Nick woke up, which was a rather refreshing surprise. As he sat up, the fact that nothing hurt made it even better. But what helped more than anything was that Judy was peering into his eyes with an expression completely devoid of hatred or murderous intent. She looked concerned, and it was almost enough to make Nick wonder if he had died after all. Then again, the gods probably didn't have such a pleasant reprieve planned for him. Not unless everything was going to be torn away from him, the way it always was.

He smiled a little at the thought, and then he couldn't help himself. Nick had gone years burying his emotions and building walls between himself and other mammals. And what, exactly, had that gotten him? A massive circle of acquaintances and contacts without so much as a single true friend. Mammals who would do things for him because they owed him a favor, not because they really cared about him. And he was, he had to admit to himself, no better than that either. Every interaction had become a transaction, buying or selling goodwill to build up a comfortable life. It was very nearly miraculous that someone had managed to see through all of that and actually love him.

And he had no intention of letting that go.

So he forgot any sort of notion of keeping himself aloof or detached and pulled Judy into a hug. She had just tried to kill him, but that didn't seem to matter much. He was still alive, wasn't he? Surely it had been nothing more than the last echoes of the control Cerdo had put her under, and now she was finally back to herself.

Or perhaps not.

Judy stiffened in his embrace and pushed herself back from him. "Well, that was weird," she said, frowning as she held herself away with both paws, "I don't think I can get used to this."

"Judy—" Nick began as an uneasy sensation started flooding his gut, but she cut him off.

There was something very odd about her. It wasn't the malice toward him Cerdo had made her feel, he was sure of that. She should have seemed normal, but there was just something off about all of the little things most mammals didn't notice. Her usually perfect posture had degraded ever so slightly, and even Judy's expression didn't seem right, like a mask that didn't quite fit. But the way she spoke was strangest of all; the very cadence of her words had changed, and she seemed almost to give them the same slightly cynical edge that he did. "About that," Judy said, looking at him again, "I'm not."

Nick slowly considered the possibility that nearly dying and then somehow being brought back had affected him more than he might have guessed. There was no question, though, that he was looking at Judy. She was dressed in her uniform, the same as ever, with no torc around her neck. One of her paws was a perfect duplicate of his own in miniature, something Nick was reasonably confident no other bunny would have. Not that it seemed likely that Judy could have a twin sister who had somehow managed to find herself in the ruins under Phoenix, but stranger things had happened. Nick was at a bit of a loss to name what those stranger things would be, but still. It wasn't the sort of thing that mammals would say if it wasn't at least sometimes true. Or maybe it would be; it was Nick's experience that most mammals didn't choose their words with nearly the same care that he did.

"What?" he asked.

Perhaps that wasn't the best example of his command of the spoken language, but Nick was at a complete loss about what Judy could possibly mean. His eyes widened as a terrible possibility occurred to him. Had he somehow wiped out her memories when he had removed the torc from around her neck? It didn't seem possible, but mind-controlling torcs were a bit outside his area of expertise as an alchemist.

Judy sighed with a shrug that was awfully familiar in a way that Nick couldn't quite put a finger on. "I don't want to have to explain this again," she said, rubbing the bridge of her short muzzle before pulling her paw back, adding in a low tone, "This really doesn't feel right."

Before another question could so much as form on Nick's lips Judy spoke again. "But I guess I have to. As I explained to the princess," she said, jerking a thumb over her shoulder in a manner that seemed to lack her normal deference to royalty, "I'm not Judy. I'm you."

Nick had been too focused on Judy to notice before, but the princess was indeed in the same dismal tunnel that they were, sitting on a rock and looking a bit ill at ease. He blinked, the memory of seeing her face before everything went black suddenly returning with a vengeance. So that had actually happened; certainly that fit as one of those stranger things. "Or at least, the copy of you that lives in here," Judy continued, tapping her forehead with one finger, "You know, the one you accidentally created during your little trick with fixing Judy's arm and don't believe could actually exist."

"I don't—"

"Your mother's name is Jada," Judy interrupted.

Nick's jaws simply hung open; he seemed to have lost the ability to speak. "Your grandparents named her that after the color of her eyes. The same color as yours."

She stopped talking, simply looking into his face intently. After a moment, she spoke again. "I can keep going, if you need me to. I know everything about you. Every secret you've never told, every thought you've kept quiet. I know it all."

And then, after an even longer pause while Nick tried to figure out what he was thinking, she added in a much cheerier tone, "But don't worry, I didn't tell Judy about any of that."

"Well that's something," Nick managed at last.

"I thought you might appreciate that," she said, and the expression on her face was one that Nick recognized from mirrors.

It was, in fact, the expression he had carefully trained himself to make until it was second nature. The one he privately thought of as his "I'm a trustworthy and good-natured fox" expression, the one that was as much of a mask as any of the others.

"Captain Nicholas?" the princess said timidly, speaking for the first time since Nick had awakened.

She stood up and walked over to where he was still sitting on the floor of the tunnel; Nick noted that her paws were stained with what was presumably his blood. "Is— is she telling the truth?"

Nick sighed as the rabbit—he couldn't think of her as Judy anymore—watched him expectantly. "It certainly looks that way," he said.

"Commandant Totchli didn't just go crazy," Nick said, and the rabbit said the words at the exact same time that he did.

The bunny grimaced just as he did as they both shot each other a look that Nick could only assume was identical based on the princess's reaction. "That's..." the princess began, and after a moment of what Nick presumed could only be some serious thinking for a polite word she finished with, "Uncanny."

"That's one way of putting it," the rabbit said, and hearing her speak alone made it even eerier how much she sounded like him.

The voice was all still Judy's, of course. The rabbit's voice hadn't changed pitch to sound like a male fox, but everything else was a copy of how he spoke. "When your, ah, mental double explained it to me while you slept I wasn't sure I could believe it," the princess said, directing her words at Nick, "But now..."

"Now the three of us need to figure out what to do next," Nick said, and he couldn't help but chuckle, "The three of us against Cerdo's conspiracy sounds like great odds."

The rabbit suddenly laughed, and Nick cocked his head to look down at her. "Is that really what I look like when I do that?" she asked.

"When I do what?" Nick asked, feeling vaguely insulted.

"When I—" the rabbit began, but she fell silent when the princess coughed delicately.

"We don't have any time to waste," the princess said, and there was just a touch of her mother's unshakable authority in her voice, "Cerdo is moving to act fast."

She explained, for what Nick supposed was the second time, what she had observed that made her decide to abandon her carriage and chase after Judy. The princess didn't seem to know exactly what Cerdo was planning, but as she had correctly deduced on very little evidence that Bogo had been under Cerdo's control Nick couldn't help but be impressed. That she had figured out how to save his life with a philosopher's stone was only less impressive by comparison, but he felt no less grateful for it.

After a moment's consideration to let the details sink in, Nick said, "I have a letter from—"

"We've already read it," the rabbit interrupted, "Took it out of your pocket while you were recovering from being stabbed."

The princess pulled forth an envelope that had been stained rusty red, a somewhat apologetic expression on her face. "I did watch you steal it, you know," the rabbit said before the princess could speak, "Everything Judy's seen since you created me I've seen too."

"We need a name for you," Nick said, looking down at what the princess had called his mental double with a frown, "It's hurting my brain."

"Then call me Nicholas," the rabbit said, "Kind of the opposite of what Judy was doing, but it works well enough."

She—Nicholas—shrugged, looking up into Nick's face. "It's really weird being able to watch yourself think," she—or probably he, Nick realized—observed, "Well, that and being so short with such floppy ears."

"Is... Judy still in there?" Nick asked.

It was the question he had forced himself not to ask from the moment he had heard Nicholas's crazy story, but he couldn't bear to hold himself back any longer. The slight frown that creased the face that was for the moment both Judy's and his own was far from reassuring. "Yes," Nicholas said at last, "And don't interrupt, your majesty, this is important."

The princess had indeed seemed about to say something, but at Nicholas's words closed her mouth. "Now, maybe Judy was a special case because she had me in her head. Maybe anyone else under Cerdo's control that we put in an anti-alchemy array won't react like she did. But maybe they will. You broke Judy's mind, you know. That's the only reason I'm in control now."

The tone Nicholas took wasn't harsh or accusatory, but the words still stung at Nick like barbs. Nicholas continued on, seemingly oblivious to how Nick was feeling. Or no, that wasn't quite right. Nicholas knew. He had to. But he was going to let Nick pretend that he wasn't suddenly consumed with guilt and doubt, and that made it all the harder to hear what Nicholas had to say. "I don't think you actually broke the power of Cerdo's commands when you activated the array," he said, "It's more like..."

Nicholas paused, rolling a paw thoughtfully as he groped for the right words. "Well, I can't think of a good metaphor. But it feels like all you did was break Cerdo's ability to give her new commands. There's still a part of her that very much wants to capture or kill you."

The rabbit tipped his head to the side, a droll expression crossing his face. "A very significant part," he added.

Nick wasn't sure he would ever get used to thinking of Nicholas as a separate entity; his mind kept thinking of the rabbit as being Judy because her appearance actually hadn't changed so much as an iota. He definitely didn't want to get used to it, either. But the more he saw Nicholas move and talk, the less like Judy he seemed, and the easier it seemed to be to accept. "But there's also a part of her that doesn't want that," Nicholas said, "And that's where I come in."

"Cerdo was able to command her," Nicholas continued, "But his control didn't work on me. So I stayed quiet about that to Judy. I was trying to get her to start thinking for herself, to realize what Cerdo was doing and take command of her own mind again, but it wasn't working. And then when you activated your trap..."

Nicholas paused again. "I could feel her mind split. It's like there's two Judys in her head now, and they're kind of blocking each other from controlling her body."

"I don't know enough about alchemy to understand that," the princess admitted, "Does that make sense to you, Captain Nicho—Captain Nick?"

Nick idly wondered if Nicholas had chosen his name just to make the princess refer to him as Nick. It seemed at least plausible; he could see himself doing the same thing if he had been in Nicholas's position. "That's kind of beyond anything I've learned," Nick said, "This is new territory."

"Probably even for Cerdo," Nicholas said, nodding his head, "But you understand what we have to do?"

The princess looked from Nick to Nicholas, and even though she seemed puzzled Nick thought she was getting a sense of what was going on. A wordless understanding was flowing between Nick and his copy, and it felt as though he could read the thoughts going on in the mind behind those brilliantly purple eyes. "Yes," Nick said at last, "I do. We need to fix Judy's mind in a way that breaks Cerdo's control. Then we need to get someone else he's controlling and see if we can free them too."

"It's not much of a fix if we just break mammals' minds trying to free them," Nicholas said agreeably, "I'm sure the princess wouldn't appreciate that."

"I would not," Princess Isabel said in a remarkably composed voice, "How do we do that?"

Nick looked down at Nicholas and then back at the princess at the very same moment that the bunny did. "I have an idea," they said together.

Author's Notes:

Nick previously suggested his mother's name as a test of whether or not the Nick in Judy's head was real or just a hallucination; as this was something he had never told Judy before it would work as a test of whether or not that Nick really did know everything that the real Nick did. Jada is a real name, derived from the precious stone Jade.

Writing what amounted to two Nicks bouncing off each other was a lot of fun for me, and something that I hope you enjoyed reading as much as I did writing.

Otherwise, I don't have too much to say about this chapter in these notes. As always, I do appreciate you reading, and if you're so inclined as to leave a comment I'd love to know what you thought!