Author's Note:

I hope to continue at least once update per week, but my schedule is still a mess because I have to supplement my income with commissions and the like. I am still not financially sound despite having three part time jobs now. X.x I'm trying.

If you are just joining Guardian Blue for the first time, you will want to check out Season 1 and 2 first, and I would highly recommend Thanks for the Fox even before that as well so everything makes sense. ^^

I do not own Disney, Zootopia, a nice car, or a flat head screwdriver, and yet I still manage.

Also! A HUGE shout-out to J. N. Squire for assisting with editing for Season 3. This series would be a lot harder to do alone, I promise.

Guardian Blue: Season Three

Episode 2: Patrolling

"Baker 914 to dispatch, the address you gave us is in Little Rodentia. Please 10-9 that 20 with less wrong 20." There was some irritation in Nick's voice. Judy could understand. That morning, they had just dealt with a skunk who was reported to have been trespassing in an art museum. They arrived on scene and found him laying catatonic on the floor of the lobby. Shortly before the pair's arrival, the mammal had simply gone unresponsive. Nick called for an ambulance but during the wait, the poor mammal had a seizure from whatever combination of prescription medication and recreational substances they contained.

Everything and everyone in that entire lobby got sprayed. No aim, just a fail-arc of olfactory devastation. Judy ducked, Nick took it square in the face. Everyone needed the musk-booth. Skunks were known to occasionally let a cop have it, despite that being its own separate charge, so there was a special, wholly unpleasant shower that was used to allow an officer to scrub out the scent, and then basically get pressure-washed.

Neither of them enjoyed it, but Nick was unhappier by far. Ever since the Darmaw incident, he showed a very low tolerance to being 'not clean', and being sprayed to the level he had been felt as 'not clean' as he could get in that moment. He had just stopped grumbling about the lack of communication on the condition of the mephit trespasser, and now an apparent error in dispatch was not cheering him up. They were stopped outside the main gate to Little Rodentia, and waited for correction or clarification.

A minute or so passed, and Clawhauser's voice cut back in.

"Baker 914, that address is verified, I'm sending a Foalkien." Judy groaned along with Nick. Foalkien wasn't a person. It meant that the explanation of what was going on was too complicated to efficiently say over the radio. Foalkien was an equine writer known for writing out painstakingly every little detail. Nick pulled up the console in their car and waited a moment. Finally, the description came through. Judy read it to herself, knowing Nick was doing the same at about the same speed.

"You have got to be kidding," her partner grumbled. Judy put a paw over her muzzle. Several lemmings, possibly as many as four, were in a traffic circle and had managed to get into a 'follow-loop'. One was following the second, the second was following the third, the third the fourth, and the fourth was following the first. Around and around and around, transfixed by the vehicle ahead of them. The result was that no one else could get into the traffic circle and it had gridlocked Little Rodentia so bad that traffic was beginning to back up onto larger streets. This created a real safety hazard for the smaller mammals involved.

"I hadn't considered that could happen, but it kind of makes sense…" Judy noted casually.

"The LR precinct can't handle this?" Nick asked. Little Rodentia of course had their own police force which specialized in dealing with matters on their side of the fence. It was just far safer than having a larger officer come in any time something went wrong. On occasion it was necessary to get help from outside, but not usually. The mice and rats on their police force usually had things buttoned down so well that the rodent criminal element actually operated in other parts of the city.

Judy answered her weary partner's question. "I would imagine their police force is stuck in the traffic as well. They can't get a car over there to stop those cars."

Nick picked up the radio. "Dispatch this is Baker 914, are you giving the all clear to Kaiju?"

"Stop calling it that!" Judy snapped. Mammals had scanners to listen to those conversations. They needed to be as professional as possible.

"You are go to Kaiju, 914," crackled the cheetah's reply. The bunny groaned. Nick grinned. He had made this an in joke in the department, and it was maddening. Mammals had, in the past, broken into Little Rodentia and done serious damage to life and property. It was not a laughing matter!

"Wait, slow down. We have to do this carefully, you remember last time!" Judy hissed at her swift partner.

Nick laughed and rolled his verdant eyes. "You were the one who fell onto the muddy abandoned construction site, then in your panic to look for 'survivors', backed into that billboard and left a perfect bunny butt-print on it. Wasn't meeeee."

"Will you let that go?! That was like… a lifetime ago." It had happened when Nick was almost fresh out of the academy. She followed the fox as he punched in the code to open the main gate so that they could safely get in. The opening of the gate also turned on a bunch of blue lights through the city to inform the mice, rats and other small mammals that an authorized larger mammal had entered their part of the city, and to exercise caution about that. Failure to do this had nearly gotten Judy canned on her second day on the job.

"No roaring at the school, Nick," Judy muttered softly. They didn't have to be terribly quiet, but Judy always felt like she would sound really loud to the smaller mammals here.

"They expect it. You know that right? Wolfard does it every single time. They cheer for him. Judy, they all actually cheer. They love it."

"Nick, that interrupts their school day and makes things harder for their teacher. It's common courtesy. Come on." She stepped carefully, taking what she felt was a long time to move short distances where there were clearings in traffic on the preferred side street she was travelling between the shorter shops and strip malls.

"Oh man, look at that tiny traffic jam." Nick motioned ahead as he took another careful step. Mice slowed where the larger mammals were to help them safely move through the city. There was no panic when there had been warning that larger mammals would be there.

"Let's just get over there so we can go back to work," Judy sighed. Her motions were painstakingly careful. After getting her tail chewed for her first blunder here, she was as mindful as she could be to interrupt these smaller mammals lives as little as possible.

"Rahr… Rahr…" Nick whispered little roars as he tip-toed through the city. Judy wanted to scold him for it, but she could only smile. Little things like that were a large part of what attracted her to him. The mundane parts of their job where they just had to correct little things turned into fun memories for them because Nick wasn't so serious unless he really needed to be.

While they moved, to them, slowly through the tiny part of the city, their strides were so long that it was faster than most of the tiny mammals on these streets could drive. Getting to the area where the traffic jam was turned into a bit more of an exercise in balancing, and a couple of times Judy or Nick needed to hold on to the edge of a building to manage it.

"No breaky, no breaky, no breaky…" the fox chanted as he moved along. Fortunately, nothing broke. They finally got to the traffic circle. As advertised, around and around and around the little identical blue cars went, and they were going fast enough it wasn't safe for the trucks that were stuck waiting for them to enter the traffic circle. That might not be a problem if the little cars ever left, but they did not.

So, what do we do here?" inquired Nick.

"Maybe… just pick one of them up?" Judy replied with uncertainty. The towering vulpine poised himself over the cars. A lot of them in the traffic jam were honking, and their horns sounded like a kit's squeaker toy. "Try not to damage it. That would save us serious paperwork." Nick sucked in a deep breath. He might have suggested Judy do it instead, but that would have been riskier. Nick was taller, had larger paws, and it just made more sense.

Deftly, elegantly, Nick snatched up the little car. He did so in a way that lifted it up out of the circle while maintaining its forward motion like a little plane taking off, and he swung it close to him so that as little force was exerted on the little vehicle as possible.

"Well done, me," Nick congratulated himself. He peered at the petrified, confused driver in the car. "I'm helping. Don't mind me," he informed, pointed to his badge. No need for the little mammal to be afraid. He was obviously a bit dazed. Looped lemmings were out of it at the point they needed intervention, so that was no surprise.

Judy could tell the little mammals still in the traffic circle freaked out a bit at one of the cars being picked up, but the sudden gap in the line of cars made it so the next one took an exit out of the circle and the others followed. The cycle was broken. There was a lot of squeaky honking from happy rodents. Nick placed the remaining car back in the traffic circle. It made a careful full loop and drove away. Nick waved and traffic began to flow. This actually made the walk away from that traffic circle a little more difficult, and the pair took a slightly different route.

After a dozen or so yards, Nick began laughing loudly and inexplicably. Judy nudged him, giving a flourish to prompt him to tell her what that was about, and the fox pointed at a billboard several blocks away.

It still had the inverted U of Judy's backside pressed in black mud upon it. They hadn't bothered to clean it! Judy's posterior had been effectively advertised on the pawn-shop side of town for a whole year?! Oh, that was just unacceptable! Nick actually had to stop because he couldn't keep tiptoeing through the city. He was laughing too hard. This commotion caught the attention of a few rodents but their point of view didn't let them see the billboard, so they had no idea what it was about. They mostly went about their business to give the officers more space to allow them to exit their part of Zootopia so everyone could go off of alert.

Whatever. At least her fox was being cheerful again.

The end of their day was a welcome thing to the fox and bunny. It had been a long one, and the cases were just weird. Most of what their job entailed was filing accident reports, dealing with petty crime, and handling safety issues. Today had been entirely different.

The skunk issue was a bit off, but the traffic circle thing was just odd. After that, they dealt with a missing mammal report that ended up being a little beaver girl's imaginary friend, but there was actually a crime that had been committed that was linked to that. The name that the parents of the girl provided was the same that had been making purchases fraudulently all over the city. The seven-year-old girl had no idea, of course, and was clearly not involved, but because Nick and Judy's involvement meant they were looking for the person, Nick discovered that the big sister of one of the girl's school mates had heard and adopted the seemingly random name. They had to arrest an 18 year old otter who had been babysitting the beaver for credit fraud.

The crime had been solved, but fell into the same category as bizarre with other calls for the day. This was the topic as they took the bus home.

"It's Tora. It has to be," Nick grumbled as he held a bar to remain standing as his bunny occupied one of the only open seats. "I'm sure weird cases pop up now and again for any officer, but I bet she's told Clawhauser to send all of them to us. She's messing with me."

"Why would she do that, Nick?" Judy asked, a little distressed that he was being paranoid. That was never a good direction for an officer to go.

"She looked up the coin. I dunno. She knows I am gonna try to get her, and she's gonna say she got me first. Foxes do that. Preemptive gettings."

"She's busy all day, Nick. I would think she has better things to do with her time," Judy stated. "She's not made any obvious attempt to just put us on parking duty or anything like that." Honestly, the bunny's interaction with Tora, while terse, had been pretty positive. She treated Judy more like a cop than Bogo did at first. Nick wasn't party to that one-sided disaster.

"An imaginary friend case? Really Judy?" Nick arched a brow.

"Well, the lemming thing was not a weird case… at least in terms of who should have dealt with it. We are literally the best mammals on the force to deal with something like that." They were the smallest and a go-to pair for dealing with an issue in Little Rodentia, despite the bunny's early slip-up there.

"I'm not saying it's an absolute, I just want you to pay attention to patterns is all. We might be getting a bit of blow-back from the intended getting."

"You know what, Nick? We'd deserve it. So far, that tiger's done fine in keeping things together for our department. She's not doing bad. She made a poor call, maybe, on how to deal with us on day one, but she's not made our jobs any harder since. It could have been ugly, and it's really not been."

"The getting is still happening," her fox stated as they reached their stop.

"... And I won't challenge that, even now… but I will say that our weird run of cases has nothing to do with Tora," Judy announced as she hopped off the bottom step and began the two block walk to their apartment. There was still a bit of chill in the air.

"You almost sound as if you like Mayumi," Nick scoffed.

"I can respect her position is all… and don't assume that since I respect her that I've ignored the fact that she insists on calling me Officer Hopps in the morning briefings."

"Yeah. Did you see Francine twitch at it this morning? It's even getting to her, and she hates me!"

"Francine doesn't hate you, Nick. She's not even still mad about the squeak prank."

"It wasn't even for her! It was aimed at Higgins!" Nick flailed a bit as he caught up. The one they were talking about happened after Nick had been on the force for only a month or so. It was one of two that were considered 'a miss' by the precinct, and was the prank responsible for the still-current rule that the first officer who laughed at a fox-prank ended up with parking duty.

"You were talking to Francine, though, not Higgins! Of course she thought it was directed at her." He'd told her they had a guest speaker from the Micro College in Little Rodentia. Then, like… a minute later Higgins stepped on a squeaker the fox planted under the rug by the podium. It didn't matter if it was supposed to be for Higgins at that point.

"I bought everyone lunch to apologize, I didn't realize how terrified Francine was of that specific scenario. You know I wouldn't have…" Nick sounded less defensive and more crestfallen at that. There was a reason he just assumed that the elephant hated him now. He'd made amends and everyone was fine with it, but he had earned his bit of uneasiness around the pachyderm. "Anyway… even she doesn't think it's cute anymore."

"And she may just be doing it because it's harder to give out assignments when there's two officers with the same name." Judy had to admit that it sounded like she was defending the tigress. That really wasn't the case.

"Are you able to say anything negative about her at this point?" The tone was strangely accusatory. Judy stiffened up. Nick was feeling isolated.

"Of course, Nick. While she might not be directly doing anything to us, I can't possibly ignore the one thing she hasn't done to us."

"That is?" he pondered as they walked up the steps to their apartment building.

"She hasn't given a single word of encouragement, support, or recognition for anything we've done in the whole time we've been back, active or administrative." Nick put his ears back. Had he not even noticed that? Judy felt a hollowness in her stomach. Oh, right. Fox. "Heck, this morning she congratulated 'Team Delgato' for an 88 percent case-resolution for last week. You know what ours was for the end of our very first week back on active patrol?"

"Higher?" Nick guessed. He didn't pay attention to the metrics and numbers. He never did. He felt they were distracting. Every case deserved all they could do to solve it, and the numbers just didn't matter.

"94 percent, Nick. We had the fewest cases outstanding. And you know that's not really far above our general average. We do good work and she … seems unwilling to recognize it in front of anyone."

"Hey." The voice caught Judy off guard as they walked into the lobby of their apartment. She glanced downward because of the familiar deepness of it.

Finnick stood before them with a tiny backpack over his shoulder.

"Hey, big guy!" Nick barked. "Goin' camping?"

The fennec rolled his eyes at the 'big guy' nickname. He answered gruffly, "Heating coil in the van snapped," he informed. "Gotta wait till pay-day next week to order the replacement. She's gettin' old, Nick. Parts are hard to find and stupid-expensive." Judy cringed at that. Even in the warmer sections of the city it was pretty cold this time of year, and a fennec was not made for the cold.

"Oh? Where you heading?" Judy pried.

"You shoulda texted me," Nick expressed in an even tone. "I'd have swung by earlier to let you in so you weren't just hanging around in the lobby here." The bunny dropped her ears back, little paw moving to her muzzle. Wait. They had to discuss things like this. Finnick and Nick got onto the elevator.

"Where's he supposed to stay, Nick? It's a one bed-room apartment.

"We'll consolidate the cookware into one cabinet instead of two," Nick answered.

"You are not gonna Hairy Otter me, Nick! I know all your embarrassing drunk stories."

"Right. In bed with us then," her mate corrected. Judy nearly tripped getting onto the elevator.

"No!" she protested with a bit of a squeak. Finnick burst out laughing as the elevator doors closed.

"Calm down, Bunnycop," the smallest of their immediate friends comforted with a grin. "Imma be on the couch. And I won't even be there all the time, I got evenin's at the radio station. I'll get my sleep when ya'll are out makin' stories for Shaky to report on. Though, y' stuck with me for tonight, I'm off!" he laughed. Judy nodded slowly. Okay, so that would not be the huge interruption of their lives that she initially thought it would. The bunny had been so eager to have things get mostly back to normal and the last thing she wanted was another issue to come up and derail their lives.

"Just… Can we talk about these things and not have you just show up with a backpack?" she bargained, more to excuse her initial reaction. She didn't want Finnick to think she didn't like him, even if he could be pretty rude and foul with a bit of drink in him.

"Nope. Standin' offer. Fox promise," the little fennec informed.

"Oh, really?" she asked, glaring at Nick. "Any other fox promises I should know about?"

"Nothin' big," Nick hastily answered, giving that panicked sort of grin that told Judy she might need to be on her toes.

"Yeah, he nullified the one he made to Frost when he vowed up to you," the littlest fox stated as he got off the elevator.

"Uh... what?" the doe bluntly responded.

"That wasn't a real promise, and you know it," Nick grumbled to his little friend. He got off with Judy darting quickly behind.

"What promise?!" the doe snapped. There was no way that her mate had been in a relationship with the other fox, they hated each other when she met Skye!

Nick sighed. "Carrots, it was verbal banter. She asked me when I'd find a good vixen to keep me in line so I would stop making foxes look bad, and I promised her that if there were no other vixens left in Zootopia it could be her. I was provoking her the way I always did."

"Naw man, you said fox-promise," Finnick pushed. Judy cocked an eyebrow. Was he trying to get Nick in trouble?

"I contained a dangerous amount of cider. Fin, I was on my back when I said that because you were literally dragging me by my tail through the lobby to the elevator." Judy had to actually stifle a laugh at that image as it seared itself into her mind. They arrived at the apartment and Nick let everyone in.

"See? Mi casa, es su casa." He gestured flamboyantly to the whole simple, charming abode of the fox and bunny.

"What was the original promise, so I know?" Judy requested, still a little unnerved by that unexpected bit of her husband's history.

"Either of us fall on hard times, they can count on the other," Nick explained.

"That doesn't sound like the kind of promise the fox you used to be would easily make," Judy pointed out with a level of seriousness in her voice.

Nick put his bag down and got a soda from the fridge, as well as a cider for Finnick. The bunny's mate looked a little sad for a moment, not locking eyes with her. "Yeah, well… He helped me through a really rough patch where I didn't really care about much and I was doing a bunch of dumb things that coulda… made it so we never met."

"I kept yo ass out of the ice-pond is what I did," snapped the little fennec. Judy felt a wave of bitter cold slip through her. Something Vivienne had told her came back fresh in her mind. Nick was so lost at one point that he recklessly provoked a dangerous crime boss. He didn't care. He absolutely didn't care if anything happened to him at that point. He was basically off the rails and careening toward oblivion back then.

The self-loathing, shamed, unhappy fox had no one back then to stop him from doing what he was doing. Nick's mother couldn't be there for him back then. He wouldn't let her close to him. The little mammal now in their apartment was the one who stood by him during that. Judy stared at the little fox as he sipped his cider, feeling suddenly very different about him. Nick made light of their friendship because Finnick insisted on his tough-guy image, but he had been Nick's friend when no one else in the city seemed to care about him.

Okay, that promise, and her understanding of the arrangement, were both deserved. She would drop any reservation she had about it. If the little fox needed a place, this would always be it. Nick was not aware that Judy had been told how bad it was, and she didn't feel like bringing it up then. She would let it go.

"Movie night then?" Nick offered.

"No pizza," Finnick deadpanned.

"Noodles?" the bunny attempted. She understood the smaller mammal's immediate response. Nick liked to order pizza for movie night and Fin just wanted anything but that.

The tiny tan fox grinned. "Hell yeah!"

The selected fare for movie night was an action flick about a kung-fu trained tiger who was supposed to be taking care of some cubs but kept getting inexplicably attacked by mammals from their past. It was cheeky and silly, but Finnick was clearly content with it. He liked cheesy 80's movies.

It was not really unlike a lot of their evenings before a day off, but the next day was a work day, so ultimately Nick confessed it was time for bed, and headed to the shower to get cleaned up. That left Judy waiting on her shower. She didn't mind taking it with Nick, but the fox had to move around quite a bit in the small shower to clean his tail and the like, and the small bunny almost always got bonked on the nose or unintentionally mashed into the wall, and it was honestly just easier in general to shower separately.

As she heard the hiss of the shower, she gazed at their small temporary roommate. He finished off his cider happily, and was quite happy to be in a heated apartment, not worried about his head-sails freezing and snapping off in the night, as he had vividly described.

"Thanks, Finnick…" Judy finally murmured. Through the whole movie she had been feeling heavily reflective.

"Fo' what?" he asked, huge ears attentive.

"Helping Nick. Back before I met him," she replied.

"He was my work partner. Didn't feel like replacin' him. We had a good gimmick goin'." Judy let her ears slowly fall back. He was deflecting. Nick did that a lot too, early on.

"What did you do to keep him from getting killed for the skunk butt rug thing?" the bunny whispered. That was the thing she latched on to. Nick could have been killed. She didn't know why he wasn't. Vivienne made it clear he should have. Something interfered and with Nick having given a very uncharacteristic promise in his past, she suddenly suspected she knew what had happened. She just wanted to know.

"What makes you think that was me, bunny?" asked the smaller mammal.

"I know what it would have taken for the old Nick to make that kind of promise to someone. Don't try to deny this Finnick. I need to know what happened. The real story."

"No, ya don't. That wasn't a good look for Nick. Not then. It was bad. You don't know how bad."

"He… wanted it all to end," Judy delivered with a weight in her heart and on her voice.

"Ooookay… So you know how bad then," Finnick stared at her a moment, then back to the bathroom. He was, most likely, judging how long he had to talk about it. Nick took forever to groom his wonderful tail. He had time.

"Please," Judy pressed.

"Okay… so… look bunny..." The little mammal pulled his ears back nervously. "I ain't supposed to talk about this, right? It was like.. five years ago, maybe four… Don't matter. He got the Internet finally, and was looking up funny things, new jokes to tell people. Maybe you don't know, but he uses humor to distract mammals… take them off their guard."

"I know," Judy admitted.

"Well, he found some pretty vile crap on there. '25 Foxes Who Had It Comin'' or somthin' like that. Bunch o' crap about completely worthless foxes gettin' run over, flattened, gibbed, burned… There was even a Flash game where you had to try to pull a muzzle onto a little cartoony fox who was bouncin' around all over the place, just plain freakin' out. That whole site got taken down in like… days… But not before it put Nick in a serious funk. Like… he gave me his laptop and told me to do whatever I wanted with it." Judy felt ill. Of course that bothered Nick. That was terrible.

"The Internet… is an easy place to be awful. I wish Nick would not have let that get to him. He didn't need to. Some mammals just… Yuk…" She shook her head. Poor fox.

"Hey, it wuzzn't just foxes, it was just all kinds of hate there. Sheer a sheep with throwing knives, cow tippin', send explodin' fish after otters… the whole site was just dedicated to cruel games like it was dark-funny or some shit." Judy did not want to give an inch to the notion that such a thing was supposed to be funny.

"Not amusing," she clarified.

"Yeah, well, Nick got into funks sometimes, but it was like he suddenly used that crappy website as his full on measuring stick for society. And he just went off the damned chart. He took big risks because he figured existence was completely meaningless. It was all a slow burn until the end and he would just have whatever comforts he could. I knew he was makin' mistakes but I didn't know how bad till a couple'a bears showed up and freaking tipped my van over.

"Kevin and Raymond?" qualified Judy.

"And two others. It was serious," Finnick replied. "I don't know that Nick ever told you the rules to hustlin', but there's two really big ones. You don't make friends, and you don't make enemies. And Nick made a really dangerous enemy doin' somethin' he knew wouldn't work. His plan? Take the money and leave. He was gonna go live in Fenrir or something.

But they couldn't get him, so they went after the only mammal they thought was his friend. I messed up. I coulda just said I didn't know him outside of our hustles but I said I wasn't tellin' them anything. They dragged me out to Tundra Town and used me as bait to get Nick out there."

"And Nick came?" asked the doe.

"Yeah, he did. I thought it was because he didn't wanna see me hurt, you know? But it wasn't like that. Not to him. Yeah, he wanted them to let me go, but he just didn't care, at that point. He was toxic. Time to go, he told everyone." Judy swallowed hard. She understood, from her discussion with Vivienne, that he was like that back then, but to hear how close it came was painful.

Judy held her breath a moment, then whispered, "How in the world did he get out of that?"

"I realized as they moved the cover off the floor and Nick just looked at it like it was an empty freakin' beer that he wuzzn't gonna fight it. And I had enough. I broke my own rule about not makin' friends. He mighta been a goof and a nut sometimes, but he was the only mammal who ain't once done me wrong. I knew what he was goin' through. I watched what he was doin' and I wanted to stay out of it. I let it get that far and I had to stop it. I told Big I wanted to make a deal. I explained that Nick wasn't… healthy right then. I needed to get Nick straight in the head. Big said he'd let my buddy go if I worked for him and his goons for a year."

"As a police officer, knowing that the statute of limitations has probably not worn off, I would like to encourage you not to share about that part," Judy murmured softly.

"You watch too much TV, Bunnycop," Finnick stated. "I did legitimate work. But it was hard and I didn't get paid, and I still needed to hustle with Nick to make a livin' on top of that, so that whole year sucked. But seein' me do that brought him out of his funk. He used that to measure the city instead, he said. But, my van got impounded one time cause it was parked illegally, and I didn't have the cash to get it. That's when Nick made the promise. And he's always kept it."

"Now can I thank you?" Judy asked. She had never really heard Finnick be so candid aside from when he was drunk and promised to go legit after Nick was lost under the city. She was glad to have gotten to really talk to him.

"Yeah, whatever," the fennec dismissed and then grunted as he got scooped up by the bunny and hugged.

"Thank you, Finnick," Judy whispered, putting him back down.

"Kin I thank you, now?" the little fox queried. For some reason that kicked Judy's heart right up into her throat. She slowly nodded, fighting not to blink just to keep her wide bunny eyes dry.

"S-sure," she whispered.

"I can't even describe what you've done for Nick. He's not the same fox he was, and you know… I ain't the same fox I was. I don't have lots, but I don't need more. I worked at the restaurant for a while, then a got a pretty sweet gig at the radio station, and they said they might even let me start doin' mornin' reports. I might actually end up bein' someone in this crazy animal city," he chuckled. "If Nick could do it, why not me, y'know? You was helpin' Nick cause you love him, and you know you help him, but maybe you don't always see what happens when other mammals see what you did. He ain't the only one you helped, and I promise I ain't the only mammal besides him that was watchin'. So thanks fo' that, Judy." The bunny's breath hitched. For as rare as it had been originally that Nick used her real name, Finnick used it even less. And he was really genuine in this heartfelt gratitude.

"I'm glad it helped. Nick.. you… I'm glad," the bunny sniffed.

"Oh, hey, don't do that. Nick comes out and you cryin' he'll drop me off the balcony!" the little fox laughed. Judy hugged him again.

"Tight… too tight!" he grunted.

"Take your hug gracefully, Fin!" Judy sputtered, half laughing, half crying.

"Why do bunnies keep pickin' me up!?"

"Oh, you didn't have a problem when my mom did it while you were pretending to be my son!" the doe laughed, getting her emotions under control.

"Yeah, well you as padded as a dime-store mannequin, bunny! Yo' ma's pure bunny-snuggle heaven! She pick me up and I never wanna be put down!" He grinned at her.

"Finnick!" shouted the bunny indignantly. "I'll take you to the balcony myself!"

There was laughter from the shower.