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Spy Games

Chapter Three

Written by Arian Mabe (Amethyst Mare)

Commissioned by Meeper

Judy and Nick faced off against one another across the rooftop, though they were still clad in their form-fitting spy wear, which barely covered anything at all. The fox was down to tight underwear only, though the brief-like clothing could have been said to be sportswear, at a push, though that would have been a very generous interpretation of its use. Sometimes, he had worn full-body spy wear in the past, clinging to every curve and muscle of his body - especially the bulge at his crotch.

But he had not chosen his outfit before heading out to confront Judy with framing his bulge in mind, even though the tightness of the clothing left nothing to the imagination at all. She did not have all that much on either, the sports bra-like contraption closing tightly around her chest and drawing a sharp line across the muscles of her back. The bunny inhaled softly, her small chest rising, though her ears were pricked defiantly and facing forward to the fox, though Nick was a natural predator to her.

Yet the twists and turns between predator and prey had to come to a head sooner or later, standing up there on the rooftop, the touch of dawn pulling at the horizon. The hypno collar resided in Judy's hand, her fingers closed softly around it, though she was not about to let it go in a hurry.

"So..." She said slowly. "This is what it comes to, is it, fox?"

She sank into a deeper fighting stance, the power in her legs bunching and coiling, muscles ready to spring her forward and up in a leap at a moment's notice. Nick grinned, the flash of white teeth in his bright orange muzzle becoming almost familiar to her.

"Aw, Hopps," he said teasingly, running his tongue over his teeth. "We're really going to do this... A dumb foot slut of a bunny should have realised that she could never win, not against a predator. It was all dumb luck that you got anywhere beforehand. But a fox will always come out on top."

The bunny suppressed a shiver.

Sly fox...

_ _

He didn't announce to her that he was leaping into action: he simply moved. Like a shadow in the night, he lunged for Judy with a snarl, distracting her as he went for a right hook with his fist and then a sideways sweep with his left leg. Demonstrating remarkable control over his body as he shifted his weight back onto his right leg and hip, he struck across from left to right with his left leg, forcing the bunny to jump.

"Oof!"

She growled, though it was not time to doubt her abilities. At long last, they really were in a fight to the death, though her heart pounded, adrenaline pumping just the right amount to remind her of what she needed to do, everything that was at stake. Yet Judy, not even then, could not allow it to control her.

That was how bunnies died. And she wasn't going to let that happen, oh no... No. She was better than that.

With the hypno collar tucked into the pocket on her hip belt, though it barely even fit, she had Nick where she wanted him, the fox lunging for her, lips peeled back from his teeth in a snarl. She was cooler than that, however, able to keep her head, and dodged to the right as he went for a side chop: a strike that would have certainly hurt if it had connected with her head. As it was, the bunny only felt the air whistle past her ears as she spun and turned on him.

"You're not going to win this one, fox!"

He scoffed, circling her, the two of them with their blood up, caught up in the moment.

"That's what you think, bunny," he said quietly." But you're forgetting that the stakes are just as high for me as they are for you."

She swallowed. That was true. Th stakes were high for both of them and neither wanted to be knocked out, no, not in any way.

So, they had to fight.

Judy moved quickly, ducking under a rain of hammer blows, coming down in fists, and dodging to his left. There was a wall behind her, something that she could have braced on if needed, but she didn't spring off it - not then. Letting the fox charge, shoulder first, his head down, she came in from his left with a side sweeping leg kick, going low. Even though Nick managed to just about jump over her leg, he was still left off-balance and had to catch himself as she pressed him back to the wall.

WHAM!

In a crescent kick, she brought her right leg up and around in a sweeping upper arc, which was much like the name of the move, catching him on his left shoulder. The bunny was short but she was stable and her centre of balance allowed her to put even more power into the kick than the fox could have realised.

"Oof!"

He jolted back, lips twisting, pressing together. It was wrong to get angry but maybe, just maybe, that anger was the very thing that he needed to best her. It did no good to think of her as smaller than him and weaker than him, his shoulder smarting from the kick as the fox planned his next attack.

His lips hid his smirk and the bunny lunged, though Nick would never see what move she was going for. As he was too swift for her, lunging past her offence into a push kick, though his foot came up to her forehead, a little higher than he had been intending to go. It was a side-effect of him being taller than her, having to adjust different kicks and strikes for her, though that was not all that bad, not as the bunny toppled backwards.

POW!

She landed hard and heavily, head rolling back to the solid rooftop.

"Unnggghhh..."

"I've got you now, carrots..."

His heart pounded. Could victory so quickly be within his grasp? The fox did not know either way, though it was his training that jerked him into motion, moving as if everything came naturally to him. While Judy tried to blink away her dizziness from coming down so hard, being knocked clean off her feet and sent flying backwards, he crouched to her level.

Yet he did not pause. The fox snatched her up but, thinking that he had her right where he wanted her, stood again with the bunny stretched out between his arms. A little dazed, it took Judy a moment to react and fight back as he lifted her above his head.

"Give up, bunny!"

WHAM!

He dropped her, slamming her to the ground in a wrestling throw, though she had just about been able to flinch her head up and away from the point of impact. That didn't honestly make it any easier for her when pain lanced through her back, though the rabbit was more than settled in her mind and her body enough to know that nothing had been broken. She was just going to have an incredible amount of bruising from that back body drop.

Nick knew when he had her on the back foot, however, and pressed his attack, joining her on the ground as they grappled. He tried to get her into a sleeper hold, with his arms around her neck to press down on either side of her neck and the pressure points that were to be found there, but it didn't quite work, not as she managed to squirm away and he dropped to his knees, his advantage evening out with her quickly.

"Oof... You're not getting away that easily," he growled. "I'm having that collar!"

Judy hopped up, even though her head was still ringing, and went for his neck, trying to get him into a neck scissor hold. But she couldn't quite clasp around him in the right way, even as she shoved the fox down to his front. She was smaller and lighter than him, but she could still pull a mean Boston crab hold on him, his head up while she knelt down on his lower back, yanking the leg that was furthest away from her up and towards the back of his head.

"Aaaaahhhhhhoooooooo!"

Nick couldn't stop a brief howl from ripping itself from his lips, even though the fox was well enough aware that it was something that he should have held in. That let Judy know that she had hurt him, bearing down even more on his lower back with her knee, pinning him in place, dragging his leg back and back, pain lancing through him.

He couldn't give up, however, infuriated by how she was able to get one over on him just like that, snapping his leg towards his back, heel first, and then using that leverage to shove her off him. Rolling over, he knocked her over with a well-timed side swipe with the side of his hand to her neck, the bunny squeaking.

"Ah!"

Judy hit the rooftop again and rolled, cursing, but the fox was already on top of her. Much the same as she had done with the Boston crab hold, the vulpine pinned her down to the ground with him sitting on her back, a leg on either side of her. Judy fought but she couldn't get out from under him as he dragged her back into a camel clutch, forcing her to bend her back at a vile angle, his hands clasped in front of her face, though it was not neat.

"Uuuurrrrgggghhhhh..."

She groaned, head pounding. Damn it! That one was always hard to get out of - how had she let the fox get on top of her? It was a trickier move for her, but she fought through the camel clutch with all the strength she had in her, eventually pushing back towards him the modicum that she was able to and wrenching her body to the side. The fox had no choice but to go with Judy as she threw all her weight to the right, panting and grunting, the two of them, so far, at an impasse.

They were evenly matched in skill and Judy knew how to get out of a tight spot when a larger predator was pinning her down. After all, it was something that she had been used to before, something that had been a very real threat to her before.

Judy had to fight back, however, wrangling and wrestling, trying to get her legs around him in a scissor hold, to slide them more than sensually around his neck and head so that the bare fur of her thighs closed in on him. She grunted, kicking out, though the fox squawked like a bird and clawed at her, leaving fluff poofing up from her legs where his claws had dragged through. She was not impervious, after all, despite everything.

Judy didn't notice that the fox's claws did not go deep enough, that time, to draw blood, however. Not as he fought against the neck scissors, his head back up against her crotch, though it was a very compromising position to be found in, if there had been anyone there to see them. They were alone though, Judy barking a short, frantic laugh as the fox squirmed, deeper between her thighs as she failed to apply enough pressure around his neck and head with her legs.

He rolled her, getting out of the choke hold, and grabbing for her, the two of them halfway up to be on their knees, though it was still something of a scramble and far from a choreographed fight. He hissed out through his teeth, eyes dropping over her chest and down to her crotch, her body lean and defined.

Yet the fox could only grab at her, clasp her tightly to him, his right arm going across her throat as he tried to haul her into a cobra clutch. Judy struggled to kick out, for her weight was not enough to drag him down with her, the fox managing to get behind her for the proper move, huffing hotly as he dragged her against him in a half nelson.

"Not...giving in...dumb bunny..."

Not his best taunt, but it was enough to rile Judy up as she heaved and fought, though him grabbing her left arm to force her into the cobra clutch, dragging her arm across her face. Judy howled, ignorant to the need to hold back just how he was hurting her, her heart pounding viciously.

She could not drop lower to get out of the cobra clutch, but she could twist to the side. Her foot slammed up in an uppercut, missing his crotch (that would not have been too dirty for everything that was going on there) but catching his stomach on the way up.

"Oof!"

Nick grunted, though it was such a scramble in the grappling, twisting holds, neither one gaining any significant advantage. The fox grabbed for her shoulder even as he released her from the cobra clutch but was not able to grab onto her to drag her into a choke hold or even throw her: it just wasn't the position for that.

She was too quick, getting her arm around him so that her elbow pointed down his chest, forcing the fox to wheeze as he relaxed what he could and tensed his muscles so that, briefly, he was bigger than he was normally. She wrenched the fox, evenly matched in terms of strength as well as skill, against her in a rear naked choke hold, a version of the sleeper hold, yet he had her on the back foot.

For she had put enough pressure down on him, hauling him back against her chest so that the softness of her small breasts naturally pressed into his back, to think that she had control of him, breathing sharply, panting. And, still...the fox had managed to wriggle into a little more space for himself.

"Unngff!"

He grunted, throwing his head back, though Judy was a little too low down for him to land a backward headbutt on her. When he relaxed his muscles, he was small enough to wriggle in her hold and pinch her inner elbow: a sensitive point that had the bunny yelping.

"Yah!"

The bunny flinched away and tried to get herself down space, smarting through the pain. She shook her head, ears flopping, trying to regain her bearings. Damn it, she'd thought she'd had him that time! With one hand on the ground and her legs bent and braced, she steadied herself, taking stock of her options.

She needed an advantage.

Judy grunted as she leapt up, though her body ached already, the fox on all fours as he tried to crawl away and get back up onto his feet. She took her chance and grabbed his left foot, yanking it back and up at an angle, so that his foot was clasped tightly in her hands, dragged up close to her chest. Such a position left the fox vulnerable, even though he growled and snarled and snapped and showed his teeth. She smirked. Somehow, it was a lot easier to be cockier when she was further away from the "bitey end" of the fox. And it was not as if he typically used the claws on the ends of his toes all that much for fighting, not like some predators.

"Aw, what's wrong?" She taunted with a cruel smirk that only deepened. "Don't like getting a taste of your own medicine?"

She increased the pressure of the ankle lock, forcing his foot to bend, at the ankle, at a harsher angle. Nick yelped and shot her a look, though it could not have been one of betrayal, no, not in the position that the two of them were in. She laughed at his discomfort and tickled his foot, taking pleasure in being in control again.

It had not felt right when she had been slammed into the ground in a back drop, after all. She was small, yes, and there were parts of the bunny that were fragile, but she didn't want that to be the sum of her, everything that people saw when they came to her. The fox's toes twitched and he jerked delightfully as she tickled his foot, his chest heaving where he was clearly trying to hold back a shriek. She doubted very much that it was laughter, but the body would do strange things when tickled.

"Unff... Let go!"

It was a snap and a demand, far from begging. Judy laughed while Nick's stomach churned. But the flinching, pinching tickling just made him want to slam into her, to kick her, even though it looked like the stupid bunny had already anticipated him hitting back with his foot.

She had things figured out beyond him.

"Oh, you can't be that worked up over being tickled, can you?" She scoffed. "You thought that you could make me worship your feet, a dirty fox? And get away with it?"

Her attention turned from tickling and Nick hissed out through his teeth - and then yelped sharply, as she pinched two of his toes, twisting them roughly to the side.

"Yagh!"

It was not a cry that should ever have come from his lips, the bunny pressing on, lips ground into a thin, hard line that should have struck true fear into the fox's heart, if he had known at all what was good for him. She was formidable and his heart lurched, stomach aching as she flipped him.

"I want to see the look on your face," she growled, advancing while she forced him onto his back, Nick still trying to recover from the toe twisting. "When I hurt you..."

She was on top and Nick swallowed a curse as she pinned him, her thighs bunching with muscle as her tail twitched and quivered. The schoolboy pin was not a move that she pulled out all that often, but forced the fox's legs up into the air so that she could abuse them easily while he was bent at an angle, almost in a C-shape. Pinning him down with her arm around his legs, Judy leaned heavily down into the fox, her lips parted while her eyes grazed his crotch.

"I see you've still left everything on show down there," she teased. "But maybe you're just hoping that a bunny is looking at you, if your past behaviour is anything to go by..."

The fox groaned, flinching and pulling away as he tried to regain the upper hand, but that was harder than even he could have thought it to be as Judy pinned him, pulling at his arms and legs with her free right hand. Of course, the bunny still had to keep him pinned in the schoolboy pin, squeezing around his legs tightly to heft him up and give him no leverage at all to get out of the position. It was not the same as forcing his ankle to extend in the ankle lock, but it was a different kind of restriction that Nick very much didn't want to be in the position of.

"Ungh..."

He didn't want to groan, didn't want to do anything at all to show the bunny that she had gotten to him. No... Not as he yelped and clenched his jaws, Judy's eyes fixed on him as she got a good view of his face while his legs were wrenched, together, to the side. She squeezed tightly, putting more and more pressure on his lower back.

"Agh..."

But, still, he didn't ask for mercy, not at all. No... No, even as a scream ripped itself from his throat as his left arm was pulled so viciously that, for a heartbeat of a moment, it felt like it was going to be yanked entirely out of its socket.

He howled, though the bunny's sensitive ears twitched. Ugh - that was so annoying! Why was he so noisy? Prey didn't scream like that. Well, not unless they thought they were about to die...

"Agh, why can't you just be quiet?"

She grunted, dropping his legs - and headbutting him. It played out, for her, as if in slow motion, air whistling past her ears, brushing against the fur of her cheeks. It was just drawn out and out and out in the growing light of dawn. Judy even had a moment, in the adrenaline-pumping slow motion, to take in how the glow of dawn coloured the red fur on his cheeks a little darker.

But the bunny had the fox right where she wanted him, on top of him, her forehead a hair's breadth from his in the instance before contact was made. The fox's eyes were half-closed, though there was little that he could do, even then, grunting, his lips barely parted as if there was something he could do or say to stop Judy.

The bunny, however, was not to be stopped, not as she slammed into him, the resounding boom of impact rolling through her as she loosened the muscles of her jaw ever so slightly. She wouldn't have wanted to clamp down on her tongue, after all, or hurt herself at all.

WHAM!

The bunny didn't give him any time to take it all in, not as her ears flopped back, her skull connecting with his sharply. The dull thwack of her head slamming into his echoed through her skull, though Judy had been prepared for it, even as she sucked in a breath, grunting deeply in the back of her throat.

Her adrenaline was pumping, harder and faster than what she might have expected. She wasn't in control - but did it matter? He was a predator and she had the upper hand, for once. She was in control of him and that was what mattered to her in that moment.

Dazed, Nick slumped, eyes rolling back in his head. The fox barely even understood what had happened, what was still happening, for the bunny had him and she could have done anything in that moment. She could have even ended his life and yet...something else happened.

Judy grunted and Nick was vaguely aware of her moving around on top of him, so that she was sitting facing back down the length of his body towards his feet. The bulge of his shaft showed through his underwear-like clothing, though it had never been meant to cover all that much, all for the fox's comfort. He grunted as something massaged his shaft, though all he could see were the strong back muscles of the bunny as she pushed her shoulder blades back, her figure cutting against the lightening morning sky.

"Unff..."

Oof, that was hard... Well, his cock was, growing, swelling, though who could have held back when her feet were working back and forth over his bulge, making the shape of his cock even more obvious through the thin fabric. His shaft drooled pre-cum, yet Nick could barely even draw in a full lungful of breath so far, still dazed and woozy from the headbutt.

Judy's toes slid across his thigh in an almost intimate caress that brought a rise of goosebumps to his flesh, hooking up and into the waistband of his clothes. Tugging down the waistband, she freed his shaft and left his balls tucked away, rubbing her feet, together, back and forth, folded softly around either side of his shaft.

The fox grunted and tried to wriggle, but it didn't seem that he was all that much with himself, no, not even then. He panted heavily, tongue lolling out, though the world around him was still spinning and spinning, even as his mind tried to zero in on just how damn good it felt to have her feet on his cock.

Maybe he shouldn't have liked it. But there was only so much that the fox could do as her feet worked over him, using her toes to softly curl around his shaft, though it was mainly the flex and pull of the bunny's feet, back and forth, that made him grunt and groan. Even then, the fox wanted to hike his tail and show some visible demonstration of his pleasure, panting more and more heavily, though he didn't know what to do.

If she was otherwise distracted, well...he could let Judy do what she wanted. Because, in that time, he could come back to himself all over again, letting everything settle inside him, even if his stomach was still lurching and churning sickeningly, as if he was going to lose what little he had eaten in the last twenty-four hours.

She was distracted but the fox could not have said why, not as she worked his cock up and down. It seemed kind of as if Judy was fascinated with the slight movement of his skin over his cock, the firmness of his length offering some substance for her feet to push into. Nick swallowed a grunting groan, not wanting to show her just how much she was getting to him, though every moment came with another flushed, heated throb of potent arousal.

"Unff..."

"That's it, fox," she hissed, keeping her eyes on his face, as if she was taking in every last detail and twitch in his expression. "You can't do anything... And you thought that you could win."

Even Judy was aware of how her voice was laden with derision for him, though she was fighting for something a lot more than what she had originally launched into the fight thinking. Her life, sure... But more still, the very existence of her and how she saw the world. That was more important than anything and she took that control with a sick kind of glee, twisting and curling in the pit of her stomach.

Judy could know that she was pushing things too far and that she wasn't doing something right and still keep going with it, hungrily locking onto Nick's face. The throb of his cock, the tiny pulse of blood flowing where it twitched under her feet, was simply divine, like getting intoxicated and wanting more, always more. Maybe she was inebriated, drunk on power, but the bunny leaned into it either way, pre-cum smearing out on the underside of her clean toes, though she didn't care. It only served as a light kind of lubrication for her to work her feet up and down his cock, rubbing and rolling them as the light creases in the skin of the underside of her feet tugged in a bit of extra stimulation. Of course, in her case, she didn't have pads on the underside of her feet but just the natural, white-grey fluff of a rabbit's fur layering the underside.

That made it easier for her to slide her feet up and down, giving him a footjob and relaxing a little more into it, as if she had forgotten what she was really doing there, what was really at stake there. She had him right where she wanted him, the muscles in her thighs contracting as she rolled her hips forward, inadvertently grinding her buttocks across his stomach and chest.

"Ah... Unff..."

That's right, fox... Give in to it... Give in to the prey_._

_ _

She was better than him, definitely so, panting, heaving, luxuriating there even as her glutes tensed and she let a more sexual edge enter the moment of domination. She didn't even need the hypno collar to control him!

What more could she do?

As a drop of pre-cum trickled between her toes, Judy huffed hotly and licked her lips faintly, though she was sure that the fox did not even see. Not as his member slipped under her foot, toes briefly massaging the tender head to a chorus of whines, though Nick screwed up his muzzle and twisted his head to the side as if he was trying to hold something back.

He was close, she was sure of it, the fox still out of it but giving little thrusts of his hips. He panted and let his tongue loll out pinkly, though the bunny merely continued her masturbation of his cock. He was under her control and she was very much going to take advantage of it...

Yet the fox was right on the edge of orgasm when Judy made a mistake.

She underestimated the fox.

His brow furrowed and she stilled a moment too late, muscles bunching for a bunny leap that was never going to come.

"Unff!"

He grunted thickly in the back of his throat, powering his hips up in a pelvic thrust. It was a good move for getting someone off that was choking you, but he could have hooked his ankle around hers to flip her over at the same time. All Nick needed, as he snarled and bared his teeth, was to throw her off him, the bunny flying through the air and landing face-first on the ground.

WHAM!

"Errrgghhh..."

Dazed, she lay there, her ears flopped out around her head. If Nick had pulled her up, there may even have been a crack in the concrete of the rooftop under her body.

But that was not what the fox was there for, not as he hopped back and forth from foot to foot in something like a boxer shuffle, gearing up for the move. Bouncing into the air, he pointed his elbow down and came down onto her belly with a slamming strike.

BAM!

"Ahhh..."

She groaned as the air left her lungs, eyes rolling back into her head. When Nick hit her, the impact rolled through her body, making her breasts bounce lightly, even if the fox's focus had not been there.

No... He was too wound up, his shorts tugged up and back into place, even though they felt wetter than they had been before, barely cupping his bulge. The fox snapped back onto his feet with a flip and did the same again, performing another, more targeted elbow drop right onto her stomach as Judy's eyelids flickered.

WHAM!

She didn't make a sound that time, not as she rasped and wheezed for breath, trying to regain what had been lost, not quite with her reality, even if she was still conscious.

"You look good all laid out there, Hopps," the fox said, recovering himself a little. "Maybe you can be a little treat for me another time... But how about you check out my new move then, hm?"

He laughed, grabbing her by the head and dragging her upright, though the bunny didn't seem to have that much strength in her legs at that time, kicking and flailing weakly as if she was trying to come back to herself a little more. He didn't have to allow her that luxury, however, not at all, not as he hooked the bunny over his shoulder, just for a little more momentum, and slammed her down again, body dropping her to the floor.

SMASH!

She groaned long and low, one foot twitching, though she didn't have the energy to even wiggle her toes. He geared up as her eyelids fluttered open, wide in fear, in time to see the fox leap into the air, face towards her, body splashing down onto her as if he was performing a huge belly flop.

BAM!

"Unnnggghhhh..."

Judy's lips parted, but she couldn't know how much of that was in her head, not as the fox stood up off her, back in control again. And, just like that, the tables had turned as he took a few steps back, a smug grin on his muzzle.

"Ready for another one, Hopps? That was just me getting started!"

Oh no...

_ _

She couldn't do anything, too dazed and weak to stop him as he leapt again and came down on her stomach in a body splash.

CRASH!

Her limbs bolted up but all that burst from her lips was a raspy wheeze of air, her eyes wide and feeling as if they were bulging, every muscle in her body going taut. Everything belted out for a moment, right at the point of impact, limbs up in all directions, starfishing, but it could not be held forever: it was just the sensation and breath leaving Judy's body that left her feeling like it dragged on forever.

"Unnff..."

She let out a breathy, weak grunt as he dragged his russet tail up against her pussy as he stood up again. It could have been an accident, but, truly, it was deliberate when it came to Nick, the fox once again revelling in his power, in the act of finally besting Judy. And he had wondered, for a few moments, whether things were going to spiral off in a way that he had not anticipated, though things were not at all how the fox had thought that they were going to go.

But that was okay. He was back in the position that he should always have been in, a predator's position. And despite having questioned some things back when he had had Judy in his hideout, he knew that he was still supposed to be the one on top.

That hypno collar... Well, whether it belonged to his agency or him, it was not sticking in the bunny's grasp.

He smirked and cracked out his knuckles, lifting his right foot to pose with it on top of her face. Judy's head lay flat back against the ground, her ears out straight and floppy, her eyes half-closed. His foot covered a lot of her face, from her right cheek straight up over her small, flat nose and towards her left eye.

"Urgh..."

Judy grunted, but no amount of struggling seemed to get her body to twitch at all. In a way, it was as if she was coming out of a choke hold, or had nearly been knocked out, straining and struggling to get back to what felt like the norm for her. She huffed lightly and panted, though his foot crushed down more forcibly over her nose and mouth. Not hard enough to hurt her, although it was more than enough to force her to take in the smell of his foot.

This is happening way too often...

_ _

"Take in the smell of defeat," the fox said with a grin, everything about him confident and suave, his muscles a little more defined where he had gotten sweaty during the fight, though not enough to smell. "Experience it all, Judy, this is going to be the last you know..."

Judy twitched as if she wanted to fight back, though there was nothing she could do, merely grumbling and grunting under his foot. He wriggled his toes, noting how her legs were slightly splayed and spread, though it was not as if he was going to do anything of that nature to her.

He was content merely taking his control and his power back.

"Silly little bunny..."

The fox shifted his foot, resting it heavily across her stomach as she grunted and wheezed. It was harder for her to breathe as he wiggled his toes and bore down with his heel, lightly rocking his foot back and forth. It was more than enough to get her to let out a long, heady grunt, the bunny still fighting to recover herself - not that the fox was making that easy at all for her to do.

"Unnnnggghhhh..."

She groaned, her head spinning. It was too much, all too much. Judy knew that she had to get up, though the weight of his foot was practically crushing, the churning of her stomach only adding to her dizziness.

The fox didn't seem to care, not thinking of her in the slightest. She moaned again, her lips barely parted, and Nick smirked down at her. His toes flexed as he enjoyed the feel of her fur under him, maintaining his position in the hierarchy between them, his control, his power as a predator. Under his foot, the bunny whimpered, eyes wide and shining as she opened them fully.

It's time, he thought. Can't delay this.

He backed off from her, though there was a part of the fox that loathed having to put that distance between them. To languish the triumph of standing with his foot on her face, pride flowing through him... Yes. That was something that he enjoyed more than anything else, he had decided.

The fox grinned, leaping for her - but he did something that time. Rather than merely coming down on top of her in a gravity-using body splash, he turned in mid-air, letting the momentum of his body carry him forward. Yet he had to come down again as he caught a glimpse of the bunny's eyes widening, coming back to her senses too slowly to do anything about it.

Time seemed to slow around them as the fox twisted in mid-air, his grin spreading widely, the bunny's eyes strained in shock. Her ears tried to slick back, fear grasping at her, but there was only so much she could do when he was coming for her, the flick of his red brush too soft for what was to come.

For he was coming down on her butt-first and there was nothing that could possibly be done about it.

She braced. It was going to hurt.

SLAM!

"Ooooffff!"

The fox's buttocks slammed down viciously into Judy's stomach and her limbs popped up, the air forced from her body as everything reacted, puffing out air from her lips. His aim had been perfect, his glutes even tensed for the most impact as he slammed down, throwing his weight into it, even using the angle of his body to apply the most pressure right at the moment their bodies connected.

And there was Judy, helpless, winded, along for the ride, her eyelids fluttering as her limbs fell limply back down. If a puff of dust had floated up around her body, she would not have been surprised at all.

"Unnngghhhh..."

She groaned, the wind well and truly knocked out of her, eyes wide and wild, her body scrabbling to regain that lost air.

But the fox was too quick for her, squirming around so that he could lock his legs around her, scissoring them around her body tightly, and drag her nose into his crotch. The bunny wriggled, but her grasping, twitching fingers barely even got a grip on him, the scent of his crotch thick and musky, duly sweaty after their fight. He growled, feral in the moment of such a fight, though his blood was up and his heart pounding, focusing only on what he had to do. Instinct did narrow down to such things in the end, lips peeled back from his teeth as he pressed her head down even more deeply into his crotch, the bulge squashing softly against her face.

Judy struggled, trying to grab at his legs, even though most of her arms, down to the elbow joint, were pinned to her body by the scissor hold of his legs around her.

"Mm-hm-mmph!"

"That's right, dumb bunny," Nick all but crooned, though his chest was still heaving. "Drink it all in, breathe it all in..."

She was forced to breathe in his crotch, the biting scent of fox filling her lungs along with his musk. He was lightly sweaty, but that was not something that dominated her senses, not even then, though her legs kicked out wildly, flailing, struggling and striving to get herself free.

Nick smirked as he held her there, relishing in the control. It was intrinsic to his species, comfortable in holding down a member of the prey species, though, eventually, he let her head fall again. The battle was won and the bunny was weak, her ears flopping, even the scrambling of her hands against his legs weak.

But there was something different there, almost something wrong. Were those... The fox didn't want to look too obvious about what he was doing, though it did look as if actual tears were falling from her eyes. But that couldn't be right, could it?

No... Her grey-furred cheeks did have darkening spots of tears on them, soaking into her fur.

Ah... Nick shook himself off mentally, preparing himself once again to do what he needed to do. Must be the lack of oxygen.

_ _

Because that would make sense and Nick had to focus on what made sense. It was never easy, ending the life of another, though it was something frequently done in his line of work.

As Judy heaved and puffed on the ground, sliding onto her side with her ears flopping onto the dirty surface of the flat roof, he brought his feet up around her head, ready to continue from exactly where they had left off before.

"You fought well, bunny."

For there could still be respect at the end and the fox shook his head minutely, tightening the grip of his feet around her head, ready to snap her neck. She was small and the muscles in his legs were strong - even though she was a bunny and he was a fox - so it would not take much at all. At least it would be easy for her.

The fox took a breath...and then stopped.

Crying.

She was crying.

Well, that wasn't what he'd expected.

The bunny openly sobbed, her fingers coming up, though she shook too badly to do anything about her predicament - which was a very dire one at that. Her eyes turned fearfully up to his once more, though the fox did not meet them for more than a breath of a moment, not even the span of a single heartbeat.

Because he recognized something in her, even then. Even when he shifted his weight a little, realising that his tight shorts were wet too, the bulge there evident yet having shifted a little. He must have climaxed when he had been squeezing her face into his crotch, though, in the rush of everything, had not noticed.

Huh...

_ _

Yet he couldn't take his eyes off her face, even if he could not meet her eyes. For the bunny... She took him back. A long, long way back to a time and a place that Nick had never thought would ever be as poignant in his memory as it was in that very moment in time.

Back in the Junior Ranger Scouts. He was there, as if it was all happening again, darkness closing in on him from outside the pool of torchlight, the prey animals framing him.

"A fox can never be honest."

No... No, please...

_ _

His heart pounded, harder, faster. Again and again, the drum of it filling his ears, a roar of blood pumping drowning out all else. He saw their faces, again and again, the muzzle coming in closer and closer to him, looming and even seeming to grow larger and larger, as if the muzzle was designed to swallow up his entire head, not just his mouth.

Nick screamed, though his jaws hung agape in a soundless cry. No one would hear him. No one would come to his rescue.

For he was nothing more than a sly fox, without any slyness to speak of, against the herd of prey who had decided that he was never going to be anything more than what he was, the sum of his species and no more than that.

His chest heaved, blinking, the darkness before him fading, bringing him back to reality. It was okay, everything was okay, Nick tried to reassure himself, though it still felt as if he was spinning and fading, drifting and falling, all at the same time.

He was there, still on the rooftop...and yet things were different there. Very different as he tried to calm down, suddenly sitting on the ground with his feet out before him, toes close together and his knees bent out at an angle. Something was wrong with that, very wrong... But he didn't know what else he could do, what was missing, a sense of unease hanging over his shoulders heavily.

"Huh..."

"Hi-yah!"

Judy was not one for loud proclamations in the middle of a fight, though it felt fitting when she was slamming into him with a dropkick, slamming into his back, knocking the fox back. Nick gasped, jaws hanging open, though the bunny was no longer afraid of the sharp teeth that lay inside, no, not when she was there and she was strong and she could turn the tables back on him all over again.

There was no time to wonder why the fox had not broken her neck with his feet before, but she was not against using every little advantage to her benefit once she had regained control of herself. The fox scrambled, knocked back down to the ground on his chest, scraping to get his limbs back under him.

"Not today, fox!"

Judy's heart lifted as she lunged, leaping with both feet at once and then slamming her powerful feet down into his back even as the fox tried to get up, turning around onto his back with his eyes wide. Knocking the air out of him, much as Nick had done to her with his butt slam, she winded him deeply, the fox's limbs jolting straight out from his body, though he was not down and out quite yet.

The roof was flat, but there were a couple of small buildings on top of it, perhaps for building maintenance and access down into the body of the building itself, and Judy used that to her advantage. The fox tried to buck her off, though he couldn't get his feet under him, not as Judy grabbed at Nick's arm with all her strength.

"Yahhh!"

She growled like a predator herself as she pulled at his arm, hurling him around her - launching the fox directly at the wall of the nearest maintenance building on top of the roof. He barely had even a moment to blink, flying backwards with his limbs left trailing out in front of his body, before slamming into it.

CRACK!

The dull, broken sound emanated through the otherwise quiet of the rooftop, the fox groaning lowly.

"Nnnnggghhhh..."

Cotton damn it...

_ _

Nick slid slowly down the wall as the bunny approached, but he could only blink dully up at her. His ears were ringing terribly, his tail limp, the strength seeming to have gone from his limbs. Well, it had been quite an impact, to say the least of it...

"So, this is what it comes down to, sly fox... But you're not so sly anymore, are you?"

It didn't sound like her own voice coming from her lips, not as she ground her foot back up against his throat, balancing on her left one while the right foot bore into his neck. The fox made a strangled sound, eyes bulging, twitching and jerking, though he could barely get his hands up to her ankle.

"Unff... Please... Mmmph... Sorry... I'm sorry..."

Judy let her ears slick back, pinned to her head. It was not a very bunny-like position for them to rest in, though bunnies could be aggressive too when the need called for it. And Judy was defending both her territory of the city and her life at that very moment, pressing down as her toes folded more softly around his throat. The pressure of her foot on his windpipe, however, was not gentle at all.

The fox heaved and choked, scrabbling, though he struggled more and more for air, heaving and grunting. But he couldn't do anything! He was too weak, caught off-guard, losing his sense of self.

This is it... He thought. This is the end.

_ _

And he'd almost had the bunny too. Even if Nick could not all that much call her a dumb bunny anymore. She'd truly held her own and he had to respect her for that, even if it seemed that she did not hold any of the same respect for him.

"Mmm...sorry...sorry..."

She paused, a little of her anger dissipating. Like any prey animal, or perhaps a predator too, the bunny had only been scared. Anger sometimes clouded fear, to allow one to carry on, to do what needed to be done.

Shifting her weight back a little, she released some of the pressure on Nick's throat, though kept her foot up on his face, turning his head to the right so that his right cheek and the right side of his snout was pressed into the dirty brickwork. Heaving for breath, his chest grasped wildly at it, Judy watching his chest rise and fall sharply.

So fragile. Even for a predator.

_ _

She pressed down with her sole, her heel closer down towards his jaw with her toes stretched up as if they were going to push into the socket of his eye. Even on one leg, the bunny was perfectly comfortable and stable.

"Why didn't you kill me back then?" She said, referencing the first time. "Or...now. Just now. Why didn't you do it?"

The fox huffed hotly, lips parting slightly. Though he couldn't quite get a snarky roll of his eyes out in time to be believed.

"Ugh... Wouldn't have been right," he grunted. "Trapping prey... Couldn't even run you down."

It was a bad joke, something about hunting, and it should have turned her stomach. Yet the bunny just stared at him strangely.

"I want to know the truth," she said, plainly and firmly. "You're a predator. That's what you do. I've seen it before, that's the whole reason that my agency was created. To protect prey and to keep them safe from predators... Predators like..."

She couldn't finish the sentence, even if she had meant to say, "predators like you." There was something wrong in it, something that didn't sit right with her, as her breath and Nick's slowly eased back to normal, hers more swiftly than his.

Nick met her eyes - well, with just one of his eyes. The other was facing the grey, brick wall.

"I'm a predator," he forced out at last, "but I'm not a monster."

Ah.

_ _

So, that was it. That was what Judy had been missing all along. In the trials and times where predators and prey fought one another, one in fear and one, admittedly, with hunting instinct, she had failed to recognise that some did not consign themselves to that way of thinking. Predators and prey were not the sum of their species and she had failed to realise that she didn't have to be that way too.

He wasn't like the predators that she had gone up against in the past, the ones that she had not had any trouble dispatching. They had been different - or, more so, they had been exactly as she had expected them to be. She grunted, one ear pricking up uncertainly, her tail twitching and tugging at the back of her tight briefs.

He eyed her warily as she lifted her foot from his face - and promptly stumbled back as she inadvertently put herself off-balance.

"Oof!"

The bunny landed smack on her butt, a wave of exhaustion pouring over her, heart hammering, her ears pricking up but without really hearing anything. Nick exhaled a breath, catching it again, taking deeper, easier breaths now that her foot was no longer on either his neck or his face.

Ding!

_ _

Ping!

_ _

Judy's communicator was strapped to her thigh while Nick's was around his waist, inobtrusive in how it rested at his right hip. The bunny pressed her lips together, trying to keep her expression neutral, checking the short message that flashed up on the small screen.

"Ugh..."

"Same here, Hopps."

She exchanged a look at the fox. The communicator's message read that her agency had been notified of the missing collar and that other agents had been sent after it.

She gulped hard. Being a spy for her agency was just the way of life for her, something that she had known for years, even though it had seemed like it had been a thing for her for much, much longer than that. It was everything she knew, what she had based her life around, the constant fight for the rights of prey.

But where predators and prey, together, just against one another all along?

Nick pursed his lips.

"Communicator missing," he read off his communicator. "Agents attending to retrieve. Well, Hopps, looks like we're out of luck."

She sighed.

"Do you think they realise that we've, kind of, gone off with it?"

Nick shrugged, leaning back against the wall.

"Maybe. Maybe not. It'll be pretty obvious if they drop down on us here and see us together and, kinda, not going at each other's throats. We can make good on that though, if you like. I'm sure I had a leg up on you..."

Judy rolled her eyes.

"Disregarding the fact that my foot was crammed into your throat a moment ago..."

The agents, however, from opposing sides, would kill them if they found them. Which put them both at risk, for the immediate future.

That was, if they weren't going to go head-to-head. Their communicators, even if they tried to disable them, would have already sent their coordinates to their respective agencies.

"So..." Nick said levelly. "What are we going to do about this?"

Judy eyed him up and down, a small smirk on her lips.

"We? You're getting cocky there for someone that had my foot on their throat only a moment ago..."

They grinned, sharing smiles. Even eye contact, though the gaze of a predator no longer held the same rapture for Judy that it once had. For there was an actual thinking, breathing being behind those eyes. Not just a mindless predator, not like those that had crossed her path before.

And that was something that Judy was going to have to remember, even if, not quite yet, she didn't trust the fox.

So it was that the two of them fought off the agents, though they did not all come at once. The first to accost them, on a neighbouring rooftop, was a big polar bear - definitely one that should have had them taking a step back, taking better stock of the situation before charging in headfirst.

The polar bear towered over both of them, easily agile and limber, but there was little to concern anyone, no. Not with Nick there to dart between his legs while Judy scaled up his body, hopping from his foot to his opposite thigh, off his forearm to his shoulder.

POW!

She slammed both hind feet into his jaw at once, knocking his head to the side, though there was already another agent on the lower rooftop, a lean antelope with a sinuous, slender figure that wore not much at all on her body.

"Wow..." She said, her spy goggles propped up on her forehead, tail twitching back and forth, clad in similar, skimpy spy wear. "And I thought the rumours weren't true. You've gone rogue, Agent Hopps. And shacking up with a fox of all things..."

Nick took care of the polar bear, taking his legs out from under him in a leg sweep to force him to crash down and use the weight of his body against him. The game was set with the opposing agencies notifying their own that Judy and Nick had turned - and there would be no going back from that point.

"Well, I wouldn't say that I'm with him," Judy said, circling the antelope, her long, lean figure slipping in and out of the light as dawn rose, glowing around them fully. "But...I think you guys have some rethinking to do."

She struck, knocking the antelope back - she knew her name but couldn't really be bothered to use it at that moment in time. It just wasn't worth it, no, not when she was taking her place and showing the way.

Or maybe that was something that Hopps would have to work out later, for she wasn't doing all that much to show the agency that what they were doing was wrong, or at the very least going about it in the wrong way when they all could be working together.

The antelope sprung, completing a perfect somersault over Judy's head, though the bunny bit back a curse. She would do what was needed as she bounced off the roof and came back around to her shoulder, backflipping and striking with her right leg alone, all so that she could put as much power into it as possible.

"Ah-hah!"

She struck the antelope's neck but, alas, the anatomy of different anthros, both predators and prey, meant that the pressure points, where she could tap a nerve, were different on everyone. She missed and dropped to the ground, one hand on the floor, tipped forward, her legs bent, ready for more.

The antelope laughed and pressed the attack, forcing Judy back, the height difference between them working against Judy, for the antelope was three times her height. Knocking Judy with a front kick to her right hip, the antelope grabbed her arm and yanked her forward off-balance and off her feet. The bunny gritted her teeth as she was dragged into a throw, the antelope using her hip to guide Judy through it, hauling her off and to the side.

"Oof!"

SMACK!

Judy came down - and she came down hard. The rooftop had never felt as solid as it did in that moment, heaving and gasping, though, fortunately, she had not had her breath knocked out of her that time. And she was sick of that happening already, wanting to be in a position of control again, a position of power. Not like a predator and not even like a fox - but just like herself.

She rolled out of the smackdown on the ground before the antelope could get an elbow drop on her. The antelope ducked out of the move halfway through, cursing, caught on the back foot when she had not been expecting Judy to shift so quickly, lunging back up on her feet.

Yet the beauty of mixing martial arts and different fighting techniques was that Judy could also use the antelope's height against her. She was long and she was lean and had a higher point of balance than the bunny, her cloven hooves also smaller. Judy wrinkled her nose at that. Those would not have suited her at all.

Feet were better.

She slammed her left hip into the antelope's stomach, pushing off with her right foot, her stronger leg, for the maximum amount of power that she could manage. With that, she dragged the antelope down and over her hip, kicking her feet out from under her as she completed the grappling throw.

"Agh!"

The antelope crashed down, even though her body weight was nowhere near that of the polar bear, who Nick was still fighting with. But Judy could not spare a moment for that as she locked her arms around her opponent's neck while the antelope struggled up onto her knees.

"Unff... Time for you..." Judy heaved out, putting all the power and pressure she could into her sleeper hold, "to go...to sleep..."

The antelope fought as hard as she could, huffing and grunting, her bony little figures digging into the bunny's arm, grasping and poking, trying to prod bone and more to jolt her away. But Judy ground her teeth together, bearing through the pain, the antelope not quite savvy enough to dig into her inner elbow, which was one thing that would have most certainly gotten Judy to pull away.

"Time to forget about the agency," Judy hissed in a rushing pant of breath that seemed eager to escape her lungs as the antelope fought. "Unff... None of this... is right..."

The antelope's eyes rolled back into her head as she grew weaker, her fingers falling away from Judy's arm as the bunny strengthened her sleeper hold. Maybe that time training with Nick, in a way, had been beneficial for her. Not that Judy was ever going to tell the fox that, oh no. She'd never hear the end of it if she dared!

Harder and harder... It was the sustained pressure of the sleeper hold that did the trick. And she kept going and going, even as the antelope fell limp. She had to hold on, had to take care, had to do everything and anything she could to ensure that the two of them, at the very least, survived.

Later, they would see just what came of them, all while Judy made sure that the antelope was good and knocked out, squeezing around her neck to stop the flow of blood from reaching her head.

Nick, on the other hand, was holding his own against the polar bear, though he could not be knocked out easily. His mind went back to the bag that he had brought out with him, while pursuing Judy, though it was down on the ground of the roof at that moment, not attached to his hip. He hadn't wanted it to get in the way when he was fighting, not after the towering polar bear had shown up, though there was a bottle of chloroform in there that he thought would be very useful. Sure, he could possibly get his legs around the bear's thick neck in a scissor hold, but his arms would have struggled, in that instance, to put enough pressure down.

So, it was best to use what was at his disposal, to know what his strengths were and utilise them. Judy seemed to be managing against the antelope as she knocked her down to the ground and got her arms around her neck in a sleeper choke hold, so he was free to focus on the polar bear.

"Unff!"

Nick could not throw the bear, not at his size, but he could grab his arm and yank him off-balance, as if he was going for a body drop throw. The grappling throw would have been effective if he had managed to catch the polar bear at just the right moment, though that didn't matter all that much as he stumbled, trying to throw his bare, white-furred shoulder into Nick. Yet that was just when Nick could take the polar bear's moment of indecision to his advantage, scrambling up his body in a very Judy-like fashion (hey, he could take a page or two from the bunny's book) and pinching the nerve on the side of the bear's neck.

"Nnnggghhh..."

The bear went slack and loose and dropped to the ground like a lead weight. Nick's heart surged. Yes! It was not right to go up against someone from his agency, that much was fair, but he thought that it was the lesser of two evils.

He had no intention to kill the bear, after all, not as he swiped the chloroform from the bag, sitting on the bear's chest with his feet on either side of his head. Nick grinned.

"Nighty-night, big boy! Time for you to go all the way to sleep!"

That was not all that bad a line, no, though it was not one of Nick's best for trash talk either. The polar bear was already coming back around to himself, fingers twitching, regaining the feeling in his limbs, eyes furious with deadly intent. But there was little at all that he could do as Nick dosed up a silky, smooth cloth with chloroform and pressed it around his lips and nose.

There was no breath that the polar bear could take that was not full of chloroform, filling his lungs, sinking sweetly into his bloodstream. The drug worked quickly, even though the bear was trying to fight the effects, his eyelids twitching, straining and trying to cling to wakefulness for as long as possible. It was all he could do, even then, but he thought that Nick was going to kill him, even though the fox felt, quite honestly, that he was past that. Fighting Judy had easily shown him that he could win a fight without killing anyone and maybe that was the lesson that he wanted to pass on back to the agency.

"Go to sleep, stop fighting..."

He glanced over at Judy and the antelope, wondering how she was doing, though she was slowly relaxing the grip of her arms from around the antelope's neck from the choke hold. The antelope's body was limp and he had to trust that she had done what she intended to do as he folded the chloroform-laden cloth even more securely around the polar bear's snout.

"Go on now," he encouraged the bear, though he felt the beast growling under his hands. "Go to sleep... It'll be better for you like that."

At least if he was knocked out, the bear didn't have to think about anything, not the agents, the agency, nothing at all, no... That would be a blessing in disguise for him.

Slowly but surely, he dropped unconscious, weaker and weaker. That was all that Nick could hope for, though he knew he had to do a thorough job, pressing down with the cloth to make just a little more of the chloroform soak through and bite into the white of the fur on his muzzle too. There would be no escaping it as the bear's eyelids closed fully, even if he was still fighting unconsciousness, clinging to the waking world as much as he could.

But he could not do so forever and he exhaled with a long, grumbling, drawn-out sigh as he fell unconscious. The antelope was already knocked out also, Judy dusting off her hands, though they had to take several long, deep breaths of their own, recovering and coming back to themselves after the scuffle.

Judy grinned.

"How about a victory pose?"

That would set the tone for all that was to come, for it would turn out, in the end, not to be fighting all the agents that came after them that was important but showing that they were triumphant, that they were victorious, that there was so much more for them to do, predator and prey together.

Rolling both the polar bear and the antelope onto their backs, Nick and Judy both took up a pose on their bodies. The bunny took the polar bear, her foot on his face, though his chunky, blocky muzzle was so large that she had to stretch out her toes to get them down near his snout, his face turned onto the right cheek. Her heel squashed into his fleshier, softer cheek, but that was just the natural anatomy of a polar bear, holding more fat and muscle bulk on them, purely for their size and their need to keep warm in a colder climate. Living in Zootopia wasn't going to change that for them.

She held both arms above her head triumphantly, so that the angle of them made a V-shape with her fingers pointing up towards the morning sky. The city was growing active down below them and there were even flying anthros starting to take flight, though there was no way, not in hindsight, of telling just how many had seen them up there. The agency information would have already been relayed back and they could not pause for long - not that time.

Nick did the same, though he hesitated slightly before propping his foot up on the lean, toned belly of the antelope, his toes stretching almost all the way across her midsection. His heel nearly hung off the other side of her body, though she was exceptionally lean, the muscle pressing back up against his foot as he bore down lightly. After all, he didn't want to be outdone by the bunny, even if the antelope had not technically done anything to him.

The antelope would, most likely, have done far worse than even the polar bear if she had come for him first, rather than Judy. So, he had to make sure that he was looked after, as well as Judy. Though the fox would only examine later what that all meant as he flexed his arms on either side of his head, showing off the muscle in his arms and shoulders, as he grinned and posed proudly.

More victory poses, however, would be coming. Those agents were left trussed-up on the rooftop as they made good their escape, though Judy scrawled a note and stuck it on one of the antelope's small horns, speared there like a letter holder.

We'll take out every predator or prey that comes for us!

_ _

A challenge, in a way... Though both Judy and Nick knew that the agencies were coming for them. That may, at the very least, make it a little more interesting for them...

The agents came quickly as Nick and Judy dropped down into the back streets of the city. Even though they were seedier, darker place, somewhere that most residents of Zootopia did not even venture, they were better places for the bunny and the fox to use the terrain and the environment to their advantage, bouncing and popping back and forth, using the walls to spring to their advantage. Even as a fox, he was lithe and agile, though better suited to scaling big wheelie bins and piles of rubbish down in the alleys, even the metal framework of walkways and stairs to back entrances, more quickly than Judy could.

She had not known before that, to some extent, foxes were good climbers. That was interesting, just something more that she didn't know about that kind of predator.

Only later would the agencies see the video that the predator and the prey, working together, had made. In respective board rooms, in silence, the video was played, Nick and Judy swapping between taking out their own kind or the opposing kind, predator and prey... When it was wolves, bulls, tigers, meerkats, leopards, deer, stoats, horses - and even a pack of hamsters (well, no one knew what else to call them when they came with such coordinated attacks like that!) - they didn't care who they were taking out.

The agencies watched quietly as Nick leapt on top of a deer with a full rack of antlers, scissoring his legs around their neck and bearing down on his instep to drop him to the ground. The holds were seemingly the favoured move of the two of them, though it was shocking just how they used everything to their advantage, their strength and power replenished where they lay in wait in the alley. For Nick and Judy did not waste energy running around all over the city trying to avoid the agency members who had been sent after them, but rather funnelled them down into a bottleneck where they would be trapped and the fox and the bunny could drop down on them.

They may not have always had the element of surprise, though it was more than enough for Nick to take out the deer, cursing and pushing at the antlers to get them out of his face, though they did still jab back uncomfortably against him. A leopard with his black spots all on show snarled as he lunged at Judy on the video, but the bunny easily dodged, bouncing off the wall with a practised leap and a spring and grabbing him by the shoulders in a breakfall (it was kind of modified, due to her leaping at him and not standing while she started the move) to haul him to the ground.

The leopard needed more targeted attacks than those that had gone before, though that was all well and good, Judy grappling with him on the ground, though she had to be careful not to let herself get pinned on the bottom. Scissoring her legs around his neck in a scissor hold, she choked him out again, bearing down with her legs closing on either side of his neck, making him lose consciousness, bit by bit.

When the leopard was out of it, they tied him up, the video cutting - it seemed to have been edited - to the next agent to attack them. That one was a lioness with a low, stalking figure who seemed to anticipate that there was more to sourcing the two of them out than others had anticipated, her eyes alit and wary.

Judy took her, for Nick had eyes on another prey species who was stalking down the bottleneck, the goat with silencing rubber feet over their hooves. It could have been ridiculous if it did not work so well, though Judy fought the lion with an uppercut and a belly kick, both trying to be as quiet as possible.

They did not specifically need to avoid attracting attention, of course, though... some things would have outed them to the police. And that was not something that they could risk, for the agencies were of good standing in Zootopia and beyond, even if many knew that there was something darker and more insidious going on beneath the surface. Not many minded, as long as they knew them to be on their side.

So it was that predator and prey were always pitted against one another. Maybe the agencies were trying to control more than the ones that they said were their opponents, after all?

"Oof!"

Nick blocked a kick from the goat with his forearms, blocking neatly and bouncing backwards, his brush stuck out straight behind him for balance. At his hip was a bottle of chloroform, which was swiftly becoming one of his preferred tools for knocking out opponents, feeling a little better about everything going in when he knew that he was not going into it with the intention to kill. Somehow, for Nick, that changed everything.

"Time for you to get knocked out!"

But Nick wasn't going to do such with his fists as he grappled with the goat, grunting and avoiding the horns. He slammed his foot into their hamstrings, which was just enough to knock them to their knees, cursing him out with language that would have made a sailor blush. That was all the fox needed to leap on top of them, getting them into a camel clutch, the goat down on their front while he sat on their back.

"Ah-hah!"

Nick crowed in triumph as he wrenched the goat's head up and back, forcing him to bow up from the ground, howling in pain. His hands locked in front of his opponent's face, awkwardly over his snout, but it was the weight of him sitting there that pinned the goat while keeping him bent at a horrible angle, scrabbling with his hands in a futile effort to try to relieve some of the pressure.

And it was then that the fox got the chloroform out, messily spilling it onto the rag. It was not a time for finesse, after all, not as he grunted thickly in the back of his throat, licking his lips and giving a little shake of his head to clear the smell of the chloroform from it.

"Ugh... What the..."

The goat's eyes rolled as the chloroform-soaked cloth was folded around his snout, a little prodding against his nostrils, though it was more strategically closed around his snout when the fox was able to adjust the hold of it.

"Off to sleep with you, Billy Goat Gruff..."

The goat's eyelids fluttered, but he didn't get a chance to grunt at the insult, not as his lips moved soundlessly, using every ounce of stamina in him to hold on for as long as he possibly could. It was all he could do, but he knew that he was failing as Nick relaxed a little more on top of him, letting the weight of his body do the majority of the work for him. Even the cloth felt a little silky with the wetness under his hand as he pressed it in more closely around the goat's mouth too, not allowing the horned beast any modicum of space at all to get a full breath in.

The fox could have done worse, of course, so much worse. But that was not what he was about, no... It had never been what Nick had wanted to do, not even as he slid his gaze over to Judy, letting the goat struggle less and less under him. The struggles were kind of hypnotic, in a way, the fox knowing that all he had to do was to relax into it, to sit there, even rubbing a little of the chloroform into the goat's rougher fur around his nose, making sure that he inhaled it.

"All for a good cause, my dear goat..."

Nick growled, though there was a small smile on his muzzle as the goat dropped lower and lower. His voice was caught nicely by the camera that they had set up, although, from how the video of them taking out the agents had been edited, it looked like they had used more than one. That was only a very minor detail, however, in the grand scheme of things, as Judy closed her legs around the lioness' neck, Nick admiring her form from a distance, and stopped the blood flow from reaching their head.

The lioness went down more quickly than the goat, though Nick could not have said why. Everything that he had ever known had been turned on its head from just a few days with the bunny - and things would never again be the same. As the goat went slack in his arms, he watched the lioness fade too, her kicking struggles growing weaker, though she did leave a line of red across Judy's arm from her claws. Such marks, however, were just a part of their job.

Judy huffed and the video snapped, again, to another pairing, Judy and Nick back-to-back while a wolf approached the bunny and a rhino approached the fox. Both were formidable opponents and agents in their own rights, though Nick and Judy would have to find a way out and through. At least, that was what those watching the videos supposed, caught up in the fights going on and set back at a distance at the same time.

Nick and Judy did not have an easy fight that time, no, the final two agents that had been sent, so far, to despatch them. Judy dodged the wolf, sliding between his legs, and leapt up onto his back with her powerful legs, clinging to his neck and going for a chokehold. He snarled, however, and slammed her back into the wall, the bunny going limp for a moment while he fought to gain the upper hand.

Nick wasn't in a position to help her, the rhino having a lot more brawn and bulk on him, though he still had his chloroform at the ready. It would take more to despatch the rhino, though the fox shot the camera a knowing glance and a wink, his tail lifting faintly, though he wouldn't have wanted to give anything away either.

"Ah, I think this brawny fool," he said, "is going to go down hard."

The agencies, of course, would not the intricacies of what he and Judy had done with the foot play and the like, but that didn't matter. For Nick surged through the air, ducking a right hook and avoiding a hip thrust; the beginning of a grappling throw that would have had him up and over the rhino's hip, losing his feet, if he had not had his wits about him.

On the rhino's right side, the wall to his back, Nick gained a bit of height by leaping onto a solid, metal bin with a flattish lid, pressing the attack. With a well-timed head kick, he slammed his left foot up and into the rhino's chin, knocking his head up and back.

WHAM!

"Oof!"

The rhino groaned and stumbled, head clearly ringing, but Nick couldn't wait. He had to follow through and he had to press the attack, to take what little advantage he had. But the fox was tiring after felling the agents already and from the earlier fight with Judy. There was too much going on, however, for him to pay all that much attention to the weariness in his limbs, how they felt a lot heavier than they should have been. The chloroform was in his paw as he flipped up onto the rhino's shoulders, needing the swift-acting nature of the drug to incapacitate him quickly.

"Unff... To sleep with you!"

He could have put the rhino into a scissor hold but, that time, he frankly doubted how effective his legs around the rhino's neck would be in stopping the flow of blood. Though it was very much one of his preferred moves for knocking out an opponent, especially after he had gotten to practice it with Judy.

"Grrrr..."

The rhino was bigger and bulkier than him, but still no match for the chloroform. Nick shot the camera a knowing grin and a wink.

"Knocked out!"

Well, not quite. But he held the silky cloth, slippery with how much fluid had been splashed onto it, soaking through, getting it around as much of the rhino's snout as he could. The problem there was that the rhino was so big that he could not completely cover his snout with it, though he got enough, covering his mouth too.

He had to do it, grunting, heaving, even as the rhino dropped to his knees with a solid thud. That had to have hurt, though Nick clung on tenaciously, utilising the chloroform to the best of his ability, letting the rhino grow heavier and heavier, drifting down so slowly. It was almost admirable just how he held on, how his eyelids seemed to be growing increasingly heavy, the rhino's arms hanging down, his thighs slackening where he could no longer hold tension in the muscles.

And then he collapsed completely, going down face first while Judy took care of the wolf. That had been a much harder fight for her to win and she circled the wolf with a canny look in her eye.

"You're toast, bunny," the wolf growled, lowering his head a little, his jaw firm. "This isn't something you can win. That's all that prey are good for - and you're always trying to circumvent predators!"

Judy scoffed and rolled her eyes, though she was not to be put off as the wolf feinted and lunged with a jab from her left fist, rocking her weight back onto her left foot.

"That's where you're wrong," Judy shot back. "This is about something more than that, something more than us. It's greater than predators and prey being against one another, we can be better than that."

She drew herself up tall, even though the wolf was bigger than her.

"And that is why I'm going to be better than you."

For she would not knock the wolf out, not as she grabbed the wolf's arm as he went in for a lunging arm thrust, pulling him over her shoulder. Once again, she could use the wolf's weight against him and hurled him to the ground in a throw.

"Yah!"

WHAM!

The floor reverberated with the impact that the wolf made with it and Judy spared a breath of a moment to check on Nick, though he was on top of a slumped-over rhino, the beast's limbs still twitching faintly as he fought the chloroform. Yet there was only so much that she could do there and he seemed to be doing well enough for himself, so she did not interfere.

The wolf groaned, dazed for a moment - and that was all that Judy needed. She took her chance, leaping on top of them and getting her legs tightly around their neck in a scissor hold. It would keep her body away from the sharper teeth and claws, most hopefully, for she didn't quite feel comfortable being up close with the wolf. There was still a fear there and a wolf was very much a natural predator of a bunny.

"Unff..."

The wolf snarled and clawed at her, though it was hard for them to fight back as weakness entered their limbs, dragging them down, soft and slow. Their claws scraped against her as their coordination went off, barely touching Judy's legs as she squeezed down even harder in the scissor hold, pressing down on her instep to apply the most pressure that she could.

He grunted under her, muttering something, though the words were lost as she applied even more pressure to his windpipe. As much as the wolf panted and heaved, there was only so much that he could do when Judy had been practising putting out predators like him for years already. She hated, in a way, that she had had to be good at that, though maybe things could change. Maybe that was the kind of change that she could put into the world with Nick, if she pressed on and kept moving forward, step by step and day by day.

"Unff... Just...get...knocked out..."

She panted heavily, squeezing around him, her muscles straining, though the bunny had to do it, had to see everything through to the bitter end. It was all that she could do, even if she knew that she was being better than she had been before, all in ensuring that she acted with integrity. In a way, her morals had changed.

Though the bunny still very much got to feel the thrill of victory as, finally, the wolf went slack under her, exhaling softly in a rush of breath. It was not quite a sigh but it more than sounded like one, all as she cautiously released the pressure of her legs around his neck, checking his pulse and checking his breath with her fingertips to make sure that he was, indeed, knocked out. Peeling the eyelid back gently, however, was usually her preferred check.

"I think that's the last of them."

Nick grunted and cracked out his knuckles, tucking away the chloroform and the cloth into a bag that he had strapped to his hip, the belt of which went around his waist. It was good to have that on hand, but he didn't exactly want to have the cloth out at all times, for simply smelling the chloroform could make him go lightheaded at times.

Judy nodded. But the bunny could not keep the grin from her face, charging to Nick as the fox's face spread into a smile, the muscles not as well-used as the vulpine might have liked them to be.

After knocking out every single agent that came after them, Nick and Judy exchanged a grin and a high five that Judy had to leap into the air to meet.

"Yeah!"

"You got some serious moves on you, Hopps!"

"You should already know that with how I've already handed your tail to you on multiple occasions, fox!"

But the jabs were exchanged in good nature and fun, of course, riding the high of having won. Of course, they didn't know whether there were more agents after them or not.

"Let's get them downstairs," she said. "Away from here. We need somewhere that we can defend."

For the agencies, surely, would have thought that they had been bested by the agents and felled - but they would soon find out that things were no longer as they seemed to be when the agents did not return. So, they had to be quick, dragging the remaining agents down a flight of steps, carefully, that had opened up into the alleyway from a wooden double door. It was the sort of thing that might have been found to access the storage beneath a building, typically a pub back where Judy had come from, but it had been the perfect base in which to tackle the agents.

Judy picked up the cameras and turned them off before heading down, though she smirked at the thought of the agencies watching the videos later, just how she would cut and edit them to show off their skills. It was not so much about showing off, in the end of it, but showing them that there was something more going on there, something different, a change in the way that predators and prey could relate in Zootopia - and beyond too.

Maybe she had big dreams for a little bunny, but Judy wasn't likely to change that anytime soon.

They wouldn't be able to stay down at their current location for long, however, for the video would be left there for the agencies to find, even if that would, most likely, be a whole new thing in itself, bringing the two opposing sides together when Nick and Judy, indeed, were the ones who were fighting together. It was kind of a mess but the fox wasn't thinking about the consequences, riding the high of the fight as he lined up every predator and prey animal that they had defeated.

Bound with their paws either tied at their sides, behind their backs or up over their heads, they were all trussed up with nowhere to go, everyone knocked out. They were lined up on the floor of a basement: it looked to have been an old brewery at some point, though Nick didn't honestly remember spending all that much time in that part of Zootopia before.

He exhaled, eyeing up how Judy had laid them down, alternating predator and prey. The leopard stirred and Judy made quick work of knocking them out again, getting them into a sleeper hold with her arms around their neck and crossed across the front of their throat, applying pressure until their twitches ceased again. It was a trick that Nick would not have minded trying out again for himself in due course, though getting to grapple and throw, as well as apply choke holds...

Well, perhaps Judy would be up for a little friendly sparring. And they still had the hypno collar, so who knew what kinkier fun could be played out with that thing in their grasp still?

"Hey, Nick..."

She grinned, the cameras set up again, though they were on "follow me" tripods, the cameras moving back and forth to ensure that whoever was moving was kept in the centre of the frame. With the fox watching, Judy posed with her right foot up on the prey's chest, choosing the rhino to start with, for he was the largest and bulkiest of the prey creatures there.

"You are full of surprises, Hopps..."

Judy pricked her ears up tall and flexed into a basic victory pose, her arms up on either side of her head, her hands balled up into fists. It was typical, yes, but it made her feel strong and powerful, as if she could do anything, be anything. It made her feel more than "just the dumb bunny" that everyone had told her that she was before.

Her toes squirmed across the rhino's bare chest and she looked down briefly. His skin was rougher, like a leathery hide, and she had not paid attention earlier to their manner of dress. Like her and Nick, all of the agents wore minimal clothing, which was typical of spy work. It allowed them to be as flexible as possible, though she did not mind that, confident in the abilities of her own body.

Her heel bore down into his chest a little more as she watched Nick set up with the leopard instead, a predator. Nick stood confidently and smiled, spreading his arms for the cameras as he looked directly into his chosen lens. His pose, with his arms outstretched on either side of his body, hands facing forward towards the cameras, seemed to invite anyone to come in and challenge him. The fox's left foot rested across the leopard's chest, from left to right, and he leaned down heavily into it. That was one creature, of course, that he could trust to hold his weight, steady under him. And he did not at all have to be concerned about harming them in the slightest, not with his lithe, light weight.

"These are a formality, these poses," Nick said, though Judy quickly realised that the fox was speaking to the camera, not her, that time. "Here... They're a gift, right, Hopps? To show that your agents are alive."

Judy nodded. The bunny adjusted her pose so that she was standing with her foot on top of the rhino's face, though, with his chunky snout, her fluffy foot covered only his cheek and his left eye. He was so big but, well...that was part of the appeal of taking the time to do those victory poses, to show their power and to soak up their triumph over the agents that should have, quite duly, taken them both out. Her toes wriggled just underneath his eye as she changed her pose to an upright position, standing ramrod straight, ears pricked, her expression serious. She too, had something to say to the agencies.

"We will not hesitate to kill any who try to kill us, of course," Judy said, feeling that there was a part of her that needed to make that clear too. "So, stop sending agents. This is no longer your fight! We will not follow you anymore... From now on, we're going to establish our own way of how predators and prey - together! - can peacefully live."

Nick grinned and nodded.

"Yes, together..."

With that said, he copied Judy to put his foot over the leopard's face, flexing his toes over the softer, fluffier fur that was to be found there. It was almost relaxing for him after the stress of the fights, allowing the thrill of victory to ebb and flow through him, enjoying every moment. It was even better with Judy right there by his side, he was sure of it, but there was something else going on there.

Maybe they would find it in time.

Together, Judy and Nick swapped to their final pose, putting their left feet, as if they were trying to match up perfectly, on the stomachs of both the leopard and the rhino. There was a lot of the rhino to go around and Judy even had to hop up so that she was standing fully on the rhino, though that was one prey creature that she didn't have to worry about hurting, such was the rhino's size. Even then, it was comical just how much larger the rhino was than the bunny, Nick stifling a laugh and politely covering it with his hand. Standing on any of the agents that they had captured, however, would not cause any harm at all, not considering everything else that they could have done.

Nick was more comfortable standing with her left foot placed directly across the stomach of the leopard, relaxing too. A little more of the stress and tension eased from his shoulders, though she laughed a little too as she exchanged a look with Nick. How things had changed!

But they were different in a good way as he wriggled her toes into the soft fur of the leopard, even if the feline's fur was mussed-up and messy after the fights that they had been in. It had all gone through so quickly and yet seemed to have been dragged out too at the same time.

It was funny how time quite felt like that in the middle of a fight. It wasn't something that Judy had understood, something to do with chemical reactions in the body and brain.

With three poses complete on the rhino and the leopard, they swapped to the antelope and the polar bear: the two that had started it all.

"It feels important," she murmured to Nick, though that was not something that the cameras would pick up on - or Judy would edit it out later so that the agencies did not get to see that one little moment of vulnerability. "To do this."

The fox nodded quietly, though there was nothing but a quiet sort of friendly camaraderie between them as he swept his tail lightly up against her legs, out of view of the cameras. There was no roughness, no choke holds and no chloroform. Every agent was knocked out and it was just the two of them there, nothing to worry about, languishing there to take everything in.

In a way, it was as if they were finally catching their breath.

Starting with the antelope's head, Judy led the way with her foot square in the middle of the antelope's chest, her toes even fanned out a little as if she was trying to stretch them as far as possible. With all the confidence that the bunny had in her, she grinned at the cameras, posing with the ease and suaveness that the older, more experienced agents had had back when she had joined the agency.

But things had changed. Nick posed too, taking his time, as if it was a kind of ritual that the two of them had to go through, though neither the bunny nor the fox made any secret at all of how much they enjoyed it. It was as if all those tiny, subtle, sexual nuances of their fight itself came through the most strongly when they were taking their victory poses. And, now that they were not posing triumphantly on each other, it gave them a much better chance to observe the other, the way that light hit their fur and the flex and pull of muscles beneath it.

Nick put his foot on the polar bear's chest, rocking it back and forth experimentally, putting as much weight on him as he liked. He leaned forward commandingly over his bent leg, as if he was going to rest his arm on his thigh, though stopped just short of it, his head tilted a little to the side. It was a smug look, a look that said that he was better than whoever was watching the video.

Well, he would never know who saw the video, most likely, though Nick preferred it that way.

Judy copied the pose sequences from the first time around on the antelope, though she focused on the cameras as she took a deep breath and rocked the antelope's head to the right side, her nostrils fluttering softly as she breathed. The bunny posed with her right foot on the antelope's face, her toes wriggling gently down towards the end of her snout, though she was quite comfortable where she was, taking only just enough care not to put too much pressure on her head.

She didn't want to go that far, not as she flexed and let the camera catch her side-on profile, the muscle in her arms showing, as if her figure was there to be put on display. Judy took a deep breath, her chest rising, and rolled her eyes at the fox who was flexing with his toes straight up and over the polar bear's muzzle.

Well, as much of his big, blocky muzzle as he could get his foot over. He was as chunky as the rhino had been for Judy, though the fox frowned, trying to cover more.

"Hm..."

He flexed and posed, showing off the muscles in his arms and shoulders, for the cameras, while he worked out where to put his foot. Eventually, the fox settled with his heel bearing down on the polar bear's snout and his toes pressing down over the white fur of his cheek. Even though the bear seemed big and cuddly, Nick was surprised to find out that his fur was not all that soft at all there. It moved lightly under his foot as he wriggled his toes and pressed them down, curling and scrunching them lightly, feeling the slight oily slickness to his fur.

Hm... That wasn't something that the fox wanted to linger on, moving to the polar bear's stomach and flexing his arms, raising them above his head triumphantly.

Oh, it was so easy to lose himself there as Judy did the same, the bunny's eyes half-closed, every tiny shift in her weight and the balance of her body catching the fox's eye. There had been several times already where the bunny could have taken him out and yet she had stopped - and for the same reasons that he had. Still, that did not mean that Nick was immune to admiring her form and her body, how her clothing hugged her chest and her backside.

It was both functional and highly flattering and there was most definitely still something sexy about how her thighs had closed around him, the smooth fur of her calves brushing his cheeks as she had locked her legs around his head and neck. Not that he would have minded at all having his head pressed back up into the crotch of any female like her.

He shook himself as he posed, Judy with her arms uplifted too, perhaps copying him. She imagined an audience there, cheering, for their victory, otherwise, was something of a private one. There was no one at either of their agencies, she was sure, who would be cheering them on. Still, she could rock her foot lightly over the antelope's stomach, completing the last of the three victory poses on her, feeling how hard and toned her stomach was. It was almost tempting to stay there as the antelope, whose name, of course, she would not and could not know, had been the one to rile her up the most.

They made sure to work their way through the rest of the agents, though Judy, in all honesty, had expected more to come after them. That was why she kept one ear perked as they went through them, listening out for any intruders. There were, of course, cameras set up outside and alerts, so it was not all that bad. She had made sure that everything was covered.

A wolf, a goat, the lioness and, of course, the stag too remained. Judy would have happily taken her pose on the wolf, though they seemed to be sticking to predator or prey respectively that time and she wasn't about to rock the boat on that one. She did, however, drag the stag's head onto the left side, cursing when she rapped herself on his antlers, trying to find a way to pose on his face that wasn't going to be awkward for her.

"You'll edit that out of the video, Hopps."

Nick smirked, teasing her even from a distance, making sure to go through the poses, sometimes sending a quip to the camera. It was a taunt, in a way, but he did not want to dare either of the agencies to come after them, in all honesty. He just wanted them to know that what they were doing was wrong.

Judy laughed lightly.

"Yeah, but I still look better than you doing it, sly fox," she teased right back. "Maybe predators really aren't all they are cracked up to be!"

He chuckled and shook his head at her, posing, flexing, even lifting his tail to show off the muscle of his glutes and the strong line of his hamstrings running down the backs of his thighs. And Judy was checking him out too, taking note of the parts of his body that had been set aside in the fight. She could not ignore, after all, that big damp spot that had been left behind when she had given him a footjob. Even in hindsight, Judy could not honestly say quite what had gotten into her, though it had been something to do with the power that it had given her. And she would not have said that she was in her right mind either.

It was like the victory poses, how she could revel in them, even though, once upon a time, they might have felt wrong to do. Now, they came as naturally to her as breathing, shifting her right foot to the goat's stomach as she balanced carefully. He was smaller than the other prey creatures that she had posed on and, honestly, she still didn't want to hurt him. Though she could still thrust her chest forward proudly, a smile on her face, allowing everything to soak into her, the thrill of besting them, of coming through on top.

It was not something that the bunny was willing to give up and there was so much more ahead of them.

Nick exhaled, the last of the victory poses done, though, to be fair, he had been tiring on the last couple. It felt like closing a loop and tying things up, however - speaking of which, he wasn't willing to leave the agents there, so many predator and prey creatures, all together without some more sufficient bondage.

"Hopps," he said, glancing over to where Judy was taking the cameras, though she would have to quickly edit them on the agency-issued laptop that, on their way there, she had fetched from a secret storage location. "Help me tie these guys up properly, would you?"

Judy leapt to it, making sure that she started on the prey agents first. That time, it felt like it was fitting to stick with her kind, at least there.

"Hopps!"

Nick chuckled and shook his head, holding up the chloroform.

"Why are you so eager to get everyone in a choke hold?" He teased, poking her in the ribs lightly. "Some would say that that's your move, after everything."

The bunny rolled her eyes.

"I have my own but it's just quicker sometimes, you know? Depends on the species too... I had to learn how to use my body more and be clever with fighting, though I'm more than happy to use whatever tools I can get my hands on too."

"Unrrgghhh..."

The wolf tried to roll over, bound with their hands up over their head, and Judy helped wrestle their arms back behind them, hitching their legs up and adjusting their bonds to get their arms and legs back behind their body instead into a hog-tie. The wolf growled, eyelids fluttering, but Nick was there with the soft chloroform cloth to fold it around their muzzle.

"Go to sleep..."

Letting the wolf agent inhale and slip down back into unconsciousness was easy. The wolf had not been all that far from it to begin with, exhaling softly as he blacked out completely again, his limbs loose and floppy while Judy tightened up his hog-tie.

Not all of the agents woke up when they were tying them up, which was probably for the best. Nick took over for the rhino and the leopard, while Judy handled the chloroform for a change, even though she was just as experienced with it as Nick was - possibly even more so. It was hard to differentiate little things like that in the moment of application, though it did not matter. Not even as she folded her hand and the cloth around their muzzles, letting them inhale, watching just how their eyelids seemed to struggle to stay open more and more.

"Go back to sleep," she advised, though there was nothing harsh in the bunny's tone. "It'll be better for you that way. Then you can go back home."

What the agents did after that was none of Judy's concern, not anymore. She had other things to do and other ways to live her life - and, finally, a goal that sat right in her heart. The feel of the softening, lightening breath under her hand as they succumbed to the chloroform relaxed even her, though the rabbit took care not to inhale the chloroform herself too. That would not have been an end that she would have wanted for herself! And Nick would have teased her for it...

She tied up the last couple, the antelope and the polar bear, even though the size of the latter was still somewhat intimidating. Every agent was bound, though the polar bear, perhaps as he was the first big predator to be knocked out, struggled the most. She quickly yanked his arms back at a harsher angle, tightening his hog-tie, while Nick pounced, making sure that he got a good, deep breath of chloroform straight into his lungs, grunting as he tried to fight it.

"Unff... No... Urrggghh..."

But there was nothing that he could do, not when he was up against two skilled agents, who were now their own agents. He could fight unconsciousness for as long as he wanted, truly, but the end was going to be the same one way or the other, even if the bear did not and would not know until he woke up again that he had been spared.

"It's going to be okay," Nick said, finding something soothing inside him, even then, holding the cloth firmly over the polar bear's nostrils and lips, staying clear of the teeth. "Go to sleep... Everything's going to be okay..."

Judy shot him a look.

"I didn't know you could be that soothing and nice," she quipped, though, quietly, she appreciated that Nick was letting that side show, that he wasn't going to just knock them out and treat them badly. "But maybe it's for the best."

Nick shot her a strange look, but the fox didn't comment on it. It was not needed, not with the unspoken understanding between them. That would have to become spoken at some point, but not until they had both worked out what they wanted from the arrangement.

With every agent face down and hog-tied neatly, every single one of them out for the count, Nick and Judy could finally relax. And there were things that they needed to do too.

Heading off from the basement, Judy pulled up a map on her phone - which was not agency issued. The laptop had been left down there too, for there was surely a way for them to track it.

"So, where are we heading? Back to your place?"

Judy grinned, darting ahead of the fox, though she was always on alert, keeping an eye out ahead of her for any danger that may have been present. The agencies had to be running short on field agents but she could never be too careful. She didn't know how many predators were with Nick's past agency either, after all.

"Hm..." He rubbed the back of his neck. "The agency doesn't know about it, not as far as I know, but I think we should stay away from our home bases for a while. If they do know where either of us lies, that'll be the first place that they look."

"Ah, shoot," Judy lamented. "I wanted to get some lotion from home. Never mind that then."

"What, you want to give a better foot job than last time, Hopps!"

"Ergh!" She made a disgusted face, though the idea was not exactly unappealing to her as she exaggerated her expression. "You're gross! Just when I was going to ask you what you wanted for dinner. Now, it's my pick!"

Nick dropped the wooden doors to the basement closed after them, heading out into the alleyway.

"Ah, no, you're not getting away that easily," he laughed. "No, no, no... You'll have to fight for that one, Hopps, and you can't just hop away from what you've set up!"

She rolled her eyes, the two of them sinking back into fighting stances. They were serious and yet playful, a softness to their positions even though they both wanted to win. For, that time, it was not life and death and, to be fair to both of them, they already knew some of the other's moves.

"Show me what you got then, fox," Judy challenged with a grin. "But I won't be seeing you cream over my feet anytime soon!"

They didn't know what they wanted, not as Nick drove in quickly first, leaping to close the distance between them and going for a side kick. Judy dodged his right foot as it flew through the air and the fox tried to recover, swapping to put his weight onto that right foot and using his left to kick up in a push kick that should have slammed into her face and chin, shoving her backwards.

BAM!

It was a dirty move and one that got his furry foot up in her face again as Judy flinched and yelped.

"Hey - that's no fair!"

"All's fair in a fight, cutie-bun," Nick said with a grin, batting his eyelashes at her while she grumbled. "Just because you weren't ready."

"Yeah? Then be ready for this!"

It was playful, even though Judy charged in, going for a spinning kick that had her turning to the right on her right foot and using her left, as she spun, to gain momentum. In a three-sixty circle, she gathered power and slammed her foot into the fox's chest.

POW!

"Unff!"

The fox stumbled back, rubbing his chest, though had to recover as Judy pressed the attack. She feinted as if she was going to go for a hip throw and darted to the side. But the fly kick that she threw out, fully leaping into the air and striking with her leading, left leg so that her legs, for a moment, appeared to be both out straight in a perfect line, caught him right in the stomach.

KA-BAM!

"Oof!"

Nick sank away from her, his limbs flying forward as half the air in his belly was knocked out of him, winded and heaving, though he blocked her neck straight kick and brought his arms up in time to stop a side slice from her right forearm, blocking her.

Judy cursed as Nick ducked around her, putting a little space in place, though he slammed his hand forward so that the heel of his hand was forward, going for her face. The bunny grunted as it glanced off her cheek, not quite dodging back and away from him in time, though they were, to be fair, quite evenly matched. The fox, however, had been using rather a lot of chloroform and was a little slower as a result of it - only marginally, but the bunny was more than willing to use any tiny advantage that was there at her disposal.

It was how Judy had gotten to be such a good spy in the first place, after all.

She ducked him going for her ears - that was a tricky move, but the fox knew that there were lots of sensitive nerve endings in them too and that was fair - and twisted away to the right, flowing into a roundhouse kick. Pivoting on her left foot, she put her weight into it and snapped her right leg around and up, coming into his side.

"Gotcha, Hopps!"

The fox caught her leg and yanked up, grinning as he threw her off-balance. He shook his head, laughing softly at her, though there was a brightness in his smile that made Judy's heart pound just a little bit quicker than it had before, though that was something that the bunny would have to reflect on later.

Much later.

He went for a hammer fist and then an axe kick, bringing his right leg up, straightened out, and down again in a chopping, axe-like motion, but Judy slipped away so that his foot came down on empty air.

"Agh!"

The fox staggered, catching his balance: but where was the bunny? She was gone, a blue of grey fur dragging at the corner of his vision as Nick whipped around, trying to get her back in his sights, his arms already up, ready to block where needed.

He didn't see her go low - simply because of her height - and aim for a hook kick until his left leg was jerked roughly out from under him and he was sent crashing to the ground.

WHAM!

"Yah!"

Judy laughed, feeling brighter and more alive than she had for a very long time. Maybe that was the way that it was meant to be, really, even though she had not realised that before she'd met Nick. It was strange, even to her, just how quickly things could change in an otherwise short space of time.

"So, the spoils go to the victor!"

She grinned and propped her foot up on his chest as the fox grunted and moaned under her.

"Urgh... Damn it..."

Judy posed, stroking her chin, as if she was trying to say that her intelligence as far greater than his. Nick may have thought that, if he had not wanted to maintain some air of mystery and to not tell her just how much he admired her. As the friendship between them developed, maybe he would have the confidence to say such. The bunny blocked out the light a little, the day getting on towards late afternoon by that time, and it was high time that the two of them did find something to eat, for they could not go without food comfortably for too much longer.

"Alright, alright," Nick grumbled, pretending to be playfully grumpy about losing. "I surrender, I give in!"

"Hah... Yeah, like you had a choice..."

Judy did not rush through the pose, wriggling her toes on his bare chest as Nick grunted and puffed out his cheeks indignantly.

"Get off me then," Nick said, grumbling under his breath. "You've made your point."

"Oh?"

Judy grinned, leaning forward and cupping a paw to her ear, as if she couldn't quite hear him.

"If you tell me that I'm stronger than you, compliment me... Maybe I'll let you up."

"Oh, for fox's sake..."

Nick sighed and rolled his eyes.

"You're the best, Judy, so strong, so amazing. I could not help but succumb to the power of your skilful moves. Truly..." He paused, actually thinking through what he was going to say rather than letting the words stream from his lips. "Um... Yeah, you really made me think differently about predator and prey fights. You're something special, Hopps, and I should have seen that before. You're so damn agile, I don't know how you move so quickly sometimes."

"Aw, shucks, Nick, you're going to make me blush."

She grinned, though she rather enjoyed it. It had been in play but the fox's voice had taken on a more serious, praising tone - and one that she liked too. It was good to hear it.

"And I'm just a dumb, slow fox," he added on, the playfulness back with a self-deprecating twinkle in his eye. "Can't keep up with the bunny, of course, not even with a choke hold or a body slam. If only I was quicker, I could have snapped you up for my own."

Judy rolled her eyes and huffed, crossing her arms.

"Silly fox... But sometimes you insulting yourself works well for me too!"

She brightened up, shaking her head at him, though she understood that it was all in play with how the fox laughed up at her, his chest vibrating lightly under her foot. Finally, Judy let up, stepping back off him after taking a moment for her victory pose, grinning widely.

"Come on."

She helped him back up after having tripped him, though it was a clean move and not a dirty one, for which she was pleased. She liked to keep her moves smooth and clean, everything honed down to a fine art. For fighting was an art too, blending together different wrestling moves and martial arts attacks, along with the blocks. To focus on a single fighting style above all else, in her line of work, was never going to be something that she thought was a wise course of action.

Nick put his hand comfortably on the shoulder of the bunny's that was furthest away from him, though Judy did notice that he didn't put his weight down on that hand. She appreciated that, for there was still something of a height difference between them, as they were members of different species, that would always be in place. She supposed that she was fortunate that he was not as tall as other anthros like the rhino, even if the rhino was an agent who should have been on her side.

How things had changed...

But she finally had someone on her side as they headed off to the victor's choice of restaurant, their initial spy games over. Only time would tell just how things would change between them, where they would go, what they would do. Yet their skills would be put to the test.

The future held many adventures for them both.