Hi! Zootopia is an exceptionally lovely movie, so I wrote a fanfic about it after being out of this here game for about a year.

I wanted to give some face time to good ol' Gideon Grey, our early antagonist-turned-regular Mary Berry before our very eyes, while also including Nick Wilde and Judy Hopps like the stupidly enjoyable cop partnership and newfound behemoth of Tumblr shipping they are. So here, check this out, maybe you'll like?

A quick note: this prologue happens within the timeframe of the movie, specifically after the meeting Judy and Gideon have as kids but before she leaves Bunnyburrow on her way to Zootopia. The rest of the story following the prologue shall take place after the events of the movie entirely. Basically, just understand that Gideon done learned to bake real good by this point, but he and Judy's parents haven't struck up their partnership just yet.

Enough bold formatting, lol.

The Redemption of Gideon Grey

Prologue

His instructions were to leave the pies on the doorstep, and that suited Gideon Grey just fine.

Not that he normally went out of his way to avoid people; no, he was friendly, if not sociable back around the stretch of acreage where his kith and kin had lived for who knew how long, possibly ever since his kind first arose from those darker, more primitive times. Those green rolling hills where the honeysuckle mingled with the plentiful apple and grape crop had always been home, and he was proud to call it that, the place where the foxes outside Bunnyburrow made their claim to a nice, hard-earned living in a conciliatory world.

But outside that little world of his, well, things were not always hunky-dory. Though relations seemed to thaw, ever so slightly, with each passing harvest, the predator-prey dichotomy had not quite healed, and he could never quite find himself becoming remotely friendly with the animals his kind used to hunt, let alone develop a budding friendship. No fault of his nowadays and certainly none of theirs; it simply was not the way things befell Bunnyburrow and its surrounding countryside - not like Zootopia, where, he heard, all lived harmoniously.

The problem was that the long, dirt clod-ridden driveway onto which he was pulling his refurbished, reclaimed red truck with his name plastered prominently in white letters across its side happened to belong to a rabbit.

Gideon's truck rumbled down the dusty ground, easing in and out of the tiny potholes that dotted its surface. His red-furred paws drummed against the cool black wheel anxiously as the fox squinted his eyes against the sunset -flooded horizon to find the home, a quaint, two-story tan farmhouse with red curtains drawn over its double-hung windows. There was no one else in sight, though a green pickup truck lingered outside a red shack of a barn out back.

Nothing out of the ordinary; with the directions he was supplied, Gideon doubted he would encounter another soul during this, the first delivery of his burgeoning bakery business.

Well, first major delivery, at least. It was customary anywhere for the family and friends of an up-and-coming entrepreneur to sample the fruit of his or her labors, especially when that fruit was quite literally that - blueberries, apples, peaches, you name it, a teenaged Gideon Grey baked it into a crusty pastry, one which became more and more delectable as time went on. At first, his exploits were humored by his parents, cousins, various aunts and uncles, the neighbors and so on. But soon enough, he had developed quite the snack for baking, and now, a young canine looking to make his own way in the world, he had his potential stipend - if, of course, the others liked what he had to offer.

And that brought him there, to 133 Whitehare Lane, longtime residence of the Thumpers, who took up Gideon on his buy-one-get-one-free offer for a new customer, provided he, again, delivered the pastries to the front stoop of the house. There would be a Clawber Girl chewing tobacco tin outside the door, and his payment would be inside. Sorry for the unwelcoming disposition - we're usually not like this, you know, but we'll be out in the fields all day, and Pa doesn't like a distraction. You understand.

Gideon did understand, though as he neared the home, rumbling past rows upon rows of tomato plants, he could not quite shake his apprehension - and not just because of it being his first real sale.

He knew the Thumpers quite well, after all.

Back in his youth, when he attended school in Bunnyburrow - the only non-segregated schoolhouse for miles around, where his kind could mingle with the bunnies and sheep and other non-carnivores of the farmland - the fox was not quite an affable, friend-making kit who made the decision to allow all mammals at the school seem worthwhile. He had picked on his share of those who were perhaps once less fortunate in the food chain hierarchy than he, chief among them the Thumpers' young sons and daughters plus the Hopps girl who lived a little ways down the road. "Ya little dullard," his mother used to scold him when she caught wind of his bullying via the schoolteacher, an opossum named Miss Bush - who became a frequent caller and later a dear friend of the family because of her constant visits about the boy, but that was another story entirely.

Come to think of it, Gideon could not remember the last time he had seen any of the Thumper family; he had stayed mostly on the family farm after school and did not venture too far into town except on important occasions. He thought he had heard that the offspring nearest him in age - Blake, Bernice, Billy and Belle - had too stayed home, largely to care for their younger siblings still in school to that day. He scoffed at the farmhouse's size in that case; tight fit, he reckoned, though rabbits always seemed to make it work somehow.

Absentmindedly his steering wheel drumming intensified. Did they forgive him for what he had done as a pup? Did it even matter nowadays or was it water under the bridge? He had rehearsed a speech a few times should he and any of his unlucky prey ever cross paths again - it was bound to happen eventually - but he was never quite satisfied with the result. The amateur psychologist in him had chalked up his spotted past to the self-doubt he felt as a youngster, as many youth do at various points in their formative years, and that he had responded with anger, sometimes violence. He could never decide if it was a worthwhile explanation.

By the time his mind wandered back to the present, there he was, Gideon Grey, about to leave his first delivery on the Thumper homestead doorstep, having parked the truck a ways toward the road, gathered the pair of pies - both cherry - out of the back and made his way up the well-worn walkway that led to the front door. A porch swing lilted in the slight, cool fall breeze, its creaking the only sound he could pick up aside from the rustling of leaves in the crop fields surrounding him.

Like before, no one was in sight. Fleetingly Gideon thought he might have seen one of the curtains of the second-floor windows sway as though moved by some force, but even if it had, he thought little of it; it was entirely possible the Thumpers still had some young ones who would be undoubtedly curious to see what was being delivered and by whom. Even if it was a fox doing the delivery, these were not the dark times in which Gideon's ancestors and, certainly, Blake, Bernice, Billy and Belle's forerunners had once resided. There was Zootopia, after all, right?

After setting down the pies, Gideon's brow furrowed as he searched for the tobacco tin. Ah, there it was - just to the right of the front step, implanted into a bed of soil pregnant with sunflowers. The lid was off. Gideon peered inside and saw, to his surprise, not cash or coin, but, seemingly, a note.

Tentatively he reached a paw into the shiny cylinder and pulled out the piece of paper within. Yes, it was a note, and not perhaps one of those new-fangled bank notes or checks he had heard about but his family refused to use.

Its message held but one word: duck.

But Gideon had no time to do so, not even to consider whether the word referred to a bird or if he was supposed to cower in place, for not long after he had unfurled the paper from the tin did something impact his left forearm, exploding on contact and squirting a wet, seedy juice onto his light pink apron and plaid short-sleeved shirt, bits caking the white fur of his chin.

Dazed briefly out of surprise more than anything, the fox put a paw to his chin, brushing the remnants of whatever hit him onto his tongue. Its taste was unmistakable: tomato, no doubt about it.

And unlike the first, the next actually hit its mark, colliding with the right side of his head.

A low cry of alarm to emit from Gideon's muzzle following the second tomato - and yes, it was certainly another tomato, what with the abundance of red that he wiped quickly out of his eyes and which splattered against the porch before him. He raised his arms to his head instinctively, bowing vaguely with his head darting about, left to right and back again, at attention in case of another attack.

"Lookit what the cat dragged in, if that ain't Gideon Grey!"

The voice came from his right, the side with the much better aim. Though he worried it would leave him open to an assault from his left or somewhere else, the fox turned, perhaps against his better judgment, to find a beige-haired rabbit with that lazy eye he always used to love singling out when they went to school together: Blake Thumper. Beside him was Belle, flanking her older brother with an armful of tomatoes from their family's bountiful field at the ready.

Blake's gaze, even his not-so-good eye, burned with a triumphant, biting aversion under which Gideon could only cringe. Belle - he remembered her being quite the athlete in the schoolyard, perhaps hence her impeccable aim, the fox recalled - stood stoic, her eyes darting briefly to a spot behind Gideon, where he imagined more of her family stood at the ready.

"Got some nerve showin' your face 'round here, ya reckon?" Blake bellowed, taking few steps closer to the cowering fox. "Least of all after what you did back in school."

"Hadn't heard the name Gideon Grey in years," Belle added, her voice dripping with hostility. "Figured you packed up n' stayed home after nearly flunkin' outta school. Sure as heck didn't expect to see a business card, to tell the truth."

Gideon, breathing a little heavier still from the initial shock of the assailment, mustered up the courage to speak at last, taking one long, deep breath after Belle had finished talking herself. "Blake, Belle, I... I just wanted to apologize for how I be-"

Two more tomatoes splattered against the back of his shirt, catching him mid-rehearsed-sentence. Gideon whirled around and saw Billy and Bernice, among them at least half a dozen of the family's younger children, most of whom he did not recall ever meeting but scowled at him, distrusting, ears raised, all the same.

"Save the speech, fox," called Blake, shaking his head and grinning. "You don't get the liberty this time 'round."

"I... look, yer mom, she placed the order, look, I had no..."

Expectantly, Gideon glanced over at the pickup truck, still in its same old spot before the barn, and then to the house itself. He managed to steal a quick look at, indeed, the Thumpers' mother, gazing out solemnly from one of the upper windows. The moment their eyes met, the older rabbit, chin up, disappeared behind the red curtains.

"Really think we'd do business with a fox, Gideon?" asked Belle. "Can you get this dumb? Didn't think it was possible, even for a bumpkin like yourself."

"Naw," Blake began, sniffing once and rubbing his nose against his hand, "maybe some other parts're willin' to move on, maybe Zootopia's got that thing where all the prey and the predators live in armory or whatever the heck they call it, but we got a bone to pick with you."

This time, Gideon managed to evade the tomato launched from behind by one of the younger bunnies, but in doing so left him vulnerable to another shot from Belle, which caught him square in the jaw. The force brought the fox to one knee, and he grimaced through the sting it wrought, not even bothering in the moment to wipe the splatter from his fur, lips and teeth.

"That's for Judy Hopps, by the way," Belle said shortly. "Sure she'd want a piece of you after all this time if she hadn't gone off to be a big city cop at their academy, prob'ly gonna bust your kind each n' every day."

The beleaguered fox's mind drifted back to the apology he had rehearsed, the one that he meant with every fiber of his being, his sincere wish that everything could be fine between past tormenter and tormented. But he thought better of it as the throbbing ache of their last projectile seeped back into the front of his psyche. Not today, not here, not them. It was time to go.

Gideon pushed himself back up onto two legs and, brushing off his sullied apron with a quick paw flick, darted toward his truck, fumbling in his pocket to locate the keys. He found them in quick succession - at least something had gone right - and, after wrenching open the driver-side door, stabbed vainly at the ignition until he felt the one for his vehicle slide in brusquely.

He sighed aloud and started the motor, which purred to life effortlessly after all the work he and his father had taken to revitalize it. Paws back on the steering wheel, drumming, drumming.

"Here, have this partin' gift!"

He glanced up just in time to see another object coming his way - but not a flurry of tomatoes as expected or even a singular one. No, Blake and Belle had dashed to the front doorstep, whereupon each picked up the cherry pies over which Gideon had labored with particular care - first paying customer outside the usual folk, after all.

And both were now on a collision course with his windshield, and though Gideon tried to throw the truck into reverse and back out of their way, it was all in vain, and soon the glass before him was covered in red paste and bits of baked dough.

He had thought to install windshield wipers just days before, thankfully - at his mother's behest, in case he had to make deliveries in the rain - and their first test worked without fail, to Gideon's relief, as he peeled out of the dirt driveway and back onto the main road. The click-clack of the fox's steering wheel drumming slowly subsided, replaced with deep sobs of frustration and hurt, as the red truck with Gideon Grey's Real Good Baked Stuff on its side sped away from Bunnyburrow, back toward home.