Chapter Text
A young Judy Hopps hopped along with her parents through the crowd outside her school, utterly failing to restrain her energy. As she leaped from the asphalt to a nearby wall, she could feel the crisp spring air through her mock scrubs.
“I’m going to be a heart surgeon mom and dad! Anything is possible!” she cried, tearing off her paper mask and allowing it to trail in her hand behind her.
“It’s great that you want to be a doctor, honey, but aren’t you setting your sights a bit high?” her mom asked, betraying obvious concern.
“Your mother’s right Judy, becoming a doctor is tough enough, nobody from our family has even been to college, let alone gotten a doctorate. You really should settle, like we did!” he dad added.
“But mom, dad…” Judy started, barely getting a word out.
“Even if you did become a doctor, why a surgeon? There’s never been a bunny surgeon. Tons of nice, hard-working family docs like Dr. Thumperleaf, but never a surgeon. Why go down that road when the risk of being unhappy is so high?” her dad asked, still smiling.
“Settling, that’s the key to happiness honey!” her mom continued, giving her husband a hug as they continued to walk.
Years later, Judy Hopps stood next to the bags that contained all of her worldly possessions, getting ready to leave home yet again, recalling that night fondly. Though she was now “big city” as far as her neighbors and brothers and sisters were concerned, it apparently never got any easier for her parents to say goodbye, even if she always kept in touch the best she could.
College had been good to Judy. Pre-med wasn’t easy, but it also wasn’t nearly as hard as her parents had made it out to be. Chemistry, biology, physics, and a host of other classes had flown by, along with a host of roommates, acquaintances, and a few casual boyfriends. Judy wasn’t the type to let her life clutter up though, every thing she held on to was another thing that could possibly keep her back. At the end of four long years, she had a handful of friends she’d never see again, a diploma that marked her as graduating Summa Cum Laude that hung on her parent’s fridge, next to dozens of drawings done by her siblings, and the certainty that she was ready for the next step.
“It’s not too late honey, it will never be too late to come back home!” her mother extolled, giving her a crushing hug goodbye.
“And it’s especially not too late to change your mind about surgery…” her father added, wiping away a tear.
“I know, I know dad…” she said, trying her best to placate him while giving him a hug and pat on the back.
“But I could never be happy with just a doctorate in primary care, I could never be happy coming back here to work with Dr. Thumperleaf, you guys know that!”
Both of her parents cracked knowing smiles beneath the bittersweet tears.
“We know honey,” her mother began, “so go out there and save the world,” she finished, stepping back to allow Judy room to turn and board the bus that had pulled up behind them.
She was telling her parents the truth, she thought, as she boarded the now very familiar bus and waved yet another goodbye.
She had shadowed in the summers between her years of college, watching how medicine was done in a backwards town like hers. Dr. Thumperleaf was a good doctor, a great one even, but he had his limits. Without taking the extra years to get a full doctorate in mammal medicine, he could never practice on mammals much larger or smaller than him, he could never specialize outside of family medicine, and he could never perform an operation outside of an absolute disaster.
Judy couldn’t live like that. She had wanted to be a cardio-thoracic surgeon since before she could pronounce it. It was in her blood, her drive, a mission that made everything make sense. It didn’t matter if most surgeons were larger or smaller than her, or that there had never been a bunny surgeon, or even that academic medicine was so backwards and “traditional” that even being a female was cause for discrimination. She was going to accomplish her dreams, and nothing was going to stop her.
As she transferred from the bus to the train to Zootopia, she drank in the familiar sights of the big city. It filled her with the kind of exhilaration that she had never felt in her hometown.