Pam feels weird. 

No, really; not just off-color or slightly loopy but genuinely weird. But the worst part is that at the precise moment the craziness strikes, its true nature doesn’t occur to her.

For example: that Saturday morning she’d been flipping through the channels and paused over the video of a nest of fuzzy ducklings chirping away in that cute little way that they do, and she’d ‘awwed’ as the announcer’s soothing voice lulled her into a false sense of calm.

For the record, Pam hates horror movies. The dialogue is badly written, the plotlines are Swiss cheesy with holes, the heroine’s clothing always seems to rip strategically… and they scare the shit out of her. But at least with horror movies there’s that suspense music so that you have warning to hide your eyes in a pillow (lately it was usually Jim’s shoulder) and when throats are slashed or zombies slurp on brains there is fair warning.

In all honesty she should have known. The Discovery channel had a history of being anti-cute things, but honestly she was completely oblivious as a fox snuck toward the nearby tree.

But as it crept closer she leaned forward a little, eyeing the fox’s narrowing proximity to the nest of yellow fuzz.

“Whatcha doing?” Pam asked aloud to the empty room, before his jaws clamped down on the neck of one said baby duckling.

Pam screamed. She honest to God screamed. Then came the uncontrollable snot-filled sobbing which was quickly followed by seething anger and she grabbed her portable phone from the hook.

Pam had only called a television station once, when she was six because they had canceled her favorite cartoon show, and she had never in her life cursed someone out, sailor-profanity and all. None the less someone who she didn’t even know. But afterwards, way afterwards, she distinctly recalled using the phrases “what the fuck do you have against baby ducks, huh?” and “you are sick sadistic assholes, you know that? how do you sleep at night?”

Jim opened the door to her apartment with doughnuts and coffee about ten minutes after she’d hung up the phone and she was still in tears.

“Ey su coote an en e ean fox come and ook em awaway” she sobbed, a tissue balled fiercely in her fist. Jim just stood there, confusion taking a dominant role on his face.

Her head lay in his lap while he stroked her hair for another hour and he still couldn’t understand a word of what she was saying.

“You are soo not having anymore coffee this morning.” He whispered, trying to coax out a smile, but her laugh devolved into another sob and sleep was her only sense of comfort.

She had no recollection of this the following day. This was her first clue.

The second came just that next Monday, as she stood in front of her mirror, getting ready for her workday.

Jim had been hesitant to leave her alone after her, well… what could only be described as a complete mental breakdown. But she ascertained, quite convincingly, that she was absolutely completely fine. But her real reasoning fell into one of three categories: 1) she needed some time to figure out what the hell was going on with her, 2) she needed some breathing room and as odd as it sounded, to be able to put the milk down in her refrigerator, come back and have it still be there and 3) his aftershave was seriously barf-worthy.

She had almost called in sick but then Jim would come bearing cold medication and soup, which was super sweet, but also super suffocating some days. Pam had been living alone for awhile and she’d gotten used to being by herself. It was at that point in her brain that Jim would usually chime in, saying that she’d have to get used to it this way too because he wasn’t going anywhere. She would agree, but still. Sometimes she just needed to soak it all in.

She’s having this argument with herself again as the zipper on her skirt is done up and she begins to work on the buttons of her blouse. Pam was contemplating feigning sick again, when her fingers pulled the third button taught across her breasts and there was no more give to the fabric.

Sure, Pam knew that she was not a flat-chested woman. The men in the office acted like she wore high-cut shirts because she had no idea what she had – they were wrong. She was well aware of them, which was precisely why she kept them away from the public eye. But this was… weird.

She’d worn this shirt just a few weeks ago and it had fit fine then. It couldn’t have shrunk because she hadn’t made the mistake of letting Jim doing her laundry which had once resulted in a load being pink and kiddy-sized. She also wasn’t going through puberty again, so again, what the hell?

Strange, she whispered to herself, as she reached for another shirt with slightly stretchier fabric.

Pam made it to work that day hesitantly and thoroughly weird-ed out. She was beginning to feel an internal resemblance to the token clueless character in numerous movies, ambling through life with no knowledge of the fact that they were actually werewolves or dating their siblings, because she felt like there was some key detail to her own life that she was missing. But the troubling thoughts were tangled and abandoned in the sticky spider web that was Michael’s morning greeting and transferring calls. That day was particularly busy – or at least more than normal for Dunder-Mifflin Scranton and their 40% productivity – so lunchtime came and went with Pam’s eyes longingly darting toward the kitchen and the bag lunch inside it. Her stomach, however, didn’t growl its normal tempo of hunger, yearning for food. Instead it flipped around, pushing at the back of her throat in the nausea she knew all too well, another strange happening to add to her mental checklist of the ways her body was rebelling against her. She was in the sickening limbo between being desperately starving and nearly tossing her cookies over the thought of food and yet still had to plaster on a smile whenever the phone rung.

Around two o’clock she was ready to say screw the company and made a move to stand, but Michael’s chiding voice stilled her movements.

“Now, Pamalama, you can’t just go running off in the middle of a busy work day. We need you to take one for the team. You’re like the heart of the company and without a heart, we’ll die… of heart failure.”

“That’s technically heart removal, not heart failure.” Dwight cut in.

Jim spun around in his chair.

“Well wouldn’t a heart being missing count as failing?”

“Shut up Jim, you know nothing of the workings of the human body.”

“I know enough to figure out that if you take out someone’s heart they will cease to live.”

“Exactly my point.” Michael shouted over Dwight’s retort, and Jim smirked self-satisfactorily for getting the last word in. “Pam will just have to sit it out until there is a quiet moment.”

“But there hasn’t been a quiet moment all day-”. Her protests were drowned out by the ring of yet another phone call, and she answered it with the roll of her eyes.

“Dunder-Mifflin this is Pam.” She placed a cupped hand over the receiver. “Michael it’s Jan for you… again.”

He made a disgusted face and waved his hand as if shooing away a fly. “Yuck, tell her I’m not in.”

“Michael I don’t think she’s going to believe that again. Or that you accidentally stuck both of your feet in gum and can’t make it to the phone. Or that a giant bird swept you away.”

He opened his mouth to speak.

“Or that the police took you downtown for questioning on a homicide investigation.”

“Well then just-“

It was then that it hit her. Pam stood suddenly and muttered something about going to the bathroom and before Michael could accuse her of skipping out she hurried past all three men, ignoring Jim’s questioning stare, and bustled into the bathroom. She bent over the toilet and, well, you know.

She was extremely grateful that all the other stalls were vacant and that no office women had the urge to use the bathroom right then, because they would certainly have heard her retching and she just couldn’t take all the inevitable questions. She once again felt as if she was missing something important. She didn’t think she’d eaten anything that had gone bad over the weekend…

Thankfully Angela chose that moment to enter the bathroom and shot Pam a disapproving glare at her place on the couch, shaking her from her thoughts before they went too far.

As Pam returned to her desk, she was relieved to see that both Michael and Dwight had vacated the spot beside and in front, a prime place for perpetually annoying her. Yet Jim did angle his chair toward her as she passed. She was happy that he’d returned to his old desk since he’d come back from New York, but it did however place him in direct view of her computer, her face and her emotions. Which was great… except when she was trying to hide something.

“Hey, if you were going to sneak off for lunch I hoped you would have taken me with you. I could have given you that extra boost out the bathroom window.”

“Oh, yeah, no. I just… really needed to go.” Pam shifted her eyes from the wall to the ceiling, then bounced her pupils to the couch, anywhere but him because if she looked him in the eye she knew he’d catch on that something wasn’t right. Damn him and his insightfulness.

“Michael can have that affect on people.”

He shot her one last smirk before swiveling toward his computer, which Pam was thankful for.

But she caught him frowning at his screen a few minutes later, when he thought she wasn’t watching, and Pam knew she had to figure things out before he thought she was mad at him or was having second thoughts. Even though they had been dating for months now, he still couldn’t shake the feeling that he would lose her, one way or the other.

So she has to find some way to reassure him, she figures, as she now absently flips through the sales rack at a superstore that runs cheaply in her price range. Pam nods, reassuring herself in her decision to formulate a plan, and mentally sifts through a list of ideas. But then her hand lands on it. The ugly duckling of every sales rack. The lace/velvet/faux leather combo shirt that every shopper pointed to and laughed at, asked the ever present who would buy that? The fabric crinkles unnervingly between her fingers and the, oh dear god, red sequins glint in the sickly pale lighting and Pam very suddenly gets the impression that it’s crying.

The runt of the litter.

Why does everyone have to be so mean to shirts just because they didn’t like them? Pam touches the repeated slashed price tag and considers, just for a moment, buying it. She would never wear it, but it makes her sad to think that it would never have a home.

But then she stops, grips the bridge of her nose between her thumb and forefinger and steps away quickly from the rack. What is wrong with her? Did she really just come dangerously close to buying the most hideous fashion victim’s accomplice ever sewn? She had almost thought that it…

Pam places a hand over her mouth and glances around quickly, as if the others could see her revelation externally. Abandoning her cart, she cuts straight through the store to the feminine products aisle, past the condoms (how ironic) and grabs the first one she sees. It isn’t like there’s a difference, right? The cashier gives her a sly smile as it passes over the scanner, and Pam tries her best to return it weakly.

Pam wonders if she should go home, tell Jim everything and move forward together, but she quickly scratches that idea because there’s no need to give him a heart attack. The notion of going home whatsoever dies shortly thereafter, because there’s always the possibility that he could see it in her trash and she really doesn’t want to have that conversation if there’s nothing to worry about.

This is how Pam ends up, with her purse balanced precariously on the sink and a shop-lifted egg timer tapping against her knee, discovering that she is going to become a mother in the handicap bathroom of Target.

“Oh shit.” She whispers to herself.

Because, see here’s the thing: they’re happy. Her and Jim are head-over-heels, moon bouncing to the sky happy. And that’s not something she’s been able to say without an ounce of uncertainty for… years. And they’ve agreed to take it relatively slow, a happy medium between the stagnant pace interlaced with break-neck speed jumps they seemed to have been stuck with for so long.

And this is… not slow. This is the opposite of slow. This is top-notch whiplash times a hundred. And now there’s this gaping chasm of uncertainty and fear and what-if’s that seems to be plummeting all her yes, finally, this is the right thing’s to the bottom.

Pam splashes water on her face because that’s supposed to help with stuff like this, right? and hopes the steady cool of the porcelain will tug her back to earth. She flips her curls over her shoulder and traces the drip of water slip down her nose and fall below with a Chinese water torture plop.

But… hold the phone. Is she really going to second guess this? At the risk of sounding like Angela, maybe there’s some higher reason.

No wait.

She doesn’t even need to go that far. There is a very simple reason why the air rushing in short bursts through her lungs and the tense of her muscles is unnecessary; this is a good thing. She loves Jim, Jim loves her and all that cotton candy fluffy bunny stuff that customarily follows it.

She calls Jim on autopilot, asking him to meet her at the coffee shop across the street because having this conversation over the phone would be putting her life too far into Jerry Springer-land, a territory of which she vowed never to become a resident. Yet she really regrets selecting the coffee place once she remembers that, duh, she isn’t supposed to have caffeine while she’s pregnant. And then Jim walks in looking all happy and carefree and the thought occurs to her she’s just about the crush all that and she really wants a shot of tequila right then. But that is absolutely off the menu. But then he kisses her, light and slow and like he could do it every day forever, which criss-crosses and cross-hatches her wiring so much that she starts to get a tad lightheaded.

Pregnancy is confusing.

“So, couldn’t last whole day without seeing me or-“

“Okay, I forbid you to freak out”

Jim strikes one of his signature looks. “Conversation pointer Beesly: never begin one like that,” and she really desperately just wants to tell him that this isn’t the time.

So she just plows straight through, her vision following her thoughts towards the ceiling and then back into her head, “… because I’m pretty sure that I’ve freaked out enough for the both of us…”

Only he keeps going too, a smirk firmly in place, unaware that she isn’t joking about the freak out thing. “… it just really throws off the expectations of the conversation…”

“… of course that assumes that I’m not still freaking out, which I am, at least a little…”

“… makes people nervous, raises heartbeats…”

“… of course this freaking out thing is mostly based on you…”

“… and then you put on all this pressure…”

“… and all this is for nothing if you’re not listening to me…”

“… and then you go assuming I’m not listening…”

“… because it’s hard to go telling someone you’re pregnant if they’re having a conversation with themselves…”

Jim’s muscles freeze under his skin.

“Wait. Stop. Backup. Say that last part again?”

“You’re having a conversation with yourself.”

“No, the other thing.”

“The pregnant thing?”

“Bingo, that one. I suggest that we shift focus to that.”

“Well, you know, it affects both of our entire lives so I figured you might feel that way, but I didn’t want to assume.” Pam pauses, figuring she has sufficiently prodded him for not taking this seriously from the get-go. “So, how do you- I mean, what do you think?”

“Think?”

“Yeah. You, me, baby, I was hoping to get your thoughts on that.”

“Well I’m currently trying to remember how to breathe, so just give me a second.”

“Second over.”

“Geez Beesely, you got a stop watch over there?”

“No, but I’d like that think that reflexes don’t take too long to regain, unless there’s a nuclear explosion involved and if you’re comparing that to this then maybe we should just-“

“Calm down, no missile crisis here. But, what do you think?”

“I asked you first.”

“Nice, mature.”

“I think that… how I feel has a lot to do with how you feel.”

“Oh, well…” Jim coughs and she’s starting to get nervous, “I think that this is really… good.”

“Good?” There’s the hopeful bud of a smile on her lips.

“I mean, we’ll have to move in together into a bigger place and buy all the books and sign up for all those classes and figure out the name thing….” And she can sense her excitement bubble up as a grin invades Jim’s lips at the anticipation. “….but basically, good is a sufficient adjective. Does that help?”

Pam gulps, “I believe so.”

“Your turn then.”

Pam smiles, resting her head on his shoulder and breathing in deeply for the first time in the last few minutes. “I think good just about covers it. But-“ Pam reorders herself into an upright position so she’s looking at him again, “But wait a second.” That had been rather anti-climactic considering what she’d been expecting.

“Oh no.” Jim rolls his eyes playfully at her worried expression, “More?”

“I just… really? You’re not flipping out about this?”

“I am flip-free.”

But Pam’s still shaking her head.

“But there’s diapers and breast-pumps and baby-proofing and pacifiers and college tuitions and… Oh my God! What about Santa? How are we supposed to deal with that? I remember when I found out that there was no Santa and I felt so betrayed by my parents, what are we supposed to do Jim?”

Jim’s eyebrows brush against his hairline they shoot up so high. “Out of all that parenting stuff, you’re most worried about how our kid will react to the news that there’s no Santa?”

But there are more pressing issues. “You don’t think we’re moving a little fast? Five months ago we were barely speaking and now…” It’s the first time she’s really thought about the future beyond just telling Jim and as she rests her hand lightly on her abdomen it finally dawns on her that less than nine months from now there’ll be a whole human being relying on them for life. Now she’s the one who might need the calming.

“Pam.” He’s using his firm voice now, the one he breaks out when she’s being especially crazy or wants to give him the last piece of pizza when he knows she’s still hungry. “I’m not freaking out because I know this is exactly where we should be.”

She nods because he’s right, and she hates that he can read her so well. In that she loves it.

“We tried slow and clearly…” Jim rests his palm over hers, a soft, cautious smirk coming to his face, “slow is not our forte.”

Pam allows herself to smile because she’s really glad it’s him here assuring her the world isn’t going to come crashing in on itself. And she wouldn’t have it any other way.