Chapter Text
The thing about chemicals is that they are very much real.
Instead of making her feelings seem dismissible or fickle, once she had given the chemical idea a second thought, it solidified into something— tangible. Physical. Something that, however small, occupied physical space. As if she could literally hold the molecules that made up her love had they been magnified enough in some mad science B-movie scenario.
If it had been magic, some ethereal force that struck her at random, that might have been easier to let go actually. Easy come, easy go. There was nothing to be done about that. But a chemical brain reaction was natural and, technically, an aspect of her just like any other chemical process. Alterable, maybe, but not fickle, not inexplicable. Something just in her, lying dormant, until the right catalyst happened by. The way most chemical reactions are triggered. She couldn’t explain it, not yet anyway. But that was okay, too. Complex things could still be broken down and understood. Their working parts mapped out and described.
Not to say it was mundane either, it certainly wasn’t if she spent so many waking hours contemplating it. And contemplate it, she did.
She pictured some neuroscientist, stirring through the chemical soup that was Judy Hopps, pulling out each and every molecule of love that was bouncing around in there, sealing it up in a bottle and giving it a label:
Sample derived from: Judith Laverne Hopps
Contains Besotted Feelings of a Romantic nature for one Nicholas P Wilde
Origin: Unknown
Likely Combustible
Handle with Care
Definitely inappropriate for Workplace
please advise
Each morning, she set that sealed bottle on a shelf in her room and went to work. She did her paperwork and patrolled her section and made her calls. She quipped when she wanted and definitely didn’t overthink any of her partner’s remarks. And then when she clocked out, hugged her partner goodbye and came home, she took the bottle out again. Turned it over in her paws, noticing any little change in color or texture from the day’s events. Shook it to see what would happen. Sometimes just uncorking it entirely and letting it loose in the quiet safety of her tiny apartment.
Sometimes she wasn’t careful and it didn’t all get back in the bottle. It must’ve stuck to her uniform or something, the stuff was tenacious, and she’d feel light headed and fluttery and couldn’t remember the word for granola and had to resort to “pass me the bar of chewing, please”. Which at least got a laugh, and the job done, but also made her feel like an idiot.
Fuzzby looked over her workbook one day and politely suggested that she consider a hobby.
Gary somehow managed to arrange an orderly little rainbow of paint tubes across the table with only the end of his tail.
Judy was…struggling.
Gary had spread out some sample images for her to try and copy. They had all looked pretty basic at first. Sort of simple and quaint and childlike. A flat house with a literal triangle roof. An ocean with a palm tree. A small caterpillar made of circles hovering over a flower. A sunflower, to be exact.
She had chosen the sunflower, it seemed like something she could put in her parent’s house as a gift, and spent the better part of an hour attempting to sketch out a copy. She could already tell she was pressing down much too hard on the pencil. Her lines were thick and dark and almost impossible to erase, which was a problem because she needed frequent erasing.
The de’Snake residence had paintings absolutely everywhere. When Judy mentioned offhand that she needed a hobby to try, Gary graciously offered to show her watercolor. She didn’t know much about art, but there was a fun, abstract kind of quality to his paintings. Colors that subtly shifted and bled into one another in big shapes. He also made it seem very quick and easy. He worked on more than one painting at a time, dabbing on a single color with his brush and letting it feather out and spread, then moving on to the next bit while the first dried.
“May I?” Gary asked, pointing with the tip of his tail at Judy’s work.
“Uh, sure.” She meant to paw over the pencil so he could take a crack at it, but instead the snake just rearranged her fingers around the utensil. “Like this?” She squinted at the thing, wedged loosely between her thumb and top finger. It felt strange. Very different from how she was taught to write. Without fingers, Gary basically held everything like this.
“Give it time, Judy Hopps,” Gary reassured her. “You’re learning.”
“Uggghh…” she knew that, of course she did. But time involves patience, which involves long bouts of nothing appearing to move or change, which is indistinguishable from being stuck in a rut.
Gary finally showed her how to apply the color. That was also harder than it looked. It made her wonder why she bothered drawing the lines in the first place. It wasn’t like the water stayed inside the lines. And once so much as a molecule of water leaked where it wasn’t supposed to go there was no saving it. Her yellow sunflower started to bleed straight into the blue of the sky. In a panic she added more blue back into the affected spot, which only added to the mixture and now the flower petals were leaking blue, turning green as the colors mixed. Gary came to the rescue with a paper towel.
“You seem distracted Judy, everything alright?”
Judy sighed. Maybe it would be better to talk about it. And Gary had no connection to work or the precinct, and as far as she knew did not talk to Nick all that much.
“Okay, you cannot tell anyone,” She stuck her brush back in the water cup. “Strictly confidential, okay?”
“I swear I will not tell a soul.” Gary made a crossing motion over his middle.
“I— have a crush on Nick.” Saying it out loud felt very weird. Very high school. There go the butterflies again.
Gary blinked. Then his head dipped a little to one side. “I’m confused… you have a crush on your partner?”
“Yes, a big one.”
“Is that— unusual for mammal partners?”
“It’s… well, it makes it a bit complicated.”
“I thought that was sort of the point. Why be partners if you didn’t feel that way?”
“It’s—wait, Gary, what did you think I meant by partners?”
“That’s what you call your mate, right? For reptiles, we have all sorts of terms: sweetheart, better half, tying the knot, hookup, but that last one is considered vulgar...”
“No! No no, we’re not— we don’t— we’re work partners, Gary. We work together.” Damn Venn diagram.
“Oooooh,” Gary’s head swiveled in understanding. “I see, my mistake,” he hissed just slightly on the sss. “I can’t always tell these things. I thought you were in love.”
Judy pinched at the space between her eyes. “I am—" she complained miserably.
Gary sat with that for a long moment. Then he replaced his brush. “I’m confused again. Maybe let’s start from the beginning.”
It took Judy several hours to get Gary caught up with her relationship with Nick, starting with the jumbo pop, all the way to yesterday when they broke up a bar fight downtown, caught the manager hoarding a disturbing amount of cash and illicit catnip by way of her missing her target and landing a kick straight through the back wall. Nick had high-foured her paw and told her she’d hit the jackpot. Afterwards, they’d left to their respective apartments to watch Ducks of Hazard for an hour over video chat until she fell asleep. There was actually a lot to get through despite it only being a little over a year since they’d first met, and she went off on quite a few tangents and needed to circle back. Gary waited patiently through the whole tale.
By the time her story had caught up to the present, their paintings were dry and they each had a cup of herbal tea. Gary’s was slurped through a metallic straw.
“He really means a lot to you,” Gary commented.
“He does—" Judy glanced at her reflection, sloshing around in her mug. “That’s why I don’t know what to do. I was so panicky the first time I thought we might be split up, I don’t want that to happen again. And I don’t even know if he feels the same way I do. He hates it whenever animals presume we’re a couple. A romantic couple.”
“Hmmm…” Gary considered this for a second.
“Maybe it’s better if we just stay friends. Like before. I’ll get over this eventually, right?”
Gary somehow defied anatomical sense and managed a shrug. “I don’t really know much about courting, Judy. It was never for me.”
Judy nodded in understanding. She and Gary were a lot alike. She hadn’t thought courting was for her either. Twenty-five was older than average for a bunny to be unattached. Her mother already had two litters at that age and all of Judy’s littermates were already settled.
“Do you hate being mistaken for a couple?”
“Not exactly… I think I might’ve been doing it myself, to be honest.” God, she hadn’t meant it that way, but maybe, subconsciously, she’d had a crush on him for longer than she’d realized.
“Well, can’t you just ask?”
“Ask?”
“Ask Nick if he wants to be a couple.”
Judy went blank. He made it sound so simple. “I… I mean. What do I even say? And I can’t take it back, if it goes wrong…”
“Oh, well, I’ll help you,” Gary offered. The snake bent and swooshed in the air for a moment, contorting his body into two sharp triangle shapes right above a long swoop that doubled back. Finally, Gary’s face with his enormous, goofy yellow eyes popped out of the middle. He’d sort of drawn an abstract representation of a fox around his own head. “Now you can practice, see?” Gary grinned.
Judy shook her head, exasperated yet fond, at the blue snake. “I’m sorry, Gary, I don’t think I can take this seriously—"
“C’mon, just try it. This is a safe space. There are no wrong answers.”
Judy crossed her arms. How to even start?
Gary ducked out of sight, leaving the pretend Nick without eyes or the snake’s exuberant one-fanged smile. He put on an affected voice and wobbled a little, back and forth. “Excuse me, Judy Hopps, I’d like to talk about our relationship—"
“Nick would never say that,” Judy laughed. “Never in a million years.”
“This isn’t about what Nick would say—"
Judy gave a pressured sigh. She shut her eyes, trying to imagine the actual Nick standing there.
“Nick… you… drive me absolute bonkers crazy…”
Gary couldn’t hold the pose any longer and dropped it, shaking with silly laughter. “See, that’s perfect!”
“Thanks Gary.” She did need to tell Nick something— eventually. She took a deep breath.
“Be patient, Judy Hopps,” Gary said, voice soothing. “You’ll figure out what to say. You told me yourself, Nick cares more for you than anyone in the world. He cares for you more than his own life. He’s not going to reject you.”
Judy gave the snake a small smile.
“For snakes, we have a saying,” Gary began. “One snake holds the other by the tail, and they dive into the sea, they come out still attached and it is meant to be.”
Judy smirked at the thought of her small cotton ball of a tail. “I’m not sure if that’s going to work for me, but thanks anyway, Gary.”
Gary was right. Probably.
Nick wasn’t going to reject her, at least not altogether. She’d have to be a pretty dumb bunny to think he’d walk out of her life just because she had an unrequited crush on him. It would change things, though. It would have to. She couldn’t say it and then take it back, going on as if nothing had happened. He’d never look at her the same way again. Nothing could undo that.
She sat on her bed, staring at her lit-up phone for a long time. His name showed up over and over on her recent call list. She could just pull the trigger right now, in theory. Just touch his name on the phone screen and it would ring and he’d pick it up and say something riding the line between flirtatious and friendly, and she’d verbally hork out several weeks' worth of stomach butterflies, which is probably not the most romantic metaphor to go with on second thought and— and—
He would've told her, right? If he loved her like that. Obviously that kind of vulnerability wasn't easy for him, but he could do it. He did do it. It had moved her to tears. And it wasn't that she wanted more... more was the wrong word. It was just different. Maybe he cared about her, deeply, he just wasn't attracted to her. It wasn't like Nick was shy, he would've said something by now, right? He could've...
By the time she realized it was time to give it up, an entire hour had passed. The sun was down and the only light was her phone shining cold light in her face. Her bed creaked in complaint as she laid down.
What was wrong with her? Why couldn’t she just say it?
She had the dream again.
He was falling. She supposed she was falling too. It’s hard to tell in dreams.
He was in free fall and reaching out for her. He called her name, her actual name. He was terrified.
And she was reaching too. She was trying. But she was all so stiff. Her body locked up. A huge weight pressed down on her chest, making it hard to breathe.
And he dropped into the cold and white in an instant and she couldn’t see him anymore.
She had the dream a lot the first week after the Lynxley case wrapped up. She usually didn’t get dreams like that, dreams reliving her cases. But it made sense that her brain made an exception for this one. Almost like her subconscious mind was going: this right here? Don’t let this happen ever again.
Judy made a deal with herself; if the dreams kept up another week, she’d tell somebody. Not Nick, not if she could help it. It was too— worrisome. He would worry. Dr. Fuzzby, probably. That was her job, after all. Helping partners navigate interpersonal conflicts and the results thereof. What if you keep reliving the time your partner nearly got murdered while out looking for you. In a dangerous place he never would’ve gone anywhere near if it weren’t for you. By an asshole that you trusted for almost no reason. And you still weren’t quite sure how it all went down, but he nearly fell dozens of feet on a huge collapsing sheet of ice. And had you, or, let’s be real, your best reptile friend you didn’t even know was right behind you, gotten there one half-second later there was a chance neither of you would have survived. Where was the worksheet for that, Fuzzby?
The dreams didn’t keep up, though, they went away. And she kept falling knee-deep into twitterpated lake where, if she dreamed anything, it was pleasant and left her feeling rested and hopeful and excited to see him in the morning.
Apparently, the dream wasn’t gone though, not for good. It had just taken a little break.
Worse still, for a minute after she woke up, her body refused to move. The only thing that appeared to work properly were her eyes. They were darting around her room, searching for— something. An explanation. Help. Something. Her limbs were heavy and immovable no matter how hard she tried to get them to budge. She couldn’t cry out. The weight on her chest was heavy and it made her breathing sharp and hurried.
After about a minute, she could wiggle her toes. Her breathing calmed down. She got up, like nothing had happened. Just getting out of bed. Fresh sunlight poured in from her window.
It was 5:45. Judy dragged herself to her bathroom. She could do this.
“Are you feeling ok? Your ears are droopy.”
Judy turned on Nick with a little more force than was necessary. He must’ve sensed she was agitated, that he’d hit a nerve, and he stepped back just a little. Sunlight flashed on his aviators.
What’s the big deal, Wilde, you checking out my ears?
She could say something like that. She could make a joke out of it. That would probably be preferred. They had a job to do. They had to get their car from the lot, and they had a block to patrol. They had to focus.
Except...
She already knew what Nick sounded like when he was concerned. No avoiding it now. What was the point?
“I— had a rough night,” she said, finally.
“Did you— want to talk about it?”
“Not really,” and then, despite the previous statement. “I had a nightmare. About you.”
He didn’t outwardly seem to react to that. “About me?”
“About— about the wall.”
Nick took off the shades. His eyes took a second and adjusted to the light and he did, in fact, look worried. He grabbed for her paw. “Let’s go back inside.”
They retraced their steps back into the precinct. Through the maze of desks and computers and back to their secluded little partition. Nick sat down in his chair and Judy followed suit.
“Did you want to tell me what happened?”
“Well, I— I dreamed you’re falling and I can’t,” she swallowed a dry lump in her throat. “I can’t get to you.” She didn't know how else to explain it. He was waiting patiently to see if she was done.
“I get them too…” he said, after a long while. “Nightmares. About that…” he looked away. “Judy, you have to understand, it might have been just for a minute, but I genuinely thought you were… I thought I’d never see you again.”
He never said the word. Never came close. Like putting it together in the same sentence with her name would actualize it somehow.
“You relive it sometimes?” She asked. “Like what if you got there a second too late?”
He nodded. “I thought it was just me, though, I didn’t— you seemed so happy…”
“I don’t get them all the time.” She shrugged. “Last night, I… well, I woke up but I didn’t— couldn’t move at all.”
His eyebrows furrowed together. The connection was not lost on him. She had a nightmare about the time he almost died, the time she almost died, and woke up paralyzed for a minute.
“We should probably talk to Fuzzby,” Judy said.
Fuzzby was much more unfazed than Judy thought she’d be. She was not uncaring or anything. But their story did nothing to cut through the aura of pleasant, sweet professionalism. The quokka didn’t even bat an eyelash.
“Sleep paralysis is more common than you’d think, Judy,” Fuzzby dipped into her filing cabinet, flipping through handouts with both sets of limbs until she came across the correct one. “Part of your brain is off the sleep cycle while the rest of you is still asleep. Paralysis is a natural and necessary stage of sleep. Some mammals can have an episode and not even realize. Ah! Here we are.” She handed them each a trifold pamphlet entitled Sleep Disorders and You!
Nick exchanged a look with Judy. The front of the pamphlet had a koala passed out in a tree branch wearing a set of striped footsie pajamas and a giant, old fashioned cap, the kind with a puff ball on the end. He wanted so, so badly to make fun of it.
“They can be quite scary,” Dr. Fuzzby continued on with the tone of a third grade teacher introducing fractions. “But they aren’t dangerous to your health, really. Just make sure you are getting the recommended amount of sleep. Go to bed at around the same time every night, if you can. And no screens before bed.”
That was easier said than done. Aside from their shifts being all over the place at times with the occasional late shift, they still watched movies right before going to sleep most nights. Judy enjoyed those, she didn’t want to put a stop to it.
“You can try a few exercises to get out of the paralysis episode. Wiggling toes, fingers, deep breathing. You can have someone try to gently wake you up, if you’d like.” She turned to Nick. “With nightmares, it’s the opposite. Don’t have anyone wake you up. It will only last a few minutes, and you are better off going back to sleep naturally. Sometimes mammals get scared or confused by being jolted out of a nightmare and they can lash out without realizing.”
Nick nodded, got the message.
“You both shouldn’t worry yourselves too much, however. It’s very common in your profession. Though I don’t know if I’ve ever had both partners at the same time.” She paused, as if trying to recollect something, then she gave up.
“Anyway, sleep disorders usually will run their course with time. Keep track of how many episodes you’re having and let me know if they’re becoming more frequent. Also, call me right away if you are experiencing any other symptoms. These things can snowball. Sleep deprivation can be worse than paralysis, as far as your health is concerned.”
“So, we’re not— getting pulled?” Judy asked.
Fuzzby laughed. “Oh heavens, no. Not for that. I don’t want to say it’s all in your head as a professional joke, but,” she shrugged. “Some things really do just exist in your mind.” She adjusted her glasses. “Thank you both for being willing to discuss this. Most of the time animals bottle things up and I can’t help at all. Maintaining open lines of communication is essential.” That was one of her catchphrases.
Dr. Fuzzby spread her paws open. “Anything else you’d wish to discuss?”
Judy thought briefly of the metaphorical bottle sitting on her shelf at home. How, dreaming or not, she always fell asleep thinking of Nick in some way. Like hell she was going to bring that up now.
“What do you think?”
“About our prognosis?” Nick asked. “Clinical. Vague. Paradoxically reassuring and annoying.”
They were making their way back to the lot to get their cruiser. Judy was walking with the little pamphlet open. It was mostly bullet points punctuated with little illustrations of a koala passed out in various locations. She turned alongside Nick to get past the maze of partitions.
“Should probably stick to a bedtime now.” she said.
“Did you want to stop watching movies? We kind of— got into a habit.”
No. The answer was no. But also, yes? She definitely didn’t want him having nightmares, especially not about her.
“We could keep it to our off nights?” She had another solution, an impossible solution.
Come to my tiny studio apartment and watch Columbo on my bed because I don’t have chairs or a sofa and potentially stay the night because I don’t want you out too late by yourself. And then if you have a bad dream I’ll just be right there and it'll be fine. How weird would that be?
Judy paused her walk down the hall and he stopped with her. She folded up the pamphlet and shoved it in her pocket. “How about this, if you get a nightmare again, you call me. I don’t care if it’s three am. I’ll hear it, I’ve got rabbit ears.”
Nick didn't say anything for a long second. “Okay— only if you agree to call me if you have one of yours.”
“Deal,” she held out her paw. He took it, no hesitation. They’d shook paws before, but this one came with a small rush of, probably, dopamine. What did this make them now? Nightmare buddies?
“Can we please talk about that pamphlet now?” He asked as soon as their paws split. “I’m going to explode if I can’t make fun of it.”
There it is.
“I’m pretty sure they ripped that image from a children’s book. Rock-a-bye Narcolepsy. Goodnight Insomnia.”
Judy chuckled. “Hang on Little Koala.”
That was lost on Nick. “Is that a book?” They arrived back outside. Judy collected the key to their cruiser from its hook and tossed it to Nick. She didn't really feel like driving.
“It’s a lullaby. Do foxes not have Hang on Little Tomato?”
“Wait, wait…" Nick held up his paws, "this is a song about produce? That you sing to kits?”
"What do you have against produce? A lot of rabbit culture revolves around produce, sir—" she poked him in the ribs.
"It just doesn't, y'know, invoke lullaby... Like do you want your kid going to bed thinking of salad?"
“Well, what do foxes sing to your kits?” Judy countered.
“Not until I know you way better.”
“Aw, cop out!” She gave him a little shove. He allowed a small, good-natured laugh and unlocked the car.