Chapter Text
Tundratown segregated district, 1966
It is here we find our protagonist, a 25 year old arctic wolf named Dimitry Fangoff in a dumpster outside a synthetic leather factory scavenging for whatever he could make useful. He had good luck with some belts that weren't deemed up to quality.
"Jackpot" he thought as he pulled out a near perfect synthetic leather jacket. The only problem he could see is a massive hole that nearly completely separated its right sleeve from the rest of the jacket. It could be fixed pretty easily. Dimitry was a pretty smart and crafty wolf who was quite good with clothes on account his mother worked with them too before she worked herself to death about a year prior, well the official cause was a heart attack caused by the drugs she took to retain her energy but that is essentially working yourself to death.
He put this jacket in his worn messenger bag that he kept his stuff in whether it be books or bags of food or raw materials he found. Of course, he knew carrying this around while being a wolf made him look suspicious to the cops, who would find any reason to strip search a pred even if they weren't doing anything of note. Dimitry swore some of those cops just had some fetish for predators but of course they wouldn't admit it. After all, nearly every aspect of life in Zootopia mandated that predators be segregated from prey. For all the Zootopian politicians cheering on the achievement for the level of trust they supposedly have to allow a city where Predators & Prey live together, they certainly don't have any of that trust. Dimitry couldn't count the number of times he heard of Predators being wrongfully detained, injured or even killed just for the crime of walking around minding their own business in the prey part of town. They always say that predator animals just have some biological urge to kill anything with a heartbeat just because, not even for food. Maybe tens of thousands of years ago but certainly not now. No predator Dimitry has ever met including himself has shown any remote interest in eating other mammals. Predators, Prey, Dimitry hated those words so much. They hadn't had any relevance since the time to first proto city states of mammals began showing up and bordering each other. Even before, there's no way that it was only predators that killed prey. Prey have been shown to be just as violent if not more violent than predators. It's not like the prey animals never brutalized corpses like predators did. Prey even used each other's corpses for material, yeah they didn't eat the corpses generally but Bovines for instance still made leather from their own family member's bodies as part of a mourning ritual. Not to mention the underground skin trade which is still going on.
"I really should stop thinking about this shit, I know it's unfair." Dimitry thought to himself as he navigated his way through the back alleys to avoid cops. Finally, he made it to the apartment building he lived in. Some unkempt former boarding house built in the mid 1800s and hasn't been officially renovated since the 1910s. Here he lived in a tiny room with his mother and father before his mother died and his father was arrested, arrested for what? Dimitry never knew. Dimitry barely even remembers his father. He's been in prison for at least 20 years at this point. Dimitry opened the door to his depressing apartment where he turned on the sink and filled up a tin tub with soapy water and he began gently rinsing his new jacket before drying it by turning the oven on low heat and leaving his jacket on the counter next to the oven. He then stripped off the clothes he was wearing and began going through the same process. Now, Dimitry is completely naked and he moves the tub closer to the sink where he steps into the tub and he takes a washcloth from beside the sink before scrubbing the washcloth with a bar of soap and then soaking it in sink water. Dimitry then proceeded to scrub all over his body with this washcloth as he scrubbed himself he just thought about the lives of all those rich politicians, all prey that have massive bath tubs with hot water and some of them probably have servants washing them for them. The thought of that almost made Dimitry puke.
When he was done with bathing, he grabbed a pair of old but clean boxer briefs from his clean laundry basket and put them on. They were full of holes and the fabric looked like it was about to give way but these boxer briefs were the only pair of undergarments he still had, sure; part of his ballsack was hanging out from one of the holes and you more than likely can see the skin of his penis through the fabric but the fact that they haven't disintegrated yet is a win in his eyes. He turned off the lights and oven before turning on the radio and then laying down on the two mattresses that he slept on.
When the dawn came, he put on his newly washed clothes. A white sweater, khaki bell bottoms, his new leather jacket topped off with his synthetic leather belt and a peace symbol necklace. Dimitry stepped out his apartment building and leaned on the wall before taking out his lighter and lighting up a cigarette for a quick smoke before his hard day of work.