Commission story 10: Endgame.

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AN: Commission for Combat Engineer.

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This was Zootopia.

She'd heard it called a lot of things. An accident, an act of terrorism, a terrible tragic accident.

It was called murder.

She'd helped.

When she was a little kit, before she even heard about what a cop was, she'd heard of the collars. She heard that there were mammals out there who used to eat ones like her, some the very same ones that had appeared in the worst of the bedtime horror stories that her siblings would tell each other. They were cunning, or cruel, or could flip and turn into monsters. But don't worry, they had collars on their necks to keep them in check. That was how she'd known them, before she could read, before she could write, before she could look and think for herself. Collars were a good thing to stop the bad guys from hurting her. Especially the foxes, the baddest of all of them.

The only bad thing here were the living conditions. It should have been condemned, it made her feel filthy and depressed, not helped by his attempts to make it look nicer. Bright motivational posters hung on the dire grey walls, a small picture shrine stood in the corner commemorating a once happy family, tacky Pawaiian shirts hung on the railings… -She flinched, quivering a little. It wasn't just any fox that had lived here.

When it came time to come to school, she'd discovered that the predators weren't bad guys, they just needed help being good. She wasn't sure at first, but on seeing a bunch of other kids attacking a frightened mammal, she'd charged in to clear them off, only finding out after that he was a pred. A little cougar (oh god, where was he, had it reached him?). Crying and sniffling, he obviously wasn't the bad guy. Afterwards they became friends. Nobody got to pick on anybody, even if they were a pred. After all, they had their collars on to help them be good.

She hadn't thought of this fox as good. She'd first seen him after hearing a cry of pain, a familiar buzz of electricity, and a loud set of screams and bangs. He was there, lying in the middle of a rodent road, causing chaos. It wasn't because of the fact that he was a fox that she ticketed him, he'd been disrupting and putting at risk rodent traffic! She treated everyone fairly. His attempts to bluff away the issue didn't please her though, especially when he tried to say that a pair of gerbils' who'd run over his tail. She hadn't seen anything, and it was not unlike all the other excuses mammals made when trying to get out of tickets. She'd just chalked him up as trying to flub out of it, lying or sweettalking as foxes were known to be good at. She didn't believe him (that didn't matter, he could go to the courts instead and challenge it if he had a case) and had gone on her way, just telling herself that he was a bad dressed sneaky fox.

His name was Nick. She could see that here, now. A few unopened letters on the floor had his name on it. A few dusty books on a shelf, his favourite reading habits, came to her attention. She paused as she realised that some were the same ones she'd enjoyed. Along with those, there were a whole bunch of medical textbooks, his swap-out for her police ones.

She'd been getting good when she found him again. A few years later, when investigating reports of noise from a 'Pred-only' medical care outlet (she'd been confused at first, why Pred only? When asking him, he's pointed out that Prey only ones were common, something she'd conceded to). Of all the mammals, he was the one who ran in, showing off a very sketchy but legitimate doctors' degree (well, here was the proof he'd put effort into it) and talking her through the basics. He even pointed to her framed ticket, talking (she could have sworn he was rubbing it in) about how he'd been inspired to be a doctor for preds after the poor treatment he'd received after that incident before (again, describing how it had started with his tail getting run over).

She'd left him, just a few weeks ago, thinking that maybe he was an okay mammal. He was irritating, he and she would not get along, but he wasn't a bad guy. After all, he had his collar on. She couldn't find a bed here, she didn't know where to look, but she could smell something off. She went over to an open drawer, wondering if it had any other clothes in, before shrieking back in horror.

There hey lay. A bed of feathers covered him, the pillow he used as a mattress torn up by his agonised claw scratches, his face still frozen in horror as it slowly decayed. He was cold and stiff but he still lay there, smelling of rot and smoke.

That night she'd woken up at around three in the morning, thinking she could hear something but shrugging it off. She fell to sleep again, only to be woken a few hours later by a call from work. Tens, then hundreds, then going through the city in the small hours as she could tell that something was horribly wrong. She began seeing them, just lying here and there, the dead not at peace.

Everyone had been in shock that morning, hearing that all those in the precinct cells had suffered the same fate. The same fate all the predators had. Nothing official was said at first, they'd been getting to work, picking up the bodies and helping to get them to a mass grave that was being dug, no time for burial honors. Men and women, old and young, she'd have been a zombie throughout it all if it weren't for the very young children, without collars, who still lived. Scared and teary eyed, most having almost everyone they knew taken from them in the night, she volunteered to help get them organised. Schools had already been cancelled and in there they went, sleeping on gym mats if lucky.

A small fraction of a minority, but there were so, so many…

The city said that they'd be setting up orphanages, the mayor herself promising extra funding while also stating that they'd found out who'd done it. A bunch of hackers with direct access to the mobile networks had hacked them to send out the signal used by correctional department collar remotes. It had only just been turned off, the hackers killing themselves, the mother of all 'mass shooters.'

That's what everyone believed, and what she wished to believe as well. But she'd known the mayor before, she knew she had a tell when she lied, and she'd replayed that clip a hundred, two-hundred, times, and each time she'd seen it. When she'd said that she was appalled, when she said it was terrible, when she mentioned the hackers.

And now some of the officers were mentioning how they didn't really care about the preds, or how things were more peaceful now, and how mammals were moving on. She'd called her parents, talking about trying to adopt one of the orphaned mammals, or getting her family to care for them. They'd looked back like she'd said collars should be banned.

But the preds still needed them, right?

But…

But…

They could be fixed, couldn't they?

The police could live without the collar remotes, right?

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But say that to a cub or kit, one of the orphaned, as you tried to tame them. She'd never imagined one of those parties before, but forcing one onto one now…

The mayor had said that new collars would be designed, and the process would carry on. She'd said they'd be safe, her tell showing. She'd said that the collars had always been needed, her tell showing.

This was Zootopia, and Judy trembled with thought, fearing the day seven or eight years down the line when this would repeat again, finishing them off forever.

Tears trickled down her cheeks. She'd thought the collars were good, were right, were just. She'd been wrong. And now this fox… -no, this mammal… -no, his name was Nicholas. He was dead because of them.

She closed her eyes and drew a paw down his ones, closing them before calling in her fourteenth body of the day.

This was Zootopia.