Jim likes to think of himself as a fairly creative guy. Whether it’s finding an angle he can use to establish a rapport with a prospective client, or coming up with a new way to mess with Dwight – or, in his more pathetic moments, making up some contrived excuse to chat to Pam for ten or thirty or maybe even forty-five seconds – he’s pretty good at coming up with ideas. But he’s been sitting here in the break room and waiting for inspiration to strike for twenty minutes now, and he’s got nothing.

He stares blankly at the nearly-blank piece of paper in front of him, and the words MICHAEL’S SOULMATE MISSION stare back at him. Those three words are all he’s got to show for the last twenty minutes of his life. The sad part is that this still qualifies as one of his more productive mornings at Dunder-Mifflin.

He’s almost relieved when Dwight marches into the room to interrupt him, because at least then there’s something else to entertain himself with.

“What are you doing in here, Jim?” Herr Schrute demands. “You haven’t clocked out for your break, and you’ve been away from your desk for twenty-seven minutes!”

That long? Wow. This morning’s just flying by.

“Michael assigned me an important task yesterday, and I’m working on my plan of action,” Jim replies, taking a moment to shuffle his papers in a self-important manner. The vagueness will infuriate Dwight, and you’ve gotta learn to take your fun where you can at DM Scranton.

Right on cue, Dwight’s nostrils flare. “Michael assigned you an important task?”

“Yep.” Jim meets his demented stare and delights in giving him a cool nod and a blasé shrug, if only to see his offended expression. “Extremely important.”

Dwight puffs his chest out, and his sternum starts swelling like he’s suffering an extreme allergic reaction. Chance would be a fine thing. “As Assistant Regional Manager –”

“Assistant to the Regional Manager –”

“I should be the one taking care of any important business on Michael’s behalf.”

“Yeah, you probably should,” Jim agrees, feeling absolutely no compunction at the prospect of dumping this off on his deskmate. “You should go tell him that.”

Dwight gives him another suspicious look, but Jim just ignores him and scribbles another few words at the top of the page with a quiet aha! sound. It looks and sounds important enough to make Dwight straighten up, adjust his glasses, and spin around before marching back to the office.

As Dwight leaves, blissful silence returns. But Jim doesn’t get to enjoy the peace and quiet for long before the door’s pushed open again.

“Just so you know, Dwight’s just gone into Michael’s office and announced that he’s taking over whatever responsibility Michael’s entrusted you with,” Pam announces without preamble, walking over to snag the other chair at Jim’s table. “I thought I should probably give you a heads-up, considering that technically covers every element of your job.”

“He’s so welcome to it,” Jim replies, and he’s not even sure if he’s joking or not. He’s tired and bored and the bond-suppression tablets don’t react well with caffeine, so he tends to spend his mornings in a bit of an apathetic fugue until he properly wakes up at around eleven, but he makes a genuine effort to smile at his favorite receptionist and appear responsive and lively and all that good stuff. “Does that mean I can take the rest of the day off?”

“I thought you already were?” Pam quirks her eyebrows at him. “Isn’t that why you’ve been hiding out in here all morning?”

“I wish,” Jim says dully. “Michael’s got me working on a project.”

He feels the overwhelming urge to bang his head against the table just saying the words. Something of his existential torment must show on his face, because Pam just gives him an understanding grimace and a sympathetic nod. “Ah.”

“Yeah.”

"Same here," Pam sighs in commiseration. “I'm guessing Dwight wants to be the one working on the project?”

“Not just Dwight,” Jim says sincerely. “I want Dwight to be the one working on the project.”

“He deserves the opportunity,” Pam agrees with mock-solemnity. “What’s the project?”

Jim sighs deeply and tries not to start weighing up the pros and cons of stabbing himself in the neck with a pen. “Michael wants to steal everyone’s soulmate files from HR.”

Pam's eyes widen slightly. “HR has our soulmates on record?”

“Michael thinks HR has our soulmates on record,” Jim corrects her dully. “And he thinks Toby’s hiding them from us.”

Pam’s mouth does that thing where she’s trying not to laugh but her lips twitch upwards anyway. “That does sound like the kind of thing Michael would accuse Toby of.”

She pulls out another chair at the table, and when she sits down, she shuffles closer to Jim so she can get a better look at his notes. For a moment, his mind goes blank and all he can think about is how she must got some new shampoo for her frizzy hair, because it doesn’t smell like strawberries today. He wants to say it smells more floral, but he knows literally nothing about that sort of thing. Katy had despaired of his inability to tell the difference between vanilla and orchids.

“Is there a reason you’ve written ‘Bellagio Hotel’ at the top of the page?” Pam’s voice interrupts his drifting stream of thought.

“Ocean’s Eleven,” he replies absently.

She makes a noise of recognition. “Roy liked that one.”

“Oh, yeah?” Jim tries very hard to keep his voice even. “That’s cool.”

He makes another mental reminder to check whether that job in Maryland is still available, but he knows he’s not going to take it. People wait all their lives for a soulmate, he’s not dumb enough to let her slip through his fingers.

Except she’s never been his to lose.

Except she kind of is his, that’s kind of the whole point of being soulmates, but there’s no way for Jim to put that like that without feeling really gross and creepy, and he just – he can’t be that guy, he just can’t, because if he lets himself think like a possessive asshole, he’ll start acting like a possessive asshole, and he’ll scare her off, he’ll fuck it up.

Maybe The Shins were right after all. Maybe caring is creepy.

“So Michael’s got you working on a project, too?” He asks, partly because it’s a safer topic and partly because his head’s starting to hurt.

“Uh-huh,” Pam replies with a delightfully comprehensive eye-roll. “You’re not the only one with a top-secret assignment from Special Agent Michael Scarn.”

“Dare I ask? Or is it above my clearance level?”

“If I told you, I’d have to kill you,” she deadpans, before sighing and shaking her head. “I’m writing up fake emails with Oscar so we can send them to Michael and pretend they’re from Corporate.”

Jim whistles. “Never thought Oscar had it in him.”

“I think working here’s corrupted him.”

“Maybe it’s you that’s corrupted him,” Jim accuses her, narrowing his eyes in mock-suspicion. He’s rewarded for his efforts with another eye-roll and a barely-stifled smile. He’ll take it. (He’ll take anything she’ll give him.)

She seems happy today, Jim thinks to himself. He likes to think that he knows Pam Beesly pretty well after two-and-a-half years of loving her, and she seems like she’s having a good day today.

He can’t be sure, obviously, because he’s taken a tablet to suppress the emotional bond they share, but Jim’s reasonably confident that he knows Pam well enough by now to be able to make an educated guess at how she’s feeling. She hasn’t been tap-dancing and singin’ in the rain, or anything obvious like that, but she’s wearing that light pink cardigan she likes, and she was humming a Lifehouse song under her breath at a couple of points earlier. She’s probably just heard it on the radio at some point, but at least this way Jim can pretend that he’s the guy that introduced her to the joys of alternative rock. And yeah, it would have been cooler if it was Snow Patrol, for sure, but at least it’s not, like, Nickelback or something.

He takes a moment to consider it, and concludes that, yes, he would still be hopelessly in love with Pam Beesly even if she was a fan of Nickelback. He’s in deep. His relationship with Dunder Mifflin is defined by Pam Beesly the same way his relationship with the Sixers is defined by Allen Iverson: if it wasn’t for Pam, he would have jacked it in a long time ago.

He still remembers the moment when the pretty receptionist who introduced herself as Pam Beesly had advised him to enjoy this last moment of his life before knowing his desk-mate Dwight. She’d given him a conspiratorial smile, and he’d felt a flicker of good-natured humor, a mild pang of sympathy, and a faint sense of curiosity – and that had been that.

He’d like to say their bond exploded into life, but it was more like it stole across him in the moment and quietly made itself at home. Like the moment the sun comes out from behind clouds, everything had seemed warmer, brighter, sweeter. It would be kind of lame for him to say Pam is the sunshine, but it would also be kind of accurate - she’s the fixed point around which he orients his days, and he feels warmer when he’s near her and colder when he’s sitting at his desk. She’s his favorite person to spend time with, the only work colleague he genuinely enjoys working with, and the obvious choice if he’s looking for a partner-in-crime.

Someday you will be loved, he thinks to himself. Death Cab wouldn’t lie to him.

“You want some help with that?”

Jim experiences a single moment of sheer, unbridled, unrestrained panic and terror before remembering that even if Pam did feel their soul-bond – which she doesn’t, and it fucking sucks – she wouldn’t get mind-reading as part of the deal. “What?”

“If we’re forging official emails, we could forge some official documents, too,” she says, gesturing to the piece of paper on the table in front of them. “I can go to Toby and ask for a Soul-Bond Declaration Form, and then if we go to the photocopier and get a couple of copies, we can just fill them out and pretend they’re from the rest of the office.”

It’s a plan so brilliant that it actually takes Jim a few moments to appreciate it for its stunningly beautiful simplicity. “You want to give Michael fake soulmate forms?”

Pam shrugs. “I mean, it’s not like he’d know the difference.”

Jim inclines his head in appropriate acknowledgement of this point. Harsh, but undeniably accurate. “Could you go and grab some?”

“Sure.” It feels like Pam’s only just sat down, but she hops up to her feet with alacrity. “Don’t go anywhere!”

“I’m not going anywhere,” Jim reassures her as she heads for the door. “I’ll still be here, wait –”

But she’s gone before he can finish the sentence, which is probably just as well.

“Waiting for you,” he mumbles to himself, and, yep, it sounds so lame it’s probably for the best that she didn’t stick around to hear him say it.

Jim closes his eyes and lowers his head until it’s pressed against the piece of paper in front of him. His shaggy hair prickles against his forehead and makes a rustling noise against the paper when he lets out a deep sigh.

Don’t get him wrong, Jim loves Pam. Soulmate or not, he’s pretty sure by now that it would be impossible for him not to love her. The fact that she’s not only able but willing to put up with Michael’s constant bullshit says everything you could ever need to know about the kind of person she is: she’s sweet, and kind, and her doodles aren’t just doodles, they’re wry and droll and achingly funny when she doesn’t just scrunch them up and throw them in the recycling bin because she doesn’t think they’re good enough. She’s warm and playful and wickedly funny when she decides Dwight needs taking down a peg or two, and Jim can’t imagine his life without her.

But he can’t help wishing sometimes, on days like today, that she wasn’t his soulmate – that she was just a girl he liked, not The One arbitrarily picked out by him by a universe with a sick sense of humor. Sometimes, Jim wants to just have a casual thing for the receptionist who looks cute with her hair let down.

Sometimes he just wants to love her the same way he loves Donovan McNabb or Brian Dawkins: from afar, uncomplicatedly, with absolutely no repercussions or implications for his long-term emotional wellbeing if things don’t work out. He wasn’t heartbroken when Reggie White left for the Packers – he was even kind of happy for the guy when he won the Super Bowl. But if Pam ever does end up tying the knot with Roy, Jim’s going to have to seriously reconsider whether that joke he’d made to the cameras about throwing himself in front of a train was all that much of a joke.

Because although everyone loves to talk about how wonderful it is to know exactly how your other half is feeling, how it feels like coming home or finding a part of you that you never even knew existed, nobody ever mentions the part where you might find yourself driving into work in the morning, feeling like you’re on top of the world, a smile on your face and a song in your heart, only to be confronted by your soulmate making out with her fiancé in the parking lot. Jim had arrived at the office thirty minutes early for a week after that, until Dwight had gotten suspicious about his newfound enthusiasm and work ethic.

There’s zero chance of that happening again today. He’d sit here with his head on the table for the rest of the day if he could. It’s always like this when he takes his suppressant tablets.

Most of the time, Pam’s emotions are a steady, reassuring background presence to Jim’s day; when she feels amused, it sends a warm glow through his body, and when she’s irritated, he feels the phantom tension in his neck and shoulders. But the tablets leave him feeling detached and disconnected, and he’s gotten used to steadily slogging through the nine-to-five in a state of increasingly listless boredom. But when the alternative is feeling second-degree arousal whenever Roy Anderson walks through the door, can you blame him?

“Oh, God,” Jim mutters darkly, dragging a hand across the back of his head and tugging on his hair in frustration. He’d been doing so well at blocking that memory out; all that hard work for naught.

Pam returns a couple of minutes later with a small pile of forms that she neatly stacks on the table in front of them. They take turns writing the names out, but they confer and discuss together, and it’s almost like a game; so far, they’ve decided that Kevin’s soulmate should be Halle Berry, Stanley’s fated to fall in love with Avril Lavigne, and the other half of Kelly’s soul is none other than Hayden Christiansen. When Jim had written Ryan’s name on the top of one of the forms, Pam had almost ripped the sheet as she snatched it out of his hands, snickering to herself as she wrote Ryan Howard in the Soulmate Declaration section.

She’s still smiling at her own genius when she reaches for the next sheet of paper. “Who’s next?”

Jim tries to remember who in the office they can get away with. Not Dwight or Angela, obviously, and not Phyllis, either – and if anyone else in the office has a secret soulmate, they’ll stay that way because it’s illegal for them to announce it, so Toby won’t know either.

“Toby,” he decides.

“Ooh, good one.” Pam nods approvingly. She scrawls Toby’s name at the top of the page, and looks at Jim expectantly. “Who d’ya think Toby’s soulmate should be?”

Jim thinks about it for a moment, and then draws out his thoughtful hmm, because he likes the way Pam’s watching him, eager to hear what he has to say. He allows himself to indulge for a couple of moments more than is necessary before getting down to business. Who should they say Toby’s soulmate is?

“Jan Levinson-Gould,” he decides, just because it’ll piss Michael off. Judging from the way Pam’s face lights up, it’s a pretty good answer.

“No way,” she gasps, eyes widening in gleeful excitement. “Oh, no, Jim, we can’t do that – Michael will totally flip!”

“Exactly, Pam,” he urges her, feeling a little like a devil sitting on her shoulder. “You can’t tell me you don’t want to see how he reacts.”

“Jim,” she shakes her head, but it’s kind of hard for her to scowl at him when she’s fighting back a smile. “That’s too harsh, we can’t do that to Toby.”

“Oh, come on.”

“Michael already hates him enough!”

“Alright, fine.” Jim lets out a sigh, and shoots her a mock-dirty look. “Catherine Zeta-Jones.”

It’s truly a gift, Jim thinks to himself, how Pam’s able to make the roll of her eyes seem so affectionate when Jim knows that it’s totally (tortuously) platonic.

“No,” she judges, although Jim can tell that she’s more tempted than she’s letting on. “Oscar and I already kind of made him look bad in our emails, so we should probably give him a break.”

“You can make it up to him by picking his soulmate, then,” Jim decides. If he sounds moderately sulky, it’s only because his great ideas have been rejected.

“Edith Loring Getchell,” she decides, which is a name that means absolutely nothing to Jim.

“Who’s that?” He asks dubiously.

“She was a painter,” Pam informs him as she writes the name out on the form in her small, neat hand. “She studied at the Philadelphia Academy of Fine Arts. I really like her work.”

It’s enough to make Jim look around the room for the cameras.

This has to be some kind of joke. The fact that Pam is deciding that someone in the office gets to be soulmates with a Pennsylvanian artist is bad enough, but when you factor in that that someone is not him and the artist is not her?

This is why Jim hates soulmates.

“Almost there,” she announces, setting Toby’s form aside and pulling a new, blank one. “Just a couple more to go.”

“Who’s next?” Jim asks, trying to run through the rest of his co-workers as a way of distracting himself from plotting Toby’s untimely demise. “Creed?”

Pam hums a little noncommittally and pulls a face, which is a less-than-enthusiastic response.

“I mean, not everyone in the world has a soulmate,” she points out. “And we’ve given everyone else soulmates. We could just leave Creed’s form blank and move on to Oscar and Meredith.”

It’s a good point, and Jim gladly acquiesces. He could try to imagine the kind of person who would perfectly complement Creed’s personality traits and moral and intellectual character, but the chances are he’d end up writing Hannibal Lecter, or something. Sometimes, the easiest option is also the best.

“Maybe you could say he volunteered for a CIA program that surgically removed his soul-bond,” he offers.

“You think Creed was part of MKUltra?” Pam asks doubtfully, giving him a dubious look and a raised eyebrow. “

“Fair enough,” he acknowledges. “Knowing Creed, it’s more likely he killed them.”

Pam laughs as she jots Creed’s name down at the top of the sheet before pushing it away without a second glance.

“I’m putting Meredith’s soulmate down as George Clooney,” she tells him with a mischievous grin. “You might be able to convince me to change it to ‘Michael Scott’, but you’ll have to be quick about it.”

“Fire away,” Jim says, gesturing that she can go ahead without delay. “I was thinking we could just say that Michael’s was ‘Classified Information’ and watch him freak out.”

Pam giggles as she takes another page from their rapidly-dwindling supply, and Jim can’t help but be distracted by how bare her finger looks without her engagement ring. She must have forgotten to put it on today.

“Jim Halpert,” she intones as she marks his name in block capitals. “Who’s your soulmate?”

Oh, God.

Jim has to think fast, or this could end in disaster. Hardly an uncommon thought considering his colleagues, but this is definitely a departure from the norm.

“Julian Casablancas,” he says, because at the risk of sounding like Meat Loaf, he’ll do anything for love, but he won’t do that.

Pam pauses with the pen hovering over the paper. “Who?”

Jim stands firm and refuses to break. He’s been working at Dunder fucking Mifflin for two-and-a-half years for this girl, he’s learnt the difference between a quire and a ream and a bundle for this girl, he’s endured Dwight and Michael and Creed for this girl. He can have this one, just this once. “Lead singer for The Strokes.”

Pam wrinkles her nose, and it’s got no right being as endearing as it is. “I’m going to write Moby, and there’s nothing you can do about it.”

“Now that’s just mean,” Jim complains. He maybe exaggerates his mock-shudder a little, but hey, better to oversell than undersell, and that’s coming from someone who sells stuff for a living. He’d definitely prefer to keep this particular conversation lighthearted.

Pam doesn’t laugh, but she does give him a smile that’s a little smaller than usual. It’s softer and warmer around the edges, and it does funny things to his insides.

“I’ve got one for you,” she says, bending over the paper again and using her free hand to cover whatever name she’s writing. “I think you’ll like this one.”

“Are you sure?” Jim can’t help but ask. Even if it’s a fake form, he’s still got his ego to consider. “You’re not going to put down, like, Chris Martin, or something lame like that?”

“Excuse you,” she sniffs. “You wish you were cool enough to be Chris Martin’s soulmate.”

Now that he’s seen the alternative, Jim thinks he could learn to live with loving a Nickelback fan. Someday.

“Okay,” Pam announces. She’s biting her lip and looking oddly nervous as she slides the paper over to him. “What do you think?”

Jim looks at the form. When he looks back at Pam, they're both smiling.