The Office: Gold In These Hills Ahead
Title: Gold In These Hills Ahead
Author: scarletcaesura
Fandom: The Office (US)
Rating: PG
A/N: Written for
festschrift, the
scranton_times celebration ficathon. No real spoilers, takes place in some indefinite time post-S4. 1800 words.
i left the game to find you at the day's end
there's gold in these hills ahead
we both had a hand in it
you and me both, kid
{the new pornographers ~ failsafe}
Ryan Howard’s employment at Dunder Mifflin is terminated on a Wednesday morning. He’s been expecting it for a while. After you spend weeks and weeks worth of your evenings alternately crunching numbers, tinkering with the sales software, yelling at the sales software, crumpling and jumping up and down on top of the cardboard mockup of the sales software, and asking Hunter to run for pizza seven times in a single hour, you have to assume that things are not really going well for you.
As he is grimly packing his things into a cardboard box, his only solace is that he managed to take the Scranton branch down with him. The fire guy. The fired guy, he thinks, although the idea of a cheesy pita being some kind of harbinger of doom is, frankly, kind of insane.
Although he’s feeling kind of insane at the moment.
Hunter is standing at the doorway, arms crossed, watching him clean out his desk with the possessive authority of an administrative assistant who has outlasted two of his superiors.
"So, what are you gonna do now?" he asks.
Ryan looks up from a pile of silver and black office supplies and squints at Hunter’s face. "Are you wearing guyliner?"
Hunter shifts his position slightly, embarrassed. "It was Ian’s idea. He thinks changing our image up might help us get signed."
"Yeah, but at work?" Ryan shakes his head. "You know what, never mind. I hope that goes really well for you. I hope you end up in paparazzi photos making out with Miley Cyrus. I--" He stops abruptly, looks down at his bare desk, and is completely at a loss.
"I don’t know. I think I might go visit my parents."
Hunter, who has backed a short distance into the hallway, nods. "That sounds nice. Uh, hey, did you want any of the leftover pizza from the fridge?"
Ryan digs the heel of his hand into his forehead. "Yeah. Yeah, sure."
While Hunter is gone, Ryan goes through the filing cabinets and pulls everything useful he can think of, slipping the documents marked clearly with PROPRIETARY in red ink into his briefcase, and piling the rest into his box. His sad little cardboard box. Ryan would like to curl up inside of it and die, if that were physically possible. Instead, he carries it out to his car with both hands, like every other fired person in the history of the world.
The thought is not exactly comforting.
~
Ryan crashes in his parents’ guest room for a few weeks. Which is awkward, but even more awkward because they still live in Scranton. Ryan worries that his former colleagues are going to hunt his ass down, or that he’ll run into Kelly at the grocery store or something, so he spends a lot of time inside, surfing productivity blogs and playing Halo. His cardboard box and his briefcase are still in the car, Ryan keeps meaning to dig out the files and look them over, but hasn’t felt up to it yet. The documentary guys call for an exit interview, but Ryan’s never called them back.
His mom brings him soup and wonders why he doesn’t look up that nice girl he used to date, and his dad asks around the insurance firm for him, but Ryan hasn’t decided on anything yet. He goes out a lot at night, to a bar as far away from the old Scranton branch hangouts as possible, and thinks about what to do.
Sometimes he wonders, sitting in the dim smoky light, still wearing a tie even though there’s absolutely no reason for it anymore, whether any of the others are doing the same thing, at that very moment.
Probably not. He remembers they were all pretty happy when the branch almost closed the first time. Except for Michael, maybe, but Ryan figures that even he’s found another office to terrorize by now.
"God help them all," Ryan mutters, and takes a swig of beer.
~
One night, after he’s had enough to drink that he doesn’t remember how much he’s had to drink; Ryan gets nostalgic for the building, and drives unsteadily over to the old office park. The door is locked, but he goes and finds a security guy and tells him he used to work there, flashing his old security pass from corporate that he’s still carrying around in his wallet, and says that he’s thinks he forgot something in his desk. The guy, who must’ve been drunker than Ryan, lets him in.
The place is completely bare. The desks are stacked in a corner, the lights are off, and the carpet is cleaner than Ryan ever remembers it being. He flicks on the overhead light and the fluorescent glow on the carpet is eerie, and makes the space look even emptier.
He should feel something, he supposes. Guilt, maybe. Nostalgia.
Instead, he rushes over to the kitchen and throws up in the sink.
When that’s done with, he wipes his mouth on his tie, winces, takes off his tie and rinses it out in the sink, then staggers back out into the main area and lies down on the floor, clutching his tie in his right hand. He stares up at the fluorescent lights, realizing that he’s ended up on the part of the floor where his desk used to be. Figures, he thinks, and passes out.
~
"Ryan. Hey. Wake up."
Ryan wakes up slowly, to a female voice, and what feels like something poking him in the side. The voice continues: "Come on, I’ve gone to nine a.m. staff meetings drunker than you must have been last night."
Ryan opens his eyes briefly, then quickly squints them shut again against the light. "Jesus Christ."
"Sorry, no."
The voice starts to sound vaguely familiar, and Ryan rolls over on his side and wills himself to open his eyes again. It turns out that the thing poking him in the side was the point of a high-heeled shoe, and the shoe is attached to...
"Jan?"
"Good morning, sunshine." She smiles down at him.
Ryan freezes, then groans, covering his face with his hand. "I’m having a nightmare right now, aren’t I?"
He struggles to sit up, and she takes a couple steps back to watch, obviously amused. He notices she’s wearing jeans and a ratty white t-shirt, but she still somehow looks immaculately put together. Better than he looks right now, he figures.
"No, seriously," he continues, sliding across the floor so that he’s propping himself up against Michael’s outer office wall. "This is a nightmare, I’m in purgatory, and you’re here to rip out my heart and weigh it on a scale."
She cocks her head at him, confused. "Ryan, I don’t--"
"How’d you know I was here?"
"Security called the building manager, the building manager called Michael..."
Ryan freezes again. "Is he here?"
"No, no, he’s not here. I told him I’d take care of it."
Jan looks around for a second, then walks over to reception and pulls the chair out from behind the desk, wheeling it over to where Ryan is slumped. She sits down, and he looks up at her, wary, because if he’s being honest with himself, he’s always been a little scared of Jan.
"Why’d you tell him you’d take care of it?"
Jan crosses her legs. "Because I have a proposition for you."
"For me."
"Yes."
His voice goes a little faint. "Regarding what?"
Jan twists her hands together, hesitant. "I’ve heard you have some papers? Sales statistics, market share breakdowns, that sort of thing?" She continues over the sound of Ryan groaning. "Oh, come on, you didn’t think anyone was going to notice? At least when I stole files I had the sense to make photocopies at home and return them the next day."
"What?"
Jan smiles, a shade of pride dancing across her features. "You only have stats going back to when you started, right? I have them going back for ten years, Ryan." She pauses. "But that’s not the only thing you took, right?"
Ryan sighs, and his eyes drift shut again. "Maybe if I pinch myself, or throw myself out a window, but the windows don’t fucking open in this building…"
“Ryan!”
He opens his eyes and stares at her, and she looks a little scared. "The software. I didn’t steal it, it was my design, I adapted it specifically for the company." He stands up and brushes past her, and she wheels around in the chair to follow his nervous pacing. "It should have worked, Jan! I don’t know why it didn’t work. I tried everything, Jan. Everything."
"You have the software," she prompts him.
"Yeah, but what good does it do if it doesn’t work?"
"You don’t know that. You don’t know that. Put my stats together with your stats, I’m betting they tell a different story. The business is dying, Ryan, and you haven’t been in this long enough to know your own limits in a situation like that. All you can do is," she shrugs, "change what you’re selling. The software, Ryan."
Ryan stops walking, his hands on his hips, "You--where is this coming from? You’re, and please forgive me for saying this, but you’re, like, legitimately crazy. You’re dating Michael, and you got fired from my old job…"
"So did you," she points out, but doesn’t look particularly offended.
"And it took months to get the smoke out of that office, can I tell you?" He’s feeling a little hysterical at this point, and he only now realizes that he’s still gripping his tie, pulling it back and forth through his hands.
Jan stands up, and walks over to him. He briefly considers running away, but stands still as she puts her hands on his shoulders and looks him straight in the eyes. "Ryan. Whatever you might think of me, crazy is not the same thing as stupid."
He looks down, but she gently tilts his chin back up. "Also, you’re a prick, but I think we can work something out here."
She smoothes down the lapels of his jacket and takes a step back. "Let me buy you breakfast, okay?"
Ryan hangs his head, completely drained. "I don’t know what I’m doing," he says, the only thing he knows for sure right now.
Jan walks to the door, looking back at him as he follows. "I know," she says. "But I have a little experience with that." She holds open the door for him. "I’m thinking a fifty-fifty profit split?"
Ryan narrows his eyes at her as they walk out. "Sixty-forty."
Jan chuckles, then reaches over and ruffles his hair. "Don’t push it, whiz kid."