She's got a story like everyone else on the strip: left home at too young an age for freedom and open skies. They called them runaways and orphans, juvenile delinquents, whores and worse. But Kara wasn't an easy target, living by her wits and fists until there was the prospect of something more.
A place to run to, a place to travel.
She liked seeing new sights and hearing new sounds, making a buck off the unlikeliest of idiots. Sometimes going legit and grabbing the odd job using her skills for more than abstract smears on canvas.
Spending a summer in Newark painting house, and in autumn moving to the Carolinas, fixing cars in off-the-track garages for the clothing on her back and a bite to eat. Winter was mild months in Louisiana, where she worked for a charter service. In her spare time, she filled cheap notebooks with pencil sketches. Sometimes, she prowled the streets of New Orleans, sketching for tourists, street kids, anyone who'd toss her a dollar or two.
Didn't matter that it wasn't high art, a girl had to eat.
The routine was varied, and the years passed, but she always ended up gravitating back to the strip, the dirt and sand of L.A. under her nails and in her blood. Like a disease she couldn't quite shake.
Like a drug that left her on a rooftop, thirsting for more even as she had to climb back down a drainpipe.
She was no longer an innocent waif at twenty, her eyes catching what others didn't want to see, her paint-stained hands sure even when she hadn't had a hit in days.
Finding a cause was almost accidental, in its way. But the peace crowd were so earnest and their enthusiasm swept her up.
Stop the war!Give peace a chance!, slogans which swirled around her and pulled her along through marches and protests. Stood at her back in cold jail cells with aching bruises and cuts on her hands.
When they weren't protesting, they were high--anything they could get their hands on, anything to enhance the experience.
She painted, then, sometimes in strokes of red, blue and orange, a symbol she used to draw as a child. Circles and circles and circles that rolled through her mind until she was punching the canvas, ripping it free and starting fresh, this time with greens and golds, skyscapes and clouds of a planet that looked like something out of Star Trek.
It was good, her paintings sold, like any other handmade wares; sometimes to others on the strip (usually for food or a new shirt), sometimes to the tourists. Sometimes, she hawked them past the clubs and shops, where they didn't quite acknowledge her even as they handed over bills that smelled like laundry soap. They were the same people who sometimes slum further along the strip, hunching their shoulders and looking like cops as they traded cash for a good drug hook-up.
Rent was rarely a problem, half a dozen places and people taking her in when she didn't have the cash for it. Sometimes, she slept in doorways, her knuckles white around the handles of her bag. She never slept heavily anymore, and she'd learned early to always watch her shit in case there was someone willing to walk off with it.
Falling in with Karl and Sharon felt oddly right and Kara began spending less time high and more time marching, if only so they didn't get so uptight about her shooting up around their daughter. After she proved to be trust-worthy, she found herself watching Hera more often than she'd expected. Karl had a legitimate job for a contractor and Sharon sold jewelry along the strip. Some days, she took Kara's smaller paintings with her. Other days, it went the other way round.
Kara teaches Hera to paint with her fingers, bold swathes of yellow and blue, sometimes circles. Other times, they are stick figures, people that no one recognizes, but that make Hera more wistful, leaning in against Kara's knees while Kara works on her own canvas.
The symbiosis works, for a time. And since time is all Kara has, she's good with that. Maybe next year, she'll be in Florida, picking oranges, or the plains with crops of some sort. For now, she has this.
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timeasmymeasure
Give peace a chance... (AU), prompts: born a lion, painting the mandala, the true story of what was
Date: 2009-07-29 05:00 am (UTC)A place to run to, a place to travel.
She liked seeing new sights and hearing new sounds, making a buck off the unlikeliest of idiots. Sometimes going legit and grabbing the odd job using her skills for more than abstract smears on canvas.
Spending a summer in Newark painting house, and in autumn moving to the Carolinas, fixing cars in off-the-track garages for the clothing on her back and a bite to eat. Winter was mild months in Louisiana, where she worked for a charter service. In her spare time, she filled cheap notebooks with pencil sketches. Sometimes, she prowled the streets of New Orleans, sketching for tourists, street kids, anyone who'd toss her a dollar or two.
Didn't matter that it wasn't high art, a girl had to eat.
The routine was varied, and the years passed, but she always ended up gravitating back to the strip, the dirt and sand of L.A. under her nails and in her blood. Like a disease she couldn't quite shake.
Like a drug that left her on a rooftop, thirsting for more even as she had to climb back down a drainpipe.
She was no longer an innocent waif at twenty, her eyes catching what others didn't want to see, her paint-stained hands sure even when she hadn't had a hit in days.
Finding a cause was almost accidental, in its way. But the peace crowd were so earnest and their enthusiasm swept her up.
Stop the war! Give peace a chance!, slogans which swirled around her and pulled her along through marches and protests. Stood at her back in cold jail cells with aching bruises and cuts on her hands.
When they weren't protesting, they were high--anything they could get their hands on, anything to enhance the experience.
She painted, then, sometimes in strokes of red, blue and orange, a symbol she used to draw as a child. Circles and circles and circles that rolled through her mind until she was punching the canvas, ripping it free and starting fresh, this time with greens and golds, skyscapes and clouds of a planet that looked like something out of Star Trek.
It was good, her paintings sold, like any other handmade wares; sometimes to others on the strip (usually for food or a new shirt), sometimes to the tourists. Sometimes, she hawked them past the clubs and shops, where they didn't quite acknowledge her even as they handed over bills that smelled like laundry soap. They were the same people who sometimes slum further along the strip, hunching their shoulders and looking like cops as they traded cash for a good drug hook-up.
Rent was rarely a problem, half a dozen places and people taking her in when she didn't have the cash for it. Sometimes, she slept in doorways, her knuckles white around the handles of her bag. She never slept heavily anymore, and she'd learned early to always watch her shit in case there was someone willing to walk off with it.
Falling in with Karl and Sharon felt oddly right and Kara began spending less time high and more time marching, if only so they didn't get so uptight about her shooting up around their daughter. After she proved to be trust-worthy, she found herself watching Hera more often than she'd expected. Karl had a legitimate job for a contractor and Sharon sold jewelry along the strip. Some days, she took Kara's smaller paintings with her. Other days, it went the other way round.
Kara teaches Hera to paint with her fingers, bold swathes of yellow and blue, sometimes circles. Other times, they are stick figures, people that no one recognizes, but that make Hera more wistful, leaning in against Kara's knees while Kara works on her own canvas.
The symbiosis works, for a time. And since time is all Kara has, she's good with that. Maybe next year, she'll be in Florida, picking oranges, or the plains with crops of some sort. For now, she has this.