unfinished fic dump 4
if life's a peach then, honey, you're the pits
the office, jim, pam/karen. jim and pam break up while she's going to school in new york. and he's fine. until she starts dating karen.
Something occurs to Jim, as the fist is flying towards his face and he’s about the get a lesson in velocity (distance divided by time, in case you were wondering):
Life just isn’t fair.
Yeah, the sentiment is expressed fairly often and, true, he probably should have known better by the ripe old age of twenty-seven. But he just couldn’t bring himself to accept the truth of pessimism (which, funny how it turns out, is actually just realism unfairly chastised and wrapped in a shit bow by the dumb-ass optimists of the world) until just this moment.
And okay, he has a second realization as a million bursts of light explode across his eyelids:
Girls are mean.
Also: ow.
Pam calls Jim and instead of calling to tell him she failed her class, she tells him that she’s doing really well. Her professor think she should pursue it further and the dean approached her about coming back the next year for some higher-level classes.
“So…”
Pam sounds almost out of breath, the word blowing across the phone’s mouthpiece in a burst.
“So.” He stretches his legs out on his couch, trying to act like another six months is no big deal.
“I reenrolled for next semester.”
Jim tells himself of course. That he hadn’t hoped she’d come home anyway. But that seems silly and selfish now.
“Mm-hm.” And he feels like an ass for not saying how great it is, for not pointing out all the cool things she’ll get to do in the city during Christmas.
It’s not just six months. And the distance stops being just about the long drive.
Pam breaks up with him. It isn’t sudden - he’s actually been expecting it since she left for that first class - but her voice sounds so clear, so unburdened, that he feels heavy in comparison.
“I’m not sure when I stopped being the receptionist who doodles in her free time to the artist who happens to answer phones for a living but whatever it is I don’t want it to stop. When I was with Roy… it was different. I was different. But you’ve really helped me go that extra step. I can finally do what I want now.”
This all makes sense to him. It’s the next part that he’s having a little trouble wrapping his mind around. See, Karen got promoted. Which, don’t get him wrong, is great for her. Really. She’d always been more for the corporate ladder, the ascending to higher levels of Dunder-Mifflin greatness.
But this new shiny job of hers? Is in New York. With Pam. And the whole thing makes him think that there should be a more explicit word for irony. Or that the one that exists should be inherently dirty. Because he knows it’s not normal for a guy to have a town full of exes. That the mere act of dumping someone (or being dumped, in one case) shouldn’t be enough to draw them all towards one another. It was like he was a polar object and they were magnets and something about that analogy in itself was just so so wrong.
He hears things. Keeps tabs on their Facebooks (it’s not stalking if they’re all friends, right?). So he notices when Pam’s relationship status changes from single to it’s complicated. He has to know what that means. He can’t sleep. Does that mean she’s casually dating? Friends with benefits?
And then one foggy morning he’s scrolling through his news feed when he sees it. Pam Beesly is now in a relationship with Karen Fillipelli.
And he’s fine. He is. He calls Pam, and their conversation is light, polite; he doesn’t grind his teeth when he hears Karen laughing in the background, a comfortable part of Pam’s ambient noise, now.
He’s fine.
It’s when he’s in New York for a conference that their worlds’ collide. He knows he shouldn’t have gotten drunk. Because one second he’s sitting in a bar thinking, I should go visit Pam and Karen, and the next thing he’s on their doorstep at three in the morning, scotch-heavy fist pounding on their door.
Pam is actually the one who punches him: he’s drunk and goes to their apartment to be an ass, so it’s not like he can blame her. She feels really bad about that later, when he wakes up on their couch. They have a nice talk, and he goes home fairly at peace with the whole thing.
He meets someone later on. And she isn’t Pam, and she isn’t Karen. He’d like to say she was somewhere in between, because it sounds poetic and like stories should end, but she isn’t. True, she’s funny and sweet like Pam, and confident and sarcastic like Karen, but she believes in him like neither of them ever did. She loves him from the beginning (she’ll say it’s from the minute they met, but he suspects that’s just a line), and she lets him love her back.
the office, jim, pam/karen. jim and pam break up while she's going to school in new york. and he's fine. until she starts dating karen.
Something occurs to Jim, as the fist is flying towards his face and he’s about the get a lesson in velocity (distance divided by time, in case you were wondering):
Life just isn’t fair.
Yeah, the sentiment is expressed fairly often and, true, he probably should have known better by the ripe old age of twenty-seven. But he just couldn’t bring himself to accept the truth of pessimism (which, funny how it turns out, is actually just realism unfairly chastised and wrapped in a shit bow by the dumb-ass optimists of the world) until just this moment.
And okay, he has a second realization as a million bursts of light explode across his eyelids:
Girls are mean.
Also: ow.
Pam calls Jim and instead of calling to tell him she failed her class, she tells him that she’s doing really well. Her professor think she should pursue it further and the dean approached her about coming back the next year for some higher-level classes.
“So…”
Pam sounds almost out of breath, the word blowing across the phone’s mouthpiece in a burst.
“So.” He stretches his legs out on his couch, trying to act like another six months is no big deal.
“I reenrolled for next semester.”
Jim tells himself of course. That he hadn’t hoped she’d come home anyway. But that seems silly and selfish now.
“Mm-hm.” And he feels like an ass for not saying how great it is, for not pointing out all the cool things she’ll get to do in the city during Christmas.
It’s not just six months. And the distance stops being just about the long drive.
Pam breaks up with him. It isn’t sudden - he’s actually been expecting it since she left for that first class - but her voice sounds so clear, so unburdened, that he feels heavy in comparison.
“I’m not sure when I stopped being the receptionist who doodles in her free time to the artist who happens to answer phones for a living but whatever it is I don’t want it to stop. When I was with Roy… it was different. I was different. But you’ve really helped me go that extra step. I can finally do what I want now.”
This all makes sense to him. It’s the next part that he’s having a little trouble wrapping his mind around. See, Karen got promoted. Which, don’t get him wrong, is great for her. Really. She’d always been more for the corporate ladder, the ascending to higher levels of Dunder-Mifflin greatness.
But this new shiny job of hers? Is in New York. With Pam. And the whole thing makes him think that there should be a more explicit word for irony. Or that the one that exists should be inherently dirty. Because he knows it’s not normal for a guy to have a town full of exes. That the mere act of dumping someone (or being dumped, in one case) shouldn’t be enough to draw them all towards one another. It was like he was a polar object and they were magnets and something about that analogy in itself was just so so wrong.
He hears things. Keeps tabs on their Facebooks (it’s not stalking if they’re all friends, right?). So he notices when Pam’s relationship status changes from single to it’s complicated. He has to know what that means. He can’t sleep. Does that mean she’s casually dating? Friends with benefits?
And then one foggy morning he’s scrolling through his news feed when he sees it. Pam Beesly is now in a relationship with Karen Fillipelli.
And he’s fine. He is. He calls Pam, and their conversation is light, polite; he doesn’t grind his teeth when he hears Karen laughing in the background, a comfortable part of Pam’s ambient noise, now.
He’s fine.
It’s when he’s in New York for a conference that their worlds’ collide. He knows he shouldn’t have gotten drunk. Because one second he’s sitting in a bar thinking, I should go visit Pam and Karen, and the next thing he’s on their doorstep at three in the morning, scotch-heavy fist pounding on their door.
Pam is actually the one who punches him: he’s drunk and goes to their apartment to be an ass, so it’s not like he can blame her. She feels really bad about that later, when he wakes up on their couch. They have a nice talk, and he goes home fairly at peace with the whole thing.
He meets someone later on. And she isn’t Pam, and she isn’t Karen. He’d like to say she was somewhere in between, because it sounds poetic and like stories should end, but she isn’t. True, she’s funny and sweet like Pam, and confident and sarcastic like Karen, but she believes in him like neither of them ever did. She loves him from the beginning (she’ll say it’s from the minute they met, but he suspects that’s just a line), and she lets him love her back.