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The Not-So-Average Girl

Standing in his studio loft for the first time in a few weeks, Isaac was only half-aware of what he was doing as he worked away at his latest painting. He still hadn't quite gotten his head around exactly how he was able to paint the future without heroin when he'd spent so long only able to tap this particular skill when he was on drugs, but it was becoming easier to slip into the appropriate 'head-space' whenever he tried to do this.

It was a little frustrating that most of his work right now ended up focusing on Peter Petrelli even when he wasn't actively looking for the other man, but he supposed that was the price of dealing with someone who was going to be this important to the future. If the man was going to destroy New York in the next couple of weeks, finding Petrelli was probably the most important thing he could do with his time right now. He had been trying to give his subconscious the proper incentive by arranging some of his other recent paintings around the loft as he worked on his latest 'project', but he didn't even know if it was making any kind of difference. He still couldn't entirely understand exactly what some of these earlier paintings meant, such as that one where a figure that seemed to be Peter was standing in a club and seemed to be shifting around in some way or another, but he had faith that he'd understand the meaning eventually.

As he sank into the right headspace for a new sketch, he spent a few minutes zoned out- it really was easier to paint when he was tapping his abilities- before he stepped away from his easel. After taking the traditional moment to clear his mind of the trance state, he took in what he had just done. The latest painting was another sketch of Petrelli, but where his recent work had depicted the man in various locations around New York, now Peter was…

Oh crap.

When he turned around and found the man in question standing in the middle of the loft, the cold glare on his face matching the one in the painting, Isaac once again cursed the relative vagueness of that particular 'gift'.

"Why'd you do it, Isaac?" the former nurse said.

"How'd you get in here?" Isaac asked, trying desperately to find some sense of control in this situation.

"What'd they give you?" Peter ignored his question. "Money? Drugs? What's a Judas get these days?"

"I was trying to stop you," Isaac countered; from what Simone had told him, Peter wasn't exactly a psychotic, so it was possible he could still talk him down. "You're dangerous. You said it yourself. Without them to help, you'll become that-"

"I had help," Peter countered, ignoring the artist's attempt to indicate the glowing man picture as he glared firmly at Isaac. "I was learning to control it. You scared away my best chance of working out how to stop that!"

A brief flash of guilt crossed Isaac's mind, but his mind moved to a more defensive approach when he was suddenly slammed against the worktable.

"What are these marks, huh?" Peter said, pulling the collar of Isaac's shirt to reveal the marks that had been left there since he was found by the Company. "What do they mean?"

"They're nothing!" Isaac pushed Peter away urgently as he got back to his feet. "They mean nothing-!"

"Don't lie to me!" Peter yelled, a strange edge to his voice as Isaac found himself flying through the air to crash into a set of paintings at the other end of the loft without the other man ever touching him. When the artist got to his feet, he saw Peter looking scathingly at a painting of Isaac and Simone on the roof of her father's building, before he looked back at the other man.

"Is that why you sent them after me?" the nurse asked. "Because you wanted to take me off the board? I wasn't even- I've got bigger things to focus on right now than that!"

"You stole her from me!" Isaac yelled, ignoring his past efforts to justify his actions as he glared at the former nurse before he calmed himself and moved to his desk, keeping his back to Peter. "But I did it to save New York, to stop the bomb… I can do it right now."

As he grabbed the gun from under a set of rags, he turned around to aim it at Peter, a sense of purpose clear in his mind. "With just one bullet, I can be the hero."

In response to his proclamation, Peter's body seemed to ripple like water before he vanished from the room right in front of Isaac's eyes.

Isaac could only stare in shock at what had just happened; he'd guessed from Bennett's reaction that Peter had some kind of ability to avoid being seen, but had he actually turned invisible or-?

"You're not a hero, Isaac," Peter's voice said, as paint cans began flying off another desk towards him. "You're just a junkie; you couldn't even save yourself."

Moving to the middle of the room, Isaac looked urgently around himself, trying to spot some clue as to where Peter had gone; even if his opponent had somehow turned invisible, he still had to be here, so if he could just spot some kind of clue…

"That's why she left you, Isaac," Peter's voice said, as that painting he'd done of Hiro and the dinosaur fell over. "I'm sorry things didn't work out, but it had nothing to do with me!"

"Show yourself!" Isaac yelled, turning anxiously around, trying to find any sign of the invisible man in his loft, some sign of the man who was such a defining threat he'd been dominating Isaac's work for weeks-

The sound or a door opening prompted Isaac to turn around and fire a couple of desperate shops, only for his eyes to widen in horror when he saw a young blonde girl fall to the ground, clutching at the bleeding hole in her chest as a redhead of the same age grabbed her arm.

"Claire!" Peter's voice called out, the redhead yelling the same name as the other man suddenly reappeared in the loft and hurried towards the girl. Isaac could only stare in shock at the sight, unable to accept that he'd just shot an innocent girl, before he tossed the gun aside and ran towards the trio-

The sharp pain in his face only properly registered when the artist found himself staring up at the ceiling, a sharp ache in his nose. Dazed and shaken at what had just happened, it took Isaac a few moments to work out what was going on around him, but when he sat up and looked back at the door, he wondered if he had started hallucinating.

The girl he'd just shot… she was standing up… Peter and that other girl on either side of her… blood all over her shirt… and showing no sign that the bullet had caused her any kind of real harm.

"Wh… what?" he said, only realising that his nose was broken when he rubbed it.

"I heal, asshole," the girl spat indignantly at him. "And I liked this shirt!"

"You… you wha-?" Isaac tried to speak.

"She heals," the redhead repeated, her own expression cold and fixed as she walked up to Isaac, arms folded and eyes narrowed in a cold manner. "Y'know, like how you paint the future and Peter can do basically everything everyone else can do? Claire's 'thing' is that she heals from everything, which includes getting shot by an idiot!"

The girl slapped him roughly, but Isaac couldn't even bring himself to fully register the attack, mind racing to try and take in everything.

"Peter… he does everything?"

"If I've met someone who can do it first," Peter clarified with a cold stare. "And before you ask, that doesn't include blowing myself up."

"But… the painting-"

"Yeah, putting aside the fact that you don't know that's Peter in that picture, have you even bothered to learn what he can actually do, or did you just decide he's dangerous and not bother to take a closer look at what's going on here?" the girl shook her head as she glared at him. "And what are you even…?"

Her voice trailed off as she seemed to look properly at some of the paintings scattered around the room, focusing on his sketches of Peter, before she turned to look at him with an almost amused expression on her face. "You're getting a bit obsessive, you know that?"

"What- I don't choose what I paint when I do this-!" Isaac began.

"How do you know?" the redhead cut him off with a cool tone. "Do any of us understand how this all works? I mean, I know that when I'm in danger my mind races to work out a way to save myself before I've even stopped to consciously think about it, and I know that Claire's body can make sure she only heals herself when everything's in the right place, but I can't explain how any of that works any more than you can explain how you paint the future!"

"I painted the cheerleader without knowing why-!"

"Maybe because Sylar getting Claire's ability was such a big thing we had to be warned about it, but what about now?" the redhead continued. "Like I said, have you ever stopped to think that maybe you're doing what artists normally do and have just been… putting too much of yourself into your work?"

"…What?" Isaac looked at the girl in new confusion.

"Look, I get that neither of us are psyche experts, but my mom works with the police, and we've talked about psychology more than once when going over some of her case notes, and that's on top of a few interesting details I've picked up from my English courses," the girl explained, displaying a sense of control that Isaac wasn't used to seeing in any teenager. "One thing that came up is that artists always end up projecting some of their own thoughts and beliefs into their work, even if they're trying to be relatively objective, picturing certain characters a certain way for all kinds of reasons. I'm not saying that you're doing it on purpose, but has it occurred to you that maybe your ability's focusing on Peter right now because you have issues with him? I mean, I agree with you that something bad's going to happen in the future, but do you have any kind of evidence that Peter's involved in that beyond the fact that you've been painting him a lot?"

Lost for a better response, Isaac indicated the picture of the glowing man that he'd come to increasingly identify as Peter.

"…That's it?" Peter looked sceptically at the painting before he turned back to Isaac. "You do realise that nobody can tell who that's meant to be, right? Do you have any evidence that it's me doing… whatever that is… beyond the fact that you've maybe done that painting with a set focusing on me?"

"Well… it made sense-" Isaac began defensively.

"Speaking as the girl you just shot because you were so eager to believe Peter was the bad guy, it does not make 'sense'," the blonde said indignantly. "If you want to stop this-"

"Stop what?"

Isaac felt like hitting something when he turned around and saw Simone standing in the door, looking between Isaac and the blonde's bloodstained chest with a growing expression of horror.

"Isaac… what did you do?" she looked anxiously at him.

"I… it was…" Isaac began, before he shook his head and sighed in self-loathing. "It was a stupid accident."

He had briefly thought about accusing Peter of being responsible for this, but even an idiot could see that making that kind of accusation in this context wouldn't help his case.

"An accident," Simone repeated, looking from the bloody spot on the blonde's chest to Isaac. "You shot Claire by accident? What are you even doing with a gun?"

Isaac simply stood in silence, lost for anything he could say that would even begin to justify what he'd been trying to do.

"I… think we'll be leaving now," Peter said, his arm about the girls' shoulders (the blonde must be Claire, but Isaac wondered who the redhead was). "We'll… see you."

With that said, Peter and the two girls vanished from the loft, leaving Isaac to face Simone's bitter glare.

"You know," she said at last, fixing him with a look of contempt he couldn't remember ever seeing on her face even when she found him high on the floor, "whatever your other problems were, I could always assure myself that you were a good man… until now."

"I… I'm sorry," he said, still feeling the inadequacy of those words,

"You do realise that if you'd done… whatever you just did to anybody else, they'd probably be dead right now?" Simone said, walking over to take the gun from his unresisting hand. "I don't even know if I want to know where you got this, but I do know you're not keeping it!"

Isaac didn't bother trying to protest as she walked out of the room with the gun, leaving him to sink to the ground as he looked at his latest painting in horror.

Could they all be right?

Was he just… projecting his issues with Peter into his paintings? He could blame the other man for him losing Simone, but she had made her choice, and right now Peter seemed to be more interested in helping those girls than doing anything with Simone…

As much as he hated to acknowledge it, Simone had a point; whatever he'd been trying to tell himself, he hadn't been tracking Peter solely because he thought the other man would be a threat to the city, but more because he wanted him to be a threat to the city because it justified his hatred of him.

There was a bigger problem out there right now, but what was he going to do about that explosion when the man he'd been convinced was going to be responsible had just made a very compelling argument to confirm that he wouldn't be?