(no subject)

[sinjun]

Background

To really understand Solara, you have to start with her mother. Amanda Ricker was an only child, born late in life to a rich Oil Tycoon who lived close to the western oil fields. She spent her childhood in a small town, but moved east to the big city before she reached her teenage years. A lot of money and a lot of big city weren’t good for Amanda’s lifestyle, much to her father’s chagrin. Amanda had her first child by the time she was 16, a girl she named Melinda. Melinda’s father, Tony Michaels, was a drug dealer, and he ended up in jail when Amanda’s father (“Big Joe” Ricker) caught on to him. Within a year, Amanda was pregnant again, having met up with a French Mime, who was part of a traveling circus. At least, that’s who she claimed the father was, though there was some confusion over the issue. This time she gave birth to another girl, and named her Sybill. The mime left when the circus did, but Amanda still gave Sybill her father’s last name, rather than her own.

It was about this time that Big Joe decided to try some tough love, and Amanda was placed into drug rehab until she was cleaned up and straight. Her daughters never forgave their grandfather for stealing their mother from them, since after she was released, Amanda didn’t want to see any sign of her previously depraved existence. She moved to another town, leaving her girls with their grandfather, and fell in love with Daniel Johnson, a neophyte lawyer at the DA’s office. When she was 19, and he was 25, she and Daniel got married. By the time she was 20, she had her first son, and the couple named him Hawk after Daniel’s great grandfather. A year later, Big Joe died, leaving everything to Amanda, and she started drinking. The couple started fighting worse than cats and dogs, and in an attempt to keep Daniel from leaving, Amanda got pregnant again, giving birth to Solara. Her attempt at manipulation failed, and within a year after Solara’s birth, Daniel and Amanda were divorced.

Amanda went through a string of men recklessly, almost as fast as she went through money, and thus, she ended up pregnant again, obviously not very careful with either her own health or her wallet. Following her own habit, she named her youngest child Simon Barnes after his father. It is important to note that the only one of the men she slept with that Amanda even professed to love was Daniel Johnson, and this was reflected in her attitude towards her children.

Now then, having properly set up the pre-history, it’s time to look at Solara herself.

Early Childhood
For the very first few months of her life, Cira (as her mother named her) was with her mother, father and 2 year old brother Hawk, Johnsons all of them. Of course, there were a lot of fights at that time, and Amanda didn’t stay clean much longer than it took to birth a reasonably healthy baby girl, before she was back on the bottle. Once Daniel moved out, Amanda soon followed suit, running back home to her teenage haunts. Of course, this moved Hawk and Cira in with the two older half sibs who pretty much disliked both Cira and Hawk on principle. Over time, Melinda outgrew that hatred to some extent, but Sybill’s dramatic nature ensures that she dislikes both Cira and Hawk to this very day.

Cira was 2 by the time her younger brother Simon was born. She was a silent and sober two year old, a little skittish, but well prepared to love her baby brother. If not for Hawk protecting her from her older sisters, Cira’s life would have been pure hell, or as close to it as Melinda and Sybill could manage. It was okay when she was a toddler, but by the time she was three, the two older girls had decided that everything that was wrong with their mother was all Cira’s fault. If Amanda yelled at them, it was Cira’s fault. If Amanda had a hissy fit, it was Cira’s fault. The girl ended up with a well-earned dislike of her mother.

What saved her from growing into a really warped and maladjusted girl was a woman named Yolanda Grey. Yolanda is a lawyer to this day, and she was in law school just a couple years behind Daniel Johnson. In fact, Daniel mentored Yolanda through a couple of classes, and she ended up in the DA’s office as well, but in a different city than Daniel. In the same city as Cira grew up in. Daniel and Yolanda kept in touch even after Daniel became a judge in New York City, and Daniel did arrange for visitation rights with his two children right up front. That only pushed the gap between the children further, though it wasn’t something Daniel meant to do. The problem was that Cira and Hawk were the only two of the 5 children with a father who was actually around, who sent gifts, and who paid his alimony and child support on time without quibbling. Yolanda had lunch with Daniel, Hawk and Cira one day, and ever after, she made a point of meeting with the two at least once a week.

School was the one thing that made everything go okay, during Cira’s younger years. First, because it was time when Sybill and Melinda weren’t home, so they couldn’t torment her. She had a bit of a rough time when Hawk started school without her, but with Yolanda’s help, she adjusted over time. The crying fits and temper tantrums faded, by the time she was in school for her own first day. The second reason why school made everything better is because it got Cira out of the house, and away from her mother’s drunken debauchery.

School also introduced Cira to two things that are dear to her to this very day. First, she met Quinn O’Malley one day, after her sisters managed to leave her crying in the playground. And of course, it was at school that the young Cira was introduced to gymnastics, and that sparked her career choice, even at the young age of 5.

For a while, things settled down. Cira was an average student in her studies, often enlisting help from Quinn or Hawk when she didn’t understand something. A slight stubborn streak helped her get through the subjects she found difficult, though it occasionally caused her trouble with teachers when she refused to let go of something they no longer wished to talk about. Still, she managed to pass each year, though never with flying colours.

Quinn made a point to protect Cira at school, since he was just enough older that her siblings couldn’t bully him. In fact, Sybill had quite a crush on him for a while, which only caused more trouble for Cira. (He liked her better than Sybill, as Simon consistently pointed out.) One time though, when Cira was 7, Quinn wasn’t there in time and Sybill and a couple of her friends beat Cira up enough to break a couple ribs and blacken her eye. When Daniel found out, the lawyer promptly put his daughter in self defense classes.

Late Childhood
As time went on though, Amanda’s habits began to get more expensive, and she ran through her father’s fortune at an alarming rate. It wasn’t that the family became poor, exactly, but well, the credit card bills started to run up. Cira was one of the two youngest, and Hawk protected her as much as he could from this knowledge. So too did Sybill and Melinda, if only because they wanted to protect their darling boy, Simon. In any event, so far as Cira was concerned, things were reasonably okay throughout her childhood and early teens, so long as she could keep away from three of her four siblings. The self defense classes helped with that, since they ensured that just one of her siblings would never pick on her, not by his or herself.

If Christmas and birthday gifts got smaller as time went on, she didn’t entirely figure it out. Though, the day that someone at school told her that her hand-me-downs were out of style, that she was poor, that day she realized how her family lifestyle had slowly changed. It’s also the day she determined that she would make it on her own. Somehow, someway. She would get to the stage where she would no longer have to worry about money, and make Larissa Quartermain eat her words. She’d live down the stigma, and she, along with everyone else, would be able to forget it. That happened when she was 16.

Of course, Larissa and Cira were tied for tops on the gymnastics team all through school, which brought the both of them into the limelight a bit. From the age of 12 to 15, the two were fast friends, working out together in the gym, spending nights over at each other’s house, and otherwise being young teenaged girls. Until a boy got in the way.

No, not Hawk, and not Quinn. Benson Tye.

See, Cira was working really hard on her acrobatics, and learning things that Larissa was frankly too big to manage. Benson was the football quarterback, and he took a fancy to Cira’s flexibility, and long strawberry blonde hair. It was enough to convince him to woo her, and the side bets his buddies made on whether he could score didn’t hurt his determination to win her over. He started when Cira was 14, and she was absolutely swept off her feet by his charm.

Unfortunately, Larissa decided she wanted Benson, and so she began to subtly pick at Cira, who trusted her friend a little too much to notice. Benson didn’t notice either, but then, he didn’t make the football team on brains. Slowly, Larissa began to wean him away from Cira, who wouldn’t sleep with him anyway. (What? Like she was going to copy her mother’s example? Fat Chance!) Larissa had no such hang up, and one day, shortly before her 16th birthday, Cira walked in on Larissa and Benson totally engrossed in each other. She threw his school jacket at him and ran sobbing out of the school, heading all the way to the Rouge River Bridge.

Standing there above the deep river, she considered if she should just end it all. She stayed there deep into the night, thinking. And when she left, it was with a solemn promise to herself that she wouldn’t ever make such a mistake again and a hatred for Larissa that was just as big as her friendship had ever been.

Three days later, she was in the hospital in a meningitis induced coma.

By the time she recovered enough to get back to school, Larissa had won that year’s gymnastics competition, she and Benson were firmly a couple, and both were extremely sarcastic to Cira whenever they crossed her path. To this day, they still are, though times change, and it’s not often that the three see each other. In fact, once the lot graduated from high school, they pretty much never saw each other again, at least, up until the current date.

Despite the meningitis, it took only one term of summer school for Cira to catch up in her studies. She threw herself into her acrobatics, self defense, and gymnastics even more, since she had nothing else to do. There was no way she was dating anyone, locking her heart up instead. Hawk and Quinn worried about it, somewhat, but there wasn’t anything they could do.

The last couple of years of high school went by quickly and reasonably well, with Cira graduating along with the rest of her class. She won the last two gymnastics competitions, but it was an empty victory, since Larissa had Benson to console her when she lost. She got scouted by a talent agent for L’Etoile Circus in her last year of high school, famous for its acrobatics and trapeze artists – something that interested Cira immensely, though she kept it a secret from everyone, even Hawk and Quinn at first. Her family, she knew already, would be against her joining a circus, no matter how talented she was acrobatically. L’etoile would train her talent, and the scout promised her she could be a star within two years, if she wanted to be. She didn’t go to her highschool prom, which in retrospect was a bad choice. That was the night that everything went to pieces on Cira, and life just hasn’t been the same since.