halistree:

“I can’t pretend I know what a handsome fox looks like,” she says to him later, after they’ve gone through one and a half bottles of cheap red wine and a tub of ice cream from her freezer. The sun has lowered, and the dust in the air spins. Her sympathies twist along with them. “Is that bad? That I don’t know what a handsome fox is?”

He drains the rest of his glass. “It isn’t me.”

“Oh,” says Judy. Then, smaller: “oh.”



She isn’t a pretty bunny, she thinks.



She hadn’t considered that he’d felt the same.



The two of them endure in worlds separate from one another, existing on a plane of equal words. Love notes in languages neither can read. Holding them under the light and trying to find the sweetness that’s potent enough to sip on.

She watches him look forward, all cherry and maple, red wine. “Nick?”



“Hmm.”

“Are you allowed to be handsome for Nick? Not as a fox?”

He wonders a moment. “Probably not.”

But she’s already tipsy on too many glasses, and her day was a long one, and at just the right angle, she can see the beginnings of constellations in his eyes. “You are,” says she, “the most beautiful Nick Wilde who ever did live.”



She still curls away when he says the same. And he still watches her curl, because it’s said in repetition every morning (”Nick, please. You don’t have to return the favor.” - “I’m not. You’re just beautiful, and that’s all there is to it.”)

His tongue is glass and sometimes (every time) it cuts her. And at some point she forgets-

(won’t)

(refuses)

(ignores)

-her own dainty farm-girl, humble, modest sensibilities…

[beautiful: (noun) What Judy Hopps is to Nick Wilde, always, forever, without debate. See adj- wonderful, perfect, mine, mine, mine, mine, mine, three glasses of wine and a life spent loving you-]

… and listens.

