Author's note: I haven't written any fic in ages and don't even know if this is an original idea (since I got the idea from a post on Tumblr it's probably not), but I felt like writing it and wanted to share it. I own nothing related to The Office besides my World's Best Boss mug.
"Where do you want to go for dinner?" Jim asked. Cece's ballet class had just ended and neither he nor Pam felt like cooking, which was par for the course on Wednesday evenings. By the time they drove home and made dinner it was pushing seven or eight o'clock, which cut into bath time for both of the kids. Jim caught his wife's eye as he looked to his right before pulling out of the parking lot and smiled. This really was their life now. Sometimes it was hard to believe.
If you had asked Jim how he saw his future 10 years ago, he never would have pictured himself having a family with Pam. He had just been a lowly paper salesman, pining over a woman he loved but couldn't have. Now they were coming up on their eighth wedding anniversary and had two beautiful children in elementary school. Their days of shilling paper at Dunder Mifflin were long gone. The Halperts had lived in Austin for the last three years, where Jim headed up acquisitions at a sports marketing company he had helped set up. Pam had recently opened her own art gallery and was still painting murals on the side, most recently at Phillip and Cece's school. Phillip played pee wee baseball in the summer and Cece had her ballet classes. More often than not, they were all happy. It was more than Jim could have ever hoped for.
Of course, Jim couldn't be in love with every aspect of his life. They ended up eating at McDonald's or Burger King more often than he would have liked, because his kids were still at the age where they could be swayed by Happy Meal toys. So when Cece pointed out the window and said "I've never been there. I want to eat there," Jim was relieved. The fact that it wasn't a fast food chain was enough for him to pull into the parking lot, but Pam didn't agree. She cleared her throat loudly as he parked the car.
"Um, Jim," she said, gesturing at the sign on the restaurant. Jim hadn't noticed it before, but they were at a Chili's. He hadn't been to a Chili's in years, and with good reason.
"Sorry guys, we're going to have to find somewhere else to eat," Jim said, backing out of the space before he even shut the car off. In the rearview mirror he saw Cece pout.
"Why can't we eat here, Daddy?" she said, sounding a bit whiny.
Good question. "They look really busy," Jim said, even though the parking lot was probably only half full. It was more child-friendly than the truth. Twelve years ago, Pam had gotten absolutely smashed at Dunder Mifflin's annual Dundies award show and had been banned from Chili's for life. Family restaurants tended to take their policy not to over-serve alcohol very seriously and the staff had been less than impressed when Pam had started swiping drinks off their co-workers' tables. Jim had thought it was funny, but the manager had not.
Realistically, they probably could have gone into Chili's. That had been over a decade ago—and in another state, no less—but Jim was never going to let Pam forget that she had been banned from Chili's if he could help it. As he looked for a restaurant that none of the Halperts had been banned from, he thought back to that night. Roy had decided to go out with his friends rather than spend time with all their coworkers, so Jim had been Pam's companion for the evening. When Michael announced Pam's award, Jim had held his breath. For the three years prior Pam had received the "longest engagement" award, and Jim knew that she didn't find it funny anymore. He had gently suggested to Michael that something different would be better (under the pretense of not wanting Michael's act to get stale), and luckily Michael had gone for it. When Pam accepted her award for having the whitest shoes in the office, she celebrated by kissing Jim in front of everyone. She had been so drunk she probably hadn't even remembered it the next day, but it had been one of the best nights of his life.
Now, with Pam in the passenger seat and his kids behind him, that night had been bumped down the list considerable. It was a fun memory to look back on and smile about, but it was nothing compared to how fulfilled he felt now. He glanced down at Pam's feet, surprised to see that she was actually wearing her old beat up Keds. They were dingy and splattered with dried paint, but to Jim's untrained eye they looked like the same shoes she had always worn back then. A lot had changed in twelve years, yes, but maybe not everything. "Fall off any barstools recently?" Jim asked, nudging Pam's arm.
"Hey, I'm still not past the trauma of Dwight taking off his shirt to use it as a pillow," Pam joked. She smiled at Jim, a truly disarming grin that let him know that she was thinking back on that night too. "I think I'm safe from that now though. I've matured beyond drinking melted ice." Second drink, she had called it.
"And stealing other people's drinks?"
Pam feigned insult. "Oh, like Meredith needed another margarita!" In the backseat the kids had grown bored of listening to their parents talk about people they didn't know and were looking at Phillip's Pokemon cards. They had been so young when they moved to Texas that they didn't remember the Dunder Mifflin crew. They didn't often go back to Scranton, despite Dwight's sincerest offers that they could stay in his barn. More than likely, the kids would never meet all their old co-workers at an age where they could actually remember them. Michael had his family in Colorado, Dwight and Angela had a brood (and about a dozen cats) of their own and last Jim knew, Stanley was still down in Florida, enjoying his retirement. He had lost touch with a lot of his old co-workers and they didn't cross his mind often, but now he thought back on them fondly. As dysfunctional as the office had been, they really were like a crazy family there for a while.
The Dundies had served as a family reunion, in a way. They all saw each other at work every day, but they rarely associated outside the office. Michael had been the mastermind behind the even, and they hadn't had a Dundies ceremony since Michael had moved. In a way, Jim had been sorry to see them go. Sure, they had been ridiculous and often included a lot of uncomfortably racist jokes, but they had been fun. "Even if you got banned from Chili's for life, wasn't it the best Dundies ever?" Jim asked, parroting Pam's excited commentary to the documentary crew after she was escorted out of the building. She probably never though that her drunken exclamations would ever make it on TV, but they had.
Months ago, Jim had caught a bit of the documentary on some random channel when he was up late working. The documentary had played it like Jim and Pam had a glorious, albeit complicated, love story. Jim had loved Pam desperately, of course, but in his mind it had been completely one-sided, even their first kiss. The documentary had shown a different story, one of star-crossed lovers kept apart by a jealous fiancé and circumstance. Pam's kiss had been a display of her true feelings, let loose in a moment of lapsed judgment. As romantic as that was to audiences, that wasn't how Jim remembered it at all, and he actually preferred his version.
Yes, things had been painful for a while, but their relationship was real and honest. They had overcome their struggles and had found something genuine and permanent and the two of them had grown along the way. Pam was no longer the mousy receptionist who got drunk at work events away from the watchful eye of her fiancé and Jim was no longer the prankster salesman who wished he could have just one more kiss from the receptionist. Those felt like different people, ones he hardly thought about now. A lot of his memories from Dunder Mifflin had taken on a fuzzy quality as the years passed, but the crazy, undeniable hope that he'd felt that night was hard to forget. His first kiss from Pam was impossible to forget. Looking over at Pam, he thought that she felt the same way. She smiled and laced her fingers through his, squeezing tight.
"Best Dundies ever."