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Wile E. Coyote was no murderer.
Okay, listen. Roadrunner knew that it was a bit outlandish for him, of all Toons, to claim something like that, but it was true. Wile E. wasn’t a murderer.
In the last however-many decades, the guy hadn’t managed to actually kill anything with more intellect than a rat. He’d certainly tried to. Roadrunner wasn’t an idiot. He knew that the coyote was, at least at one point, trying to kill him. The key term being: try. Coyote never succeeded. Call him crazy, but he was pretty sure that there was a wild difference between success and failure, and it drew the line between murderer and not-murderer. To him, that was a pretty clear distinction.
Wile E. had killed before, don’t get it twisted, but everyone did in the wild. That was how you ate and lived, it would be pretty stupid to expect anything different. It was lizards and small mammals, lonesome, tired things that Coyote killed, though. They couldn’t talk or think much beyond: eat, sleep, eat, sleep. That didn’t really count as murder in his book, it was just age-typical hunting for your food.
…Not that Coyote actually caught much of that either. He wasn’t sure how he got his meals day to day, but that wasn’t something he worried about. All Roadrunner focused on, for the most part, was the chase. Their game. He ran, Coyote followed, and they’d go round and round til’ the sun went down.
So, Wile E. Coyote was no murderer. Roadrunner knew this for certain.
There was no possible way that he was responsible for the corpse stretched out on the main road.
It came from the west and bore down upon the land, a wall of thick-sharp dust. It moved quickly, so quickly that any average-moving creature might not realize it before they were swallowed in its suffocating clouds.
Roadrunner was, thankfully, not average.
When the wall encroached, he ducked into a small cavern, and holed away as it swept over the land. Dust storms were not uncommon in the Sonoran, but that didn’t mean they weren’t dangerous. Even if it irked him to sit through it, he knew better than to play with mother nature. That was a game he knew he’d lose.
Roadrunner liked games. For seventy-seven years, he’d played the same one. The game of chase, with his partner in play, Wile E. Coyote, genius. It was a wonderful game in and out. They both put in a fair effort, maybe one more than the other, but it was still nice and he still loved it. So much that too long without it made him… antsy. It may have been hard to tell, but he wasn’t very good at the “sitting still” thing. His days were packed with movement. Goading his friend, prancing around, and playing about. Roadie was a busy bird.
That didn’t mean he never had moments of pause. In fact, there were plenty when taunting Coyote, or any other predator-esque thing that tried to catch him (ACME noted). He paused when he ate his food, and he paused when he watched the sun rise. It was just that those moments were, well, moments. A few minutes at maximum, not much more than that. Even when he slept, he was twitching with life. Roadrunner was always on the move.
For someone like him to have to spend a week squared away, waiting for mother nature to run its course? Well, it was just torture. That small, frigid cave became his home for those seven days. For hours, he paced. Fantasies of the desert land laid out in front of him played in cycles of want. Roadrunner would yearn and yearn and imagine and imagine, and then he’d remember that he was still stuck under a mountain of rock, and that Wile E. was miles away. Then he’d yearn again. Then he’d imagine again. The only thing that really got him through it was the knowledge that Coyote would be out there when the storm was cleared. They always came back to each other in the end. That much he could count on.
It felt like ages before the storm cleared, and Roadrunner began to peer out of the cave. The stillness outside was strange and pronounced. Further out he crept, his head lifting as he tried to get a visual grasp of his surroundings. It was impossible to see more than a yard in front of him. It was near impossible to breathe, too, with how much dust there was. Did he really want to brave that?
For a minute, he gave it thought. Coyote was determined. It was possible that he’d leave his cave, ignore the dust, and push on to hunt him. Even if it hurt his eyes and lungs and had him hacking for days after, Wile E. would probably do it, just for the sake of the chase. Roadrunner wanted to do the same, he did, but… he wasn’t Coyote. That kind of determination was otherworldly. That was the thing about them. Roadrunner was fast, and that was his otherworldly thing, and Coyote was determined, and that was his otherworldly thing. So, despite all his upset about being made to sit an extra day or so, he’d turned around and sulked back into the cave to pace.
Wile E. would be there when he emerged. He always was.
It was scorching. Bright sunlight shone down upon him, unobscured by clouds or the earlier days’ grime. Clear skies, crisp air, a slight breeze—it was the perfect day for a chase.
It was rather unfortunate that there was a dead body in the middle of the street.
Roadrunner hadn’t gotten closer than a nearby ridge, but he could see well enough. There were buzzards picking and ripping at the flesh of some larger bird, a morbid display of savagery that turned the stomach. It was another roadrunner, that much he could tell, and he wasn’t exactly sure how he felt about that. On one hand, it was inherently disturbing to see your likeness getting eaten by scavengers. On the other hand, the roadrunner was in his territory, and now it wasn’t.
The thing about being a wild Toon was, balancing morality with instinct was pretty difficult. Roadrunner guessed that it was made harder by the fact that he didn’t really feel much of anything for this dead stranger. He’d never actually experienced death close to him, if he thought about it. Things died sometimes and it was strange and revolting, and he could understand that. The way it affected people on a deeper level? Completely out of his field of expertise (which really only involved Coyote, and running from him).
It was strange that the coyote wasn’t indulging in this, actually. Or, maybe it wasn’t. Roadrunner, again, had only ever seen him capture smaller mammals and reptiles. He’d never seen what he did with them after, but he was sure he could take a gander. Wile E. wouldn’t be so disrespectful, though, he thought. From the little he knew, he was pretty particular about the preparation of his food. The fact that he brought utensils out on their runs gave that impression, anyway. So to see something be so… well, disgusting, with their eating… it unnerved him.
Roadrunner darted off to get away from the sight of it, and also to start poking around in search for his friend to bother. It was a bit weird to refer to his main predator as a friend, but it also wasn’t untrue. It was only that he’d recently admitted it. He was pretty sure that Wile E. had been his friend for a long, long time before he managed to say it out loud. Neither of them had really considered it, though. Personally, he’d figured it didn’t matter all that much. What was the use in definitions and words, when you had actions? He’d defined their relationship by continuing their game for seven decades. That felt like enough.
Wile E. wasn’t anywhere to be found. Not around the fields of prickly cacti, not in the ravine between the two towering cliffs, not even near the main road. Usually, by now, Roadrunner could find some spare evidence of him. Traps or gadgets or ropes and whatever, but there was nothing around, and it left a strange pit forming in his stomach. It reminded him of a feeling he’d had not long before, when he’d discovered the coyote gone, and only later found out he’d been off to sue a mega-corporation. Not knowing where Wile E. was then had been strange, and a large part of him dreaded the potential end of their game. Now, though, he understood that they were on a similar page. They didn’t want the chase to end.
It made the absence of Wile E. far, far more unnerving.
It had been too long. A full day had gone by, the sun arching slowly over the broad blue sky, until it began to kiss the soft sandy horizon. Roadrunner had searched and searched and searched. Then he waited, and waited, and waited some more. Wile E. never showed up. There wasn’t any indication he was nearby at all.
Something was wrong. He could feel it. Was he being paranoid? Should he wait a little longer? Maybe he’d return before nightfall. Maybe he’d just slept in, or something like that, even though that wasn’t something he ever did. There’d been a lot of change lately. Who was to say that Wile E. couldn’t change a little more? Roadie waited, and waited, and waited.
There was no way he'd gotten bored. He didn’t think it was possible for Wile E. to grow bored. Someone so driven and determined to have dedicated his life to the same thing, despite constant hilarious depressing failure, couldn’t just give up like that. It wasn’t in his nature. It wasn’t the Coyote that Roadrunner had come to know. He liked to think he knew him well.
The alternative was something that he also didn’t want to believe. The alternative was that something had stopped his friend, against his will or something like that, and he was either out there or he wasn’t. Y’know. Wasn’t.
There was no way he was acknowledging that as a real possibility. It was just a lot easier to pretend. To ignore it. Wasn’t that what they’d done for the last seven decades? Pretend and ignore truths that they didn’t know how to address? Would it be that bad if he did that now, too?
He didn’t want there to be something bigger or greater than them, something that could interfere in their game. That was a threat. Threats were pretty common in his life, but it was easy to deal with when the threat was just toward himself. When it was someone else? Someone he’d spent so long with? Their game?
Roadrunner didn’t know what to do with it. So he didn’t acknowledge it.
It was dark and it was raining. The moon was vast overhead, obscured just partly by heavy passing clouds. Droplets fell like crystals from above, gleaming in the glow of the beautiful night. Roadrunner pressed himself further under the slight ledge of a cliff, and watched the world with tired eyes. It wasn’t rare that he’d get tired. After all, he was quite the active bird. It was rare, though, for him to become exhausted, and exhausted he was. Being by himself was taking its toll. He never realized that his entire social life, or at least most of it, revolved around Coyote.
Where was he? It—he couldn’t really be hurt, could he? Coyote was never hurt. Well, he was always hurt, but he always got up. He always came back.
Maybe Roadrunner had just been abandoned. That was not an easy pill to swallow, but it was the better one. It was nicer to think that he’d been left behind, that Coyote had found a greater calling, rather than the idea that Wile E. had been hurt or taken or one of the million other terrible things that was running through his head. Awful pictures painted in his mind, over and over, of him hurt and bleeding and in pain and—and he didn’t want to think about it anymore. He didn’t want it to be true. It wasn’t.
Was he scared? Was he hurt? Was he hungry? Had he eaten?
Sometimes, he wondered what went through Wile E.’s head. In the past he’d thought there hadn’t been anything in there at all. After all, only an idiot would chase a clearly unattainable goal for a near decade.
It turned out that Roadrunner had been an idiot, by comparison. Coyote’s genius was astounding, the first time he’d seen it. Intricately built and laid traps, carefully constructed ruses, incredible feats of sheer wonderful effort went into attempting to capture and eat him.
It was as amazing as it was conflicting, but he found less conflicting the idea of being hunted, and more conflicting the idea of Coyote hunting him. He couldn’t understand why Coyote had chosen him. He wasn’t that intelligent, even if he was clever. He wasn’t large or meaty or visibly appealing. He was just an average roadrunner, like any other. What made him so appealing all these decades?
Bits of meat and bone rotted in the blazing heat of the Sonoran desert’s sun. Bugs crawled between layers of leftover tendon, burrowed into empty sockets, and ate away at flesh bit by bit.
Roadrunner hated being so close to the body, but there was something he had to see, something he had to know. He’d really thought and he still really believed that Wile E. couldn’t murder, wouldn’t murder, but he almost wished that he had. If he had killed this roadrunner, mistaking it for him, maybe that meant that he’d figured he completed his goal. Maybe that meant he was off living some fulfilled life under false pretense. Was it wrong to hope that he had killed something?
It was hard to tell by looking. Vultures had done quite the number on the corpse, ripping apart limbs, feasting on rotten, ugly flesh. Roadrunner wasn’t sure if he could reliably look at the thing and come to the conclusion that, yes, Wile E. Coyote, genius, had killed it. So, against his better judgement, he got closer.
…Closer.
…Close enough that he could hear the bugs crawling around in its crushed open skull, the flutter of their little wings batting against bone.
He took one hesitant inhale, and recoiled about six feet.
It. Smelled. Putrid.
It smelled like bird dander.
It smelled like critters and sand and sunlight and rot and death.
It did not, however, smell like Coyote.
What went on in Wile E.’s head was impossible to know or understand. Trying to think about it was kind of pointless, when that head was so complicated. Early on, he hadn't really got that. He'd tried and tried to figure him out, but again, there was just no point. Wile E. Coyote’s mind was a total enigma.
Then it sort of wasn’t.
He wasn’t sure when things changed. Whether it was ten years in, or five, or twenty… but at some point things started to make sense between them. Maybe it had always made sense, actually. It was quite simple: a coyote chased, a roadrunner ran, and there was nothing more to it.
He liked when things were simple like that. It was much easier to live that way. Blissful ignorance indeed.
It opened before him, a massive earthen maw with rounded lips and stalactite teeth. Cold and hollow it stood, its shadow casting an overbearing weight on Roadrunner’s shoulders. A thick, tremulous swallow pushed bile back down his spasming throat.
Okay. Okay. Just a peek. He’d just take a peek. It wasn’t that he was scared.
…Okay, he was scared. Not of the idea of Wile E. being in there, as that would solve exactly all of his problems, but the idea of him not. Stepping through this threshold and looking around meant shattering whatever false sense of security he’d given himself. If Wile E. wasn’t in there, then there was no doubt that he was truly gone, and that would open floodgates of possibilities that he didn’t know how to live with. Even if he was dealing with some of those things now, it was easy to deny them, because he had the gift of ignorance. Why, exactly, was he taking that away from himself?
It was the slowest that Roadrunner had ever moved. One talon reached in front of the other, carefully pressing into dirt and sand. A soft, hardly audible crunch produced under his slight weight. Forward and forward did he go, deeper and deeper into the cavern, until boxes and pictures and things alike revealed themselves from the shadows. It was larger than he’d ever expected. Mountains of things piled up and about, trinkets and gadgets that were either broken or yet to be. Scattered in organized piles were blueprints and sketches, a million contraptions that he had yet to see. It felt sick to be looking at them, wrong, like he was cheating at their game. Roadrunner averted his eyes and tried to focus on finding life.
There was none. A thin layer of dust caked over some of the bigger furniture. A quaint mattress sat pushed to a corner, with ratty blankets and hardly any pillow. Was that where Wile E. slept? Was that his nest? It didn’t smell like him. Nothing in the area smelled like him, not freshly. It was all stale and dusty and uncomfortably still. Even Roadrunner went still, and he hated to, but he couldn’t move an inch in the middle of all of that overwhelming nothingness. It was cold, quiet, and he was alone. So alone.
Where did he go? Why didn’t he say goodbye? Was it something that he’d done? Had he changed too much by admitting that he saw him as more than just a predator, had he changed too much by admitting that he cared?
If he could take it back, he would. Or diminish it.
“I just said it for the court case,” he’d lie.
“It was for the sake of continuing the game,” he’d pretend.
Anything if it meant that Wile E. would have stayed.
Was that desperate? Did he care that it was desperate?
What had he done wrong?
If he could just know, if he could just understand, then maybe it wouldn’t feel so terrible.
It was a cold and lonely cave. Roadrunner didn’t know how Wile E. lived in it by himself for so long. Even with the furnishings and blueprints and gadgets, it just felt so empty. It was the closest he could get to him, though. The closest he’d probably ever get again.
He didn’t like being still. He didn’t like settling in one place. But a lot of things had been changing lately, and he’d finally started to adapt to that change. Roadrunner curled up on the worn mattress of Wile E.’s old bed and watched the entrance through half-cracked eyes. For just a night, he made it home. It was the most still he’d ever been. He didn’t sleep a wink.
For someone who valued action, he hadn’t done much of anything to really help Wile E. beyond the court case, had he? Living in ignorance and bliss was easy and fast, so he’d taken that route. Pretending that he hadn’t cared had been easy and fast, so he’d done just that. Look where it led him. Stranded in the desert on his lonesome, friendless and tired, worrying and waiting for someone that was never going to come back. If he had been a better friend, if he’d been proactive, maybe things would be different.
Wile E. Coyote was a wiry thing, made of bone and fur and nothing flesh. The growl of his stomach was as pronounced as his stubborn mind, and Roadrunner had never paid any attention to that fact. Coyote never caught anything substantial. Which meant that he never ate anything substantial. He functioned off bits and pieces and scraps of things, a half-built contraption of wit and desire. Every day of his life was spent dragging himself to the next, tooth and nail, desperate to survive. Their game was probably the pure motivator for that, if Roadrunner were honest with himself.
It was easier to let the knowledge that Wile E. had been starving sit in the back of his mind, and collect dust. It was easy to watch him get hurt and get back up and get hurt and get back up, and it was easy not to let himself think or feel anything about it. Roadrunner had, every time, taken the easy route in their friendship.
He wished he could say sorry.
Roadrunner preened and preened and preened. Beaked lips ripped and tore at clumps of feathers, absent yanks as he cycled through endless thought.
Was it normal to miss someone so much? So much that you felt it in your chest, the want, beating at your sternum and clawing at your ribs like it wanted to rip out of you?
Minute little flinches jerked his feathered limbs as he tore away another patch of blue.
Roadrunner couldn't get a night's sleep. Every time he closed his eyes he was faced with him. Coyote’s gleaming, hungry eyes. Coyote’s drooling mouth, his pearly teeth. Coyote’s paws grazing his feathers. Coyote’s tongue touching his neck. Coyote, coyote. Coyote.
Roadrunner ripped another clump of feathers. Dots of blood stained his roots.
Was this what he felt like, all those years chasing him?
Maybe he had killed that roadrunner. It didn’t smell like him, but maybe he had anyway. Maybe he’d been wrong about him.
If he had killed it, did he feel guilty about it? Would he have felt guilty, too, if he’d managed to catch him?
Wile E.’s body was torn and mangled, his limbs twisted, gnarled so awfully. Skin and fur was smeared on the pavement, rocks and bits embedded in wet flesh. The track of a tire traced over him messily, skirted off the edge of the road, and stopped right in front of Roadrunner’s feet. Mindless horror beat harshly in his chest, a pounding rhythm that drowned all sound. There Coyote was, in bits and pieces, and Roadrunner could not move. No matter how hard he tried or how much he wept, he could not move. If there was ever a worst nightmare to live, this was so clearly it.
Every day, Roadrunner searched. Every night, he plucked feathers. The desert was so massive and terrible, and he didn’t know how he hadn’t realized that til’ then. It was empty. It was empty and quiet and so very still, and the only things that moved were buzzards that ripped at the unmoving dead. It wasn’t until then that he considered how much life Coyote brought to the land, how all his determination and efforts had completely warped an entire biome. How had he not realized? Was he really so oblivious?
Feathers. Feathers, feathers everywhere. Roadrunner curled in that bed surrounded by tufts of blue, and picked and nipped at himself, and waited for something to change. Every single night went like this, over and over, a neverending cycle.
Neverending cycles were quite normal for him. Most of them, he liked. Chase, run, chase, run. Again and again and again and again. Roadrunner liked consistency. Roadrunner liked repetition.
Maybe he didn’t, though.
Even the rain was hot in the desert. Warm droplets from a dark dreary sky poured down over his head, buckets and buckets of tears. Roadrunner stood in the midst of the main road, the corpse long-gone, and the stillness smothering.
Wile E. Coyote’s determination was otherworldly. How the guy had chased him so long, he’d never quite know. In another universe that was better and bright, maybe he had the power to change who he was, and become the one that chased, and find him. But it was not that world that he lived in. Roadrunner couldn’t become someone he wasn’t.
He wished that he could, though. He wished that he would. So long he’d searched, so long he’d waited, and nothing had come of it. It was kind of pathetic, wasn’t it? Coyote could go seventy-seven years empty-handed, and Roadrunner could hardly make it a few weeks. He could never amount to him. He could never.
Hot, salty smears spread slow across his vision. They bubbled thick and overflowed, sliding down with the rain, soaking thin feathers. It weighed him down, down, down to the asphalt. It wasn’t wise and he knew it, but he sat there in the road, and he stayed still and quiet.
Roadrunner waited and pretended he didn’t know what for.
A long time ago, there used to be a language barrier between himself and Coyote. There were a lot of nuances in the noises of wild coyotes. Their yips and yowls could mean anything if context changed just slightly. It was more than noise. It was body language, it was scent, it was movement. It was complex, and it was beautiful, and Roadrunner wasn’t very great at understanding it. But there were pieces of coyote dialect that were impossible to misinterpret, even for the stupidest of creatures.
Roadrunner had put in the work of learning though. Back then, he didn't know why. He still didn’t know why. But he had tried and tried and slowly he got better at understanding the small, subtle intricacies of coyote language. He was by no means fluent or an expert, but he knew enough to understand his—to understand Wile E..
There was a time long ago, when they were playing and running, and Wile E. had gotten hurt. It was normal for him to get hurt, of course, and it was normal for him to yelp when it happened. What wasn’t normal was the kind of yelp that had come out of him that day. Something had happened and he couldn’t quite remember, but he remembered the noise, and the feeling inside him when he’d heard it.
Wile E. cried out in awful pain, a yelp so loud, that ended with a whimper and whine. Without thought, Roadrunner had skidded to a stop, kicking dust and dirt into his own face, and whipped around to see what’d happened. That moment before he knew that Wile E. was still okay, was the first moment that he’d felt fear in that way. Fear that choked you up. Fear that consumed your insides. Unbridled terror of loss.
Roadrunner, as past Roadrunner often did with deeper, complicated things, had brushed it off and refused to question it. There was no point. It didn’t matter.
Maybe if he had paid it any mind, it might’ve clicked in his thick skull that he cared about Wile E. and didn’t ever, ever want to lose him. Maybe if he’d paid it any mind, or the thousand other signs he’d displayed that screamed “Idiot! Moron! Can't you see it?” any mind, he’d have known by now that there was so much more to the two of them than what he’d ever thought.
People didn’t know what they had until they lost it.
People were stupid. He was stupid.
The wind was dead and the earth was frozen. Roadrunner sat curled in the road again, waiting for something, and he pretended that he wasn’t.
It began slowly and quietly in the distance of the desert. A soft noise, just barely audible. His head rose to catch the sound. To be sure of what he was hearing.
Oh. Oh, that was—was that…?
Hope knocked on his sternum like a pounding fist, a fierce beat without any rhythm. The force of it made him choke and sputter, his feathers ruffling as he scrambled to rise.
Could it really be? Was he dreaming?
No. No, there it was again. It was yearning and sorrowful and scared and hurt. Desperate, wanton, it echoed through the land.
A coyote’s howl. Wile E. Coyote’s howl.
Roadrunner had, somehow, never moved faster in his life.