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Tweety is scared.
Strike that, Tweety is fucking terrified.
“M-Mistah Cwane, I-I-“
“Oh come on, it can’t be that hard to just talk to the guy!” Buddy says, throwing his arms up as he paces in the desert. “Toon to Toon, right? You talk to him, he’s good, and we win this farce of lawsuit!”
“I-It’s not dat simpwe, siw,” Tweety tries so hard to explain, flittering in the air around his ‘handler’, who just looks bored. “T-Toons have theiw tewwitowies, a-and the desewt is theiws!”
“I don’t care! You see me? I don’t care,” he says, pointing at Tweety who squeaks and hides behind his handler. “Just get the roadrunner, full stop. I don’t care how it’s done. Report back in an hour.” “Y...yessiw...”
Tweety flies back towards their car, the always mute man climbing in the driver’s seat as Tweety buckles in, sighing. “I’m gonna die...”
The glue works for all of two seconds before Beep Beep, the roadrunner, blasts it to bits. Tweety isn’t surprised by this at all because this is probably the first trap Wiley ever tried on Beep Beep back in the day.
He is caught off-guard, as is every other human ACME employee, when Beep Beep pins him to the sand by a clawed foot, squeezing him tightly as Tweety yelps and flails. “W-Wait, wait, Beep Beep, stawp!”
A click and a hiss is his answer, the grip tightening as Beep Beep’s normally friendly smile is gone, replaced by anger and deep, unbridled hate. ‘Such a surprise to have you here! Do you mind letting me know where my darling, genius mate is?’
“Y-Yes! He’s in the city, if you could just-!”
The claw tightens, and Tweety wheezes as everyone starts panicking, torn between aiming guns and calling higher-ups as Beep Beep leans in further, chittering at Tweety as his head jerks to the side. ‘And that means you can just move in here with a bunch of humans, Tweety Bird?’
“N-No! Dat’s not at all what we’we doing! W-We want you t-to come get him!”
Beep Beep chitters out a laugh, the kind that makes you wanna bury yourself deep so you never hear it again. ‘That’s so cute! We both know he’s a grown coyote who can get himself out of whatever mess he’s in. He’s not infringing on anyone’s boundaries that I know of, so what’s your excuse here?’
Tweety can’t even make an excuse because Beep Beep’s right. The Desert is a territory, but cities themselves are not. Albuquerque used to belong to Bugs at one point, before his own mate went a little daffy-hah-but that boundary had been erased when he went into hiding from ACME. Whatever Wiley was up to there wasn’t held to the same level that it was with Tweety out here trying to capture Beep Beep.
The claw twitches and he can feel it dig against his neck, and he resorts to sad, desperate chirping as Beep Beep dodges a bullet, catching the next in his beak and spitting it out. He stares at Tweety, that bored gaze that made him always a little terrifying when Wiley wasn’t around.
For some reason, the claw is removed, and Beep Beep backs up as Tweety gasps for air, chirping and coughing pitifully.
‘Leave,’ Beep Beep says, smiling widely, ‘and tell Wiley to hurry home, if you will. Because if I see you again, Tweety, poor ol’ Granny will have to bury a child, and I’d rather not stoke HER ire.’
Then he sticks his tongue out as if he hadn’t made that threat, spitting at them all, and races through the puddle of glue still left behind.
Tweety plops his head back, wheezing as one of the humans shakily picks him up, nervously asking if he’s okay.
“I t’ought I taw my wife fwash befowe my eyes. We need to weave, befowe we stawt a tewwitowy waw,” he says, sitting up with a cough. He knows the humans might see that as simple or something more akin to sending police in to handle, but there was nothing worse than a territory war between long-lived beings and their strange, unearthly powers.
...it’s days like this he misses singing in his cage and teasing Sylvester.
Damn Wiley.
Written by a human in Ellipsus.