A/N: You might want to read Consequences of Neglect before this one or you will really think I'm crazy. And I don't have a beta because they would probably have me committed, so all the mistakes are mine.
Disclaimer: I still own nothing. No roaches, no fictional TV characters, no tarantulas and CERTAINLY no cocoons on twigs. This entire thing is a figment of my imagination and no infringement is intended.
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When Grissom (a.k.a. B.O.S. in Roachtopia) went on sabbatical, the six roaches and Houdini the tarantula were moved to the lab so they would have a little more intellectual stimulation than they would have had if they were left alone in the townhouse for four weeks.
Grissom and Sara feared what would happen if they were left to their own devices for too long. Their song repertoire had grown to include over ten songs, including an interesting version of Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit" with synchronized head banging and hissed lyrics almost as easy to decipher as the original. Sara had brought a few different albums in and left them in the stereo to see just how broad their skills actually were. She and Grissom were pretty impressed with what the roaches had exhibited so far, but Grissom didn't want to come home from sabbatical to a revival of "The King and I" in his living room.
So the roaches and Houdini had been sitting in adjoining terrariums spending their days watching the lab rats and other inhabitants of the lab scurry about through the window nearest to their current homes.
Greg the Roach was pretty proud that the person he was named after was rather cute (for a human anyway), and smart too. He threw it in the other roach's faces when they would make fun of something silly he had done. Like when he tried to strike up a conversation with the fetal pig in a jar their first night in the office.
Archimedes was using his spare time to hone his percussion skills using a toothpick broken in two as drumsticks and driving the rest of the roaches insane with the incessant banging on his new miniature drum kit. Grissom had eventually figured out what that roach was doing with the plastic water tub and had dropped a couple bucks so he could have a "real" one to play with. Archimedes had almost figured out how to rig up a rotating platform beneath his drum kit with a little help from Socrates the Roach and some rigging made from Houdini's silk. Archimedes had seen something similar on one of the music video channels on the TV and thought it was "wicked awesome." Archimedes was also trying to figure out how to grow long hair and tease it really big, but he wasn't having a lot of luck in that area.
Houdini was having an excellent time scaring the people that would walk past his terrarium by staying really still until one of them would put their face close to the glass when inspecting him and then jumping up and waving his legs threateningly to make them scream. It entertained him to no end and he would sit there laughing to himself for quite a while each and every time he sent someone shrieking down the halls.
One afternoon they saw the brown haired lady bringing in a new terrarium and sat it next to Houdini's place before refilling the water bowls and tossing roach and tarantula kibble in their respective places. The new terrarium had a twig with a cocoon in it.
The very nervous and jittery roach named Kafka started freaking out the minute Sara left Grissom's office.
"I know what that is. That's a baby bug. They're gonna have a baby and we're gonna be replaced and they won't have any more time for us at all and we're going to be thrown out into the cold and we'll have to live in an alleyway somewhere with some nasty smelling hobos and hookers and drug addicts and we won't get Kibbles 'n Bits for dinner anymore and we'll have to eat three day old McDonald's and it will upset our digestive systems, and people will try to smash us with their shoes, and only The Great Bug in the Sky knows what they'll do with Houdini! We're all doomed! Doomed I say!" Kafka ranted for about 15 minutes about how a new baby changes the family dynamics before taking a breath.
"We don't have any proof they're having a baby bug. For all we know that's a folded up letter made to look like a cocoon, one of those modern-art spider webs or maybe it's even empty. We must do some investigating before we start convincing ourselves that we'll become feral roaches anytime soon. Do you really see the Bringer of Sustenance tossing us out into the streets after all he's done for us? He even got Archimedes that horribly annoying drum set. That's not the kind of guy that would throw out his existing bugs just because he and his girlfriend unexpectedly found themselves with pupae," Methuselah the Roach, always the voice of reason, told Kafka in a futile attempt to soothe his fears.
Kafka the neurotic roach would not be calmed with simple logic and continued pacing through Roachtopia. "Let's kill it! Whack it to death with Archimedes' drum sticks! Then we won't have to worry about it. And B.O.S. would be upset with the brown haired lady for not taking good care of their baby and they would break up and he would be all ours again! We wouldn't have to share anymore! Then we could work on dispatching that damn spider…" Kafka continued his ranting and pacing, interspersing it with maniacal laughter as his speech got faster and less coherent.
The rest of the roaches were worried about their dear Kafka. He was obviously unstable, and lately he had been regaling them with tales of how he used to be a human before he suddenly turned into a roach one day, so Houdini tossed some spider-silk their way and they put Kafka in a little roach straight-jacket before they loaded up their deranged friend on Houdini's back and put him in solitary confinement inside the miniature Izzy Delancy crime scene on the other side of the room.
They didn't really understand the whole evidence preservation thing and were less than concerned as to how Kafka might end up ruining a trial at a later date because of evidence tampering.
After securing Kafka in his well furnished Plexiglas prison, the rest of the roaches and Houdini had another meeting around their food bowl. They ignored the pounding and screaming coming from the dead rock star's tiny kitchen across the room.
It was decided that Houdini, master of escape, would break into the new terrarium and check out the situation.
Houdini was, after all, the one that broke into the display case now holding Kafka.
They waited until the lab was quiet for the evening, when all the CSI's were dispatched to various crime scenes and lab technicians were busily working on their samples, before Houdini quietly crept out of his terrarium and over to the roof of the new addition. He dropped down from the roof into the terrarium like a professional jewel thief and tentatively tapped the cocoon with his leg.
He listened carefully for an answer to his tapping, but he heard nothing. He looked over the cocoon, trying to discern if it had already been vacated, but couldn't really tell.
Tarantulas aren't well versed in cocoons and how they work, so he didn't really know what he was looking for in the first place. But he was pretty sure it wasn't an origami love note or avant-garde spider silk art.
Houdini ignored Kafka, who was busy alternating between hitting the Plexiglas walls surrounding him with the rolling pin while chanting "whack it into pulp" and writing "All work and no play makes Kafka a dull roach" on the walls with a Sharpie he had found in the kitchen's junk drawer.
Socrates and Greg started grinding up some Xanax and putting it in some kibble for Kafka's dinner.
Houdini returned to Roachtopia to give a debriefing to the roaches after thoroughly examining the cocoon.
"I can't tell if there is anything alive in there or not. I do believe it isn't a letter or modern art."
"Oh dear, you don't think it might be one of those poor unfortunate souls that is going to be" Greg shuddered slightly before continuing, "permanently affixed behind glass and hung on a wall do you?"
The roaches, and Houdini of course, had all seen the multitude of innocent butterflies and moths hanging in various groupings around the office and on the walls of their townhouse. They didn't understand what these things meant, and at least one of the roaches believed that their B.O.S. was an angry Old Testament style B.O.S. and shouldn't be crossed for fear of the repercussions. The preserved corpses of their dearly departed insect brethren hanging on walls just kind of creeped out the rest of the roaches.
Socrates put a reassuring hand on Greg's back. "We don't know anything for certain yet Greg. Houdini, any idea on what our next move could be in our efforts to determine the reason behind the new addition?"
"I can only think of two things to do at this point. We can either learn how to read and pour through those books over there looking for an answer, or we could just wait until B.O.S. returns from his trip. It shouldn't be much longer."
"Well, I for one am not going to learn how to read" declared Archimedes. "That's the kind of thing people do, and I don't want to start thinking I'm people and end up like Kafka."
The occupants of Roachtopia looked across the room toward Kafka's prison, where Kafka was trying to get the Izzy doll to dance with him.
"And we'll still keep Kafka detained, right?" Houdini was a little worried about his own safety, since Kafka had threatened to kill him and all.
"It's decided then" said Methuselah. "We will just have to be patient until the Bringer of Sustenance returns before we know the fate of the new terrarium."
With the decision made, the roaches settled down for the night and Houdini went back to his home. The only things heard from the roaches for the rest of the night was a slightly exasperated "I can't stand the suspense!" being occasionally uttered by a sleeping Greg roach.
The next morning when she came through to feed the roaches and tarantula, Sara was rather surprised to find only five roaches in the terrarium, the lid of the cocoon terrarium partially left open, and slightly visible graffiti in the miniature crime scene with a very hyper roach running around in circles in it.
"I swear these are the weirdest bugs I've ever known."