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-Baby Steps- by Toga

 

“Who the heck organizes a robbery ring in a rest home anyway?”

 

Judy’s voice rang in his ear loud and clear, snapping him out of his boredom-induced stupor. In truth her voice had made him jump. It had been a long time since she had said anything. By the third hour of the sting he might’ve guessed she fell asleep at some point, but he knew her too well and realized how ridiculous it was to think for a second Judy would slack.

 

Lord knows Nick had fallen asleep at least three times already. Getting paid to nap was a new one, but he wasn’t about to argue about it. Someone would walk into his room, check his rigged vital monitors, check the bedpan, and then leave him be once again.

 

“People looking for easy marks,” Nick whispered into the tiny microphone clipped beneath his hospice robe. The robe was rough and itchy and he couldn’t wait to have it off. “Marks that sleep for twelve hours a day, can’t hear or see well, or have faulty memories and unreliable testimonies.”

 

Judy paused. Nick had a feeling what she was going to say next. “Speaking from experience?”

 

“I had morals,” Nick huffed, “even in my old days. Separating a kid from his lunch money or geezer from his medicine money was not something I wanted to do. But I knew a few people that did.”

 

Judy said nothing else, leaving Nick alone with his thoughts and his past. The hustling game had a very diverse group of players and not everyone had a well-developed moral compass. To the majority, money was money and the ends justified the means, old or young. He scowled, wondering if Finnick was doing all right on his own. Though not exactly thick as thieves, they had been through a good bit of trouble together, and Nick found himself thinking about the little fox from time to time.

 

Judy giggled in his ear.

 

“What?”

 

“Just looking at you,” she said. Nick turned to look directly at the camera discreetly nestled in the ficus plant in the far corner of the room. “Your face is all scrunched. You look like a real geezer yourself.”

 

“An age joke? Some things cannot be forgiven, Carrots.”

 

“I’m just saying I don’t think I could’ve pulled off the role so convincingly.”

 

Nick smiled in spite of himself. “Keep digging that hole, bunny.”

 

She laughed again, though it felt curt, forced. Nick pondered it for a moment, going over the last ten seconds of conversation before coming to an obvious conclusion and the next second found himself wishing he had just let it go. As if he had dug up something ugly and unspoken and now had no way of putting it back and covering it up. He couldn’t be sure he was on the right track until Judy told him he was, but he didn’t want to bring it up. So, have her bring it up.

 

“What’s eating you, Judy?”

 

“The nurse–the vixen that walked in earlier today,” Judy said. Nick began to roll his eyes but remembered Judy could see him through the camera. “Do you think she was…someone you’d be interested in?”

 

Judy ignored the elephant in the room in favor something benign and easily swept under the rug. Nick had the biting sense he was being played into finally pointing out the obvious, but he’d leave it be for as long as he could. If she didn’t want to talk about it, neither did he. “The one that offered me a sponge bath? That one?”

 

“Come on, Nick.”

 

“Okay, sure, I guess. I mean, yeah, as far as fox standards go, y'know, she was a looker,” Nick said, stumbling over his words like they were hurdles. He collected himself for a quick second and again took on his usual demeanor. “But I’m a one girl sort of fox, and I’m happily involved with a bunny, insecure as she may be.”

 

He waited for a retort, a flash of wit that let him know she had not taken him seriously. It didn’t come, and it gnawed at him that he might not be taking this as seriously as he should be.

 

“Judy?”

 

“No,” she said quickly. “Never mind. The recorders are on, we shouldn’t talk now.”

 

Judy had just set a trap. He was sure of it. The recorders are always on during sting ops, and no one really liked to talk about personal things because the nosy voyeurs in records would get to hear every juicy detail. But that never happened. Everyone spoke about whatever they felt like during boring stings because the guys in records weren’t actually nosy voyeurs. In fact, they were incredibly respectful and for all the garbage they probably heard throughout their jobs, they never breathed a word of it or leaked it to anyone else. Whenever tapes get released to the public, never is there a word concerning any personal matters of any officers involved.

 

But Judy knew that. She must have. So for her to say that was a deliberate attempt to throw Nick an easy way out of a conversation he didn’t want to have.

 

For the lovably impulsive and loud-mouthed bunny to be so round-about and sneaky was frighteningly different; this was a conversation that Judy clearly wanted to have–now. So he wouldn’t take her bait. Not because he knew it was a set-up, but because he knew what needed to be said.

 

“The records guys don’t care about anything unrelated to the case and the next nurse shift doesn’t come in for another thirty minutes. You want to talk? Let’s talk.”

 

She let go of a long and heavy sigh, as if she had been holding her breath for minutes.

 

Do you ever feel like…“ she began, but then lost her nerve. Nick had a vision of her fidgeting in her seat. "The vixen. You thought she was pretty?”

 

“Sure,” Nick said dryly.

 

“Do you ever wish you had ended up with another fox instead?”

 

“Oh my goodness, sweetheart,” Nick cooed, suddenly doubting the direction of the conversation. “I’ve got almost a decade on you; you’re not the first girl I’ve gotten to know. Most of them have been foxes, some of them knew me longer than you have, but every time it all went south for one reason or another. And after all that drama the only thing I’ve ever wished for is someone that made me happy.”

 

“That’s sweet, Nick,” she said. Ominously, she still sounded tense; not even a hint of relief in her voice. “I know you’re older than me, and that’s why…why I wanted to ask. And that wasn’t entirely…I mean…”

 

“Come on, out with it. You’re killing me, Carrots.”

 

“It seems like you might be at the age–I mean, don’t you want to settle?” she asked. Her voice shrank with every word until she was barely a whisper, even with the earpiece. “Don’t you ever want–want a baby? To have a family?”

 

And just when Nick thought she was steering away from it, there it was again like a sucker punch, as hard and bone-shattering as the left hook from that rhino during his academy days.

 

He had no good answer for her. Nothing that his near ten years seniority of wisdom could give him, nothing that might be of some use to her. “Do you?” he asked.

 

He heard a light rustling, a soft sound that repeated over and over. He recognized it as Judy stroking one of her ears, pulling it forward over her shoulder to run her paws down again and again.

 

“For bunnies, it’s sort of a given. You don’t understand what it’s like to grow up how I did, like I was a drop in–we were all drops in the bucket, but mom and dad knew us all by name, loved us. Mom talked all the time about settling hard but I never saw her any happier than when she was buried up to her neck in babies.”

 

Nick swallowed loudly enough for the microphone to pick up on.

 

“Relax, I’m not thinking about three hundred kids running around,” she said, waiting for Nick to finish his sigh of relief. “But I’m just scared that we don’t even have the option. We’re happy now, career-focused, but what about later?”

 

Nick cleared his throat and tested the waters. “Have you thought about other, uh, options?”

 

“Adopting? Surrogacy?” She thought for a moment. “Bunnies…I know I throw out multiplying jokes at least once a day, but it’s kind of a point of pride. A bunny with a big family is seen as a happy, successful individual. Bunnies that have to adopt are outcast. Not openly, no one’s that callous. Everyone’s supportive to your face but they talk when you’re not around.”

 

“So what? let them talk.”

 

She sighed. “You know when you’re patrolling anywhere in Sahara Square, and you’re buttoned up top to bottom? Your belt’s snug as can be, your uniform is crisp, tight, and there’s not a single way in. And yet at the end of the day there’s still sand in your underwear? It’s like that. Now imagine you grew up in Sahara Square, trying to keep that uniform sand-free for 24 years. It gets through no matter what you do. I never believed in it. I never gossiped when someone did, but the stigma is so overwhelming that most bunnies would rather move to the city and live it up than adopt and stay home.

 

"And as for the…other option–I don’t want that. I don’t want something of ours to be half me, none of you. That doesn’t seem fair.”

 

Nick’s mind sank further and further, as if slipping beneath endless waves. A child seemed important to Judy, that much was clear. There were only four options: stay childless together, adopt, get a donor, or split up and hope she finds someone as amazing as himself. He shook his head of the last thought. Now was not a time for playful narcissism nor could he bear to think of letting Judy go.

 

“I say adopt.”

 

She sniffled loudly like the waterworks could begin at any moment. “Just like that?”

 

“You’re in the city already; anyone who’s talking crap about you behind your back in Bunnyburrow has probably been doing it for a while now–”

 

“Not helping.”

 

“Hear me out,” he said, pausing for just a moment to make sure the footsteps outside his room kept walking. They did. “You’ve got a big family; I’ve met them, seen how they act with you and without you. Even if this stigma you mention is as vicious as you say, I don’t think they would ever talk behind your back. Your other friends are sheep, cats, a fox, even that out of place lynx–all mammals who probably don’t have even the slightest grasp of this stigma. If the entire bunny population of your hometown was talking behind your back save for your family and friends, would you care? Because I’m betting you’d care just as much as when they told you it was weird for a bunny to want to be a cop.”

 

She laughed softly; music to Nick’s ears, a sense he was on the right track.

 

“If I remember, you told me even your parents tried to get you off the law enforcement path, that you shouldn’t believe too hard in your dreams. Look at you now! The weirdest bunny they’ve ever produced, the only one of your kind. They still love you, right? Still support you?”

 

“They do,” she said with an obvious smile.

 

“And if you don’t want to find a donor, then I don’t want one either. So the only option left is to adopt,” he said, conveniently leaving out the last, unmentionable choice. “To me, parenting’s about setting a kid up on the right path. Blood shouldn’t have much to do with it. If two couples have a child–one natural, one adopted–and both kids grow up to be great, is the adopted one somehow less than the natural birth? I think it’s less about genes and more about ideals.”

 

“Yeah?”

 

“Definitely. And who better to instill ideals that Zootopia’s best officers?”

 

She laughed again. “When did you make that list?”

 

“Not important. If we could take a sullen bunny with no family of his own or a fox going down the path society’s already laid out for him, turn them around and teach them that they’re more than their past, more than what people think of them–wouldn’t that be amazing?”

 

Nick held his breath. He had more or less prepared for this discussion since the two of them had started dating. He, being older and possibly wiser, knew it would come sometime down the road, and truth be told he was glad she had been stronger than him to bring it up, especially before he went ring shopping. And even though he thought he had laid out a compelling argument, none of it mattered if Judy wasn’t on board.

 

She hummed a note to herself before letting go of a contented sigh. “That does sound pretty amazing, Nick.”

 

The sting had ended when the night shift nurses had checked in. Nick and Judy had not found their thieves that night, and would be forced to try again. And when Nick had gone to find Judy, he had in fact found the fur of her cheeks streaked wet and shiny, but far more important to him was the happiness he had clearly seen in her eyes.