Judy woke up stifling a scream, which came out as a wavering moan as she covered her mouth with her paws and clenched her jaw. She had dreamed of the fire again, of Nick being trapped and not being able to free him. This time, Nick hadn't screamed the blame she deserved as he turned into something monstrous that was as much fire as it was fox. This time, he couldn't have. He had been muzzled, exactly as how he had been when the officers had pulled him out of the conference room, and his face had been full of confused panic rather than anger, and as he caught fire he had simply burned.

It hadn't seemed as though her nightmare could have gotten worse, and yet somehow it was. It had been more vivid, more real, and when Judy finally woke up she was alone in her cell. Her heart was racing and she could feel her body shaking with something, a powerful mix of regret and anger and despair that there wasn't a word for, something that made her vision throb as her eyes became wet but didn't shed any tears. Judy took in an uneven breath, trying to force her body back under her control, and to her ears it sounded almost like a sob.

"Hey!" a voice called out from a few cells over, gruff and groggy with tiredness and drunkenness, "Have the screaming meemies somewhere else, huh? For cripes sake, mammals are tryin' to sleep!"

Judy looked at the wall that defined the boundary of her cell in the direction the voice had come from. The holding cells of the Precinct One station had been built to be strong, not pretty; they were unpainted and rough cinder blocks, but there weren't any gaps into the next cell over that she could see. "Sorry," she said, and her voice was oddly thick.

The only response was a grunt from that same masculine voice, and then a few minutes later the sounds of deep snoring. Judy didn't think that she'd be able to fall asleep again and couldn't even remember when she had fallen asleep. After Bellwether's visit, she had been left mostly alone. The lawyer—Darnielle, that was her name—had been by only long enough to tell Judy that Nick was being held in solitary confinement. "For his own safety," the mountain goat had said apologetically.

Judy had wondered who he was being kept safe from; was it mobsters upset he had betrayed them or cops who thought that he had killed two of their own? It was probably both, and the thought had made it difficult to stay focused as she kept reading the file she had over and over. Even before her most recent nightmare, it had been too easy to imagine Nick being held completely alone, still muzzled for no other reason than to make him a little more miserable than he would have been otherwise. Afterwards, though, as Judy straightened out the pages that had crumpled when she had fallen asleep in the middle of her reading and dropped the folder, she couldn't help but wonder if Nick had suffered the same kind of nightmare. Or maybe, for him, the warehouse fire from his military service ran into her apartment fire, made worse by the combination. If he did, he wouldn't have someone there to comfort him the way that he had been there for her; he wouldn't even have an irritable mammal sleeping off his night off to say something to him and prove that he wasn't all alone.

Judy tried to force the thought aside as she finished straightening up the file, setting it on her lap as she glanced out the window. The view through the barred window wasn't very impressive—just a bit of a plain brick building and a slice of the street. She could see mammals moving about their business though, maneuvering around the cars starting to take to the street, and everything was bathed in the gold-orange light of early morning. That meant that, if Bellwether had been telling the truth, she would be released soon, and for what felt like the hundredth time Judy went back to the file.

It might have been an hour, or maybe two, but Judy heard the jingling of keys and the gentle tread of paw pads against linoleum before she saw the officer who had come to release her. The officer, a massive wolf whose shaggy black fur stood in sharp contrast to her immaculately pressed uniform, looked vaguely familiar to Judy, and she thought that she might have seen her in the Precinct One office before. She gave Judy a brief nod and unlocked the cell door. "You're free to go, Ms. Hopps," she said, and despite her thick and powerful build her voice was surprisingly high-pitched and as smooth as crushed velvet.

Judy had, to some degree, been anticipating her release ever since Bellwether's visit, but now that the cell door was open it felt like all she could do was stare at the mammal who had released her. The wolf's glittering yellow eyes considered her impassively, her face set in what was probably the gentlest expression she was capable of making. "You can have your purse back," she added, and thrust it into the cell, holding it in one massive outstretched paw.

Maybe it was because Judy had spent the previous day racking her brain, trying to stave off her worry for Nick even as she tried to figure out how to prove his innocence, or maybe it was because she had slept poorly, but it all seemed strangely dream-like, as though it might still be possible to wake up and have it still be the day of the raid on Lionheart. Her body seemed to rise automatically, tucking the precious file under her arm, and she crossed the few steps to the entrance of the cell and took her purse back. "Thank you," she said, and the wolf nodded.

"They're holding onto your gun and the bullets as evidence, Ms. Hopps," the wolf said, her tone politely apologetic, "And Director Bellwether, ah, insisted on getting your badge."

A shadow had passed over the wolf's face at the mention of the ewe's name, and Judy wondered if she had been the one who had been forced to fulfill Bellwether's last little act of spite as Judy's boss. "That's fine," Judy said, "I'm not a prohib— I'm not a prohi anymore."

She had never shortened her title the way that Nick had insisted on doing, but it felt right somehow to say it that way. The wolf nodded and gestured towards the hallway that led away from the cells. As she walked down the hall, the wolf following after her, Judy asked, "Can I see Chief Bogo?"

"If he's not busy," the wolf said, and even without being able to see her Judy could hear the whisper of fabric that meant she had shrugged.

"It's about Nick Wilde," Judy said, plowing ahead at the opening she had, "I know he's innocent."

A single longer than usual stride on the wolf's part was enough to get her in front of Judy, where she stood and looked down at her impassively. The wolf had to be at least six-and-a-half feet tall and was so broad across the shoulders that Judy felt scrawny by comparison, but the wolf didn't look like she was trying to be intimidating. She cocked her head to one side, her tail waving slowly back and forth behind her. "Why?" she asked, and all Judy could hear in the word was curiosity.

There were so many things that Judy could have said that would have answered the question. There were all the little things she had seen in the file that didn't seem to quite add up to her no matter how obvious it seemed that Nick was guilty, but Judy thought that the wolf was asking a slightly different question. Why would a bunny stick out her neck for a fox accused of three murders? Maybe that was the question the wolf really wanted to know the answer to, and it was the question that Judy answered. "He's a good mammal," Judy said simply.

Judy had told Detective Moulmein the same thing, and the elephant had seemed particularly skeptical. The wolf, though, had straightened out her neck so that her head was upright again and nodded slowly, her tail still moving side-to-side. There was something about the gesture that reminded Judy powerfully of Nick, and her heart ached as the wolf turned around and started walking down the hallway again. "Then you'll see Chief Bogo," the wolf said.

Bogo's office was even more cluttered than it had been the last time that Judy had seen him, stacks of paperwork taking up every available surface. The wolf officer, after leading Judy to the door to Bogo's office, had simply opened it without knocking, said "Ms. Hopps to see you, sir," and then had gently nudged Judy into the office and shut the door again before Bogo had a chance to react.

His concentration on his paperwork broken, Bogo looked over his glasses at Judy, a scowl darkening his features. "I thought you might stop by," he said, and then he put his elbows on his desk and sighed, rubbing the back of his neck.

"Chief Bogo, I—" Judy began, but he interrupted her before she could continue.

"Officer Wolfsburg has to work twice as hard as any other beat cop because she's a predator," he said, nodding in the direction of his door to indicate that he meant the wolf officer who had brought Judy to him, "How much harder do you think you'd have to work to be a bunny cop? Three times? Four times?"

Judy blinked, puzzled by the buffalo's sudden conversational opening. "As hard as I'd have to," she said firmly, "But—"

"Any mistake you make is going to be blamed on you being a bunny," Bogo interrupted again, "Such as if you're too soft-hearted."

Judy suddenly realized what he was implying and couldn't help but bristle at the implication. "I'm not being soft-hearted!" she said, her voice shriller than she would have liked, "Nick is—"

"Listen very carefully, Ms. Hopps," Bogo interrupted again, and his voice had a dangerous edge to it.

Judy swallowed her words, but she didn't move from where she was standing in front of his desk, her eyes locked on his. "You're not a prohibition agent anymore. You're not a police officer, not yet. It's my duty to tell you to stop," he said, his voice gravelly.

Before Judy could say a word in response, he held up one massive finger in warning. "I see two possibilities: either all the evidence is right and Wilde is guilty, or there's a conspiracy involving half-a-dozen of my most trustworthy officers. Think about what that implies."

Judy had spent the previous night thinking about little else, but she forced herself to nod. "This is a matter for the courts," Bogo continued, "Lionheart is behind bars and he'll stay there until his trial. The judge saw fit to heed my warning and deny him bail. As for Mr. Wilde, I did what I could, but..."

The buffalo spread his hooves wide. "Mr. Wilde could be free on the streets if anyone could raise ten thousand dollars in bail," Bogo said, and there was significance in the look that he gave Judy that she couldn't help but catch.

She realized that there was another conversation that Bogo was having with her, some meaning buried beneath the words he was saying. The implication he was making was clear: somehow he had pulled the right strings to make sure that Nick could be bailed out of jail, if only she had the money, but why would he do that? Judy had to resist gasping in surprise when the reason struck her. Bogo might not believe in a vast conspiracy against Nick, but he also might not believe that the fox was guilty. "Now, I agree with Director Bellwether that it'd be best for the case against Lionheart if your involvement stays unknown. As she may have mentioned, I will honor our agreement to endorse your application to the police academy," Bogo continued, and his voice had mellowed, the words almost soothing.

"You might make a fine officer someday, if you can learn to listen to your superiors," he said.

Judy wasn't sure if she had imagined it or not, but Bogo seemed to have put a subtle emphasis on the word "listen" and she was reminded of how he had pretended to angrily send Nick and her out of his office. It made sense to think that he was afraid of being overheard, but Judy still wasn't entirely sure she knew what he was getting at. Did he actually want her to investigate the case against Nick, or was that just wishful thinking? She found herself wishing that Nick had been there to puzzle Bogo's intentions out; he'd always been better at seeing into mammals than she was. "Thank you, sir," Judy said, and Bogo nodded approvingly.

"I've prepared some material you might find useful in preparing for the academy," he said, and he pulled a thick folder from underneath a stack of papers, "I suggest you review it."

When Bogo gave the folder to her, he did something she never would have expected. He winked, although his features otherwise remained as stern as ever. Judy opened the folder briefly, and saw that the top page was the full version of the report that the officer who had supposedly taken a photograph of Nick on Zweihorn's doorstep had written, even including the pictures. On top of all of that, and other documents that Judy could only guess at, was a single scrap of paper with a single word written in large block letters: "WHY?"

It was the same question that Officer Wolfsburg had asked Judy, but she knew that Bogo meant something else entirely. Why had someone gone to the effort of framing Nick? Why had the officers Bogo claimed to be the most trustworthy betrayed him? Why had Zweihorn and River been killed? "I'll make sure I read everything," Judy said, closing the folder.

"Excellent," Bogo said, "I hope you enjoy your time in the city before the police academy starts."

"I'm sure I will," Judy said, clutching the folder to her chest.

"You can let yourself out," Bogo replied, his head already back down to his paperwork.

The small ember of hope that had starting burning in Judy's heart had grown a little, and she had to stop herself from running out of the police station. She forced herself to walk, maneuvering around the mammals in the lobby and out the door and walking down the street. As she approached the spot where she had parked the Buchatti what felt like a lifetime ago, though, she couldn't see a sign of the distinctive blue car, and then she was right where it had been.

The spot where Judy had parked the Buchatti was empty. It might have been stolen, but it was probably more likely that it had been impounded, and as Judy looked at the empty space, the key ring that had the key to the car and the one to Nick's house clutched in her paw, she could hear Nick's voice in her head as clearly as if he had been standing next to her. "Well, of course it's gone," his voice said, "Why would any of this be easy?"

Judy couldn't help it. She felt as though she had to laugh or cry and she had already done enough crying. She collapsed to her knees, laughing so hard that her stomach hurt. She tried to imagine how she must look, a disheveled bunny who needed a shower clutching a couple of folders and a purse and laughing like a maniac, and the mental image only made her laugh harder until the thought crossed her mind of what Nick would have thought. Her laughter died slowly and she forced herself back up to her feet. Not having the car was a complication, but that was alright. A vague plan had been forming in her head ever since she had left Bogo's office, and not having the Buchatti didn't change it much. Judy straightened her shoulders, wiped at her eyes, and walked to the edge of the street, her arm outstretched. "Taxi!" she shouted, "Taxi!"

A few hours after leaving the police station, Judy was at the county jail. The first stop she had made had been to Nick's house, which had been thankfully untouched. She had felt like an intruder, like a thief, as she crept through the house without Nick there, and when she walked into his room of records she had had to force herself not to look at the picture of Nick and his mother on the table as she groped for the hidden compartment. She dropped the cigar box when it popped out of its hiding place, the lid coming off and spilling tight rolls of cash across the floor.

Judy remembered thinking, when she had first seen it, that there had to have been at least ten thousand dollars hidden in the box, and she had been right. She had counted the money three times, making sure that there was enough, and there was, if only just. With however much Nick had already taken as spending money gone, there was ten thousand four hundred and fifty dollars left. Considering that Judy had grown up on a farm and then taken a job that didn't pay particularly well, it felt strange to consider four hundred and fifty dollars as almost nothing, but she had no idea of how long it would have to last.

She had carefully bundled the cash together, organizing the bills by denomination, and stuffed it into her purse, keeping a ten-dollar bill out to give the taxi driver. She hadn't had nearly enough money left in her purse to pay for a taxi ride from the police station to Nick's house, but the driver, a middle-aged goat who seemed to be about half-deaf, had allowed himself to be sweet-talked into letting her run in and get payment with the promise of a generous tip.

From Nick's house, the ten-dollar bill vanishing so quickly into the driver's pocket that it was like a magic trick while his other paw made the taxi meter click off, the goat had happily driven her to the courthouse and waited with the engine running while she paid Nick's bail to a bored-looking ram who hadn't even blinked when she had pulled ten thousand dollars out of her purse. It seemed as though the closer Judy got to seeing Nick again the less she was able to remember the events that were getting her to that point. She wouldn't have been able to describe the courthouse if she had been asked; the entire visit had passed in a blur with her building excitement, and even though the goat driving the cab had spent most of the drive holding a rambling monologue at a high volume she wouldn't have been to name any of the topics he had held forth on.

After she had made it to the front desk of the county jail, the approval form for Nick's bail in her paw, she had no memory of what she had said to the mammal at the desk, or even of what kind of mammal he—or was it she?—had been, only the knowledge of where she had been told to wait. Her heart felt as though it would burst out of her chest and she couldn't keep a thought straight in her head, she needed to see Nick that desperately.

It wasn't until Judy saw Nick again that she realized that she had been holding onto a fear of how he might look; if Moulmein's dire predictions about what the guards in the county jail might do to him had been right, he probably wouldn't have been able to walk under his own power. Nick was walking, though, although that didn't seem quite the right word for it. Normally, the fox had something of a swagger, a sort of unconscious confidence that touched everything he did to the point that he even moved with it no matter how much the world might try to beat him down. Maybe it was his way of showing that he was above it all, that no matter how much anyone might dislike him for what he was it didn't bother him.

But as Judy waited by the end of the hallway, Nick shuffled into view. His head and ears were both down, his tail limply dragging against the floor. His suit, which had been pressed so crisply that the folds had looked knife-sharp, was rumpled, and his matted fur had an unpleasantly greasy sheen. He looked, quite simply, broken, although as far as Judy could tell he didn't have so much as a single extra cut or bruise compared to the last time she had seen him. "Nick?" Judy asked, her voice tentative.

The guard who had been a step behind Nick didn't stay, turning around with a jangle of his keys and heading back the way he had come. It left Judy and Nick alone in the lobby of the county jail except for the mammal at the reception desk, and the sound of the guard's hooves echoed as he disappeared. "Oh," Nick replied, "It's you. I thought it might have been Lionheart's goons stopping by to make my day worse."

The words themselves were right; Judy would have had no problem believing that Nick would say them if they had been quoted to her. But his voice was flat and completely emotionless, with none of his usual playfulness. It was somehow worse than it would have been if he had been angry and Judy's paws fell to her sides.

Judy had wanted to run to him but he seemed as fragile as glass and she found herself seemingly rooted in place. When he looked up from the floor to look at her, Judy saw that his eyes were half-lidded as usual. Normally, it made him look as though he knew a joke that no one else was in on, but now he just looked tired and rundown. There was no amusement dancing in his eyes or across his muzzle, just a blandly neutral expression of exhaustion. "Bellwether came to see me, you know," Nick said, and while Judy thought he was trying to say the words as though they didn't matter, she thought she could hear a quaver in his voice and see a slight twitch of an ear.

Judy swallowed hard. Nick had every right to blame her for what had happened to him but the words were out of her mouth before she could stop them, although they sounded pathetic even to her. "I heard," she said, "I—"

"She said you had a deal," Nick continued, cutting her off as though she hadn't spoken, "Your dream job and your freedom for mine."

It was technically true, which was the worst of it; whatever Bellwether had told Nick Judy doubted that it had included any lies except by omission. Nick had managed to keep his voice flat but the look in his eyes had changed somewhat. It appeared more calculating, as though he were sizing her up, trying to see if the bunny she had been, the one who had been willing to blackmail him into helping, was still the one standing before him now, or if she was the bunny who had kissed him back. "I didn't," Judy said, "I wouldn't."

Without even quite realizing what she was about to do, whatever had kept her rooted in place broke and Judy ran for Nick, her arms spread. Before she could reach him, before she could wrap her arms around his waist, his arms were around her, lifting her up as effortlessly as she might pick up a kit. Nick buried his head in the space between her head and her shoulder, his muzzle fitting as perfectly as if they had been designed to go together. His arms around her were strong and warm, and the sensation of his body against hers was electric. The smell of him, that unique musk with its strangely floral undertone, filled her nose and Judy couldn't tell if the wetness on her cheek was because she was crying or because he was. "I knew you wouldn't," Nick said, practically breathing the words into her neck in a way that made her fur tickle and let her feel his voice in her chest, "But I was afraid you would."

Nick's voice nearly broke on the words and he didn't have to say anything else; Judy thought she was beginning to understand what he had gone through, how he had retreated into himself to avoid giving up on his sliver of hope. On her. "I'm sorry," Judy said, her words somewhere between a whisper and a sob, "I'm so sorry."

The words were like a mantra, and Judy wasn't sure how many times she repeated them before Nick shifted her in his arms so that they were looking at each other, his nose only inches from hers. He still looked worn out, but there was a ghost of his old self she could see somewhere in his eyes and the quirk of his mouth. "I couldn't keep my promise," Judy said, and she could feel her ears droop and flush in shame, "I couldn't keep you safe."

"You tried," Nick replied simply, as though it were enough.

It wasn't, and it never would be, so Judy said, "So I want you to know I'll never, ever give up on you. No matter what happens."

Nick cocked an eyebrow, and his expression of amused interest filled Judy's heart with a fierce joy. "Is that a promise, Carrots?"

Judy couldn't help but laugh, not so much at his words or his expression but in response to the feeling that things were finally starting to go right again. "It is," she said, and her cheeks hurt from her smile.

"Alright, then," Nick said.

He kissed her on the nose, so lightly and so quickly that Judy felt it more in her belly than she did on her face, and said, "It's a promise."

Nick gently set her back down on the floor, apparently oblivious to her reaction. "So what's next?" he asked.

Nick clapped his paws together and rubbed them briskly as he waited for her answer, which took a moment as she pulled herself back together. "Bellwether and Bogo both told me to stop investigating," Judy said, doing her best to match his business-like tone.

"Ah," Nick replied, "But we're going to keep going, aren't we?"

Judy smiled up at him, and entwined her fingers into his. "Of course we are," she said, and Nick nodded approvingly as they began to walk out of the jail, his larger paw engulfing her smaller one.

She didn't have her badge or her gun. Nick's money was almost all gone and they didn't even have the Buchatti anymore. It should have felt impossible, walking back out into the city to try and clear Nick's name with a mountain of evidence stacked against him, but it didn't. No matter what she didn't have, she did have what mattered most. She had Nick.

Author's Notes:

Before I get to anything else, I'd like to apologize again for the delay in this chapter. I do my best to keep to my schedule, and while I was able to post something, it wasn't this chapter. I have fixed my computer (the hard drive died and I had to go about the tedious business of replacing it and restoring my system), which led to the delay. On the bright side, though, the first chapter of my next story is up now as a sort of advance preview a few weeks before I had planned on posting it, which you can check it out; it's titled "The Unlikely Heir."

It's a sequel to my Sherlock Holmes AU "A Study in Gold" and is the first sequel that I've written that I've thought was worth posting. If you enjoy my copious author's notes about historical settings and the mysteries I come up with, you might enjoy it.

Now, on to this chapter. The title of this chapter, "Let's Misbehave," comes from a 1927 Cole Porter song. Considering that Judy no longer has any law enforcement authority and has been (sort of) warned against continuing the investigation, it seemed appropriate.

The screaming meemies was 1920s slang for a fit of anxiety, panic, or the shakes. The mild oath "for cripes sake" was first used around 1910, and is a kind of minced oath to avoid using the much stronger "for Christ's sake."

Chapter 20 did mention that the Precinct One station had at least a couple of wolves, and in this chapter one of them shows up as the officer releasing Judy from the holding cell. Although her surname of Wolfsburg is pretty obviously related to her species, it's also a nod to the city of Wolfsburg in Germany, famous as the location where the very first Volkswagen Beetles were built.

Mechanical taxi meters were invented in 1891, and a cab in 1927 would certainly be equipped with one. $10 in 1927 is equivalent to about $140 today, and would have been an extremely generous tip for a taxi ride at the time.

$10,000 in 1927 is equivalent to about $140,000 today, which is a significant amount of money. As Nick stands accused of three capital crimes, he's fortunate that Bogo was able to bend the ear of the judge a little to not make him ineligible for bail. People accused of capital crimes can be denied bail; in Lionheart's case he's probably considered a significant flight risk.

Parking meters weren't invented until 1928, and weren't really usable until 1935; the version from 1928 needed to be connected to the car's battery for a power source, which was pretty impractical. Judy is right to assume that the Buchatti was either stolen or impounded, but it wouldn't be for not being around to feed a parking meter. It would mean that, if she was a cop, it'd be impossible for her to be a meter maid at this point in history, which I suppose is something.

Nick took about $500 out of the cigar box hidden in the table of his music room back in chapter 9, which he did in full view of Judy. He gave her a key to his house in chapter 27, and as Judy's been the one driving the Buchatti this entire story she's also held onto the key to the car.

Of course, the real news of this chapter is that Nick and Judy are back together again. Hopefully you find it satisfying; I'd love to know what you thought!