Work Text:
To testify in court as witness to injuries caused by Defendant, Acme Corporation to Plaintiff, Mr. Wile E. Coyote while using Acme products.
He picks out the words on the piece of paper even as he’s picking out the little bits of dirt from the loose scattering of bird seed. It's not a particularly impressive offering, even considering it's coming from a human. It's not how they do things: the Coyote likes to leave him bait in a pretty, appetizing little pile. His predator has standards for how they treat each other!
But the Road Runner will humor it, for now. The seed is quite clearly just an amuse-bouche. It's the subpoena that is the real bait for the trap.
And it is a trap! Of course it is! It always is — the Coyote never does anything but try to catch him. It’s all either of them have ever known. It’s not even particularly new for the Coyote to involve humans; his predator is enormously creative and never declines an opportunity to think outside the box.
It’s fun, and funny, to try and tie him up in legalities, but he’ll have to get up a little earlier in the morning than all that to catch the Road Runner this way!
The Road Runner darts away with a merry little cry and a short note to show what he thinks of this latest effort.
But the word does stick to him, just a bit.
Injuries.
Has he ever seen any of those? It’s hard to recall. It’s a big desert. He moves very fast. Often he barely even sees the Coyote himself; so much of his world is a blur, up close. The only things that seem to stand out are the indifferent rock formations away towards the horizon, their steady gliding migrations either drifting in his direction or opposite to him as he runs along the roads.
And the Coyote? When he sees him, yes, there’s often a flash of sharp fangs, a bristling hackle standing above his back. He's a flash of something lean and hungry in the dust. As soon as he sees him, the Road Runner is already miles away.
It’s only after he’s gone that he hears the explosion. Perhaps sometimes his feathers will blow in the shockwave, or he will feel the earth rumbling beneath his feet. But he must always run away from the scene of action, if later he is to find the crater in the earth, the cracked façade of the cliff.
And by then, there is the Coyote again, unchanged. A little more frantic, a little more thin, but nevertheless right back where he belongs. There he always is, giving definition to the matte stillness of the desert with his unchanging originality. Day after day, night after night, the Coyote is there: the only thing in the desert that cares, one way or the other, what happens to either of them.
No. The Road Runner has never seen any injuries. How could he? They’re toons! Nothing hurts them. Certainly nothing has ever hurt the Road Runner!
The Coyote’s singed fur or crushed body or dangling teeth or accordionized spine are just… effects! Accidents! Mere bad luck.
It doesn’t hurt the Coyote. It can’t. Not in any way that really matters, at least.
After all... just imagine it! His resilient friend—inexhaustible, unrelenting, devoted forever to their chase, to their home and their hunt—hurt by the things they do. Imagine, their way of life, their happiness, the never-ending tension between them that is the only thing in the world for either of them, besides the abyss of their desert…
Imagine it painful, acutely painful, to one of them.
No. No.
It's not like that.
Any other time, he would not need to be aware of what he is evading to evade it. But to take himself out of a trap whose foundations embrace every corner of the desert, he must look where he is going. When he looks, he sees.
The humans pull sunken anvils out of the ground. They number the gouges in the earth left by a falling body. They collect sheaves of insurance claims and X-rays that show the ways the skull had been penetrated, the ribs shattered, the organs rattled and crushed and liquified.
Working in the desert, they count catastrophes.
He counts, too.
“Mr. Runner, have you been a witness to Mr. Coyote’s pain and suffering?”
There is only one answer to give. After that, he doesn’t know what he'll do. It's different, now that he knows.
Is there is anything to do? Is there is any way to go back to how things were? Horribly, he's not sure the Coyote has any desire to come back, when coming back means returning to something that always, always hurts.
The Coyote has already lost the court case. The Road Runner testified that he saw the products fail only after it was already too late to make a difference. So why would they need this extra question? Why connect the dots? It won't help!
And if they leave them unconnected, think what they gain! What a vast track of open space would be left between those dots! Room enough to run. They could escape into the silence between them and be what they always were. Unchanged, again!
He could lie. Feign that all-aware ignorance once more. He could pretend he never saw it, and the circumstantial evidence simply doesn't add up to earn the name of "suffering."
All he needs to say is that they're just toons, silly toons, and that of course nothing could ever hurt them! All he needs to say is that there is no cup of teeth, no red film left around the sink drain. He will say (and he will be believed, because this room is ready to believe it) that anguish is a foreign country, one unpopulated by the likes of them; certainly, it is not a territory which only one of their inseparable two would ever be left to wander, alone.
It would be nice to believe that. He's even reasonably sure the Coyote would allow him to believe it.
But the Road Runner tells the truth. It's the only answer there is to give.
Because it's been days, you see, weeks since he stood at the edge of that crater and looked inside. No matter where he goes or what he does, no matter how fast he runs: he can’t seem to shake the reek of searing meat and burning fur.
The human accepts his answer, grim and fond.
“Yeah. Me, too.”
The Road Runner wonders how long it took the human to see it.
If it’s less than 77 years, the human got there faster than him.