In Sanity

Disclaimer: I still don't own Repo! and I never will. I really don't do witty disclaimers. Also, there will be a couple of marked footnotes, for those who care to know a bit more about Shilo's bugs. Said footnotes will be indicated with asterisks (*).

A Brief Author's Note: I'm breaking this one into chapters, since I have been alerted that Breaking and Entering is a bit of a long read.

Whatever Shilo answered with wound up getting completely lost as the both of them heard a wet burbling sound, then a pop! and the hiss of liquid meeting heat and instantly turning to steam. She turned her head quickly to look over her shoulder as the Graverobber jerked up to locate the source of the sound as well - together they watched the water in the spaghetti pot continue to boil over for a moment, disoriented. Yelling a sharp "Goddammit!", Shilo pushed back out of the Graverobber's arms and whirled around to turn the stove off. Half the pasta had sloshed over the sides with the water, causing a great mess and effectively ruining her plans of homemade anything - no way was she trying anything else tonight, not after that. A quick look located a pair of potholders, black with white sheep embroidered on them, and she snatched them up, clamping her best grip onto the pot handles. Cursing under her breath - the few words Graverobber could accurately pick up surprised him - Shilo shuffled over to the sink and set the pot down, her face red in embarrassment.

"I'm... really sorry about that," she told him stiffly, not meeting his eyes as her face burned bright crimson, the color spreading to the tips of her ears and down her neck as well. She scuffed one boot over the floor and leaned on the counter beside the sink. "I guess I should have mentioned I can't cook."

His mind elsewhere, the Graverobber just shrugged his shoulders and looked at the mess on the stove contemplatively for a moment before smiling at the blushing teenager.

"Hey, don't worry about it," he said dismissively, a jaunty smile curving his lips after a second. "I just asked if you could manage without catching anything on fire... and you seem to have managed that just fine."

Shilo scowled at him, obviously still flustered at what had just happened with the spaghetti - maybe about what they had just been doing; he couldn't quite tell for once.

"I've got some frozen stuff - that's what I normally have," she told him, still not looking at him as she scurried across the kitchen, pulled the big silver door open and stared determinedly into the freezer. "I hope you don't mind..."

"Kid, it'll be better than what I've normally got," he told her, not elaborating on that.

The teenager made a noise that he couldn't quite decipher, somewhere between a sound of assent, a snort, and a touch of something else he couldn't rightly place, and bent down to grab something off one of the bottom shelves, once more without even thinking of bending her knees. Graverobber let out a barely-audible groan, wondering if the girl possibly knew she displayed her panties to him every time she did that. The restraint he showed earlier left him - third time's the charm, eh? - and he crossed the kitchen quickly, fully intending to let her know exactly what he thought of her little teasing routine. However, he showed up a few seconds too late and wound up getting hit in the chest with a box of frozen lasagna as she turned around without warning. After letting out a surprised grunt, he stepped back and tried to pass it off as an accident, as if trying to say without words, "No, I wasn't about to grope your ass". Of course not, he thought sardonically, raising an eyebrow at the girl, who remained unaware, as she brushed past him and set the box on the kitchen counter. The sounds of ripping cardboard gave way to a loud POP! and he turned around to find Shilo standing by the counter with a large knife in her hand.

"Do I want to know?" he asked, his eyebrows both raised in surprise, badly disguised as a suave tease - the sight of her with the butcher knife proved both arousing and frightening at the same time.

Shilo shrugged and returned the knife to the hardwood block beside the stove.

"It just makes a really satisfying loud noise," she said simply, bending over again - he stared openly, wondering if she would notice - to pull a difficult cabinet door open and rattle through the inside's contents, finally straightening up with a rather dented cookie sheet in hand. "Crap... I forgot to preheat the stupid oven..."

She set the temperature on the oven and placed the frozen tray of lasagna on the cookie sheet - after pausing for a moment, she backed up to the counter, placed her palms on the edge, and hopped up to sit there, swinging her legs idly. The Graverobber briefly wondered if she had ever been taught that girls were supposed to sit with their legs closed, his eyes finding that little flash of black between her legs. Slowly, he practically stalked across the kitchen, forcing back the smile that threatened to curve his lips at her sudden expression of anticipatory unease. He placed a hand on each of her knees, deliberately not moving closer or pressing against her, just waiting to see what she would do. At first, she shrank back a bit as he approached, unsure of what he wanted from her, but the slight anxiousness melted at the warmth of his touch. Surprising him just a little, she leaned forward, an almost expectant gleam in her dark brown eyes - he grinned back, content for the moment to tease her again.

He removed the hand he'd had resting on her left knee and threaded it into her hair, not leaning any closer to her as he ran his fingers through the soft black strands a few times. Shilo tilted her head back into his touch, a pleased purring sound rumbling softly in her throat - oh, that was just naughty, thought the Graverobber, laughing briefly in his head. Taking that last step towards her, still not pulling her any closer, he found himself almost pressed against the kitchen counter, at a small stalemate with the brown-eyed girl sitting there, staring back at him. She wouldn't move, waiting to see what else he might do, and he wanted her to explore this new situation a bit. He tugged a bit on her hair, just enough to tease, to make her want, and she gave him a challenging look, leaning close to him, her lips an inch or so from his. The Graverobber smiled, delighting in her using his own tricks on him - not as well, due to inexperience, but it was certainly endearing having her try. Not nearly as patient as him, Shilo pressed her lips eagerly on his, moaning with desire as he opened willingly for her, quite ready to let her let loose.

A fumbling, inelegant, barely middle-school-quality kiss followed as he allowed her to completely take the reins - certainly not the best he'd ever had, but most definitely with more true, whole-hearted quality than he had felt in a very long time. At first, she used her tongue a bit too much and exactly twice, their front teeth clacked together. Her fingers tightened a bit too much in his hair and she wound up leaning to the left, banging her forehead on his and pulling back to smile apologetically, her cheeks pleasantly red. Graverobber ran his tongue over his front teeth, trying to shake off the edging memory of enamel hitting enamel, and chuckled softly as he rubbed the sore spot on his forehead. He leaned in again, the quiet laughter turning sinister as his lips touched her ear and he wrapped an arm around her, one hand still on her right knee for leverage and to keep her where she was. His teeth nipped gently at her earlobe, causing a surprised squeak to escape from Shilo's moist, kiss-swollen lips. The hand pressed against her lower back snaked around to skim up her side, bringing delicious shivers with it.

The intruding DING! of the oven's preheating cycle ending nearly went ignored - Graverobber would have been fully prepared to pretend it hadn't happened, if not for Shilo's small hand pushing at his chest. He rolled his eyes and then laughed a bit when she hopped down off the counter, nearly toppling over as she tried to get her knees to do what she wanted them to. Shilo glared at him and turned on her heel, letting out a shocked "OH!" at the playful swat he administered to her backside as she made to stalk off. Hell! She had just been on her way to grab the lasagna and put it in the oven! She looked over her shoulder and saw the Graverobber sitting on the counter where she had been, so she stuck her tongue out at him. He raised an eyebrow at her and she turned back to the lasagna. The container and its frozen contents made all kinds of eardrum-rattling clattering sounds as Shilo made a great big noisy production of setting everything up and sliding the cookie sheet in the oven. After the oven door shut with a satisfying BANG!, she reached over and set the timer on the microwave, then turned around to face the Graverobber again.

"The package says it has to go for almost an hour," she told him, leaning on the counter beside the stove.

Shilo pretended not to notice the mischievous smirk the Graverobber had fixed on her and tried hard to ignore him as she headed for the kitchen table to commandeer the chair he had pulled out earlier. Reaching over, she picked up a new book on butterflies that she had bought while she had been out earlier in the day - the blue morpho butterfly on the cover had caught her eye. Very deliberately studying the table of contents, she continued to pretend unawareness of the Zydrate dealer sitting on her kitchen counter as if he were nothing more than an old alley cat. The hairs on the back of her neck prickled as she felt him watching her more intensely than ever, as if he knew she hadn't actually read a single word yet. She acted like she couldn't hear the theatrically heavy steps of his badly-concealed approach from behind her, nor smell that revolting old coat of his. For as unaware as she had pretended to be and as truly aware as she actually had been, the hand he dropped on her shoulder startled her enough that she jumped almost out of her chair and her book went flying.

"OH!" she yelped, one hand flying to her heart as she nearly hyperventilated. She swung around and glared at him. "You know, while the lasagna's in the oven, why don't you go take a shower or something?"

Now that was a hell of a brush-off! Pretending to be appropriately chastened, the Graverobber bowed his head in exaggerated penitence and nearly dragged himself across the kitchen. Rolling her eyes, Shilo got up to locate her book - from the softer fwish sound of the landing, it had wound up on the rug near a side door. Graverobber gave her a heartily wounded look when she looked at him almost involuntarily, and continued on his way out of the kitchen as slowly as he possibly could go. Blushing, she turned away quickly and skittered over to where her book had fallen, snatching it up and hurrying into an adjacent sitting room to curl up in an armchair and try to cool off. She found her dad's old couch, the far right seat of which she had spent a lifetime commandeering - her heart clenched in pain as she remembered Dad letting her win the races they'd have from the kitchen table to the old couch. The aged, cologne-scented leather sort of puffed up around her in all the right places as she tucked her feet up under her and settled into her book.

If someone had ever asked her why she found bugs so confounded interesting, she wouldn't have been able to give that person a straight answer because, truth be told, she never really knew. Flipping through the introduction and the first chapter, which had been an introduction to basic insect anatomy - i. e. nothing she didn't already know by heart - she started on chapter two. The first illustration to greet her eyes was a magnificent Audubon painting of a yellow lady sulphur on a pink and orange lantana bush and a soft sigh escaped her lips. True bliss, she thought, studying the picture intently, trying her best to commit every single brushstroke, each detail, to memory. As... odd... as her relationship with her dad had been at times, it was quiet moments like this one - even with the Graverobber himself in her shower - that she realized how lucky she had been in so many ways. Had her dad been just a bit different, he might have tried to steer her in another direction or told her that society in general felt that entomology wasn't an appropriate interest for little girls.

As if just to irritate her, the cold, circulation-strangling sensation of her right foot falling asleep jerked her out of her thoughts and she shifted, scrunching her nose up as she tried to find a more comfortable position. Feeling returned to the extremity and she adjusted her hips one more time just to be secure in having that best position as she dove back into her book. Viceroys, painted ladies, and three different kinds of swallowtails adorned the next few pages - she had never quite broken the childish habit of going through and looking at all the pictures first. Words were always there and could be read over and over, as many times as one wished, but nothing compared to seeing a remarkable picture, whether photograph or some other media, for the very first time. Again, her right foot fell asleep and, growling under her breath, she decided it was time for the boots to come off. Now that her hands had feeling in them, she could easily grasp the zipper of each boot, the right first as she was quite eager to get full sensation back, and slide the device down. Hanging about in her sockfeet had always been one of her favorite ways to just be, to forget everything wrong in the world - like being barefoot, but able to slide across tile and hardwood.

"You never did tell me where the bathroom was," said a deep, off-handed voice as a shadow fell over a wonderful two-page spread of a monarch butterfly migration in Mexico, the kind with millions of individuals and trees blanketed with butterflies to the point that branches fell under their weight. She looked up, straight into that smug, grinning face. "Care to j--- I mean, show me?"

Shilo declined to dignify that with a response, just rose rather mechanically from the couch, sad to leave the soft, spicy-scented leather, and, after dog-earing the specific pace - careful not to mar the picture - set her book down. Still trying to pretend she wasn't looking at him, she stole a glance at the infuriating man and immediately decided she liked what she saw. His horrible old coat hung open, as did most of the buttons on his stained, once possibly off-white shirt, as if he had been "loosening his bullets", so to speak, when he realized that he had no idea where a shower might be in the convoluted old house. She forced herself to hide her smile - his pale skin made her want things she couldn't begin to wrap her mind around. What little she knew of the "relations" between a man and a woman came from the occasional spicy novel and that one shocking experience in the Zydrate alley. Somehow, everything she knew beyond the little world that had been built inside her own house traced back to him. Keeping her head ducked, a position that did not go unnoticed by the Graverobber, the teenager brushed past the man and headed for the stairs.

Graverobber had certainly had every intention of playfully annoying Shilo on the way up to, he assumed, the guest bathroom, but soon figured out that if he didn't actually pay attention to where they were going, he wasn't going to get there or get back. This house had apparently been built by a termite colony, with all its twists and turns, all the hallways tall and narrow. Shilo moved surprisingly fast for someone who had been "sick" her whole life, every so often ducking off to the right or left and going down a different hallway - had the house looked this big from the outside!? Graverobber decided he really didn't want to know the logistics of the place, considering it would probably just make his head hurt, and stepped up his pace as Shilo turned a sharp right-hand corner. With the sudden movement, the skinny teenager nearly disappeared from view. He turned just as smartly and stopped short when he found Shilo with her back against one hideously-papered wall - sickly, mustard-y yellow-green with horrible orange... were those daisies or just really screwy-looking sunflowers? Whoever had wallpapered this house had either been blind or... The Graverobber blinked, not wanting to pursue that line of thinking for even one second longer. Shilo grinned up at him, the expression so exquisitely wicked, and took a step towards him.

"And just what do you have in mind now, young lady?" he asked her in a teasingly patronizing voice, tilting his head down at her. He didn't even have to take a step, just leaned forward and braced his hands on the wall, one on either side of her shoulders. "Here I thought you were a good girl..."

He pressed forward, backing her up fully against the wall and watching her eyes light up with a devilish sort of excitement - he liked this side of her, however much of it she wanted to show him. Shilo's jaw set in determination as she took both sides of his open shirt and gripped with all she was worth, so he let her pull him flush against her. Her cheeks blushed red at her own brazen action, but she giggled and tugged on his shirt as she tilted her head up, stood on tiptoe, and missed his lips entirely due to the difference in their heights, kissing his chin instead. He laughed quietly in return and helpfully brought his lips down on hers, growling playfully into the kiss as Shilo continued to pull at his shirt. Still bracing with his left hand, he brought his right down to slide over her shoulder, feeling her shiver even under the thick knit of her dress. Their tongues clashed - she was definitely getting the hang of that with speed well exceeding his expectations - and Shilo moaned louder than anything he had heard out of her so far. A small, warm hand found his bare chest and he pulled back just enough to suck in a quick breath before descending on her neck, sucking gently at the soft, pale skin. Shilo tilted her head to the side, her eyes widening in surprise as she gasped at the new sensations.

She had read her fair share of vampire lore during a short period when she was about fifteen, around when her father said she should have been learning basic algebra. The Vampire LeStat seemed boring by comparison now and even Dracula himself had nothing on the solid physical sensation of this man's lips and tongue teasing her, his teeth nipping her skin just hard enough to make her yelp. She loved every second of it, moaning and trying to pull him closer, one hand threading up into the back of his hair. The texture wasn't exactly pleasant, rather rough and matted - he did need a shower, but for the moment, she could deal. A positively sinful idea crossed her mind and she raised one knee to hook around his hips. Graverobber's eyebrows raised in surprise and he pulled back to look down at her with a question in his eyes. She answered with a smile that practically sparkled back at him, pressing her hips to his and pretending that she was not blushing fiercely at the feel of him between her legs. To hide that, she tightened her hands in his shirt, pulled herself up a bit, and nipped his lip, this time not hard enough to even come close to hurting him. Well, he couldn't argue with that, so he placed moved his free hand from the wall to her knee, holding her where she was for a moment before she started wobbling and he let her down, returning his hand to where it had been. Shilo giggled, rested against the wall for a bit, then ducked under his arm and veritably skipped back into the main hallway, still smiling at him.

"You are a naughty girl," the Graverobber told her, trying to hide the heavy arousal in his voice - having her pressing her most intimate part against him like that still rang at the forefront of his mind.

A glowing, divine smile answered him and its bearer continued down the hall, a significant increase in the spring in her step - he couldn't help but follow, growling under his breath at how she teased him. There couldn't be any way she was unaware of how tantalizingly her hips swayed back and forth in that pseudo-modest, curve-hugging knit sheath. Those silly black thigh-highs clung attractively to her legs - there weren't many girls who could pull off the whole "tights" thing, much less something that unusual. Shilo continued down the hallway, past a few close-doored rooms and another hallway, her steps so light that she did not cause the floorboards to squeak. She took a left turn and stopped short, almost causing him to collide with her as he turned the same corner, considering he had been unable to see her from his approaching angle. The alcove had a hardwood door standing halfway open just at the end of it and Shilo stepped back against the wall to let him pass. He gave her a rather curious look and proceeded, the teen following not-quite-closely.

"This is the guest room," she told him unneccessarily, gesturing around. Then she paused for a second. "Well, it would have been if we ever had guests..."

Graverobber nodded, not feeling the need to say anything to that.

"Bathroom's in there, should have soap and everything," she said a bit stiffly, pointing at the back left corner of the room. "Towels are in the linen closet on the right. I'm assuming you can find your own way back downstairs, right?"

The Graverobber grinned and gave a snort of teasing laughter - he noticed she was back to pointedly not looking at him.

"I'm sure I can," he replied, looking back at her over his shoulder. Shilo inched towards the door and the Graverobber noticed it. "So run along like a good little girl - I'll be back soon, I promise..."

He followed this with a large, taunting grin, watching Shilo's face turn as red as he had seen it become so far. Her thin hands clenched into fists and for a moment she looked like she very much wanted to punch him - part of him wanted her to try it; that spirited side of her amused him to no end. Turning around quickly, he advanced on her, causing her to back rapidly towards the door. He didn't have to cover much ground before he could take her by one shoulder and pull her to him again. Shilo struggled, pushing at him with both hands - somehow, she lost the effect entirely when, every time she touched his bare skin, she yanked her hands back as if she had been burned. Graverobber smirked down at her, quite amused by her quite-obviously-forced display of prudery, and caught her by both wrists, stilling her movements. Slowly, predatorily, he leaned down so that his lips almost brushed her ear, snaking his tongue out to trace the sensitive skin and send shivers down her spine.

"Try not to miss me too much," he teased before pulling back, turning her around, and swatting her behind again - just as she turned around, fully intending to smack him right in the jaw, he turned away and she found him halfway to the bathroom. Staring dumbly, she watched him saunter in and give her a naughty wink before closing the door firmly behind him.

"You jerk!" she yelled, spinning on her heel and slamming the door as she stormed out of the room.

The Graverobber grinned in total merriment as he listened to Shilo's stomping footsteps fading away down the hall - that girl would never cease to amuse him, what with all that theatrical standoffishness. He whistled happily as he dropped his moldy old coat on the floor and his shirt followed it, the cloth tumbling down to form an evil-smelling heap. He balanced for a minute or two, halfway seated on the edge of the sink, and bent down to unbuckle his boots - two loud, satisfying thunks accompanied the falling footwear. A completely abhorrent smell filled the bathroom as he removed the mismatched knitted... things that passed for his socks. After fiddling with his belt for a moment and a half, his pants landed on the floor alongside his socks and boots, the large, clunky buckle hitting the tile with a clank. His whistling went a bit off-key as he had to be a bit ginger with the waistband of his boxers - his body had not entirely calmed down from the excitement in the kitchen. The rather threadbare blue pinstriped boxers joined the rest of his clothes on the floor and he stretched out a bit, then reached over to twist the shower knob to "hot".

Steam filled the bathroom within about a minute and a half, fogging the mirror from top to bottom, and he took a deep breath of the hot, moist air before stepping into the shower. He loved having them almost scaldingly hot - when you didn't get to shower on any kind of regular basis, you didn't take the few you got for granted. After cracking his neck noisily, he turned around, letting the steaming stream hit his back; immediately, he felt heaven-knows-how-long worth of tension release out of his muscles. He tipped his head back and winced slightly as the nearly-blistering water hit his scalp and cascaded through his long, matted hair. A few seconds passed as he acclimated himself to the ridiculously hot water, then he turned about, looking around for something resembling shampoo. To his chagrin, he found a widely-varied assortment of the most feminine-looking bath products he could ever remember seeing. The prettily-molded plastic bottles were enough to make any man stomp out of the shower, determined that they would rather stink than smell like that.

However, as anyone who laid eyes on him could say, the Graverobber was decidedly not just any man - to him, a shower was a shower, and that was just that, regardless of how flowery he wound up smelling. He reached out for the bottle containing shampoo, about three-quarters full of a viscous, violet liquid, and squeezed a bit into his hand. The almost-cloying smell of artificial lavender fragrance wafted up with the steam of the shower and he wrinkled his nose for a second before bringing the purple handful up and rubbing it into the top of his head. Lather practically erupted from it and he figured it would be best to just get this over with. Never one to be particularly gentle or careful with his hands, he scrubbed briskly, squeezing his eyes shut and rinsing the offensive froth from his hair - it hadn't done a thing to rid the soggy mass of the tangles; if anything, getting it wet had made it worse. The bottle that had been next to the shampoo - the one no self-respecting man would ever touch - the conditioner, looked so inauspicious...

Well, it had been quite established that he wasn't like other men. So, he picked up the other bottle, this one full of pastel lavender goo, and tipped out a more generous handful than a less self-aware man would have dared. Not entirely sure how this "conditioner" stuff worked, he slapped that on top of his head just has he had done with the shampoo, scrunching his nose in confusion when it did not start to lather. As strange and unfamiliar as the stuff was to him, he had to admit his hands slid through his hair much easier than they had been doing before. A few knots had become so bad that he just had to grit his teeth and rip out the knotted hair. The conditioner made everything in the shower slippery - the sensation of it dripping down his back felt particularly odd; he had certainly never experienced anything like that before! And on top of everything, it smelled even more strongly of lavender fragrance than the shampoo had.

With his hair rinsed and hanging, waterlogged, down his back, he peered from one end of the shower to the other, hoping, but not really figuring, that whatever he might find that looked like soap was not heavily scented of artificial lavender. Thank heaven, he found a plain white bar of soap sitting innocently in a dish at the back end of the shower. Silently thanking the Powers That Be, he reached for the soap and cursed loudly as the conditioner on the floor of the shower nearly caused him to fall forward. Seizing the small white bar before anything else went wrong, he started scrubbing his shoulders and chest, relieved to be getting rid of the smell of half-dead Zydrate junkies, not to mention the actual corpse yuck. More of that old, nagging tension melted out of him as the soap, mercifully lavender-free, glided over his skin. For a very brief moment, he felt... tired, something he hadn't allowed himself to truly feel in longer than he could reasonably remember. His eyes drooped a bit, then he perked himself up, washing rather sloppily under his arms, screwing up his nose at the way the humidity of the shower magnified the fact that he smelled like a dead goat.

Mindlessly, the Graverobber continued washing the filth of his life off his body, his nose still tingling absently from the strong scent of lavender hanging about the steamy air.

*****

Downstairs, Shilo had returned to her book - after all the informational bits and Audubon paintings in the front of the book, everything from the fifth chapter on formed a field guide to the butterflies of the world. A Dryadula phaetusa* seemed to blink back at her from a patch of rich-looking, deep brown forest soil somewhere in Brazil, no matter that bugs did not blink, strictly speaking. For someone who, up until a few months ago, hadn't left the house she had grown up in but twice ever, she had the most amazing sensate imagination. She could nearly smell the soft, almost spicy aroma of the forest floor and the sweet, heady perfume wafting off the white blossoms of the surrounding Amazon lilies. Her ears pricked up a bit and she swore she could hear birds cheeping and singing and monkeys making noises of one raucous kind and the other. For a long moment, she just had to close her eyes - while she had always been a voracious devourer of written information, sometimes she couldn't deny that books brought her a visual experience no television screen could.

Tilting her head back with her eyes still closed, she let herself relax into her dad's old seat on the couch, simultaneously smelling the reality of smoky-scented leather and hearing the fantastical sounds of innumerable rainforest songbirds. Greens, blues, whites, reds - every color that grew out of a plant, glimmered down from the sky, or gleamed off of a bird's wing - danced across the backs of her eyelids. The weight of the book in her lap vaguely kept her grounded as her mind soared away to explore the dangerous rainforests, dreaming of the bugs she might find there. Leaf-cutter ants skittered over branches, carrying green scraps that dwarfed their segmented bodies. The loud buzzing alerted her to the termites and mosquitos flying around the air - she wanted a specimen from each and every species she saw, male and female. In her right hand, she held her favorite jar, the lid tightly screwed on to prevent the ether-soaked cotton wad in the bottom from leaking its sickly fumes everywhere.

A beautiful four-and-a-half-inch-long Titanus giganteus** hiked resolutely along a knobbly branch, clacking its magnificent pincers together, small for a bug that could potentially reach a solid six-and-a-half inches in length. Sure, it was small for its species, but it seemed a shame not to take such a gorgeous specimen; its elytra, the hard covering over its forewings, shone bright and brown, like polished wood. Four-and-a-half inches wasn't exactly a shabby size for a bug, anyway, thought Shilo, smiling as her hand tensed on her jar. She padded over as slowly as she possibly could, wincing and then freezing dead still every time her foot hit a fallen branch. The beetle didn't seem to notice; for everything she had ever read and all the attention her books paid to bugs and their compound eyes, she never could quite figure out how well they could hear. They didn't seem to have visible ears - but her brain was trying to distract her now and she shook herself back to the forest, staring at the brown insect. She was just out of reach of the giant bug and had to restrain herself from pouncing a second too early - the countdown started in her head: Five... four... three... two...

"Shit!" she swore in her dream as the insect took it into its head to fly away just before she got to 'one'. A monkey chattered at her from overhead, and she dodged a flying nut shell - it landed near her right foot. A large scarlet macaw laughed cacophonously and ruffled its wings, sounding like it was probably somewhere near the monkey. "What else could go wrong?"

As if on cue, a cold, wet drop hit her nose and for one horrible moment, she thought the spider monkey had let loose with its normal territorial display - everyone knew that monkeys would piss on you given half the chance.

Footnotes:

* Dryadula phaetusa is also known as the Banded Orange Heliconian, Banded Orange, or Orange Tiger. I found this information on Wikipedia under "Dryadula phaetusa".

** Titanus giganteus the Titan beetle, the largest known beetle in the Amazon rainforest. To back this up, check Wikipedia under "Titan beetle".