't be such a nice dress. Anyway, pick out someone else, we've got plenty of time… plenty of time for me to make you a master 'Observationalist'."

"Alright, I'll erh…" his gaze wondered for a few seconds. "Woah," he exclaimed, nudging the wolf with his elbow and nodding to the front entrance, with a tone of heavy sarcasm in his voice, "look at this bad-boy, it's the toughest buck in the city who just turned up to play. Uh-oh," Jim mocked, quite openly, "better watch out, he's probably here to get into a fight?"

"Pretty hench," the fox concurred. "Doubt he's here for a fight, he'd have to be a pretty darn thoughtful mugger to only attack people someplace where they've got pretty much instant access to expert medical attention. Heh, it'd be like a thief breaking into your home and leaving behind crime-scene-preservation leaflets and installing a security alarm before they'd be gone."

"Pretty swish jacket he's got on, looks somewhere between bikerware and something an aviator would have. Bet that gives him a lot of 'street cred'."

"Yeah, but, what's that underneath? He's wearing… dungarees?" The fox squinted, his head tilting to one side. "Huh. Well, that's pretty interesting… Wonder if he's from outside the city. I'd say he's a painter, but I can't see any paint on his clothes from here so… maybe he's a factory worker or something? But then why is he here in the corporate sector in the west when there's another hospital in the industrial area over in the north?"

"He's waiting for someone, whoever he is," Wolfard said, watching the hench buck in the dungarees as he stood looking out the front doors. "What do you think, girlfriend or gang of youths?"

"Hard to tell. Seems pretty impatient. I think it'll be a—" The person the buck was waiting for stepped through the electric, glass doors "Bonnie?!"

"A what?"

"It… that— that's Judy's mum!" The fox rose sharply from his feet, a look of surprise crossing his features at the sight of the motherly doe off ahead.

Author's notes:

Hesitance jumps around your mind,

Grooms decision thus chosen blind.

Your thoughts most succulent of snack,

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