Chapter Text
The trial was over.
The lawsuit had not gone as they wanted but the Acme Corporation had been forced to answer for years of defective products, and Wile E. Coyote had finally walked away from the courtroom with something he had never really expected to possess: a sense that, for once, somebody had listened and he had won in his own Wile E. way.
There had been consequences for Acme, consequences for the people who had treated his suffering as a joke, and consequences for Wile E. himself, because he had been forced to look at his own life from the outside and recognise that somewhere along the way, the chase had stopped being about catching Road Runner and had become something far more complicated.
Road Runner had never been merely prey. Not anymore at least. Perhaps, in some strange way, Wile E had always known that.
The desert was still the desert when they returned to it. Vast and golden beneath the endless sky, the wind carrying dust over the rocks and through the familiar canyons, and for a while it seemed that everything would simply return to the way it had always been.
Wile E. would devise something.
Road Runner would run.
Wile E. would chase him.
Road Runner would escape.
Except that the courtroom had changed everything.
The first time Wile E. found himself running after Road Runner again, he didn't have a bag of birdseed tucked under one arm or some elaborate contraption strapped to his back, and there was no particular hunger driving him forward. He simply ran because Road Runner had taken off, because the familiar challenge was there, because the two of them had been doing this for so long that neither quite knew what to do with themselves when they weren't.
Road Runner glanced back. Wile E. locked eyes with him and Road Runner grinned. The chase was still ridiculous, still impossibly fast and looney.
Road Runner zipped across the desert in a blur of blue, and Wile E. still found himself scrambling after him with considerably less grace, but when Road Runner finally skidded to a stop on a distant ridge and looked back, there was something new in his expression. He was waiting eagerly like every day he had waited for Wile E. to come back to him while the other fought against Acme.
Wile E. Understood now, it was never about catching him: it was a game. A game between friends. And somehow, that made all the difference.
For a while, Wile E. was content with that. He would build something absurd, Road Runner would outwit it, and the two would spend the afternoon racing through the desert before eventually returning to their separate homes as though nothing unusual had happened.
Except Wile E. gradually began to notice something. He didn't actually want to catch Road Runner anymore. Catching was a goal fuelled by hunger that then turned into something else that he couldn’t quite explain. A blank sign to Kevin Avery in the car all that time ago.
The realisation came quietly. There was no dramatic moment, no revelation accompanied by thunder or some sudden flash of enlightenment. No light blub appeared above his crooked ears. It simply became increasingly difficult to ignore that whenever he sat down at his workbench and began sketching an elaborate contraption, the old question no longer had an answer.
What was it for? For years, the answer had always been obvious.
Catch The Road Runner.
But now he didn’t want to catch him so why the traps? Why the machines? Why the intentions that kept him up all through the night and day? Now he stared at the notebook on his workbench, the blank pages yellow in the light above him. Then at the half-finished project, the smell of grease and smoke in the dusty air. He would flip through faded blueprints, fondly crease a corner in between his paws and stare at the filing cabinet of old failed plans. Then his eyes would drift through the opening of his cave, where Road Runner could occasionally be seen standing on a distant rock, watching him with open curiosity, a tilt of the his head as he watched to see the coyote make his move.
Wile E. slowly lowered his pencil. He had spent his entire life inventing things because there was something he wanted and now that he no longer wanted to catch Road Runner...
He had no idea what to invent. It was, strangely enough, the most difficult problem he had ever encountered.
For several days, his cave remained unusually quiet. The Road Runner occasionally sped by to check what was happening but with no sounds of sparks and explosions he moved on, sure their game will continue soon enough. Then, one morning as sunlight slowly warmed the cave and Wile E. began making breakfast he looked at the small pile of tools beside his bed and had an idea. It wasn't particularly grand. It wasn't designed to catch anything. It wasn't even dangerous. He simply wanted to make something that would make his own life a little easier. An egg cracker. Well, he had thrown away all his Acme related products and he needed one so he built it. Put it together with a flourish of cartoon zaney logic and stepped back to look over his work. The mechanical arm lifted an egg from the carton, held it over the bowl and...
Crack.
The invention worked. Wile E. stared at it long after the invention discarded the egg into the bin. He blinked and he tested it again. It worked same as before, pick up, crack, discard egg shell. There was no explosion. No fire. No collapsing ceiling. The eggs in the carton didn’t even suddenly catch fire too.
Wile E. slowly smiled. Perhaps that was the beginning of everything? The next invention was slightly more ambitious. One invention became two. Two became several.
Soon the cave began filling with things that had nothing whatsoever to do with Road Runner. Small machines that made unpleasant chores easier, tools that saved time, devices that solved little problems Wile E. had previously accepted as unavoidable parts of daily life. And, to his own surprise, they worked. Not perfectly every time, of course. He was still Wile E. Coyote. There were still occasional sparks, the occasional cloud of smoke, and more than one invention that had to be dismantled after producing results considerably different from those Wile E. had intended but the explosions became fewer. The successes became more frequent and the machines became better. Acme products no longer held him back and he felt like he could create freely.
Road Runner began visiting more often when the coyote’s absence became too long. Sometimes he would sit on a rock outside the cave and watch Wile E. work, his head tilted curiously as unfamiliar machines whirred and clicked beneath the coyote's careful hands. Wile E. would notice him watching and gesture toward whatever he was building, giving a demonstration of the harmless machine.
Road Runner would lean closer, maybe even move towards the opening of the coyote’s cave. Sometimes he understood why Wile E. had built it and sometimes he didn't. Either way, he stayed and watched the demonstration and with each new machine the bird would get a little closer to entering the cave until eventually he crossed the threshold and would stand next to Wile E. and meep at the machine.
Wile E. on rare occasions, took one of his inventions into the city to show the human he had become fond of during the trail. Kevin Avery was busy with the law firm of course as business was booming but had days off eventually and humoured Wile E. as the coyote demonstrated a new idea outside the Prickly Pear Motel. At first Kevin had braced himself for an explosion and became increasingly relieved each time Wile E. simply showed him a helpful machine. Eventually, other people began taking an interest too. A crowd would gather outside the Motel, people intrigued with products not branded with Acme’s tainted logo. Someone offered to buy one. Then someone else asked whether Wile E. had considered selling the design itself. The word patent entered his life.
Wile E. discovered that the world was willing to pay rather well for a mind that could build things nobody else had thought to build or fill the gaps Acme products had left as many of their things had been recalled. And so, slowly and almost accidentally, an inventor's business emerged from the remnants of a lifetime spent chasing a bird.
Wile E. moved out of his cave and built himself a proper workshop, a large structure filled with workbenches, machinery, blueprints and shelves of carefully organised components, with enough space that he could finally construct things without worrying about accidentally bringing half the desert down around him. He had learned that if he wanted something, he could make it himself and it would reliably work again and again. And he patent his machines, selling a few selectively to factories to reproduce as they saw fit, using his designs and sending him a nice paycheck to boot.
Road Runner became part of the new arrangement almost without either of them consciously deciding that he was. When a prototype needed testing somewhere beyond the workshop, Road Runner would volunteer. When an invention needed delivering, Road Runner would take it gleefully. He became like Wile E.'s courier, crossing distances in minutes that would have taken an ordinary delivery service hours, returning with a pleased expression and whatever feedback the recipient had given.
Wile E. would pretend that the whole arrangement was merely practical. Road Runner knew better. They were friends. Real friends even if Wile E. was still wrapping his mind around the concept. Their lives had simply changed shape just a little with the kinship that settled between them.
There were still races across the desert though. Road Runner enjoyed them too much to abandon them. Road Runner would appear during still afternoons and would deliberately stop outside the workshop and give Wile E. that familiar look until the coyote finally abandoned his workbench with an exasperated sigh.
But there was no hunger in the chase anymore. No hatred. No desperation. No tricks, sly last minute teases, no Acme product blowing up and definitely no more falling from a great height accompanied by the sound of a long whistle and a cloud of dust. Just two old rivals who had somehow become friends, still playing the same game because neither of them had ever really wanted the game to end. Years seemed capable of passing that way. Wile E. became successful. His inventions travelled far beyond the desert. His workshop grew and his reputation grew with it. And every so often, when there was time, he would sit down and write a letter to Kevin.
The letters were never particularly sentimental, because Wile E. had never been, well, particularly sentimental, but they were regular enough to keep the connection alive. He told Kevin about his latest inventions. About the business. About Road Runner's increasingly unconventional courier work and Kevin always wrote back.
Sometimes they exchanged letters several times a week. Sometimes months passed between them. Life had become busy for all of them. An inventor, a lawyer and a remarkably fast courier who had the open desert and the roads between it and the places Wile E.'s inventions needed to go.
For a while, it seemed entirely possible that this was simply what the rest of their lives would look like. Then, one afternoon as the sun light came into the workshop turning things amber and warm, Wile E. was working on something new. Something bigger. Something he was certain would be useful for Toons. The machine hummed. Its mechanisms began turning faster. Wile E. leaned closer. His eyes widened with a spark of expected success and he rubbed his paws eagerly together. Road Runner was stood next to tilting his head as a light grew in front of them, letting off small chrips of excitement. There was a sudden flash of light.
And then—
BOOM.
The workshop disappeared beneath an enormous cloud of smoke. The sound carried around the desert as the structure collapsed into itself and metal was scattered into the dust...