fell in love with the bird (Miss Peregrine x fem!OC)

𝟎𝟑.

It was June 22, 1990, one day before Kaylee's 10th birthday.

Over the past few months, Sarah, Kaylee's mother had been noticing changes in her daughter. They lived in Los Angeles, a very sunny state, and Kaylee had always loved the outdoors so naturally, she was always pretty tan. But this year it strangely took longer for her skin to get the natural winter-paleness to disappear.

While that was strange in and of itself, it wasn't the only thing she noticed. On one particular day, Kaylee came to her mom because she fell and injured herself. While that wasn't too unusual for a little kid to do, she did notice that she was acting a bit different than all the other times, as if it hurt less; but brushed it off to her getting older and not being as affected by small falls. The thing that concerned her the most, however, was the fact that there wasn't a normal wound on her knee. No, there was what looked like a sort of crack, which made the surrounding area of her knee seem almost glass-like.

Little Kaylee seemed to not realize that this wasn't normal. It was just such a habit to run to her mom whenever she injured herself that she repeated it this time without much thought. She just wanted her mom to put a band-aid on and kiss it better so she could keep playing with her friends.

Noticing her impatience, Kaylee's mother followed through with their routine and let her run off. The more she thought about it, the more confused she became.

She remembered seeing childhood pictures of her dad, around late-summer time and her dad was always one of the palest children, although he was almost never inside, according to himself. Sometimes you could even see similar kinds of cracks on his skin, that she swore she also saw on him in real life but never seemed to question them. She didn't know why she never did. Maybe if she had she wouldn't be so confused now.

Hoping to find out what was happening to her daughter, she went to ask her mom if she knew anything about it. Alice, Kaylee's grandmother said, that George was very secretive about it, only telling her vague things or changing the subject altogether. But she remembered how he would constantly write in journals, whether it was simple things such as what he did that day, or long-winded explanations about his favorite things, that no one seemed to want to listen to.

So that was the logical next place to search for potential answers: Kaylee's grandfather's old journals.

To say he had a lot would've been an understatement. In the basement of the old house were 3 boxes full of journals. Deciding that it would be better to just look at all the covers first, rather than probably spending a week reading all of them, she started rummaging through the 3 boxes, looking at journal after journal, reading the titles that some of them had and hoping she would find one that could be helpful.

They were all pretty similar; most were plain leather books in various colors. However, one was different. It was on the bottom of the last box, coincidentally, and it had a lock. Sarah thought long and hard about where a key could be. She tried to conjure her dad up in her mind and thought about where he would hide a key. After a good 5 minutes of thinking, she finally had an idea.

Book in hand, she went out of the basement and into Kaylee's room. On her desk, there was a little music box with a ballerina on it, which her grandfather gave to her, about one year before he died. Opening the box, she found a key and a necklace. A bit cliche of a hiding spot, but not unusual for Kaylee's grandfather. She took the key out and put it in the lock of the journal. At first, it wouldn't budge, but she continued wiggling the key around until it finally did and she could read whatever her dad thought would be important enough to put a lock on it.

The handwriting looked a little messy but still neat in its own way; clearly from Sarah's dad. The first page read,

"Only proceed reading if you're a relative of me, George Daniels."