Sunderance - Chapter 25: Scouts Honor Part 2

“Nick,” she began, unable to even comprehend the idea of being torn away from her family as more than an ache in her chest, one that she was certain was only a fraction of the reality of having everyone he had cared about taken from him. But whatever her aching heart wanted to express to him was cut off when he continued abruptly.

“In person, anyway. Obviously, I saw her on TV and in the news later. After she left, Mr. Big kept tabs on her and kept me as informed as he decided I needed to be, while providing me with just enough information so that I knew she wasn’t in danger – without allowing me the option of going after her. As you can imagine, that didn’t go over well at first,” he added, a toneless sort of humor in the smirk that crossed his muzzle. “At that point, though, I was either tired of the anger or I was tired of yelling because I had learned there was no point. Gotta give Papa credit. A lot of credit. I called him some vile things in anger, things that would have had most other mammals… misplaced.”

And Judy knew that he used the term ‘misplaced’ rather than spell out what exactly happened to those who crossed a figure like Mr. Big, not because he didn’t think she could handle it, but because she was a lawyer. She remained silent, however, her eyes intently focused on his expression and the green eyes that were sometimes focused on her and sometimes in the distant past. Her sense of right and wrong was even present with this knowledge, like an itch at the back of her neck. The itch became maddening, however, when his story moved into territories she had hoped it wouldn’t.

“I was… seventeen, I think, when he started me working with the bears,” he said, leaning back in the chair and folding his hands behind his head as he looked at the ceiling. “It made perfect sense to me at the time. I was his burden, I was draining his time and resources. He should get something back. And I didn’t mind at all. I needed to put all of the impractical training to good use, right? Get into some real fights, and what better way to do that than to meet some less than reputable characters who were being uncooperative? I found out later than he only sent me to acquaintances of his that were already dirty. No innocent shop keepers, no mothers, no goodie-goodie mammals who were just mixed in bad business. No. I was sent to other members of the family who had gotten out of line, bookies who didn’t pay their till, cops on the take who got too greedy, a few cases of excessive violence in the neighborhood. Those were my favorites, the violent ones. They never came quietly, and I was very, very angry at the time.”

“He made you an enforcer for the mob?”

“In a way,” he said, turning his eyes back to her without dropping his arms. She could tell that his relaxed appearance was fabricated; that the smooth, easy tone was forced in a way she had never heard from him before. “He was giving that anger a direction, pointing me towards mammals who deserved it. It was easy enough at first. The first few never saw me coming, big or small. A rat with a pair of lynx bodyguards, a lion who was convinced he was unstoppable, a giraffe…”

“A giraffe? How would you even…”

“Like chopping down a tree,” he said, using two fingers to mime legs as he grinned at her. A real grin, this time. “They’re really tall, but those legs are just begging to be taken out from under them. As long as you avoid getting kicked. Even the bears were wary of the kick. Hard to get the drop on them, too. Good ears, wide range of vision. High head, meaning they can see you coming. But once you have them on the ground… What? You asked.”

“I did,” she sighed, dropping back in her own chair as she looked across at him. It was disturbingly easy to imagine him as an enforcer for Mr. Big as he was now. He could be cold and distant, sometimes seeming emotionless, while at the same time he seemed driven. His drive in her case was to protect her, which was a far cry from being muscle for the mob. “Go on. But not about the giraffes.”

“Right,” he smirked, dropping his arms and leaning forward again. The smirk fell away. In fact, all humor dropped away from the handsome face in the time it took him to lean forward far enough to rest his elbows on his knees. “It seemed to work well enough at first. For a few years. Until I was legally old enough to drink. Don’t look so surprised. Life in the mob isn’t like the movies. They don’t run around like yahoos, breaking laws just because they can. At least, not as I saw it growing up. They were very neat and clean in all respects. Stay inside the law, unless it was official family business. That way, the ZPD can’t arrest you for little nitpicky details like letting a minor drink alcohol. That becomes kind of important later.

“Anyway, the bears took me out for a night on the town to welcome me to adulthood. It was a great night. I was introduced to scotch, which one of the bears explained was what sophisticated mammals of means drank. That first drink damn near killed me, too, or it felt like it at the time. Like swallowing terrible, pungent fire, coughing, and ending up with some of that fire in the nose. Which led to more coughing, watering eyes, the laughter of those around me. But not the mean kind, not like they were making fun of me. The kind where they have all been there themselves, so they could laugh and slap me on the back, and congratulate me. And then pour me another drink. And as the warmth that quickly saturated my blood worked its way right into my brain? I found myself laughing with them. Really laughing, instead of forcing it. And for the first time in years, I was feeling as though there was still some fun to be had in the world. Neveen being gone wasn’t such a huge weight on my shoulders because, when I drank, I never thought about her.

“Which was why I never stopped drinking after that night,” he said lowly, turning his eyes to the bottle on the table before reaching out to take it in one paw. He rolled it around, the amber liquid within coating the inside of the bottle to slowly slide back down in a clean film while he looked at the label without actually seeing what was etched there. “And like when I became an enforcer, it was great at first. An outlet, a way to feel a little more like who I had been before everything had come crashing down. That’s how it catches you, you know. It feels good, until it doesn’t. But by the time it stopped feeling good, I already needed it. And then, when feeling good become misery, stopping becomes pain. It affected everyone and everything around me. Papa told me, more than once, that I needed to clean up my act, but I didn’t listen. Couldn’t really. We fought constantly at this point. Or I fought and he talked calmly back at me, in that way that parents sometimes do. ‘Nicky, you need to stop this drinking. It’s no good. You make me sad, Nicky. Your parents wouldn’t want this, Nicky. Think of the family, Nicky’ and so on, until I just started to tune him out by drinking more.

“And it started to affect my work, in some obvious ways. I became more violent, as angry alcoholics tend to do,” he admitted, setting the bottle down again and focusing his eyes on her fully. “Which led to some messes, for all parties involved. Sometimes I… took it too far. And sometimes I was the one who took the beating, and for the first time the bears had to step in to save me, more than once. I was causing a lot more problems than I was solving, in the end. I had become the sort of problem that I was sent to solve.”

“But you didn’t stop,” she decided, setting aside the violence of the life he had led for now to focus on what was really being explained to her. “Or you couldn’t.”

“It’s the same thing, really, with the same results in the end,” he shrugged, his ears falling flat as his chest rose with a deep breath which he released in a slow exhale. “Mr. Big became more insistent, because he had to. And I was just as resistant. It had reached a point where he told me that I had to stop drinking or get out. So, I got out.”

There was a drawn out silence then as he looked down at his paws for a long moment. It was the sort of silence that would have allowed her time to think about everything that she had been told so far and allowed him to gather his thoughts to tell her the rest. But rather than think, all she found herself doing was watching him. Trying to read him and realized that it was because he was showing emotions he hadn’t shown her before. Regret being in the forefront now, as he released another breath.

“As you might expect, it went downhill fast after that. I had money, of course. My parents’ money, which had been silently split between Neveen and I, and the money Papa had paid me as one of his enforcers, which was no small amount. More than enough to allow a pissed off male to break loose on the world, drink himself into a pit, and wallow in that pit for years. The only time I wasn’t drunk was when I woke up every morning, and that only lasted until I was able to reach over the vixen I had fucked the night before to grab the bottle.”

He seemed aware of the wince that crossed her muzzle at those words and cast her a sympathetic, if wry, grin.

“It went along pretty well with my general attitude at that point,” he admitted, causing her ears to raise as his seemingly nonchalant tone dripped with something akin to self-loathing. “not really giving much of a damn about anything. The females were just warm bodies, sweet smells, disposable pleasure. The love ‘em and leave ‘em idea was my favored means of seduction, which is a terrible thing for a todd to do. Find a pretty bitch, convince her that she’s the most beautiful creature I’d even seen, take her to some expensive hotel, and be gone by morning. I never thought about them afterward and even now, I can’t remember a single name or a face to attach to a name even if I could.

“And I carried on like this for years, getting deeper into the bottle with every passing month. I got into fights regularly, slept with pretty much any female who would have me, got thrown out of so many bars that I had to move into a different part of the city just so I could get a drink. Not that it was hard to do that, because by that point I was living out of hotel rooms. By this time, half the time when I woke up I didn’t remember where I was or how I had gotten there or who I had gone there with. Sometimes I woke up to find I had been robbed, but I never even cared about that. Money was as disposable as everything else.”

“So, what changed?” she asked at length, her brow furrowed and her eyes concerned for the male. Everything about that period of his life seemed so unlike the Nick she knew. The discipline, the skill, the self-control. The caring he showed her.

“Someone knocked some sense into me,” he said, a distantly affectionate smile crossing his muzzle. Not for her, she knew, but for whoever ‘knocked some sense’ into him, though he didn’t mention the name as he went one. “And because of them, I saw Neveen again for the first time in years. In the news. A new rising star in Zootopia politics, going by the name Kyubi, walking alongside the newly elected mayor Lionheart.”

He was silent again, looking down at his paws thoughtfully, and this time she made no move to comfort or press him for more information. She just sat with him for what seemed like minutes before he sucked in a breath and exhaled it in the words that followed.

“She was every bit as bright and full of energy as I remembered before our parents died,” he said, his muzzle turned into a slight frown as he shook his head slowly, “but it was faked. Even as muddled as my mind was, I knew my sister. Every smile she offered the camera, every shy twitch of her ears as she tried to play herself off as demure… Even the sway of her tail was timed. All of it was rehearsed in the extreme.”

“That’s a lot for a drunk fox to see,” she commented, not doubting but because she was curious of how well he knew his sister that he would be able to see that much from a newscast.

“We were inseparable as kits,” he supplied, leaning back in the chair and resting his head against the back. Then, without raising his head, he turned his muzzle to face her. “I don’t know. It all just seemed so wrong. When she started to talk about Lionheart being a force for change in the city, the crowd cheered her passion and bravery and I cringed inside. Because what I heard was anger. An old anger that I recognized, because it was one of a dozen things I had been trying to drown in oceans of liquor.”

“And heartless sex.”

“Yes,” he said, his muzzle quirking slightly as his eyes met hers fully. Not so much amused as he was pleased, she was sure, because she hadn’t been able to keep the annoyed tones from her voice. “And that.

“But that was when I decided to get control of myself. I failed, at first. Miserably. Drinking was almost as much a reflexive habit as it was a physical one for a while. The pain came back, the grief, fuzzy memories of heartbroken vixens without faces. It drove me back to the bottle a few times, before I managed to take control of myself. I watched her while I did this. Even when she tried to vanish from the public eye as Kyubi, I kept tabs on her through Flash and Mr. Big’s sources. Watched a Council that she helped elect ‘elect’ her to an office that hadn’t existed before.”

“She withdrew from the public eye almost entirely before being appointed the roll of Administrator by the Council,” Judy confirmed, remembering the rumors that she had actually been assassinated that had run their course, but were dismissed quickly. “Most people in the city, and in the Common Wealth, don’t even know that they’re the same person.”

“And even fewer know who she really is,” he nodded, “which made sense given what happened to our parents, so I decided to do the same. No one knew who I was, anyway. The Wilde family was dead. So aside from contacting Mr. Big to let him know that I wasn’t passed out in a gutter somewhere – anymore – I removed myself from Zootopia entirely. Got myself a nice setup in the Nocturnal District, somewhere I could watch from a distance without being watched, to see what my angry sister was planning to do with absolute power. It became clear for those who paid attention that things had silently become darker than they were before. Political figures vanishing, an entire district segregated to allow only one species, the return of things like public assassinations.”

“Did you care about the changes?” she asked, nibbling on her lower lip slightly as she considered the idea that The Administrator was at the heart of everything wrong with Zootopia. Or at least, she sat by and did nothing to stop it.

“No,” he said, turning to face the table so he could rest his arms on it as he leaned towards her. “I still don’t. I care about Mr. Big, but none of the laws or anything else that has happened since Neveen took power have affected him at all. I am sure this is by design. I worry about my sister, but I am not going to get in her way. She is my family.”

“Is that why you’re helping me?” she asked, tilting her head slightly as she brought the subject back towards something that she had never gotten an answer to, “because Neveen invited me into the city?”

“No,” he replied simply, green eyes unwavering. “I saw you on TV, when the reporters were asking you if you had protection. You reminded me of Neveen when she was young: bright and full of hope, but helpless. I didn’t want to see you crushed by what the city has become because of my sister.”

“You think I’m helpless?” she asked, frowning as she narrowed her eyes at him, something that only caused a slow grin to spread over his muzzle.

“No. I think you are brave but vulnerable,” he said, reaching one paw across the table towards her, palm pad up. After a moment of hesitation, she reached out to place her paw on it, watching as the much larger paw closed to squeeze gently. She raised her eyes when he continued. “I also think you’re the most dangerous mammal in Zootopia as the city is right now. Which is why I need to protect you.”

“Because I’m dangerous?”

“Because I’m not the only one who knows it.”