This story takes place after Volume 2 and will (probably) center on Peter, Claire, two well known and much beloved villains as well as a few more or less interesting OC.

Please comment on my writing, as English is not my first language.

Also, I've never been to NY and don't know what it looks like :p so just pretend I'm right whenever I make up a location.

* Thanks to Rurrlock-God of Power's review, I realized I forgot to say something important here, that I actually meant to say:

Nathan does not hold the press-conference at the end of Volume 2, in this verse. Thus, he doesn't get shot.

Thanks for pointing it out!

Chapter 1

The New Everyday

Traffic in New York was hell. Peter stuck his head out of the ambulance and glared at the endless queue in front of them. At the far end of the street, several hundred meters away, the light from a fire could be seen against the evening sky.

"Tough luck for the survivors of that crash," his partner Lynda in the driver seat said and scratched her brunette head. "Told you we should have taken the other way."

Peter gave her a look. His colleague didn't seem too upset about not making it to the accident in time to save the people who could be on the brink of dying right now. But to Peter, it meant everything.

"Think we can drive up onto the sidewalk, if I annoy people by turning on and off the siren and bump the horn a couple of times?" Lynda said, looking around outside.

"I'll be right back," Peter said and jumped out of the ambulance.

"Hey, what? Petrelli!"

Peter slalomed between the cars and cabs until he reached the sidewalk. There, he spurt into an empty street, closed his eyes and suddenly vanished.

When he reappeared, he was standing in the middle of a park in the shadow of a tree. A bus had run straight through the high fence and collided with a big statue at the edge of the lawn, and now all of it was a burning inferno.

He wasted no time in walking up to the flames, focusing his mind as he did so. Yes… he could here people's thoughts from inside the bus. There were people still in there!

Raising his hand, he moved even closer. The heat was immense, but Peter bit his lip and kept going. As he got to the jammed bus door, he wiggled his hand. The door rocked sideways from the telekinesy but didn't budge completely Instead, he grabbed physically it with both his hands and slit it away with his super strength. More flames burst at him from the interior and his hands were burnt from the hot metal, but he stepped inside without caring about the pain. His burns slowly healed themselves as he moved forward, searching the bus, to find two people lying unconscious between the seats in the far back of the vehicle. A little boy and a woman.

Peter grabbed them both by their hands, made sure to make them all invisible with another of his abilities, and then closed his eyes again and focused on the spot outside the bus where he had been before.

In no time at all, all three of them were tumbling onto the grass on the other side of the statue. As Peter lost the grip on them, they turned visible again. Someone saw them and came running. Peter gasped lightly, noticing more people had came to the scene in the short time he had gone into the inferno, and he made sure he was still invisible. Yes. To the onlookers it would look as if the boy and the woman had found their own way out from the fire and tumbled out behind the statue. Shit, he still wasn't too good with pinpointing the exact location to which he was teleporting. Just needed more practice.

Still unseen, he began to levitate and eventually shot up faster into the sky, flying and viewing the scene from above. It looked like there hadn't been many people on the bus, luckily, and other ambulances had gotten there before he did. He wondered what had made it crash so badly. Soon, he spotted Lynda's van down there and soared downwards until he took ground behind it. Making sure he wasn't in anyone's centre of attention, he became visible again and went to open the van's door.

Lynda jumped and almost hit the roof of the car with her ponytail. "Where the hell did you go?" she shouted.

"I took what I thought was a short cut, but apparently I was wrong," he replied, still standing outside. "Been here for long?"

"Ten seconds before you came storming back, Petrelli. This is at least the third time this week you go off all of a sudden. Wait, are you… cheerful?"

Peter actually smiled. "Looks like nobody died."

"How can you know that if you just got here?"

Peter simply shrugged.

"You are such a weird guy," Lynda sighed, got out and slammed her door.

...

Claire sat on her bed with her favourite pen in her hand and a paper and envelope in her lap. She didn't really know how to end the letter. She wasn't really sure she should send it at all. But what would she do otherwise?

A light knock on the door came before it opened up without the knocker waiting for a reply. Claire's roommate stepped inside and smiled cheerily at her with all the yellowish teeth showing. Cassie just wouldn't stop drinking too much coffee, and of course right now there was a cup in her hand. Probably her sixth for the day.

"Claire-bear, whaddaya up to?" she asked, and then spotted the letter in her lap. "Oooh… you're writing it after all?"

"Yeah… I guess. Dunno if I will send it though," Claire responded, looking down and sighing.

"Of course you should." Cassie said calmly, putting down her cup of coffee on the desk in her corner of the room. "No matter what kind of person he is, he has to care about his own flesh and blood."

Claire chuckled bitterly, images and words flashing by her inner eye. "You really don't know him."

"No, I don't," Cassie said. "But if you send the letter, I might get the chance to. Is he good looking?"

Claire looked up and raised both her eyebrows. "He is my biological father and he is, like, forty or something."

"Ripe and experienced then, with good genes!" Cassie giggled and then laughed a bit louder to let Claire know she was joking. They didn't know each other inside out yet, but in the couple of months since Claire came to the New York University, they had become better and better friends even though they weren't exactly alike.

Cassie had chocolate brown skin and bright greenish-yellowish eyes that were always vivid and glimmering. Her black hair was as curly as hair could be and she wouldn't step closer than two meters from a hairbrush. Her teeth looked white due to her dark skin, but they really weren't. She claimed it was because of her high consumption of coffee, and Claire didn't see any reason not to believe that, since she hardly saw her roommate without a coffee cup in her hand.

The person to whom Claire was writing was Nathan Petrelli. Her bio-dad. They hadn't really got along well before, and after the events of Kirby Plaza, where both him and her uncle nearly died, they hadn't really been talking at all. She didn't demand for him to be there for her, though. He had his own family and life, and she had hers. Or rather she had had hers…

"I see you're still really lost in thought," Cassie said a bit more softly and patted Claire on the head. Claire had not even noticed she had come close. "I'll leave you to it, and you'll come find me if you wanna grab som dinner later, 'k?"

Claire nodded. "Where will you be?"

"Probably at Nick's," Cassie replied smiling as she got out of the room and gently closed the door behind her.

Claire smiled a little lopsided. Cassie and her boyfriend had been together since long before Claire arrived in New York, but they were still so incredibly… in love. She was happy for them, and she was glad Cassie still chose to spend a lot of her time with Claire. Without her, the first months here would have been a lot stranger than they had been now. Nick wasn't too bad either, and Claire guessed she would call him a friend as well.

Claire's thoughts kept wandering further, until she came back to her own family. They were still in Costa Verde. Since Claire decided to move to New York, the others remained back there instead of moving and starting over again. They were still called the Butlers, but Claire had insisted on inscribing at New York University as Bennet.

She couldn't help feeling she was the one who had caused all their trouble, and the feeling grew stronger as her family decided to stay. That meant they had really been doing all that for her, and when she went away they didn't have to run and keep secrets anymore. Of course both her parents would protest if she told them this, but she knew it was true. And that was enough for her to leave.

There was another reason for coming here as well. Not the studies. No, actually Claire didn't care much about her studies. But New York was where her biological family lived. Her adoptive father had probably realized that, and maybe that was the reason he wasn't calling her very often. She hadn't built up the courage to contact the Petrellis yet, though, but somehow she guessed at least her grandmother already knew she was there. Which could mean Nathan knew too. And Peter...

She knew Peter was alive, Nathan had told her. But she hadn't seen him since he exploded in the sky above New York so many months ago. She was really itching to see him soon, and to tell him she was living in the same city as he was, but she didn't really know how to best make contact. There was something about Peter that kept fascinating her... though, there was something about all the Petrellis. Maybe the fact that they were related by true blood. The fact that she was more alike them than any other people on the planet.