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Nick Wilde might be (and is) a clever bastard, but he's also a very simple person. All he's wanted, for his entire life, is peace. He craves stability, and to feel at the end of the day like he's done something good.
It starts young. He's seven when he watches the junior ranger scouts marching in the Zootopia Days parade, and he is almost sick with jealousy. The cubs and kits have their heads held high, pride and belonging obvious in the smiles on their faces. Nick is young, but he wants that. He wants it desperately.
He begs his mother for a uniform, and she scrounges and sacrifices and makes it happen for him. It's the first time he realizes just how madly and deeply his mother loves him; watching her painstakingly stitch his uniform together, he knows that she would do anything for him.
When he walks into the meeting, insisting that his mom let him arrive on his own, all he can think about is how close he is to achieving his dream. He's going to belong. He's going to be part of a pack. He's going to know peace and it's going to be incredible.
So when he is muzzled, unable to breathe, unable to think, it's more than just a loss of bodily autonomy. It's a loss of his dream and a rough introduction to the real world. His understanding of peace, of what might be possible for him, of the type of life he can allow himself to envision; they're all wiped away and left in their place is the comprehension that he will not find peace. Not the kind he'd thought was possible.
Peace, for Nick, becomes sliding under everyone's radar. He's thirteen, and the best he can do, the kindest he can be to himself, is to keep his head down and unnoticed. He doesn't want anyone to see him, to think about him, because if they see him they might think of him as a threat and if they think of him as a threat he might be muzzled again. He's never going to let anyone get the chance.
There's a kid in his class that he thinks is cute. Her name is Stevie, and she's a badger, and he wants to talk to her but he's too scared. Every time he imagines telling her he likes her shirt he can't help imagining her telling him that he's a lowlife, that she can never trust him, that foxes aren't the kind of mammal anyone wants to talk to. Every time he imagines it his throat aches and he remembers the cold wire of the muzzle and he ducks his head and focuses on his math homework.
Occasionally he'll allow himself to dream of laughing in a group, like the other kids in the cafeteria, instead of slinking out to the bleachers and eating his lunch underneath of them. He'll wonder what it would be like to go out to the movies with everyone else, or what it would feel like to get clapped on the back for making a good joke instead of shoved into the lockers for being a fox. It's not the lofty junior ranger scouts belonging to a pack dream, but it's a dream nonetheless.
He doesn't go to prom and he still gets blamed for spiking the punch. He walks the stage at convocation, but only because his mom refuses to let him skip it. He does feel a spark of pride as the principal hands him his diploma, and no one boos him off the stage. It's just... normal, and it sets off a new dream life for him.
Normalcy sounds great. Doing what he wants to do, not avoiding people but not seeking them out.
He spends the summer between high school and college wishing that he was one of the packs of kids that roamed the city, splashing around in the community pool, drinking milkshakes in the park, smoking cigarettes under the bridge. Instead he works a construction job, meeting a gruff fennec named Finnick, waiting for college acceptance letters.
He doesn't get into any of them.
Occasionally Finnick will be mistaken for Nick's son, which sets the gears in Nick's head turning.
"Finn," he says one day, while he's losing horrendously at cards, "I think I know an easier way to make money than busting our asses on the site."
Finnick raises an eyebrow. Smoke curls past it from the cigarette he's smoking.
"Ace of spades," he says. "What's your stupid idea?"
Nick curses and tosses his hand down. Finnick cackles and scrapes the pile of coins towards his side of the table.
"We play on people's sympathy," he says. "I'm the poor single dad, and you..." This will be the hard sell, and he knows it. "You're my kid."
Finnick predictably flips out, but Nick somehow manages to talk him down, and on their next day off they put the plan into action.
Nick's dreams change again, morphing from normalcy to riches. He figures out how to sell people something for way more than it's worth, how to get licenses, how to tap dance all over the letter of the law without smearing the ink. He dreams of making enough money to buy a penthouse somewhere. He dreams of getting out of this city. He dreams of showing back up on his mom's doorstep with a wad of cash and a name that means something.
He doesn't get any of those.
What he gets is a decade of struggle, of constantly chasing the next big thing, of somehow never quite making enough money to find an apartment. He gets hunger, he gets small wins, he gets to know just about everyone in the city. He learns how to talk anyone into anything, and how to cover his tail when someone gets angry.
He also manages to piss off a mob boss, but he does his best not to think about that.
All in all, his dreams sink into survival. He stops hoping for wealth and starts hoping that he'll make enough to buy dinner. He learns to settle.
And then, one day, Judy happens, bursting into his sepia-tinted life and throwing it abruptly into focus. She reminds him what it's like to hope, to dream. Unlike him, she achieved hers, and she sparks in him a new one.
If you'd told Nick five years ago that he'd be applying to the police academy, he would have laughed in your face. Now he's trying to keep himself from beaming as he fills out the form, offering occasional absent-minded quips on whatever the doctor is saying.
He finishes it up pretty quickly, and when he looks up Judy is beaming, despite the fact that she just got her leg bandaged for a gash that is way deeper than he'd expected.
"All done?" she asks.
"Yep." He hands her the form for emphasis. She doesn't even look at it, just looks at him, eyes soft and warm. Nick thinks he might choke on the sweetness of her gaze.
"I'm proud of you," she says softly, and he scoffs.
"Why wouldn't you be? That was an Osprey-winning performance back there. I mean, if I—"
"I meant about this," Judy says patiently. He clamps his mouth shut. "It takes a lot of courage to try something new."
"Carrots," Nick says, "a different coffee place is something new. This is…" He laughs quietly to himself. "This is a transformation."
She smiles at that and he crosses his arms, uncomfortable with how much is welling upin him.
And he wants something. He wants to get in.
The day his acceptance letter arrives, he does something he never thought he'd do again. He visits his mom.
She starts crying when she opens the door, which makes him cry, and they're just two foxes, fifteen years older than when they last met, sobbing on a strawberry welcome mat.
She invites him in and they drink tea and eat sugar cookies and Nick tells her, trying to keep his expression neutral, that he's going to become a police officer. His mom drops her mug, but she also tells him that she's proud of him, that she knows he can do it, that she loves him.
"And maybe," she says, "you can find somewhere to stay that isn't a bridge."
His jaw drops and she laughs at him, and as Nick's chest warms he starts to think about that. Maybe he can, he thinks. And maybe he can get a roommate.
Judy moves into their spot in Sahara Square while Nick is at the academy. She tells him about it on their weekly calls and, to Nick's shock, his mother also tells him about it.
"It wasn't hard to meet her," she tells him. "The two of you are all over the newspapers. She's a nice girl, Nick."
Like he doesn't know.
Nick puts his head down and studies hard and he does it with the dream of a shared apartment twinkling over his head like a wishing star.
Nick Wilde might be a clever bastard, but he's also a very simple person. All he's ever wanted, for his entire life, is peace. Police work can get hectic and occasionally scary, but it's all worth it to feel at the end of the day like he's done something good.