"I'm marred forever. I'll never be pretty again."
Judy rolled her eyes, dabbing away at Nick's cuts with an iodine-soaked rag. "The paramedic barely took a square inch of fur off you to stitch the bite. Your shirt will cover it, anyway."
"It's the principle of the thing." Nick was lying on one of the bear-sized pillows as Judy tended to his scratches. The two of them had been called in to help with a perimeter for a search warrant, and had spotted the inhabitants of the apartment - a pair of ferrets - shimmying down a drainpipe in an attempt to escape. After they split up, Judy's one had slipped on a patch of ice, slid into a dustbin, and knocked himself out cold. Nick's ferret had proven more slippery, and had lead him on a chase through Tundratown's filthiest alleys before making a wrong turn and cornering himself, at which point he had turned nasty. Nick had managed to pin him down early on, but since cuffing a ferret was an exercise in futility, he'd had to hold down the wriggling, scratching, biting ferret until backup arrived and managed to take over for the bleeding and utterly exhausted fox.
After booking in the ferrets, seeking a bit of medical help for Nick, and filling out the inevitable paperwork, the two of them had been given the rest of the day off, since Nick was obviously dead on his feet. And now Nick was distracting himself from the sting of iodine with alcohol and complaints. Or, as he had said to Judy before chuckling at his own joke and looking pleased with himself, wine and whine. He was drinking it out of a shot glass the size of a coffee mug, which was balanced precariously on his bare chest, and already his muzzle was stained blue.
Judy grabbed the glass, took a swig from it, and started to swab the scratch that it had covered. "We got the bad guys, and you're still in one piece. That's what matters."
Nick tried to recover the glass from her, but she easily dodged his lazy swipes without interrupting her tending. Before long he gave up, and just watched the rabbit work. "I guess you're right. We did good today. And we got on the good side of the Tundratown sergeant, which I thought was impossible if you didn't weigh in at at least half a ton." Before long both Judy and the glass were finished, and Nick looked forlornly down at his fur, with one patch missing and a number of other patches dyed yellow. His mourning was short-lived, however, as the growling of his stomach interrupted.
Judy laughed. "You stay there, hero. I'll get us some food." After pulling a blanket over Nick's bare chest (after one last look) she went on a quick raid on the crisper draw and the bowl on the kitchen counter, producing a bowl full of various fruits. As she returned to Nick, she saw that without conversation and the sting of iodine to keep him awake, his exhaustion was threatening to drag him into slumber, his eyes half-lidded and his breathing even. She smiled fondly down at him for a moment or two, watching him doze, before saying "lift your head."
Nick opened his eyes for a moment to give her a questioning look but obeyed all the same, and Judy sat herself down on the pillow perpendicular to Nick and pulled his head down towards her lap. Nick's eyes widened, but after a moment they found Judy's smiling face and he relaxed again, letting his head sink back into her lap. A moment later, he opened his mouth to accept the grape she dropped into it, chuckling to himself as he chewed. "Feeding me grapes, now. All I need is another one of you fanning me with a palm frond in a skimpy outfit and I'd have seen everything- ouch!" Judy had tweaked his ear with her nails as she threw a grape into her own mouth with her other hand. "Watch the ears, bunny, don't you know I'm wounded?"
"Watch your tongue and your ears should be fine," Judy replied, booping him on the nose scoldingly with a tangerine before peeling away the skin with her buck teeth. They worked their way through the entire bowl of fruit that way, alternating morsels, with Nick's content, sleepy gaze rarely leaving her face. Judy was a little self-conscious at first, but settled down into the comfort of the routine, unconsciously stroking his ears with her spare hand as she fed the two of them. After the fruit was finished and the two of them basked in the comfortable silence, Nick finally broke it by murmuring, "remind me to get wounded more often, if this is how I'd get treated after."
Judy smiled down at Nick. "As long as you agree to pamper me just as well when I'm the one all scratched up."
Nick scoffed in response. "We both know you're too fast to get hurt in the first place and too stubborn to admit to needing a little TLC if you did get hit."
"But you're stubborn enough to give the TLC even if I said I didn't need it."
"That's true." There was a long moment of simple happiness as the two of them smiled at each other. "We make a pretty good team, don't we?"
"The best."
A few moments later Nick had fallen entirely asleep, and Judy waited a few moments longer, continuing to stroke his ears, before she gently slid herself out from under his head. She almost fell over on top of him because her legs had fallen asleep, but not even that could ruin the moment for her.
Several hours later Judy had cleaned up from lunch, showered, and was now relaxing on the armchair, one eye on the news playing on the TV and one on the battered second-hand paperback she was reading - a charmingly bad pulp spy novel, where the protagonist killed or slept with everything that moved and used everything that didn't move as a prop in one of the first two things. She was drawn from the book by Nick stirring, who hissed when his movements disturbed his injuries, then stiffly dragged himself upright and staggered into the bathroom. A few moments later the toilet flushed and he emerged again and staggered towards the armchair, looking up at Judy sitting above him and plainly considering whether he could scrabble his way atop it. Judy couldn't resist the urge to look smug, and Nick shot her a playful glare before going back to the pillow and then dragging it over to the base of the armchair to sit on. Judy allowed herself a moment of lofty superiority before she let herself drop off the chair, and her butt bounced on the pillow a couple of times before she came to rest next to Nick.
The major stories had finished and it was on to the cruft and drama. The CEO of a firm that specialized in deodorants and scent masking products was unsuccessfully trying to put down rumours that he was a civet with dyed fur and a prosthetic tail instead of a genuine skunk, and had ended up unwisely challenging his detractors to test his smell for themselves, and enough new 'detractors' had appeared from various fetishist groups on social media that getting them all together was a genuine logistical challenge. Now he was stuck arguing that he shouldn't have to foot the bill for renting and subsequently clearing the smell out of a conference hall.
"You know, Nick, that reminds me of something I was meaning to ask you..."
Nick frowned at her, then looked down at himself. "I don't need a shower THAT badly, do I? All I can smell is iodine right now."
"No, nothing like that. It's just that you've always had kind of an obvious smell- not a BAD smell!" she rushed to reassure him, as he gave her an insulted look. "I kind of like it now that I'm used to it, actually. It's just pretty distinct. I thought it was just a rabbit thing, you know, being very aware of the smell of a fox, but I've started getting a lot of questions about what exactly our relationship was from some of the mammals at work, and apparently it's because they can smell you on me."
"Ah," replied Nick thoughtfully. He leaned over to Judy as best he could, wincing, and sniffed at her. "Now that you mention it, you do smell a bit me-ish. Where are the rabbit scent glands, Carrots?"
"Huh? Um, one on the chin, and one, ah, private."
"Hah. Yeah, foxes have a private one too. But we've got other ones all over. Cheeks, hands, feet, tail. Some mammals say they smell like violets, others just say it's musk. Either way, hang around a fox long enough and you start smelling like one too." Nick looked over at Judy, smiling a little at her shocked expression. "We foxes are territorial animals, Hopps. If we really want to claim something we rub our cheeks on it, but we're always marking everything we touch a little bit."
"That's..." Judy mulled the thought over a bit, trying to decide how she felt about that. Nick watched her think for a moment before interrupting her train of thought.
"If you want, there's a bottle of musk mask in my bag. It'll neutralize the smell, let you put something else over it - but make sure you do, because if coming in to work smelling like fox is getting tongues and tails wagging, coming in smelling like musk mask definitely will. Or," and his voice lowered, becoming almost seductive. "You could even the score. Put that bunny chin of yours to work and return the favour. REALLY get them talking."
If Nick was bluffing - and he himself couldn't say for sure whether he had been in that moment - he didn't get a chance to retract it. Learning that her scent had been announcing to the world that she, a rabbit, had been marked by a fox, had started a whirlwind of emotions in her that she couldn't begin to separate and identify, one that only intensified when she considered killing off that familiar, comfortable, Nick-y smell. But when Nick had suggested marking him back - 'chinning' him, as rabbits called it - it had felt RIGHT. With only just enough presence of mind to keep herself from tackling his chest and probably reopening his stitches, she instead stood up, took Nick's head in her arms, looked him in the eye for a moment, then gently but firmly ran her chin along the top of his head, from the point of his nose to the base of his ears.
With the task done, her boldness fled in an instant, leaving behind that maelstrom of emotions, and she returned herself to his side without meeting his eyes again, a little shocked at her own daring. There was a quiet, thoughtful moment between the two of them as Judy blushed hotly, before Nick broke the silence. "Huh. Well. That puts that matter to rest pretty solidly, then." His voice was forcedly casual, but it was too stilted to ring true, displaying his shock to Judy as clearly as if he had stammered it. After a further thoughtful moment, he continued on with artificial smoothness, "so, what have you been telling these tongue-waggers about us when they ask?"
"That we're partners."
"Which we are, of course."
"Great ones."
"Mm." There was a long, thoughtful pause, and Nick decided to press his luck. "But... something else, too, I think."
Judy gathered her courage and tore her gaze away from the nothing she had been staring so determinedly at, and looked up to meet Nick's expression looking down at her. There were a lot of emotions in that look, most of which she couldn't begin to identify, but there was one she had long experience with: the pure, uncomplicated fondness that he almost always looked at her with these days. With that look concentrated on her, any desire to deny Nick's unspoken question melted away in her. "Yes. Something else. I mean, don't ask me exactly what that something else is because I couldn't even begin to tell you what that something is, but... something." She smiled up at Nick, feeling an incredible relief at having put into words, even so vaguely, what it was that had been brewing between the two of them.
"Something." Nick mulled it over for a moment, his smile not wavering for a moment. "Well, I'm glad to be something with you, Hopps."
"Thanks, Nick. I am too."
After another moment of looking into each other's eyes, Judy broke off her gaze and burrowed her face into Nick's side, taking a deep breath of that familiar, comfortable smell of Nick that had taken on a whole new dimension of meaning for her. Nick rubbed a finger along the top of his muzzle and then brought it to his nose, sniffing deeply, testing out the smell of being marked by a rabbit. It was quite gentle by fox standards, but it had a quiet intensity all of it's own, and Nick quickly found himself deciding he liked the smell of Judy having claimed him - though it wasn't an objective judgement by any measure.
A/N: As far as I know, and corroborated by the finest results two minutes in Google can produce, the scent gland info in this chapter is accurate. It's the anal scent glands that give foxes their musky, almost skunk-ish odor, so in a more civilized world where applying your butthole to things is no longer considered socially acceptable, foxes would likely still smell potent, but less skunky and more like violets, apparently. Rabbits chinning things is also correct, and it's trivially easy to find dozens of insanely adorable videos demonstrating this on Youtube.