Zootopia Fanthologies: A Birthday Hope

Time Setting: March 4th, 2017, the year after the events of the first film

The midmorning spring sun shone through the window blinds in the ZPD bullpen, dappling the tables and leftover coffee cups with a glorious golden-white light.

Now, on most days, the entire bullpen would be full of chattering, eager police officers who would be subsequently yelled at to quiet down by good ol' grumpy Chief Bogo. In fact, this happened almost every day at the exact same time: 11:00 p.m.

Now, however, there was only one occupant, and the time on the ZPD clock measured 11:30. This was for one reason and one reason only.

It was Trash Day.

Officer Nick Wilde groaned inwardly as he walked around the bullpen gathering up pencil shavings, leftover pieces of paper, and the occasional chocolate-chip tiger-head-shaped cookie. Since he knew that Officer Fangmeyer, the tiger, had an ever-thoughtful mother who repeatedly mailed him cookies, Nick had a sneaky feeling he was eating them in the bullpen when he wasn't supposed to.

Not that Nick was actually that offended, even at the trash-gathering. However, collecting the trash around the Zootopia Police Department's premises was not exactly what he'd expected to be doing on this particular day.

Today was Nick's twenty-eighth birthday.

Twenty-eight years ago today, Nick had come into the world as a tiny red fox kit whose little, green eyes were closed for the first week of his existence.

As Nick started work at the back of the room and began to gather up a few more wads of crumpled-up scrap paper and toss them into his plastic wastebasket, he reminisced about birthdays past.

As far back as Nick could remember, his mother and father had celebrated his birth with a few cherished standbys: lunch at Suzi's bake shop and ice cream parlor in the Canal District, a movie at Southside Theater in Savanna Central (there were many good movies that came out around his birthday in March), and a visit to his Uncle Jack's apartment downtown. Those were the times when Nick felt the happiest, he recalled now. The times when it seemed like nothing was happening between his parents.

But, ultimately, things weren't quite that way in his household.

His father, John Wilde, was the embodiment of the rebel spirit found in the darkest recesses of a fox's heart. He wanted to be the kind of animal that was unpredictable, sly and wild, wanting to steal and be stolen from, for that was, he reasoned, the only place a fox could truly be happy. He was also the only fox Nick ever knew to have a detachable tail, a prosthetic made after an unfortunate accident.

Nick's mother Hope was the total opposite of his father. She was always on the conservative side, and that life wasn't just about being sly. These differences sparked many disagreements between his parents, causing Nick to have a slightly upsetting childhood.

Fortunately, that was all in the past.

As Nick walked to the forefront of the bullpen, he saw a pile of note papers, one of which was emblazoned with highlighted contact info and a name, written in his best friend Judy Hopps' handwriting: "Mrs. Kanin, 10:00 am, March 5."

Paying the text no mind, Nick was about to toss the stuff into the trash when all of a sudden—

"Wait! Don't touch that!" Judy barked.

Officer Judy Hopps' compact rabbity frame stood in the doorway to the bullpen, a look of near-panic on her face.

Nick, meanwhile, leapt about a foot-and-a-half off the ground and dropped his wastebasket, sending scrap paper, used sticky notes and the occasional mound of cookie crumbs flying everywhere.