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The Not-So-Average Girl

"Y'know," Ron said as he sat on the floor and stared at the files Peter had retrieved from the station, "if this was anything other than real life, it would be kinda cool."

"Cool?" Kim looked at her friend incredulously, looking up from another file. "We're talking about a psychopath with superpowers who seems to be going around on some freaky… collection spree!"

"Collection spree?" Claire looked at Kim, the three teens gathered around the files on the floor of the empty room in the abandoned house they'd been squatting in for the last few hours.

"He's going around collecting all the powers he can track down and putting them in one place; I'm not saying it's not extremely wrongsick, but it'd still be kind of cool if he wasn't murdering people, right?"

"Except that we know another guy who could have done all that without killing people," Kim jerked her head at Peter as he stood by the door of the room, before she turned to look apologetically at him. "Sorry, I'm not saying you're like this guy-"

"Yeah, he's like the evil knockoff… you-wannabe!" Ron affirmed eagerly.

"The 'me-wannabe'?" Peter looked at the young man with a slight smile.

"Hey, I'm not saying you inspired this guy or anything like that, but there are similarities, what with him having to work at the power-copy thing while you can just do it," Ron noted, before he sighed and shrugged awkwardly. "So… I mean, we've become the targets of a nutcase who's cut a killing spree across the country trying to get more oomph, and what do we know about him?"

"Not much," Kim shook her head as she held up a few papers. "I mean, I'm only working from whatever insight I've picked up from Mom's work, but there's nothing in these files to suggest that anyone knows anything about Sylar as a person, and the only thing we can add to the list that the FBI don't know already is that he's after abilities. The only way people have been able to work out that he's responsible for these crimes is the fact that he does that whole 'cut the skull in half' thing to at least one person at every crime scene; we don't know how he's finding these people, we can't be sure what else he can do, and we're not even sure where he is now…"

"Which means you can't stay here."

"Excuse me?" Claire and Kim looked sharply at Peter.

"Huh?" Ron asked.

"Look, whatever happened to Sylar after he… killed me, from what we saw of that guy's abilities, I for one am not going to think he's dead until I've seen the body."

"And maybe not even then," Ron put in. "I mean, this is full-on superhuman stuff; based on the comics, even the guys who don't have enhanced healing as a thing are really difficult to kill."

"…Right," Peter conceded, nodding tentatively at Ron before he continued addressing the teen trio. "Anyway, my point is that we can't be sure what happened to this guy after he left the school, but if there's a chance he's alive, based on these files, we have to at least assume he's going to try and come after Claire again."

"And considering what he did to some of his victims here, they probably didn't all have powers, which makes him an equal-opportunity psycho killer…" Ron said, his already-tentative smile faltering even further as he spoke. "So you think Sylar'd want to go after me and Kim as well?"

"When this guy killed a husband and wife and it seems like he only spared their twelve-year-old daughter because he didn't know she was there?" Kim observed grimly. "Yeah, I think we're on his hit list now."

"And with my dad involved in this with that… mind-wiping guy, we can't be sure what he's going to do to us if he finds out we know," Claire said grimly.

"You think he'd-?" Peter began.

"I don't think he'd hurt me, but if he's got that memory-wiping guy… maybe he'd just wipe Kim and Ron's memories and leave them to get killed by Sylar?" Claire said, looking anxiously between the others for a moment before she looked at Peter with a new sense of hope. "So… do you have a plan for how we're going to get out of this?"

"Well… you're all under eighteen, right?" Peter said, looking between the group and returning their confirming nods with a nod of his own. "OK, so all we need to get you on a flight back to New York is photo ID and at least one adult; I assume you've all got your student IDs on you or at least know where they are?"

"Right here," Kim confirmed as she pulled out her wallet and displayed the card in question, Ron and Claire following her example.

"Right," Peter nodded. "I can see about getting us tickets, and if I can tap that… persuasion thing again, that should help make sure we're not going to have too many questions until we can get on the plane and get back to-"

"Hold on; you're serious?" Kim looked urgently at Peter. "We can't just ditch school like this-"

"KP, we're potentially being hunted by a psycho superpowered killer who wants to take Claire's head to bits and kill us just because we saw him; I think there are more important things than school right now!" Ron cut his friend off, before he looked at her with a more hopeful yet tentative expression. "Besides… this is something big, right? Aren't you the one who's always wondering what you're going to do with yourself?"

"Well… yeah, but there's a difference between wanting something to do after leaving school and going out to…" Kim began, before she trailed off and looked around the room with a slight sigh. "OK, I guess this is kinda cool; it's just…"

"Not having a choice, huh?" Peter smiled over at her. "I can get that; it took me a while to find what I wanted to do myself without my family trying to control my life."

"What do you do, anyway?" Claire asked.

"Hospice nurse at the moment, but my last patient died a week or so ago and I haven't been sent to anyone new since," Peter explained. "I've been thinking I'd see about re-qualifying as a paramedic to get back into the thick of things, but… well, this whole thing with Sylar came up, and I obviously had bigger priorities."

"This was that important to you?" Claire looked at Peter in surprise. "When you didn't even know me?"

"I had to save a life," Peter smiled.

Maybe it was a bit self-centred of him to appreciate the way that these kids were looking at him like he could save their lives, but after so long with Nathan and his mother thinking of him as an embarrassment, and the way Simone had doubted him…

Simone?

Peter was surprised to realise that this was the first time he'd thought of Simone since he met these kids. It wasn't that he didn't still care about her, but after he'd spent so much time basically fighting to convince her that the idea of people having powers could be real and how important it was for him to find the cheerleader…

Peter appreciated that it sounded petty, but when Simone had spent so much time doubting something that had become so important to him, it was actually… nice… to find himself with people who had faith in him and his ability to protect them.

All I need to do now is live up to that…

Maybe he was over-thinking this, but like Ron had pointed out, in comics it took a lot to kill off superhumans, and with the amount of powers Sylar had it would probably be best to be cautious. If they could lay low for a couple of weeks somewhere Sylar probably didn't know about, they might be able to work out a way of actually dealing with the killer, or at least find out more about that company Claire's father worked for. Peter might not have the family's interest in business, but he'd picked up a few tricks and contacts over the years; maybe once he was home he could look into the official name of the paper company and trace its history from that…

"OK," Kim nodded at Peter, drawing him out of his thoughts as she looked down at herself with a slight smile. "I guess it's a good thing I dropped off my homecoming dress when I was picking up that suit for you; probably don't want to be too sharply dressed for a getaway, right?"

"Oh yeah; no point getting away if we just stick out like that guy in xXx."

"Who?" Claire looked over at Ron.

"Spy film; opening scene featured a spy basically go from an aerial jumpsuit to a tuxedo and then try and get away by sneaking through a punk rock concert," Ron shrugged. "Good film, but that really stood out as a screw-up moment; he stood out like a sore thumb when the bad guys came looking for him."

"Good thing we're not going to be doing that, then," Peter said, glancing down at the borrowed suit he was still wearing. "I'll send this back to your house from the airport; maybe we can include a note to reassure your parents you're safe…"

Simone appreciated that it came across as petty, but it was almost disturbing to realise just how far her father had spread his money.

She had always known that he had a range of business interests, of course, but when she actually started looking at them, it was hard to even work out what she should sell and what she should keep. She wasn't a stupid woman by any means- apart from her recent taste in men, considering that whatever she had with Isaac and Peter was just becoming really complicated even without their apparent powers- but she knew that she would never have her father's head for work, so it was best to streamline what she could and put those companies in the hands of more interested men.

She had arranged a business lunch with Robert Bishop, who was apparently one of her father's key financial advisors, but so far she had been waiting for fifteen minutes and Bishop hadn't shown up yet. She'd been surprised that the meeting had been arranged in a restaurant in a mall, but the place had a decent reputation and the food at least seemed good; she just wished that Bishop would actually get here…

Glancing out of the restaurant, Simone raised a curious eyebrow when her eyes focused on a particular figure walking along the main corridor. She wasn't sure why this woman in particular had drawn her attention, but it could have been the sheer strangeness of seeing someone wearing a hoodie with the hood pulled almost completely over their head when inside a busy mall…

Simone's thoughts shifted abruptly when the hooded figure stopped almost directly outside the restaurant, pulled a shotgun out of their backpack, and fired the weapon into the air. The mall was suddenly filled with screams as people started to run away from the gun-wielding figure just outside, while Simone and some of the other restaurant guests dived to the ground to escape the attack.

"Everyone stay down and nobody gets hurt!" the figure yelled, revealing a deep female voice that even Simone could speculate was put on. "I'm just here for the gold!"

Glancing up from behind her seat, Simone saw that the woman was standing in front of a jewellery store, the gun now held in one hand as she studied the window displays. Simone had just started wondering why the woman was only standing there when the figure turned around, grabbed the edge of a stone bench in the middle of the mall, and-

Simone felt like her brain had just frozen in shock.

The woman who was robbing a mall in broad daylight, the woman who couldn't be any bigger than Simone was, the woman right outside… had just picked up a thick stone bench, practically tearing it from the floor, and used it to break the window in front of her like the bench had just been a baseball bat.

Holy shit, Simone thought, staring incredulously as the woman tossed the bench back towards its original place, walked through the broken window and began scooping handfuls of rings and watches into her backpack.

Hearing Isaac talk about how he could paint the future and Peter's talk about 'destiny' was one thing, but seeing a woman who couldn't be any larger than her swinging around something that big…

"Freeze!" a male voice yelled, as a security guard came running down the mall towards the thief as the woman stepped away from the store window, the backpack now clearly weighed down with the stolen items.

"Bad call," the woman said in her strange deep voice, following the statement up by aiming her shotgun at the approaching guard and firing it. The guard managed to duck to avoid the blast- from what Simone recalled from films, those things weren't meant to be great at aiming and were fairly heavy to carry one-handed- but somehow, in the moment when Simone's attention was on the guard, the woman had moved up right next to him and followed it up by punching him with such force that-

Simone fought down the urge to scream or throw up as she saw the guard's head twist completely around from the force of that blow, before the thief- the killer ran out of the building, leaving Simone to stare at the rest of the people in the mall with a gradually dimming sense of dread.

Whatever the Hell just happened here… why do I suddenly think I've been judging Peter and Isaac too harshly?

AN: In advance, to answer the most obvious questions people might have that I can clear up without giving away significant spoilers, the woman Simone just saw is someone Kim and Ron faced in their original series, and she has a power that was first demonstrated in the third season of Heroes; beyond that, you'll learn the relevant details later.