When Jim was fourteen he accidentally broke his sister's nose. It all happened rather fast and it wasn't until Jim heard the screaming and crying that he realized what had happened. He opened the door to his room and panicked when he saw the blood running down his sister's face.

“What's going on? Oh god, Gina! What happened?” Larissa grabbed some tissues from the near by bathroom and pushed it at Gina, who was too hysterical to notice. Larissa turned to her son. “Jim? What happened?”

“I don't know,” Jim said honestly. “She was following me and I told her not to come into my room.”

“And then...?”

“The door slammed shut on her nose,” he explained. “I don't know why.”

Larissa's gaze turned skeptical. “The door just slammed itself on your sister?”

Jim twitched a little, knowing how stupid it sounded. “Uh...yeah.”

“Is it possible, maybe, you shut it on her because you didn't want her coming into your room?”

“No, Mom, I was all the way across the room. I SAW it slam shut.”

Larissa sighed. “I have to take your sister to the hospital. In the mean time, I want you to sit in your room and think about what happened. I'd like a detailed, and ACCURATE report when I come back.”

A good three hours later, Larissa came home with a bandaged Gina in tow. Again, she asked Jim to explain what happened. Jim repeated his story from earlier: he was by the far wall at his book shelf when the door shut on Gina.

He ended up being grounded for a week. Every day that week his mother would ask him again to explain what happened. Jim's story never changed. He wound up being grounded for the whole month, for lying.

That's when Jim learned sometimes it was better to lie when the truth just wasn't what the other person wanted to hear.


Jim thought he could keep his abilities a secret forever. He just had to be careful, something that proved more difficult than he originally thought. He found himself using his, 'gifts', reflexively at the strangest times. One Christmas when he was still in high school, the tree stand they bought was bad and the whole tree nearly came tumbling down one night. Jim stopped it from where he stood across the room and then quickly had to run around to stand behind it so it looked like he had physically stopped it before his mother returned from the kitchen with the hot chocolate.

When the news broke about the “new leap forward in human evolution,” Jim was in college and had just mastered the ability to lift himself off the ground by a few inches. It was during the media explosion, with panel after panel of scientists on CNN blabbing on about this new phenomenon, that Jim finally told his mother what he was .

He began to regret the decision almost instantly. Larissa was confused and upset at first but eventually her emotions calmed and she grew accepting of Jim's 'talents.' Although the first time he passed himself a plate at dinner she nearly had a heart attack from fright. She was comfortable with the situation, until the media circus surrounding the mutant issue started to take a more dangerous tone.

“Mom, those people on TV, they're not the majority,” Jim told her. He'd insisted on turning off the TV when he found her watching a particularly aggressively anti-mutant round table on one news network.

“They could easily turn into the majority,” his mother warned him and turned the TV back on.

The days before the Mutant Registration bill went to the Senate floor his mother called at least twice a day. Jim dodged her calls at work and let her vent on the answering machine at home.

“Dude, I've had to erase this tape three times,” Mark complained. “Pick up the phone every once and a while, would ya?”

“Yeah,” Jim agreed with a sigh. Mark found out what he was very early in their friendship. An incident with a lunatic cab driver, Mark not paying attention to street signs and Jim's lack of self control put it all out in the open long before Jim would have preferred it. Mark managed to be pretty understanding about the whole thing, except when Larissa was freaking out on their voice mail twelve out of twenty four hours each day.

“Mom, its fine. It'll never pass,” he told her again the night before the Senate vote.

He really did believe it. Until the Senator that would put them over the three fourths majority cried out yay. Jim left the conference room after that happened. And after that, he found Pam.


“Are you going to tell Roy?” he asked her while they were packing up to go home. Nearly everyone else had already left, only Michael remained besides them, holed up in his office on the phone.

“About...” she waved her hand instead of saying the word. “I guess I have to.”

“Yeah, I mean, you probably should.”

Her hands clenched around her purse, knuckles going white with the strain. “I don't even want to think about what he'll say.”

Jim shuffled his feet awkwardly before smiling at her, encouragingly. “Hey. If he wants to marry you? He won't care.”

Pam smiled. “Thanks, Jim.”

“You have some time anyway. The bill still needs to be signed by the President and even then it won't go into effect until the beginning of December.” Jim glanced at the calender on the wall by pam's desk and wondered why November suddenly felt so short.

“Yeah, I just won't think about it right now,” Pam said, shaking her head to rid herself of the negative thoughts. “I'll...see you tomorrow, Jim.”

“Yeah, tomorrow.” He watched her leave before starting his own slow walk outside.


He wasn't at all surprised to find his mother and sister sitting in his livingroom when he came home. He glanced at Mark, who just shrugged.

“What are you going to do, Jim?” his mother asked, bypassing pleasantries.

Jim groaned and dropped his bag. “I don't KNOW, Mom. I've barely had time to digest this.”

Gina scoffed. “Oh god. You really thought it wouldn't pass.”

Jim shot an annoyed look at his sister. “I hoped.”

“Naive.”

“This has nothing to do with you!”

Larissa held up a hand. “Enough. Both of you.” Larissa threw an added stern look at Gina before turning her focus back to Jim. “Jim, have you read this Act in its entirety?”

“No.”

Larissa held out a hand and Gina handed her a large document. Larissa in turn stood, walked over to her son and passed it to him. “Do me a favor, honey. Read it? Call me afterwards and tell me then that you're not in the least bit worried.”

She kissed his cheek and walked past him out the front door. Jim looked up from the document to his sister who was walking towards him.

“How did you even get this?”

Gina shrugged as if to say it was nothing. “I have some connections in DC. Just read it, okay? And take it easy on Mom she's just...scared for you.”

Jim tucked the document under his arm and nodded. “Yeah. Okay. Thanks Gina.”

Gina patted his shoulder and Jim knew it was the closest to an apology or sign of sympathy he was going to get out of his sister. He heard the door close and Jim shifted his gaze towards Mark.

“Sorry man, they kind of elbowed their way in.”

“Its okay, I know how persistent they can be,” Jim said sarcastically.

“Your sister scares the crap out of me.”

“She's a professional political operative, its her job to scare the crap out of people.” Jim sighed and tossed the packet of papers that was the Registration Act down on to their coffee table.

“You going to read that thing?” Mark asked, nodding towards the packet.

Jim glared at the pile of papers for a long moment before shrugging off his jacket and leaving it pooled on the floor. “Tomorrow.” He shook his head and went straight upstairs to bed.


The next day at lunch Jim walked over to Pam's desk and leaned towards her a little more then usual. “Hey can you, maybe get away for lunch today?”

“Um...sure. You mean, like, out to lunch?”

“Yeah,” Jim suddenly found he couldn't look directly at her and instead, focused on fishing for a jelly bean. “Um, its about, you know...”

“Oh. Okay. Yeah. I can get away.”

They wind up ordering a pizza and going to Jim's. Pam looked a little awkward sitting on Jim's sofa and she actually jumped when the pizza delivery guy rang the front bell.

Jim waited until they each had a slice of pizza and a glass of soda before breaking out two copies of the Registration Act. He handed the one he'd made earlier at work to Pam. She flipped through it for a moment before looking up at him, scared and awed.

'This is...”

The document that would determine their future. “Yeah.”

“Wow.”

Jim cleared his throat and stared down at his own copy of the bill. “I thought maybe we'd sift through it then...talk? Or...something.”

Pam nodded and flipped open the first page. “Yeah. Okay.”

They fell silent as both devoured the bill in front of them, taking small breaks to grab more pizza or pour more soda. After an hour past Pam finally broke the silence when she flopped back onto Jim's sofa, looking defeated.

“God.”

Jim nodded sadly. “Yeah.”

“Did you see the part where if we move to a new neighborhood we have to alert the local police so they can tell the whole town?” Pam growled and tossed the document from her lap as if it burned her. “Like we're sex offenders or child molesters.”

“I'm still hung up on the part where if we aren't registered by the twelfth they can toss us in jail for up to five years,” Jim muttered. “Oh, that and how the word mutant will be stamped on every damn piece of personal identification we have.”

Pam slumped down in her seat even further. “They won't give me a marriage license.”

Jim's head snapped up. “What?”

“Its in there, somewhere,” Pam gestured to where her copy of the bill lay on the floor. “They're suspending marriage licenses for mutants for a year. Until they can get a majority of the population accounted for.”

Jim choked on a laugh. “You haven't even set a date, I think waiting a year will be okay.” Pam's jaw dropped and Jim instantly regretted his words. “Shit, Pam, I didn't mean-”

“No. Its okay,” Pam said bitterly. She grabbed her purse and stood up. “You're right, its only a year. Its no big deal that I just had my rights taken away. Not a problem. Because I wasn't going to get married for another year anyway.”

She stormed towards the door and Jim jumped to his feet, following. “Pam, I swear I didn't mean it like that.”

“Right. Whatever.” Pam shrugged. “I have to get back to work.” She stomped out of the house, slamming the door behind her.

Jim groaned and resisted the urge to slam his head against a wall. He was about to go collect his own things and head back to the office when his door opened again. Pam was standing in the entry way, still glaring.

“I didn't bring my car and of course I'm not one of the mutants who can fly,” she grumbled.

The ride back to work was less then pleasant.

Jim somehow made it through the rest of the work day, even with Pam mad at him and Dwight being more annoying then usual by spouting off idiotic facts about the mutant phenomenon he'd looked up on wikipedia. Not surprisingly, Jim bolted as soon as the clock read five. Pam had left at four, telling Michael she had a headache. Jim thought about apologizing before she took off, but Pam made a serious effort not to look at him at all and Jim decided starting a shouting match in the middle of the bullpen wouldn't help anything.

He called his mother the moment he got home.

“You read it?”

“Yeah. I read it.”

There was a long pause. “Well?”

Jim sighed. “Yeah. I'm scared.”

“I love the part about how any of my future grandchildren will have to be fingerprinted and registered at birth just to be safe, in case the genetic abnormality is passed on,” Larissa scoffed. “They're practically electronically tagging babies.”

“How is any of the legal?” Jim groaned. “I mean, isn't the ACLU on this?”

“They are, but these things take time. It could take years for a case to reach the Supreme Court,” his mother explained. “At least that's how Gina's explained it to me.”

“Maybe the President will veto it,” he was reaching now and he knew it. He just wanted to believe that there was something that would stop this from happening.

His mother sighed into the phone and Jim closed his eyes against the sad noise. “He won't, Jim. He's under pressure, you've seen the stuff on the news. There are some bad people out there who are misusing their...gifts.”

Jim couldn't help but laugh at the word 'gifts.' There was a time where he honestly thought he was gifted. When he was fourteen and he spent that month he was grounded experimenting with floating books around his room. When he was drunk at seventeen and all that stopped him from dying after he fell of his friend Alex's balcony was his ability to stop himself in midair. Then it was a gift. Now it was a burden, a disability, a genetic abnormality.

Jim heard his door bell ring and sowly realized that Mark was out and he would have to answer it. “I...have to go, Mom.”

“Okay. Are you alright?”

He tried to speak around the lump in his throat, but it came out rough and quiet. “No.” He hung up the phone, knowing he'd have to call again in the morning to apologize. Jim rubbed furiously at his red and watery eyes for a moment before collecting himself and heading for the door.

Tired, he didn't even bother physically opening the door. He stopped halfway there and opened the door with his mind. Pam stood on his porch, her own eyes red with tears and she jumped a little when the door crashed open. She glanced at Jim knowingly.

“I...I'm sorry, I know its late but...”

Jim took a step closer to her. “No, I mean, I wanted to apologize anyway for what I said earlier. It was way out of line. I think you and Roy-”

“I left Roy,” Pam blurted out.

Jim stared at her blankly. “...what?”

“I had to, I...” she was practically sobbing now and that was when Jim realized she was still standing outside.

“Okay,” Jim walked forward and pulled her inside, closing the door behind her. “You told him?”

Pam shook her head. “I don't want to...I can't talk about...”

“Okay, its okay,” Jim pulled her into a hug without thinking. “Its okay.”

“Can I stay here?” she sniffled into his sweater. “Just for tonight. I need to...find a new apartment.”

“Yeah, its fine, of course its fine.”

Pam pulled away from him and gave him the smallest of smiles. “Thanks Jim.”

Jim laughed awkwardly and grinned. “Hey. No problem. We're in this boat together, right?”

Pam giggled and wiped her tears away with the sleeve of her sweatshirt. “Yeah. You and me against the world, huh?”

Jim watched her walk past him to lie down on his couch with a sigh. “Yeah,” he muttered. He decided not to ruin the sentiment by telling her that so far, they were losing.