Family. For some, it's a list of names to send Christmas cards to. For Monica Dawson, it's a tightknit support group. Always there, always giving all they can for the others. It wasn't exactly fairytale growing up, there were fights. And tragedies, but the bad stuff just seemed to make the family pull together all the more. Monica was taught a spirit of giving first from her mother, who worked two jobs to get the family by, and then by her Nana, who took care of Monica and her brother like her own when their mother died.
The hurricane changed the whole of New Orleans, the Dawson family included. While things had been challenging before, for a working class family, after it was downright rough. They were told to leave, they were advised to stay, they lived in fear that either decision was a bad one. Nana took Monica and her brother, Damon, and fled the city. Her mom stayed behind to help get other people out, to urge people to leave, to try to gather all she could before she followed her family. Before the storm, Monica was a high school grad looking forward to going to college and learning enough to get her family into a better living situation. After the storm, school was the furthest thing from her mind. It was weeks before they even learned their mother's fate. She wasn't lost, she wasn't just unable to find them… she was dead. Found in the aftermath.
The loss rocked the little family, made a little smaller now. But they clung together. They survived. And when they were let back in the city… they worked together to start over again. Nana worked, and Monica, too, to contribute to the household. College was… out of the question. They needed her and she sacrificed for them. Some day. Some day, she'd be able to make it there. But she did what had to be done, despite how frustrated her losses and sacrifices could make her. And she did her best at it, trying for promotions and being a model employee.
For the city itself, it was a slow climb back up out of the ruins Katrina left. Crime was higher, homeless were more numerous, and no one could shake the overall sense of loss. And then there was a little more. Not for their city, but for New York. And the nation. The bomb seemed to remind New Orleans of it's own destruction and loss. At least, it did in the Dawson house. Who could feel for New York more than New Orleans? Something uncontrolled comes to change life as you know it, and there's nothing you can do to stop it. All you can do is survive and rebuild. It started then, for Monica, the drive to get there somehow. Someday. When her family could spare her.
In between the bomb and the big reveal of the Evolved, Monica started noticing things. She'd never be able to really pinpoint when her ability started, when she'd started collecting skills… but it came out at work. Small, at first, when she'd absent-mindedly cut a tomato into a rose instead of the normal slices. She'd seen it done just that morning on a cooking show Nana watched. And then, a few days later, after Damon had been watching some wrestling program, a man tried to rob the restaurant she worked at and she pulled of a spin-kick she'd seen on that program. She didn't even think about it, it just happened.
Nana must have taken it as some sort of sign. Because she insisted on Monica going to college. It was time the family sacrificed for her some. she tried to refuse, but Nana was very insistent. And, seeing how it was her dream, she let herself get talked into it. And since she wanted to somehow help New York… she set out to see if New York's colleges were up and running yet. She got herself out there in the early days of 2007, applying for jobs, getting an apartment, finding a school (eventually, NYU)… and so she was there when Nathan Petrelli made his announcement. Sylar, the Evolved… It answered Monica's question of what the heck was going on with her, but she worried about the already broken city losing it with finding out that superpowers weren't limited to comic book pages and movie screens.
And she was right to worry. There was a classmate of hers who paid a lot of attention. Monica's power isn't an easy one to spot, not when she's being careful, but this guy was just in the right place, right time to witness her little trance when she learned new abilities, and to see her do some impossible things when her instincts kicked in. Like disarming a gunman and knocking him out. most girls in their early twenties… just don't know how to do that, and do it expertly. And he was intelligent enough to put two and two together. And no matter how many martial arts videos she's watched, there's a point when you're outnumbered. And when he and his friends came with their own makeshift weapons to attack her for what she was born, Monica did her best against them, but they were just too much for one girl. Luckily, a good Samaritan came along. His name was Cameron Spalding and he was a man with a mission.
After getting her out of trouble and helping bandage up what wounds she'd sustained… the pair got to talking. And he told her about his group. Freedom fighters wanting to make sure things like what had just happened to her wouldn't happen anymore. And worse things. Things the government could do to them. Monica was swept away between the moment and the man and the speech and the fear and the adrenalin… and she joined with PARIAH on a whim. And she wasn't unhappy until she found out just how they were looking to fight for freedom.
Cameron and her time with PARIAH did a lot to teach Monica… about the lengths she would go to for something she believed in. And taught her the strength to stand up, even to people she considered friends. And she taught them, hopefully, about how far was two far. He was the voice of revolution in her ear, and she was the voice of reason in his. Holding him back, some would say, but she would say, keeping him human. Keeping them all human. And she very much agreed with the deal Cameron made with Peter, supporting the non-violent approach. When he died, Monica truly grieved for him, and still does, on worse days, just like she still grieves for her mother. But the choice to defect to the newly founded Phoenix was an easy one for her. And hey! She even helped save the world once, with them. But the sad part was that the group was far from cohesive, at least, what she experienced of it. The last meeting she was at, there was even in-fighting. And it was something she felt… wouldn't have happened under Cameron, and something she wanted to fix in the group.
Sadly, she never got the chance. Always one to drop everything for her family, she left work and school and Phoenix without a word when Nana called her with an emergency. It seemed New Orleans needed a hero. The first involved some gangsters holding some kids hostage, including Damon. And when that was cleared up… there was another emergency. And another. And another until Monica had adopted a full fledged alter-ego. It was the result of her brother showing her a comic book with St. Joan on the cover, who could do what Monica could do.
It was Nana who finally put a stop to it, after watching Monica's deep grief for everyone she couldn't save, and after being forced to care for her wounds since she refused to go to a hospital. She told her New Orleans would have to learn to look after itself and Monica would have to learn to let go and go on with her life. So, with a heavy heart, she returned to the Big Apple once more, back to school and work and maybe picking up where she left off.