It was later, and they were drunker.
The sleet outside had given away to heavy snow, and the silence had gotten somehow quieter and the darkness darker, and it seemed that the world had shrunk to just the two of them in their cozy, warm blanket burrow. They had nothing to do, nowhere to be, and no concerns. All they had and all they needed was each other.
Judy was stretched out on Nick's bare chest, her fingers running over his muscles, marveling at that which was so well hidden under his fuzzy pelt. He was entertaining himself by tensing and relaxing the muscles her fingers were tracing, and she could feel the raw power in each one as they rippled under his skin. These were the muscles of a predator, she thought wonderingly to herself. A creature that would, in the past, have chased her down and eaten her if given a chance. And even in the modern day there was a variety of products meant to protect creatures like her from him. And now here she was draped over one, completely vulnerable, and she knew for a fact that she couldn't be safer. Even the strong musky smell of fox that she was surrounded by meant warmth and comfort to her now.
Her probing fingers had run down Nick's arm and had reached his paws, and with barely a moment's hesitation she continued on to the pads of his paws. As rabbits lacked them, she was unfamiliar with them, and they held a certain fascination for them. Night-time horror stories told among rabbit kits told that they were to hold their victims in place, but she had done a little research on fox anatomy and knew that they were to support a fox's weight, from back in the quadrupedal past. They were rough, almost as rough as a callous, but underneath they were very soft, almost gel-like. She entertained herself for a moment poking at them, building up her confidence before she moved on to the claws.
She had been worried a bit, and in the past had deliberately avoided thinking about them, but she was just drunk enough and comfortable enough to dive in. And she found she needn't have worried. She had pictured some dramatic reaction she would have to his claws, hyperventilating or rubbing at her cheek or some other such nonsense as she flashed back to her childhood encounter with Gideon, but everything about this moment was so Nick that it was impossible for her to relate it to someone else. These were Nick's claws, how could she ever be concerned about them?
Her fingers ran over his claws, lightly at first. Nick held his paw absolutely still, and she could feel his heartbeat increasing slightly under her. She considered saying something to calm him down a bit, but decided against breaking the silence, and just continued on with confidence, and soon enough she felt some of the tenseness go out of him and his heartbeat slow back to it's drowsy level as she ran his clawpoints over her fingertips. They were blunter than she expected, which made sense - he couldn't retract them, that was a grey fox thing - but they weren't for cutting or slicing like a cat's claws. They were for pinning down his prey.
His prey. She rolled that thought around in her mind for a moment. Well, she was prey. And, in this moment, she could admit that she was his. Did that make her his prey? Well, she thought, blushing at her own boldness, she'd let him pin her down if he asked nicely. The thought burned brightly in her imagination for a moment, before she was distracted with her ongoing investigation of Nick's claws. Carefully testing them she'd found that even if she pressed her paw against it hard, without force and momentum behind it it didn't break the skin or hurt at all. Running her paw back and forth created the most effective scratching sensation she'd ever encountered, even better than rabbit nails. "Mm, Nick, when I shed this coat you're so scratching me all over with these," she murmured sleepily. Nick's only response was to exhale the breath he had been holding, and his muzzle sought out the top of her head to kiss it in affirmation, managing to land a direct hit between her ears that she giggled slightly at. She considered grabbing at his face to explore his teeth, but that would mean leaving his chest - or at least breaking contact with it enough to reach up - and that was a sacrifice she wasn't willing to make.
It was later, and they were slightly less drunk.
After finishing off the second bottle, they had mutually and silently refused to venture out of their bubble of warmth for more. Time had passed - minutes, hours, days, they neither knew nor cared - and whether they had slept or dozed or just lay their in sleepy bliss was equally unknowable. The only indication of time passing was the almost unnoticeable fade from the fuzzy warmth of alcohol to the fuzzy warmth of fuzz and warmth. That, and another, more pressing indicator, that Judy felt herself hating with every fiber of her being.
She had to pee.
At some point, Nick's paw, released from her examinations, had planted itself on her back. If her using his chest as her mattress didn't nail home the size difference between them, his paw circling her entire lower back certainly did, and while she normally exulted in those differences, right now pushing the paw off her would require a whole master plan of movements - turning around, putting her paws on his, lifting it off her - which would require waking up a little more. Which seemed impossible to her.
So instead, she nudged Nick. The tiny, soft movement was almost entirely absorbed by his fur, and whatever impact got through didn't stir him. She tried headbutting his chest, but when she lifted her head she found that robbed her head of the softness and warmth of his chest, so quickly gave up on that idea and burrowed her face back into his chest fur. This was a disaster. She only had one recourse left before she'd have to abandon the sleepy half-doze she was in and actually start thinking her way through the problem.
"Nick. Nick. Niiiiick."
"Mmm?"
"Getyerpawoffme. Gottapee."
"Mm." There was a long moment while he processed that, and the comforting weight of his paw was lifted off her, and she almost asked him to return it. But she had a mission. With the determination and raw grit that had driven a tiny bunny through the police academy, she gathered up all her willpower and rolled off Nick and onto the bed.
The bed was cold. She could feel warmth radiating from where Nick was lying, but compared to lying on Nick himself, the bed was freezing cold. When she burrowed through the blankets to escape the bed, the blankets seemed to grow colder as she went further from Nick. When she finally found the edge of the blankets and nosed her way through, the outside air hit her like a sledgehammer of coldness, driving the sleepiness from her in an instant. And when she dropped off the bed and her little bunny feet made contact with the carpet, that was the coldest thing of all.
Except it wasn't. Because after the carpet came the tiles of the bathroom. And then the porcelain of the toilet.
Half a minute later, after her business was done and the toilet was flushed, Judy felt like she had survived the worst ordeal of her life. She practically flew out of the bathroom and made possibly the best leap of her life going from the door to the bathroom to the bed, and then burrowed into the blankets in a desperate search for the warmth of Nick's body that felt like a distant, hazy memory. As she burrowed, she could feel the temperature rising as she made her way back to the promised land. And she almost sobbed with relief as a pair of paws reached out and plucked her from the blankets and carried her back to the incredible warmth of Nick's chest, which she swore to herself she would never, ever leave again. She shivered uncontrollably as she wriggled, trying to burrow further into Nick's chest as his paws roamed over her body, rubbing warmth back into her, and before long she was back in bliss. No, she had been in bliss before, and now that she had such stark contrast this was beyond bliss - this was a religious experience. She had found her purpose in life. It was to never, ever leave the endless radiating warmth of this fox's chest. Every time she thought she had been warmed back up to where she was before, every time she felt she had reached the pinnacle of warmth before discomfort would set in, she somehow got warmer and even comfier.
When Nick murmured that he had to pee now too, she almost cried.
Nick's return to the warmth of the bed had been a whole lot less acrobatic but more dramatic than hers. He scrabbled up the side of the bed in sheer desperation, then tunneled through the blankets like a trained tracker, beelining straight for her. When he reached her, he wrapped his arms around her, clung her to his chest, and curled his entire body around her, shivering violently. Judy just clung to him in return, knowing well the terrible torment he had just suffered and trying to alleviate it with her presence as best she could.
When his shivering had minimized, he finally found his voice. "Carrots?"
"Yeah?"
"We really need to alert the authorities. There appears to be a wormhole to some sort of frozen hell dimension in our bathroom."
"We are the authorities, Nick."
"Oh. Are we alerted?"
"Yes. We are."
"Good."
With any hope of sleep dashed by their encounters with the primordial realm of ice and cold that had once been known as their bathroom, the two of them started planning further excursions out of their bubble of warmth and safety. More wine was required, as were snacks. There was a short but vigorous debate as to who should venture out, and Nick won the argument, with a combination of arguing that he could warm up Judy a lot faster than vice versa, and an oath that he'd bear her children. Judy braced herself for another voyage into the cold, promising herself that if Zootopian medical science made some really surprising advances in surrogacy technology, Nick would regret his promise.
The trip was almost anticlimactic. Having a solid mental map of the room and a short list of objectives, she was able to bound free of the covers, leap across the room, take the wine bottle in one hand, a plastic bag full of snacks that had been left on the counter in the other, and be burrowing back into the blankets before the shock of the cold had fully hit her. She burrowed her way back into Nick's chest fur nevertheless, but only after tucking the wine bottle up against it's side to warm it, ignoring his yelp. After warmth had filled both her and the wine, they popped the cork and started swigging some more, interspersed with feeding each other snacks and scolding each other playfully as they missed in the darkness and started scattering crumbs.
After a while, the last of the chips were munched down and a good third of the wine bottle was gone, and they started on the fruits. A little nipping of fingers escalated into flirtatious sucks, and soon enough no hands were involved at all as they took it in turns to hold a berry in their lips and invite the other to take it, which lead to a lot of kisses and also a lot of inadvertent headbutts and nibbles of chins, noses, and on one occasion an ear, all of which failed to dampen the mood. A little after that, and after a few mouthfuls of wine were shared in the same way, all pretenses were discarded and they found themselves rolling around in bed, making out with each other with strength and passion that was sure to leave bruises in the morning. After they separated to catch their breath, Judy reached out with her paws to take Nick's face in them to be sure that she'd be looking in the general direction of his eyes.
"Hey Nick," Judy half-whispered half-panted, her voice hoarse with need. "Want to do something we'll regret in the morning?"
Nick began to answer with a kiss, then paused as there was a shuffling in the darkness and a faint whine from him. "Officer Hopps, I regret to inform you that I am not equipped to comply."
"Are you reporting you're unarmed on duty, officer?"
"No ma'am, I'm reporting my firearm is malfunctioning. No matter how much I rack the slide, my safety remains jammed in the 'on' position."
Judy dissolved into giggles, though they subsided into a frustrated frown. "Well, I guess that's any friskiness for tonight off the table. Who knows when I'll be rocking this much artificial courage again?"
"Hey, don't forget that academy training. If you're lacking your sidearm, you can still fallback on paw-to-paw combat. Which is where the metaphor breaks down, because I'm actually referring to bunnilingus."
Judy started giggling again, though when the giggles stopped, it definitely wasn't a frown that followed. And Judy began acquainting herself with the final predatory feature that she had missed on her earlier tour - his wide, grinning mouth, and the long, dexterous tongue within.