fearlessfan (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
fearlessfan) wrote2007-08-05 09:46 pm
fearlessfan) wrote2007-08-05 09:46 pm
wips, ridiculous self-indulgence
As I've stated before, I live for the old post-wips-meme, which I just noticed was making its way around fandom again. I stink at completing stories! Here are the few I've got stalled on my hard drive.
Untitled HP fic, Ginny, post-DH but not too spoilery.
Ginny ends up in the Gryffindor common room. It's quiet and empty and strange-looking because of that; even in the last year of falling admissions, the Gryffindor common room always had someone in it.
Now it's quiet. There's no one sitting at the table by the fire where she and Neville spent so many nights this year, planning and strategizing and hoping, healing each other's injuries, worrying over Luna. The place where Neville took her hand, once, in mid-February, his eyes hopeful, tentative, so kind that Ginny felt sick. She wanted to hex Harry in that moment, hex him for leaving, for breaking up with her, for noticing her at all.
But she couldn't. Harry wasn't there. Neville was, and she didn't want to hex him, didn't want to hurt him at all. She pulled her hand back, avoided his eyes for a bit, and when she looked back up, he was staring at the parchment spread out on the table, his face determined.
"Neville-"
"Let's talk about the meeting, all right?"
"All right," Ginny said, and they did, but all the while Ginny was thinking: stupid Harry Potter. Stupid Ginny, for being right all along, even at ten, even before she knew him, when she decided Harry was the boy for her.
Get There, Ocean's 11, ventually Rusty/Linus. Part of this was posted before, I'm excerpting a different part now for kicks.
Rusty hates it when Tess answers the phone at Danny's place, especially when he has to call collect. It's not that he doesn't like Tess – she's fine – it's just that there's not much to say to her after she accepts the charges.
"Hey, Tess," he says. "How's life?"
"Life's just fine, Rusty. You planning to steal my husband?"
"More like borrow."
There's a pause. "Is everything all right?"
"Nothing to get too worried about. Is Danny around?"
Tess says yes and then her goodbyes, and then Danny's on the phone. "What's going on?"
"Isabel left me."
There's a pause. "She left?"
"Three days ago."
"Do you think she's going to –"
"No," Rusty says. "If she was going to, she'd have done it before she took off."
"I guess that's good."
"Yeah."
Danny clears his throat, whispers, "In a minute." Rusty can picture Tess standing next to Danny in the kitchen, asking what's going on; Isabel never did that when she wanted Rusty's attention. She sat down on the other side of the room, tilted her head, crossed her legs suggestively, and Rusty was off the phone before the person on the other end had finished his sentence.
"-okay?"
Rusty shakes his head. "What's that?"
"I said, are you okay?"
"Actually, now that you mention it, I need a favor."
"Name it."
"Come pick me up."
"In LA?"
"Not exactly. In – hold on a second." Rusty puts the phone down on his shoulder and turns to the woman behind the bar. "Where is this again?"
"Ten miles west of Tucumcari."
Rusty picks the phone up again. "A bar, ten miles west of Tucumcari on Route 40."
"That doesn't sound like California."
"It's not. It's Arizona."
The woman behind the counter clears her throat.
Rusty tilts the phone away from his mouth. "Not Arizona?"
"New Mexico."
"You're kidding me."
The woman shakes her head. "Almost Texas."
Rusty tilts the phone back toward his mouth. "You get that?"
"I got it," Danny says. "Tucumcari, New Mexico. Practically Texas."
"Yup."
"I'll see what I can do. Can I call you at this number?"
"Can he call me at this number?" Rusty pulls out his best smile.
It doesn't disappoint. "Sure."
"This number's fine." Rusty reads it to Danny off of the masking tape on the phone.
"Got it," Danny says. "I won't ask what happened to your cell phone."
"Don't."
"Or why you're in New Mexico."
"Good choice."
"Or why you thought you were in Arizona."
"I'm hanging up now."
"I'll call you back."
"All right." Rusty puts the phone down in its cradle and nods at the woman behind the bar. "Thanks."
"Not a problem." She smiles and leans forward. "Who's Isabel?"
Refrigerator - Office fic, Michael, set early season 3. This was originally going to be a Michael and Phyllis story, but it all hinged on Phyllis having broken up with Bob Vance and then the show went and had them get married. So that pretty much killed the concept. Whatevs!
The refrigerator breaks sometime over the three-day weekend. Michael finds out from Dwight, who was the first to arrive and discover it, and who follows Michael into his office with the story.
'It smells like rotting corpses, Michael. Rotting. Corpses."
Michael sits down and turns on his computer. "How do you know what rotting corpses smell like, Dwight?"
Dwight shakes his head. "Don't you remember? I worked with the sheriff's department for years. You see a lot of things there. Things normal people will never understand."
"You're telling me that you actually saw a corpse. That you smelled a rotting corpse."
Dwight pauses. "Well, no, not me, exactly, but we read a lot of reports from the other officers-"
"From the actual officers."
"I was an actual officer," Dwight says. "The fact that my position wasn't salaried didn't make it any less authentic. Is the Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces salaried?"
"Yeah, he is," Michael says, typing in his password (cartman). He's waiting for an e-mail from Jan, but the New Mail icon doesn't come up. Michael frowns and looks at Dwight. "Of course he is. He earns like a million dollars a year. His name is Norman Schwartzkopff. Don't say things like that if you don't know what you're talking about."
This fact throws Dwight off, and it takes him a few seconds to respond. "Something needs to be done about the refrigerator."
"What?" Michael looks up. "Yeah, fine, I'll look into it."
"Promptness is imperative. I have perishable foods with me for lunch."
"Perishable – Dwight. You need to stop obsessing over the refrigerator. What you need," Michael says, and hear he pauses long enough to send a meaningful glance Dwight's way, "is a girlfriend."
Dwight looks away, and then back at Michael. "I have a girlfriend."
"No, you don't."
"Yes, I do. I told you about her. Blonde, trim, religious."
"That sounds like Angela," Michael says, and laughs. He looks up when Dwight doesn't join him, and realizes. "Wait, Dwight, it's not-"
"I have to go," Dwight says, and leaves, shutting the door behind him. It might be the first time Dwight has left Michael's office voluntarily in Michael's memory.
- - -
"So, uh, Dwight and Angela." Michael leans on the reception desk casually, surveys the office. It's after nine and almost everyone has arrived.
"What about them?" Pam asks in her quiet voice. Pam is quieter since Jim came back.
"Just, you know. You know," Michael says in a significant way.
"Wait." Pam looks up. "Did they break up? Seriously?"
"Break up?"
"They did?"
"No. No, they're together. You mean – you knew they're together?"
"Well, yeah. I think everyone does, now. Why?"
"No reason," Michael says. "Just checking how the intel flows here at D-M. You're our point of entry, Pam-a-Rama. Need to know you're in the loop."
Pam nods. "I can call about the refrigerator if you –"
"No, no, I'll take care of it. It's what I do, take care of you guys. My pack. I'm the leader of the pack. Ha!"
Pam stares up at him.
"Leader of the – like the song, you know. Vroom, vroom-"
"Okay," Pam says. The phone rings and she answers it before the first ring ends.
"I'm just going to-" Michael says, gesturing to the rest of the office. Pam doesn't even look up.
Here's something that's even more self-indulgent than the stuff above, but really, as I've said before, what are LJs for if not to be ridiculously self-indulgent? Other people may have nobler purposes for their LJs but I do not.
I think I've posted before about how the one Office fic I completed was originally supposed to be set mid-season 2 and so most of the Jim/Pam stuff had to be rewritten to fit with the events of Casino Night. Most of the Jim/Pam jokes and light moments got cut, and it was a really hard decision b/c I spent SO LONG on those stupid jokes and then they ended up being scrapped. I kept the structure of the scenes and some of the actions and a lot of the descriptions, but most of the dialogue had to be re-done. I feel kind of dumb posting this but whatever, if nothing else it will serve as a handy place to find these scenes; I had to dig through my computer to find them just now.
Random Office snippets, mostly Jim/Pam
Jim's desk chair is set too high off the ground for Pam (she has to tilt her feet to reach the floor), but she doesn't adjust the setting. Jim is twisting back and forth in her own chair, looking at her computer. She left a free cell game half-finished when the meeting started, and he's probably finishing it up.
The main phone rings a few minutes after Pam starts going through Jim's desk. She spins the chair to face Jim and says, "The phones are set to voice-"
"Dunder Mifflin, this is Pam," Jim says into the phone before she finishes. "As a matter of fact, I do have a cold."
Pam has to put a hand over her mouth to keep herself from laughing too loudly.
"Just a second, I'll put you through." Jim covers the mouthpiece with one hand. "How do I do that, exactly?"
"Keep the person on the line and put them on park 1." Pam is halfway across the room before she finishes the sentence.
Jim shakes his head. "Yeah, I have no idea what that means."
Pam reaches past him to the phone. "Here," she says, pressing the button to put the person on hold. "Who's the call going to?"
"Angela."
"Angela. Well, in that case, we misdirect the call a couple of times before putting it through."
"Seriously?"
"Not seriously," Pam says. "She's at Oscar's desk, so you just pick up the call again, dial Oscar's extension, tell Angela who's calling, and then either put the call through or take a message."
Jim looks up at her, still as a statue.
"I'll do it this time."
She does. "Not as easy as it looks, is it, Halpert?"
"No, it's not. I'm definitely going to let voicemail take it from here on out."
"Good choice." His hair is sticking up in a funny way on one side, and she wants to reach out and pat it down. She used to do that without thinking. Now she clasps her hands behind her back to keep them to herself. "Hey, how's the game going?"
"Game?"
"Free cell. Did you finish up? I thought you were -"
"Oh, yeah, I am. Haven't finished it yet, but I will." Jim turns in his chair, away from her a little bit, and brings the game up. It looks mostly unchanged. He turns back. "You know, I almost went pro in free cell after college?"
"Really?"
"Really. A couple of professional teams were very interested, but my agent told me to hold out for a better deal, and – well, you know the end of that story."
Pam's knows that conversations like this one are the only reason she comes to Dunder Mifflin every day. "Actually, I don't."
"Tore my ACL in a pickup game. Lost it all."
"That's a sad story."
"Yeah," Jim says. He turns his face away and pinches his nose, as if to fight back tears. "Yeah, it is. Get out of here."
Pam puts a hand on his shoulder (solid, warm, nice-feeling shoulder; she keeps her hand there a second longer than she needs to). "Be strong," she whispers, and pats him twice before walking away.
- - - -
Jim's desk is messy in a guy kind of way, with few personal things and a lot of clutter. Pam finds four pens that don't work sitting in his drawer, along with a bunch of faded messages and takeout menus for restaurants that have gone out of business. Nothing too incriminating or even very interesting.
She buzzes him after a few minutes (it takes two tries; the first time she dials Jim's extension instead of Reception and spends a few seconds listening to the weird feedback chime from the phone system before she figures out her mistake).
"Hey."
"Hey, so what do you want me to do with this Celine Dion mix tape?"
There's a pause before he responds, enough time for Pam to smile in satisfaction. "Why are you going through Dwight's desk?"
"Nice," Pam says, and now she's grinning. "Anyway, I haven't found anything too interesting here."
"That's because I work in sales for a paper company. There is nothing interesting about my job, including my desk. Hey, what's Stanley doing?"
Pam looks at Stanley. "I don't know."
"Is he doing something on Dwight's computer? He's been staring at it for, like, ten minutes."
"I can't really see."
"Well, stand up, then."
"Yes, boss," she says, but she does stand up. Stanley's screen is blank.
She turns to look at Jim, who's watching her with an expectant expression. "So?"
"So, nothing."
"Nothing?"
"Nothing," Pam says.
"He's doing nothing."
"Nothing," Pam says again.
"Not even checking his e-mail?"
"Nope," Pam says.
"Wow." Jim sounds honestly impressed. "We should clock him. It could be a workplace record."
"Do you want to?"
"I'm game if you are."
Pam looks over at Jim, can't keep the smile off her face. "Of course."
~
Jim calls Pam every ten minutes so he can check on Stanley's situation, even though Jim can pretty much see from where he's sitting whether Stanley has changed. He doesn't mind calling her up.
In between, he cleans.
So far, he has found a pile of Save the Date cards, which he piles neatly and doesn't look at again; several sharpened pencils; a half-full bag of mini-Cheese Nips, folded over neatly and held closed with a paper clip; a grocery list (milk, bread, Diet Pepsi, ice cream); and a pile of printed-out supply requests from co-workers.
The last is the most interesting. Angela has complained because the new hanging folders are a darker green than purchased previously, disrupting the continuity of her filing system. Toby has told Pam that Michael can't order anything from the Spencer's Gift Catalog for the office. Phyllis is apologetic in her request for a new stapler, offering to buy one herself if it's too much trouble.
Oscar sends an e-mail with a reminder of the new supply policy: generic when possible, cheap always.
When he finishes Oscar's e-mail, it's time to check in again.
"Agent Beesley, your report?"
"No change."
"No change?" Jim notes it down in the steno pad next to the phone. His handwriting looks harsh and messy, dark blue scribble below Pam's elegantly penciled notes above. The notes are neatly written and free from editorial comments, easily understood and she got all of the important points of the meeting.
They kind of make Jim sad.
"Keep up the good work," he says, and hangs up.
At the top of the paper, Pam sketched a hand reaching out for a balloon. Jim stares at it for a long time.
- - - -
One day, Michael came into the office wearing cowboy boots and called a meeting.
"Has anyone seen the movie High Noon?" He strutted around the conference room, one hand on his hip where a holster would have been. "It's a great movie. Very important. Bill Clinton's favorite, in fact – though a little less action than you'd expect, given that fact. A different kind of action. Not that all great movies need to have that kind of action. Or any kind of action."
Stanley stared Michael down. "Michael, why are we here?"
"Stanley." Michael shook his head. "Just try to keep up, okay? We were talking about High Noon. Cary Grant, Grace Cooper, a small town out west. A showdown at high noon, over a woman."
"Actually," Jim offered. "I think it was about-."
"Whatever," Michael said. "The point is: Cary stood for something. We all should stand for something. Every day, we might have a high noon."
Untitled HP fic, Ginny, post-DH but not too spoilery.
Ginny ends up in the Gryffindor common room. It's quiet and empty and strange-looking because of that; even in the last year of falling admissions, the Gryffindor common room always had someone in it.
Now it's quiet. There's no one sitting at the table by the fire where she and Neville spent so many nights this year, planning and strategizing and hoping, healing each other's injuries, worrying over Luna. The place where Neville took her hand, once, in mid-February, his eyes hopeful, tentative, so kind that Ginny felt sick. She wanted to hex Harry in that moment, hex him for leaving, for breaking up with her, for noticing her at all.
But she couldn't. Harry wasn't there. Neville was, and she didn't want to hex him, didn't want to hurt him at all. She pulled her hand back, avoided his eyes for a bit, and when she looked back up, he was staring at the parchment spread out on the table, his face determined.
"Neville-"
"Let's talk about the meeting, all right?"
"All right," Ginny said, and they did, but all the while Ginny was thinking: stupid Harry Potter. Stupid Ginny, for being right all along, even at ten, even before she knew him, when she decided Harry was the boy for her.
Get There, Ocean's 11, ventually Rusty/Linus. Part of this was posted before, I'm excerpting a different part now for kicks.
Rusty hates it when Tess answers the phone at Danny's place, especially when he has to call collect. It's not that he doesn't like Tess – she's fine – it's just that there's not much to say to her after she accepts the charges.
"Hey, Tess," he says. "How's life?"
"Life's just fine, Rusty. You planning to steal my husband?"
"More like borrow."
There's a pause. "Is everything all right?"
"Nothing to get too worried about. Is Danny around?"
Tess says yes and then her goodbyes, and then Danny's on the phone. "What's going on?"
"Isabel left me."
There's a pause. "She left?"
"Three days ago."
"Do you think she's going to –"
"No," Rusty says. "If she was going to, she'd have done it before she took off."
"I guess that's good."
"Yeah."
Danny clears his throat, whispers, "In a minute." Rusty can picture Tess standing next to Danny in the kitchen, asking what's going on; Isabel never did that when she wanted Rusty's attention. She sat down on the other side of the room, tilted her head, crossed her legs suggestively, and Rusty was off the phone before the person on the other end had finished his sentence.
"-okay?"
Rusty shakes his head. "What's that?"
"I said, are you okay?"
"Actually, now that you mention it, I need a favor."
"Name it."
"Come pick me up."
"In LA?"
"Not exactly. In – hold on a second." Rusty puts the phone down on his shoulder and turns to the woman behind the bar. "Where is this again?"
"Ten miles west of Tucumcari."
Rusty picks the phone up again. "A bar, ten miles west of Tucumcari on Route 40."
"That doesn't sound like California."
"It's not. It's Arizona."
The woman behind the counter clears her throat.
Rusty tilts the phone away from his mouth. "Not Arizona?"
"New Mexico."
"You're kidding me."
The woman shakes her head. "Almost Texas."
Rusty tilts the phone back toward his mouth. "You get that?"
"I got it," Danny says. "Tucumcari, New Mexico. Practically Texas."
"Yup."
"I'll see what I can do. Can I call you at this number?"
"Can he call me at this number?" Rusty pulls out his best smile.
It doesn't disappoint. "Sure."
"This number's fine." Rusty reads it to Danny off of the masking tape on the phone.
"Got it," Danny says. "I won't ask what happened to your cell phone."
"Don't."
"Or why you're in New Mexico."
"Good choice."
"Or why you thought you were in Arizona."
"I'm hanging up now."
"I'll call you back."
"All right." Rusty puts the phone down in its cradle and nods at the woman behind the bar. "Thanks."
"Not a problem." She smiles and leans forward. "Who's Isabel?"
Refrigerator - Office fic, Michael, set early season 3. This was originally going to be a Michael and Phyllis story, but it all hinged on Phyllis having broken up with Bob Vance and then the show went and had them get married. So that pretty much killed the concept. Whatevs!
The refrigerator breaks sometime over the three-day weekend. Michael finds out from Dwight, who was the first to arrive and discover it, and who follows Michael into his office with the story.
'It smells like rotting corpses, Michael. Rotting. Corpses."
Michael sits down and turns on his computer. "How do you know what rotting corpses smell like, Dwight?"
Dwight shakes his head. "Don't you remember? I worked with the sheriff's department for years. You see a lot of things there. Things normal people will never understand."
"You're telling me that you actually saw a corpse. That you smelled a rotting corpse."
Dwight pauses. "Well, no, not me, exactly, but we read a lot of reports from the other officers-"
"From the actual officers."
"I was an actual officer," Dwight says. "The fact that my position wasn't salaried didn't make it any less authentic. Is the Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces salaried?"
"Yeah, he is," Michael says, typing in his password (cartman). He's waiting for an e-mail from Jan, but the New Mail icon doesn't come up. Michael frowns and looks at Dwight. "Of course he is. He earns like a million dollars a year. His name is Norman Schwartzkopff. Don't say things like that if you don't know what you're talking about."
This fact throws Dwight off, and it takes him a few seconds to respond. "Something needs to be done about the refrigerator."
"What?" Michael looks up. "Yeah, fine, I'll look into it."
"Promptness is imperative. I have perishable foods with me for lunch."
"Perishable – Dwight. You need to stop obsessing over the refrigerator. What you need," Michael says, and hear he pauses long enough to send a meaningful glance Dwight's way, "is a girlfriend."
Dwight looks away, and then back at Michael. "I have a girlfriend."
"No, you don't."
"Yes, I do. I told you about her. Blonde, trim, religious."
"That sounds like Angela," Michael says, and laughs. He looks up when Dwight doesn't join him, and realizes. "Wait, Dwight, it's not-"
"I have to go," Dwight says, and leaves, shutting the door behind him. It might be the first time Dwight has left Michael's office voluntarily in Michael's memory.
- - -
"So, uh, Dwight and Angela." Michael leans on the reception desk casually, surveys the office. It's after nine and almost everyone has arrived.
"What about them?" Pam asks in her quiet voice. Pam is quieter since Jim came back.
"Just, you know. You know," Michael says in a significant way.
"Wait." Pam looks up. "Did they break up? Seriously?"
"Break up?"
"They did?"
"No. No, they're together. You mean – you knew they're together?"
"Well, yeah. I think everyone does, now. Why?"
"No reason," Michael says. "Just checking how the intel flows here at D-M. You're our point of entry, Pam-a-Rama. Need to know you're in the loop."
Pam nods. "I can call about the refrigerator if you –"
"No, no, I'll take care of it. It's what I do, take care of you guys. My pack. I'm the leader of the pack. Ha!"
Pam stares up at him.
"Leader of the – like the song, you know. Vroom, vroom-"
"Okay," Pam says. The phone rings and she answers it before the first ring ends.
"I'm just going to-" Michael says, gesturing to the rest of the office. Pam doesn't even look up.
Here's something that's even more self-indulgent than the stuff above, but really, as I've said before, what are LJs for if not to be ridiculously self-indulgent? Other people may have nobler purposes for their LJs but I do not.
I think I've posted before about how the one Office fic I completed was originally supposed to be set mid-season 2 and so most of the Jim/Pam stuff had to be rewritten to fit with the events of Casino Night. Most of the Jim/Pam jokes and light moments got cut, and it was a really hard decision b/c I spent SO LONG on those stupid jokes and then they ended up being scrapped. I kept the structure of the scenes and some of the actions and a lot of the descriptions, but most of the dialogue had to be re-done. I feel kind of dumb posting this but whatever, if nothing else it will serve as a handy place to find these scenes; I had to dig through my computer to find them just now.
Random Office snippets, mostly Jim/Pam
Jim's desk chair is set too high off the ground for Pam (she has to tilt her feet to reach the floor), but she doesn't adjust the setting. Jim is twisting back and forth in her own chair, looking at her computer. She left a free cell game half-finished when the meeting started, and he's probably finishing it up.
The main phone rings a few minutes after Pam starts going through Jim's desk. She spins the chair to face Jim and says, "The phones are set to voice-"
"Dunder Mifflin, this is Pam," Jim says into the phone before she finishes. "As a matter of fact, I do have a cold."
Pam has to put a hand over her mouth to keep herself from laughing too loudly.
"Just a second, I'll put you through." Jim covers the mouthpiece with one hand. "How do I do that, exactly?"
"Keep the person on the line and put them on park 1." Pam is halfway across the room before she finishes the sentence.
Jim shakes his head. "Yeah, I have no idea what that means."
Pam reaches past him to the phone. "Here," she says, pressing the button to put the person on hold. "Who's the call going to?"
"Angela."
"Angela. Well, in that case, we misdirect the call a couple of times before putting it through."
"Seriously?"
"Not seriously," Pam says. "She's at Oscar's desk, so you just pick up the call again, dial Oscar's extension, tell Angela who's calling, and then either put the call through or take a message."
Jim looks up at her, still as a statue.
"I'll do it this time."
She does. "Not as easy as it looks, is it, Halpert?"
"No, it's not. I'm definitely going to let voicemail take it from here on out."
"Good choice." His hair is sticking up in a funny way on one side, and she wants to reach out and pat it down. She used to do that without thinking. Now she clasps her hands behind her back to keep them to herself. "Hey, how's the game going?"
"Game?"
"Free cell. Did you finish up? I thought you were -"
"Oh, yeah, I am. Haven't finished it yet, but I will." Jim turns in his chair, away from her a little bit, and brings the game up. It looks mostly unchanged. He turns back. "You know, I almost went pro in free cell after college?"
"Really?"
"Really. A couple of professional teams were very interested, but my agent told me to hold out for a better deal, and – well, you know the end of that story."
Pam's knows that conversations like this one are the only reason she comes to Dunder Mifflin every day. "Actually, I don't."
"Tore my ACL in a pickup game. Lost it all."
"That's a sad story."
"Yeah," Jim says. He turns his face away and pinches his nose, as if to fight back tears. "Yeah, it is. Get out of here."
Pam puts a hand on his shoulder (solid, warm, nice-feeling shoulder; she keeps her hand there a second longer than she needs to). "Be strong," she whispers, and pats him twice before walking away.
- - - -
Jim's desk is messy in a guy kind of way, with few personal things and a lot of clutter. Pam finds four pens that don't work sitting in his drawer, along with a bunch of faded messages and takeout menus for restaurants that have gone out of business. Nothing too incriminating or even very interesting.
She buzzes him after a few minutes (it takes two tries; the first time she dials Jim's extension instead of Reception and spends a few seconds listening to the weird feedback chime from the phone system before she figures out her mistake).
"Hey."
"Hey, so what do you want me to do with this Celine Dion mix tape?"
There's a pause before he responds, enough time for Pam to smile in satisfaction. "Why are you going through Dwight's desk?"
"Nice," Pam says, and now she's grinning. "Anyway, I haven't found anything too interesting here."
"That's because I work in sales for a paper company. There is nothing interesting about my job, including my desk. Hey, what's Stanley doing?"
Pam looks at Stanley. "I don't know."
"Is he doing something on Dwight's computer? He's been staring at it for, like, ten minutes."
"I can't really see."
"Well, stand up, then."
"Yes, boss," she says, but she does stand up. Stanley's screen is blank.
She turns to look at Jim, who's watching her with an expectant expression. "So?"
"So, nothing."
"Nothing?"
"Nothing," Pam says.
"He's doing nothing."
"Nothing," Pam says again.
"Not even checking his e-mail?"
"Nope," Pam says.
"Wow." Jim sounds honestly impressed. "We should clock him. It could be a workplace record."
"Do you want to?"
"I'm game if you are."
Pam looks over at Jim, can't keep the smile off her face. "Of course."
~
Jim calls Pam every ten minutes so he can check on Stanley's situation, even though Jim can pretty much see from where he's sitting whether Stanley has changed. He doesn't mind calling her up.
In between, he cleans.
So far, he has found a pile of Save the Date cards, which he piles neatly and doesn't look at again; several sharpened pencils; a half-full bag of mini-Cheese Nips, folded over neatly and held closed with a paper clip; a grocery list (milk, bread, Diet Pepsi, ice cream); and a pile of printed-out supply requests from co-workers.
The last is the most interesting. Angela has complained because the new hanging folders are a darker green than purchased previously, disrupting the continuity of her filing system. Toby has told Pam that Michael can't order anything from the Spencer's Gift Catalog for the office. Phyllis is apologetic in her request for a new stapler, offering to buy one herself if it's too much trouble.
Oscar sends an e-mail with a reminder of the new supply policy: generic when possible, cheap always.
When he finishes Oscar's e-mail, it's time to check in again.
"Agent Beesley, your report?"
"No change."
"No change?" Jim notes it down in the steno pad next to the phone. His handwriting looks harsh and messy, dark blue scribble below Pam's elegantly penciled notes above. The notes are neatly written and free from editorial comments, easily understood and she got all of the important points of the meeting.
They kind of make Jim sad.
"Keep up the good work," he says, and hangs up.
At the top of the paper, Pam sketched a hand reaching out for a balloon. Jim stares at it for a long time.
- - - -
One day, Michael came into the office wearing cowboy boots and called a meeting.
"Has anyone seen the movie High Noon?" He strutted around the conference room, one hand on his hip where a holster would have been. "It's a great movie. Very important. Bill Clinton's favorite, in fact – though a little less action than you'd expect, given that fact. A different kind of action. Not that all great movies need to have that kind of action. Or any kind of action."
Stanley stared Michael down. "Michael, why are we here?"
"Stanley." Michael shook his head. "Just try to keep up, okay? We were talking about High Noon. Cary Grant, Grace Cooper, a small town out west. A showdown at high noon, over a woman."
"Actually," Jim offered. "I think it was about-."
"Whatever," Michael said. "The point is: Cary stood for something. We all should stand for something. Every day, we might have a high noon."
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And heee, oh man, you have Dwight and Michael DOWN. And Michael Figuring It Out (and Pam's unfazed response) -- ha! Also there's an easy solution to the Phyllis-getting-married thing: a/u!
Seriously, how can I bribe you to write more Office fic??
And mmmmm, I loved the HP one; I want the Hogwarts b-side of DH SO badly and I love that little painful moment and your Neville and Ginny are both just perfect.
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I totally want the b-side of DH, too! I love the minor trio in the last three HP books and really enjoyed the little glimpses we got to their activities at Hogwarts. Yay Dumbledore's Army Part II!
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I hope you had a great vacation, but I have to say I'm glad that you're back and posting awesome fic again! And you have only yourself to blame for the abuse of "awesome" in this comment - I just finished your story and it made me realize, again, how awesome the word awesome is.
Thanks again for the comment!