~There is no expression so terrifying on the human face as a smile which holds not a shred of joy.~
The first impression Andromeda got of the girl known as “Kaylee” was: “She doesn’t look happy. She doesn’t look like she’s ever been happy.” It was an evaluation she quickly discovered to be totally and utterly accurate. For the first three months of her residence in the McAllister home, Kaylee did not speak a word. She had armed herself with a household knife and slept in the kitchen, much to the alarm of their cook/maid/handyman. During this entire time, not once did Drew stop talking to her, however, and she was, of course, the first person to hear the strange, older girl speak.
She had been sitting in the kitchen with Kaylee and it had been 2AM, later than she was supposed to be up. Her parents had “put her to bed” hours ago. She was chattering away in her usual fashion with no reply in sight. Thus far, Kaylee had taken everything she’d said with unconcerned silence, but perhaps it was the time, perhaps it was the topic of “the family lineage,” but quite suddenly she struck. One minute Drew was talking about her great-grandfather’s favored mistress, the next minute the knife had been shoved point first under her chin and a voice hoarse with disuse growled at her, “Do you ever shut up?”
She hadn’t flinched. She leveled her grey eyes at Kay’s brown ones and the look on her face was anything but scared. Interest, calm, excitement even, but no fear. She smiled and the look on her face could not have been described as anything less than the image of a hunter, intoxicated with the chase. Most people would have been startled by this look, but most people didn’t cause Drew to smile like that, and Kay was certainly not most people. Kay lowered the knife with a sigh and discarded it altogether, throwing it across the floor so it skittered against the cold tiles. Then, she’d stood and asked, “Where are my actual rooms?” Her voice had still been a little gravelly, but her tone had been no-nonsense. Her period of silence was over quite abruptly. The older girl continued to be quiet, but it was now a much more listening silence. She spoke when she needed to, kept her mouth shut when she didn’t, and lived her life as if she had been one of them all along. She had shed a life of squalor and pain more effortlessly than a snake shed skin.
It took three more years for Drew to first find Kay cracking a smile, and in this she was also the first. Kaylee Berring had no memory of smiling. Kaylee McAllister smiled over three years into her Chrysalis life, and it was the first that had ever graced her face in all her fourteen years of breath. Drew couldn’t even remember what it was that had caused her to smile. The younger girl had been chattering away, as she was wont to do, and had let a careless remark slip her lips, and suddenly all thought fled in the face of the very serious, skinny girl who had become her sister cracking into the smallest of smiles. From then on, it had become her life’s mission to find ways to make Kay smile, and she was the only one who ever succeeded at it. The second person to ever cause Kaylee’s smile, however, probably made it their personal life goal never to see it again.
When Kay was sixteen, she discovered that there was a girl who bullied Drew. Andromeda was perfectly capable of dealing with her bullies herself, thank you very much, but this one had colluded with a boy. Which was, of course, to say that on the bully’s prompting, the most attractive boy in school had chased Drew enthusiastically, wooing her with flowers and sweet words and all those little things teenage girls couldn’t quite seem to resist. When at last he had captured her attention, he turned her down flat and revealed it was all a game. Angry tears and hormones overwhelmed any sense of clear thinking that night, and she returned home to relate the entire story to Kay in half-intelligible sobs. Kay had comforted her, told her everything would be okay, and left the house for the rest of the night. She returned the next morning with blood staining her fists and a little on the toe of one shoe, and when Drew asked in horror where she had been, there was a small pause. Then: the corners of Kaylee’s mouth turned upwards, her lips parted to reveal rows of nice white teeth, and her eyes widened with a frightening, almost insane light. It was a smile that spoke of a hatred that tore down nations, promises of blood written on the walls. All she said was, “They needed… to learn.” And she disappeared upstairs to scrub the blood from her knuckles.
Drew had stood stunned where she’d met Kay at the doorway, and then a small smile had thinned her lips as well. No one had ever told Kay that it was Drew who had insisted she be adopted, but the younger girl had known the second she’d laid eyes on Kay that she wanted her. She had stared at the animal girl, stabbing her would-be rapist over and over again, drenched in blood from head to toe, and decided that Kay would be her person and no one else’s. She had waited five years to see that look on her face and satisfaction coiled in the pit of her stomach to see the product of her patience. It was, after all, Drew’s mission in life to make Kaylee McAllister smile.
(Original date written unknown as it is saved from a site no longer running.)