Chapter Text
The strange part - the part that got Nick to stop wasting any time with preconceptions for good - was that it almost didn't work out.
Because it almost hadn't. He'd stood there in the mist of Rainforest District, watching her chief hold out his hoof for her badge, and had dared to think that maybe this time it was actually going to be different. He was watching a weird inversion of his own life play out on her face, and it was hurting his heart. She had been brave, and loyal, and tried so hard, with every angle she could, to help. Because she knew it was the right thing to do.
Worse: he, Nicholas Wilde, had started to trust her. She'd saved his life, what, three times?
He'd probably saved hers, too, facing down that jaguar. He'd stood up for her, put his own neck on the line with the police to get her on that tram. He'd helped her navigate bureaucracy and underworld and the sewer systems at Cliffside, and he'd given her the confidence she needed to finish her job, to get her happy ending.
She'd given him an application, and that stupid little carrot pen of hers. She'd given him chance to turn his life around, to do more than just survive, to mean something.
Nick - against a lifetime of experience and instinct - had started to hope.
And then she'd thrown it in his face, with earnest words and shallow excuses. Nick had dealt with that mindset for years, from all corners - but coming from her that simple ignorance and fear still somehow hurt more than any malice ever could.
Nick had trusted Judy Hopps. But it seemed she still didn't trust him.
All he'd had to show for his trouble was that pen, and the crushing suspicion that the lies he'd fed himself for two decades until he believed them - weren't lies at all.
---
And that should have been it.
He should have gone on like that - burned, hard, one last time, the time that really mattered - but still alive, still surviving. He should have hustled pawpsicles until he had enough to retire, or something. The bridge wasn't that bad. Finnick was tolerable. There were still rooftops and blueberries to be had. Maybe it wouldn't have even mattered that the world was coming apart around them, predator by predator.
He'd seen the news, even as ZPD had tried to brush it under the rug as if nothing had happened. A leave of absence, they'd called it. Something temporary. He hadn't believed it. If anything, the news that Judy was gone just solidified what he'd told himself over and over again until it stuck. Little rabbit couldn't hack it. She'd tried, which was more than most of them ever did, but she couldn't fight the inertia that eventually dragged all of them along.
She wasn't supposed to come back.
She wasn't supposed to be standing there one day atop his bridge, or making Nick freeze with the pain of hearing her voice crack like that.
Nick hadn't expected her to prove that both of them were still capable of change. That she hadn't wanted it to end any more than he had. That she wanted his help to do this again and do it right.
That she trusted him.
But there it was. And it was like she'd never left. He'd had his own chance to prove it, too. In the subway tunnels underneath the city, and when they faced down Bellwether together, and when he'd patched her up. When they'd put on the most dangerous play of their lives, and Nick had had to tap things deep inside, things that scared him because they were more true than he'd like. When it was all said and done she was still there, and Nick was daring to hope that the world had issued him a second chance without a single string attached.
---
He was never going to forget their first time.
It was the most banal, mundane thing in their relationship so far, but a promise, no matter how routine, was a promise. None was less important than the others.
"And how's first aid?" Judy asked.
"Informative and just a little bit unsettling," Nick said. "Useful, for sure, but the clamps they showed off to stop bleeding in the big mammals give me the willies."
"It's efficient." Judy shrugged. "An elephant has a femoral artery as big around as my arm. It's not like pressure is going to work there."
"Gross."
"You're not going to wimp out on me now, are you?"
Nick narrowed his eyes at his phone's camera. "I think it's one of those things we hope we'll never need. They just have to play it safe."
"No, you're right. How's the food there?"
"Seriously?"
Judy laughed silently at him. She was kneeling somewhere up on the rooftop patio, it looked like. Nick could see sky behind her. "Our salad is coming along, is why I ask."
Nick was working too hard to let first aid queasiness get in the way of dinner. "The protein here is a little stale. They don't go in for fish. Not good stuff, anyway. Let me see the progress."
Her perspective shifted to the rear camera, and a neat row of leafy stalks climbing alongside their trellis. "There's not much to see, yet. There will be green peppers in a couple of weeks. You missed the flowers."
"What did they mean?"
Her view swapped back and Judy gave him a knowing smile. "I don't think bell pepper flowers mean anything."
"Everything you plant means something," Nick disagreed. "You told me that. Your daisies mean simplicity. These could mean tasty lunch, maybe."
Judy laughed at him again. "You're making fun of me."
"Just a little bit."
"Now I wish they would be ready sooner," she said. "So you'd get a break from academy food. When you come in next weekend, I'll take you someplace nice. Sushi, maybe."
"Aw, Carrots. You'd do that for me?"
"Promise."
Nick's ears sharpened it. The word didn't come up often here. It certainly hadn't been directed at him. Police training was a bunch of legally defined rules and regulations. There weren't absolutes, or keeping of word, unless it was in the legal purview and obligation of a peace officer to do so. Not even Casset promised anything, even with her sharp rhetoric out on the field. Of course, her word was already law to the nuggets. Maybe that had something to do with it.
"You mean that."
Judy frowned at him. "Of course. Why wouldn't I?"
"Sorry," Nick said. He glanced around. It was quiet in the barracks, or quiet enough. Most of the others, with their larger stomachs, were still chowing down on the overdone bug burgers in the mess hall. "I grew up knowing something, is all. About promises."
He hadn't thought of his mother in a long while, and hadn't spoken of her to anyone else in even longer. Judy's field of view rotated as she sat back and looked down at the camera in her lap, with her chin propped on the fist that still held the weed puller. "What was it?"
"Well, you have to keep them if you make them." Nick rolled so the camera was facing into his bunk. "It's-"
It sounded cheesy.
"It's what?"
Nick thought of his mother; and of the reckless, shortsighted vixen he'd once known; and of the ominous wolf on the edge of Happytown; and of the look on Mercury Caffrey's face when he'd come out of it that night on the sidewalk, with gunfire going in his ears, and Nick was still there.
It sounded cheesy, but to this day it still wasn't wrong.
"You have to mean it," Nick said. "A promise the most important thing you can give someone else."
Backed by the full faith of your entire relationship with that person.
"Well then I'll have to keep it, won't I?" She smiled at him.
"I'm serious."
She cocked her head. "So am I, Nick. You say this is important, I believe you. You will be back next weekend, right?"
"I will."
"Then I'm taking you to lunch," she said. Her paw drifted at the bottom of Nick's vision, where she was touching her screen. "It's a promise."
---
Judy kept that promise. And the next one, and the next one.
There was no one big change. It was like sitting in a giant pot, with water getting hotter and hotter around him - but instead of boiling, Nick was approaching a truth he never would have thought himself lucky enough to experience before.
Their first night together was happenstance. Their first kiss was a shivering mess, coming off a case neither of them wanted to remember. Their first declaration of love was ceremonial. A formality. By then, they already knew.
And life was an endless series of risks he never wanted them to have to take, but he took them anyway. Nick watched Judy's back on patrol, even the risky ones that ended in chases that took them near his old stomping grounds in Happytown. He learned that no, she wasn't invincible. Unruly citizens got a little bit too close and knocked her off her feet, or landed her in the hospital and made him do his job without her support, where she couldn't watch his back.
They built their garden together, on the rooftop of her apartment, and filled it with life and love and little purple flowers and quiet domestic struggle and success. It bloomed and bore fruit and became an anchor; some place they could go to escape the rest of the world. Every harvest proved, more effectively than the last, that the work they put into their lives together was worth it. Tangible. Real.
They built a reputation as the strongest of partners and the most steadfast of ZPD's servants, even when it was hard, even when the rest of the city didn't see eye to eye with the fox and the rabbit. Awards rolled in, for valor or exemplary conduct. They weren't anywhere near as important as the looks Judy gave him in the cruiser right before they plunged back into public service, the ones that said I've got you and you've got me.
They argued, yes. It wasn't always easy. Their inescapable differences saw to that. Sometimes they didn't share their beds for the night, or their couches, or even their apartments. Figuring out her family was hard. There were limits they discovered that they had to compromise for. But learning when to give each other space and time - that was part of being together.
Nick had never been an inspiration before. For the first time in his life, with Judy's support, he had an opportunity to improve things for others: from the tourists who needed directions, to the little kits who got their frisbees stuck in the trees in the plaza outside headquarters, to the older ones like that raccoon lurking around the edges of the summer concerts, who just needed a bit of a nudge, a bit of advice to keep his life going in the right direction. Nick pretended not to notice the way Judy looked at him whenever it happened.
And they made love, sometimes fast, sometimes slow, deep into those nights after long runs or longer paperwork. On occasion it was hard. There were limits here, too, that they were forced to acknowledge to keep each other safe. But it was part of the process. It never ended in anything less than the shivering perfection of her breath against his nose, her warmth pressed close.
But most important, Nick had found someone to trust for the first time in his life, as deeply as he ever thought he could, and then deeper still. And when Judy turned it around and showed him just how much she trusted him, too - it made every false start and sacrifice and mistake along the way worth it.
Nick still stayed awake savoring it sometimes, when he couldn't believe his luck.
Like tonight, while they rested before their train for Bunnyburrow left in the morning. Now it was dark, with the lights of the building opposite and the sounds of the city washing through the open window of Judy's apartment. She was curled up against his collarbone in his arms, so close he could feel her steady breath against his fur. She was really asleep now, he judged, now that they'd finished work and eaten dinner and tended their garden and celebrated their connection as only they could.
"What are you thinking about?"
Or maybe not. Nick looked down. Her eyes were half-open where she'd raised her chin to look at him.
"How can you always tell?"
Judy blinked at him, slow. Deadpan. "I can smell the smoke."
There was no comeback for that except to smile down at her. He raised a paw against her cheek.
"Just memories. You. Growing up. My mother."
Judy knew what that meant. He'd told her. He'd shared, that, too. Now she pushed herself closer. "I love you."
"I know, sweetheart." Nick rested his nose against her forehead. Every day, he was so, so grateful for it.
"We should go see her," Judy said. "Before we leave. There's time, if we get up early."
His heart quickened, and he pulled her tighter. "We can take her flowers from the garden."
"Clover," she whispered, and stiffened against him. "Oh, Nick, we have to. There's white clover blooming in the corners."
Her eyes had filled with tears. His confusion became understanding, though, as she wriggled far enough up to get her paws on his cheeks.
Judy planted the various flowers because they were pretty, and because they helped keep the soil fertile and rich for the foods they grew in their garden. But she knew what the blossoms meant, too - even the clover. Especially the clover. That one, she'd taken special care to teach him.
And now she was weeping against his forehead, and he was right along with her, squeezing her against him because right now, nothing was close enough. Nothing felt more right in this moment than keeping Judy as tight in his arms as he could.
It had taken him so long to find her. It almost hadn't happened. And until he had, he hadn't understood what his mother had really meant, the night she said goodbye in the hospital.
She'd made him promise to do more than just survive. More than just keep his promises. She'd wanted him to live, and make it meaningful in the most important way he could. Inherent in promises was having someone to promise things to, and to receive them from. Having someone who he would want to share that commitment with, and who would want to give the same stability and comfort and trust back because they appreciated just how valuable it was.
Having someone to love.
And they weren't just white clover blossoms they would be leaving at his mother's grave the next morning. They were a physical reminder of what she meant for him, even now. What she had taught him. What he had learned and finally, finally made good on and would share with Judy for the rest of his life, thanks to the love his mother had passed to him and trusted him with. They were a message.
I promise.