"Why did we have to be the ones to pick up the slack, anyway?" Nick asked, wrapping his arms around his ZPD sweater and shivering violently.

"Nick, we've been over this. Rabbits and foxes deal with the cold better than most mammals, so we were the natural fit." Nick suspected Judy was suffering almost as much as he was, but of course the stubborn bunny refused to show it. She hopped along in her adorable little sweater-vest, her mostly-bare paws fluffier than usual thanks to her thicker winter coat. She had been sensible enough to turn down the heat in her apartment in advance to prepare herself for the posting to Tundra Town, but Nick, being Nick, had decided to enjoy his last days in the milder simulated winter of Downtown by blasting the heat at every opportunity, and his winter coat remained stubbornly absent.

The two were proceeding down the aptly-named Frosty Road, fulfilling their task to maintain appearances and make sure the public knew that the ZPD were still out in force even though a significant fraction of the Tundra Town Precinct were hibernating. Tundra Town was a very different district to Downtown, he knew from experience - people kept to themselves and resented any attempt to pry into their private business. It had taken him months to learn how to weave the strange unwritten rules of the Tundratown social norms, to say nothing of the snowdrifts in the streets. And though he had visited daily as part of the Pawpsicle hustle, he'd never had to suffer through an entire day of the harsh cold. And there were still weeks to come!

Nicholas Piberius Wilde was one unhappy fox, and the only thing that mollified him was that the shift was almost up and they had just arrived back at their car.

"Finally! Crank up the heating, Carrots. I'm a pawpsicle over here."

"You know your winter coat won't grow in if you keep warming yourself up. Hold out a little longer, we're 10-42, we'll drop by the station, grab the paperwork and our bags, switch cars, and head to the apartment. We can warm up and do the paperwork there."

"You sure know how to sweet-talk a guy." Judy shot Nick a fondly exasperated look before turning her attention to the road as she pulled the car out. "So tell me about this apartment anyway."

"Fru-Fru set it up for us. She says it's a place they maintain in case one of their guards needs a place to stay."

Nick gave Judy a long, level look. "It's a mafia safehouse, is what you're saying."

There was a long, thoughtful silence. "Well. Now that you mention it, it probably is. We probably shouldn't be staying there, right? As police officers of the ZPD?"

"Hey, should've thought of that before you became cozy with Mr Big and his family. It's too late to wriggle out now."

"You're probably just saying that because you don't want to look for a new place."

"On this short a notice, the only other option is the sort of motel room with mirrors on the ceiling, bedbugs in the mattress, and stains on the sheets."

Judy scrunched up her adorable little bunny face in distaste. "When you put it like that, I think I can live with a little bit of graft."

"That's the spirit."

The apartment was tiny. Two beds filled one half of the room, so close together they almost touched, with a kitchette, a small TV, and an armchair filling the other half. An ancient metal heater hummed away next to the front door, struggling to keep the temperature inside the room above freezing, and a second door lead into a tiny ensuite with a sink, a bathtub, and toilet.

Of course, seeing as this was built for Mr Big's employees, everything was scaled for polar bears. For Judy and Nick, the room was practically palatial. The beds could fit six of either of them, the armchair was wider than a sofa, and the TV was bigger than both of them put together. In the bathroom, the sink was the size of a bathtub and the bathtub was the somewhere between a hot tub and a swimming pool. To top things off, Fru-Fru - or more likely, one of her father's employees acting on her orders - had thoughtfully left a stepladder just inside the door, as well as a large pile of freshly-laundered bear-sized bedding.

The two of them gawked at their new home, before the feeling of the snow covering his fur starting to melt spurred Nick to action. He dug through his bag, pulled out a ZPD t-shirt he had 'acquired' from one of his wolf classmates at the police academy and a pair of woolen pants, and threw a quick warning to Judy - "protect your innocent bunny eyes, Hopps" - before starting to strip off his snowdusted uniform.

For her part, Judy just rolled her eyes and strolled over to the minifridge - mini for a polar bear, she could stand upright in it if she removed the shelves - and opened it up, surveying the contents with delight. "She even stocked the fridge for us! If she wasn't happily married I'd be telling you to try to snap her up, Nick. She's an absolute angel." Without looking, she ducked the police shirt that had been thrown at her head.

"Har har. I may like small women, but not that small."

Judy started stripping off her accessories - vest, belt, kneepads, wrist and shinguards - and stacking them neatly on the kitchenette counter. Unlike Nick's standard-issue one-size-fits-nobody uniform, hers was custom-made and fit her perfectly, so after she stripped off the bits and pieces it was surprisingly comfortable to lounge around in. "So how small are we talking? Should I worry for my sisters if I ever drag you to Bunny Barrow?"

"Definitely going to plead the Fifth on that one." Nick finished pulling on his change of clothes and came up behind Judy, pushing his muzzle between her ears to rest on top of her head. She'd stopped pretending that annoyed her months ago. "Not bad. Fruit, microwave meals - the good ones! - and even drinks. Soda, juice, beer... is that blueberry wine? I didn't even know that was a thing!"

Judy turned her eyes upwards, getting an eyeful of fox snout. "Oh, you can make wine out of everything. One of my brothers made carrot wine once. About as alcoholic as light beer, still enough to get a bunch of half-grown bunnies drunk off their tiny fluffy butts. Let me tell you, it is not fun to work the fields with a hangover while trying to hide it from mum and dad."

Nick plucked a beer out of the fridge, winced at the coldness of it, and wrapped it in the enormous quilt he had dragged along from the pile of bedding. He ambled over to the armchair and with a bit of struggle, managed to pull himself onto it, and started to mummify himself in the quilt as he pulled it's length up with him. "Didn't realize that Bunny Burrow was such a den of inquity. And I thought I was the hardened crook of this partnership."

"Obviously, you thought wrong." With an effortless hop she leapt up onto the armchair, drawing a look from Nick through the gaps in his wrapping - jealous? impressed? admiring? - and she plopped herself down next to him. "You just gonna coccoon yourself in there, or is there room for you to share the warmth?" There was a quiet moment, just a hair too long to be casual, before Nick rearranged the quilt so it was more bedding than clothing, and Judy ignored the almost-awkward moment in favour of slipping in. She had intended to just share the quilt, but drawn by the warmth - 'sure, keep telling yourself that Jude' - she found herself tunneling through the bedding until she reached Nick and pressed herself into his side, popping her head out the top of the quilt next to his.

"Hi," said Nick, his voice too casual to be convincing, his smile tinged ever-so-slightly with that prey-in-the-headlights look.

Judy smiled back, hugged herself to Nick for a brief moment -

- but not so brief that she couldn't feel his muscles working under the skin as he shifted uneasily, even through two layers of clothing, muscles he'd always had a bit of but had been added to and refined and toned by the police academy, leaving him no bigger but denser with lean muscle, muscles that she'd seen face down a charging buck and flip the perp into the ground using the 'soft' martial art techniques she'd taught him because the academy didn't, muscles she'd caught a glimpse of a time or two her 'innocent bunny eyes' had just happened to not redirect themselves in time when he'd been changing around her, and underneath the coarse fur that protected him from the world and the oh so soft undercoat she'd only felt a fleeting handful of times was the well-defined lean musculature of a predator in peak fitness, one that had been honed into her equal -

- and smiled innocently at him. "Let's see what's on TV."

Nick blinked a few times, then turned his attention to the armrest, where a remote the size of his leg was resting precariously. A few moments later they were watching some cop drama that Nick used to enjoy unironically before he learned actual police procedures, and now enjoyed even more when he and Judy criticized it's inaccuracies together. He fished around in the quilt before he found his beer again, popped the top, took a long gulp, and hesitantly put his arm around Judy. She snuggled tighter into his side, and all was well with the world.

Nick was buried alive in fuzzy warmth.

Or that's what it seemed like when he woke up. There was a soft warm weight burying him and everything was dark. The only thing he recognized was the softly-snoring lump curled into his side, clinging onto him a double-pawful of his t-shirt. He'd recognize that smell anywhere.

Let's see, they had watched the cop drama, then Antiques Roadshow had come on. Carrots was always fascinated by it, and Nick kept up to date out of habit even though a cop didn't need to know antiques like a hustler did. After that, nothing, so he supposed they must have drifted off about then. Sure enough, when he burrowed his way out of the quilt, with Judy clinging on to him like a baby sloth, he was greeted with the sight of a stoat desperately trying to sell a set of vegetable knives through a muted TV. It must be some time after midnight, then. He was considering burrowing back into the blankets for some more sleep when his stomach rumbled loudly and reminded him that he hadn't had dinner.

Judy's eyes snapped open as a rumble filled the air and some ancient, partially-buried instinct flooded her system with adrenaline. The smell already flooding her nose was instantly familiar, sparking a mix of instinctive terror and familiarity-bred comfort than mixed together in some sort of emotional alchemy to produce a warm, happy thrill that sent a tingle through her fur every time. Let's see, her and Nick had been watching TV and Nick had fallen asleep about when that darling little otter-made weather house was being valued, so she had muted the TV and-

As her memory and her sense of where she was met halfway, she shifted her eyes from the comforting darkness that she now realized must be Nick's t-shirt and looked up, seeing a faint sliver of light through a gap in the blankets, barely illuminating Nick's face which was looking down at her with a warm smile. "Morning, Fluff. Sleep well?"

Judy considered snarking at him, but was too warm and content to do anything more than answer honestly. "I did. What time is it?"

"Infomercials start around midnight, so it's at least then. And I don't know about you, but I am starving." After a couple of failed attempts to leave the warmth of the blankets, the two of them managed to tear themselves free and started investigating the possibilities of the microwavable meals. "Huh, looks like the local specialties instead of the crappy Hungry Maw stuff. Let's see... Carrots, you okay with me microwaving up some fish?"

"As long as I get the microwave first." Judy sorted through the stack of meals and pulled out a package boasting "Tundra Town's Finest Crowberry Pie", with a picture of a reindeer giving a thumbs up. A quick rummage revealed a stack of bear-sized saucers that made for suitable dinner plates, and before long they sat down to their late dinner cross-legged on the ground and side-by-side at the coffee table. Nick's meal, far from the soft, soggy fish-sticks she had expected, was a long, thin yellow steak covered in a rich, dark sauce with a side of rice. Likewise, far from the smell of fish-sticks, or of the smell she had encountered coming off the Tundra Town fish markets, the smell was more... "Blueberry? Seriously?"

"Yep, halibut steak with blueberry and pepper sauce. Had it a couple times back when I was spending a lot of time in Tundra Town. It's not actually the same blueberry your parents grow, this one grows a lot further north. Still good, though." He took a deep whiff of the meal, before plucking a berry out of the sauce and throwing it into his mouth.

"It actually doesn't look, or smell, half bad," she observed, starting to gnaw on the crust of the crowberry pie. It was sweeter and more dessert-y than she expected - back at Bunny Burrow a nice savory fruit pie would often be a main course - but it was still better than a donut dinner, which she'd had a time or two on stakeouts.

"Really? I thought you bunnies were too civilized to go in for the eating of animals." Nick started to dig in to his meal, delicately carving slices of fish off the steak, dipping it in the sauce, and delivering it to his mouth. His eyes closed as he revelled in the taste before going back for more.

Once, Judy would've flinched at that and tried to tiptoe around the subject, but she knew better than to let his banter get to her now. She leaned over, filched Nick's fork and considered the sizable morsel speared on it. "When I was seven, the alfalfa crop failed all through our region. Not that big a deal for my parents or older siblings since our other crops were fine, but little bunnies need a lot of protein, you know. We could have imported something like legumes or bought a bunch of protein supplements, but the cheapest source turned out to be good ol' Zootopian 'Hungry Maw' brand fish-sticks." She started to nibble away at the morsel, the semi-familiar taste of the ersatz blueberry mixing with the unfamiliar but surprisingly palatable taste of halibut steak in her mouth. She continued to speak through the mouthful of fish, "and let me tell you, this tastes a lot better than fish-sticks."

"Huh." Nick watched her for a moment and considered trying to recover his fork, before shrugging a little and starting to peel bite-sized chunks of fish off the steak with his claws. "Surprisingly cosmopolitan of you, Carrots. We'll make a big city girl out of you yet."

Judy rolled her eyes at him, finished off the forkful of fish, and returned to her pie. The two of them finished off their dinners in companionable silence, and before long both of them had their paws and muzzles stained dark blue with berry juices, and they exchanged glances and grinned at each other's appearances.

"Alright, Fluff, go have a bath and clean up your adorable bunny face. If I went first I'll come back to find you neck-deep in paperwork and blue pawprints over all of it."

"And I'm going to come out to find blue pawprints all over the remote," she shot back, but dug through her bag for her towel and a change of clothes anyway.

Sure enough, Nick was flicking through channels in a doomed attempt to find anything more interesting than vegetable peelers on post-midnight TV, but he had done the dishes beforehand, in the process cleaning the worst of the blueberry juice off his paws. It had been a while since Judy had shut herself away in the bathroom, and if he hadn't heard the bath draining not long ago he'd have started to worry. Finally the door opened and Judy re-entered the room, her winter coat sticking out in every direction and almost concealing the disgruntled look on her face. She was wearing one of Nick's old palm-patterned shirts (she'd stolen it from him in retaliation for some mischief or another ages back, and she'd never gotten around to returning it and he'd never gotten around to asking) and Nick put a great deal of effort into not thinking about whether she was wearing anything underneath it. Instead, he locked eyes with her poofy head, tried to control his expression, and ducked the towel that was thrown at his head when he finally cracked and grinned at the adorably poofiness of her fur. "Would it've killed you to make the beds while I was in there?"

Nick plastered an innocent expression over his face. "It might have. I wouldn't know, I've never successfully made a bed in my life. Why take the chance?" Nick slid off the armchair and, avoiding a playful cuff from Judy, made his way into the bathroom to get clean.

When Nick emerged wearing his comfortable silk pyjama pants, one bed was immaculately made - no small feat considering the scale - and the other had a pile of blankets heaped atop it, much like his bed in his tiny apartment Downtown. Though it looked like a haphazard mess at first, it was actually a spiral centered on the center of the bed, and he was genuinely impressed that Judy had managed to replicate it so perfectly. Speaking of, Judy was perched on the lip of that central point, nibbling her lip in concentration as her carrot pen worked it's way through the bane of every cop's life: a considerable amount of paperwork.

Nick sighed and followed her example, grabbing the manila folder full of unfilled forms and his pen. It was a nice pen; it clicked satisfyingly when deployed, fit perfectly in his paw in such a way that it minimized (but not eliminated, never eliminated) cramps from overuse, and had his name emblazened on it in fancy lettering, but he had yet to find a way to blackmail someone with it. Sometimes he regretted returning the carrot pen to Judy.

Shaking off his pen envy, he clambered up the ladder Judy had left leaning against his mess of a bed and joined her in the center of the swirl of blankets. She glanced up at his approach, a smile breaking through the concentration for a brief moment, being met with one from him in return, equally as unconscious. He plopped himself down next to her and started working his way through the stack, pretending not to notice that his pace was at most half that of Judy. At least, he did until she worked her way through her own stack, stuck them into her own manila folder, dropped them off the bed, then grabbed the bottom half of Nick's pile from him and started working through them. "Thanks, Hopps."

"No problem."

They continued to work away, only the twin scratchings of their pens and the occassional rustle of paper breaking the silence, until eventually, mercifully, they reached the bottom of their piles. With a shared sigh of relief, they combined the two piles, slipped them into Nick's folder, and dropped it off the bed to land on Judy's, followed by their pens. "That's all the transfer forms dealt with, and since we're just a show of force here in Tundra Town we might get away with just a few sheets a day to report that we have nothing to report. Almost makes the cold worth it." Nick flopped back on the bed with a relieved sigh.

"Why do you keep your bed like this anyway, Nick?" Judy asked, eyeing the odd burrow of blankets. There was a long delay before he answered, and Judy was just about to check whether he'd fallen asleep when he started to answer.

"Back when I was a kid, it was just me and mum. She worked two jobs just to keep food on the table and a roof over our head, and on top of that she spent hours every week looking after the place - she wanted to give me a good upbringing, and in her mind that meant a clean and orderly house. One thing she'd do is make my bed every morning, even though I insisted that I didn't mind whether it was made or not. I had some idea, in my stupid little kid way, that she was always tired, and I wanted to do something to give her less work to do. I tried making the bed myself, but I was never any good at it, and when it came time to go to bed I'd find that she'd remade it - probably taking even longer than if I had left it alone. So one day, I came up with my first con. I messed up my bed like this and told mum I'd seen a picture of a fox den and I wanted to sleep like that, and then it wasn't her son in a messy bed, it was just her son's little foible, and she thought that me curled up at the bottom of the little blanket foxhole was adorable. Eventually I got used to sleeping that way, and I guess I just kept the habit after I moved out of home." Nick propped himself up on his arms to meet Judy's eye, his familiar smirk plastered over a carefully smothered mix of emotions. "And, hey, it means I don't have to make the bed every morning."

The silence between them stretched out until the smirk started to slip from Nick's face, and then he was hit with a double-armful of suddenly clingy bunny. "Nick, that is the sweetest thing I've ever heard from you!" she almost yelled into his chest. Nick returned the hug with a smile, ruffling Judy's ears familiarly as the silence returned. A long moment later, Judy looked up from his chest. "You never talk about your mother..."

Nick's ears flattened, and he looked away. "Another time, Hopps. That's a story for a maudlin rainy afternoon, over a bottle or five of wine and with no work the day after."

Judy managed to recapture Nick's gaze. "I'll hold you to that." She smiled at him, and after a moment Nick returned it faintly. "In the meantime, how about you share this foxhole of yours with me instead? It is way too cold to sleep alone."

A thousand possible responses raced through Nick's head in an instant, each too lewd or aggressive or kinky for the circumstances, and he settled for a slightly choked "Mi casa su casa, you know that." Nick lead Judy into the top of the burrow and lay down atop the pillows scattered inside it, and waited for her to follow suit. After a moment of hesitation she lay herself down in front of him, the top of her head against his chin, and wriggled backwards into his chest. Nick tugged on the blankets surrounding them, narrowing the entrance until the two sides met in the middle and left only a tiny crack of light to show where it was, letting the darkness enfold them and their own body heat to accumulate in the little burrow as Nick wrapped his arms around Judy.

"G'night Nick."

"G'night Judy."

Before long, Judy had drifted off to sleep, her breathing slowing to a gentle rhythm he felt rather than heard. Sleep eluded him, however. He was too busy trying not to think about things. Like how relatively small the safe zone his arms occupied on Judy's body was, his paws interlocked on her small stomach with danger zones above and below. With how even that 'safe zone' felt under his paws, taut with compact but powerful muscles. The tuft of her tail tickling his stomach, and how that being bare indicated that the shirt she was wearing - that *his* shirt she was wearing - had ridden up dangerously. With how wonderfully soft her bare fur must feel with her winter coat grown in. With how her smell had already filled the blanket den, the wonderfully familiar scent of her that had his instincts and conscious mind in rare agreement on something: that this was a creature he wanted to get close to. And just a faint undertone of the berries she had had for dinner.

And with how if he let those thoughts get the better of him, the tangible proof of his wandering mind would be mere inches away from Judy's bunny butt.

Despite his wandering mind, the warmth and comfort and darkness soon caught up to him, and he followed Judy into slumber.