Chapter Four, "Sometimes Giving Up Is a Second Chance"

Riiiiing… riiiiing… riiiii- BEEP.

"Please leave your message for… seven. Seven. Eight…"

So, no personalized voicemail greeting? Some would call that a red flag, but he knew it was probably a smart move on the other guy's part. If you get involved in gritty business and there are bad people who want to find you, you don't want to just confirm to them that they have the right number. And Nick knew from having family on his mom's side up there that 778 was indeed a Vancouver area code, so that seemed like a good sign that this was more legit than it might seem to an outsider. And just in case it wasn't, he was using his cheapie backup flip phone with a number from back home out east, something he used to call numbers he wasn't sure about and which he could toss easily if he decided that he didn't want the people he'd called with it to have a way of contacting him back.

"...At the tone, please record your message. When you are finished recording, you may hang up, or press 1 for more options!"

BEEP.

"Hello, this message is for Howard…" Nick squinted as he tried to decipher how to pronounce this stranger's surname. "Lotter? Low-tore?" He tossed the tab of paper on the floor and turned sideways to put his feet up on the couch, legs crossed. "This message is for the gentleman named Howard. My name is Nick, I saw your flier at the Safeway by Barnstable and Furlong, and… I'm interested in exploring the world of private investigation. Seems like it might be interesting and suit my skill set. If you'd like to call me back and we can talk about it, you can reach me at six-two-four-"

He stopped when he thought he heard something. He was right: a key was turning in the deadbolt of the front door.

"Uh- you can just hit the Call Back button and you'll get this same phone. Alright, have a nice day and hope to talk to ya soon-!"

He hung up just in time before the door opened. He didn't know why he was so nervous about being on the phone with this random stranger when she got home, but… wait, why was she coming home at this hour? This was her, right? Did somebody mug her and take her keys and get her address off her driver's license? No… no, she'd know how to fight back.

"...Nick?" she sort of groaned as she welcomed herself home.

"Judy!" he beamed as he spun himself out of his reclining position to stand up off the couch and walk over to her; lately he'd felt a compulsive need to be more outwardly enthusiastic about seeing her rather than the cool and stoic way he typically presented himself, as if she'd lose interest if he didn't make his adoration for her abundantly clear. "How's my hop-hop cop-cop!?"

She knew as well as him that this over-the-top chipperness was just a wee bit fake, but she understood his reasons for it and respected the effort, so she never commented on it. Besides, the feelings were real even if the presentation method was a little forced, and (hopefully) that's what mattered.

"I feel like I'm about to drop drop," she muttered as she held her arms out to accept a hug she knew was coming. As he embraced her, she looked off to the side and let her eyes drift to the floor, not to avoid looking at him so much as to avoid looking at anything at all.

On a day like today, he was glad he wasn't withholding an ounce of affection, because clearly she needed some. "That much I could figure out. Alright, so you're home from work early and you look completely beat… so what happened?"

She sighed as she gently took his arms off her and made her way to the kitchen. "Nothing to worry about, just-"

"First things first, are you okay?"

She stopped to turn and make eye contact for the first time since walking in the door. "I just said… nothing to worry about," she repeated, trying not to be too stern - but indeed trying to be a little stern. She turned her head from him and kept walking. "You know me, you know I'm not afraid to share things with you."

"Alright, then," he replied with a faint forced chuckle, "...share it with me."

"Just got… minorly assaulted by some kids-"

"Okay, wait, hold on!" Nick suddenly barked as he marched up behind her. "Define minorly," he said as he put his hands on her shoulders and spun her around to face him. "Actually, no, even better: what did he do? Specifically."

Judy knew there would be no fighting this, so she just spilled the beans. "She - and her friends - they were some college kids, they thought the police were all evil, this one girl throws a coffee cup at me before she realized actions have consequences. Knocked me down."

"Jesus Christ!" was all he could say. Nobody could say he wasn't comfortable being something other than calm, cool, and collected in private company with her. "How big of a cup!?"

She shrugged, seemingly deeply disinterested. "Big enough to knock me down?" Again she gently lifted his paws off her person. "Nick, I appreciate the concern, but I'm telling you, I'm fine. At a certain point, it sounds like you're not listening to me."

The fox looked a tad annoyed by that remark. "Well, excuse me, princess, but this was bad enough to get you sent home early!" But then something else dawned upon him. "...Wait, weren't you supposed to stay late today?"

The hare nodded as she opened up the fridge to grab a bottle of water. "Yeah, and I still am."

"Well, you're here now."

"Chief told me to head home for a while and just come back after rush hour. He's expecting a late night for himself, too." She sat down at the kitchen table and started glugging.

"So… he wants you to go home… sit around… and come back later anyway?" he asked as he joined her at the table. "Yeah, just hassle somebody to commute to work twice in one day, that's not rude or anything. This really can't wait till tomorrow?"

"He says it's something that… well, he says if he waited till tomorrow, I'd be annoyed I had to wait an extra day to hear it." She was leaning over and looking forlornly at her reflection on the surface of the water in the bottle. No real poetic reason why; she just wanted to make sure she was still the same mammal with the same drive and passions she thought she had.

He tried to lighten up for the both of them. "Ah! Sounds like it might be good news, then!" He put out a fist for her to bump.

"Yeah, yeah, I agree, I think…" She eventually noticed the fist and pumped it back. She still wasn't her usual upbeat self, but she didn't look mopey anymore; she just looked… okay. "I'm holding out hope that it's a good thing… I mean, if it was a bad thing, he probably wouldn't have waited to tell me, would he?"

He snapped his fingers. "Well there ya go! You've deduced that this can only be a good thing!" Nick then proceeded to ruin his own happy moment by thinking about it: "...Though after what you went through today, it's kinda… sick to think he'd be withholding good news from you when he coulda just told you before he sent you off."

"I trust he has the best intentions." Back to staring at the water; another sip. "Believe me, I told him to just let me stick it out for the rest of the day. Poor Brady's gonna get stuck doing all the paperwork by himself - except for what he can't do on my behalf, which means I'm gonna have to do it tomorrow…"

"How's Rin Tin Tin doing?"

She caught herself starting to roll her eyes but thought that would be too mean, so she stopped halfway around and pretended to look at the clock instead. Three o'clock exactly. "Apparently he knew these kids from school, so they gave him grief, too - maybe more than me, maybe less, depends on how you weigh a whole bunch of personal belittlement versus one good cup throw… oh, and another potty emergency."

Nick tutted his tongue and shook his head as he rolled his eyes halfway as well. "That poor kid. I don't wanna say he's letting it hold him back in life, but… the only other interpretation is that he isn't in control of his life, and that's just… existentially terrifying, to be frank." Wouldn't I know it?

Judy was staring intently at her water, seriously debating dumping it on herself just so something fun and exciting could happen. "Yeah… I guess… He went on another rant about how jealous he is of you again."

His brow furrowed. "What inspired this this time?"

She shrugged as she rubbed her temples. "Like I even remember. And then he unwound by singing his weird songs… He's so jealous of how charismatic he thinks you are, but he's not doing himself any favors by screaming the word 'linoleum' out the window of a moving squad car. I don't wanna be mean, but he… there's being comfortable being yourself, but then there's just being too weird."

Her boyfriend nodded along pensively. "Well if the kid idolizes me so much, maybe I can meet up with him some day and talk to him one-on-one. Maybe give him some life advice!"

She was in no mood. "I'd actually prefer you didn't," she said with a groan as she got up and headed for the counter. "I don't want my job to keep revolving around him and his problems." She pulled the stepstool to the sink. "Plus he'd probably prefer not to have you coach him on life, he'll probably be afraid you'll think he's pathetic and too boring to remember." She turned on the sink and got her paws wet. "How is it possible that both could be true? Beats me! But that's how little he thinks of himself." The hare started splashing her face right there next to the drying dishes. She didn't care.

Nick faced a choice: provide her with advice, or comfort?

...or levity? Screw it, levity.

"I can see how it'd be both!" he quipped. "He could be so bad at everything that my subconscious mind erases him from my memory to spare me from depression! It's funny how the mammalian brain works-"

"You're not helping," she said between splashes.

...Levity was a poor decision. Therefore he would now try comfort. Comfort: always a safe bet!

"...Well for what it's worth, I think you're doing a great job mentoring him."

"You can say that all you want, the results aren't there."

...Well, fuck you, too, Comfort. Fine, advice then.

"If you really believe that, maybe it'd be best to just bite the bullet and… ask to be reassigned to a new partner? I know you don't wanna quit on him, but… for both of your sakes."

She turned off the water and ripped a paper towel off the roll to sop up what she'd splashed all over the counter. "Sorry I made a mess, I just needed… I dunno, some sensation." No attempt to field his suggestion.

"It's fine," he said as he stood up to join her. "I've got it."

"No, no, I'm almost done anyway…" She stepped off the stool and made her way to the bedroom, still barely looking at him or anything else in particular. "I know you're trying to help, and I appreciate it, I do, but… I just don't wanna think about work right now. Bogo didn't just tell me to go home and take it easy, he told me to get some rest. I'm gonna go take a nap if… you don't need the bedroom for anything."

"Uh… no, no I don't."

"Alright…" But then, as if having remembered something she'd forgotten, she stopped, turned around and walked up to him, yanked gently on his tie to pull his head down, and gave him a peck right on the nose. "You know I love you," she said as she let go and he stood upright again, "you don't need to try so hard to feel like you've earned it. Wake me up for dinner, alright?"

"Of course."

And off she went to hopefully find a happier world in her dreams.

He grabbed himself a bottle of water and sat down at the table. So… he'd been waiting all day for her to get home and that's all the interaction he gets with her? Ah, there would be more days in the future; this one just didn't have it in the cards. And still… that was a lot to unpack right there. She'd had days like this before where she'd been just completely zonked of energy, but while rare, they were becoming more frequent. Perhaps more alarming, however, was the idea that nothing he was doing was working to make her feel better.

I love you, you don't need to try so hard to feel like you've earned it. Actually, Judy, yes he did, because if he just cruised along on autopilot, he just wouldn't be a good boyfriend. He'd know. He'd tried it plenty of times before.

So this Brady kid was so deeply envious of Nick's ability to charm anyone for any reason? Y'know, somebody oughta tell that dog that there are, in fact, downsides to being such a magnetic personality who can connect with anyone.

Not too many, but they indisputably exist. And one of those downsides was that while you may have a greater quantity of relationships - friends, significant others, business colleagues, whatever - that will invariably come at the risk of lower quality. It's not necessarily anybody's fault, it's just a matter of mathematics. When you can attract anybody, you're inevitably going to attract someone you wouldn't otherwise gel with - in fact, you're going to attract a lot of people like that. It might seem like someone like Nick can get along with anybody and make it stick - but nah, he was frequently faking it for the sake of networking. Maybe some mammals out there could genuinely be friends with anybody and everybody in the world, but that wasn't him. Nick knew everybody in this town, but while a lot of those people didn't realize it, he wouldn't call more than a few of them friends.

And this brings us to his romantic history. He'd never had too much trouble finding a date; he hadn't batted a thousand in getting girls, but he rarely completely struck out. He didn't know whether he was genuinely handsome or whether he was helped by the handsome amount of money he'd been making since before puberty (doing work that required him to learn and excel at making people like and trust him, no less), but there was certainly something about him that was compellingly attractive. He'd lost his virginity at fourteen on a warm summer night between the end of middle school and the beginning of high school; it had been a complete disaster that ended with his bedroom destroyed and uninhabitable (don't ask) but he proved it wasn't a fluke a few months later when he had his second, this time with a sophomore vixen who was old enough to drive him home after knowing each other at her place. For much of his twenties he'd made a game of how many different species he could lay in one lifetime (his running tally depends on where you draw the line between species, but it was safely in the neighborhood of a few dozen). He'd even once as a side-hustle (back before everyone said they had a "side-hustle") tried his hand at teaching desperate dudes how to get women; he'd still privately maintain that this venture failed not because he was a bad teacher, but because his pupils had turned out to be more hopeless than he'd ever imagined (recall that this was in his devoutly cynical days). Why was he single when Judy met him? Because by his early thirties, "the game" was almost starting to bore him - and he hadn't been "playing" for something more sincere because he'd always been wishy-washy on whether he even believed in true love.

You see, my friend, Judy was the first relationship of his that wasn't complete bullshit. There had been others that he'd thought were genuine at the time, but hindsight is 20/20, and no, in retrospect, if he'd had to sit down when he was twenty-five and ponder what he really had in common with that beaver chick who he mostly kept around because she was into freaky tail-play in the bedroom, then that relationship was probably also bullshit, and all others like it.

His relationship with Judy was the first where he was really, really trying to get it right. Was he getting it right? He was fairly certain he was, but he couldn't be sure because he had no frame of reference. All those dud relationships in his past weren't just duds because the females weren't up to snuff. He'd just been unapologetically himself - even when he really ought to have apologized for who he was. He wouldn't pretend to take interest in their hobbies if those hobbies didn't interest him, he wouldn't stop making increasingly caustic remarks towards them just because he thought it was funny, and he never even entertained the thought of quitting his street-running and getting a "real" job even though every girl he was with for more than a few weeks told him he had to eventually. Whether because they started seeing through it or because he got tired of maintaining it, one way or another, the charm wore off.

He didn't want it to wear off on her. But that was reliant on one thing: had the charm ever been real? You can be a smooth talker all you want, Nick, but have fun enchanting a woman when you have no goals or aspirations in life. Or a job.

Was he a good boyfriend? Hell if he knew. But he could probably concede that there was more than one way to be a worthy romantic partner. Now this begged the question: if he absolutely had to choose one or the other, should he follow her idea of a perfect partner, or his own?

Well, they say you have to live with yourself the longest so you might as well appease that mammal - and you know what? Judy seemed like the type of gal who'd rather her man live by his own code instead of borrowing someone else's and never really thinking about it, not even hers. Because yeah, she was a farm girl, and she did have rather conservative ideas about romance and of an ideal man; as much as she was flattered beyond words that he'd followed her lead into the police, he thought she might just appreciate it more if she could prove he was brave and capable enough to blaze his own trail.

At least he was hoping she would. He didn't have much of a choice in it, now did he? It either had to work this way or it just wouldn't work. But hey, maybe somehow managing to crawl out of this hole would make his life's story all the more impressive. Yeah, see? She'd dig that he was taking a positive attitude to this. He hadn't lost everything he'd worked for, he was starting with a clean slate, and doing so with more knowledge and experience than the first time through. He wasn't lost, he was finding himself - the ZPD had gotten him closer to that, but it hadn't gotten him there. They'd established that he wanted to live for good rather than for evil or chaotic neutral, but that was a start and now he was setting off to seek a more specific answer. This whole messy situation could be a good thing if he made it a good thing.

And as much as we wanted to do this to prove himself worthy of her love - naw, man, he had to do this for himself first and foremost. He was just hoping like hell that she'd still love who he'd have become when he finally became that person. And if she didn't… well, then it was never truly meant to be, and he'd just repeat the process of starting from scratch on a romantic level. Piece of cake.

It's a shame that that puppy who was partnered with his bunny was so intimidated by the fox's air of debonair; in a world where so many of his friends weren't really his friends, Nick thought he could probably have hit it off pretty well with Braverman. After all, they both knew what it was like to be lost in society, meandering through life not sure of who you are… or who you're meant to become. They could have bonded over that.

...Okay, but seriously, what the fuck was he going to do to achieve any of the above?

So somewhere along the line, he realized he'd been sitting at that table zoning out and pondering his life for two entire hours. Between her job and her upbringing, Judy was a militant early bird, and since she needed to leave after the traffic cleared out, that meant dinnertime was now. Once again, she was proving she loved and trusted him - trusted him enough not to set her own alarm.

He walked quietly to the bedroom and crept his way in. The hare looked catatonic as she lay on top of the covers, the light shining through the windows onto the back of her head. Cliché to say, but she did look peaceful there, like a model for a classical painting. It would almost be a crime against beauty to wake her.

But thus was his duty. "Heyyy there, Carrots!" he whispered as he slowly lowered a hand to shake her shoulder. "It's time to -"

He never made contact with her shoulder.

"COOOME OOOOON, FEEEEEEEL THE NOOOOOH-OOOIIIIISE!"

The fox jumped at the sound of his flip-phone ringing. Hey, backup phone has to have a unique ringtone, don't it?

"GIIIIIIIIIRLS, ROCCCCCK YER BOYYYS!"

Judy's eyes just simply fluttered open, hardly disturbed as the song played. "Is that your backup phone?" she murmured in a malaise of confusion.

"I'M SORRY!"

"WE'LL GETTT WIIIIIIIIILD, WIIIIIIILD, WIIIIILD!"

If you were wondering why Nick chose an old glam-metal song as his backup phone's ringtone… well, there it is:

"WIIIIIIIIILD, WIIIIIIILD, WIIIIILD!"

Do ya get it? And for bonus points, that song was released the year he was born, so there's another fitting detail. Hey, it's his backup phone, might as well have fun with it.

"I'm sorry, I barely get calls on this thing so I keep forgetting to turn the ringer down!" He fumbled to get it out of his pocket and open it. "Next time I promise to keep the Quiet Riot… uh, quiet."

Hm. He hadn't needed to save the stranger's number. Seeing a 778 area code was all he needed.

"It's fine, I couldn't sleep anyway. Mind racing, body exhausted, just sat here like a corpse… you know how it is. Why're you… carrying your backup phone?"

But he had already hit the Answer button and had his free paw covering the mic. "I'm sorry, Judy, but… I gotta take this."

Time to look on the bright side. For all he knew, destiny was calling him.