The rain.
The rain slammed the city, with a force only matching the roar of the loudest of lions.
The sky was a deep grey, darkening out the sun for thousands of miles. It kept the city in a shroud.
This city was Zootopia, and dear reader, don't let the name deceive you; this is no utopia.
This is, for lack of a better world, a grey, dirty hell; where the power hungry ran a tyranny, and the citizens were treated in the most vile and unfair ways imaginable.
Predatory animals, while rather docile in this modern time, were looked down upon as monsters. Monsters with only the urge to kill, not raise families, not love, not learn; but to kill.
This is where the story starts, with one of these "monsters", a fox named Nick P. Wilde, sitting at his window desk in his dark room, on August 29th, 1999.
¤
The fox's room was dark, and musty. The walls and low ceiling enclosed him in their claustrophobic way, the light bulb burnt out from many months ago. A deep, dark blue blanketed the rough, carved wood, and... two quivering arms.
One laying down on the table, scarred, fur in miss matched patterns. The other was above it, holding an Exact-o knife. The fox was shaking, eyes dilated to dots the size of an ant.
His breath was shaking, and his stomach felt empty, cold sweat breaking out over his fur. His muzzle was contracted, fear carved into his face.
The blade was sharp and shiny, while his fur was a spiced reddish orange. Such a stark contrast.
Lined up against the windowsill on the desk, were dozens of hackysack dolls, all seemingly homemade, and needles shoved inside of them. They seemed to be as full of pain, as were Nick's eyes.
The fox felt his eyes burning, tears began to form in the corners of them, and he brought the exact-o knife down, and he cut a diagonal line in his flesh.
He screamed; screamed with an intensity that rivaled the heat of a boiling sun. He cut and cut, until there were three X's carved in his right arm, bleeding a deep, dark, shineless crimson.
His breathing was erratic, his body shook with tremors, and he moaned in pain, moaned with hurt.
His shaking eyes glanced to the desk, where the dolls were all lined up, faceless and nameless.
They locked onto the pins in the dolls.
Dolls of voodoo are stuck with pins.
A voice rang in his ears, a very angry, horrible voice; that didn't exist.
He gulped, and with reached to pull a pin out of one of the dolls.
The pin was dull, no shine, but all the more sharp at the end. With his quivering finger, he jabbed into his arm, alongside the heavily bleeding x's.
A pin for each of us and our sins.
Nick cried out in pain, he reached for another pin, and jabbed it, then another and another.
Soon, his arm was stuck with twelve pins, all bleeding in thin lines, making their ways to the thick, black oozing crimson waves from the larger X's.
He whimpered, tears tearing down his voice. They were supposed to take away the emotion. The anger. The sadness. It did nothing, everytime.
But... He still did it every Thursday. The day his parents had died.
This was the not only the day his father had finally kicked the fucking bucket (good riddance, Nick had thought), but the day father Wilde went off his rockers and hit his mother one last time too hard...
Nick cried outloud, moaning in sorrowful pain.
He wanted the pain to somehow fix him. Fix him. Fix him.
"Fix me..."
He stared at the blood, how it oozed, how the flesh was torn up.
"Fixx me.."
The X's stared back, sneering in their bloody ways.
"FIXXX ME!"
The blood flowed, and so did his tears. Nick gritted his teeth and stared deep into the window, managing to make out his faint reflection.
His fur was ragged, eyes drooping, black underlining his eyes like a slut with too much mascara.
He was a slut, a slut for pain.
And he hated it.
Nick Wilde, 22, parentless; was a depressed schizophrenic.
XXX
After the cuts just started to have the blood congeal, the fox got ready to go to work.
His hands were dirty, his pockets empty of any money; dressed in janitor overalls. He put on the worn baseball cap, with a D.P.C.U. logo on the face.
A white paw in a trash bag was stitched on the coveralls, a logo that was more like a label, a smug little label that totally degraded the worker. It just snickered; look at me, I pick up dead predators, like myself.
It was funny that the public service only employed predators.
Maybe it was a way of striking fear into their hearts.
Nick brushed his teeth in his dirty sink, didn't bother to comb his fur, and took his medications.
Then Nick noticed himself in the mirror. His face was a sad, slightly open maw. His eyes were anxious and tired, and he looked like a dark, depressed cloud.
Then he saw the blinking collar at his neck, which inside, held the needle which killed predators when they stepped out of line.
Which created the need for the job he currently worked at.
He turned his eyes away in disgust. They didn't even trigger for real reasons anymore, any predator that even remotely raised their heartrate was in danger of having that needle penetrate their throats.
It only made him feel worse. More sad... Mommy was looking down from heaven and instead of her little boy being successful, happy; he was cutting himself, crying, staring at old pictures of mommy and daddy when they used to love each other.
Nick wanted to die. But he couldn't bring himself to do so.
Instead, he marched like a good little tin soldier out his apartment, ready to pick up the bodies of the deceased, of his own kind.
While he was very much alive, inside;
Nick was dead.
¤
"Momma?"
Nick's mother gently held her son to her breast, looking to the skies together.
Nick's father was in the tree beside them, hammering away at a tree house, Mrs. Wilde taking glances at his back muscles working with each swing.
She smiled, and sipped on her iced tea. Her son giggled and pointed to the sky.
"Momma, I wanna be a spaceman when I grow up!"
His mother's heart melted with happiness, and she hadn't felt any happier.
"This is Zootopia Nick. You can be anything you want to be."
Above, while hammering away peacefully at a board on the clubhouse he was building his son, he felt a little headache head his way, something normal.
Only it wasn't normal.
Today, Razor E. Wilde had a tumor that would later effect his mental stability, began to grow in his brain. While only the size of a speck of dust at the moment, it would later escalate to something that would change the course of his son's life.
He would be the shaman, and his son would be a voodoo doll.
Razor E. Wilde was now playing the game as a Fixxxer.