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Silco couldn’t believe it had been a year since he took Jinx in.
Not in the sense that time had flown by, perhaps, but rather how he had managed to force himself through it before. As cliché as he knew it sounded, he didn’t know what he had done without her. In his darkest hours, she managed to be the lightest presence, and being with her became the highlights of many of his days.
It was these thoughts that plastered a giddy smile on his face, as he entered the office to meet her. It had been an incredibly quiet day-a compensation for the tumultuous one prior-and as such she hadn’t gotten dressed, lounging on his desk, half-asleep and hazily smiling, in an oversized, green dinosaur onesie he’d picked up for her at a flea market a while back. Her feet dangled off the front, swinging unconsciously in an impressively balanced state of momentum, little toes peeking out of the loose leg holes. Leaning forward, he pinched at one. Jinx squeaked and jolted upright, hand flying to her feet.
”Got your toes!” he teased, crouching in front of her.
”You scared me!” she protested, flinging her rabbit plushie at him, so that it whacked his face with a little ‘thump.’
”And for that,” he started, rising again and reaching for her, “I’ll have your nose, too!”
To his pleasure, she squealed and began scrambling away from him. He gave chase with zeal, leaving heaps of paper to fall as he let himself enjoy this moment with her. She zigzagged across the office with great speed, her exceedingly long braid flailing this way and that. But Silco was strategic, cutting her off between the sofa and coffee table, hands lunging for her stomach. She was overcome with helpless laughter before she could even cry out ‘no!’
For a few moments, she struggled against his tickles, but before she knew it he’d wrapped a solid arm around her, his free hand proving relentless to her pleas for mercy as he attacked her tummy with his tickling fingers. Despite her kicks and squirms, he held her fast until she was practically breathless. He nuzzled into her head, showered it with kisses and affirmations of love, and so was very surprised when she flipped around to face him and reached for his stomach with retaliating attacks. When this elicited no response, she looked at him, baffled.
”I’m not ticklish,” he stated plainly.
”But…that’s…” she panted heavily, still catching her breath. “That’s…it’s not fair.”
“Alas, it’s true,” he placated, thickening his voice for dramatic effect. “You can’t change the truth, little one.”
“But you must be a little bit!” she argued, her inner fire reigniting now she had her breath back. “Once, Mylo told me he wasn’t ticklish, but then Vi said everyone has a tickle spot, and I found his, and he laughed!” She gave a resolute nod, as if this proved her point.
If Silco was surprised she was talking about her old family so freely, he didn’t show it. Instead, he just kept smiling softly, brushing a few stray hairs from her face.
”Well, I don’t.”
”Bullshit!”
”Now, Jinx,” his voice shifted, taking on a stern quality. “I know you get frustrated when you don’t win, but this is just a game.”
”Sorry,” she muttered begrudgingly, resting her chin in her hand. “I just don’t believe you don’t have one,” Suddenly, her face lit up, and Silco recognised that strange quality her eyes took on when she became dead set on something. “I bet you do have one. You just don’t want to show it.”
She stared him with that all-too-familiar face that implied a challenge was brewing beneath the surface, and try as he might, he was just as bad as her when it came to not backing down from a challenge, especially if it was just between him and her.
”Even if I did have one, I wouldn’t tell you,” he insisted. “And I’ll damned if you could get within a mile of tickling me anyhow.”
That did it: her eyes widened to twice their size, and the corners of her mouth upturned and formed a roguish grin. There was no turning back now.
“Alright,” she said, leaping to her feet and giving another prove-my-point nod. “Bet.”
Before Silco had time to process what that meant, she’d turned on her heel and strode haughtily out the door.
The first order of business was to interrogate Sevika. Of course, it was excruciatingly doubtful that she knew anything about Silco’s ticklishness, but they had known each other a long time, so Jinx figured at the very least she would know some of his weak points.
”Sevika!”
”What is it, now?”
At first, Jinx ignored her, addressing the bartender. “Chuck, serve up some orange juice! And use my special cup!” She switched back to Sevika before the bewildered boy could correct her (once again), perching genially on a neighbouring barstool. “What’s Silco’s weak points?”
”Jesus, you don’t waste a second, do you?” Sevika took a swig of ale.
”What’s his weak points?” Jinx repeated impatiently.
”Now, hold on, that’s not something I can just talk about in public.” Sevika eyed Jinx suspiciously. “Why the hell do you wanna know, anyway?”
”You want the truth?-thanks, chuck,” Jinx took a sip of orange juice before proceeding, inclining her head toward Sevika and lowering her voice to a whisper. “I want to find his tickle spot.”
Sevika scoffed, genuinely scoffed. “Well, I don’t know why the hell you think I’d know anything about that, but I can tell you that I did spar with the guy a fair bit back in the day, and, yeah, sure, you could say he’s a little sensitive under the knees and elbows, and especially-and you ain’t to tell nobody this, but-“ she paused, glanced sided to side conspiringly. “One time, we had a knife duel, and my blade brushed his ear, and I swear to god, Jinx, he yelped.”
Jinx gave out a muffled giggle, obscured by the straw in her mouth, through which she was heartily slurping the last of her fruit juice. She chucked the cup to the side, and thanked Sevika and added that she’d been a great help, and left skipping with several blooming ideas running rampant in her mind.
The next step was, naturally, to plan an ambush, but this… well, this was difficult with Silco. Despite his size, the man had the reflexes of a wildcat, like he was constantly wary of a trap that hadn’t been sprung.
Fortunately, she had the amiable advantage of him trusting her, so that his guard was down whenever she was around. And as for getting him alone, well, that was easy enough too.
The next evening, as Silco encapsulated himself with the numerics of paperwork, she observed him thoroughly from her safe-house in the ceiling, her slim body vibrating a little with the thrill of stealth fuelled by adrenaline. Eventually, after much pondering, she deftly manoeuvred herself onto another plank, internally congratulating herself when she didn’t make a sound. Admittedly, he did know she was in the room-he’d said hello upon entering, despite her hiding spot-but that was typical; the man had uncanny ability to sense a human presence, even if it was invisible or inaudible. However, chances were he didn’t know exactly where in the room she was, and she’d become something of an expert in lurking in the last year or so.
She wiggled carefully around and down, testing the woodwork with her boots before each step. The trickiest part was jumping down without giving herself away, and she had to sorely repress an exclamation of self-congratulation when she managed to hit the floor without a creak of the floorboards, nor the thud of her boots.
She was right behind him, now, the back of the chair making for an irritating obstacle. She’d have move to come around to the side, but then what? Clenching her fists, she cursed internally, wishing she had spent less time meticulously planning her route down, and more time on what she’d do when she finally got close enough for the attack. Luckily for her, Silco had given no indication that he had noticed her movements (which he usually did), and, cruel as it sounded, his bad eye had particularly poor peripheral vision-while his better orifice would certainly pick up on her, the former was far less, if not completely unlikely to see her coming from that side.
On the sole of her boots, she crept to the left, her father coming more and more into view as her vision became unobscured by the chair. She could only just determine the outline of his face when he addressed her.
”Forgive my directness, but what are you doing, Jinx?”
Shit. Think fast. Her left eye was drawn to the pocket watch resting on the desk.
”It’s medicine time!” she blurted out.
He followed her eyes to the watch and raised his eyebrows. “So it is,” he said, pulling the contraption from its drawer. He took her outstretched hand and guided her into his lap, handing her the syringe. “Though, I’m impressed you’ve come to know the schedule so instinctually.”
She absorbed the praise with a smile and no comment, eyes burning with concentration as she positioned the needle over his eye. He leaned back obligingly to give her a better angle, and when the pain came he rested his aching head on her shoulder as she whispered away the pain.
When it had passed, he stayed there a while, allowing himself an elongated moment of vulnerability, letting himself lie there purely for the sake of lying there. When he shuddered from an aftershock and nuzzled further into her shoulder, his hands tightening around her, any inkling of strategy left Jinx’s mind. It was so rare she got to share this with him, have her be the one comforting him, that she shoved her plan right back to the sooty crevices of her mind. Resting her head against the top of his, she pressed a kiss into his hair and crooned out silky words of comfort, as he had with her so many times.
”I wuv you,” her voice came out muffled against his head.
An equally muffled hum that resembled an ‘I love you, too’ came back, his arms fully entangled her. As always, they managed to share a hundred words without saying a thing. Moments like these, Jinx realised, reminded her that it wasn’t just her that needed him, but him that needed her; she wasn’t a burden, she was needed. She was loved.
The moment was broken, however, when he slowly pulled away, which didn’t break the moment in itself, but rather, the minute chuckle he gave out when the syringe brushed against his ear.
Instantly, her brain went Code Hyperfocus. With a face so bunched up it looked ready to explode, she scrutinised him with a peculiar look.
”What?” Silco asked, concerned at the sudden shift in expression.
“You. Laughed.” she said strangely, head tilting.
”Not at you,” he assured, assuming her unreadable face might be due to insecurity.
“No, not at me,” she concurred. “But you did laugh,” She set the contraption down on the table, freeing her hand to brush his face. Unresistingly, he let her find what she needed to find. Her hand travelled upward, her thumb tracing his scar, until, not a millisecond before her fingertips reached his ears.
”Jinx, no.” In a raw reflex, he snatched her hand, but his stern tone and warning eyes were lost on her, an elvish smirk spreading across her face. She knew, and Silco cursed himself for not considering a less obvious nor suspicious reaction.
”Jinx, yes!” Her free hand went for above his elbow, and this time his reflexes weren’t swift enough. An involuntary burst of laughter escape him, and instinct made the attacked arm jerk away and push her off the seat with a moderate shove to the chest. It was a little more than moderate. She fell to the floor with a disconcerting ‘thud.’
“Jinx!” he cried out, crumpling to the floor hastily after her. Thankfully, some movement and a delicious giggle wiped away his fear. She whacked his shoulder genially, with respectable strength, body jerking with bouts of staccato giggles. Rubbing away the pain in his shoulder, he leaned forward and kissed her forehead.
”Alright, you’ve won your little bet,” he said, nuzzling his nose against hers. “Enough of this game, now.”
”Oh, but that’s so unfair!” she whined, pushing him away frustratedly. “You can’t always win!”
”Well,” he said, kneeling above her and folding his arms tightly about him. “If you really want to win so badly, you’ll have to do it properly, hm? Put up a real fight.” His fingers briefly and emphatically tickled her chest, and she batted them away with a smile. He appended, pinching her nose in mild chastisement: “No more sneaking.”
Inside, Jinx’s little wheels turned and turned, and worked and worked. She smiled at herself mischievously, and gazed back up at him with that lamenting ‘I’m just a sad, helpless little girl’ face she’d practiced and utilised many a time before to get out of a tricky situation, and felt the familiar taste of satisfaction when his face utterly melted in response.
”My back hurts,” she groaned pitifully, writhing uncomfortably for believability.
”I thought it might. You hit the floor rather hard.” His voice was husky with sympathy, and he lifted her carefully into his arms, causing her to whimper at the movement. “There, there,” he cooed, combing her hair with one hand and tentatively examining her ‘sore’ back with the other. “Let’s have a look.”
Whislt Silco checked her for injury, Jinx sniffled and flinched and pathetically pawed at his chest, her brain acutely aware of his body language and waiting for his guard to fall again. One thing was for sure: the next time she tickled him, it had to count, because there would be no turning back after that-this was all out war, and like Silco said, she’d have to put up a fight. As she felt his body relax from relief, her hands once again innocently wandered to his ears, while she let out emotive pain sounds to keep him enchanted and in the ‘she can do no wrong’ state.
Then, an obstacle: he tensed again. The jig was nearly up. In a ditch effort to keep his sympathy, she pulled back from him at arms length, pouting miserably, and for a moment his strength loosened. Without a moment’s notice, she flung her entire body weight on him, knocking him to the floor and disarming him, much like the night he had found her.
Except this time he had no knife. Instead, she pinned his arms with her knees, her elbows pressing into his chest as she gazed at him with a pleased expression, face resting on her clasped hand-Silco knew he was a doomed man.
”You fiend,” he gasped, barely finishing the sentence before she was upon him, relentless and gleeful, making him giggle uncharacteristically. But like it not, he was stronger than her, and it wasn’t very long before he had squirmed out from beneath her. She leapt back to dodge his incoming attack, and they raced around the desk, their flailing arms knocking down anything and everything they caught on. After a few laps of effectively Ring Around the Rosy, they halted at either end of the desk, panting laboriously and gripping the wood with unsteady arms.
“Alright,” he breathed, his voice coming out hoarse and worn down. “I mean it, now. Can’t we just,” the emphasis made him sound almost pleading, “play it like we usually do?”
”Chicken!”
”Excuse me?”
Silco straightened up instantaneously, mouth agape at the audacity of it all, and Jinx knew she had struck a nerve.
”Chicken!” she repeated, and then proceeded to march purposefully toward the coffee table and start performing a terrifyingly accurate emulation of the sounds and movements of a frightened mother hen.
Something snapped in his brain. His teeth gritted harshly and he set upon her like a bloodhound. Together, they ran tumultuous laps around the tiny room, Jinx utilising her agility to an advantage and leaping and bounding off the walls, as his hands reached out for her. All around them, things were falling and clattering and scraping, but none of that mattered, for Silco was strategic; she zigzagged, he zigzagged; she bounced off the walls (or did a circle around the table), he tried to cut her off.
But she was intelligent too. In a single fluid movement, she propelled herself off the coffee table, clamped onto his head and shoulders, and began tickling mercilessly.
”Ah, no!” he yelped at the sensitivity of his tickle spot, his body buckling with the sensation, and his throat eliciting endless sharp yet near girlish giggles. He collapsed onto a crawling position and then slumped to the floor entirely when she didn’t let up, his composure disintegrating and transforming the Undercity’s Druglord into an utterly hapless heap of laughter. Through his breath, he tried pleading with her to stop, and when that failed he turned to begging unconvincingly.
"If you really wanted me to stop, you wouldn't be smiling," she pointed out in a moment of wit.
"No-ah! That's not-"
"Fair?" she asked him mockingly, still tickling and keeping him down despite his squirms and their contrasting sizes. She wished she could take a picture of his face: it would make a fine memento to her success.
She was so busy torturing him she didn't notice he'd slipped off her boots until it was too late.
The second her hands moved away in defence, he yanked her off of him, hooked her feet under his arm, and use the other hands to tickle her toes. Between giggles, she writhed and grasped for him, but he had her secure and she knew she would need another way.
For the second time that evening, Silco had the wind knocked out of him, this time by a solid kick to the stomach. As he flinched, one of her feet was set free and she could sit up enough to reach behind his knees; he squealed as she tickled him.
"H-how did you even-?" he began, but his inquiry was interrupted by another assault on his ears. He still had her other foot though, and she squealed and jerked so hard from the following counter-attack that her body threw itself backwards, head first, into the coffee table.
"Ow!!!" her cry came out scarily strained, and she went limp. For a millisecond, Silco was frozen, but then adrenaline and fatherly instinct rose to the surface. Hastily, he crawled over to her.
Turns out he wasn't the only one who heard her screech.
"Alright," Sevika's voice was loud and authoritative as she swung the door open. "Someone better be broken, bleeding, or dying cause that was a hell of a lot of noise!" Her statement was barely finished before her eyes grew wide in bewildered horror at the mess around them-books everywhere, lamp shades assaulted, paperwork amuck, a few shattered glasses, and at the centre of it all, Jinx and Silco, strewn across the floor, looking just as dishevelled.
"What happened?!"
"We had a tickle match," Jinx whispered. Silco was cradling her in his arms, supporting the back of her head with his hand. When she spoke again, she sounded groggy and slightly pained: "I... I didn't get to win, I... I was so close."
"So close," Silco assured her, kissing the top of her forehead. "You would have won, I’m sure of it.”
"I..." she breathed, recovering enough consciousness to sit up and pull a mischievous grin. "I did have you, didn't I?"
He chuckled, partly from her cheekiness and partly from nervous relief. "You certainly did."
"So I won?"
"You won."
"Yay!!" she wrapped her arms joyously around his neck, and Sevika, determining that nothing serious was wrong, left. Silco hugged Jinx back, congratulating her on a well-deserved win. Technically they weren't done, but he knew without a slither of a doubt she would've beaten him if it weren't for the coffee table, at least until they eventually became exhausted.
Now, he thought to himself, what am I going to do about all this mess?