xox (Karen, Andy, pre-Merger) xox

Karen knows there should be some solace that she can take comfort in, some bit of mantra that she can repeat in her head and make it all seem okay that she moved to the fucking middle of nowhere for a guy that barely even registers her existence. She checks at the bottom of her glass for that string of words, but all she finds is a crushed bar peanut magnified by the glass and the watery drudges of her vodka tonic. Maybe it’ll be enough, because she’s just a little drunk and that always seems to help.

“My my my, and I thought I was the only one to have discovered this fine place of business. I guess you beat me to the punch.”

Andy tries to punch her in the arm as the dotted period to the end of his sentence, but she glares and he drops his fist.

“How did m’lady end up here? I’m assuming you accepted the job offer at Scranton as well?”

Karen nods but doesn’t say much more; she really isn’t in the mood to humor him.

“I’m surprised Big Tuna isn’t here to keep you company. I guess he’s probably too busy catching up with all his local pals. You think he’ll even recognize us here? I, for one, know my hair looks completely different under fluorescent lighting.”

He doesn’t register that what he’s said might upset her, and that doesn’t surprise her. She wipes a tear away with her cocktail napkin discretely as he orders another beer and later, after the bar is closed and she feels a tad nauseous, she makes out with him by her car. The next morning she pretends she doesn’t know what he’s talking about and it sort of works.

xox (Kelly, Toby) xox

“Ohmygod Toby! Did you see this? Paris Hilton’s puppy went missing! She’s putting up flyers all over Hollywood!”

“Okay Kelly.”

“Okay? Are you even listening to me? A dog has been kidnapped!”

“I thought you said it was missing? Not kidnapped.”

“Yeah but Paris is, like, super rich. I bet some black market puppynappers took it for ransom.”

“But there’s no evidence that… no. Kelly, I have to get back to work.”

“Don’t you even care Toby? You are an awful person.”

“There’s no need to cry, Kelly, it’s just a dog.”

“Just a dog? I can’t even imagine how scared Tinkerbelle must be right now. Out on the streets, in the cold…”

“In LA…”

“… with no one to help it, looking for its mommy. If I were Paris I’d be totally freaking out right now.”

“It’s okay Kelly. I’m sure someone will find… Tinkerbelle soon.”

“Yeah totally… Ohmygod have you seen the new pictures of Brittney? She looks hideous. Leather is so not her color.”

Toby sneezes.

“Are you okay? You’re not getting sick are you? Because I have a date tonight and I am sooo not going all snotty and gross.”

“No, I just think I might be developing an allergy. To… the desk.”

xox (Angela, Michael) xox

Her sister isn’t well, but she can’t call her because that would be giving in and Angela would rather die by pitchfork than admit defeat. Her cat is sick and her hot water is broken and even though this is her job, Michael could at least stop acting like a petulant child long enough to actually step out of her way. She doesn’t expect help, just for him to stop hindering her.

She’d been stringing popcorn necklaces for a week and searching for the right shade of table cloths for twice as long, but nobody cares what color the tables are when they’re doused in spilt Vodka and Cheetos.

Orange is a whorish color.

The tears come before she can hold them back and she actually dials seven out of ten digits in her sister’s phone number before she hangs up.

“Damn you to hell, Michael,” she whispers under her breath, and slips a bottle under her coat.

xox (Jan, Ryan, Michael/Jan; post-The Job) xox

Jan fingers the stark fabric of her Italian suit one last time before hanging it in the back of her closet and setting a mental guideline for herself to forget it’s there. The sweatpants feel elastic and soft and foreign as her thighs brush together on the trek down the stairs, but she tells herself to ignore that as well. This is her life now and, despite how drastically different it is from the one she was living a week ago, she’s never met a hurdle she couldn’t clear. 

The hot-pockets she takes out of the oven are a little blacker than they probably should be, but a bit of burned bread never hurt anyone so she arranges them in a pyramid shape on a Muppets’ plate, covering Kermit’s face gratefully (she’s always had an irrational fear of frogs).

Jan glances at the clock: 4:52. She’d be in an afternoon meeting with the executives right now, negotiating some deal breaker in fancy wording that really meant “we’re going to take all your money and there’s nothing you can do about.” She misses that. There’s the brief flicker of Ryan in her chair, running her meetings, flirting with her secretary, taking her calls, looking up college-age porn on her computer, but her physiatrist’s voice is in her head, reminding her that it isn’t hers anymore.

She clips coupons while she waits for Michael to keep her mind off it, but she still can’t help picturing Ryan’s face under the snip of her scissors and in the end she throws the damp coupons away.   

xox (Meredith, Dwight; post-Business School) xox

Most of the time Meredith is afraid of needles.

Yet here she is, in a paper medical gown that shows everything except her best assets, an unattractive doctor coming at her with a fucking urchin spine.

She can almost still feel the noisy thump-thump of that flying rat’s wings against her ears, the suffocating darkness of the garbage bag around her head. She could have sworn that thing had red glowing eyes but her blood sugar had been low at the time and she wasn’t exactly sober. If she were a superstitious woman she’d say it was bad luck that she walked under a ladder just behind a black cat but she’s not so she’ll just say it’s… bad timing. Or the product of stupidity. Dwight’s, not hers. There’s the stinging smell of antiseptic and then he’s gouging her arm.

“Ow, god damn it!”

It takes longer than it should and then he hands her a bundle of gauze to stop the bleeding, patting her arm (which also hurts) when he notices her eyes have red rims. Nothing a little Bailey’s can’t cure. But her arm still really hurts.

“Fucking Dwight.”

xox (Phyllis, pre-series) xox

It really wasn’t anything unusual today.

Dwight made her feel insignificant and Michael made her feel old and Stanley made her feel invisible. And maybe she was. Phyllis told herself that she had her cats and her online poker and the faded photos of her and the girls at Mario’s strip bar, before Jamie got married and Kim got killed and Fran found religion.

But it was Kevin again today, and maybe he hadn’t meant it to hurt her, maybe he figured that she was okay with her weight, but she hadn’t told him that it did upset her and that’s what was really bothering her. There were days when she just thought it would be better to follow Tom on the path of taking mortality into your own hands.

It’s not like anyone would miss her.

But she stops herself right there. That’s just… too dangerous. Wouldn’t want to fall back into old patterns. Besides, there’s this cute guy who works downstairs, Bob if she recalls correctly, that’s been flirting with her.

Phyllis traces the sixteen year old scars on her wrists and lets the tears on her pillow be enough for tonight.

xox (Pam, Jim, Jim/Pam; circa-Back From Vacation) xox

Pam cries because they’re happy. She cries because she made them that way.

She cries because it’s all her fault, and all his fault, because it’s no one’s fault.

She cries because she wonders when it’ll be her turn to be selfish without everyone looking at her like she ran over their grandma, when she’ll stop chaining her self to the stocks with every time the word Karen bites a little as it rolls of her tongue.

She cries because it never seems like she can shrug all the monkeys off her back and it’s getting a little crowded back there. She thinks she deserves to score a point in this cosmic game of her versus the universe, although she can hear her dad’s voice in the back of her head: “you don’t win because you deserve to, you win because you’re better than everyone else.” But she doesn’t suppose he knows what it’s like to go toe to toe with the world.

She thinks she can feel a tiny piece of glass embedded in her leg from when she shattered a cup this morning, even though she knows every shard is still in her dust pan at home, but still.

It hurts. 


xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxox

oxo (Dwight, Dwight/Kelly, Dwight/Angela; circa-Christmas Party) oxo

Dwight’s first thought: her lips taste like salt and her tongue like sugar, almost like that margarita he’d sipped once to make sure it wasn’t anti-freeze.

Second thought: She shouldn’t taste like that. She should taste like white chocolate and mouthwash and a little bit like glue.

Third thought: This isn’t Angela. It’s Kelly.

Eff.

And he’s scared. Not that he’d admit that: he hasn’t been scared of a girl since his disowned cousin Marta would sneak in his window at night, pull chunks of hair out and leave it on his pillow. Her hair, not his. She was an odd girl.

But he’s seen his Monkey’s eyes when they’re on fire, felt her little stubby nails claw into him when she’s having a bad dream about blue cheese and houses that don’t own vacuum cleaners. He’d like to avoid that at all costs. But a sharp spine-d Christmas ornament clips him in the back and there’s just nothing he can do about that except duck the next time. 

“I’m sorry Monkey. She caught me unawares.”

And he doesn’t cry because he knows how much she hates it when he looks weak so he swallows that lump in his throat even though he really just wants to do something drastic.

She lets him drive her home and gets out of the car without a word, and Dwight thanks his lucky stars that things are back to normal.

oxo (Jim, Jan, Jim/Pam; post-Conflict Resolution) oxo

“So why are you here Jim?”

Jan interlocks her fingers in front of her on her desk, the routine corporate question still on her lips.

“Well, I guess I’m looking for a change. I don’t really feel like I have a future in Scranton.”

She seems amused by this and that seems oddly out of place.

“Does this have anything to do with Michael? If the purposely brief encounters I’ve had in the Scranton office are any indication, I can only imagine the hoops he makes you jump through.”

But that isn’t it at all, and he tells her as much, but it’s clear she thinks that he’s just covering for his boss.

Later, as Jim is turning to go, lifting his jacket off the coat rack and hefting his messenger bag into his arms, Jan stops him.

“Oh, Jim? Could you give these to Pam?” she holds out three different pamphlets for him to take. “I know she said before that she wasn’t interested but I think she has real potential here. And she listens to you, I’ve seen it.”

Jim reaches out a slow hand and takes the glossy paper in his grasp, turning them over in his palm. Jan notices his doubtful expression.

“I’ve seen many women rise from a ground level position to high-paid careerist in this company, myself included. But then again I’ve also seen many more just stay where they were. Out of fear. Don’t let her go her whole life without knowing what she can accomplish. Just once.”

Jan blinks and the moment is gone. She smoothes out her skirt and shakes his hand one last time. “But then again it’s none of my business.”

Jim pretends the moisture in his eyes is from staring at the road for two hours, and he makes a mental note to leave the pamphlets on her desk when he moves to Stamford.

oxo (Ryan, one-sided Ryan/Pam; post-Dunder Mifflin Infinity) oxo

Her lipstick is smeared and her shirt strap keeps sliding off her shoulder but she has curly red hair and a nice smile. Or at least Ryan thinks. The lighting was pretty dark in the club.

The girl’s (woman’s) fingernails are burning patterns down his chest and if he squints maybe he won’t notice that one eye is bigger than the other and that they’re both brown, not green. That she isn’t the one he wants.

“You want to take this back to my place?” She asks in a growl and for once he really isn’t too sure about this.

“What’s your name?”

She seems surprised by the question, which makes him a little sad for her, makes him think that she does this too often and they don’t usually care.

“Lucy?” It comes out as a question so he feels safe to ask.

“Do you think you could be Pam tonight?” and there’s a lot riding on that question, hiding in its belly of emotional subtext.

She smiles, slow and sultry, like mommy just told her she could play dress up for the night.

“Sure.”

Later, lying under her sheets that smell like tide and the glare of fluorescent from outside the window, he’s trying to figure out what the hell he’s doing anymore. Pam (Lucy) murmurs that she never made a man cry before. 

oxo (Phyllis, Michael) oxo

“You need to sign these Michael.”

Phyllis raised her eyebrows and gave him a stern look. Sheesh, what was her problem anyway?

“Yeah, yeah, yeah, I’ll get to it, God. Take a chill pill. Or like twenty of them.” He smiled at the camera crew but they only stared blankly back. Those guys have like no sense of humor.

“When? I’m not staying late like the last time. Or the time before that. Bob Vance is taking me out to dinner and I’m not going to miss it.”

Phyllis snatched away the bouncy ball in his hands and when he tried to take it back she hid it behind her back. Meanie.

“Come on, Phyllis. Philadelphia. Philly cheese-steaks. It’s practically already done. Now just…”. He tried to reach around and grab it. That’s what she said. “Geez are you PMSing or something?”

And she pinched him. Phyllis, grandmother of the office, pinched him really really hard. What was that about?

“Ow Phyllis, that hurt!”

She frowned at his tears of pain.

“I’m sorry Michael, but some things just need to be done.”

And he could swear that she was smiling as she turned around and walked out of his office. At least she said she was sorry. He cradles his arm across his chest and moans.

“Paaaaaam! Can you get me some ice? I’ve been injured!”

oxo (Toby, Karen, some Toby/Pam and Karen/Jim; post-The Job) oxo

“You have got to get me out of here.”

Toby’s surprised to see Karen's figure standing starkly against the muted backdrop of his cubicle, one hand on her hip and her legs forming the bikini half of a ‘K’.

“I’m sorry?” He wonders why that’s his default question. His therapist would say it’s self-deprecating.

“Transfer me. Fire me. Throw me in a trunk and drive away. I do not care just as long as I’m someplace that’s not here, because let me just say that I might go postal on this place if I have to stay here one second longer.” Her words are clipped and her tone firm but there’s something in her expression, the way her eyes are wet and her lips pursed as if she’s trying to hold something inside, that gives her away.

“Is this about Jim?”

Karen squares her shoulders at this, defensive now.

“Of course it is. Have you seen the way he looks at her? He dumped me by a water fountain for God’s sake! What kind of idiot stays somewhere that they’re constantly reminded of the guy that pretty much stomped on your heart?”

He wants to say this type of guy, but he doesn’t, so he requests a transfer. Karen walks away well, not exactly happy, but no more bitter than she was when she walked in and with a bigger salary so he doesn’t feel too bad for her. Toby checks to make sure that the office is completely deserted before he pulls out the tissues and buries the bridge of his nose inside. He waits to throw them away until he gets home, but he’s not sure why. It’s not like anyone there would care anyway.

oxo (Andy, Meredith, circa-Fun Run) oxo

“Meredith.”

Andy pats her arm comfortingly, making sure not to tangle himself in her IV. When Michael did that it looked… disgusting.

“What is it?” She looks agitated and that’s totally cool. She must be really upset.

“I’m really glad that you’re okay. I don’t know what… we’d do with-“ Andy pauses to wipe his eyes. He’s getting emotional, hospitals always do this to him, “without you. The office just wouldn’t be the same..”

Meredith’s bottom lip puckers in thought as she strokes his hand. “It’s okay Andy.”

He nods, pinching the bridge of his nose between his thumb and forefinger. Keep it together Andy.

“Hey do you think that you could get me some Vodka? The nurse bitches won’t run down to the liquor store for me even though it’s only a block away-”

Andy sets his flask down on her chest.

They do shots together until visiting hours are over and her son comes in to poach some cash out of her purse. And it’s kind of… nice.

oxo (Angela, Kevin) oxo

“Can I have a bite of your candy bar?”

“No Kevin, you may not. Why don’t you stick your mouth into that vat of M&M’s on your desk. That should satisfy you.”

“That was a really mean thing to say Angela. You hurt my feelings.”

“Save your crocodile tears for Overeaters Anonymous.”

“You must be in a really bad mood today. You hardly ever say anything that mean unless I deserve it. What happened to you?”

“You always deserve it Kevin… and stop pouting.”

“No. You hurt my feelings.”

“Don’t make a scene Kevin.”

“I will if I want to.”

“Fine… I’m sorry, alright?”

Kevin smirks.

“That’s all I needed to hear.”