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Story Notes:
I do not own the Office or any of its related IP.
Author's Chapter Notes:
Pam begins to notice Jim. Pre-series.

She doesn’t really notice him at first.

 

OK, that’s a lie. She notices him. Of course she does: him being hired is something new in the office, something to break up the tedium. When she first got the job a year ago, she wouldn’t have believed tedium was possible with Michael running the office and Dwight…well, actually, now that she remembers it, Dwight wasn’t quite as bad before. Still bad enough that the first thing she told this new hire was that he’d never forget the moment he met his deskmate Dwight, but more in the way that you might show off your roommate’s weird trained parakeet to a new friend (or, say, to your boyfriend Roy when he came to visit your first and only year of college), hoping that they’ll see what you see, that this thing is strange and odd and not as normal as everyone around you seems to think (although sometimes they just laugh distractedly and then whine about when you’re going to go out to “one of those cool college parties I keep hearing about”). The new guy got it, of course, but…wait, that wasn’t the point. She couldn’t let herself get distracted. Anyway. Dwight hadn’t been as bad then, just dour and reserved and still quite beet-obsessed. And Michael had still been Michael (or maybe just still was Michael now). So she hadn’t believed it would ever be tedious to work there: terrifying, yes. Dismaying, yes. Awful, maybe. But not tedious.

 

It had definitely become tedious by the end of the first year.

 

So the new guy was a distraction, and Michael’s sudden and obvious man-crush on him was even more of one, especially when it made Todd Packer (ew, Todd Packer) get weirdly defensive and aggressive all at once. He started calling the new guy “queer” and “gay” and a bunch of other words that meant similar things but were just straight up offensive so she chose not to remember them. She didn’t want to psychoanalyze anyone…well, not too much…but it almost seemed like Todd didn’t know how to deal with his own sense of being threatened in his male (she’d say homosocial but she didn’t like what he’d do with the first half of the word) friendships and was lashing out. Almost. Maybe.

 

But that was Todd Packer being distracting. The new guy was just that…a new guy. He did his work—not too much of it—he kept his head down—except when he was glancing up at reception with a grin in his eyes—and he quickly became an integral part of the office. He cheered up Toby, which was itself a miracle but not a distraction, and he dealt with Michael, and he tolerated Dwight. And that was it. They had lunch his first week there, and it was nice, and she got a vague impression that he might have liked her, but then she mentioned her fiancé before it went anywhere and they settled into a genial but boring routine.

 

It was barely worth mentioning.

 

If anyone noticed the new guy in her household, it was Roy: apparently he played basketball down at the local Y, and Roy and Kenny had gone down and ended up playing 2-on-2 with him and his roommate, and gotten their butts whooped in that confusing manly way that meant Roy liked him now instead of sulking like he usually did. Somehow it came up that they both worked at Dunder Mifflin (OK, it was probably the single most obvious topic of conversation beyond “nice jumper”), and then Roy started talking her about her new coworker occasionally. “How’s the new guy fitting in?” “Man, I don’t envy him dealing with Michael every day…no wonder he’s down at the Y so much.” “That new guy’s an Eagles fan too, he’s invited me and Darryl around to watch the game, be back later.” “Hey, that new guy in your office says Michael danced on a table today, is that right?”

 

It was weird, honestly, that she kept having to remind him that “the new guy” (several months into it and hardly new at all anymore, if she was truthful) had a name: Jim Halpert. It was like Roy had some kind of Memento thing with him: they kept running into each other but he had no idea who he actually was.

 

Apparently, neither did the new guy.

 

Five months into his time at Dunder Mifflin, he was hunched over her desk, whispering to her about Dwight (apparently the presence of another younger salesman had prompted something in the assistant to the regional manager, who had started pressing harder and harder on his sales calls to “establish dominance”) when Roy wandered upstairs to take her to lunch. It had been a while since he’d done that—she wished she could say it was an unpremeditated gesture of goodwill and love, but she might have happened to mention that it had been a long time at dinner earlier that week, so she knew where it was coming from—and apparently long enough that the new guy…Jim…hadn’t noticed it earlier, because she could definitely see a look of confusion cross his face when Roy bounded through the door with a cheery “Hey Pammy!”

 

Or maybe he was just confused about her name, since no one else called her Pammy. Either way, he drew back and she stood up and kissed Roy and they went out to lunch, and when she came back Jim Halpert was lounging by the copy machine. She slid back into her chair and he sauntered around the circular desk and popped a jellybean into his mouth. She busied herself with the messages she’d missed while she was out and waited for him to talk.

 

Eventually he finished the jellybean (how long did it take to eat one of those, anyway? And when had she started noticing things like how long it took him to eat a jellybean?) and glanced up at her.

 

“So.” He took another jellybean and twirled it in his fingers. “Roy’s your fiancé?”

 

She felt flustered. Why did she feel flustered? It was just the new guy. It was an easy question. “Yes?” Why had she asked it like a question?

 

“Huh.” He popped the jellybean into his mouth and chewed around the words. “Didn’t know he had a girlfriend.”

 

“Fiancée.” The correction was automatic by now, even though this wasn’t Roy speaking.

 

“Sorry. Fiancée. Didn’t know he had one of those either.” He grabbed another jellybean. “He’s a real monster on the glass.” He glanced up as if realizing that she might not know what he meant. “At the Y, I mean. Pickup basketball.”

 

“I know.”

 

“Cool.” He popped the third jellybean in. “Congrats, Beesly.”

 

When had he started calling her that?

 

Why hadn’t she noticed?

 

She refused to admit the next thought, but it slipped in anyway: why did it sound so much better than Pammy?

Chapter End Notes:
There will be at least three chapters in this fic (one Pam, one Jim, one Roy). I may do more if I feel like it. Let me know what you think.

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