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AN: In advance, I'm slightly bending the timeline here so that the Heroes storylines set in 'the present' take place maybe a year or so in the future of when it originally aired, but it's a minor detail and I liked a particular pop culture reference here too much not to use it.

The Not-So-Average Girl

Ron fully appreciated that heroes going to the future never turned out well for them in the comics. If it wasn't Iron Man learning that his descendant from 2020 was a total psycho or the Hulk finding out that he'd become some crazy dictator after a nuclear war, than it was Hal Jordan's past self getting sent to the future and learning he destroyed the Green Lantern Corps after losing his city (and Ron still wasn't that sure if that storyline where Superman learned he'd be alive over eight hundred thousand years in the future was meant to be a happy ending for the big guy).

Granted, so far he and Hiro hadn't clearly learned that anything bad was going to happen to them in this future, and the way everyone addressed them at least suggested his future self was still alive here too, but the fact that they had been outright arrested said some very worrying things about his future activities. Right now, with the dark-skinned power blocker sitting beside them in what looked like some old storeroom, Hiro was even more powerless than he had been before this mess started, and Rufus was trembling with fear in Ron's pocket while Ron tried to keep himself from fidgeting.

God, what did Mrs Dr P say the guilty always do in interrogations… did she ever even mention that kind of thing to us…?

"This is all misunderstanding," Hiro said, at least trying to sound casual as he spoke for the two of them.

"Hiro Nakamura," the fat man said as he placed a file in front of Hiro. "Born Osaka, Japan, to Kaito and Ishi. Teleportation. Stopping time." He placed another file in front of Ron. "Ron Sinclair, who likes to be termed 'Ron Stoppable'. Animal empathy and control-"

"WHAT?!" Ron and Hiro yelled simultaneously.

"Sit," the large man said, a cold glare in his eyes that halted any thought either of them might have had about trying to find out more about that topic.

I have powers? Ron thought, trying to process the implications of that casual comment. He could swear that Rufus was basically frozen with shock in his pocket, the small rodent not even making a squeak as though even he was surprised at this news.

"You're both wanted for prison breaks and attacks against US interests," the man continued with a cool tone that put Ron in mind of a teacher ignoring his latest weird comment in class in favour of getting on with business. "I don't think there's any misunderstanding."

"Prison breaks?" Hiro repeated, a brief smile on his face as though he was trying to suggest that the idea was absurd.

"Two years ago," the man continued as he took out Hiro's sword and paced around the table with the blade outstretched, "you killed a lot of good men when you raided the National Science Centre in Raleigh."

"No," Hiro said firmly. "I know myself. I'm no killer."

"And Mr Sinclair here has trashed more than a few containment camps over the years," the large man said, looking intently at the two young men for a few moments before his expression shifted from probing to curious. "How can you not remember that?"

"Because… we're not the droids you're looking for?" Ron asked hopefully, wishing he could kick himself after he'd said those words; this was not the time to make stupid jokes to lighten the mood.

"I'm talking about men like you and Sylar ruining it for the rest of us," the man said, bitterly tossing the sword onto the table. "Making us live in fear, captivity and hiding, making us choose sides, tearing families apart."

"I would never tear a family apart," Hiro said, looking at the other man with an earnest expression on his face that gave the impression he was trying to stop himself crying.

"And I… well, I wouldn't hurt people," Ron said, lost for anything better to say. He particularly resisted the temptation to say that he might hurt other people if he was sure they'd seriously hurt someone first, but in all honesty he just wasn't sure how he'd react in a fight; Kim had always been good at stopping people from going too far when they started picking on him…

"I don't know what kind of game you two are playing," the man said, looking grimly between Hiro and Ron as though he'd given up looking for some particular reaction, "but I'm going to get it out of you."

With that said, the two men got up and walked out of the room, leaving Hiro and Ron to look apprehensively at each other.

"…OK," Ron said at last. "Can you get us out of here?"

"No," Hiro shook his head. "Already tried; can't use power."

"So the Haitian guy's still near us," Ron nodded in grim acknowledgement. "That's not gonna make this easy…"

"Haitian?"

"The guy who didn't talk," Ron clarified. "KP, Peter, Claire and I ran into him back when we first met after Sylar's attack; he's got this whole ability to… well, shut down other peoples' abilities, but Peter was able to turn that back on him by copying the guy's ability and basically using it to shut the guy's own power off…"

"That… 'something'," Hiro conceded, glancing around the room as though trying to find its exit before he looked at Ron. "He say you have ability-"

"Which I did not know about before now, so I'm honestly just as surprised to learn that detail as you are and I haven't been lying to anyone, I promise," Ron held up his hands anxiously.

"I believe you," Hiro said, his expression becoming thoughtful as he looked at Ron. "He say you have… animal empathy… and you say Peter Petrelli has that power?"

"Well, from what KP said, the invisible guy described Peter's ability as 'empathy', which let him copy other people's abilities…" Ron trailed off as he looked at Hiro with new understanding. "You think I'm like Peter?"

"But for animals," Hiro nodded, a cautious grin growing on his face. "You… like Vixen!"

"Vixen?" Ron asked, before he snapped his fingers. "Didn't she date Green Lantern in Justice League Unlimited?"

"She copy animals in comic," Hiro explained. "If you animal empathy, you do same?"

"…Makes sense," Ron said, as his hand suddenly reached towards his pocket. "And… maybe that's why I've got this… bond with Rufus?"

"Rufus rat?"

"I mean, if I'm an animal empath… and it works like Peter's ability… wouldn't I be copying Rufus constantly by now?"

"Duh!" Rufus poked his head out of the pocket and looked up at Ron with an expression that nobody could mistake for anything other than a grin.

When Ron shifted his gaze from Rufus to Hiro, it was only slightly comforting to see that his friend was just as shocked by that development as he was.

Ron had always liked to basically imagine that Rufus was reacting to him, but the idea that he could do something that obvious…

"Uh… Rufus?" he looked tentatively at his pet. "Did you… can you understand me?"

"Uh-huh!" the naked mole rat nodded enthusiastically up at him.

It said something about how truly bizarre this situation was that even the normally enthusiastic Hiro was clearly confused at this turn of events.

It wasn't as though Rufus being able to think really changed much about their situation, but added on to Ron's own discovery about his apparent ability, it raised some interesting possibilities…

While Hiro was off running down a few of his other contacts for the next stage of his plan, Kim Pierce was left to sit with the time-displaced Ando Masahashi in a quieter part of the bar, neither party sure how to feel about the apparent upcoming turn of events.

The idea that Ron's younger self was active in this time period was a strange one even for the mess that Kim Pierce's life had become, but Kim supposed she had been lucky that it was just Ron's younger self rather than her own. She had her reasons for staying close to Peter and Nikki in the years since the explosion, just as they appreciated that she had her reasons for occasionally leaving them to do her own thing, but while she could see a younger Ron eager to understand what she had made of herself in this time, her past self…

Kim recognised that she'd been forced to compromise her own ethics both to keep people safe and due to some unfortunately circumstances, but she knew her younger self likely wouldn't see it that way at first, and if this situation was anything like what Hiro had claimed they wouldn't have had time for her to properly explain herself to herself.

"Uh…"

"Yes?" Kim looked over at Ando with a brief smile, grateful for once that she hadn't spent much time with him before the explosion. She'd spent years regretting not getting to know Hiro's friend so that she could properly mourn him with Ron and the others, but this way it was easier to just treat him as a visitor and not think about the fact that he had been dead for years.

"Why… so willing… to help?" Ando asked (As Kim recalled, he'd been reasonably good at English before his death, but she'd give him some leeway and assume that learning everything he'd found out so far made it harder for him to concentrate). "If you stay with Peter-?"

"Shouldn't I share his and Nikki's views on staying out of things?" Kim finished for Ando with a brief smile. "It's… well, you kind of have to thank my ability for that."

"Your ability?"

"The thing about having an instinctive knowledge of how to survive is that your body always wants to survive," Kim explained, allowing herself a bitter smile as she held up her hand. "After the explosion, it just made sense to stick with Peter so that we could protect each other; he needed to be sure nobody could find him, and with my gift boosting his own, it wasn't hard for him to keep us both off the radar. We tried to do what we could to help the general public, but with the likes of Andrea Washington, Camille Evans and Montgomery Fiske making themselves basically the public face of what we were…"

"They bad people?" Ando asked.

"Andrea gained strength if people around her are afraid or at least apprehensive; can you imagine what she'd do to get the kind of strength that would really scare people?"

"…Not good."

"And she wasn't exactly a nice person before she realised what she could do," Kim nodded. "And as for what happened to me… I think Hiro compared me once to this guy in X-Men… Darwin, I think the name was…"

"I remember!" Ando smiled as he looked at her, glad to be back to more familiar territory. "He evolve to survive… whatever he up against!"

"Yeah, that sounds right," Kim nodded, returning his smile with one of her own before she became more subdued. "Anyway, the analogy was relevant because there was one story where Darwin was fighting the Hulk- something about the Hulk being angry with the X-Men's leader for some reason- and Darwin was trying to channel his power so that he'd get the ability to drain off the Hulk's energy."

"World War Hulk?"

"Probably; I never got around to reading it myself. Anyway, from what Hiro told me, Darwin's idea worked at first, but when the Hulk got angry enough, Darwin's body decided it was safer to run away and he developed the ability to teleport instead."

"But why- oh," Ando's eyes widened with new understanding. "Your ability… do something similar?"

"Obviously I can't teleport my way out of a fight I can't win, but like with Darwin's ability, I can't exactly… choose whether I'm going to fight or run according to my instincts," Kim affirmed grimly. "It was easier to pick 'fight' at first, but as the world became more dangerous for people like us, and even some of our known friends ended up choosing sides… well, it's hard to resist the urge to stay safe when so many people are trying to kill you."

"Ah," Ando nodded in understanding. "Hard to make yourself go out and fight?"

"It's easier when I have a suitably powerful ally as back-up, but on my own… well, it's hard," Kim sighed. "Ron was my partner for a while at first, but back when I still didn't entirely understand what my ability was doing to me, we had an argument about the risks he was taking when he was helping strangers while our friends and contacts were trying to make a difference themselves…"

"You think… he need… different focus?"

"It wasn't that I didn't approve of what he was doing, I just… I ended up trying to convince him that there could have been a different way to do it," Kim clarified. "Back then it was just us and Hiro acting out when we could find some kind of reports or news about what they were going to do; if we'd been able to get things more organised and work out a clear plan…"

"What if?" Ando said, shrugging as though he wasn't sure what else he could say to that comment.

"I could have driven myself crazy wondering about that," Kim conceded. "It took a while, but I was able to work out a way to use my instincts in small doses without basically making them useless."

"Choose carefully?"

"Bingo," Kim nodded at him. "Which is why Hiro had to go on his current recon mission alone; you're safe enough here with me giving Peter a boost, but if I went with you I'd… well, I'd wear myself out too fast."

Noticing the uncomfortable expression on Ando's face, Kim smiled at him in understanding. "You can say it; I'm basically overly paranoid, but I'm not overly sensitive."

"…It like you… addicted to safety?" Ando said tentatively.

"Probably a fair description of my situation, actually," Kim nodded at him with a wistful smile. "I can go without the sense of safety for a while if I have a clear goal, but if I stayed away from Peter for too long…"

She sighed and glanced at the back door where Peter spent most of his time these days. "So much for the days when Peter and I were going to try and not get stuck together…"

"I hate my life," ex-special agent Audrey Hanson reflected, not for the first time in the last five years, as she looked at the latest news reports on superhuman-related activity.

It wasn't as though she didn't get why people were worried about what these abilities could do in the wrong hands- this story about a kid accidentally suffocating his elementary school class would definitely start a panic- but was it so hard for people to work on accepting these abilities instead of basically treating them as an automatic threat?

As far as Audrey was concerned, the true tragedy of life since the explosion was what this world had done to Matt Parkman. She understood how he had become so bitter over the years- constant exposure to the thoughts of the more evil superhumans out there mixed in with the bitter desperation of others would be enough to leave anyone with issues- but that should make it more important to find the good ones rather than focus on the bad ones…

She still couldn't entirely believe that this had become her life since the explosion. She'd agreed with the initial idea to try and capture the worse examples of the new 'superhumans' to prevent anyone doing something on the same scale as Sylar's 'attack' on New York (even if there was still a lot of debate on what he'd been trying to accomplish with that kind of mass murder), but when Matt and the Haitian started capturing anyone who displayed powers, it hadn't taken Audrey long to conclude that she couldn't keep towing the party line. She had withdrawn from the active field agents as discreetly as possible, unable to keep going along with the agency's increasingly harsh methods of dealing with their targets, but she still sometimes wondered if she was actually accomplishing anything even with her new approach.

The explosion kicked it off, the likes of Andrea fed the paranoia, and then Petrelli took power and it's become all anyone wants to talk about any more…

In a strange way, the hardest part was seeing how interest in the comics had fallen by the wayside since this all happened. She'd never actually read them herself, but it had still been a kind of comfort to walk into shops and see those graphic novels, the colourful costumes of Superman or Spider-Man ready to swing into action… and now interest in them had practically plummeted, as so many people became scared of the 'reality' of superhumans and decided to try and suppress any ideas people might have to 'follow their examples'.

"Anything new?"

"No news so far," the ex-agent smiled wistfully as she looked up at the dark-skinned woman who had walked into her makeshift office. "The lines are still open as far as I can tell, but these days… well, either our inside guys can handle it themselves or everyone who's worth capturing is good enough that they don't need our help to stay away."

"It never hurts to keep ourselves available," Simone Deveaux said with a solemn nod. The other woman had lost her boyfriend to Sylar's murder spree shortly before he detonated himself, but as she'd explained to Audrey when the two started working together, she had used some of Isaac's last warnings (based on the man's paintings of the future, and Audrey still couldn't believe that was an actual thing) to find a few crucial people who could help her put this all together. "Besides, we both know the system's never let us down yet."

"That's true," Audrey gave a wistful smile as she looked at her computer screen. She had no idea how it had been set up, but apparently their search and monitoring algorithms had been written by some kid named Micah, who'd died in the explosion but left behind a laptop that had been acquired by some of Simone's earlier contacts that contained the programs they'd been able to adapt for their current purposes. Audrey didn't understand how, but this laptop apparently automatically upgraded any program that they ran through it, and had managed to keep track of any search parameters they used to find new superhumans no matter how much data it had to search through. It was getting slower in its old age, and Audrey was sure she wasn't the only one dreading how they'd cope once its hardware finally gave up the ghost- copying the files to another computer hadn't worked out the last time they're tried that- but for the moment, it was still enough to get the job done…

An alert from one of the other computers in the office drew Audrey's attention to a different screen. Booting up the screen, she was initially just intrigued at the email she'd received from the mysterious Bennett- even after working with the guy in various ways for the last five years she didn't think she knew anyone who knew his first name- but that intrigue shifted to greater interest as she read the message.

"What?" Simone asked as Audrey turned to look at her in surprise. "What's up?"

"Get the Goghs," Audrey said grimly. "If this is right, we might have just been given our best chance to make a real impact."

Two versions of Hiro Nakamura… all this speculation about time travel…

It might be a drastic solution, but considering what the world had become, didn't they need a drastic solution to what they'd been dealing with since Sylar went off in Kirby Plaza?

The more time he spent looking at this version of Kim Pierce, a girl he'd heard so much about from Ron Sinclair and only met briefly back in his time, Ando wondered at what this world could do to people.

He had started to get a better sense of the negative consequences of Hiro's power after his friend had walked back into the diner and revealed that he had spent the last few months basically trapped in the past after failing to save someone's life, but it was one thing to see how an individual could change and another to see how so many could change. The idea of seeing the future might have just been interesting if he was only looking at it from a distance, even if the sight of a post-apocalyptic New York was a terrifying one, but seeing the friend Ron Sinclair had described reduced to a bitter woman defined by her power and her inability to fight the way she wanted to…

A ringing phone drew Ando's thoughts back to the present. He looked up to see Kim pick up the phone and listen to whoever was on the other end for a moment, but she hung up without saying anything.

"That was Hiro," she explained. "He's spoken with a contact who spoke with someone else, and we might have some allies we can use to get the younger Hiro out."

"Who?" Ando asked.

"If I've got your dates right, you haven't met any of them yet, but they might have had a run-in with me, Peter and Claire before you got here…"

"And they… good?"

"They're good at what they do," Kim shrugged. "It just depends on if enough of them are still free…"