"I told you about mine."
"Yeah, but-"
"But what, Nick?"
"No, it's nothing."
"No, it isn't. What were you going to say? That mine doesn't count? Because I'm some inexperienced practically-a-virgin country bunny?"
Nick opened and closed his mouth a couple of times, before admitting, "okay, yes, I thought something along those lines. But I didn't say it."
Judy opened her mouth to retort, but managed to bite it back just in time. She took a few deep breaths, then laughed at herself ruefully. "What is it Clawhauser always says? If thinking it was a crime, we'd all be guilty?"
Judy had known it was going to be a touchy topic. For Nick, the past largely held pain, and he didn't touch on it often. But she hadn't expected him to clam up so tight when it came to the subject of former lovers, and when she had recounted her own experiences over coffee - some awkward fumblings in school, a couple of relationships after it that never went anywhere - she had expected him, perhaps a bit unfairly in hindsight, to return the favour. And things had gotten ugly quickly as Nick had clammed up and, unable to help herself, she'd started prying.
Nick gave a hesitant smile at her change of attitude. "Look, Judy, I'm not trying to keep secrets. And you have to believe I don't look down on you." He hesitated, and Judy rolled her eyes and made a get-it-over-with motion with her hands, and he added "-except literally. I mean, sure, you've got less life experience than me, but when you've done so much more with what you do have, how is that something I could hold above you?"
"Then if it isn't that, what's the problem?"
Nick leaned back against the kitchen sink, considering his answer. "I've... had relationships go badly. Sometimes because of my own stupid mistakes. I don't want to..."
"Scare me off?"
"Well, not scare you off, so much as give you more reason than you already have to rethink all this." Nick gave a self-deprecating smile. And if he thought that would defuse Judy's anger, he was sorely mistaken.
"Urgh- Nick! You can't constantly be tip-toeing around me worried that any little thing is going to set me off and lead the the downfall of, of us!"
"Judy-" Nick tried to interrupt, but Judy raised a hand to silence him. She took a few deep breaths, getting her temper under control and thinking carefully about what to say next.
"Nick, I get that you've had a hard life. Really, I do. But you really need to stop thinking of me like I might be the next thing in your life that blows up on you." Nick opened his mouth to reply but Judy plowed on once more; "and I know I might be, maybe I'll get shot in the line of duty or get hit by a car crossing the road or whatever, or some stupid paranoid thought that's lurking in the back of your head like that I might decide what I really want to do is spend the rest of my life having baby bunnies and farming root vegetables, but you can't put your girlfriend through this... this emotional risk management. Not and keep her as your girlfriend."
Nick cycled through a number of emotions at Judy's speech, before saying, almost as an aside; "you've never said you were my girlfriend before."
Judy blinked, nonplussed. "I- I guess I haven't. But, I mean, we're a couple now, right?"
"Right." Nick smiled for a moment, before shaking his head slightly and returning to the topic. "So, what, I should just unload all my relationship baggage before you and let you see all the fuck-ups I've made and hope it doesn't convince you that I'm a lost cause?"
"Yes! Because even though I don't know every single little anecdote of your life, I know YOU, Nicholas Wilde! And there is nothing you could tell me about your past that would make me think different of you!"
"Oh really?" Something gleaned in Nick's eye, and Judy had a moment to wonder if she hadn't blundered before she pushed the thought away. "I was dating an arctic fox, one of triplets. I dropped in unannounced at her work and snuck up behind her and gave her a bit of a pinch and squeeze, and it turned out to be the wrong triplet entirely."
"That's- that's a perfectly innocent mistake! It could have happened to anybody!"
"And then I tried to play it off like it was deliberate and I suggested a threesome!" Judy blinked and gave Nick a hard look. "Okay, that part wasn't true. I once got to the third date with a grey fox before I realize they were male! And I was too chicken to say anything so we ended up making out in the back of his car!"
"That's... actually kinda hot."
"It was at first but then he got a boner and I panicked and stopped and told him about the whole misunderstanding. He was actually pretty nice about it, I still have drinks with him sometimes- not the point! Before I freaked out I was planning to have Finnick call him the next day and tell him I had left Zootopia!"
"Nick! That's terrible!"
"Exactly my point, Carrots! You can't handle the accumulated decades of the hot mess that is Nicholas Piberius Wilde's love life! As a teenager, I was a back-up dancer for a K-pop music video and I ended up getting a pawjob from the blue one, who turned out to be actually the pink one wearing the blue one's clothes, and they got into a fight that ended up with one of them losing a tooth!"
"What- seriously?"
"Absolutely serious. For a month Finnick and me experimented with cross-dressing to see if we'd get better results if one or both of us looked like a girl!"
"That's not actually a relationship thing, though. Wait, was it?"
"What- no, neither of us swing that way. Jeez Hopps, mind out of the gutter."
"You brought it up. And Nick, stop. Seriously, if these stories are the worst you got..."
Nick took a deep breath, looking at her, before deliberately looking away and staring at a wall. "Another time-"
"Nick-"
"Last one, I promise. I dated a girl for almost two years, about ten years ago. Was crazy about her. She was about to go into postgraduate studies, and I got it into my head that I was holding her back. But I was too cowardly to actually break up with her. I started acting distant, hoping she'd realize she could do so much better. We started fighting all the time. When we did break up, months later, it was... really bad. Messy. I heard from friends she ended up flunking that semester, went on a sabbatical. Never ended up picking up her studies again, she got a job after she got back instead. Got married a year later to a guy a couple years older, had kids, ended up being a full-time mother." Nick sighed, staring into the distance. "This girl, maybe it's just bias speaking but... she was brilliant. She could've gotten a doctorate, and after that, sky was the limit. Instead stupid Nick Wilde derailed her life and now... well, she seems happy in the pictures I've seen, but..." He trailed off and sighed, looking down at his lap.
There was a long silence as Judy processed this, Nick's earlier reticence and his covering for it with silly anecdotes all making sense. She was shocked at first, even a little outraged, but she refused to let her initial reaction take over. Especially after she got a glimpse of his distraught expression. After a long, quiet think, during which Nick's eyes never left his lap, Judy found her voice and quietly broke the silence. "You ever seen inside the bottom left drawer of my desk back at the Downtown precinct?"
"I... don't think I have. Why?"
"It's about half full of newspaper clippings. From what they call the Nighthowler Riots, now. All caused because some dumb bunny didn't keep her mouth shut at that press conference. And it's not just the stuff that happened then, it's the stuff that's still happening." She closed her eyes and started to recite from memory. "There's a stag still in physical therapy for the shattered leg he got in a brawl with a wolf, who is still on probation for it. One of the burned buildings hasn't had an insurance payout yet because the insurance company and the fire alarm company are suing each other. There's a jaguar officer over in the Rainforest District that was pushing for a promotion to Downtown and was on track to get it, then he got his paw fractured during riot control, was on desk duty for months, which wasn't his strong suit. He didn't make the cut because of it. There's a stoat anti-pred activist that's been in and out of the cells ever since then for dancing on the line between free speech and inciting violence, never had so much as a parking ticket until his windows got smashed and his car overturned in one of the riots. Pred/prey motivated violence rates still haven't gone down to pre-Nighthowler Riot levels." She managed to keep her voice steady during the speech, but a few tears slipped out anyway. She could picture the faces of each of them from the photos on their government files. She opened her eyes to find that Nick had looked up and was staring at her. "So you fucked up. That just means we're both fuck-ups, and it's not just me."
Nick's stare pinned her to her chair for a moment longer, before he abruptly rose to his feet and circled the table towards her, and she barely had time to twist in her chair to face him as he dropped to his knees in front of her - bringing his head level with hers - and almost throwing himself against her, his large, strong arms gripping her in a gentle but firm grip, and after a moment she felt a drop of moisture start to soak through the fur of her shoulder, and she realized that Nick was crying too.
In that moment she wasn't sure whether he was seeking comfort or trying to supply it. She pulled him in closer, her thin arms wrapping around Nick's comparatively broad shoulders. She could feel his heart beating against her chest, and though hers was a lot smaller, she would bet he could feel hers beating too. And just for a moment, they seemed to be beating in sync.
The hopelessly sappy thought completely undermined what was left of her composure and she buried her face in the nape Nick's neck, her arms tightening. The two of them lost track of time as they sat entwined in that awkward position, slowly soaking each other with silent tears as they drew comfort from one another.
Finally, Judy broke the silence. Some part of her had realized that this was an opportunity that likely would not come around again. So she composed herself as best she could, pulled her muzzle from where it was burrowed into Nick's neck fur, and with a voice that only slightly cracked from emotion, said "oh, you foxes. You're so emotional."
A/N: So far Winter Snuggles has been entirely snuggly, but every relationship has fights and this one has gotten developed enough that it'd be remiss of me to continue portraying it as entirely made of happy snuggles. Don't worry, this won't be the new norm, it'll be back to coziness next chapter.
Any given couple will always, eventually, disagree about something. That's pretty much a truism, right? So when you consider that a fight is, when you get right down to it, an emotionally charged disagreement, the fact emerges that fights will always happen, no matter how good a relationship. Whether a fight damages a relationship, or the relationship emerges unscathed on the other side, depends on - you guessed it - communication. If you can get to the core of a disagreement - peel back the vitriol and anger until just the point where your opinions diverge - then emotionally healthy people will be able to let the emotions dissipate harmlessly and address the point.
Of course, if you haven't managed to find one of these theoretically possible but practically non-existent 'emotionally healthy people' to date, you're going to have to deal with the messiness of lingering emotions. There's no real pithy way to explain how to do that! Just try to understand their feelings, and wrap your mind around the concept that no matter the source of a feeling - whether it's unfounded or silly or baseless or whatever - it doesn't stop the feeling from being real and potent.
Truth be told, this fight is actually pretty cheat-y of me - there's at least three point where if Judy didn't stop and cool down a little, it would have devolved into a full-on shouting argument, and similar for Nick. In my defence, having hundreds of siblings and a passion for law enforcement could very well leave someone with a finely-honed suite of conflict deescalation habits.
When did these author's notes become a soapbox for me to lecture about healthy relationships? I don't know! God knows that's the blind leading the blind. But just because I don't take my own advice doesn't mean you shouldn't, either.
On a less soapbox-y note, these chapters have been in Judy's head a lot lately. I wouldn't have expected that, but in the more recent chapters it's been a lot more interesting in the head of the less experienced partner. I'll probably do something in Nick's head before long.
Oh, and yes, rabbits and foxes have similar heartrates. I checked. I don't know why - if artistic license can cover anything, it could cover that - but I did.