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Author's Chapter Notes:
Jim gets a new room in a new unit, and Pam reflects.

Two floors down, two turns left, and they were in the ward that would house Jim for the rest of his time in Geisinger—assuming all went well. Pam took note of the new room number, obtained a pass for the floor with the room number noted in a nurse’s flowing scrawl (oh dear, she was going to have to learn a new set of names…this one was Julia), and set to putting back up Jim’s various decorations. Jim, meanwhile, had been issued with a few new medications (mostly to inhibit swelling and pain around his broken limbs, but also for blood flow and heartrate) and told to take them.

 

Unfortunately, Jim was apparently comically bad at taking pills. Pam wasn’t sure how she hadn’t noticed this before—surely he must have taken something at work sometime? An ibuprofen, a Claritin, an accidentally swallowed oversize jujube?—but watching Jim take gulp after gulp of water from his entertainingly large Geisinger-branded plastic cup was a true delight. He had to take one pill at a time, and his eyes would bulge and his face contort and about half the time he wouldn’t even get the pill down, so he’d have to try again. And even when he did get it down, but especially when he didn’t, there was a lot of coughing. The first couple of times Pam was super-concerned, coming over and checking on him because coughing with broken ribs was obviously no fun at all. When he assured her this was normal for him, and that while no, coughing with broken ribs hadn’t suddenly become the leisure activity of the extremely wealthy and very bored, he could totally stand it just fine, she was licensed to express her amusement instead of her worry. This took the form, of course, of an even more exaggerated set of concerns about his wellbeing. Was there anything she could do for him? Was he sure he didn’t have black lung? She’d heard on the radio that working with paper could be just as bad as working in a coal mine if you had sensitive lungs. Or had he been secretly smoking for years behind her back? She would be very disappointed if so. You know, Jim, if Creed is trying to peer pressure you, you just say no. He probably won’t remember what the question was ten minutes later anyway. Are you sure it’s not some kind of emphysema or something? Cough once for yes, twice for no. What does coughing eight times mean, Jim? You’re sending me mixed signals here.

 

Of course, this mockery did not exactly help the patient’s ability to take the pills without laughing, but it did seem to raise his spirits, so Pam considered it a success. After all, Jim being Jim, laughter seemed likely to be, if not the best medicine, a pretty good one. She briefly considered whether Dwight would have allowed laughter to be covered in their healthplan, before deciding that he definitely would not. Angela wouldn’t have approved, after all.

 

The mockery was cut short by a call from Larissa, who wanted to know what they wanted for lunch. She was coming by soon, having tidied their parents’ house and taken out the trash and variously prepared it for their re-occupancy more quickly than she’d expected. Pam took the opportunity to update her on Jim’s status, and the new room, and then handed him her phone (which he took with an odd look) to talk to his sister. Apparently the Halpert clan were not big phone-talkers; Jim and Larissa exchanged what sounded to her like the Neanderthal-grunt version of her conversations with her sister Penny, and then Jim was handing her back the phone.

 

She was pleased to discover that she and Jim had nearly identical orders (calzones from Cugino’s, if Larissa was willing to pick them up; from the cafeteria, if not), and after assuring Larissa that she would notify the nurses that she was coming up, she hung up the phone and just took a moment to look at Jim.

 

He was clearly doing better than he had been when she’d first arrived. Not that that was a surprise; it was a low bar to clear when he’d been unconscious and barely breathing before. But he looked like Jim. There was a sparkle in his eyes and a smile on his face. And she realized with a start that she had put those there. Not just now but always. That the Jim she was used to looked like this not necessarily because this was just who Jim was, but because of the observer effect: by the very act of looking at him, she could put a smile on his face and a jump in his step (not that there should be any jumping or even stepping until that leg healed). The Jim Halpert she thought she knew was not the same one everyone else knew, because when she knew him he was always, always reacting to her.

 

And the same was true of her, she thought. Before Jim, she had still been Pam—much as she suspected Jim hadn’t been conjured out of thin air when she met him, though at this point she wouldn’t have disbelieved it if Larissa had told her so—but she hadn’t gone to work with a smile on her face, or even woken up consistently when the alarm went off in the morning. She had loved weekends and dreaded weekdays, in fact, rather than the opposite, and she hadn’t treasured Dwight’s idiocies as perfect opportunities for pranks. She’d hated them because they made life worse. In short, just as much as she created a new Jim when she observed him, he did the same to her, and had for longer than she’d once known. But, she reflected, this wasn’t a false Pam that Jim produced—it was the realest her she’d ever been. Which gave her high hopes for the idea that this wasn’t a false Jim she knew; that this was just as real for him as it was for her.

 

“Whatchya thinking about, Beesly?”

 

She smiled down at the love of her life.

 

“Just you.”

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