Laughing Jack had spent centuries alone and he had never cared. Not once. After Isaac, after that single, brief flicker of connection was snuffed out like a candle in a hurricane, he'd made peace with the emptiness. Emptiness was clean. Emptiness was safe. He filled the silence with screams and giggles, with the wet crack of bone and the poetry of human scream. It worked. It always worked.

Until it didn't.

Lately, something strange had begun to fester beneath his painted grin. A girl. She kept appearing at the edges of his vision. Not a hallucination, he'd checked - but a real, breathing, impossibly persistent girl. He'd catch her at the corner of a street, through a rain-streaked window, slipping between crowds like a ghost that didn't know it was dead.

And he couldn't help but watch.

At first it was idle curiosity. A new toy to dissect, a puzzle to solve. Then it became... routine. He found himself lingering in places he had no business being, at hours that meant nothing to a creature who didn't sleep. He'd perch on rooftops and count the seconds until she appeared.

He'd started waiting for her. And that, more than anything else in four hundred years, terrified him.