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AN: My take on 'One Giant Leap', as our new players become a more fixed part of the world we know…

The Not-So-Average Girl

Kim might doubt that Jackie had anything to do with the train rescue, but without any clear evidence to favour an alternative candidate, it hadn't taken long for Kim to settle back into her usual school routine and let Jackie enjoy her new celebrity status. With the big game coming up, Kim had concluded that Jackie would screw up her own lie on her own soon enough, and had decided to just focus on looking forward to the planned celebratory bonfire if their team won the next big game, and once the event became official, even Ron was eager for the chance to go to the party.

Unfortunately for Kim, it seemed as though it was taking longer for Jackie to give up on the idea of using the 'rescue' for her own reputation than she'd expected. Jackie had spent most of the previous school day talking about how she was going to use the entire incident as part of her upcoming campaign for class president; everything she said about running on a platform of moral, mental, and social advancement through good deeds sounded good on paper, but Jackie had never shown any interest in doing good deeds before people started asking about the train crash and Kim doubted she'd suddenly decided to start now. Kim had thought about running herself, if only to limit the chance of Jackie getting it, but with all her other school activities, she couldn't find the time to think about how to come up with an effective campaign message on top of everything else.

Frankly, after a long day at school that also featured her and the squad performing some particularly challenging cheer routines, Kim was physically and psychologically exhausted. The bonfire itself seemed set to be a fun event, particularly since the team had won their best game of the season and left them all in high spirits, but right now all Kim wanted to do was sit down and enjoy a quiet talk with Ron.

Granted, the cars gathered around the central bonfire made a fairly good 'barrier', and Kim appreciated that her uniform attracted attention- she had thought about changing, but with the rest of the squad still wearing theirs she felt the need to show solidarity- but she and Ron had found a good spot at the rear end of a van that at least gave them some privacy while still able to appreciate the view.

"Y'know something, KP?" Ron looked at Kim with a thoughtful smile as he indicated where Jackie was currently talking to another group of students about her 'heroic rescue' near the centre of the event. "That is why I never got to be popular."

"Because you're not a lying bitch?" Kim asked (she briefly wondered if there'd been alcohol in her drink to make her that loose-lipped, but decided not to worry about that; if there was any alcohol here, it was a small amount, and she wasn't going to be the one to kill the party mood this early on).

"Because I can't just get people to like me whatever," Ron observed, shaking his head slightly as he looked around the circle of students. "I mean, we have all these people here, and seriously, you want to bet most of them have bought Jackie's story?"

"Even after knowing her for so many years?" Kim finished, smiling at Ron in understanding. "For what it's worth, even if I can't understand how they're buying it, I can get how she did it; some people are just good at selling themselves… hopefully not in that way."

"…Yeah, that is a scary mental place," Ron observed, shuddering slightly at the thought. "I mean, she's hot and all, but some things-"

"Wrong-weird," Kim said firmly, not wanting to discuss the idea of Jackie having sex. "I still can't believe nobody's realised it doesn't work; she hasn't even asked how the man she allegedly saved is doing."

"How's the guy doing, anyway?"

"I asked Mom about it; he might not be dead, and it's not exactly a crime, but she has some inside info about the whole accident as the medical examiner," Kim explained. "The guy's still not ready to leave the hospital, but he's coping as well as you'd expect from someone who was caught in a fire."

"Cool," Ron smiled, before his grin faltered. "Y'know, that's the good thing about your parents; they always tell you stuff."

"It's not like your parents don't tell you things, Ron-"

"I get that, but firstly, your parents always had the more interesting jobs, and secondly, mine seem like they just wait until the very last moment to tell me anything that I might find interesting and give me occasional snippets that they have to know I'll find boring," Ron shook his head in frustration as he leaned against the truck and stared up at the sky. "I mean, I told them I wanted a pet for ages and they never told me about Dad's allergies until I was actually in the pet shop…"

"In their defence, you never actually told them you were after a pet until you were just outside the shop in the mall," Kim observed.

"Yeah, but it's not like I didn't give them enough clues," Ron observed, turning back to face Kim. "I get that they could be worse, considering that they're not actually abusive, but they just basically leave some money out for me each month and then leave me alone when they're not suddenly throwing my life out of whack…"

Kim could only stand beside Ron in awkward but companionable silence as he spoke about his parents. His relationship with his family might not actually be a bad one, but ever since she and Ron became friends back in pre-K she'd probably been over at his house a dozen times while he came over to hers at least twice a week, and meals with his parents were always awkward in a best-case scenario. She wasn't even sure if Ron ate at home when he wasn't eating with her family or at the local fast food restaurants, even if she'd never been able to bring herself to ask him that question directly; hearing about his poor relationship with his parents when he brought it up was fine, but asking him something that explicit felt like it would open up issues she wasn't sure how to handle.

"Why can't my parents be more like yours?" Ron sighed as he glanced over at Kim, breaking the awkward silence with a pained expression on his face. "I mean, your dad told you everything he was legally allowed to tell you about those personal trackers he was creating for the space program, even when he could have just told you all squat, but my mom only told me we'd have to move when she'd already found the new house."

"It's not as though you actually minded about the move; you said yourself the new house is an improvement-"

"Maybe not, but I still would've liked to be told about it earlier than the weekend before the moved," Ron said, shaking his head as he slumped against the truck and slid down to the ground, his gaze shifting upwards once again. "I mean, they don't even know anything about Rufus; what does that say about our relationship?"

"That's your own-" Kim began, before Ron sat sharply up, his hand over his pocket. "What?"

"Rufus!" Ron urgently patted his pocket. "He's gone!"

"Gone?" Kim repeated, looking anxiously from Ron to their surroundings, particularly anxious about the people still pacing around them; Rufus might be fast and the area might be fairly open, but it would only took one misplaced foot to crush Ron's pet, and that was assuming nobody decided to move their car. "Where would he-?"

The question essentially answered itself when a series of squeaks was heard from off to their right. Looking in that direction, Kim and Ron's eyes widened as they saw Rufus chittering anxiously at them, pointing urgently at something off to the side of the bonfire.

Exchanging glances, Kim and Ron hurried after the naked mole rat, not even questioning the strangeness of the situation; Rufus might be an odd pet, but when he looked that anxious about something it was bound to be worth checking out. They were briefly unnerved when Rufus led them to the outskirts of the party and out to the bleachers, but that discomfort was replaced by shock when they ran around the hill and found themselves looking at Claire Bennett, lying on the ground behind the seats, clearly dead, with a short white branch sticking out of the back of her neck that must have come from the nearby bloodstained tree stump.

"Oh God," Ron said, hands beginning to flap as he anxiously hopped from one leg to another, unable to take his eyes off Claire's body. "She's dead she's dead she's dead somebody killed her somebody here killed her somebody at our school is killing people-"

"Ron," Kim said, forcing down her own feelings as she looked over at her best friend, trying to coolly assess the scene based on the rare occasion her mother let her look at a crime scene report (always without photos, naturally). "Firstly, from what I've seen of some of Mom's old reports, I'm pretty sure this looks more like an accident than an explicitly intended murder, and second…"

As she stared at the body of her fellow cheerleader, Kim couldn't explain what impulse prompted her to stop talking, crouching down to more closely examine the branch sticking out of the back of Claire's head.

There's something…

The cheerleader who ran away from the train…

Claire's reaction to Jackie's stories…

That moment when Brody ran into her at practice a few days ago…

As though a 'click' had gone off in her mind, Kim reached out and yanked the branch out of Claire's head. Ron's awkward yelp at her action shifted mid-way to a self-strangled scream as he clapped his hands over his mouth when Claire sat sharply up, the wound in the back of her head already healing.

"Holy sh-" the blonde began, before she realised that Kim and Ron were standing over and Kim still held the bloody branch in her hands. "What-?"

"Easy!" Kim hissed, tossing the branch aside and waving her hands urgently at Claire. "I don't… we didn't… look, I have no idea what just happened to you, but maybe we should get out of here before we start talking about it?"

"Get out of-?" Ron began, frantically patting his pockets before he relaxed as he felt Rufus in one of them, only for Kim to grab his flapping arms.

"Ron," she looked firmly at her friend, "whatever just happened here, I think we can all agree that… well, let's keep this to ourselves until we're somewhere a bit more private?"

"…Thanks," Claire nodded tentatively at the other two before she indicated a path off to the side of the main football field. "This is a shortcut to a back entrance; if we go along this way for a bit, we should hit the main road, and then we can pretty much walk away from here."

"Good call," Kim nodded, as Claire took a moment to collect herself before walking briskly along the path she'd just indicated. Kim and Ron exchanged brief glances, but with no other clear solution to the situation that had just presented itself to them, they soon walked after her, the trio continuing in silence until they finally reached the road.

"OK," Ron turned to look at Claire once they'd confirmed that nobody had followed them from the party, "so what was-?"

"Tomorrow."

"Tomor-?"

"I get it," Kim cut Ron off as she looked at Claire. "We'll just get back home now and we'll… talk this over outside Ron's house tomorrow morning; it's closer to school than mine, and I'm pretty sure it's closer than yours."

"Yeah, I… I'll look up the address when I'm home," Claire nodded briefly at Kim, a haunted look in her eyes that the other two could only just make out in the darkness. "So… talk to you tomorrow?"

"Sure," Kim nodded at the other cheerleader in tentative understanding, hoping that she wasn't making a mistake.

Maybe Kim was being a coward, but she was a kid who'd just seen someone she knew dead; even if she and Claire weren't exactly close friends, they still knew each other enough for that to be uncomfortable. Anne Possible's work for the police might have helped Kim acknowledge the reality of death, but it wasn't like she saw any of the bodies her mother analysed herself, and she'd certainly never heard about her mother being called in to analyse someone she knew.

If what had just happened had been hard for Kim to cope with, she didn't want to think about how Ron was reacting to it, and the idea that Claire had literally been apparently dead a few minutes ago was probably something the other girl was going to need time to take in before she felt up to talking about it to anyone else.

As the trio walked home in silence, Kim couldn't stop herself shooting the occasional glance at Claire, hoping that whatever had just happened wouldn't leave Claire too shaken; maybe it was selfish on some level, but Kim wanted to know what had just happened for more reasons than just wanting to understand something that incredible…

AN 2: To justify this particular shift in canon, considering that it was stated that Claire's body was found dumped in a river during her autopsy, I'm assuming that Brody left her body where it lay at first until he was able to get her 'safely' into his car without anyone seeing it so that he could dump her somewhere once the party had begun to die down. By contrast, in this version of events, when he returned to the party to give himself an alibi by 'pretending' to look for Claire, her body was discovered by Rufus, thus setting up this new meeting.

If anyone thinks Brody's not intelligent enough to come up with something like that, he was smart enough to convince at least one girl not to bother testifying against him after a rape, so he must have some skill at knowing how people will react to his own actions and how to use that against them.