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Author's Chapter Notes:

I don't livejournal, but I lurk a bit, and I am a. Huge. Fan. of the Five Things meme. So here's my shot at it. I kind of think that Jim is probably a huge music nerd, and I'm firmly planting my fingers in my ears and singing LA LA LA at the thought that maybe I'm projecting too much. In all seriousness, I'm so intrigued by Jim's character, and who he is outside of the office, away from it. And he's real pretty when he's sad - I also kind of think that he would cry over Yellow sometimes. The Final Fantasy lyrics are from a song called The CN Tower Belongs To The Dead, so you see I couldn't resist the joke. And that snippet is so perfectly Jim.

Five Places Jim’s Never Been

by tonightyourghost

Disclaimer: All publicly recognizable characters, settings, etc. are the property of their respective owners. The original characters and plot are the property of the author. The author is in no way associated with the owners, creators, or producers of any media franchise. No copyright infringement is intended.

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Jim thinks he would like Canada. He’d really like to check out the indie scene in Montreal and part of him even thinks he’d like to go to BC and get baked, really baked, for the better part of a week. Fresh-faced girls would smile at him from outdoor tables at cafés. He kind of thinks that people would be gentle but would leave him alone and that maybe the quiet heartbreak he’s wearing around wouldn’t stick out quite so much there.

One autumn he ends up in Toronto for a sales conference. He spends a day wandering around the city but the lasting impression he is left with is that hockey is kind of boring and that Toronto is uniformly grey – the streets, the buildings, and the sky. The glass floors in the CN Tower that he can see the dizzying distance to the ground through throw his world out of balance and remind him of Pam’s eyes. Something corkscrews deep in his belly and he has to take the next elevator he can cram himself into down to the main floor and escape. He sits on the concrete lip of a nearby fountain and doesn’t bother looking for change in his pockets.

He changes his flight to a red-eye and leaves twelve hours earlier. He leans his head against the window that reflects only the overhead lights from its glossy black surface, turns on his iPod and listens to Final Fantasy on the plane. I could fill up a lake with all the things I didn’t say. Had a good run anyway. Had a good run anyway.

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The master bedroom at Pam and Roy’s house is dimly lit and gives the overall impression of being cranberry coloured. He takes a moment to consider the fact that he would describe a colour as cranberry, which he never would have done before Dunder-Mifflin and sheaves of paper dyed lemon sherbet or cornflower blue, and before someone’s nail polish that is the colour of the inside of a seashell. Pam has thrown scarves over both the standing lamp and the bedside lamp, and the shadows in the corners seem heavy. It smells deeply of other people, of Pam and what must be Roy and of unfamiliar personal products. Maybe it’s potpourri. The coverlet looks like they got it from Sears and the bed is queen-sized. Jim’s uneasy, but Pam sighs against his ear and his willingness storms over any discomfort like an ocean wave breaks over sand.

Later he has to leave by the back door with his shirt still unbuttoned as a truck motor dies from the front driveway, and he throws up in Pam’s lilacs.

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One evening Jim is at the office late filling out paperwork. He should’ve done it during the day, but it’s not like he has anywhere to be after five, anyway. It’s cool and quiet and the janitors turned some of the lights off. Any noise he makes as he shifts in his chair is embarrassingly loud.

It feels like when he’d go to the Scout meetings held after-hours at his elementary school as a kid. After his mom dropped him off and before he joined the other kids and the leaders in the brightly-lit gymnasium, he’d always be tempted to wander down the echoing hallways and maybe explore the basement where the furnace and old desks and textbooks and who knew what else was stuffed, but he never did.

The empty office feels similarly forbidden, which is why he sneaks a guilty glance from side-to-side before stepping into the women’s washroom, even though he knows he’s alone, at least on the Dunder-Mifflin floor. The door swings shut too quickly for him to find the light switch, and now it’s pitch black, so he has to prop the door open with an elbow while he finds the switch and flicks the fluorescent lights on. He feels deviant, being in here. There’s a tampon machine and instead of florid pink soap in a dispenser screwed to the wall, there’s a hand-pump dispenser next to the sink filled with Honey & Milk Cream Hand Wash.

He checks all the stalls but the Michael-centric vandalism has been painted over. He thinks Dwight maybe came in here after everyone left with a bucket of regulated bathroom-stall-shade paint and did it himself, eyebrows furrowed furiously, and the thought of both he and Dwight surreptitiously going into the ladies’ room after hours discomfits him so much that he leaves the building almost immediately. He puts the paperwork in a drawer for tomorrow morning.

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Every morning on his way to work Jim is parked in traffic for at least a couple minutes near this coffee place that always has posters taped to the glass door. Sometimes a barista will be wiping down the deck tables. They're usually twenty-something hipsters with facial piercings, but sometimes he sees an older guy who sports shoulder-length, sun-bleached dreadlocks and seems to favour a tattered black Velvet Underground t-shirt. Once he caught the guy’s eye and smiled, and the guy flashed him a good-natured grin and gave a sort of wry half-salute, half-wave with the damp cloth. One morning there’s a sign propped close to the road.

OPEN MIC TONITE

POETRY, MUSIC, JAMMING

EVERYONE WELCOME

At five-thirty that day Jim opens his fridge and looks at the half-empty jar of pasta sauce, the head of cauliflower slowly being overtaken by brown in his crisper, and the two cases of beer. He puts his guitar case in the back seat and drives to the coffee shop. There’s about ten people there who seem to know each other at least loosely and most of them are younger than he is by a couple of years, but he has people skills if nothing else By the end of the night they all know his name and he knows theirs, and they’re joking around with each other. He’s even gotten a couple of yuppie cracks from one or two of the mouthier ones. He’s still in his work clothes, but fifteen minutes in, he draped his jacket over the back of his chair, his tie in the pocket.

The dread-head is Stewart, who eyes Jim’s untouched guitar case curiously when he thinks Jim isn’t looking. At ten, half an hour before the place closes, everyone catcalls for Jim take the stool which serves as a makeshift stage. He is halfway through an Elliott Smith song before Jen shakes her long black bangs out of her eyes and dramatically mimes slitting her wrists, and they all laugh. Everyone claps appreciatively at the end of Yellow, though, and an unexpected glow of happiness flashes through him at how much these strangers want him to come back in two weeks.

Stewart tells him to stop in for an Americano some morning. On the house.

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Jim always went to Safeway, never Save-On Foods, but he’s back in Scranton for Thanksgiving and his mother’s moved across town, five minutes away from a Save-On. She needs cinnamon for her pumpkin pie, she needs it now, she forgot she used the last for her special brown-sugar cinnamon butter for toast yesterday morning.

He’s peering at the aisle descriptions, a little uncomfortable with how different it is from where he prefers to go, when he sees Pam, holding a large jug of organic pomegranate juice in her naked left hand and reading the label intently.

“Pam?” he asks. She glances up, annoyed, and then her pursed lips and arched brows melt into a gobsmacked smile, and she hops to hug him, all flushed cheeks and flying hair. He wants to grip her firmly, but her coat is too big for her so he can't find her through it, and she slips away after a few long moments. But when she pulls back, her hands stay at his sides, knotted in his wool sweater. Her mouth is slightly slack, and she looks up, her eyes a question, and he has a hard time knowing what to do with his own hands.

He comes home after an hour, walking a little funny, and his mother wants to know if he got jumped on the way out of the grocery store. He wants to know if he can bring someone extra for dinner.

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