Author's Note: Hey everybody! A bonus quick update, relative to the last one. We're nearing the end, so why not celebrate with a breakneck pace? Has anybody watched Channel Zero yet? I've been curious about it but I have Netflix not Hulu or whatever sub it was on. Drop a review and let me know if you liked it! Are there any other CP that have been made into TV or movie?

Chapter 16: I'm Not Okay, I Promise

If I was an ordinary person, Laughing Jack thought to himself as he materialized in the hallways of the group house, I would probably be concerned by how many people have asked me to take them to a graveyard today. Even on the cusp of winter, Louisiana still managed to be humid and warm. He combed his claws through the feathers on his coat, muttering complaints about the South. Jack knocked on Melanie's door and it opened instantly.

Melanie looked like a force to be reckoned with. She stood several inches taller in combat boots she never would have worn on an ordinary day. Her daily attire of elegant and brightly colored clothes had been swapped for layers of black and grey snow gear. The hair she usually spent so long straightening now hung in frizzy curls that draped over her eyes which screamed with a need for revenge and victory. Jack knew that until today none of the other housemates would ever truly know this side of her.

The Melanie they knew was naive and bubbly, always putting others first and willing to love at the risk of her own life. What they could never understand, having never been inside her head, was that nearly every damn thing they saw was a lie. Those first few weeks at the house, Laughing Jack had instantly sensed her presence simply from the whirlwind of emotions that flew through the hallways every time she passed. Loneliness, self-loathing, terror, guilt, and even disgust. But she would have never let them see that. She had known the second she walked in that house that she needed to put on an act in order to survive. Fake it till you make it. And she had. Eventually she really had been able to become that person she pretended to be. If the sight in front of Jack was any indicator, she had skills that could be used for great good as well as horrible deeds. By only glancing at a person for a moment and exchanging a few words she could know exactly what was missing in someone's life. What they feared, what they missed, what they wanted. Only he and Toby knew that she had once used that skill to ruin people.

He supposed that she faked it a little too hard at the house, because eventually she began to believe the lies she told herself until they became true! That she was happy here, that her parents wouldn't have given her grief. When she realized she was no different from the lost souls around her, was that when she finally found peace? Peace from her past that she had been running from for so long?

Jack remembered the day she had confided in him about the truth of her parents' deaths. She had leaned her head against that end table, face buried in her hands, and begged him to never tell the others how broken she was. That she was just like Jane. That she had to live a lie in order to live at all. How he wished then that they had had more practice at communicating so he could offer some words of consolation through the walls of his prison. His heart was too rotten then anyway to have been able to cough up anything genuine.

No, the wild looking girl in front of him with burning eyes was a side of Melanie that she would fight to hide from those she loved to her dying breath. This was the side that would always battle with the ideal version of herself. But it was also the piece of her that would lay ruin to anyone who dared to hurt her family. This was the side that would defeat Moira.

It was also the side that had created her. He sensed that they both knew this, that they had accepted it gradually but without acknowledgment. There weren't enough answers as to how to worry about the why. All he knew was that in order to kill Moira, the side of her that she had leaned on for so long to get her through the hard times would have to die.

"Are you ready to leave, Jack?" Melanie asked. She was holding a hairband stretched between two fingers and her face was mostly covered by tresses of curls.

"Oh, there you are Candy-cane! I didn't see you under there," he teased. Melanie lightly punched his arm as she slipped on a backpack. The dangerous look in her eyes disappeared when her ears were met with that familiar nickname. That had always been a reliable trigger to snap her out of any moment of brooding. "I have everything I'll need. And as soon as I get you to the gates I'm coming straight back here for the others."

"Good," she said. Jack took a step back as she passed him into the hallway, leading him with a hand on his arm while the other fiddled relentlessly with her hair. He laughed and swooped up behind her to fix it. He was Laughing Jack, after all! He'd braided plenty of little girls' pigtails in his hundreds of years on his Earth shadowing the lonely children of the world and-

-Son-of-a-Nutcracker that sucker was really stuck.

Melanie chuckled as her protector tried to pretend nothing was going wrong as he experienced the exact same amount of trouble she had just abandoned.

"Now you see why I used to keep it so short!"

"It's just so... I mean your hair looks great either way honey but this is just... how do you live with this?" he exclaimed.

"Well, I never have to worry about it being flat. Hey, weren't we just on our way to a battle or something?"

"Yes?"

"And... how did we get on the subject of my hair?" she asked. LJ shrugged as he stepped up in front of her, smiling and holding out his hand palm up.

"I- well either way, kiddo, you look fabulous enough to blind an army. You kill 'em girl. We can do this," he said, lowering his voice to a more serious tone. "We've made it through every other mess life has thrown at us, and plenty we've thrown at ourselves. And hey- what do we say to death?" he asked.

Melanie grinned and placed her hand over his palm to initiate the teleport, being careful to avoid his curled claws. "Not today."