Chapter Text
where do we go,
when we go away?
the universe says,
you’ll find it someday.
where all the cheetahs watch
and wait by the bay.
Judy Hopps felt so, so, so utterly stupid at the moment.
She couldn’t move her body, nor could she move her jaw. Hell, even breathing felt impossible. A searing white hot pain spread from the back of her head, and the only sensation felt besides nothing was that blood was pooling out the back of her head. Judy’s eyes were glued to the cream, popcorn ceiling, watching the tiny shadows of the little divots move slowly, while the morning sun slowly rose through the windows from over the horizon.
This is how I’m going to die. Her brain quaked with horror and pain; mostly pain. I rushed down the stairs and slipped.
If she wasn’t completely paralyzed, she would take the time to curse at the stairs for even being there. She wasn’t sure if she was sad, scared, disgusted or just disappointed. It was just a flurry of thoughts she had no way of expressing. Because after all, she was dying.
This is taking forever, Her brain managed to think while it throbbed so horrifically intense. Where am I gonna go?
Everything felt so very cold, but she couldn’t feel at all. She couldn’t even move, nor make sounds. Her breathing was slowing and her lungs felt heavy and they were burning.
“Well, this is it Judy. You slipped down the stairs like an idiot and you died. You’re dying. You’re paralyzed. I haven’t even left Bunnyburrow yet. Oh god, I haven’t even been out of the state… I haven’t found a lover for my future... I don’t even have a future anymore...” Her mind raced, and she then began to see her vision tunneling.
If she could have cried out and curled inwards with fear, she would have. The every second that passed, the black would slowly creep in around her eyes. The seconds felt like hours, the haziness began to make her feel dull and lost. Her lungs, starved of oxygen, felt like they were going to explode into death.
“I don’t wanna go,” Her brain sobbed, “I don’t wanna go, I don’t wanna go…”
That was exactly when she went.
…
And then her eyes opened towards an orange sky where the clouds hung daintily still. The sounds of unreal noises, echoing water, and animal chimes and yelps from afar made a reverb like sound throughout the world. She sat up slowly and cautiously, and felt so strange when she could hear her heartbeat thump throughout the air shortly, like the world was listening and making sure it could hear her.
The way sound moved was unreal, it was slow… calm… but huge. Exotic sounding birds chirped and it rung throughout the world, chimpanzees yelped, and a wolf in the distance howled.
She used her hands to support herself up, and then felt so strange when she realized she was lying on top of the ocean. An ocean that sat perfectly still and did not ripple when she touched it.
The flapping of a bird from somewhere rung in the sensitive air like her heartbeat had. It was powerful, but it blew no wind, yet it echoed into infinity throughout the world…
Then she turned to her side, and her heart leaped up into her throat when she saw the island, the island that was made of what looked like roots, generous amounts of spaciously placed trees, and thick, grassy plains of dry algae. The source of noise came from the island, and it only looked like it was less than half a mile across, but this is not what caused her alarm. It was the feral cheetah that stood at a small, peninsula-like protrusion, on a natural sort of small hill right at the tip. It looked down at her from the small pedestal it was given, and it watched with careful, eternal… one might say… infinite brown eyes.
There was something sentient about those eyes, yet something so much more ethereal in them. Aside the cheetah, the appearance of a fox--sentient like her--emerged from the small pedestal hill. He looked her age, dressed in an ugly button up Hawaiian shirt, with scruffy, long head fur that curled where his neck scruff met his shirt collar. A pair of broken glasses hung over his muzzle and he looked at her with green eyes and a calm, yet wonderfully happy look.
“I see you’ve probably met some stupid or unfair fate too. My theory is that all of us come here, to our own little pieces of ethereal eternity. But you’re here in mine, so there goes the latter part of my theory.” He rambled towards the end.
Judy looked vehemently from the cheetah, to the fox, and to herself. She was going bonkers.
“Where am I.”
“This is the Isle of the Cheetah.”
She looked at the feral animal beside him, which still stared at her so graciously.
“No shit.”
The fox shrugged. “Well, what’d’ya do? Get hit by a drunk driver? Bleed to death by cutting yourself trying to plant some pretty flowers?”
Judy felt silly. “I-I fell down the stairs.”
He tsk’ed. “Yep, that’ll do it. About as unfair as it can get. I died from… well, the latter I mentioned. I liked my garden but I refused to buy cutters without a cheap spring because… well, I was cheap. The stupid thing popped and sent the blade into my neck. Died before I could get to the phone,” Then he threw his arms in the air, and whooped out loud. “But now I’m here! This is my heaven, and I guess it’s yours now too. You won’t go hungry, you won’t be hurt, and the only way to be sad is if you make it. No animal or life here makes you sad.”
Judy slowly stood up, afraid the glass like water would break beneath her feet. “Is… there anything else?”
The geeky fox faked a cough and hid a blush. “Well, it got super lonely not seeing another mammal; well, like us at least. The animals here I like to believe are as smart as us, but they can’t talk like us. They also don’t get so emotional. Like this guy here,” He patted the cheetah. It looked to him so calmly. “I named him Rudolph. The first time I woke up here, I was right where you were.” He pointed to where she stood. “I got so freaked out when I saw him, I punched him in the nose and I thought his nose would bleed, but it didn’t. Get it? Red nose—well, he would have had a red nose…”
The rabbit stared at him with honest and still traumatic confusion. Her nose wrinkled.
“W-well, it makes sense in my mind. The point is… I don’t have to be alone anymore.” The fox then shuffled with his clawed fingers, and his face turned beet red. The cheetah whipped around to look at him with a firm… almost parental look in its eyes, and it nudged him.
He coughed and murmured to himself. “My name is Nick, I uh, forgot my last name. It’s been so long since anybody’s talked to me, I guess I forgot the last half.”
Judy still was so very afraid to even move from the spot her feet were glued to. This could not be real.
Some part of her moved to answer anyways. “My name is Judith,”
She looked past the two to see the jungle like island, and the traffic of animals moving through it as well.
“And I guess we’re spending eternity together.”
“Guess so.”
Nick held down his hand for Judy to grab. She eyed it ever so hesitantly, realizing that accepting it would mean instantly realizing everything from her past life no longer mattered. She just had to let it go like it was nothing. This was it.
But maybe she could fulfill everything she never did on Earth. This fox was cute, and he was very well mannered, nice... she could come to like him. She thought she could. Maybe love him. Hell, I could easily come to love him, I'll show him, she thought. Maybe her future always was coming here.
But the future was uncertain, and her uncertain death had her horrified of uncertainty.
And the future was right here, and she had to make the decision to either stay in the water or go.
An eternity of security and loneliness, or a scary new world she never new about with a boy that seemed so... promising and so good.
She had to make the decision. She had to. This was it.
Judy grabbed Nick's paw.