Chapter Text
"Excuse me, do you know a fox called Nick Wilde?"
The pig ignored her question and kept walking. Judy didn't try to ask him again. A lot of people reacted like that, and by now Judy was too exhausted to really care. She kept walking down the street, her eyes darting between all the mammals that passed her. Just in case one of them happened to be a fox. The sun had sunk below the horizon and the last, lingering daylight was quickly fading, giving way to the artificial glare of street lights. Judy rubbed the exhaustion out of her eyes and took a look at the time. Only nine hours left before her morning shift started. Which meant she could still get six hours of sleep if she went home in an hour.
It had been two weeks since she last saw Nick. Two weeks since her first (and probably last) press conference. Two weeks since what Judy had come to realize was the biggest mistake of her entire life. That press conference had replayed in her mind over and over again, like an earworm she just couldn't get rid of. She had tried in vain to justify to herself what happened that day. But every day she remembered something more that went wrong that afternoon. The things she said. The questions she got asked. The look on Nick's face. She groaned as the memory of Nick's angry, disappointed face once again forced its way into her brain. She tried to shake the image from her mind and focus on her task.
"Excuse me, do you know a fox called Nick Wilde?"
The bear she asked actually stopped and looked down on her with surprise showing on his face.
"Uhm, Nick Wilde? Can't say that I do, little miss," he answered.
"Okay, thanks anyway."
The bear didn't walk away like most mammals had at that point in the conversation. His surprised expression turned into a frown that seemed to express confusion and concern at the same time.
"A friend of yours?" he asked.
Judy hesitated.
"Yes. ...For my part," she answered, her voice low as she stared down in the pavement.
"Uh, are you okay, miss? Do you need help or something?
"No, no, I'm fine, thank you! Just trying to find this… friend."
The bear just nodded, hesitated for a moment and then walked away. Judy sighed and leaned against a street light. This was a terrible way to go about it. She knew that. But all other ways had turned out to be dead ends.
It had of course been easy to find Nicholas Piberius Wilde in the system. After all, she had gone through his file before they even really knew each other. But there was not much to go on there, except for his name and shady tax returns. His last known address had led her to what appeared to be a long abandoned chop shop. There she found nothing but rusty skeletons of cars, empty mailboxes and some mammals playing cards on steel drums in the yard. She had tried to talk to them but didn't get the answers she was looking for. They hadn't heard of any Nick Wilde and they apparently knew nothing of the building they were squatting in. Nick had claimed that he knew everyone, but no one seemed to know Nick. It was as if the fox had vanished off the face of the planet.
Judy clenched her paw into a fist as she continued down the street. Why do I even care so much? she thought, even as she turned around to get a better look at a fox that of course wasn't Nick. She had only known Nick for a few days, and hadn't even liked him for a large chunk of that time. So why had she already spent more time looking for him than she had actually known him?
"Excuse me, do you know a fox called Nick Wilde?"
Her question was ignored by yet another mammal. Judy sighed and shook her head. She had so much else to focus on at the moment. She was finally getting some small degree of respect at the ZPD, and with that respect came a heavy workload. Mammals were still going savage, and more frequently too. Tensions were rising at an alarming rate. All in all, she had more important things to worry about than finding that damn fox. And still, there she was. What would she even say or do if she actually found him? She had no idea. If she actually found him, he might not even stop to listen to whatever she had to say.
It was hopeless. Judy realized that as she sat down on a bench by a bus stop to rest her feet. She would never find him like this. Maybe Nick didn't want to be found? Maybe she was just trying to fix something that simply couldn't be fixed? And maybe it was time to just quit. Give up on this obsession to find Nick again. She stared down at her paws. People always told her that she was too stubborn for her own good. Was this one of those occasions? Was it time to just accept that she messed up and move on? Accept that sometimes the damage you do is permanent. She let that thought sink in. She stroked one of her hanging ears in thought. Then she straightened up, took a deep breath and turned to the armadillo waiting for the bus next to her.
"Excuse me, do you know a fox called Nick Wilde?"
Apparently about three months pass in the movie between the press conference and Judy's return to Zootopia. My interpretation has always been that she spent the majority of that time still working as a cop and just a few days back with her family. And I wondered how she coped with it all, and what she did on her free time, during that period.
But how did she find Nick so fast later, I hear you ask. Well, she was really lucky and she had a car. That's my handwave of an explanation! Or maybe I'll have to write another piece about that.