When Judy woke up, the golden light of the rising sun coming through the window was making Nick's fur glow like burnished copper. At some point in the night he had curled himself around her, and her head was resting on his belly facing towards his head. Nick hadn't put his pajama top back on, so Judy could feel the softness of the cream-colored fur that covered his stomach tickling gently at her nose with each slow rise and fall of his chest.
Judy glanced at the alarm clock at Nick's bedside. After looking at it she realized that she couldn't hear it ticking and it must have wound down, so she ignored the time the clock showed and looked instead at Nick's face. His expression was peaceful, and it wasn't just a matter of sleep taking away the sly cast his features usually had. He looked contented, the side of his muzzle curled upwards in a gentle smile. The night before, with the lights in the bedroom off and only the dim glow of the streetlights coming through the windows to provide illumination, Judy had felt Nick more than she had really seen him. She couldn't find it within herself to regret it, but as she admired the lines of her fox's body she thought maybe they could leave the lights on the next time.
He was so different from any buck, but the lean and angular lines of his body gave him a sort of grace and power that no bunny could match. Or at least, that's what Judy suspected. When she had been younger Judy had listened to her older sisters' whispers and giggles about bucks, about what they had expected before their first time and what had actually happened. As it had turned out, the only thing that they had been right about was the need for a towel afterwards, but she couldn't guess if that was because her sisters simply hadn't been able to explain things properly or if it was just another one of the differences between foxes and bunnies.
Without really being aware that she was doing it, Judy started to run her fingers through the downy fur of Nick's belly, and when she realized what she was doing she didn't stop. It was a pleasure to simply touch him, she had discovered; their closeness had burned to a climax that had felt as though they were one and the same, and now each touch had a faint echo of that moment. Nick gave a wordless murmur and shifted slightly to give Judy more access to his belly, the curve of the smile on his muzzle widening slightly as his ears tilted back. A moment later Judy felt his tail swing against her leg before she heard the muffled thump of it hitting the mattress, and at the little laugh that escaped her mouth Nick's ear perked up and his eyes slowly opened and focused on hers.
"Good morning," he said, and while his face was split by a wide yawn there was no mistaking the smile in his eyes.
"Good morning," she said back, and her throat felt oddly thick as the words came out.
Looking at Nick, and playing with the fur on his belly, while he slept had been one thing, but suddenly with him awake the enormity of what had happened the previous night hit Judy. She thought that she had realized what Nick meant to her when he had been arrested and they had been separated, but looking at him as he propped himself up on one elbow, a mildly quizzical expression on his face, she realized just how deep those feelings truly ran. The idea of losing him again was too painful to contemplate and she tried to push it aside, but it must have been plainly visible across her face.
"Well that's a serious expression," Nick teased, "Penny for your thoughts, Carrots."
"I love you," Judy said.
The words had fallen out of her mouth almost unconsciously, but she kept going. "I want you to know that," she said, "That I love you."
Nick's eyes had widened a degree at her words, and he simply smiled in response. "You told me so last night," he said.
It was true; Judy had said it, when Nick had been doing something that her sisters had never even hinted at and might not even be possible for a buck to—Judy tried to push the memory aside, but if she hadn't been covered with fur her face would have almost certainly been as red as Nick. As it was, she felt as though the insides of her ears had to be glowing scarlet, and she hastily added, "I wanted you to know that I mean it."
Nick chuckled, and drew himself smoothly upwards, gently using one paw to pull her upright too so that they were sitting side by side on the bed, their heads turned to face each other. "Judy," he said, "Do you know how I know you love me?"
His tone was light, but she was sure that he wasn't teasing, and she simply shook her head. "You could have left me to rot in prison and you still would have gotten everything you wanted. But you came back for me," he said, and Judy shook her head again.
In a way, he was absolutely right. She could have left him to his fate and still gotten her chance at becoming a police officer. Even with Bellwether taking the credit, Lionheart would still be behind bars himself and Bogo's offer would have stood whether she helped Nick or not. It was the sort of conclusion she might have accepted a little more than a week ago, but in a more important way than how Nick was right he was absolutely wrong. "I wouldn't have had everything," she said, "I wouldn't have had you."
Nick laughed, and nuzzled his head against her shoulder, his head angled up so that the end of his muzzle was against the base of her ear. "Bunnies," he said, "Such hopeless romantics."
He pulled himself backwards until he was looking into her eyes again. "And do you know how I know that I love you?" he asked.
"You told me so last night," Judy said, doing her best to echo not just his words but also his tone.
Even as she felt her ears flushing again at that memory, Nick did not seem even the slightest bit embarrassed. Quite the contrary, his smile widened a degree in both size and smugness. "My charm is wearing off on you, I see," he said, but his voice grew more serious as he continued, "When I was rotting in that cell, all by myself, the only mammal I wanted to see was you."
Judy could feel her heart swell at his words and she wrapped her arms around him and squeezed until he did the same. They sat there for a long moment, Judy burying her head against Nick's chest so that she could feel his heartbeat even as she could hear it. There were other conversations that they'd have to have, she knew, other topics they had both thought of the previous night but not brought up. For the moment, though, she felt as though they had had the most important one.
Nick had taken breakfast as an opportunity to try something more ambitious than either hash or a salad, and the golden-yellow sauce he painstakingly prepared for Judy's poached egg and steamed asparagus was surprisingly delicious. He had prepared a similar meal for himself, with two poached eggs instead of one and a couple links of chicken sausage alongside the asparagus, and positively preened as Judy ate her own meal as quickly as possible, her enjoyment apparently evident on her face. When she had finished, pushing her plate aside as she wrapped her paws around a mug of coffee, she had asked him what it had been. "Hollandaise," he had replied, giving the word a slightly exotic flair with his pronunciation, "It's haute cuisine, you know."
"It was delicious," Judy had replied, and then she had pulled out the thick file that Bogo had given her and started organizing the documents while Nick finished his own meal.
By the time he was done, she had sorted the contents out; the stack of items that they hadn't gone through yet was starting to get very small. It only took a couple of hours to get through the last of it, and in the process of doing so they had come up with one other item of interest. Judy had missed it on her first time reading it, but Nick had caught that in addition to having unusually large amounts of money hidden in their homes, the money that River and Zweihorn had was sequential with what had been found on Carajou's body. And, as Judy had realized with growing excitement, the contract that they had found in Carajou's binder for the Tundra Towns Lanes job had been for five thousand dollars, not the three thousand in crisp bank notes that had been on his body. "So how's this for a theory?" Judy asked eagerly, as the pieces fell together in her mind, "Lionheart gives Carajou the job of killing Koslov at the bowling alley, and Bauson has the job of giving Carajou his payment. But what Bauson was really doing was distracting Carajou—"
"—So that Scursly could gore him," Nick interrupted as he took up the thread of her thought, "And the reason it took place at the Thief of the Night—"
"—Was because Lionheart knew that Mr. Quill would call River and Zweihorn—"
"—Which means that they would be the first officers on the scene and could take their cut from the envelope—"
"—Which was payment for making sure the frame job on Zoya for murdering Carajou went through!" Judy finished triumphantly.
Both Nick and Judy sat still for a moment. The pieces all fit together so perfectly; although Zweihorn had only had eight hundred dollars hidden away rather than a full thousand like River, that was easily explained by the possibility of her having already spent it. Judy remembered perfectly how obviously new the hundred-dollar bills in Carajou's possessions had been, and how obvious it was that they had been pulled out of a bank recently. In fact, maybe the chain of payment hadn't ended with Zweihorn and River; maybe there were other crooked officers who were supposed to dip into the money for their own cut once it had been taken into police custody. Judy scribbled the idea down as Nick began to articulate an idea of his own.
"Lionheart was always planning on killing Carajou, Scursly, and Bauson," Nick began slowly, "But I bet he only had River and Zweihorn killed because they didn't do a good enough job making sure no one asked too many questions about Carajou's murder."
"Crooked cops are too valuable to waste," Nick added, "I guess he thought I was worth it."
He smiled, but there was no humor in it. "But why didn't he try framing me, too?" Judy asked.
It was something that Judy still couldn't think of any reasonable explanation for. Her apartment had been burned down, but it seemed as though that was it for attempts to make her stop her investigation—unless Nick had been wrong and the intended victim of the fire really had been him instead of her. She still had no idea how the gunpowder residue on Nick's paws had been faked, but it didn't seem like it would have been much more difficult to frame her in addition to him. Nick simply shrugged. "Maybe he thought you wouldn't question it," he said, "When he saw us at the restaurant, I doubt he thought you liked me much."
Judy couldn't help but feel a twinge of guilt at his words; although his tone wasn't sharp at all, she really had treated him terribly when they had first met. Nick must have seen her features fall, because he put a paw around her shoulder and squeezed gently. "This would be a lot harder if we were both in jail, you know," he said, and Judy nodded.
"I still should have treated you better," she said softly, and Nick responded instantly.
"You really should have," he said cheerfully, the words—and his blatant refusal to allow her to engage in self-pity—so unexpected that Judy couldn't help but laugh.
Just by the fact that he was willing to joke about it so openly, she knew he couldn't have been holding it against her, and although she doubted her guilt would ever fully go away, it did ease up a little. "He probably did think it'd be good enough for you," Nick said, "A couple of police officers get murdered, a former gang accountant gets blamed for it, and the evidence says a different gang got me to do it. Didn't you notice the note that got planted on me wasn't in Lionheart's writing?"
"You're right," Judy said, "It was typewritten. He must have wanted it to point to one of the other gangs."
They both fell silent again, and Judy was sure that Nick was thinking about which gang Lionheart might have wanted to implicate. It would have certainly been a plausible motive for a gang to kill a crooked cop that was loyal to a different gang, but there simply wasn't anything to go on from what they knew. As Judy repressed a sigh, her gaze fell on the dirty plates from the breakfast she had shared with Nick, which they had left pushed aside to a corner of the table for the past few hours. She had been far too eager to get back into the file to stop for something as simple as cleaning up after themselves, and a small frown crossed her face as she looked at the mess.
Judy's ears leaped upright as she came to a sudden realization, and she herself shot out of her chair nearly as fast as she stood up. "Maybe he didn't clean up!"
"Carrots?" Nick asked, looking at her with an eyebrow quirked in confusion.
Judy paced around the dining room, already seeing in her mind's eye what had likely happened and trying to put it into words as quickly as she could. "Lionheart didn't plan on getting arrested himself," she said excitedly.
"I would imagine it was something of a surprise for him, yes," Nick said, and Judy could see that he still didn't get it.
"Every other murder, there's been someone who really did it and someone to pin the blame on. He pinned the murders on you, but there's no... But someone else obviously did it, and they always got killed. But this time, for River and Zweihorn—" Judy said, fumbling over her words in her rush to get them out.
"Maybe he didn't get the chance," Nick said at the same time Judy did, and she nodded eagerly.
"So whoever killed River and Zweihorn might still be out there," Nick said, "Or maybe they're already dead, but Lionheart didn't get the chance to make the next link to frame someone else for it."
"Or maybe," Judy said, "He was able to start framing them, but not finish."
Judy's epiphany certainly wasn't anything ground-breaking, she was sure, but it took an obvious fact she had known all along—that someone else had murdered River and Zweihorn—and gave her something useful they could do with it. Lionheart almost certainly hadn't had the chance to make things as clean as they possibly could be, and all they needed was an inconsistency—any inconsistency—that they could use to pry the case open and prove Nick's innocence.
"But we still don't have any clues as to who actually did it," Nick pointed out, but Judy shook her head and rummaged through the file until she found the picture of a fox on Zweihorn's doorstep.
"We have this picture," she said triumphantly, "It has to be a fake. But they put your head on the real killer's body."
"Unless the whole thing is faked, and there wasn't an original from the night Zweihorn was murdered," Nick countered, but Judy knew he was bringing it up more as a possibility than trying to dismiss her idea completely.
"But either way," Judy persisted, "Someone put your head on the body of another fox."
Nick nodded. "We've read everything," he said, gesturing at the table, "I guess it's time to go to the New Yak Evening Graphic and ask some questions about faking pictures."
Judy felt her excitement suddenly fall. "But I don't have a badge anymore," she said, and Nick gave her a crooked smile as he waved dismissively.
"Oh, I think I know how to get them to help," he said, and Judy could hear the absolute confidence in his voice.
"Then come on!" Judy said, grabbing his arm and pulling him towards the door closest to the garage, "Let's go!"
"Before you get yourself in a lather, aren't you forgetting something?" Nick asked as he stumbled a few steps forward, and then looked down at her meaningfully once he had pulled her to a stop.
It took a moment for Judy to realize what Nick was getting at until she looked down at herself and realized she was still wearing one of his dress shirts as a nightgown. They had come right down to the kitchen after getting out of bed, and after breakfast they had gone right back into the file; Nick was still wearing his silk pajamas, and from the way his fur was sticking out at odd angles she guessed hers wasn't any better. "Oh," Judy said.
There was a pause, her paw still wrapped around Nick's wrist, and without letting go she pulled him in a new direction. "Then come on, we need to take a shower!" she called over her shoulder as she set off for the bathroom.
Author's notes:
Before I get to anything else, I've got something pretty cool to share. Reader JoenSo put together a playlist on YouTube of all of the songs from the chapter titles of this story. I can't directly link it because of FanFiction's automatic anti-spam functions, but if you go to YouTube's main page you can add the text below to the end of the URL to get to it:
playlist?listPLNOH6C6-fEDqNdPIkAAn9LXvKs02UM4MK
JoenSo is also an artist, and his DeviantArt page is worth checking out; his latest work is a very cute piece of Judy wearing a button up shirt and tie. Again, I can't directly link, but you can find him there under the username JoenSo.
Thanks again for putting this together, JoenSo! I think it's a great companion to the story, and it's perfect if you want a little mood music while you read.
As for this chapter, the title comes from a song variously known as "Confessin' (that I Love You)," "Confessin'," "I'm Confessin'," or "I'm Confessin' that I Love You." I went with the title I liked best, but whatever you call it the song was written in 1930 by Al Neiburg as an alternate set of lyrics to the song "Lookin' For Another Sweetie," by Chris Smith and Sterling Grant, which was written in 1929. Besides the obvious nature of the title and the events of the chapter, "Confessin' (that I Love You)," also has very sweetly romantic lyrics.
You may find it disappointing that this chapter skips the events of the previous night, but I thought that the emotion of their closeness was more important than the particulars of any physical acts, and that hopefully came through well enough.
Nick's alarm clock stopped because it wasn't wound while he was in jail, and he was somewhat distracted the previous night to wind it again. In the 1920s, watches and most clocks were powered by a coiled spring that slowly unwound, not electricity. Self-winding watches were starting to become more common in the 1920s, but as they rely on the motion of the body the mechanism wasn't practical for alarm clocks, which are generally left by the side of the bed and don't move. By the 1930s, alarm clocks that were electrically powered were more common, and clock radios also started showing up in that time period.
Hollandaise sauce is indeed one of the five sauces of French haute cuisine, and the original recipe dates to at least 1651. It's an emulsion of egg yolks, butter, water, and lemon juice, and can be somewhat tricky to prepare without accidentally curdling the egg. It's a key ingredient in Eggs Benedict, a popular American breakfast and brunch food made with an English muffin topped with ham, a poached egg, and hollandaise sauce. Eggs Benedict was first created in 1894 (supposedly as an attempt at a hangover cure by a stockbroker named Lemuel Benedict) in Manhattan, and from there started to become more widely known. In either case, I think it's reasonable considering Judy's upbringing that she wouldn't be familiar with hollandaise sauce either from its European origins or from its use in a popular East Coast breakfast.
Nick had noticed, in chapter 17, that the three thousand dollars on Carajou's body was in sequential bills, and in chapter 33 the contract that Carajou had in his hotel room was indeed for $5000.
Getting into a lather was, in 1920s slang, to get yourself worked up about something. The origin of the term comes from the tendency of horses to sweat when they're exerting themselves. When horses sweat, the sweat can form a sort of frothy white lather, giving an obvious visual cue. Since there are horses in the world of Zootopia, I figured that it made sense for the expression to still exist; horses are one of the few non-human mammals that produce significant amounts of sweat from their body to help regulate their temperature, and it would definitely stand out there as much as it does here.
This chapter was more of a beat and something of a recap than a chapter intended to really move the investigation further, but I thought it was crucial to have these scenes here before they jump back into investigation mode as some of the development of their relationship, so hopefully it worked. Next week, though, it is off to the offices of the tabloid. As always, thanks for reading! I'd love to know what you thought!