Single Dad Coyote AU

Prologue: Clerical Errors

It was four AM.

That is something that remains crisp and clear in his memory, even years later.

It was four AM. Wile E. Coyote (Super Genius) had been up for about thirteen hours too many, at that point. Wiley yawned, the schematic he was working on swimming before his eyes, and decided that perhaps it was finally time to go to bed. He would have enough time, in the morning, to finish the schematic before he set off to lay out the day's traps.

He put his pencil down horizontally in its place among a neat little row of its brethren, and yawned again, presumably as an attempt by his body to encourage him to bed. His nightgown made a quiet swish against the stone floor as he padded across his den towards the sleeping chamber.

There was a single knock, crisp and smart, echoing slightly against the metal of the exit hatch.

Wiley froze. His head turned slowly towards the small green square that sat innocuously in one rough corner of his cavernous ceiling.

The only one who ever knocked on that hatch was The Roadrunner. His knocks were rapid and repetitive and usually brought the smell of Thai food with them; it only ever happened during the bad weeks when Wiley's food budget got low enough for the other to notice.

His family called ahead when they came, and he usually met them at his mailbox by the nearest road, which was one and a half kilometers away from his den. The closest thing he had to a friend, a bird-obsessed housecat, did not bother knocking and had no respect for locks on the grounds that his claws got past them fairly easily in one manner or another.

He did not get any salesmen, Jehovah's Witnesses, nor other door-to-door individuals. The hatch was the color of sand on the outside and further hidden by desert plants placed there for precisely that reason, and every vent or chimney that came from his den was disguised — painstakingly accurately — as a cactus. People did not find his den, people did not come to his den, people did not knock on the entrance to his den.

Equal parts wary and curious, Wiley slowly walked over to the ladder leading up to the hatch and began to climb.

The usual sounds and smells of the Melody Desert on a warm June night washed over him as he stuck his head through the square hole, a soft desert wind going over his fur as he pulled himself out. In front of him was an impatient-looking stork with one talon raised as if to knock again, dressed in a professional blue jacket and frankly dumb-looking hat, holding a clipboard under one wing.

"About time, pal," the stork told him, his voice nasal and snippy. "I've been waitin' here for ages."

[GO AWAY], Wiley Signed at him, eager to go back to bed. Or go back to going to bed, anyways.

"Hey, I'm not happy being up this late neither," the stork responded. "I've still got the rest of my route to get to, you know." He used the raised talon to grab the clipboard and held it out to Wiley. Wiley looked down at it. "Sign here to accept delivery an' I'll be out of your fur soon enough."

[Delivery of what?], Wiley asked, bewildered. From the clipboard, it almost seemed like... But no, that wasn't possible.

The stork gave him a flat, unimpressed look and gestured to his own feathery form with an outspread wing. "What d'ya think, huh? There ain't a lot storks bring, buddy."

Wiley, suspecting more that the wasn't possible thing was true, felt his mind go blank. On automatic, he raised his arm to deliver a Sign, his brain latching on to the not-question for lack of anything else acceptable to think about.

[Ancient Egyptians, Slavs, and Chinese believed you guys carried the souls of the deceased]

The stork blinked, eyes momentarily widening. Then, flat, replied, "Yeah, well, we do that too. Sign here."

[I don't use souls in my experiments], Wiley told him, mustering up the driest expression he could. He flipped the Sign, adding, [You must be for Witch Hazel]

He wasn't used to Signing quite this much in one go, and he had already been exhausted before the conversation began. His arm was starting to tire. Despite this, he Signed twice more:

[She lives over the cliffside to the north]

[Little black hut on chicken legs, green smoke coming out of the chimney — you can't miss it]

"Very funny, pal." The stork rolled his eyes, sounding as if he didn't find it anything of the sort. "I'm on the other type of job tonight. Sign here."

[I don't know what I'm signing for], Wiley protested. He was thankful for his habits of silence at that moment, as he was fairly certain he'd feel like an idiot for once in his life if he had to hear the desperation that surely would've laced his voice at his own poor attempt to deny reality.

Wordlessly, the stork used his foot to move a basket out from behind him, pushing it across the sand towards Wiley. Wiley looked down at a tiny, grey-furred pup with a nose like a cherry. He was so young, Wiley thought dazedly, his eyes weren't even open yet.

[There's been a mistake], Wiley insisted, because of course there had been. The aching in his arm was entirely forgotten in the face of an 8-ounce problem in a basket. [I don't even have a mate, I most certainly did not register for a baby!]

The stork consulted his clipboard, flipping through the papers held on it. "Uh, it says here that ya called three years ago. Somethin' about our carriers going too slow — an' boy howdy, were you right!"

[Three years ago?], Wiley asked, his face going slack and expressionless.

"I know it's a little late, buddy, but you gotta understand that production rates nowadays are–"

"You– you blathering fool of a so-called delivery agent!" Wiley snapped, his low, scratchy, cultured voice making its way out of him in his panic irritation. "That was me double-checking transfer times for my sister, not placing an order of my own!"

It was quiet for a moment. Then the stork asked, "So you didn't ask for a kid?"

"No," Wiley growled, because his arm really was tired and his mind was spinning too much to properly conjure a Sign, and it seemed more effective to speak aloud in this particular case anyways. "I did not."

The stork looked at him with the specific open look of someone processing something. He looked down at the pup, who had begun to softly whine.

Wiley valiantly tried to stave off his instinctual response to that whine. It was cruel, he thought, to just leave the crying boy there. But everytoon knew that the moment you picked up a baby dropped at your door, they were yours. The bond was instant, as good as blood, and entirely irreversible. The only exception were the storks, which was either the cause of or resulting from them delivering babies; notoon knew for sure.

Wiley could not pick up that baby.

The stork looked back up at him after a long, considering moment. He shrugged, actually shrugged, and said, "Take it up with administration."

"Excuse me?!"

"Listen, pal, he's either going to you or he's going to the Studio Heads to raise 'im with all th' other solo acts." The stork got a sad look that Wiley thought was only somewhat an act meant to manipulate his emotions. "You want that for him, huh? Life of an orphan, just cause his would-be dad didn't want him?"

Wiley glared at him. The stork just continued giving him that horrible, insufferable look of sympathy. Wiley sighed, long and deep. With jerky movements, not quite believing what he was doing, Wiley took the pen connected to the clipboard and signed where the stork indicated.

He picked the pup up out of the basket.

The moment they touched, something went through Wiley that he would never quite be able to explain to anyone that hadn't felt it themselves. It was like being drawn all over again, his ink shifting and settling, but this time there was something else there in him. It felt almost like the indescribable thing that connected him to his family, his parents and siblings and cousins and all that, but different. More like how it had felt meeting each of his nieces and nephews for the first time, but still not quite.

This went someplace different than that. Someplace deeper.

The little coyote pup in his arms pulled himself closer to him. The whining stopped. An impossibly tiny muzzle rubbed against the fur of Wiley's neck, an equally impossibly tiny arm whacking upward until it hit his nose. Wiley, entirely involuntarily, began to laugh.

He did not see the soft smile that the stork gave the two of them. He did not see the stork put the clipboard into his jacket and pick up a large cloth bag with his foot. He did not see him fly away.

He didn't see the egg, either, as it slipped unnoticed from the stork's sack.

He did see it, however, when it fell onto the pup's head and cracked open, surprising them both. A violently orange-and-red fledgling of a roadrunner chick sat among the shell pieces on top of the now-crying pup's head. He looked up at Wiley with wide, guileless, brilliantly purple eyes.

Wiley blinked, his eyes being the only part of him that could reliably move at that moment. It wasn't possible. It just wasn't possible. The Tooniverse had done a lot to him before, yes, but surely there was a line–

The bird bumped its head affectionately against Wiley's forearm. Wiley felt himself be redrawn for the second time that night, his ink shifting and settling in exactly the same way as the first.

Wiley let out a series of words that he was going to have to remember not to say when the children in his arms grew old enough to actually understand them, at a volume that was perhaps not appropriate when holding two newborns in the middle of the night.

Startled, the bird ran into the den. Blindly, groping, most likely operating entirely by smell, the pup jumped out of Wiley's arms and followed him. Wiley heard a crash as the pup failed to use the ladder and instead dropped down to the floor of the den, followed by the squawking laughter of a newly hatched Geococcyx Toon.

Wiley's spiraling thoughts were brought to a screeching halt as something painful clenched in his chest. His body unfroze, moving seemingly without his input, and Wiley was through the hatch and down the ladder faster than he'd ever been in his life.

Wiley scooped the pup up from the stone floor and held him close to his chest, making shushing noises until he began to calm down. A red-orange blur passed by them, and Wiley heard something with springs go off in another chamber. Great, he had a crying coyote in his hands and a hyperactive bird loose in his den.

The bird...

His son.

His other son, actually, because he had two. He had two sons.

And one of them was a roadrunner.

Who was currently running through a den filled with discarded and half-finished Roadrunner traps.

Wiley felt his ears fall straight down and brush against his back through the cloth of the nightgown he was still wearing. Holding the small grey creature in his arms as gently as possible, Wiley dashed further into the den.

Existential crises could come later, he decided. For now, he had an underground laboratory/workshop/den to baby-proof.