Zootopia: Runaway: Gazelle's Story

Chapter 3: Sixteen Years Later

Gazelle woke up from the nightmare she was having, and saw the familiar room around her, a solace from the horrors she had experienced as a child. The room was not the nicest room, but she definitely was happier to see it than the burning remains of her childhood home.

She now sat up in a small, neat-but-shoddy room. The dusty wooden floor harbored an ugly dark red cotton rug that hadn't been cleaned all that much in the past few years. Her bed's single mattress was a tad lumpy, and not exactly the most comfortable place to sleep, made only marginally better by the soft sheets and heavy blanket. The closet off to her right held only two other outfits (a work outfit and the other a reasonably nice set of clothes), plus a hanger for the pajamas she was already wearing. The derelict desk across from her bed sagged like an overtired pig, and the snout motif on the handles of the drawers only made it appear far more like a pig. The sole source of light in the room, a lamp with a tortoiseshell shade, stood on a corner of the desk, casting a yellowy-green light into the room.

"Crud," Gazelle whispered to herself. "I must have left that on last night."

Don't get me wrong here. Gazelle was not totally pleased with the apartment she was in, but it was certainly better than what her old home would have been at this point. Her old home was nothing but ash.

It had been sixteen years now, sixteen years since her parents were killed at the hands of those evil predators and her home was destroyed. Sixteen years of nothing but foster care, state aid and being placed in less-than-comfortable residences like the apartment she inhabited now. It wasn't much of a surprise that the crew of the train that carried her to Capital City eventually found her when they were unloading the boxcar. From there on out, she had had pretty much only one stable home: one with the elderly engineer of the train. She had enjoyed living with Mr. Barr before he passed away.

But that was all in the past now.

With a grunt, Gazelle kicked off her sheets and climbed out of bed, tossing Amigo onto her badly-crumpled pillow. Grabbing her work clothes from a hanger, along with the one bottle of shampoo she had been able to buy recently, she headed towards the bathroom across the hall.

As she headed towards her door, however, she caught a glimpse of herself in her wall-mounted mirror, caught her breath, and paused for a few seconds to take a look.

In the span of sixteen years, the young animal with innocent brown eyes and knobby horns had flowered into a beautiful, mature female gazelle. She was tall with a naturally shapely figure, with fur so gold the early morning sunlight almost matched it in hue. Her bluish-grey horns had grown in from the small stumps she had had as a child to be longer than those of most of her family. The richness of her brown eyes was very similar to the color of coffee, a color she had seen from time to time in the Third Quarter: wondrously dark. The whiteness on her muzzle was as perfectly tan as the sand of the desert. Everything about the Gazelle in the mirror reminded her of... of...

No.

Gazelle shook off the idea that she looked anything like her mother. Just even entertaining that possibility was enough to bring tears to her eyes.

After a long, hot shower, Gazelle felt a little more able to focus, but she still had an undercurrent of weariness in her heart. Dressed in a pair of black sweatpants and a red t-shirt, Gazelle quickly put on both of the golden bangles she had kept with her all these years. No matter how much she grew, they were still able to fit around her slender, delicate wrists. Trying not to dwell on the origin of her bangles, Gazelle quickly grabbed her cheap, dusty pleather purse from her desk and headed down the stairs of her apartment building.