A/N: Hey guys, I'm sorry for not updating in a while. I know I'm a bit late for this chapter seeing as it's Halloween themed, but at the time that I had started this (on Halloween day), I had been drafted into going trick-or-treating with my younger brother. And walking around for about an hour in boots—that I can assure you were not made for comfort—in the cold essentially zapped all energy I had for actually finishing this chapter. But I've actually been working on it over a few months, trying to get it just right. I'm pretty happy with how it turned out. Anyway I hope you all enjoy this chapter!

Disclaimer: I don't own the Expendables or the Losers, just my OC, Sky.

Growing Pains

New Orleans, Louisiana

October 31st, 1997

Lee Christmas wasn't sure what he should be more worried about; the fact that he and Barney had to go meet with a client regarding a dangerous job in the Polynesian Islands or the fact that tonight was Halloween and Jake and Sky would be going trick-or-treating with only Tool and Gunnar. Honestly it was a toss-up. It wasn't that he didn't trust the two men to look after his daughter. It was that he knew better than to think they'd be able to look after his daughter without something going wrong. He wasn't stupid, not at all. In fact he was quite an observant person, which came in handy in his line of work. And over the few months since Gunnar and Jake joined them, he'd observed a few key things.

First, Tool was a loving uncle figure to both children. It was clear that he absolutely adored the two children, but he wasn't the best babysitter. He would let the kids slide on most things and he let them do whatever they wanted if they asked with enough pouting and eyelash batting. Secondly, Gunnar was a fair and loving parent. He would make sure that the two kids were doing what they were supposed to be doing and though he'd allow a little wiggle room within the rules, if something was serious, he'd put his foot down. And lastly, Jake was good at convincing Sky to break rules. The small blonde was a handful and he was slowly corrupting his precious little angel. Not that he had anything against Jake. He loved the kid, but having to keep giving reminders and punishments when rules were broken was a pain.

"Daddy! Daddy! Look!"

Lee snapped out of his thoughts and looked down in time to see his daughter running up to him with a large smile on her face. Her hair was in two braids on either side of her head and she had a black knee-length dress with white and black leggings. There were black boots on her feet and her nails were painted a black color. But still she was smiling brightly, completely contrasting the dark color she was wearing. "I'm Wednesday Addams!" She announced proudly, holding onto her black pillow case in her hand.

"You can't be happy!" Jake cried out in dismay, running over to her. He had his light blonde hair covered in temporary spray die to make it look black and he was wearing a black and white striped shirt, black shorts, black socks and black sneakers. "Wednesday is never happy unless she's killing someone or something!"

"Let me guess," Barney spoke up in amusement from his spot on the couch, getting ready for their meeting. "You're Pugsley?"

Jake immediately beamed, nodding vigorously. "Yup! We came up with the idea like weeks ago! It was totally better than the Incredibles idea that Joey Barton thought up! And dad even decided to dress up!"

Lee raised an eyebrow. "Your father decided to dress up? As what?"

Jake grinned. "DAD!"

"You rang?"

Lee had to bite his tongue to keep from laughing as 'The Viking' Gunnar Jensen walked out from the back room, dressed up in black suit, black bowtie with his hair hanging over his forehead and his face covered in white and black make-up to make his face look angular and sickly. It was almost surprising how much Gunnar actually looked like Lurch, but the surprise that Lee felt was soon overwhelmed by amusement. He tried everything he could to keep a straight face, but to no avail. The glare that Gunnar tossed him made it apparent that the blonde noticed. "That's a pretty good costume," Lee commented, just barely restraining a laugh.

"What are you smiling at Uncle Fester?" Gunnar retorted without missing a beat.

Lee glared.

Sky however, whirled around to look at her father with a large smile appearing on her face. "Are you going to be dressing up with us too daddy?"

"You'd make a good Uncle Fester!" Jake added on looking at him with big blue eyes.

The knife thrower noticed Gunnar smirking and made a mental note to say some not so nice words to the genius when the kids weren't in hearing range. "Sorry kiddos," Barney spoke up, getting to his feet and grabbing his jacket. "Lee and I are going to go for a job meeting. Tool and Gunnar are going to take you."

The little girl looked down, her smile disappearing from her face. Lee was quick to fix that. He immediately knelt down and grabbed onto his daughter's shoulders, smiling at her softly. "They're going to take you around to all the houses in the neighborhood and make sure you have a fun time. But, you and Jake have a mission, alright?" Almost immediately, she perked up and Jake quickly rushed over.

"We have a mission? Like a mission-mission? What kind of mission? What is it? Do we get to—"

"Jake," Gunnar cut in, succeeding in quieting his son.

Lee smiled at the boy and removed one of the hands from Sky's shoulder's to rest on his. "Your mission is to get as much candy as you possibly can and to be very brave. Don't let anything scare you out there tonight, alright?"

"Yes sir!" The two kids chorused. Jake puffed his chest out. "I won't let anything scare me or Sky!"

"Atta boy," the British man smiled, reaching up to ruffle the boy's hair, only to feel how stiff it was with the dye and get a bit of the color on his hand. He ignored it for the moment and stood up. "Now, you two listen to Gunnar and Tool, got it?" They nodded enthusiastically. "Good… now where is he?"

"Back here," Tool called out, walking in from the back room. There wasn't anything different about his attire, except for the fact that he had a black leather jacket and he was holding two smaller black jackets in his hands. "I was just grabbing your jackets just in case you guys get cold."

"You're not dressing up, Tool?" Barney asked with a small smile on his face.

"The only dressing up I do is in the bedroom."

Almost immediately, Lee, Gunnar, and Barney all sent the tattoo artist fierce glares. Tool winced and realized his mistake as soon as he saw Jake and Sky look his way, their big eyes full of confusion. "Why do you dress up in your room?" Jake asked in confusion. "Are you trying to be a superhero in your room like Spiderman? He always got dressed in his room!"

"Yeah, that's exactly it," he quickly agreed before clearing his throat. "Well, we best get going before all the candy is gone. C'mon kiddos, let's go."

Jake and Sky were quick to agree, practically sprinting over to the door with their black pillow cases, before Gunnar called to them, telling them to stop and wait for them. As soon as the Swedish man made it to the door he grabbed onto the hands of both the children before walking out, assuring Barney and Lee that they wouldn't be home too late. Tool waved to both the mercenaries before following the blonde out and onto the street. Barney shook his head as soon as they were gone, muttering something about 'recipes for disaster' before heading to the garage, no doubt looking to hop on his motorcycle. Lee waited a few more seconds, staring out the door before following the Italian.

He had a bad feeling about all this.

Surprisingly, the meeting for the mission in the Polynesian Islands had gone well. It was a retrieval mission to recover some sort of ancient family heirloom from a warlord that had taken over on a chain of islands. There were a lot of manpower guarding the compound, but based on the maps and charts that their client had given them, there were easy ways around the bulk of the soldiers. Of course, it would take recon in order to make sure that they were comfortable with taking the job, but it was one of the more straight-forward ones that they'd been offered as of late. It was a surprise to Lee that the meeting went well.

What wasn't surprising was the fact that as soon as their meeting was over, he checked his phone to find three missed calls, two e-mails, and seven text messages, all of which were from Gunnar and Tool. If he was being honest with himself, he knew that something was going to happen. He knew it the second the Gunnar and Tool had suggested they take the kids trick-or-treating. He knew something was going to happen, but still he let them go anyway. And despite the fact that he knew something would happen, his mind immediately went to the worst case scenarios the second he saw the missed notifications. He had images of his daughter being lost or kidnapped in his mind. Though, when he listened to his voicemail, read his texts and checked his e-mail, he wondered if they weren't just messing with them; because honestly, the kids being kidnapped had been a higher probability in his mind then what actually happened.

"So tell me again how you got arrested?"

Lee tapped his foot on the ground in agitation as he looked down at the smirking blonde giant, the grinning tattoo artist, and the positively beaming children, make-up on their faces creating fake blood and large gruesome gashes, surrounded by a sea of candy on the floor of the tattoo shop. The two adults didn't seem to be fazed at all by the tone Barney had used to phrase his question. Jensen seemed oblivious, lost in his sea of candy, lifting it up to eye level and whispering 'my precious' in a creepy little voice that the Brit was sure he learned from some movie. And Sky at least seemed to be sheepish, but since she had a piece of candy stuck in her mouth, it didn't seem like she was terribly concerned with what had transpired just an hour earlier.

"We weren't arrested," Tool responded immediately, waving off the Italian. "They just called the cops on us. But they had nothing to take us in on."

"Why did they find the need to call the cops on you four?" Barney rephrased his question, tossing his old mentor a look that said he was in no mood for arguing semantics.

Gunnar smirked. "Didn't you two see the videos we sent?"

In fact, they did see the videos. They were sent as two attachments to Lee's e-mail with a simple caption of 'Best Halloween Ever'. It was a video of Tool, leading some group of teenagers—all very mouthy and rude teenagers—through some sort of large abandoned house, with only flashlights lighting up the dark space. The first video had been full of Tool manning the camera, explaining to the teens that they were in a haunted house that had been vacant for hundreds of years because of the tragic deaths of two children on a Halloween night, murdered by their parents while their butler tried to save them and got killed in the process. The story was obviously fabricated and seemed to be largely off the cuff, but the tattoo artist had sold it well.

Now the second video was harder to follow, but it was largely the others scaring the crap out of the teenagers. He had seen a shot of his daughter—her innocent Wednesday Addams make-up being twisted and altered so she looked like her face had had a fight with a shredder—standing at the end of a dark hallway, her head tilted to the side and a bear covered in blood dangling loosely out of her right hand. The screams from the teenagers had all been high-pitched and full of fear before she disappeared as their flashlights flitted about in what he took as a sign that they were all running. Jake had appeared next—his face being painted up in a similar manner to Sky's—standing at the top of a large staircase, holding a baseball bat in his hands and hitting it repeatedly on the stair just below the one he was sitting on. Another round of high-pitch screaming—and what sounded suspiciously like a laugh from Tool—had echoed through the video before the group was off running again. And finally the Brit had managed to make out a shot of Gunnar—looking like the embodiment of death himself with sickly skin and blood and puss painted onto his face—appeared in a doorway with Sky on his left side and Jake on his right, both of them holding his hands and giggling eerily.

The teenagers had all screamed again—one shouting out for his mother—before the camera panned around to show them sprinting away and out the front door, dropping their bags of candy in the process. The rest of the video was largely filled with Tool dying of laughter while Jake cheered at the bags of candy they had 'acquired'. Gunnar had been grinning the entire time and Sky had started giggling just before the video ended.

It had actually been pretty hilarious, but still that didn't explain why the cops had been called.

"We saw it," Lee assured.

The Viking smirked wider. "Well, apparently we freaked those kids out too bad, because they ran to their parents and ended up calling the cops. We hid the candy and the camera so by the time the cops showed up we just said we were running a haunted house attraction up at the old Stackhouse place."

"Wait, that place is in foreclosure isn't it?" The Italian questioned. "You managed to con some kids into thinking it was haunted?"

"It was like taking candy from a baby," Jake piped up—showing that he was indeed listening to the conversation—as he continued to stroke the piles of candy he was sitting in, still not looking up from the colorful pieces of sugar that held his attention. "Literally. We literally took their candy. So much beautiful candy…"

"Okay, so why did you decide to psychological traumatize a group of teenagers?" Lee questioned, wondering what had possessed the two men to plot with the children to terrify a group of teens.

Tool shrugged a bit as he gestured over towards the kids on the floor. "The whole group came over to Jake and Sky while Gunnar and I were helping some mom look for her kid. They stole their candy and shoved them on the ground, so we thought retribution was in order."

"What? Are you two okay?" The Brit asked, his eyes landing on the two children. A bunch of punk teenagers had stolen from his daughter and Jake and had the audacity to push them around? Suddenly, he didn't feel nearly as confused and perplexed as he did just seconds before. In fact he felt a bit proud that Gunnar and Tool had come up with a plan to get even with those jerks.

Sky bobbed her head with a smile on her face. "We're okay! We didn't get hurt and we made sure that we got them back!"

"Vengeance was ours!" Jake exclaimed triumphantly, his fist flying into the air. A Butterfinger flew into the air in the process, but the blonde ignored it as he finally looked up from the candy, mischief and amusement burning behind his baby blue eyes. "We shall feast upon the spoils of war tonight!"

Lee made a mental note to block the history channel. That hour-long special about the history of Rome had been a horrible idea.

"There will be no feasting on any spoils of war," the Viking cut in immediately, looking down at his son. "You'll be saving your candy and eating only a few a day. And that's only after you two get cleaned up and ready for bed, got it?"

Jake began pouting and whining like a puppy. "But dad, look at all this!"

"I am looking. And I'm telling you I'm not going to let you eat it until you get sick."

After a few more minutes of complaining, Jake finally agreed and Sky followed his lead. Tool helped the kids grab sacks for all their candy and moved them into the kitchen, leaving the other three adults alone for a moment. "So, out of curiosity, how did you guys paint your faces to look so realistic?" Barney questioned.

Gunnar grinned. "Remember we said we were helping a mother find her baby?" At their nods, the blonde grinned wider. "She was a make-up artist, so she agreed to help as soon as we told her what happened. She actually loaned us the camera and laptop too so we could record everything and send it to you."

Lee couldn't help but shake his head and let out a chuckle before he turned towards the kitchen, intent on grabbing his daughter and scrubbing her face clean of any dried blood or fake gashes. He also planned on getting her out of the dark clothes and back into her cheery monkey pajamas. "Let's go Gunnar. Those kids aren't going to bathe themselves," he called out over his shoulder, prompting the blonde to get up and follow the knife thrower.

"It's gonna take about an hour to get all that dye out of Jake's hair," Gunnar grumbled slightly.

"I wonder how much time all that make-up will take to scrub off," Lee mused before looking up at blonde with a grin on his face. "Gunnar, do you have any extra copies of those videos?"

"Course I do, why?"

"We're keeping those. I can't wait to see their faces when their older and we show them the video. And I think it will serve as a great deterrent for all boyfriends Sky will want to have."

The Viking let out a loud laugh as they entered the kitchen and spotted their kids watching Tool put the candy on the fridge carefully. "You're evil, you know that Christmas?"

"Says the man who caused a group of teenagers to require a therapist."

"Touché."