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She would an easy hustle. It’d almost be a crime not to. She’s got the face, the look, the posture – it all screams I’m pliable, rob me! And Nick is so close to doing it. The plan sort of unfolds in his head, like a blueprint mapping itself out along the wrinkles of his brain, and he’s edging closer to her, making his way over –
And then some cheetah (Nick’s seen him before, name is something like Cosmo but it changes every month) reaches into her purse–
And she backhands him.
“Don’t you have any dignity left whatsoever? Can’t you seem I’m exhausted? I’ve worked an eighteen hour shift and you’re going to rob me? Get your paws off me and back up.” Cosmo-whoever nods, body visibly twisting away from her. It was a smooth move on his part, but the little bunny is too clever for him, and probably for Nick, too, at this rate. At least for something physical. If he wanted to hustle her it would have to be some kind of long con, and even then she’d probably have him sorted.
She catches his gaze, gives him a look, and Nick takes a god damn seat.
This is a bunny you clearly don’t want to fuck with.
It’s like, what? Two weeks later? Nick’s not sure. The pain is making him a little hazy. He definitely got hit by a taxi, and he’s definitely not going to die – but it definitely hurts. He’s sitting up in bed, nursing a sprain, waiting for someone to come give him the look-over –
And who walks through the door.
“Mr. Wilde?” She flips the sheet on his chart up as she walks into the room. “I’m Dr. Hopps. I’m going to be taking care of you today.”
Nick nods. It hurts.
She pauses. “Don’t I know you?”
“You were on the subway two weeks ago, a cheetah tried to steal something out of your purse.”
Hopps chuckles. “Yeah, that’s right. I saw you, you were watching. Guess it would have been good to have a witness, in case I was too comatose to notice that day.”
“Keen senses of a rabbit.”
“Something like that.” She checks his pulse, does that stupid blood pressure cuff thing, and tests his reflexes and reaction time. “So you got hit by a car.”
“Taxi. Very different. Less liability.”
“How so?”
“Well, you know, taxi’s gotta go where they gotta go. I was just getting in the way. Probably not the first time they’ve mowed down a fox minding his own business.”
She pulls back. “That’s not what you believe.”
“Well, not about me being in the way. But that last part.” He shrugs. “Yeah. Pretty much.” He peers at her name tag. “Judy, huh?”
“It’s Dr. Hopps,” she says, and makes a note in his chart. “And I’m sorry you got hit by a taxi cab. That…is a sucky way to end the day.”
Nick smiles. “Beats this.”
“What, my job?” He nods. “Some days are better than others. I’m an ER doctor. I sort of never know what’s going to come through those doors, but I can hazard a guess. You’re definitely not a first.”
Nick puts a paw over his chest. “Doctor. I thought what we had was special.”
She shakes her head, signing off on his paperwork. “Right. I’m discharging you, Mr. Wilde.”
“Call me Nick.”
“You’re free to go, please try not to come back.” She scribbles something down. “This is a script for some pain meds, make sure they read your weight and your species. Last thing I need is you back in here getting your stomach pumped.”
“It says to take one.”
“Yeah. You ever seen the dosage on elephant pain meds?” She hands it over. “Take it easy, Mr. Wilde. Let’s not meet again this way.”
To be fair, she had said, this way.
And that’s what he tells her, when he’s buying her lunch in the hospital cafeteria while Finn’s in getting treated for a fractured paw.
“I’m not a patient this time around. So technically…”
“Technically you’re pushing my buttons,” she mutters, but takes the little plate of pasta he offers anyway. “Thanks.” She liberally coats it in enough synthetic parmesan to clog Nick’s windpipe. “Your friend okay?”
“Yeah, he’s just an idiot. He punched a wall.”
Judy snorts. “Wow. I always wondered what foxes got up to. Now I know.”
“Nah, that’s just Finn. Some of us are respectable.”
“Good to know.” She pops the tab of her drink.
“I always wondered what bunny’s got up to. Didn’t think it was…this.”
“What, the medical profession?” Nick shrugs. “Yeah, you and everyone else.”
“Not a lot of bunny doctors.”
“Some. They’re mostly local to their towns and stuff. In the city, though? Nah, not too many. You can tell, too. I think there’s one who’s a surgeon, they need the smaller mammals to work on one another. But other than that.”
“Just you.”
“Just me.” She pauses. “Well. It’s not…it’s not just me anymore.”
Nick shoves rubbery meatloaf into his mouth. “They hire a new bunny? Some competition.”
“…No.” Judy looks at her plate. “I’m pregnant.”
Nick pauses. “Oh.”
“Yeah.”
“That’s…good? Do you want a congratulations or a condolence, you’re sort of hard for me to read right now.”
Judy laughs. “No, it’s fine. I mean it has to be fine, this is happening. I made the choice, so…” She frowns, looking up at him. “Why am I telling you this? Why are you even listening?”
“People do this to me a lot.”
“What, confess their pregnancies?”
“No, just…secret share. I have one of those faces. I guy told me the other day that he stole money from his mom’s underwear drawer.” She raises a skeptical brow. “Hey, cross my heart, fluff.”
A laugh. Nick breathes a short sigh of relief. “Okay.”
“So…where’s dad?”
“Wow, you have zero tact, did you know that?”
“It’s been said,” he admits.
Judy sighs. “He’s…not in the picture anymore. It’s a long and stupid story that sort of boils down to me being a dumb bunny and him being a flighty asshole. He’s not in the city anymore, and I’m…having this baby.”
“Just the one?”
“Just the one.” She scoops pasta into her mouth. “I just told the hospital. I guess everything’s going to be okay. I…don’t have a lot of options. I might go back home for a while. My mom’s done this loads of times. But I sort of have to…tell her. First.”
Nick whistles. “Damn, Carrots.”
“Ugh, I know. I know.”
“Hey, you’ve gotta build up to it. Probably shouldn’t just show up at her house with a baby though.”
“No?” Judy laughs. “Damn, that was plan A.”
Nick’s not sure how it happens –
(Well, that’s a lie. He knows. He gave her his number, and she called him. He gave her his number, and then – )
Nick Wilde, known liar, thief, and sometimes homeless con artist, begins dating an intelligent, respectable, slightly pregnant doctor.
It is warm and it is casual –
And he is sort of crazy about her.
And crazy. She makes him fucking nuts.
She’s stubborn as all get out. Argues about everything, makes his life way harder than it has to be because she sees through him right away. Like the second Judy Hopps gets without shooting range of his general life, she knows him. She’s got him pegged, and from the second she walks into that space, Nick starts doing everything he can to make it good for her.
He moves all his crap out of Finn’s van, vacuums his floors, and tries to be…respectable.
It’s harder than one might imagine.
His job history is shorter than she is.
(She doesn’t like that joke, she doesn’t think it’s funny, so he says it a lot.)
His skill set is varied and mostly illegal.
He isn’t poor, but if he doesn’t get a job, legal or otherwise, soon, he’s going to be broke.
And Nick Wilde is not the kind of fox who starts dating a doctor so he can live off of her big bucks. Her apartment is almost as crappy as his.
(Another lie, her apartment is clean and decent and nice and Nick is ashamed of the way he wants to spend all his time there, but it smells like cupcakes and she has Christmas lights up in the kitchen and drinks tea in the morning and does little yoga exercises on her orange mat and listens to NPR while she does them and okay these aren’t reasons he loves her apartment, these are reasons he loves –
Her.
He loves her.)
He loves her. So he cleans up his act.
A lot of places won’t hire Nick, so he takes a different approach.
He goes back into the neighborhood where he grew up (stealthily avoiding his mother for all of five minutes before she’s calling him from her job asking why his skulking around the neighborhood and doesn’t believe him when he says he’s got a nice, sweet girlfriend who thinks he could do something with his life until she meets Judy and then she starts crying so that’s awkward, that’s really awkward – )
And he walks into his old community center, the one where he spent a lot of time after school, learning to do the kinds of things they try and stop kids from doing now – and the kit fox behind the desk recognizes him, and his old preschool teacher is still there, and his old track coach is still there and Nick gets lots of bear hugs, figurative and literal, and then a job.
“Welcome home, Nicky. Welcome home.”
One night.
She reaches over. Nudges him awake.
“Nick.”
“Hrmph.”
“I need you to call a cab.”
“S’five minutes.”
Judy sighs. “Nicholas. I really need you to call a cab.”
He turns to face her. “Why?”
She taps his nose. “Do you remember that time I told you about that baby I was having?”
Nick blinks. He swears so loud the neighbors bang on the wall and he’s calling the cab, and Judy is waddling to the corner to get her overnight bag and they are out the door and Nick is definitely carrying her and this is definitely happening.
His girlfriend is having a baby and the sort of strange reality of the fact that it isn’t his but has gently and secretly and stealthily become his hits him pretty fucking hard and he has a panic attack right there in the car.
“Nick, breathe.”
“You breathe! You’re having a baby.”
“And you’re freaking out and we only need one hospital bill.” She calms him down, and he looks at her.
“Judy. This is—”
“Yeah.”
“Like. We’re doing this together.”
She nods. “We are.”
“We’re doing this because I love you.”
“And I love you.”
Nick nods. “Okay. Just…checking. Just making sure.” He kisses her. “Because I do love you.”
Judy leans against him. “I know that, Nick. I really do.”
And then.
A gasp. A push. Lift from the water and a cry –
A baby.
Her baby.
His baby (and he will never stop enjoying the look people give them when Judy calls him the father, he will never not love that, he will never not want that) –
Their baby.
A little baby, a little rabbit, a little girl. Bonnie, after her grandmother.
The nurse doesn’t look at Nick strangely at all when she says, “Would you like to hold your daughter?” She should, because he’s definitely openly sobbing, like full on crying, while they get Judy out of the water and get her looked at.
He nods wordlessly, and takes the little bundle into his arms.
He’s learned at his mentor job that, sometimes, when a kid shares something powerful with you, all you can say is wow. Because wow, words or pictures or silence can be powerful. Stories of pain and love can be powerful. A child passing a class for the first time can be powerful, and all you can say is wow –
Something so small, something a tiny as the little thing he’s cradling as close to his chest as possible can be so powerful, and all Nick can say, leaning close to her tiny little face, is the softest, “Wow,” he’s ever said.
The nurse nods. “I know.”
Judy cradles their daughter in her arms and tells her a story.
“Once upon a time. A dumb fox walked in front of a taxi cab. And my life changed forever.”
“You forgot the part where I was going to steal your purse.”
She narrows her eyes. “We’ll tell her that part later.”
Nick shrugs. “It’s never too early to get out that ugly truth, Carrots.”
Judy sighs. “She’ll learn it later. Right now…let’s just stick to the good stuff.”
“So the good stuff is me walking into moving traffic.”
“Yes.”
He groans. “I can already tell this entire family structure is going to be notoriously unbalanced.”
“You gave me your number.”
“I did.” He kisses between her ears. “Once upon a time. A clever fox gave a clever bunny his number.”
“And he took her to a bad vegan restaurant where there was one bathroom.”
He laughs. “You loved it.”
“I did.” She leans against him. “I never saw this happening, but I’m so glad that it has.”
“Me, too,” he murmurs, and crawls in the bed, curling around them both carefully, his tail coming up to close off the little circle of their tentative family, small and new and bold. He nuzzles her neck, strokes her ear and says, “Me too,” into the web of their future.