Work Text:
There were certain things Nick had begun to dislike about police work.
With a quiet drum of claws on the desk, Nick leant in and surveyed the seemingly impossible amount of assigned work that was waiting in his ZPD inbox.
There’d been a lot of unpredictable shift changes and reassignments of late.
On one shift he might be out on regular patrol, or if the still inscrutable tumblers of the ZPD duty rota happened to align just right, on mobile patrol with his partner, Judy.
Nick's ears had sunk once again as he was handed today's assignment.
“Desk duty,” the sergeant had said.
Judy had been quick to explain to Nick that during busy periods at the Precinct, officers — unless on a dedicated operational assignment — would be assigned to desk duty and could be allocated to whatever and whichever task needed the resources.
Being a rookie, Nick was finding that his own resources were taken up with the paperwork of other officers, all too often finding its way to his inbox to process.
And one thing Nick was sure of — a rookie found that this happened with alarming regularity.
“Ugh. Carrots, there’s so much of it,” Nick said, resting his head on one paw, waving the other dismissively at the unread bold-text listings waiting in his inbox.
“I’ve got just as much to process as you have, Slick,” breezed Judy, quickly glancing across from her screen.
Judy had been with the force longer than Nick and as such had a little more seniority, by duration of service rather than rank, but still found herself getting short shrift when it came to desk work.
Often, she would just find a position somewhere nice and quiet and get to work, diligently filing report after report, but today she had taken up a spot on the team-desk next to Nick.
He was, she noticed, suffering under a pile of work piled so high that she’d offered to lend a paw and help him clear it.
“It helps to have a system, like this. Do, delegate, or defer,” Judy sing-songed, demonstrating by clearing a few of her own tasks.
“You can’t just keep deferring though,” she added. A tap-tap of claws sprang her next task open on the screen ahead of her.
Nick made a low, irritated rumble in the back of his throat.
“Judging by these inboxes, someone went all around Districts and back deferring all this.”
He scrolled down the list of due dates against each item.
“Look — Today. Today. Today, Today, I mean come on, they’ve left a file here untouched for three weeks, and on the due date, it lands in my pile.”
He narrowed his eyes. “Coincidence? I think not.”
“Happens all the time, Nick,” said Judy. “You should have seen some of the deadlines and tasks I used to get handed.”
Judy arched her eyebrows and let out a breezy little sigh.
“Rites of passage, let me tell you,” she said, and continued with her typing.
* * *
Their shift wore on, slowly.
Officers filed through the team area, some coming in off patrol, others just heading out. They drifted, loitered and distracted with non-sequitur conversations.
“So — of course — the lights were out when we got there. Yeah, the whole street,” said Snarloff, swirling his mug of coffee.
Nick leant forward with a paw resting uncomfortably above his eyebrow, trying to ignore the conversation about some inane landlord disagreement that Wolford and Snarloff had got embroiled in.
“They’re claiming someone was tampering with the meter, but you don’t have to have a nose like mine to tell the whole thing stinks,” Wolford said, wincing slightly as he drained the dregs of his own cup.
A headache was beginning to work itself across Nick’s forehead like a tight band again, the characters on his screen beginning to grow fuzzy and indistinct.
He looked over to where Judy was working beside him.
She was sat upright, typing steadily at her keyboard, She moved her paw to her trackpad. A double-click, pause, double-click, and the typing would start again. She was quietly humming, a faint smile moving across her lips.
“hm-mm-mm hm-mmmm, hmm hm-mm-mmmm,”
“Fluff,” he said.
“hm-mm-mm hm-mmmm,”
“Carrots,” he called, a little louder.
One ear perked, rotating toward him.
“Hopps.”
He waved a paw to catch her eye. She turned her head, blinking, as if waking from a trance.
“Hm-hmmm?” she smiled lopsidedly.
“Are you actually enjoying this?”
“Oh, no,” she chuckled. “I’m just used to chores. It comes from living in a burrow, and especially one on a farm. You’d sing a song, make up a story, anything really. Then just get your head down and try…”
Judy stopped, searching for the words.
“Try to make the best of it,” she decided, placing her patient outstretched paws gently on the desk.
Nick clearly wasn’t making the best of anything right now. He looked forlorn. His own eyes were red-ringed and his headfur was full of stiff little tufts where he’d been raking his claws through it.
“Nick? You good?” Judy asked. There was a flicker of concern in the way she blinked.
“Another headache,” he sighed, pressing a pad delicately to his temple.
“You should take a break, you know,” Judy advised. “Before it gets bad.”
It was never really an issue when the pair were out on duty, either on footpaw, or in the Prowler, but desk-work really didn’t suit Nick.
Judy’s eyes were able to deal with a range of lighting conditions, and adjusted far quicker. But good night vision like Nick’s didn’t sit well with long periods under office lighting.
She recalled a few months ago, to assist her for duty on dark moonless nights, she’d been briefly introduced to new low light equipment the ZPD had acquired, and had to squint if the tinted, noisy view in the goggles flared brightly when she caught the glare of a streetlight or headlamp of a passing car.
She’d not given it much thought at the time, but now she imagined that this was what Nick saw every day when he caught the glare of office lighting or a computer screen.
“And you should be drinking more water than you do,” Judy said. Nick made to reply, but she cut him off smartly. “Coffee doesn’t count.”
“Oh, well, I’m not sure this stuff actually counts as coffee,” he replied, matter-of-factly tapping a claw on the dark stained cup beside him, half filled with break-room coffee.
“More like liquid road,” he said, wrinkling his nose.
Judy let out a little laugh.
Nick huffed. “You know, I’m starting to think that a few weeks at the Climate Wall Paint Company would be less tedious than resource work.”
“Oh, I hear you,” Judy mused.
Painting the Climate Wall was a Zootropolism she had heard often in and around the city. It was said that teams of engineers would work annually to resurface the weatherproofing over the length of the Wall that both heated and cooled Sahara Square and Tundratown respectively.
The Wall was so long and the job of painting it so arduous, so time consuming, that once finished at one end it was time to start all over again at the other.
With sigh and appreciative nod for the analogy, the soft tip-tap of her keys resumed.
* * *
Nick whistled air thoughtfully through his teeth.
Judy lifted her eyes.
“You’ve been sighing like that for the last quarter hour, Nick.”
“These reports,” Nick begin after some consideration. “The ones I said had been in the system for three weeks. Well, they’re a bunch of noise complaints, each one on filed on consecutive days in the same locality. Up towards Rainforest.”
Judy craned over to look at the last of the six reports on Nick’s screen.
“Nick, they were each investigated and logged, with no action taken. No eye-witnesses, no leads... Noise complaints up there aren’t uncommon.”
“No, but that's a nice little cluster, don’t you think?” Nick asked, thoughtfully tapping a claw on the screen where he’d plotted the report locations upon a Zoogle Map.
“Hm. You’re right. All around those warehouses. You should flag it up for observation,” Judy eagerly suggested.
Nick nodded.
“And, done,” he said, his chair creaking as he sat back.
“So, does that mean we get the operational assignment?” he asked across his shoulder. “I’d take parking duty or even ugh, some watch duty right now.”
“Well, no guarantees on getting it in the next docket. We can but try. Good eyes, Slick,” Judy said with a smile.
“Oh, well, they’ve been better Carrots, believe me.”
He rubbed his pads under sore eyes once more.
Judy continued on with her work for a moment, until something caught her attention, making her ears rise and the rest of her lean back a little into her chair.
Judy reached over to her box-file of papers and began to search.
“You know, Nick, I think I might have just found you the perfect assignment.”
Her fingers picked past the wanted ads, the property listings, the to-do lists in her looping paw-writing and even the little pamphlet on mindfulness that Nick had handed her — a slightly awkward attempt to help her improve her focus on blue light response runs — until:
“Officer Wilde, I am assigning you to this,” Judy said, with a smile and a certain authority. She stretched, reaching across to tap the fox on the arm with a piece of tri-folded paper.
Nick rolled his eyes. Printed in a deliberately tall paw-written typeface on the paper waving to the side of him were the words Lovage and Rocket ~ Takeout Menu.
“What do you say? A little fresh air? Hm?” Judy gave him some more insistent little taps with the folded paper until he reached out to accept, plucking it from her paw between his thumb and fore-claw.
“Hm. I will run your little errand,” Nick said, dropping to the floor, a little unsteadily after sitting for so long.
“The usual?” he asked, shrugging his jacket over his shoulders.
“The usual,” Judy nodded. “And get yourself something healthy this time. For the sake of your head, if nothing else."
With a quick side-glance through the window to the bright, crisp day outside, Nick slipped his sunglasses over his muzzle. His ear flicked, and they settled into place.
* * *
The pair sat grazing contentedly. Screen-savers span and danced on their idle screens.
With a gurgle, Judy drained a little of her vivid green smoothie while Nick rustled a bag and popped a pawful of fried cricket into his mouth, licking his chops with a toothsome grin.
He was glad he’d decided on comfort rather than health. It felt better, and having enjoyed the all to brief time away from the Precinct station he had already returned looking brighter.
He quickly scooped up a morsel that had dropped on his shirt and it vanished with a snap and a crunch.
Judy’s face puckered as he chewed and huffed and swallowed.
“You are a noisy eater, you know,” she pointed out, raising a tiny plastic fork before scooping up her own mouthful of beans and salad. She began chewing, making tiny, rapid crunching sounds, her nose twitching just as quickly.
One, two, three, all the way up to ten and then, swallow.
Another mouthful and quickly, again. All the way to ten and swallow.
“And you are an incredibly precise eater,” Nick said, a smirk beginning to spread over his lips. “Do you chew the exact same number each time, every time?”
Judy shot him a glance and scowled.
“Stop watching me eat,” she said. Nick’s smirk grew to a grin.
“Oh, but it’s so c…”
Nick got as far as pursing his lips around the vowel before Judy’s scowl deepened like an approaching storm, suggesting he should stop right there, lest there be consequences.
He smiled and shrugged, taking another mouthful of cricket. Judy’s ears quivered with each crunch, crunch, crunch.
* * *
The shift was over.
Are you sure you want to log out?
Nick considered the system message on his screen for a moment.
Are you sure you’ve done enough work? it may as well have asked.
He blinked slowly and confirmed with a keystroke that yes indeed, he wanted to log out and had in fact done enough work, thank you very much.
With relief, Nick arched his back, arms high over his head. He winced a little as he stretched out the slouch he’d developed during the day, shoulders popping and chair creaking as he flexed. He smacked his lips and cast his tired eyes over to his partner.
Judy was still typing nimbly, working through her remaining task list.
Collecting the detritus of the day from his space at the desk, he eased himself out of his chair and down to the ground.
He rolled his head into his shoulder as his paw went up to try and un-ruffle his headfur.
“So, are you heading off soon, or will you be sleeping in the office again?” he grinned.
“Oh, har har,” Judy said, without looking up from her keyboard. “It was just that once.”
Nick tilted his head. “Er, Nu-oh. Trunkaby told me she used to catch you dozing in the locker-room most nights in the summer.”
“Ugh.” Judy dropped her shoulders. “Like I said. Rites of passage. And with neighbours as noisy as mine, I don't think you'd blame me sometimes.”
She turned around on her chair to face him.
“Don’t worry,” she said, resting one arm up and over the back-rest. “You go, get that head of yours rested. I’ve got a li-ttle bit more of the Wall to paint before I can get away.”
“Ha. Then you’ll go and keep your neighbours company, yeah?”
“I will.”
Nick raised his paw to give a stiff little wave with outstretched claws. “Till the next shift, Carrots.”
Judy held up her own paw to return the gesture.
“The next shift, Slick.”