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He was bored. There was literally nothing to do except watch the new kid crochet. They had somehow gotten Caine to give them some yarn and crochet hooks, which he immediately took as an opportunity to tease them.
“You’re like a little grandma! That’s so dorky!”
Fidget looked a bit annoyed, but mostly ignored him. Just like now, when they were just sitting on the couch crocheting. Not paying him any attention.
What was so interesting about yarn anyway? It was stupid. It wasn’t fair that she got to be entertained by her dumb yarn while he was bored out of his mind.
Jax let out an annoyed sniff.
Suddenly, Fidget shuddered and their face crumpled up.
For a second, Jax was confused. One sniff triggered that? Was it really that easy to tick her off? He did it again, just to test it, and Fidget cringed again.
His trademark wide grin spread across his face. Now that he figured out how to get under their skin, he was going to have some fun with it.
Every few seconds, he sniffed, trying to make it seem accidental. With every sound, Fidget got more and more agitated, trying to cover their nonexistent ears. But they couldn’t crochet and cover her ears at the same time.
He found that he got the best reaction when he put random intervals between sniffs, so she never quite knew when the next one was coming.
It was so funny to see them upset. She was like a little chihuahua, shaking with rage. Just a tiny silicone ball of frustration. At one point, he even thought he could see tears in their eyes. Oh my god, were they actually crying over a sound? This was almost too easy.
“Stop that,” they muttered without looking up.
“Stop what?” he asked in a faux innocent tone, immediately followed by another sniff.
“Sniffing!!” she whined between gritted teeth, yanking the rubbery tendrils on the sides of their head. They looked just like Ragatha for a second.
“I just have a cold!” he lied. “Are you saying you don’t want me to breathe? That’s mean.”
Fidget whispered something that sounded like “you can’t get a cold here…”, but shrunk back into herself right after.
Jax continued sniffing intermittently, even throwing in some coughs to really sell the cold excuse. This seemed to agitate Fidget just as much, if not more. They were barely focused on their crochet anymore, too fixated on the constant sensory onslaught.
Her dumb little three-fingered paws were shaking, balled up into fists. They looked so silly.
Jax coughed again, louder this time.
“I swear to god…” Fidget mumbled.
“Whaaaat? I’m not doing anything-“
Suddenly something small and blobby bumped into his legs. Fidget had jumped off the couch and latched onto his ankles.
He laughed. “Are you kidding me?” The baby of the bunch barely reached his knees, and now she was trying to attack him? It was hilariously pathetic. He didn’t even try to defend himself in any way.
But then she started climbing.
Jax hadn’t really thought about the fact that he was built like a tree, and that Fidget’s rubber body gave them pretty good traction. Still, they were just silicone, it’s not like they could do any actual damage, right?
Only when she reached his eye level (which happened shockingly fast) did he realize she was still holding the crochet hook.
The last thing he saw was Fidget’s face contorted in anger, one hand grabbing him by the shoulder and the other one raising the crochet hook like a weapon.
All of this happened in the span of a few seconds. He barely managed to raise his hands to try to swat her off, but she already struck.
Suddenly, the vision in one of his eyes was gone, and there was a stabbing pain. He screamed when he realized what happened, a mix of pain and shock. Injuries were pretty common in the circus, but it didn’t happen often that someone physically attacked him in retaliation for a simple prank like this one. Much less with a fucking crochet hook to the eye.
With the eye that didn’t have a metal hook sticking out of it, he could vaguely see Fidget stomping off to their room, hands over where their ears should be.
Caine heard Jax’s scream and fixed him up in a second, removing the hook from his eye and returning his avatar to its original state. Once Fidget calmed down enough, she was forced to apologize to Jax (an awkward “sorry” mumbled towards the floor) and use plastic crochet hooks from now on. Apart from that, the incident seemed pretty inconsequential to outsiders. Soon Jax was back to calling Fidget childish insults, squeezing their head and picking them up by the tail. But Fidget noticed that he never seemed to purposefully cough or sniff around her anymore. And when she was crocheting, he mostly left her alone. She wasn’t really proud of how she lost her temper, but in a way, she didn’t hate the result.