I've seen this meme of Max going around the freelance police tag for a minute and i unironically love it. So I drew something based off of it.
Max: "Have that meltdown! Regardless of merit, they can't stop you."
☻ ⁀➴ SUMMARY/SYNOPSIS : After a strange mishap during a case, Max finds himself stranded in the real world—alone, disoriented, and stuck in the form of what appears to be a simple stuffed rabbit. Meanwhile, a withdrawn teenage girl struggles through her everyday life, burdened by severe depression, isolation, and the crushing expectations of her overachieving parents. After an especially unbearable day at school, she stumbles across the “toy” rabbit—only for it to spring to life, leading to a chaotic and unsettling first encounter. Who knows how this will end.
꥟ ⁀➴ WORD COUNT/DURATION : None (yet)!!
ᥫ᭡ ⁀➴ WARNINGS/CAUTIONS : Depression, Emotional Distress, Themes of Isolation, Parental Pressure, Bullying/Ostracization, Hurt/Comfort Dynamics, Reversed-Isekaied!Max, HINTS OF Freelance Husbands (I love them sm)!!
ඞ ⁀➴ NOTES : HEHEHE I LOVE THIS SMMMM, AND I AM SO SORRY FOR HOW IT HAS BEEN TAKING!!! </3
♱ ⁀➴ TAGS : Max the Lagomorph, Teen Reader, Platonic Relationship, Found Family, Hurt/Comfort, Angst with Fluff, Father Figure Max, Depression Themes, Supernatural AU, Slow Burn Friendship
☻ ⁀➴ SUMMARY/SYNOPSIS : After a strange mishap during a case, Max finds himself stranded in the real world—alone, disoriented, and stuck in a different dimension. Meanwhile, a withdrawn teenage girl struggles through her everyday life, burdened by severe depression, isolation, and the crushing expectations of her overachieving parents. After an especially unbearable day at school, she stumbles across the “toy” rabbit—only for it to spring to life, leading to a chaotic and unsettling first encounter. Who knows how this will end.
꥟ ⁀➴ WORD COUNT/DURATION : 20,819 Characters ~ 3,325 Words
ᥫ᭡ ⁀➴ WARNINGS/CAUTIONS : Depression, Emotional Distress, Themes of Isolation, Parental Pressure, Bullying/Ostracization, Hurt/Comfort Dynamics, Reversed-Isekaied!Max, HINTS OF Freelance Husbands (I love them sm)!!
ඞ ⁀➴ NOTES : WOOO THE BEGINNING AND I AM REALLY GONNA ENJOY MAKING THIS SERIES!!
♱ ⁀➴ TAGS : Max the Lagomorph, Teen Reader, Platonic Relationship, Found Family, Hurt/Comfort, Angst with Fluff, Father Figure Max, Depression Themes, Supernatural AU, Slow Burn Friendship
The sniffle that escaped your nose was soft, exhausted—the kind that comes after hours of stifling frustration, when your body betrays you just to remind you how worn down you really are. God, you wanted nothing more than to be home, to collapse into the quiet sanctuary of your room where the world couldn’t claw at you anymore.
The rain fell in a fine mist, clinging to the city like a second skin, turning the streets into slick ribbons of reflected neon and streetlamp glow. It wasn’t a downpour—just enough to dampen sound, swallowing the chatter of passersby into a muffled hum. Conversations bled together—snatches of phone calls, laughter, the rhythmic tap of hurried footsteps against wet pavement—all dissolving into white noise against the backdrop of your exhaustion.
You had good news and bad news, a duality that felt almost cruel in its predictability.
The good news: it was Friday. Spring Break stretched ahead, a brief reprieve from the grind, and your parents—brilliant, distant, perpetually occupied—would barely be home. The apartment would be yours, silent and sprawling, a rare pocket of freedom.
The bad news: that freedom was an illusion. Your weekend was already a graveyard of obligations—chores piling up like unmarked headstones, homework assignments looming like overdue epitaphs. Fail a class? Not an option. Not with parents who wore their academic laurels like armor, who studied the fabric of the universe while you struggled to stitch together a passing grade.
You tugged your jacket tighter, the material damp beneath your fingers, as a gust of wind sliced through the gaps in your clothing, needling your skin. The voices around you sharpened suddenly—too loud, too close—and you gritted your teeth against the sensory overload. Too much. Always too much.
Sometimes you wished the ground would just open up and take you. Not permanently—just long enough to forget, to sink into the quiet dark where no one expected anything from you.
Your parents weren’t cruel. They weren’t. But their disappointment was a language you’d learned to translate early—the way their arms stayed crossed instead of opening, the way their sighs carried the weight of a question you could never answer: Why aren’t you better?
Scientists, both of them. Matter. Multiverses. Hypothetical dimensions where the laws of physics might bend. You’d wondered, more than once, if somewhere out there was a version of you who didn’t feel like a failed experiment. Someone brilliant, beloved. Someone who made their parents and peers proud.
Or maybe you didn’t exist in those other worlds at all. Maybe this was the only one where you got to be—this. Average. Isolated. A ghost in your own life, haunting the halls of a school that felt less like an education center and more like purgatory. The kids there carved their cruelty into you with precision—nicknames that stung worse than a slap, laughter that followed you like a shadow.
You exhaled, fogging the air in front of you, and adjusted your bag on your shoulder. The bus would’ve been faster, but you’d chosen to walk. The rain was worth it if it meant avoiding the sneers, the whispered jabs, the way the seats always seemed to empty around you. Hypothermia was preferable than heated glares.
As you walked, you inventoried the weekend ahead—laundry, vacuuming, the mountain of assignments you’d been avoiding. The apartment would be empty. Quiet. Your parents would check in, of course, but it would be late, perfunctory. A text. A creak of the door past midnight, long after you’d pretended to be asleep.
You missed them, sometimes. Even when they were home, they weren’t there, always half-lost in equations and theories. When was the last time they’d really seen you?
The thought curled like smoke in your chest, bitter and familiar, and you barely noticed as the crowd thinned around you, footsteps fading until yours were the only ones left echoing against the wet concrete.
Time dragged, as it always did when you were alone with your thoughts. Spring Break. Freedom. A joke, really.
Then—sound.
Not the usual city noise, but something wrong—a warping, resonant hum that vibrated in your teeth before it even registered in your ears. You clapped your hands over them instinctively, wincing as the sound crescendoed, sharp enough to border on pain.
From the mouth of a nearby alley, a glow pulsed—unnatural, electric—casting jagged shadows against the brick walls. Your body screamed to run, but your feet stayed rooted, curiosity a hook in your ribs.
The hum cut off abruptly, leaving a silence that rang louder than the noise.
Then—impact. A thud, heavy and wet, like something hitting a dumpster at speed. A curse, sharp and startled, before—
Silence again.
You blinked.
"...What the hell?"
The street was empty. No heads turned. No shouts of alarm. Just you, the rain, and the lingering sense that something had happened, something that no one else had noticed.
A sigh shuddered out of you, frustration warring with dread. You didn’t want to investigate. You didn’t. But the alternative—walking away, pretending you hadn’t seen—felt worse.
Your feet moved before you could second-guess them, carrying you toward the alley’s mouth. Curiosity killed the cat, sure—but maybe, just this once, it wouldn’t kill you.
Or maybe it would.
You stepped into the dark.
The alley exhaled its stale breath against your cheeks as you hesitated at the threshold—a thick, metallic exhalation that carried the iron tang of rusted pipes and the stagnant musk of rainwater left to fester in forgotten crevices.
The ambient hum of the city didn't fade behind you so much as snap like a taut wire, severed by some invisible demarcation where sound went to die. Even the rain lost its rhythm here, its patter against the skeletal fire escapes above sounding muffled, warped, as if filtered through layers of wet gauze.
Your pulse fluttered against your throat like a trapped moth.
"Hello?"
The word dissolved into the quiet air almost immediately, swallowed whole by the oppressive stillness that clung to the alley's walls like grime. No echo. No response. Just the slow drip of water from a broken gutter somewhere overhead.
A breath escaped you—part nervous laughter, part resigned sigh. Investigating strange occurrences in shadowed alleys ranked somewhere between "spectacularly bad life choices" and "how urban legends got started." Yet here you were, soles scraping against pavement slick with decades of accumulated filth, stepping deeper into the gloom despite every survival instinct screaming at you to turn back.
The air thickened with each step, growing warmer—not the comforting warmth of shelter, but the cloying, oppressive heat of a fever dream. Your skin prickled beneath it, damp with something that wasn't entirely sweat.
Then something white and odd caught your eye.
A crumpled form near the alley's far wall, half-concealed behind a toppled crate. Your stomach lurched before your brain could fully process the shape.
"—Shit."
You were moving before conscious thought could intervene, sneakers splashing through shallow puddles, heart hammering against your ribs. Your mind conjured horrors—broken limbs, wet gasps, the coppery stench of blood—but as the distance closed, the silhouette resolved into something smaller.
A rabbit.
Not flesh and blood, but plush fabric, its once-white fur darkened by rainwater, one ear bent at a grotesque angle where it had struck the pavement. The sight should've been reassuring. It wasn't.
You crouched slowly, knees protesting the damp concrete. Up close, the rabbit was all wrong. As far as you could see, there wasn’t any stitching or lining to show where each limb has been sewn. Its face lacked the vacant sweetness of childhood companions; instead, its expression held a quiet, unsettling intensity, like it had been frozen mid-snarl.
"...What the hell?"
Your fingers hovered above it, trembling slightly. The rabbit's fur was damp beneath your touch, but beneath that…
….The white pile had the springy resilience of real animal fur, dense and slightly oily beneath your fingertips. Your stomach lurched—had someone skinned a—?
Heat.
Faint, flickering, but unmistakably alive. You recoiled as if burned.
"Nope. Absolutely not."
You turned on your heel, ready to sprint away, pretend that you never stumbled across this, and you could try and enjoy the one week break without worrying you stole someone’s stuffed animal.
But your body betrayed you, unsurprisingly. You went still and reluctantly turned your head to stare at the short—albeit, its still a huge, and it reminds you of one of those prizes you never win, but you want to just because of the size—white stuffed creature.
You heaved a sigh, and walked back to it.
Lifting the rabbit, despite your better judgment, it weighed more than it should have—not by much, but enough to make your muscles tense with unease. Water dripped from its ears as you turned it over, revealing a patch of darker fabric on its chest. Not dirt. Not a stain.
A badge. Tiny, fraying at the edges, but unmistakable: a star-and-shield emblem, the kind worn by officers.
Police Freelance.
A laugh bubbled up your throat—high, unsteady, bordering on hysterical. "Okay. Sure. Why the fuck not."
The rabbit hung limp in your grip, its glass-bead eyes catching the distant glow of a streetlight, reflecting nothing. You told yourself it was just a discarded toy. That the warmth had been a trick of the damp air. That the badge meant less than nothing.
But when you shoved it into your backpack, the weight settled against your spine like a promise—or a threat.
~~~
The apartment swallowed you whole the moment you crossed the threshold. Not with warmth or familiarity, but with a silence so thick it pressed against your eardrums like cotton stuffed too deep. This wasn't the comfortable hush of well-worn solitude—it was the hollow vacuum of a space that had forgotten how to hold life. Even your breath sounded obscenely loud as you kicked the door shut behind you with more force than necessary.
"Home sweet home," you muttered to no one, tasting the bitter tang of irony on your tongue. Your backpack slid down your arm like a dead weight, hitting the hardwood with a dull thud that reverberated through the empty space. The sound lingered oddly, as if the apartment itself was reluctant to let it fade.
You stared at the bag like it might grow teeth and explain itself. When it didn't—because of course it didn't—you dragged a calloused palm down your face hard enough to leave temporary grooves in your skin. "Get your shit together," you told the empty room, your voice scratching against the silence like sandpaper.
The ritual was automatic—toes hooking under sneakers, nudging them off without breaking stride, the habitual kick toward the shoe pile that never stayed tidy. You crouched slowly, fingers hesitating on the backpack's zipper like a bomb tech disarming an explosive. The metal teeth parted with theatrical slowness, revealing...
Nothing unusual. Just clothes. Notebooks. The rabbit.
It lay exactly where you'd stuffed it hours ago, its limp form somehow both too heavy and too light in your hands. The fur—real fur, your brain supplied unhelpfully—was damp with something you refused to think about too hard. The police badge pinned to its chest caught the fading daylight through the blinds, casting jagged reflections across your palms.
"Yeah," you told it, because talking to inanimate objects was definitely normal behavior now. "Still fucked up."
The mattress springs protested as you deposited the rabbit near your pillow, the dip in the bedding disproportionately deep for something that should weigh ounces. Your fingers lingered near its ear—the left one bent at that unnatural angle—before compulsively smoothing it into something approximating normalcy.
"People fix things," you announced to the ceiling, as if daring some invisible observer to contradict you. "That's a thing normal people do." The ceiling didn't answer. The rabbit didn't either, which was somehow worse.
The chair groaned as you threw yourself into it, the computer's startup chime cutting through the silence like a scalpel. Blue light washed over your face, highlighting the bags under your eyes that no amount of concealer could hide these days. Your fingers danced over the keyboard in aborted movements, the search bar blinking expectantly.
weird fucking rabbit doll with badge what the hell
are real fur plush toy legal??
can stuffed animals be evidence
The results were depressingly mundane—endless eBay listings for vintage Steiff rabbits, forum debates about ethical taxidermy, Pinterest boards of cursed-looking handmade dolls. Nothing even adjacent to the unsettling thing currently occupying your bed.
The cursor blinked mockingly as your fingers hovered over the keyboard, twitching with restless energy. You clicked through search results with increasing desperation, each tap of the mouse sharper than the last—like punctuation marks to your growing frustration. The glow of the monitor painted hollows beneath your eyes in ghostly blue, turning your reflection into something gaunt and unfamiliar in the darkened screen.
"That's not—" You hissed through clenched teeth, scrolling faster. "Why would—ew, no—"
Nothing useful. Nothing real. Just endless digital detritus that slid through your fingers like water. Your jaw tightened until the muscle twitched, molars grinding against each other with quiet violence.
"Of course." The words dripped with bitter amusement. Because when had anything in your life ever lined up neatly? When had the universe ever handed you answers wrapped in pretty paper?
A soft thud from behind made your shoulders lock. The sound was barely audible—just fabric shifting against fabric—but in the apartment's hungry silence, it might as well have been a gunshot. You turned your head by degrees, neck protesting the slow motion.
The rabbit sat exactly where you'd left it.
On the rumpled bedsheet.
Motionless.
"...Okay." You exhaled through your nose, the breath whistling slightly in your nostrils.
You stared for three heartbeats longer than necessary before wrenching your attention back to the screen. "Apartment noises," you muttered, mostly to hear your own voice drown out the pounding in your ears. "Old building. Pipes. Gravity." A pause. "Whatever."
Totally normal.
Your fingers twitched toward the rabbit before you'd consciously decided to move them. The fur was still faintly damp when you lifted it—not with water, your traitorous brain supplied—and the badge clinked softly against your keyboard when you set it down.
"...Okay," you whispered this time, as if volume might break some fragile equilibrium. "Research round two."
Your fingertips hovered over the keys, hesitating. Then, with deliberate slowness, you typed:
white rabbit detective badge cartoon
The enter key echoed like a judge's gavel.
Images exploded across the screen in a riot of color—cartoons and comics and pixel art tumbling over each other in chaotic succession. Anthropomorphic rabbits in trench coats, rabbits with magnifying glasses, rabbits holding guns that looked both comically oversized and disturbingly real.
You leaned forward until your nose nearly touched the screen, squinting at one particular illustration.
"...No way."
Two rabbits—one tall and lanky, the other compact and scowling. Their designs sparked something like recognition, the kind of half-memory you get from Saturday morning cartoons watched through a sleep-fogged haze.
Your gaze darted between the screen and the... thing sitting beside your mouse.
Then away.
"No." The word came out sharper than intended. "Not even close."
Next tab. Another rabbit detective—sleeker lines, smoother animation. Wrong. Too polished. Too safe. Too much like something that belonged safely behind a television screen.
Tab after tab opened and closed beneath your fingers, each click a little more desperate than the last. Every image was wrong in its own special way—too cute, too clean, proportions off just enough to make your stomach tighten with frustrated recognition.
"Not him," you muttered, clicking through another gallery of fan art. "Not him either."
Your cursor hovered over an image that made your pulse stutter—something in the hunch of the shoulders, the slant of the ears. The loading icon spun, and for one breathless moment you thought—
The page resolved.
"Nope."
You slumped back in your chair, the springs creaking ominously. The rabbit on your desk stared blankly ahead, its badge catching the light at an angle that made the engraving illegible.
"...What even are you?"
Behind you, the sheets rustled again.
You didn't turn around.
Instead, you typed slowly now, each keypress deliberate:
rabbit detective duo 90s animation
anthropomorphic rabbit detective short
indie comic rabbit detective violent humor
The results came faster this time, flooding your vision with more almost-rights and not-quites. Your eyes burned from the screen's glare, but you kept scrolling until the images blurred at the edges.
A thought crystallized in the back of your mind—not fear yet, just the cold prickling of wrongness. This wasn't like searching for a forgotten toy or obscure cartoon. This felt like chasing something that wasn't supposed to be caught.
You clicked one last image—a rabbit detective smirking at the viewer, one paw resting cockily on a holstered gun. Closer. Definitely closer.
"...Wait."
You studied the digital rendering, then the physical rabbit beside you. Same species. Same aesthetic. Same general idea.
But this one didn’t have the sharp teeth. Dammit.
The rabbit on your desk looked like it had been pulled mid-stride from something real and violent and messy. A cartoon, definitely.
You swallowed thickly.
"...You're not any of these."
The cursor blinked patiently. You added one last word:
rabbit detective violent cartoon with sharp teeth
You really couldn’t believe you forgotten to add the last two words.
Enter.
The screen refreshed—and there they were.
Two figures—one rabbit, one canine—caught mid-action in various panels. The rabbit was all sharp edges and sharper expressions, his partner towering beside him with weary amusement. The art varied wildly between pages—sometimes clean and polished, sometimes rough and frantic—but the energy remained constant: chaotic, snarky, unpredictably alive.
Your breath caught.
"...Oh."
The realization settled somewhere behind your ribs, heavy and undeniable.
Click.
More images. Different angles. Different expressions. Same unmistakable presence.
Your gaze flicked between screen and desk, desk and screen.
"...You're from this."
Because while the essence matched, the details didn't. Every digital version was simplified—stylized for mass consumption. None of them carried the weight of the thing currently occupying your desk space.
The rabbit didn't feel like fiction.
It felt like an interruption—something paused mid-motion and waiting to continue.
Slowly, so slowly, you turned your head.
The rabbit—Max, you finally figured it out—hadn't moved.
But his left ear—the one you'd straightened earlier—was bent again at that unnatural angle.
You turned back to the monitor with a sharp inhale.
"Sleep deprivation," you announced to the empty room. "That's what this is. Fantastic."
The search results remained stubbornly open on your screen, their glow casting elongated shadows across the desk like silent spectators. A faint electrical hum emanated from the monitor, barely audible beneath the oppressive quiet of the apartment.
Then, your phone’s screen flickered—just once—as a notification materialized in the lower right corner.
Mom.
Your fingers froze mid-air, hovering above the keyboard. Something in your chest tightened preemptively, a familiar knot forming behind your ribs before you’d even clicked the message.
Running late. Something’s come up at the lab.
Three dots appeared. Disappeared. Reappeared. Typing. Stopping. Typing again.
Actually—we won’t be home tonight. Or tomorrow. Don’t wait up.
Another pause. Just long enough for the silence to settle heavier around your shoulders.
There’s food in the fridge. Finish your assignments. We’ll check in when we can.
No Are you okay?
No How was your day?
No Enjoy Spring Break!
Just instructions. Like always.
The knot in your chest twisted tighter. A dull ache radiated outward, settling somewhere behind your sternum.
“…Yeah. Okay.” The words tasted bitter—automatic and hollow.
Your fingers moved mechanically across the keyboard, typing out a response you’d sent a hundred times before:
ok
Sent.
You stared at the screen, watching the message status change to Delivered. The read receipt never appeared. Of course it didn’t.
Two nights.
Alone.
Again.
Your hands fell away from the keyboard, limp in your lap. The apartment absorbed the movement without comment, the silence thickening until it pressed against your eardrums.
