Title: Prayers To Pele
Rating: T
Diclaimer: Not mine. No profit made.
A/N: This is a story that occured merely from writing the first line. I had almost no control over it until I finished the train of though, and only then did I go back and add a few of the finest metaphors I've penned in months. I'm ludicrisly proud of this piece.
He's prone to grand and meaningless gestures.
The pressure builds up in him like a volcano, everything bottled and suppressed until he can barely think from the rage and madness boiling within him. Just when it reaches its zenith--when he thinks that the lava's going to rush forth and pave over his sad little life and his sad little mistakes--he spews forth a thin stream of ash and heat and bile that the wind sweeps away.
The analogy occurred to him in Amsterdam, heartsick and wondering how he could have forgotten that pot only makes him tired and that he's the worst kind of melancholy drunk. It still feels apt, but not as elegant as he believed it to be at that moment.
After he'd given up on trying to forget, he crawled home and curled up into his shell of a life. All the pressure had abandoned him, pissed away like his savings in a place he'd only thought he'd wanted to be. It left a void where it used to be, an absence of love and anger.
But it didn't stay empty for long. Every glance to Reception was a drop of both into the empty bucket of his soul. It gradually built, like Chinese water torture, into a straining levy, and for the first time he sees that he really has two choices here.
He can run away to the beach and the sun, finding a new start. He knows, though, as he looks into the bleak mirror of disillusionment, that even the ocean can't fill the vacuum of his heart.
Or he could...
He tries not to think about it much, lest his thoughts collapse the waveform, opening Schrödinger's Box to reveal that his last dream has died.
But, one day not terribly unlike any other day, he does more than think. He acts. Morose Toby Flenderson tells pretty Pam Beesly that he likes her, that he wants to be with her and be the reliability without the thoughtlessness, the companionship without the abandonment. Or, in short, everything she's never gotten from a man. Not exactly in those words, but that's how he'll remember it.
Pam, she stands there on the spot, and her gaze falls to the floor in a way that lets him know, more certainly than he's ever known anything, that it will never quite reach his the same way again.
He feels the steam and the ash and the bile rise in his throat, and behind them is the molten rumble of magma.
A/N II: A Schrute Buck to anyone who gets the title.