Boxer had led him right back through to the roadside before Peter came back to his senses. He promptly turned on the high-pitched courtier, but the question "Why?" caught in his throat, choked amongst all the other questions Peter wanted to ask first as well. Boxer didn't hang around long enough to answer any of them. He snorted, as he usually did, having got said nasal activity perfected as a form of communication. He could say anything with a snort, but Peter knew full well that all he was saying with them now was a definitive fuck off.

So Boxer returned through the bushes, leaving Peter standing on the hard shoulder, giddy with a mix of rage and confusion. A few moments later, Mark, Tom, Kurt, Chris and Dave came bounding down the road toward him.

"Oh, Pete, this can't be happening!" Tom wailed.

"This is worse than the legend!" Mark hollered.

"You!" Peter spat, turning on Kurt straight away. "You! You knew about this, didn't you? You knew about this and you didn't even warn us! You've been keeping it from us all this time! I knew there was something!"

Kurt didn't step back, even when Peter stormed up close to confront him. It wasn't that he wasn't afraid. Indeed, he had expected this.

"Yes, of course I knew," he said, his tone a mixture of both solemnity and bitterness. "What exactly did you think the Roadkill Turnpike People's Front was rebelling against, Peter? Morellius' disdain for us captive breds? Give us some credit, why don't you. This is why we live on a fucking roundabout!"

His lip curled up into a snarl as he said it.

"So why didn't you tell us, Kurt?" Peter ranted. "You had every chance. I asked you more than once. But you didn't say a word. You even warned me about Mopsy's chances here. You said she'd be very welcome. But you didn't explain why. You never said a word. Why? Why not, Kurt?"

"Oh, think about it, Pete," Kurt replied, somewhat flippantly, as if to dismiss Peter's burgeoning anger. "If I'd told you back at the roundabout you would have had this reaction back there. And where would it have got us? I can just imagine how that conversation with Morellius would have gone. We'd all be dead by now."

Peter snorted. Sounded a bit like Boxer.

"And you know it," Kurt concluded gruffly.

"Bullshit!" Peter growled. "I would have gone into that encounter informed and knowledgeable. As it was, he always had the upper hand."

"Yes," Kurt interrupted. "Because he's His Imperial Majesty, Emperor Morellius the Seventy Sixth, Esteemed Ruler of Roadkill Turnpike and all its Environs. He was always going to have the upper hand, Pete. Even if you'd gone in there half-cocked and ready to fight him over your daughter."

Peter started to chew his tongue and stew over the words Kurt was berating him with. The wannabe revolutionary had some sound points.

"I just..." he said slowly, quietly. "I just... hate to imagine her... Mopsy, being somewhere in the middle of all that. She's... she's so small and innocent. She's never taken a lover. Yet here... here she has no other purpose."

Kurt nodded sagely. "And perhaps now you won't scoff at the fact that there are only three members of the Roadkill Turnpike People's Front," he said. "Because, Peter, it's not me you should be badgering. We're the ones who do care."

Peter bowed his head, going quiet all of sudden.

"How did things get like this?" Mark hissed.

"It started just after this Roadkill Turnpike war that's made it into your ancient legends," Chris explained. "That lasted all of a few minutes. Decimated the population of the colony. Cut it almost in half."

"Quite," Kurt agreed. "And it wasn't even a war, was it? It was just rabbits getting run over by cars, as per usual. No, they decided another tact was needed. They needed to keep the warren alive, but they couldn't stop the humans killing off rabbits at the astonishing rate they now were. You must bear in mind, this was just after the building of Roadkill Turnpike itself. Anyway, one rabbit had a solution."

"Emperor Morellius!" Dave piped up.

"This Emperor Morellius?" Peter asked.

"No," Kurt went on. "The first one. He's the seventy-sixth. They all take the same name. It's part of some familial legend. They maintain that each Morellius, the son of the last, is the perfect copy of his father. In that way, whilst he appears to live and die as other rabbits do, as long as he fathers children, there is always a replacement Morellius to follow in his paw-prints."

"It's all about sex," Dave chirped cheekily.

Tom shook his head. "Seventy-sixth?" he repeated. "If this has been going on for seventy-six generations... well, that's nearly forever!"

"Yes," Kurt said. "Anyway, it was his solution that rather than try and stop the humans killing us, that we breed to such a degree that they can never manage to kill us all without digging up the entire warren or something."

Peter began shaking his head as well. This was unbelievable.

"At first," Kurt continued. "Or so we hear now, rabbits just bred normally. We rabbits like to breed. We're famous in the animal kingdom for it. But still, numbers continued to fall at a drastic rate. Something more was needed. So, it was agreed, unanimously, by all the rabbits of Roadkill Turnpike, to extend the breeding season so that rabbits could breed at any time of the year."

"Didn't work," Chris muttered.

"No," Kurt said. "It didn't. Rabbits were still only breeding several times a year. And now established mating partners were being broken up by the new junction above the warren and people were refusing to take another mate. Numbers fell beneath two hundred before the second Emperor Morellius came to power and changed everything. He was an evil, evil rabbit."

Dave spat at the sound of his name.

"And supposedly the ugliest in-bred little runt ever to be squeezed out of a rabbit's womb, as well," Kurt explained. "Nobody wanted to be his mate, did they? So one day he decreed that all females should become enforced breeders. One suspects it was just because he wanted to get his end away..."

"The third Emperor Morellius was a bit better, though," Chris pointed out.

"Oh, yes," Kurt said. "Not his father's son, that's for sure. He was a handsome, effeminate fellow who felt a little guilty about effectively enslaving all the warren's females, so elevated them to some sort of mythical level of goddesses where they were worshipped as the reproductive heart of the entire warren."

"He never had a son, did he?" Chris asked.

"He was gay!" Dave cried shrilly.

"There were rumours," Kurt said, in an undertone. "Yet a fourth Emperor Morellius there was. And a fifth, and so on. And for a while, the women were pampered and cosseted and though they no sooner gave birth than they were made pregnant again, they lived luxurious lives catered for by us males."

"How long did that last?" Peter asked bitterly.

Kurt's face fell. "Who knows?" he sighed. "But, somewhere along the line, it stopped being about some glorious notion of the warren's prosperity, and started being about fucking as many women as you can in two days every eight weeks..."

Chris and Dave shook their heads sadly.

"That's how it is now," Kurt explained. "Every alternate full moon, for two full days, from midnight one day, to midnight two days later, these shambolic festivities are held. No female escapes fertilisation. That's why they all get fucked several dozen times, just to make sure..."

He fell silent then. Chris and Dave didn't speak either. Peter sighed. Listening intently to Kurt's relation of Roadkill Turnpike's sordid history, he'd almost forgotten this was still going on today, just on the other side of the bushes.

"But... what about you captive breds?" Tom spoke up. "There seem to be a lot of them. But not as many of them were taking part. They were just pinning girls down most of the time!"

Kurt nodded. "We've only started appearing here since the thirty-fifth Emperor Morellius. The first pet rabbit dumped here all those years ago was welcomed, of course. Anything to further buoy the numbers..."

Chris agreed. "That's why I'm glad that, even though those bastards in there see me as some sort of captive bred sub-rabbit, at least I know I'm not the product of something like this. I was bred for a reason other than just to keep the cycle flowing and the bloodlines growing. I don't have this kind of obscene behaviour trapped in my genes. And I sure as hell wasn't ever going to start when I arrived!"

"Unbelievable," Peter said under his breath, though he knew it was not. "And you three are the only ones who see anything wrong with this?"

"There may well be others," Kurt said sadly.

"We've heard there are," Dave chimed in.

"The women, of course," Chris added.

"Morellius and his courtiers crush dissent as soon as it appears," Kurt continued. "He's your typical power-mad dictator and they're your typical blindly obedient sycophantic henchmen. Apparently the women did try to fight back once upon a time, before we three arrived. That's why they no longer even enjoy the freedom of movement around the warren anymore..."

"But why?" cried Peter. "Why can't anybody else see that this is wrong? If the warren dies out, then it dies out. If you refuse to fight for a balance of power with mankind, then your extinction is only natural. This - this isn't."

Kurt shook his head. "Pete," he said. "You're digging a hole in a crater. You don't need to convince me. Why do you think we want to destroy Morellius and his regime? Though, think about it, why do you think most people don't?"

"I don't know," Peter grumbled.

"Sex," said Dave. "Sex, sex, sex!"

"Sex?" said Mark and Tom.

"Yes, sex," said Kurt, with a sigh. "Think about it. What do rabbits crave more than anything? Hell, what do all living things crave more than anything? You create a regime based around delivering an endless supply of that and you're not going to face much resistance, however fucked up it is at the core."

"I don't understand," Tom said.

"They do it because they want to," Mark hissed.

Tom looked horrified. "No..."

"I did it once," Kurt suddenly admitted. "My first month here. I didn't know what was coming. I wasn't thinking about mating. I've been, well, I'm a pet rabbit. A lot of those captive breds dumped here can't seem to breed."

"Why do you think we're all second class citizens?" asked Chris.

"But yes, anyway, I'd been here a month, I didn't know what was coming, I had never met a female rabbit before, and the only friend I had made in all that time told me what I had to do to one when I met her. So I did."

Mark and Tom looked disgusted with him, but not as much as Kurt looked disgusted with himself. He went on to continue, but couldn't.

"At least you saw the light," Chris comforted him.

"I met these two running away," Kurt said, choked.

"And we started the Roadkill Turnpike People's Front," Dave said proudly, but it just didn't seem like all that great an achievement to the rest of them after hearing the reasons behind its formation.

There was a long silence in which they all ruminated over what they had heard and Peter tried hard not to let his attention flit back to the sounds of those females being attacked just feet from the six of them.

"So what do we do about Mopsy?" Mark asked.

"You didn't find her, then?" said Kurt.

"Obviously not," Peter said sharply. "That courtier, Boxer, took me down into the tunnels... the tunnels where they keep the ladies. I must have seen a couple of hundred. Out of a thousand. Right now she could be..."

He trailed off. He didn't need to finish.

"I say we kill that fucker Morellius," spat Tom.

"Great plan," Peter said sarcastically. "You kill him, his courtiers kill you, we kill them, somebody else kills us... And what do we end up with? A whole lot of blood shed and Mopsy still being gang-banged every full moon, that's what."

"Alternate full moon," Dave corrected him.

The five of them glared at him menacingly.

"If killing Morellius would do any good, we would have done it long, long ago," Kurt pointed out. "Even if we had to die doing it. But the simple fact is, he has sons, his sons have sons, and some of them have sons too. There's always another Emperor Morellius waiting to take his place and continue the regime."

"There must be some way to find her," Tom cried desperately. "Perhaps we should go back in there and pretend we'll happily live with them and take part in the festivities. If it means we can search for her and find her..."

"I'm not living like that," Peter said firmly.

"Amen," Mark and Kurt both said.

"Then another way," Tom murmured.

But none of them had an idea what.

"I want to get away from here," Peter said after a while, the sound of the mass fucking getting to him more than ever. "There's nothing we can do here right now. I need to get away. Is there somewhere closer than your burrow?"

"We have another one nearby," said Kurt. "We don't usually live there. You heard Morellius. He thought he recognised me. It's just not safe for us to live any closer than that roundabout in normal circumstances."

"Okay. Which way is..." he trailed off again. "Hang on, where's Benjamin Bunny? Oh, shit, you lot didn't lose him, did you?"

Mark and Tom hadn't seem to have noticed.

"Great," said Chris under his breath. "Another one to find..."

"The difference being," Kurt said. "Your little friend knows we're here and will come looking for us eventually. Plus, as a natural born male, he's in a whole lot less danger than your daughter right now, Pete."

Peter nodded. "You're right," he said.

Suddenly, there was a noise in the bush. It sounded like Boxer had returned and they all turned round defensively to face him. The same thought was racing through all their heads. Perhaps they couldn't waltz up to Emperor Morellius and slay him, but if one of his courtiers came out alone, they could tear him apart.

But it wasn't Boxer. It was someone else. A natural born.

"Hullo," he said perkily. He wasn't moving. He didn't look like he had been coming through the bush when the twig snapped. Indeed, he looked like he'd been standing there, leaning cockily against a branch and listening for some time.

"You!" hissed Kurt when he saw whom it was.

"You know him?" asked Peter quietly.

"Name's Jack," Kurt murmured. "One of Morellius' courtiers. There was a fourth member of the People's Front until that son of a bitch caught and killed him. He's a manipulative liar. Not even Morellius himself fully trusts him."

Jack cleared his throat. "And with good reason."

"Fuck off, Jack!" Chris snarled through his teeth.

"Certain things have changed since our paths last crossed, Chris," Jack told him. "Certain things you know nothing about because your little rebellion is too far away to make any difference whatsoever."

"I say we kill 'im!" Kurt growled.

"Yeah!" Chris and Dave agreed.

"Oh, I wouldn't, if I were you," Jack warned them.

"Give us one good reason why not?" Kurt hissed as he and his two monochrome companions started to close in on the courtier.

"Because I'm one of you now," Jack said flippantly. "I'm a rebel. I've seen the Emperor's regime for what it is and now I want to overthrow it. Just like you. Kill me and you'll be killing an ally. But it's your choice."

Kurt laughed. "You're not on our side, Jack!"

"Aren't I?" Jack said. There wasn't even a twitch of fear in either his voice or his facial expression. "Why aren't I in that field fucking the brains out of rabbit after rabbit after rabbit, then? That's what I should be doing, no?"

Kurt paused. Chris and Dave growled.

"Instead," Jack continued. "I'm out here, talking to you. Wouldn't you rather be fucking than talking to me? Yeah, of course you would, but not if it has to be those poor, helpless bitches in there, right? Now, d'you believe me yet?"

"He's manipulating us, Kurt!" Chris hissed.

Jack rolled his eyes. He nodded at Peter.

"Your daughter's safe, by the way," he said.

NOTES:
Lots of talk and lots of exposition, but I think the coarse and direct nature of the chapter helps carry it interestingly enough. There's more swearing in this chapter than all the others, but I felt it would be far too euphemistically sanitised to say the rabbits were "making love" to their women. Now all the set-up for Roadkill Turnpike has been done I can go play in the world, hence this ending. Jack was, of course, named for Jack Bauer out of "24". And Mopsy definitely appears in the next 2500 words, I promise.