Like a carpet, everything can be brushed behind a smile.
Like the pain of breaking off with her parents, determined to find her own future rather than the one they'd planned out for her. Making her own way to Hathian on a Greyhound bus, and using the last of her savings to pay her tuition fees.
Like the fear she first felt when the KNX girls began threatening her and her new sorority sisters in a grimy downtown bar.
Like the dissapointed sinking in her heart when she was only chosen as a substitute for the cheerleading squad.
Psylocke hides the pain well. But these little things, they're breaking her like glass. Every day a new little piece falls off, lying like a shiny sliver on the ground where the sunlight glances off its reflective surface. She tries to sweep them up, but even she knows that secretly she'll never find them all.
She keeps upbeat. Keeps the light in her eyes. After all, like a carpet, that smile can hide a lot of dust.
It nearly all came crashing down, the mirror splintering like a spiderweb. When "he" cornered her with his guile, manipulating her into a corner and then pressing the blade against her breast like a sharp baby's tooth. The things he had done to her there - things she didn't think it was possible for any human being to inflict on another - had took her to the brink. She could almost hear the sound of tinkling glass mingled with her sobs of pain and terror.
But at that moment, when "he" was hurting her the most, she saw him as something vulnerable and scared, and saw that maybe he was even more afraid, more in pain than her.
A cloud gathered over her for a day or two, but that sunshine smile somehow crept out behind them again, and that carpet, can hide scars as well.
When she saw "him" again there was none of the fear. He was just a little boy and she told him so. She stood up to him at the steps of the university and called him out. She wouldn't be his playtoy ever again.
Sometimes even shattered glass can be put back together with a little superglue and a lot of effort. But like an old forgotten jigsaw, the pieces don't fit together in quite the same way again.
Like a carpet, everything can be brushed behind a smile.
She smiles more than usual these days.