"I can't believe we forgot candles."
"I can't believe YOU forgot candles. Me forgetting them is perfectly believable."
Nick and Judy sat in pitch darkness, the howling wind buffeting the taped-up windows. A mechanical fault in a Sahara Square heater had forced an unscheduled shutdown, and there hadn't been time to do the same for it's counterpart on the Tundratown side of the artificial weather network. So without that heat to counterbalance the system, the weather system spiraled out of control, with temperatures plummeting and gale-force winds expected. A system of safety measures and built-in inertia had given the ZPD and Zootopia Emergency Services time to distribute supplies and instructions for anyone under 50kg to stay indoors until the all-clear was sounded. Which, of course, included Judy and Nick.
The two of them had piled up bottled water and thermal blankets in a corner of the apartment, stacked extra cold packs into the refrigerator, and settled in to wait out the storm, but shortly after sundown the power had gone out. Neither of their phones had been charged because they had unplugged everything from the wall sockets to protect against power surges, and, as it turned out, they had no other source of light. So to avoid wasting the limited power, they had decided against using them as light sources.
So now they sat, side by side and wrapped in a shared blanket on Nick's mess of a bed to ward off the chill, passing back and forth a bottle of wine they had warmed with their combined body heat. The sat in companionable silence for a while, until Judy spoke up. "Well, it's not exactly rainy, but we've got the wine and there's definitely no work tomorrow. Is it alright if I ask about your mother?"
Nick took a while to answer, and Judy felt him shifting in his seat. "There's more wine, right?"
"Five more bottles."
"Well, alright then." He took a swig of the current bottle, weighing his words carefully before starting. "Well... the short version is she deserved a better son than she got. Or at least a son better at hiding what he was really doing for a living. She never did take no for an answer, not when she knew she was in the right. And when it came to whether I should be cozying up to organized crime for a living, she definitely did, and in hindsight, she was right as hell. But I was young and angry and convinced that there was no legal income stream for a fox like me, not just to keep me in Hawaiian shirts and exotic fruits but to keep the roof of the flat I grew up in over her head without her having to work two jobs as well. So when she made some ultimatums, I walked out. For her own good, I told myself. Only contact I had with her for years was sending money every month."
Nick trailed off for a long moment, lost in memory, and Judy reached into the darkness and, after a bit of fumbling, put her paw over his. Nick flinched slightly at the contact, but didn't pull away, instead plowing on with the story. "After my falling out with Mister Big, I still didn't get back in touch with her. It would have meant admitting I'd failed her, that I'd hurt her out of stupid pride and didn't even have anything to show for it. So I kept throwing myself back into business so I could keep sending money to her. Took a lot of stupid risks before I went into business with Finnick. Little guy probably saved my life when we started doing the nice, safe bread-and-butter hustles.
"About a year after me and him went into business, I felt confident enough to get back in touch with mum again. Six years since the last time I'd spoken with her. I dressed up all nice, bought a bunch of flowers, and swaggered back into the shitty dead-end neighborhood. Walked up my street, up to the block of flats I'd lived in, pressed the buzzer of the apartment I'd grown up in. And a nice old beaver couple responded. I thought I'd hit the wrong button at first but a bit of talking later they said that Mrs Wilde had used to live there and they forwarded mail to her new address - after a fire had gutted half the tenement block she'd taken the settlement from a class-action lawsuit against the landlord and moved away. I charmed them into giving me the address easy enough, and it was in some county hours away.
"So I poked around. Asked some questions. Had a couple friends in government pull some records. Turns out mum had done pretty well for herself. Got a few promotions at one of her jobs and was able to quit the other. Ended up getting close to a well-off guy that did business with her firm, they dated for a while then married, moved into the country. For two and a half years she'd been Mrs Pentleton. She and him had been trying to have a baby before they had grown apart. I had almost been an older brother, never realized it. They ended up divorcing amicably, and she agreed to waive alimony in exchange for a property she'd spend most of the marriage developing. By the time I had tracked her down, she was Mrs Wilde again and owner of thirty acres of prime beetle-ranching farmland. And still getting an envelope of money from me every month.
"I guess it was stupid and probably more than a bit selfish to expect her to just stay exactly the same and wait for me to decide to waltz back into her life, but still, it shattered me. I'd built my entire identity around having done what I'd done to provide for my mother, and she had been making more money than me the whole time. And it was my own damn stupid fault for deliberately not having left her with any way to contact me. I couldn't blame it on anyone but myself. Ever since that, I just sort of drifted forward on autopilot doing what I've always done because I couldn't think of what else to do. Up until I met a certain bunny, anyway." In the darkness, Nick's paw turned to take Judy's in his, their fingers intertwining. Judy had no other response, stunned by the story. Unnoticing of her befuddlement, or unable to stop until it was done, Nick pressed on.
"I did end up getting in contact with her again. Things are- were- okay between us, I guess. Strained but civil. We talked about once a month and I pretended I wasn't a crook and she pretended she didn't mind, but with that topic off limits there wasn't much else in my life, so I mostly just listened while she told me years and years of life events I had missed out on.
"Then came graduation from the Academy.
"I hadn't told her about the whole Night Howler thing, or that I was trying to become an officer. At first because I didn't want her to worry, and then because I wanted to surprise her. Then when I heard that I had made it through, I called up mum to tell her and invite her to the ceremony and...
"She didn't believe me.
"It wasn't just shocked disbelief. It was her being unable to accept that her son had it in him to become an officer of the law. She was angry at me for whatever it was I was trying to pull.
"I hung up. Haven't called her since. She hasn't tried to call me, either."
The long lull after Nick's words stretched out, punctuated only by their breathing and the howling of the wind. It took Judy quite some time to realize that a response would be appropriate, and then even longer to stop reeling from the emotional baggage that had just been unpacked before her to come up with an appropriate one. In the end, all she could say was:
"Holy SHIT, Nick."
"I know, right?" Judy could hear the bitter smirk in Nick's words.
Having run out of words, Judy just tucked herself deeper into Nick's side, hugging him tightly. He gently wrapped an arm around her in response.
"You don't have to say anything, Hopps. It's just a big shit sandwich I've made for myself that I've got to munch my way through. All I need from you right now is for you to keep drinking with me."
Accepting the bottle from Nick's paw, Judy did exactly that.
Things were pretty maudlin for a while after that. Nick cried a bit, Judy cried a lot, and they just cuddled and drank together in the darkness, Judy trying to show with closeness what she couldn't express with words. Eventually, however, Nick pried Judy off his side, sat her up on his chest, and wiped her tears away with the back of his paw. "Okay, that's enough wallowing. Don't get me wrong, I really appreciate you sharing getting mugged in memory lane with me, but if we don't cut it out now I'll be miserable for days." There was a soft, wet noise as Nick licked the tears off his paw, sending indecipherable feelings shooting through Judy.
Judy flopped forward, propping her head up with her elbows on Nick's chest fur, and lay in comfortable silence for a moment. Most of her mind was occupied with trying to decide whether she should admire Nick for his emotional fortitude or be upset with him for trying to avoid having to process the issue, but a rapidly growing segment was too busy exulting in the sheer amount of warmth radiating off the chest below her. She'd shared body warmth with mammals before Nick, of course - winter in Bunny Burrows had almost all the bunny children piling into beds with each other or their parents or older siblings for warmth - but Nick easily outdid all of her previous bedmates in sheer heat output. And, of course, in a number of other areas.
A small, oft-ignored corner of her mind raised a notion that threw the rest of her thoughts into disarray. She wanted to kiss him.
She knew it was bad timing. If she kissed him now, he'd think it was just pity motivating her, and while sympathy was a factor the urge had been building in her for a while. And even if he didn't blame that, he'd probably blame the wine, and if she was honest with herself she probably was just tipsy enough to make questionable decisions.
A solution presented itself, and she embraced it. "Hey, Nick?"
"Yeah, Carrots?"
"You're not allowed to interpret this badly, okay?"
"Interpret what-"
She wriggled up his chest, found his muzzle in the darkness with her paws, pulled it down towards her, and placed a gentle kiss on the end of it. His mouth had been partially open and her aim had been partly off-center, so she had mostly just kissed his upper lip and grazed one of his fangs with her lower lip (sending a thrill of fear and excitement through her on top of what was already there), but as clumsy and poorly-aimed and poorly-timed that it was, it was perfect. She knew it was perfect the second it was done. It was a beautiful, shining moment of perfection on par with her graduation from the Academy.
Nick was silent and still for a long stretch of time, long enough for Judy to wonder whether she'd made a mistake, and then there was a rustle of fur on blankets as Nick's arms begun to move. One circled around her, placing a paw on her back - well, slightly lower down than her back, but that was probably just misaimed from the darkness and even if it wasn't she decided she didn't mind - and the other gently probed the darkness until it found her face. His paw engulfed her cheek and she leaned into it, her eyes closing in bliss. She was almost surprised when his mouth sought out hers in the darkness and they kissed again.
It was incredibly awkward. Neither of them had much experience with kissing, let alone with such a size difference, and the darkness and the alcohol certainly didn't help. But it was still perfect, even when they had to stop because they were giggling so much at their fumbling missteps. Then Judy tried to lean in to resume and went drastically off-course, and her lips had found Nick's left nostril. He snorted in surprise, causing Judy's cheeks to bulge with his breath, and they had both burst out laughing, Judy collapsing onto Nick's chest. And that was perfect, too.
A/N: A shorter chapter than usual, but it was a nice point to end on. The rest of the night will probably be in the next chapter.
I may have caused frowns or stepped on toes by turning a fluffy little snugglefic into such a drastic expansion of canon by supplying my own answer for one of the biggest unanswered questions of the movie, and if I harshed your buzz I apologize, but after I had started writing the set-up for the blackout, I realized that it was the perfect point for Nick to tell Judy the rest of the story with his mother. And I think it's a good answer for why they'd be out of contact - no tragedy, no villain, just two strong-willed and stubborn people who both think they're right. If you've got a strong opinion one way or the other about who's right and who's wrong here, I'd love to hear it.