Their last day in Sydney together dawned clear but not especially warm—not that Jim or Pam saw the dawn, since they were nicely tucked away in Jim’s hostel room—and even after they finished their morning routine it remained jacket weather alongside clear skies.

For Jim, this meant only one thing: the Harbour Bridge climb. He hadn’t really been sure about, at least not that sure, until last night, actually, when the vision of the bridge from the boat had made him realize that the best view would, of course, have to be from, rather than of, the bridge.

He’d certainly thought about it before. It had been one of the elements of Sydney that the travel agent had hyped to him when he was first buying the ticket to Australia, actually—not that he’d had to do much selling, since Jim had opened with “what’s the farthest I can get from Scranton for the money I can afford to spend” and gone from there. But it appeared to be an important part of the travel agent code that you had to talk up the area you were selling the trip to, even if you had a guaranteed sale on the line—or maybe this guy just really liked Sydney—and so Jim had heard a steady patter of information about the important and exciting landmarks of Sydney in between handing over credit card numbers and relevant dates.

He hadn’t really paid much attention, obviously, because he had been completely at sea when he came, but he remembered the Opera House and the Bridge—and because he remembered the Bridge, he remembered the Climb.

Pam, it turned out, had grabbed a brochure for that too, and they spent a little bit of time poring over it to figure out what they wanted to do. Jim had, to his surprise, a surplus of cash on hand, because he’d taken out money assuming he’d be desperately throwing himself at entertainments to forget Pam and, well, that had turned out not to be the case for some reason. Pam was a little uncertain about her head for heights, though, and when she mentioned it he felt obligated to admit that, while the climb seemed completely awesome in the abstract, he too was not entirely sure how he felt about the summit­-summit. They agreed that the halfway “Sampler” climb was more their speed: plus, it took half as long because it went half as far, which would leave them more time for bumming around the city together, which was their other priority for the day.

After the success of calling ahead to the Zoo, they decided to do the same here, and Jim arranged an early afternoon climb, thanking his lucky stars that it was not only the off-season but a day when the midday sun wouldn’t be too much of a bother.

They wandered their way over the city towards the bridge climb through the neighborhoods they’d come to know over the week together. It was nice, actually, to have developed a familiarity with a part of the city; it made it feel a little more like they were living life together, and a little less like it was all some sort of strange dream they had wandered into. They had places they liked, inside jokes they made every time they saw certain signs or businesses, and even a street they jokingly pretended that they needed to avoid “because it was cursed.”

It was exactly the way Jim had always expected things to be with Pam—except it was all in Australia, and they’d never see it again. On the other hand, of course, they did know Scranton pretty well, and he was looking forward to getting to this point with her there as well.

**

Pam snapped the last buckle in on her safety harness and looked over at Jim, who had already finished and was watching her with a look of open adoration on his face.

Had he always looked at her like that? She was beginning to think he might have, when she wasn’t looking; that like water to a fish, Jim’s love had been the medium she had wandered through for long enough that she had no word for it. Well, there was love, obviously, but she’d been using that all her life and she’d never felt the same way she did now about anyone else—nor did she think anyone who hadn’t had the massive investment of bringing her into the world had ever had her best interests at heart in the way that Jim did. And maybe not even them.

So she was beginning to think, no she did think, that she had made the best decision of her life by coming to Sydney, because seeing just how much Jim and she fit together (she was pretty sure a similar expression to his was on her face, even if it hadn’t been there as often in the past) was pure joy. And that was before she considered the fact that she was about to climb the Sydney Harbour Bridge and look down on the Opera House from above, a view she’d never even imagined seeing even if, under consideration, it had always been possible.

In that way, she supposed, the adventure she was on now was a metaphor for Jim: it had always been available to her, if she just looked up from her expected, normal, routine life and decided to make a grab for it.

Speaking of which, she grabbed Jim’s arm and pulled him down for a kiss before linking in to the larger group of climbers they were part of. They trooped up the outside of the bridge, harbor beneath them, downtown behind them, Opera House delicately placed on its promontory to their right.

It was a glorious sight, matched (if it was matched at all) only by the fact that she was directly behind Jim’s ass as they climbed.