Chapter Text
Nick stopped pacing in his living room when he felt too tired to continue.
He sat down on his couch and drank a beer to make things a bit lighter.
Then he took another one.
Fortunately tomorrow was Sunday and he didn’t have to work.
He didn’t really want to sleep, he could feel the nightmares lurking in the darkness.
He wasn’t thrilled to join them.
He hoped Judy wasn’t having them too when he took his third beer.
~
She turned and turned in her sleep. She felt like a child again, every shadow seemed like it was going to attack her. Her loud neighbors weren’t there to make the silence bearable.
She felt alone.
She was alone.
Soon it was 4 in the morning and she still wasn’t feeling better.
She got up again and turned the light on to stop getting scared by every shadow or creak in the floorboards.
Out of exhaustion she decided to put on a coat and go to the only place she knew she would feel safe.
~
Around 4:30 Nick heard a quiet knock on his door.
He wasn’t sure that was what it was, since he was a little drunk and the rain had been making a very similar sound for the past thirty minutes.
Then the knock came again and he got up to open the door, first checking in the peephole that it wasn’t Josh or Joss — because that would be a stupid way to get kidnapped. Just let them in and, while we’re at it, let’s drink tea together.
He huffed at his own thought and finally opened the door.
On the doorstep stood a very wet-looking bunny who apparently hadn’t thought of bringing an umbrella before leaving.
Judy.
Her ears were completely down against her back and her big violet eyes looked up at him with a mix of sadness and relief.
He was a bit drunk, as said earlier, and got stuck looking at her in awe, absolutely not realizing that she was real and staring back at him, waiting for him to either let her in or say something.
She ended up being the one to talk.
“Sorry to show up randomly that late. I uh… I don’t really have a reason I guess…”
He got out of his daze to reply.
“No problem, come on in.”
She entered, thanking him, and noticed that he looked like he had never gone to bed. The lights were on, he was still wearing the clothes from earlier, and he didn’t look like she had just woken him up.
Then she noticed the three beers on the table and understood why he had been staring at her like that when he opened the door.
“Sorry, it’s still a mess,” he said, sitting back on the couch because his head started spinning slightly when he stood up.
The three beers he drank were beers meant for bigger animals than him.
He was starting to understand just how much bigger those animals must have been.
“Hey, did you drink those three wolf beers in one night?” she asked, concerned.
“They’re for wolves? Yes… I guess I did,” he replied, looking at her as calmly as ever.
“Well that’s stupid! You didn’t even know what animal they were for? They could have been bear cans!” she said, fuming.
She was already stressed out enough.
“Yeah but they weren’t,” he answered casually, still sitting, his head resting on the top of the backrest of the couch.
She pouted, really unsure about that argument.
He smiled. He loved when she did that.
“Hey, you’re cute when you do that!” he said, pointing at her face.
“Don’t call bunnies cute, it’s rude,” she said, still a bit mad at him.
“I’m not calling bunnies cute, I’m calling you cute. That’s very different,” he replied, poking her shoulder while smiling stupidly.
She softened slightly.
Then she noticed his paw.
“Hey, why is your palm red?” she asked, taking his hand to look at it. “Does this hurt?” she added, concerned when she realized it was dried blood.
“I clenched my fists too hard. Nothing bad, I didn’t even feel it,” he said, yawning and taking his hand back.
A silence passed.
“Anyway… what’s bringing you here in the middle of the night?” he asked when he realized her presence didn’t really make sense.
She felt stupid because she didn’t really know what she was doing here or why.
And now that he was drunk it felt like it made even less sense.
“I don’t really know. I had a nightmare and I couldn’t sleep, so I came without really thinking… but you’re kinda drunk so it makes even less sense,” she explained, turning her head to look into his half-lidded — as always — eyes.
“Hey I can be usevu— useful even when I drank a bit!” he said, smiling, still completely in awe looking at her.
Alcohol made everything feel ethereal, but she already was the most ethereal thing he had ever seen.
The mix of both made him look at her like she hung the damn moon. He didn’t realize how obvious it must have been.
To be honest, he didn’t care.
“Yeah right,” she said, smiling slightly.
“That’s my girl! Just smile and life will be easier!” he replied, feeling wise.
“That was a lame thing to say,” she stated, still smiling a little.
Drunk Nick was so much lovelier than sober Nick.
He looked at her softly — something he did rarely, when she wasn’t looking most of the time.
She still preferred her Nick.
But this one wasn’t the worst.
“Not lame. True,” he said back, smirking, his head still resting on the top of the backrest, looking at her sitting next to him.
For a moment she just looked back at him, taking the same position he had.
“I don’t know what we’ll do on Monday. We know what’s happening but we’ll have to investigate as if we knew nothing?” she said, hoping he would have all the answers to her misery.
“It’s not Monday, is it?” he asked softly.
“It will be eventually. We can’t just arrive on Monday with zero idea of what to do,” she retorted.
“Then I guess we’ll do our best as always. We’ll eventually catch the bad guys and put them away and everything will be fine,” he said in a soothing voice.
For some reason she felt tears come into her eyes and laughed quietly.
“Do you have other lies like this one?” she asked jokingly.
“Yes, plenty. But this is not a lie. This is what will happen. It’ll be hard of course, but you always succeed in everything, so you’ll succeed in this too,” he replied, smiling at her, still very obviously in awe.
She snorted but her eyes kept filling up. She wasn’t a hero. She was getting tired of being one for everyone. She couldn’t solve this and she knew it.
“I can’t fix this. This is too deep…” she said.
“Every single one of our cases was like that, Carrot. Yet we did it. We’ll find a way, cross my heart,” he replied calmly.
Then she felt a tear run down her cheek.
Then another.
Then another.
She wasn’t fully crying, she was crying quietly, tiredly.
“Wow that’s not my girl. Stop crying, this isn’t funny,” he said, ears plastered against his skull.
She huffed.
“Of course this isn’t funny. The Savaks are maybe dead, and if they are not they’ll want to be when we find them. Alma is alone, potentially forever. We can’t tell anyone or we put Finnick and Mister Big in danger. We’re alone in this,” she said all at once, now sobbing.
“Judy we’ve always been alone. First case nobody was with us, right? And second case we were against the whole government and yet!” he said, taking her hand that was resting on her thigh, not daring to lift his head from the backrest to face her because his head was still spinning.
“Yes but I’m tired of being alone. I’m tired of big cases. This is getting too much. It just won’t stop coming and coming,” she explained, still crying, the lack of sleep making everything even worse in her mind.
“Nothing’s happening right now, is it? We’ll deal with that after we gain our strength back tomorrow. We’ll come up with a plan when I’m sober,” he promised, his thumb brushing lightly over her hand.
She wiped her tears with her free hand and took a shaky breath.
He was right, but her brain couldn’t just stop thinking like that.
“We’ll still have to deal with it,” she said stubbornly.
“Yes we will. In the future. For now we don’t,” he said, still calm as ever.
She liked that sentence.
He was kind of poetic when drunk.
She yawned, his thumb brushing her hand felt kind of soothing.
She didn’t think too much before leaning her head on his shoulder, looking ahead of them at the turned-off TV.
They stayed like that for a long time.
Until he spoke again, his voice quieter now.
“See? I’m useful even drunk,” he stated.
She snorted and couldn’t disagree.
Her eyelids began to grow heavier and she fell asleep like that.
He stayed awake.
A few minutes after she fell asleep he got up, his head spinning and his vision a little blurry, to lift her up and bring her to his bed carefully so he wouldn’t wake her up or trip over one of the piles of mess in his apartment.
He laid her down in his bed and pulled the sheets over her small frame.
She looked so small.
He could tell she had cried — her eyes, even closed, kind of gave it away.
He hesitated to stay there with her. His bed was double, there was enough space.
But he decided to go back to the couch.
He just took his pillow and a blanket and left the room, whispering goodnight.
The second he finished improvising his bed and his head hit the pillow, he fell asleep.
~
The alcohol first made his dream strange — shapes, colors, with barely any sound. Then it slowly started to turn into a nightmare.
He was seeing everything from above. He wasn’t physically there.
Judy was being sold by the two raccoons to a pawbert-looking old rich mammal.
He was stuck. He couldn’t do anything. Screaming didn’t make a single sound.
He woke up confusing reality and dreams, disoriented, his head pounding, breathing unevenly.
The living room was dark. He sat up, feeling the ground move under his feet.
He went to the kitchen to get a glass of water.
He didn’t understand why he had fallen asleep in the living room and not in his bed.
He went back to his bedroom and saw the small bunny sleeping deeply, still looking exhausted even while sleeping.
Oh… that part wasn’t a dream?
Fine then.
He went back to the living room to grab his pillow and blanket, too tired and only half sober to pretend he wouldn’t feel a whole lot better next to her.
Nightmares were beginning to become a real problem in his life, and she helped a lot when she was near him.
He lay down on his back next to her and turned his head to look at her.
She was still unbelievably beautiful.
He sighed and carefully took her paw in his, making sure not to wake her.
She didn’t seem to wake.
He kept holding her paw until he felt her move closer to him in her sleep, throwing her free arm over his chest, their paws now trapped awkwardly under her.
He really didn’t care.
He fell asleep still holding her paw, feeling the weight of her arm over him, her muzzle buried between his shoulder and her pillow.
He smiled one last time as he drifted off.
Smiling really made life easier when you had a reason to smile.
Tomorrow would be hard. They would have to come up with some kind of plan, start thinking again.
She was tired of it, scared, and he didn’t want her to think that just because she was who she was, she had to solve everything.
He was sure she could, though. Maybe he was being too optimistic while drunk, but he would probably still be sure tomorrow.
And the day after that.
And in two years.
This would get solved at some point.
Maybe there would be losses. Maybe a big revolution. Maybe nothing like that.
Yet he was still certain she would solve it, and he would be there for her the whole time.
He would never let her go. Under no circumstances would he let her walk away again like last time.
After all, he loved her.