It was like he couldn’t breathe.

For some reason, he found that funny. Once he’d have said that was hyperbole, but now he knew better. They’d all had to go through the orientation sessions before they boarded the DM Scranton, those endless VR sessions during which they’d had to train for and then endure a host of potential deep space disasters, decompression chief among them. That meant they’d all felt the neurologically-induced sensation of near-asphyxiation (rumor had it that Corporate had experimented with inducing actual asphyxiation, but that negative focus-group testing and a quick consultation with the lawyers about the applicability of various war-crimes resolutions to corporate actors had resulted in a hurried return to a less-than-total simulation). So he literally knew what it felt like to not be able to breathe.

He also knew what it felt like to have his heart crushed in his chest. Not like this, no, but physiologically he was very familiar with it, both from the simulations (both “accidental intersection with an active gravity well” and “thrusters stuck on maximum” involved pulling ridiculously high Gs in the VR room) and from the actual takeoff sequence, where he’d been strapped into the pilot’s seat in the secondary command module and felt the immense power of the DM Scranton’s engines pile-drive him into the acceleration couch behind him (or, as the immense gravitic pull of their takeoff insisted to his lizard brain during the process, beneath him). Then he’d felt every organ, not just his heart, being seized by a massive hand and squelched inside him.

Hell, he even knew what it was like to have your stomach in literal knots, if the topographic physicists were right about what happened in the middle of warp jump. He’d flunked out of n-space topography in flight school (fortunately, only astrogators needed to pass it, and he’d known from day one that was not his path) so he couldn’t follow their logic, but according to the simplified reading he’d been doing (could you believe they actually published N-Space Warp Astrogation for Dummies?) the current thinking was that during a warp the ship and everyone in it began to resemble ancient art: a cross between a Picasso painting and an M. C. Escher etching with a dash of Jackson Pollock overlaid across them both. As a result, his stomach, liver, and every other relevant organ had somehow been knotted, turned inside out, and extraneous to his internal reality for the infinite instant of the warp.

Of course, thinking about ancient art just reminded him of her, so he was currently recreating that effect (in fact, all three of those effects) on a much more personal, psychological scale. Though if anyone had dared to tell him they were “all in his head,” they’d have received a very sharp punch in the face, first because he was not in the mood for that sort of stupid cliché and second because anyone who’d gone through Corporate’s VR training knew exactly how badly things that were all in your head could hurt.

But he had no such convenient target available to vent his frustration on, so instead he just sat there in the empty secondary command module (it was only actually occupied during takeoffs and other emergencies, when the chance of damage to the primary command module was considered sufficiently great to justify the power drain of activating the secondary) and wept.

This was a bad idea.

Not because it wasn’t healthy for him to manage his emotion this way (it was) but because the unoccupied, unpowered secondary command module did not have its gravitic generator turned on, and the DM Scranton’s acceleration was insufficient to generate a pseudogravity of its own. This, in simple terms, meant that the tears didn’t go anywhere because there was no gravity to draw them away. They just accumulated on his face until he was surrounded by a simple sphere of slightly saline water.

If anyone had been watching, they’d have found it beautiful. If they were a particularly artistic someone (don’t think of her, don’t think of her) they might even have found it a metaphor for his decision to hide out in the secondary command module, wallowing in his grief instead of dealing with it, just as he let the tears surround him rather than sucking them up with his suit vacuum or even bothering to wave or wipe them away. They might have concluded that he wanted to let the sorrow wash over him, wanted to indulge his emotions for a little bit where no one else (except of course this hypothetical observer) could notice.

They would, of course, have been right.

Because Lieutenant James Halpert of the DM Scranton was finally taking the advice the ship’s inbuilt psychological evaluation routine (and its interpreter, his friend Chief Human Officer Tobias Flenderson) had doled out during their first training cruise: he was letting his real emotions show instead of deflecting them with (too much) humor.

Unfortunately, he reflected, this was not the first time he’d done just that this evening. And for all that he was currently surrounded by an ever-expanding ball of tears, he had to consider this to be the more successful of his two attempts. Not that he hadn’t let his real feelings out to play earlier in the evening. It was just that it had gone basically as badly as he could imagine it having gone—leading, of course, to his presence in the middle of the aforesaid big wet ball.

He’d made the mistake of telling Comms (Communication Officer Pamela Beesly, his best friend) that he was in love with her. Or rather—since both the psych routine and Toby kept insisting that telling her was necessary for his mental health—the mistake of hoping that when he told her, she’d respond. But, then again, he’d had awful timing, hadn’t he? Here they were, on a colony ship destined for the stars, stuck with each other as coworkers for an unnaturally extended lifespan while they tended the thousands of cryofrozen colonists in the Colony Preservation Tank (generally, and more informally, known as the Warehouse)—including her own fiancé, Specialist Second Class Roy Anderson (though what was so special about him, except for his special ability to make Pam cry, Jim had never been able to tell in all their interactions before the DM Scranton’s takeoff)—and he had taken the first opportunity he’d had when he’d gotten her alone to tell her how he felt, potentially ruining who knew how many hundred years of being forced to interact with each other professionally.

But he’d had to. The date of the first Colonist Resurrection Day was coming up, and Roy Anderson had told him (and Captain Scott, and Comms, and half the Warehouse) on the drunken Camaraderie Event they’d had a month before takeoff that he planned to marry Pam then, “so that she couldn’t back out when they got to wherever they were going.”

Damn the flight planners for building in the Resurrection Days anyway. Apparently some earlier colony ships had shown degradation in either the cryofrozen bodies of the colonists or the technology designed to wake them up over extended flight periods, especially when those periods included a warp, and so the decree had come out that all ships should periodically wake up their colonists for a day at a time in order to confirm the functionality of both plastic and flesh. And of course Roy had been scheduled for the first available date after that little declaration of his at the Camaraderie Event.

So Jim had started the journey knowing he was on a clock, and the feeling had only increased as the days ticked away and Captain Scott’s…idiosyncratic approach towards crew shift scheduling had stopped him from finding a moment alone with Comms until now, only a few weeks before the date Jim had first idly and then increasingly nervously circled on his virtual calendar. It was good that no one but him and the ship’s psych routine could access the interface through which he marked that date, because otherwise he’d never have heard the last of it from anyone, least of all his fellow lieutenant Dwight K. Schrute.

Dwight was a pain in Jim’s ass, not least because (as a graduate of flight engineer school rather than pilot school) he was Captain Scott’s designated number two in the primary command module while Jim was the captain’s backup in the secondary. This lead Dwight to refer to himself as the Assistant Captain, which bothered Jim more than he cared to admit. Not that he thought of spacefaring as a career—God no, it was just a way to get off Earth—but Dwight was Assistant to the Captain and he had vowed never to let him forget it.

And Comms—Beesly, as he called her, Pam as Captain Scott insisted on referring to her, Comms to the rest of them by ancient tradition in the same way Toby was Doc, Chief Astrogator Angela Martin was Stars, Head Engineer Creed Bratton was Guns (even though the ship didn’t have any) and Chief Cryogenic Coordinator Kelly Kapoor was Ice—had been his right-hand woman in helping keep Dwight in his place. And she was enchanting, to him at least, as she did it. The way her eyes lit up as she figured out a way to localize a minor gravitic fault to just Dwight’s station so that his screen started sliding up, or convincing him that Guns had to authorize any and all uses of electricity on the ship with a detailed form (which itself had to be filled out on a device using electricity) was sufficiently advanced technology to be magic. And he was caught in her spell.

But, as he’d found out tonight, she was apparently not caught in his.

No, rather she was, apparently, quite happy to marry a man who was literally not going to be present for the next several decades of her life—a man who had had all of their living, breathing, sentient lives together before this voyage to actually set a date and get it done, but hadn’t bothered until just before he was conveniently in cold storage in the Warehouse, unavailable to help with the wedding at all until he was magically revived and whisked to the front of the onboard chapel—a man who could spend a wedding night with her but would then be returning to the Warehouse for as long as the shipboard computers decided was necessary to keep his body preserved for the inevitable arrival at their destination—a man who would be just as warm and emotionally available down in the freezing darkness of the Warehouse as he had been before.

Most importantly, though, a man who wasn’t him.

Jim desperately wished that there were somewhere else he could go, somewhere he could be besides here in the secondary command module crying his eyes out. He’d been on the comm (ironically—good thing Beesly had been distracted by wedding planning [and that was the only time he’d call that a good thing] and hadn’t noticed his quick call) to Admiral Levinson-Gould, but apparently the only way he could transfer ships was by waiting for the end of this run and then taking the DM Stamford back to Earth. He’d put in for the transfer, of course, because he needed to get out, but it wasn’t soon enough. Nothing could be soon enough now that he’d told her. The one thing the Admiral had suggested was that, if he was really looking for an increase in responsibility (the reason he’d given for requesting a transfer: admitting his feelings for Comms to the admiral was definitely a bad idea even if he did suspect that she was sleeping with Captain Scott whenever the opportunity presented itself) she could give him authority to run command simulations in the secondary module at need, in preparation for his impending transfer. That was why his pass to the module was currently active—which had turned from a minor benefit to a major boon once Beesly had turned him down.

What had he expected from her anyway? He knew her well enough to know she didn’t act on impulse. In fact, that was her greatest asset as communications officer: she might get a little quiet when intimidated, but she didn’t act on impulse. She didn’t rattle—but she also didn’t make the kinds of intuitive leaps that he had found to be his greatest asset in pilot school. So of course she’d told him she couldn’t be with him. She wouldn’t do that to Roy, but she also simply wasn’t that kind of person. If he’d wanted her, really wanted her—as he did, but as he certainly hadn’t acted like he did—he’d have had to lay the groundwork, get her thinking about it, let her have the time to come to her own conclusions.

And sure, he’d thought he was laying the groundwork, but obviously she disagreed. And here, in the sudden clarity of his giant, slightly rotating ball of tears, he could see her point. He’d laid, maybe, the groundwork for the groundwork. He loved her; she clearly valued him. Even as she’d rejected him she’d told him that she valued their friendship, that he couldn’t know what he meant to her. Sure, a large part of him wanted to tell her to stick those words in the nearest airlock and blast them out into space, but he couldn’t afford to ignore them. She did value him. Just not the same way he valued her. And that wasn’t her fault. It wasn’t even his. It was just a fact, and one that he should have expected. His desires weren’t hers, his way of thinking wasn’t hers, and by trying to force her to think and want the way he did he’d only succeeded in pushing her away.

And that was the one thing he couldn’t afford to do. In space, once you pushed someone away you kept drifting further and further apart. He wasn’t sure he could stand it if they did that.

Communications Officer Pamela Beesly sat crying in her chair in the primary command module, and she didn’t know why.

Oh, she knew a lot of potential reasons why; it was just that there were so many that she could hardly choose one contributing factor.

She wept because Lieutenant Halpert—Jim—had just confessed his love for her.

She wept because, while she hadn’t told him she loved him too, she hadn’t actually told him she didn’t—and whether telling him “I can’t” made her a complete failure of a communications officer, because it didn’t actually address the real issue, or a massive success because it managed to skirt that issue while sounding completely definitive, she wasn’t sure—and she felt an incredible wave of guilt wash over her when she thought of her fiancé deep in the freeze of the Warehouse.

She wept because Jim had looked so…so crumpled, like a landing strut after a hard impact on an asteroid or the silver wrapping around their emergency rations on that one drill where they’d had to improvise shelter during the VR training, and she and Jim had convinced Dwight—Lieutenant Schrute—that crumpling that particular plastic made it structurally sound.

Then she wept because thinking about pranking Dwight with Jim was exactly what she couldn’t afford to do right now.

And she wept because she was alone, in space. Oh, to be sure, there were a dozen active staff and the innumerable thousands in the Warehouse, but without Jim she felt as alone as if she’d been stranded all by herself in an escape pod (another VR simulation they’d had to endure, and by far her least favorite). She was far from everyone and anything she loved. Yes, Roy was in the deep freeze, but all that meant was his brain was ticking along at about a neuron-fire a minute—and it was awful of her to wonder how much faster it really went when it was warm, wasn’t it?—and Jim was…well, actually she didn’t know where Jim had gone after his confession and her mealy-mouthed rejection. But it wasn’t here.

She was still a good ship’s officer, of course. She wept over the vacuum attachment by her desk, designed to clear the area in the event of an emergency that produced “floaters” (items floating around in a zero- or low-G environment that interfered with emergency work) so she could operate her communications equipment, but equally up for recycling the water of her sadness. She briefly considered the irony of recycling tears—would they make others sad if they drank the water she had wept out?—but stopped when she found herself wondering what Jim would make of the thought. He’d probably tell her to paint the image in the VR suite, titling it something like “Infectious Emotions,” and to send him the image file once she did.

He was sweet like that.

And she’d just broken his heart.

To be fair to herself, she thought, she hadn’t known he was going to say anything. She’d been sure, in fact, that he wouldn’t—that if he’d been going to say something it would have been before they took off, because he was generally considerate of things like that—and so she’d rested assured that she had until their arrival at their destination to figure out how she felt about him. Because it wasn’t like Roy was going to be along on the cruise, so she didn’t really need to disentangle her feelings about him from her feelings about Jim until they were both awake at the same time.

And she’d been so sure of that, she realized, so confident that she had all the time in the world to think things through, that she hadn’t actually let herself think two extremely important thoughts until this very moment.

One was that she was, actually, genuinely interested in Jim Halpert. She’d been avoiding the reality of that so long that apparently the idea that she could just “decide between” him and Roy had burrowed itself into her consciousness without her realizing it. When had she started thinking of the end of this journey as a decision point? And when would she have realized that she was thinking that way if Jim hadn’t just given her the push that had sent her, reeling, to the command module?

The other was that she had been fooling herself: she didn’t have until the end of the voyage, because Roy was going to be woken up in just a few days. And while she’d had all the time in the world to discount his drunken promise to marry her when he was next awake, he hadn’t. He’d been in cold storage down in the Warehouse. To him, he’d made that promise yesterday, or the day before.

And she wasn’t entirely sure if she wanted him to do it.

Oh, she’d enjoyed planning the wedding, sure enough. Having something to focus on beyond the absurdity of “checking for messages” when they were at speeds at which light itself struggled to keep up with their motion had been a godsend. Her job was only real when they were within, say, half a day of their departure or destination, and it had been a joy to have something to do during the day at her desk. But when she’d been planning, had she really been thinking about having the wedding this week? Having Roy awake, saying her vows to him, having a wedding night, then sending him back into the Warehouse a married man?

She knew the answer was no. She’d been thinking of the wedding planning as something to distract her on the voyage, something with an eventual payout, sure, but not something that was urgent, present, now.

But Jim, she realized, had been.

He must have been counting down the days until now, when he couldn’t help but say something.

But what was she going to do? She did love Roy, for all that Jim made her days bearable. She was going to marry Roy. She couldn’t be with Jim, and she’d told him as much. And yet…how could she go on without Jim, either?

This was an emergency, she decided. And since it was an emergency, it called for three things.

One was a tablet of chocolate, which she’d stashed underneath a non-functional button on her desk back during pre-flight checks. Non-extruded, non-vat-based, natural chocolate was rare and valuable, but if there was ever a time that called for it, it was now.

Two was relaxation. As communications officer, she was the junior officer in the command module and as such she had the worst, least comfortable chair (why this should be true when the ship was built from scratch for this mission, she couldn’t quite make out, but it was true, nonetheless). She was going to sit in someone else’s seat, dammit, just this once, because she needed it.

Why she chose the crash couch by the entry hatch, Jim’s duty station when he wasn’t in position in the secondary module, she refused to speculate.

Three was the message her mother had sent her right before takeoff, with the ominous label “Listen to ONLY in case of emergency.” She would have worried it was something somber—a will, perhaps, or some dire family secret—if underneath that there hadn’t been the reassuring message “Don’t Panic! Happy Thoughts Only!” She had no idea what the message might be, but she trusted her mom, and while this might not be the worst emergency on this voyage, it was probably the only one where she’d have the leisure to listen to whatever her mom had recorded. That was justification enough.

She popped the chocolate and reclined into the couch (it was naturally molded to Jim’s body shape, which she had expected to find slightly awkward, but it seemed to envelop her like a warm embrace). Snuggling into the soft material and strapping herself in by instinct, she triggered the beginning of her mom’s message as she chewed.

“Hi honey!” It was all she could do not to answer back. But her mom was back on Earth, not on the DM Scranton. “I love you.” And I love you, mom, she thought. I wish you were just three hours away like you used to be on Earth, instead of three warp jumps. “And now, young lady, it’s time for your pep talk.”

How like her mom to know that if she were in a real emergency, the thing she’d need most would be a pep talk. Pam had never really struggled as a child except with confidence, but she struggled with that on a daily basis. She wouldn’t have become an officer on a colony ship without stellar test scores and aptitude markers—for all that Roy had grumbled that “the tests are biased” when he was relegated to cargo, she was proud of her own results—but she didn’t always act like it. In fact, the first time she’d really come out of her shell had been when she’d insisted on taking the crew position they’d offered her, even when Roy had suggested that “you’ll miss me too much” and “we should just sleep our way there together.” So in any emergency—even this one—she needed a confidence boost more than anything. She breathed a silent thanks to her mother and settled in to hear the talk.

Her mother’s voice went over the usual elements of a mother-daughter pep talk from her youth: going over all the things she’d overcome to get where she was today, reminding her that she loved her and believed in her, reinforcing that she wouldn’t be where she was now if she wasn’t capable (“even if Captain Scott’s position makes it seem like that can’t be true, I’m sure it’s true of you at least”), emphasizing that they’d gone through all their testing and training for precisely whatever situation this was (not exactly, Mom, Pam thought. They didn’t put heartbreak in the VR sessions). But it was the end of her mother’s message that really made her sit up and take notice.

“And Pam? Remember that you’re not alone. No, I don’t mean me—I wish I could be with you, honey, I really do, but these old bones don’t relocate as easily as they used to—but I do have a deputy on that ship with you.” As her mother paused, Pam smiled weepily, thinking about all the time her mother had spent with Roy as Pam and Roy grew up together, started dating, planned their emigration. She’d been like a second mother to Roy, and he’d been the son she’d never had but always wanted (“a matched set,” she’d always told Pam). They’d spent even more time together as Pam had been drawn away into officer training, with her mother sometimes laughing to Pam that it almost felt like Roy was her child and Pam the one marrying into the family, for all he was over at her house so often. This was the reminder she needed that she and Roy were meant to be—that he was a part of her, a part of her family, her mother’s designated representative from afar.

That’s why it was such a surprise to hear what her mother actually had to say. “Remember that you can always count on Lieutenant Halpert for whatever you need.”

The bottom dropped out of her stomach—unusual, as the ship had continued on its merry way without a hitch, and she was strapped into the crash couch anyway—and she stared at the console as it continued to play her mother’s message. In her surprise she’d missed a few seconds, so she rewound and listened to it again with startled ears.

“I can’t remember the last time you messaged me about training without some anecdote about Jim—usually some prank you played on that other lieutenant, Schute or Toot or whatever his name is. When I visited your training I had a chance to see you two working together, and I want you to remember this: a prank is just a plan with a funny purpose. That man knows how to make a plan, and you two know how to work together to make it happen. If you have any trouble—and since you’ve opened this message I’m assuming you either have, or you’ve reached your destination, in which case  I want to be the first to say congratulations! Call your mother!—you’re going to need all that practice to get you out of whatever trouble it is. Oh, I daresay you thought you were goofing off from training when you pulled those pranks, but I don’t think even Captain Scott would have let you keep doing them if they didn’t serve a higher purpose. You can count on Lieutenant Halpert. I do; I’m counting on him to keep you safe. And above all else remember I love you, and I’m proud of you.”

Pam sat back in the crash couch, suddenly extremely aware of exactly whose couch it was, and goggled. “You can count on Lieutenant Halpert?” What the hell, Mom? Where was the reassuring message about Roy that she’d been listening for?

What was she supposed to do now?  

Eventually, of course, Jim cleaned up the tears. He didn’t really want to—a small part of him wanted to leave them as a ball in the middle of the secondary command module, a little monument to his hopelessness—but he was too conscientious (for all he laughed his way through the job, he did take the important things seriously—like how any acceleration at all would spread that water all over every surface in the module and cause electric shorts across the board). Instead he carefully sucked up every tear with a leftover coffee bulb that was lying around (he was conscientious, not neat) and made his way back to his bunk to cry some more. At least the material of the bunk was absorbent, so no one had to see the tears he kept crying.

He wanted nothing more than to be somewhere else. Do something else. Exist otherwise than he currently did. Because since his transfer didn’t go through until their arrival at their destination, and he was authorized to spend some time but not all the time in the secondary module training, he was going to have to face her.

When he woke up, he came to a realization he’d been trying to put off for some time now, but that had just come into stark reality as the fact of her rejection sank in. He was going to have to be there for the wedding. Oh, he was not, not, NOT going to be in the little multipurpose room that doubled as a chapel for it, he’d made sure he was the duty officer on watch so he could be in the command module instead—but as duty officer it would be his duty to be watching all the video feeds from across the ship, emphatically including the one with all the people on it: the one that would be focused on the room while she glided forward to meet her future. Her pudgy, icy future that was going right back into the Warehouse and wouldn’t actually be there for her until they arrived at the destination. 

He briefly considered whether there was any way to sabotage Roy’s freeze or his thawing or something like that, but he didn’t try to think about it too hard because he really wasn’t that kind of person. He didn’t like Roy at all, of course, but he wasn’t a murderer—and even if he had been, he couldn’t hurt Pam like that. He wanted her nowhere near Roy (the distance between Warehouse and command was already too close) but he didn’t want her unhappy. In fact, if marrying Roy was what would make her happy, as she’d all too clearly implied to him that night, then that was what was going to happen. He’d make sure of it. Her happiness came first.

And after all, it was his duty. His shitty, awful duty, but his duty nonetheless. She’d been hurt when he’d volunteered to be duty officer on her wedding day, shocked he wasn’t going to be in the chapel, but now he realized what he’d actually done. He’d made it literally his job to make sure she got married: the duty officer’s responsibility was to make sure that the day’s planned activities went off without a hitch. And it was going to hurt him immensely, but he could do that for her. He’d make sure she had the best damn wedding she could, because she deserved it.

With that thought in mind, he swung out of his bunk, not even bothering to straighten his uniform, and marched up towards primary command. He still had a few days until her wedding, sure, but there were security subroutines he wanted to implement that had been brewing in his head for days now. Sure, he’d intended them as part of a giant prank on Dwight: his being able to partition otherwise unpartitionable space in the rooms of the ship would drive Lieutenant Schrute crazy. But now they had a higher purpose. He was going to give Pam a bride’s room—and, grudgingly, Roy a groom’s room—and he was going to make sure it was decorated exactly as she’d like it. She’d shown him (with a devastating grin that had fed his heart for weeks afterwards) how to reprogram the bots to spread themselves out on the walls like whitework embroidery, different designs in the same color. He was going to make her room look like a freaking museum of the decorative arts. And Roy’s…Roy’s would be the same. Because he couldn’t do less than his best for her, and Roy was hers. Even if he didn’t want him to be, he was, and that meant he couldn’t actually do less than his best.

Fortunately, it was early enough that he was basically alone in primary command, with only one other officer on duty.

Unfortunately that officer was Ice, Chief Cryogenics Officer Kelly Kapoor.

Doubly unfortunately, she was spending her duty time making plans for Roy Anderson’s thawing for Resurrection Day.

Triply unfortunately, she wanted to talk about it.

And when Kelly Kapoor wanted to talk about something, it got talked about. The cryogenicist on a colony ship was always called Ice, but Jim reflected that in Kelly’s case that name took on an ironic double meaning. Kelly was the absolute opposite of icy, or frosty, or the colloquial meaning of any of those terms. She was an absolute and total chatterbox and gossip queen, and she would talk to anyone and everyone about…well, actually not about anything, but about whatever it was that interested her at any given time.

Jim actually quite liked her. He’d set her up fairly recently with Ensign Ryan Howard, on his first colony flight run, because she’d seemed interested in him (in Kelly’s case, “seeming interested” meant telling Jim repeatedly every time the three of them were on duty together, in a voice designed to carry at least as far as Ryan if not to Betelgeuse, that she was interested in Ryan). More to the point, space was a damn lonely place, and while he treasured the moments he got to spend with Pam, he couldn’t in good conscience (or in the reality of shipboard assignments, sleeping schedules, and duty rosters) spend every waking moment with her. It was much better to spend an hour listening to Kelly talk about celebrities who were allegedly traveling on colony ships under assumed names (and wouldn’t it be amazing Jim if one of them was on our flight? Can you imagine me, defrosting Angelina Jolie? Only it wouldn’t be Angelina Jolie of course, she’d be going by something like Andy Smith or some other common name, but it would still be her, you know? Or would it, Jim? Do you think that Angelina Jolie’s Angelinaness is tied up in being Angelina Jolie? I really hope not, because when Ryan and I get married I am totally becoming Kelly Kapoor Howard and I don’t want that to change me, you know? Like, a name is just a name, but at the same time I can’t really see her being anything but an Angelina, you know? It would just be so strange if she had some like really normal name or something, but still, it would be so cool just to have the chance to meet her and to be a part of her journey you know? And so on) than to be alone with the darkness of space. Or with Dwight Schrute, or Captain Michael Scott, or honestly pretty much anyone else on the DM Scranton besides Pam.

Comms. He needed to start thinking about her as Comms, just like everyone else did. Because he was not going to be able to get through the next several days if he let himself think of her as Pam.

Thinking about Pam—Comms—had been a tactical error, though, because it had brought him to a halt right as he was about to try to steer the conversation away from the revivification of Roy Anderson. But he’d missed his chance. Now Kelly’s warm, non-Ice-like voice was nattering on about how she was really only supposed to wake him up the day after tomorrow, but wouldn’t he want to be involved in the planning? She could always switch him and Madge, Madge wasn’t really interested in much of anything, she wouldn’t miss a couple days of alertness. But of course, how silly, if she switched them he wouldn’t actually be awake for the wedding, would he? And while she’d always thought it would be better if the groom were quiet and let the bride get her whole thing on without butting in and stealing the attention, it was probably a little much if he were actually an icicle, wasn’t it?

Jim was trying his best not to listen, because the very thought of Roy Anderson being anything other than an icicle was painful right now, but he had to nod at that. Pa—Comms deserved better than that. And he wasn’t going to actively encourage Ice to interfere with Roy’s thawing process. Because if she did revive him early, all that would happen would that Comms would be married early, and even if he’d just decided that he’d help that wedding in any way he could for her sake, he drew the line at moving it up. No way. No how. That was not gonna happen, not on his watch (and it was now, literally, his watch).

He crossed to his crash couch and strapped in, noticing idly that the belt was drawn much further in than he usually left it. Ice was now chattering away about something a little different, having moved on from the specifics of Roy’s defrosting via the idea of frosting a cake into the question of refreshments at the wedding, but since he didn’t intend to actually attend the ceremony or any of its associated events except by remote monitoring, he could get away with the occasional grunt and nod. Of course, you could usually do that with Kelly, but now even more so.

He slid the console over in front of the couch only to find someone else was still logged into the device.

To his inordinate and complete surprise, it was Comms.

His mind whirled. What was he supposed to do with this? Why was she logged into his station? When had she even done it? He checked the timestamps and realized she had logged in just a few minutes after they’d parted in the recreation commons. Just when he’d been sitting in secondary crying his eyes out.

How would things have gone if he had come up here instead? What if he’d walked up and found her sitting at his console (now the exceptionally short belt length made sense)? Would he have turned on his heel and walked back down to secondary, then recreated the same scene that happened in this reality? Would he have found some unexpected scrap of courage and asked her again, or told her off, or kissed her? Would they have been icily polite to each other, him asking for his console back, her backing away slowly and returning to her own station with its uncomfortable chair? Or would she have fled, back to the rec commons or her bunk or some other location? His mind flashed to the escape pod that they’d logged into and shared a meal while watching the last rays of a dying star explode above them on the first few days of the journey while floating together in zero-g, an event he’d made the mistake of calling their first date only to have her snap back that a date required some kind of pull between the two people and they’d been in zero-g. Maybe she would have run. Or maybe she would have stayed. But either way, he couldn’t see a good result of that. Maybe it was for the best that he’d gone to secondary instead while she’d been up here in primary. At least that way they hadn’t had to see each other.

And when had not seeing Pam become a good thing?

More immediately—what was he going to do with this console? The right thing to do, he knew, was to log out immediately and log back in as himself.

But the urge to see what she’d been doing in his seat at his station was almost unnervingly strong.

Was he really strong enough to do the right thing?

He pushed back from the console. He might not be strong enough right now to log her off. But he was definitely strong enough not to take a look.

He paced the command module while Kelly talked. What the hell had Pam been doing at his console?

It was driving him crazy.

Pam rolled over in her bunk. Shit, she thought.

It was twenty minutes past the beginning of her shift in command.

This wouldn’t usually be a problem. Captain Scott kept hours on the ship that could be generously described as “lax,” and she wasn’t scheduled to share this particular shift with either Lieutenant Schrute or Stars—Chief Astrogator Angela Martin—the only two crew members who seemed incapable of following the captain’s example and would still scold her if she was even a minute late. Instead, if she remembered correctly, she had Ice—Kelly—who just wanted to talk  her ear off, Junior Astrogator Kevin Malone, who probably wasn’t going to roll in himself until a hour or so after the eight-hour shift began (especially since, in their current location between warp jumps, there wasn’t really much astrogation to do anyway), and Senior Specialist Stanley Hudson, who was almost certainly present on time, but who would equally definitely be playing Asteroids on his console for the entire length of the shift. Pam was pretty sure Stanley held all ten of the top ten places on the highly informal crew hall of fame for the game, and suspected that by now he could play the game with his eyelids closed. In fact, she was sure of it, because he was well-known for closing his eyes whenever the opportunity arose, and yet she’d never failed to see the scrolling lines of the game covering his screen—nor seen him miss a shot.

No, it wouldn’t normally be an issue that she was late. But neither would she normally have been late, because the duty officer on this watch shift was one Lieutenant James Halpert, and she would ordinarily have been racing to make the most of an entire eight-hour shift with Jim and without Schrute or Stars. They would have spent the entire time plotting some kind of prank and setting it up so that when Schrute arrived to take over the watch at the end of the eight hours he would find his console displaying only in ancient Aramaic (they had been shocked to see that the “comprehensive language package” of the shipboard AI had included so many dead tongues and scripts—and more shocked still when Dwight had sat down at the console and proceeded to go about his work as if nothing was wrong, only to look up ten minutes later and inform them smugly that “familiarity with all available text input options was a basic requirement for proper shipboard management”), or the tracking monitor for gesture control reporting his motions in mirror form (this had been much more successful: apparently Lieutenant Schrute was aggressively right-handed, despite diligent effort on his part to increase the dexterity of his left, and so he’d been reduced to standing facing backwards so that his right hand could still make the familiar gestures to interface with the ship), or something similar. In fact, she’d been looking forward to suggesting today that they should find a way to reroute Dwight’s personal armband to the central console and vice-versa, thus ensuring that his armband never stopped buzzing due to the sheer number of alerts the central AI would generate. But now that plan would never see the light of the ship’s artificial day because she was late. Or, more accurately, because she was not only late but still sitting in her bunk even after realizing she was late, because she really, really did not want to go into primary command and have to face Jim.

What was she supposed to do, or say? How were they going to get back to normal? It was all very well, she’d decided as she tossed and turned, for her mother to tell her Jim was there for her, or to appoint him her deputy on board, whatever that might mean, but she didn’t know what had happened and she didn’t have to face the man whose heart she’d literally seen break in front of her the night before. The man who made her heart race fast enough to pull an alert from her medical band just thinking about the possibility of having done anything else last night other than telling him no. No, her mother didn’t have to deal with Jim herself, so she couldn’t be counted on to give Pam good advice about him. She’d have to deal with it herself.

But oh how she didn’t want to. She wanted to do anything, pretty much literally anything, rather than walk into the primary command module right now and have to face Jim. Not because she was late, but because she’d have to say something after last night’s debacle. And what could she say? She’d already said “I can’t.” She couldn’t now turn around and say “I can,” could she? Not that she wanted to. No. Of course she wanted to marry Roy. She’d been planning to marry Roy since they came out of the children’s crèches together. They were a part of each other, a basic element in each others’ lives. Planning to marry Roy was like checking the oxygen level in her spacesuit, or ensuring the coordinates of tightbeam message when sending it, or anything else she did as instinctively as, well, breathing.

Not that she was doing a great job of that right now, she thought, as she sniffled in her bunk. In fact, it had been noticeably harder to breathe ever since Jim had told her he was in love with her. And even more so ever since she’d heard her mother’s message. If she didn’t know him better than that, she’d have accused Jim of tweaking the ship’s oxygen levels, because every breath felt like a gasp. But he wouldn’t do that to her. To Dwight, maybe, she thought and smiled for the first time she could remember since his confession. But not to her. He…but that was a dangerous road to go down. Nothing good would come out of thinking how Jim would do his best to make her life as easy as possible.

But now that she had thought of it, where was that instinct last night? Why had Jim, her protector, her friend, her confidante, the person she was closest to on the ship, the one her own mother thought of as her deputized representative to help her, suddenly chosen not to make her life easier, but harder? Why had he thrown her into such a tizzy with his eye contact and his deep, sincere voice and his “I’m in love with you”? Where had all of that come from?

But she couldn’t really let herself think about that question either, because the answer was all too plain. Most basically, most fundamentally, Jim had done this to her because he was her protector, her friend, her confidante, and the person she was closest to on the ship. Roy was on the ship, if only in the Warehouse, and Jim was still the person she was closest to. At a basic level, wasn’t that screwed up? And at the same time, she knew that if there had been any way Jim could have not told her…what he told her last night, he would have. How did she know? Because he’d been avoiding it assiduously ever since they took off—if not before.

There was that night they watched the supernova…and she shot him down.

There was the Camaraderie Event, when they’d gone out onto the observation platform and she’d teased him about dating the quartermaster, Katy Moore, who wasn’t coming with them on the journey but had (as they’d just discovered to her amusement and Jim’s obvious chagrin) been a minor intervid celebrity talking head before joining the fleet (and, as it turned out, covered Roy’s brief career as a junior roller derby champ). He’d turned aside from the swirling nebulas to reply to her jibe and their eyes had caught, and there had been a noticeable, lengthy pause (twenty-seven seconds, she thought, though who was counting? Besides her, that is) before she’d pulled away, declaring she was cold—absurd thought, given that the dome was temperature controlled and any failing of the heating system even in the dome would have indicated a disastrous and deadly leak in the sealant, given that the surrounding universe was at roughly 3 Kelvin. They’d never discussed it again.

There was the celebration of their graduation from “crew-in-waiting” to “active crew, assigned to ship,” when Captain Scott had insisted on giving those absurd, borderline offensive awards to everyone (just as he had when they’d first been formed as a crew-in-waiting, and when their proposed destination had been announced, and when the signups had begun for actual colonists. Each time he’d given her and Roy, who was there as her date, the Longest Engagement award, joking that with time dilation, they’d be engaged longer to an Earth-bound audience than they’d actually be alive in their own timeline. This time she’d gotten the Whitest Spacesuit award, because Comms didn’t go outside on the EVAs but monitored them from primary command, and she’d been so happy, not to mention drunk, she’d…she’d jumped up and kissed Jim, actually). She’d almost asked him that night, after Roy had gone home early and before Stars had come by to take her back to their living pod, whether, if she weren’t together with Roy, he’d have wanted to share a berth on the upcoming cruise, but (just like the later Camaraderie Event) she’d lost her nerve and let Angela walk her home instead. It had never come up later.

Every time, he’d let her off the hook. So if he wasn’t letting her off the hook this time—if he’d actually felt compelled to say something to her, and not even to back down after she’d insisted he must be mis-speaking or misinterpreting—he had to be at the end of his rope.

Oh, God, what was that going to mean for them? How could their friendship survive? She didn’t know the answer to that, but she desperately needed that friendship. She couldn’t imagine the rest of this cruise—the rest of her life—without Jim Halpert. Not just without Jim; it wasn’t like he was going to disappear. In fact, he was probably up in primary command waiting for her right now. But without Jim’s friendship. Without his warmth, and his presence, and their connection. She couldn’t do it.

But she couldn’t not marry Roy, either. He was in cold storage right now in the Warehouse, so even if she wanted to do something with Jim (which she didn’t, did she?) she couldn’t do that to him now. There was no way. She wasn’t that kind of woman. He deserved better than that.

Not that it was going to happen anyway. She wanted to marry Roy. Right?

She didn’t have time for this. She was even later now than she’d been when she woke up, and for all she didn’t want to see and interact with Jim right now—didn’t know how to see and interact with Jim right now—she still had duties she had to do. She began her morning routine (thank God for waterless, airless showers) and used her armband to log into her central communications console.

Only to be locked out.

The flashing yellow sign for “User Already Logged In On Bridge” popped up on her armband, covering the interface. It was a basic security measure against infiltration, mutiny, or piracy (all of which were laughable in deep space, she thought, but all of which Dwight K. Schrute had solemnly assured her he had engaged the proper precautions against, she now remembered): the bad guys wouldn’t be able to use a single crewmembers’ credentials to run the whole primary command module (also known, in a bit of outdated shipboard terminology from when ships meant water, as the bridge). So if a crewmember was logged into one bridge terminal or console, they couldn’t log into another (except for the central console, which all active primary command personnel were logged into simultaneously). And apparently, impossibly, she was logged into somewhere besides her own console.

Oh shit. Last night.

Jim’s.

How was it possible that she was still logged into Jim’s console, forty minutes after the start of their shift?

And what might he have read—or listened to—in that time?

She was three rungs up the central ladder that led between the berths and primary command before she had another conscious thought: would that really be so bad?

She didn’t pursue that thought any further, but pulled herself up into primary as fast as she could.

Where was she? Not that he was all that eager to deal with the awkwardness he knew was coming, but it was unlike P…Comms to be late. He and Kelly had been there early (Ice, given the nearness of the first Resurrection Day, was pulling extra shifts), Stanley had come in precisely on time as usual, and Kevin had strolled in a good ten minutes late humming a dirty song and then spent another twenty quizzing Jim about what he thought about the latest roller derby stats from Alpha Centauri. Kevin was currently leading their fantasy league, as he always did, but Jim’s team had made a strong push last year, so they’d made a friendly wager on the outcome of the season and Kevin took every chance to rub in his lead. Eventually he apparently felt he’d made his point, as he wandered over towards astrogation and started noisily doing something on the main screen (Jim strongly suspected it was fantasy-, not astrogation-related). That was ten minutes ago, and still no sign of Comms.

There was a soft thump by the far hatch. Jim looked up from very carefully not reading anything on his console to see Comms heave herself up from the ladder bay into primary command. She looked…

Well, it wasn’t his place to notice how she looked, was it? She looked damn gorgeous as always, of course, even though he was pretty sure she wouldn’t admit it, or at least not if he was the one who told her. Her hair, which was usually pulled back into a ponytail or a bun, was floating around her face, because she had clearly flung herself up into primary command without taking the time for her normal morning routine. It looked enchanting, like a nebula splayed out around the twin burning stars that were her eyes. She was wearing a regulation jumpsuit, just like everyone else on board, and yet somehow on her it looked like…not custom design, like Katy Moore had used to wear, but like the kind of personal clothing choice he remembered Pam wearing back before she was Comms, when they were still just a bunch of probationary potential crew members all getting to know each other and Captain Scott had insisted on numerous (probably too numerous—the rumor was that Admiral Levinson-Gould had called him on the carpet for cost overruns associated with training) social bonding events and exercises. He’d stored away all those glimpses of Pam-as-she-wished-to-be (or at least, he thought as he got to know her better and realized all the dreams she hadn’t had a chance to fulfill, Pam-as-she-saw-herself) as time went on and they started having to all dress alike—and so he still saw her as herself, not as Comms, not as a cog in the machine that was the DM Scranton, even as she wore generic regulation jumpsuits every day. And she looked beautiful.

Not the same kind of beautiful as Ice, who had also noticed Comms’s entrance and was billing and cooing over her (poor Comms! You look so tired! You must let me give you some of my anti-wrinkle cream, it’s designed for just this sort of thing. Not that I get wrinkles, mind you, but we are going to be on this cruise for years, and it never hurts to be ready. Do you think Ryan would like me if I got wrinkles? I think he would, because he’s so totally in love with me, you know, but at the same time like, girl, please, I ain’t gonna get no wrinkles and if he’s waiting around for me to get all old and wrinkly so he can have all the power in the relationship—because you know, it’s so unfair that when guys get wrinkles they just get handsomer and more distinguished, like that George Clooney you know—then he’s got another think coming because Kelly Kapoor wrinkles for no one) and who had somehow found a way to get permission to bring her custom-fitted uniform jumpsuits on board instead of the standard-issue (it’s an emergency! I look really good in them!) but a kind of beauty that welled out of her so easily and in such quantity that she didn’t even notice, like the ship didn’t notice the vacuum around it, or like he’d heard fish didn’t notice water (never having seen an actual fish, he couldn’t tell you).

But noticing how beautiful Comms was was not his job.

Making sure she did her job was. And if he was going to stop himself from mooning all over her, he had to do his job. Because the alternative, apparently, was falling to his knees and begging her to reconsider. He’d recently discovered (recently, as in in the five seconds or so since Pam had re-entered the primary command module) that, having confessed his love for her out loud to her for the first time, he no longer had a working filter. The habits he had worked so hard to establish over the past years of pining didn’t work. He didn’t have the ability to flash a smile at her and go about his day, clinging to the crumb of her answering smile as if it were real sustenance for his heart. If he smiled at her; if he joked with her; if he treated her as Pam and not as Comms, even for a moment, he was going to be either crying on the deck with a broken heart or pressing her up against a bulkhead kissing her the next. And the first was just distasteful, while the second she was clearly out of bounds. She’d said no. She’d said she couldn’t. He needed to move on.

“Comms, you are forty-one minutes late. I do hope you’re planning to get some work done this shift.”

He hated when he sounded like Dwight.

He hated more the way her eyes snapped to his with a shocked look, like he’d slapped her. He had to get out of there—he couldn’t even keep eye contact with her, because if he did that same terrible binary, crying or kissing, reared its head again. He couldn’t get off the bridge, because it was his duty station, his watch, his responsibility. But he could get as far away from her as possible—and he had the perfect tool to do it, because his console, which she was still logged into, was at one extreme end of primary command.

“Since you’re logged in on this console, you might as well work here.”

Her face, as he glanced at it involuntarily while turning away, was completely unreadable.

He strode to the central console and, with his back to her, began using the gesture interface to…well, he actually didn’t have a lot to do, since Ice was dealing with the Resurrection Day plans, Comms had authority over incoming and outgoing messages, Astrogation charted the course, and they were alone in deep space. But he tinkered with oxygen levels and power curves and generally made busywork for himself. Because for the first time since he’d come out of pilot school (and, if he was honest, the first time for a long time before that) Jim Halpert wanted something to do. He threw himself headlong into the work, tinkering with details, min-maxing outputs, stress-testing systems that had gone too long without review. And all the while deliberately not looking behind him. Not because he didn’t want to, but because the temptation was too great—because he knew that if he looked back, even for a moment, her eyes would be on him, and he’d have to say something.

And what could he say?

Hey was lame, and just committed him to a conversation without actually helping him navigate it at all. If anything, it was a dangerous opening, one that invited on the one hand the screaming invective that (while Pam was unlikely to actually indulge in it) he suspected he deserved for saying what he had said to an engaged woman, or on the other hand a soft hi that would do nothing but remind him of the day he’d spent not talking to her because of that stupid jinx, when he’d eventually had to synthesize Coke out of pure molecular substance (according to a template Comms had pulled out of the ether and nudged his way, of course) in order to fulfill his obligations. Another wasted opportunity, that day, and not what he needed to be thinking of now.

I’m in love with you was a proven loser. Used it last night, didn’t get a good response. Failed its stress test. Thank you, no.

Please love me back was just the same thing in more pathetic language. At least I’m in love with you was a strong statement of his own feelings, something he could be proud of and keep his head high about. He’d said it, he’d promised to move on, be the bigger man, not grovel and beg.

I’m sorry might cut it, but it wasn’t accurate. He wasn’t sorry. Well, he was sorry she hadn’t fallen into his arms last night, but “I’m sorry you did this” wasn’t really an apology, and he’d always hated fake apologies.

Normally this would be the place where he’d shy away from the next thought, but he was already in a desperate enough situation that he just let himself think it. He hated fake apologies because they reminded him of what Roy would say to Pam. The way he’d step on her feelings (like about that internship they’d offered where shipboard staff could become ship designers, which Comms had been about to jump at as an artistic opportunity before he’d discouraged her) and then not-really-apologize. “I’m sorry I’m being careful about saving credits for the wedding”—as if he was doing any wedding planning, or had even set a date at that point—or “I’m sorry, but we have to be realistic.” He wasn’t going to fake apologize to Pam. No way.

But that was a dangerous thought, because then he had to wonder: would his fake apology be like Roy’s? Was he too covering for something he shouldn’t have done, something he’d done to hurt Pam, by making it her fault?

Because, in all honesty, what did “I’m sorry you didn’t fall into my arms last night” mean?

The best version of it, the one he really hoped he meant, was just “I’m sorry you don’t feel the same way,” or maybe more accurately “I’m sorry circumstances are such that you can’t feel the same way about me that I feel about you.” Because he was pretty damn sure, or had been before last night, that she did feel the same way, but when he was being scrupulously fair, as he was trying his damnedest to be right now, he could see how it was harder for her to embrace that feeling than it was for him. Not that it was a picnic for him, but still.

But there were other versions of it lurking beneath that he was beginning to worry were if not dominant then more present than he would have preferred to admit. “I’m sorry you can’t be honest.” “I’m sorry you’re scared.” “I’m sorry you’re lying to yourself.” Those were unfair because they presupposed a mental state of Pam’s that he had no right to suppose, and because they cast legitimate difficulties on her part as moral failings. But beyond that loomed the worst one, the one that made him feel like a total asshole when he thought about it: “I’m sorry you didn’t overturn ten years in ten seconds.”

Because how long had he given her to decide? Ten seconds was maybe an overestimate, if you considered how absolutely shocked she’d looked when he’d confessed to being in love with her. And yes, he didn’t think she should have been so shocked, but she clearly was. And now he was giving her the silent treatment; literally giving her the cold shoulder since he’d positioned them so that he was standing with his back to her and refusing eye contact or conversation. He knew Pam. She wasn’t impulsive. She wasn’t rash. She took her time. And he’d insisted on an instant decision—not verbally, but through his actions.

Now, he could be fair to himself too: she hadn’t told him she needed time. Except she hadn’t said “I don’t.” She’d said “I can’t,” and that wasn’t the same thing. And she hadn’t paused—she’d answered him right out, and accused him of misinterpreting their friendship, which had hurt, a lot, and so it had been totally reasonable to leave, and even to avoid her now.

But he could still feel like a bit of an ass for trying to make it an instant decision.

Especially with her fiancé in the Warehouse. Because whatever else Pam was, she wasn’t an asshole. Even if she did love him, even if she did want to marry him instead of Roy, she wouldn’t do it while Roy was sleeping in the deep drowse of cryofreeze, waiting to wake up to a wedding.

What the hell had he been thinking?

He straightened his shoulders. It wouldn’t do to be too optimistic. She had turned him down. He had to assume she would continue to not love him, to not respond the way he’d thought she might, to insist he had it all wrong. But even so, he couldn’t be an ass to her. Well, not more than he had been already. He’d promised himself he’d make this wedding the best it damn well could be for her, but even before that he was going to have to be better than he’d been.

He couldn’t go back to the friendship they’d had. He wouldn’t. It just wasn’t possible without torturing himself beyond belief or collapsing in a heap at her feet. But if he was going to do right by her wedding, he could at least be civil to her.

Now he just had to figure out how.

Pam was never sure, afterwards, how she got through that shift. She’d always joked—sometimes to Jim, never to Roy (even before he went into the Warehouse), sometimes to her mother, sometimes (most of the time) just to herself—that if Jim left, she’d shoot herself in the face with a phaser. When she was feeling dramatic, she’d say she’d blow her brains out—like that time that she’d made the mistake of suggesting Jim try to become captain of one of the little scout ships that searched out new colonies, and then had realized that would mean he wasn’t working with her. When she was honest with herself—and this was almost always only to herself—she’d admit she’d probably set the phaser to obliviate, and wipe her own memory. Because she might be able to do this boring, useless communications job in deep space where there was no one to communicate with if she had no idea there was anything better. But if she could remember the good times with Jim, she’d despair.

Today, she thought, she’d had a taste of what that would have been like. True, Jim was there. But he wasn’t there there—or maybe it would be more accurate of her to say that he wasn’t there, the Jim she knew and loved.

She usually didn’t let herself think that last word, but it was the truth, wasn’t it? She loved Jim. Not like she loved Roy, and how she loved Roy was the barometer by which she judged that sort of love, but she loved Jim. He was a part of her, just like her mother or her sister or her artistic ability. But that Jim wasn’t there on that shift. He never caught her eye. He never cracked a joke with her. He was perfectly polite and professional and very much the proper lieutenant. He even cracked jokes with Ice, for goodness sake, but he didn’t have anything to say to her beyond a gruff “you might as well work here” and then some ordinary commands. There was no prank planning. Over an eight hour shift she wasn’t even sure he’d exchanged twenty words with her.

And she hated it. Just like she’d thought she would. She just never thought it would come while Jim was still there with her.

She logged off-shift after eight hours and headed for some solitude. In the old days (old—yesterday) she’d have headed for some company, with Jim. Not that they actually hung out together that much, but when she’d had a particularly crappy day, like today, she’d have nudged her head out just so and he’d have angled his in response just so and they’d have found their way out to one of the more out of the way areas on the ship and ordered up some tea and coffee from the automat and just sat and hung out.

Today she was going to have to do that alone, because Jim was clearly not interested in that. Not that she had actually angled her head—it didn’t feel appropriate while she was still digesting last night, not with Jim’s in love with me?!? still cascading through her brain. She couldn’t tell you a single thing she did during that shift, in fact, between her annoyance at the cold shoulder Jim was giving her and her continued discombobulation after last night. So now she went and she sat and she sipped her tea alone.

But even that didn’t actually relieve her of Jim’s presence, because she was drinking tea.

Normally, on Earth, say, drinking tea would not have been a particularly noteworthy event. Most people on Earth, in fact, drank tea at least once in their lives, if not necessarily as frequently as Pam Beesly did. But for some reason, spaceships had never been able to make proper tea. It was a notorious lack, in fact; the automat was supposed to be able to mimic any human food to a degree of accuracy imperceptible to a human tongue, but was famous for producing a beverage (when tea was ordered) that while it was technically hot and potable, was otherwise almost but not entirely unlike tea. So she’d expected when she got on board the ship that she would not get any tea, not until they reached their destination anyway, and that was an eternity away.

But they’d had their shakedown cruise before the colonists were loaded into the Warehouse, and there had been the traditional secret exchange of gifts amongst new crew members at the start of a cruise, and Jim had given her a teapot. A small blue-green teapot filled with references to little in-jokes that they’d shared. Initially, when they’d played a game of Yankee Swap at Captain Scott’s request, she’d swapped the teapot for the Interactive Holosphere that Captain Scott had gotten Ensign Howard. You could create whole worlds with that thing! But then curiosity had won out: why on Earth (or more accurately, off it) had Jim gotten her a teapot when the ships didn’t dispense tea? What had been the point of that? So she’d swapped with Lieutenant Schrute (who had been trying a nose-cleaning maneuver with the teapot that really would have required some functional gravity to work, and was instead coating his face with a clinging film of water).

Jim had delighted in showing her all the little presents inside the teapot (all of which were now firmly strapped down inside her bunk, a fact she did not particularly want to think about right now given that she had insisted that Roy store all their mementos of each other in his cargo allotment, out of sight in the hold, because she didn’t have enough weight allocated to her personal items). But more importantly, he told her why they were inside a teapot at all.

He had somehow (she never figured out how, and he just winked and said it was the magic of the season) reprogrammed their shipboard automat to be the one and only automat capable of dispensing proper, traditional tea at the press of the tea button. So even now as she sipped tea in the little bubble intended for visual examination of the exterior surface of the engines (and also, coincidentally, providing an awesome fireworks show in the infrared spectrum, which Jim and she just happened to have polarized the window to phase-shift into visible light) she couldn’t stop thinking about Jim. How he knew her. How he cared for her. How he didn’t just say it, but showed it.

And also, how he’d said it, and how she’d reacted.

Her reverie was interrupted by the sound of the lock on the door clicking open with the slight hiss of disturbed air. She turned—too quickly, because the ship was not operating at full gravity and her hair was still hanging free. It spun out around her face and made it difficult to see who was coming in. But then again, she didn’t need to see: her instincts had told her the moment the door opened.

It was, of course, Jim.

She wasn’t sure whether he was the last person she wanted to see right now or the first. But here he was.

“Oh…”

She wasn’t sure which of them said it first, or if they actually managed to say it at the same time, but they stared at each other for a good two seconds, each waiting for the other to continue, before the hissing of the door closing behind him seemed to shake Jim out of his trance.

“Um…huh. Those doors are, um, not supposed to make that noise.” She could see him reach up to rub the back of his neck and then think better of it. “I…I could get someone to take a look at it.”

God, how was this so awkward? This was Jim. They never had trouble communicating before. Talking to him was like talking to herself: automatic and a little neurotic, but never difficult. Of course, she knew why it was awkward—she could hardly forget about last night (God was it just last night?)—but she was suddenly determined that she was not going to let it be any more awkward than it had to be. And she was definitely not going to let him leave right now, as he was clearly planning to do on the patently obvious excuse of getting someone to look at the door.

The thought was parent to the action, and she reached around him (marveling at how the simple action of leaning towards him in low-G, feeling the always-surprising inertial effect that made it seem harder to stop than it was pull her close to Jim because her mass was unaffected even if her weight was, so her mind expected her to stop a moment or two before she did, felt different, almost languorous or sensual, now that she knew how he felt about her) and flipped the door to LOCK: ON.

She glanced up at him (and she really had let herself slide in close under the guise of inertial surprise, she realized, because she was really looking up at him) and dared him with her eyes to object. He looked almost dazed, as if she’d flipped his brain off instead of the lock on. Feeling powerful—feeling in control for the first time since he’d dropped that bombshell on her last night—she grinned up at him. “OK. You can send someone to look at it, but only if it’s Dwight.”

“Dwight?” He was clearly not following her train of thought, and she shook her head impatiently at his dulled reaction—a mistake, as it turned out, because she’d forgotten again that her hair was loose, and it floated all about her head again in an impenetrable ball. She combed it back with her fingers and giggled. And then suddenly she was out of control, giggling and floating a few inches off the floor as the momentum of her hilarity pulled her feet out from under her. His arms came out instinctively to steady her, and she came to rest a few inches away from his face, his hands locked onto her arms and his eyes boring into hers: but, she was happy to see, no longer dazed. If anything, her burst of giggles had apparently managed to crack that indifferent surface he’d been projecting towards her all shift, and there was the ghost of his usual humor showing in his eyes.

She decided to ignore the fact that he was holding her—or at least to ignore her own reaction to it, which was trying very hard to reveal itself as a blush—and pick up the thread of the conversation (stilted as it was) instead.

“Yes, Dwight. Come on, Jim, think. There’s obviously nothing too wrong here: the only way that this door thing becomes critical is if something pierces this dome and allows the oxygen out. That would take a rock impact large enough to smash through the dome’s surface. And if that happens, do you really think the engine is going to be OK? So obviously if you’re sending someone to look at this door, it’s just make-work. A bullshit excuse to do some unnecessary maintenance. And who do we know who just loves unnecessary maintenance?”

“Dwight.”

“Exactly.” She loved that he’d recognized the logic of her argument right away—loved even more that he hadn’t called her out in turn for basically calling him out on the fact that his excuse for leaving her in the dome had been total bullshit. “So if we’re going to call Dwight down for this very unnecessary repair, don’t you think we should make sure there’s something for him to find?”

For a moment she thought it had worked: that he was going to play along, plan a prank with her, let them go back to normal and get rid of the giant ache of anxious stress that had taken up residence in her stomach. His face almost relaxed into a grin before shutting down: it was like watching an engine light up, only in reverse.

“I can’t do this, Pam.”

She was painfully aware of how similar that sounded to her own “I can’t” the night before, but that only made her more desperate to find their way back to normality. She had reasons she couldn’t just give into whatever this was: the first and foremost of which was Roy, down there in the Warehouse sleeping away his life. What were his reasons?

She found herself, to her horror, actually asking that dangerous, dangerous question. “Why?”

He looked down at her with a bleak expression, then abruptly turned (she was struck for a moment by the elegance of the motion in low-G: how his arms began counterturning as his legs and torso turned one way, so that he didn’t end up swirling around in a circle) and tried to exit the pod. As he did, she heard a muffled answer to her question: “I have a wedding to plan.”

“A what?” Absurdly, ridiculously, her first thought was that Jim had somehow found someone (someone else, a traitorous part of her whispered) to marry in the last twenty-four hours; her second was that’s my line; her third was utter confusion as a result of the first two.

“A wedding to plan.” He tugged on the door to the dome. “Or didn’t you know I was going to be bridge officer then?”

Right. She did remember, actually. It had been a matter of real contention between them, back before when she hadn’t understood why her best friend wouldn’t walk her down the aisle, leaving her with Captain Scott of all people (since her parents were back on Earth). He had insisted on pulling desk duty during the ceremony, and had insisted it was “just his turn in the rotation, and he couldn’t ask someone else to cover” when she’d asked him why. It hadn’t really hit her until now, though, that that meant it was his duty to plan the actual logistics of the day according to the requests she’d placed in the onboard systems.

An absurd laugh choked its way up through her body. Jim Halpert was planning her wedding. Oh God.

Then a funnier thought struck her, and her laugh became real and unforced. Jim turned his head to stare at her and tugged again on the door, his face creasing in confusion as the peals of laughter pushed her closer to the door switch. She grabbed the hold bar next to him and used it to calm the guffaws coursing through her body, carefully positioning herself beside him.

“What’s so funny?” The obvious annoyance in his voice just set her off again, but she held onto the bar for dear life so she didn’t go drifting again. He shrugged and tried the door again.

“Jim.” She took a deep breath and stood tall, directly between him and the door controls. “It’s still locked.”

“It’s still locked.”

Of course.

Because she’d locked it earlier, when he’d been about to turn tail and run back to his bunk, or secondary command, or anywhere where he didn’t have to be quite so aware of her presence.

But she’d cut that off, and he’d gotten so addled by her presence (seriously, was she trying to kill him, floating in next to him like some kind of space siren and acting like she didn’t notice she’d entered his personal space?) that he’d forgotten. And then her laughter—and what (or who) was she laughing at?) had kept him from thinking of it even as he rattled a closed hatch.

His hand was still on the lever.

He let it go with a mental shake.

“Look, Pam, I really do need to go prepare for…you know.” He’d already mentioned the wedding once. She didn’t really need him to remind her what it was he had to go prepare, right? She knew she was getting married in three days.

Of course, she was still standing there in front of the door controls, grasping the hold bar for dear life, blocking his exit.

“So are you going to let me out, or what?”

“Or what.” She pushed her hair back out of her eyes and glared at him. “What the hell is up with you today, Jim?”

“Really?” He goggled at her. “Pam, I…”

She interrupted him. “You what? You can’t be bothered to treat me as a friend now that I didn’t drop everything and jump into your arms last night?”

“No, I…” Was that what he meant? From a certain angle? Because from where he was standing, it was more a matter of self-preservation, of keeping his feelings in check by trying to avoid falling into the patterns that had created those feelings, but he could see how it might look like he was punishing her, rather than saving himself. “I just need space.”

She gestured towards the rest of the little dome. “So take your space.”

He had to smile at that. “Pam, you have me locked in the smallest space in the ship. I might need a little more space than that.”

She shook her head. “If I let you out, you’re going to run.”

He was going to run? She was the one who ran. Who told him to put her down at the zero-G training when they’d been using each other as leverage to swing around and Specialist Palmer had seen them—and who’d gotten mad at him when he’d pointed out, quite logically, that without gravity there was no down to put her. Who found a way to slip out of every conversation they had that was even close to honest about either of their feelings. Who was going to get married in three days. Who’d literally run off to her bunk or wherever she’d been when he’d confessed his feelings the night before. “I don’t think I’m the one who’s likely to run.”

“So don’t.” She gestured into the pod again. “Have a seat.”

What else could he do? He sat.

She turned to face him. “Jim, are we friends?”

He was so startled by the question—even though when he thought about it later, he probably shouldn’t have been—that he blurted out the truth. “Of course. You’re my best friend.”

“Then why are you treating me like this?”

“Like what? Like I love you?” He was getting angry again, even as he tried to keep himself under control.

“Is this what love looks like to you, Jim?”

With that one comment, he realized, she’d cut him to the core. Because this wasn’t what he imagined his love for Pam looking like. He’d justified it to himself as a necessity: something he had to do before she married Roy (telling her he was in love with her) and then something he had to do to protect himself after she rejected him (minimizing contact with her). But he hadn’t gone about it in the right way, he realized. He’d acted like because it was necessary, it couldn’t also be kind, or friendly, or loving. He shook his head, because he wasn’t sure what he could say right now.

“It’s not?”

Again he shook his head.

“Then that’s all I really wanted to say.” She seemed to deflate in front of him, as if that minimal confrontation had taken as much from her as his confession yesterday had taken out of him. He heard the lock click back to OFF. “I’m sorry I trapped you.”

He shrugged and tried a half-smirk at her. “Not worth an apology, Beesly.” He pushed off over to the door and cracked it open. “Now, as I said, I have a wedding to plan.” He offered her his arm. “Would you like to see what I’ve got so far?”

She must have been very startled indeed by the change in his demeanor, because she took his arm without hesitation and they pushed off together down the corridor (after closing the door behind them, of course—and there was that little hiss, the one she’d suggested they should sic Dwight on. Maybe some other time…if there ever was another time when they could prank as freely as they had before she was set to become Communications Officer Pamela Anderson).

He steered them down corridors and up ladders until they arrived at secondary command. He’d taken a calculated risk in bringing her here: primary was now the domain of Lieutenant Schrute, but even he was probably not paying sufficient attention to power drain to notice if Jim did some imagining in secondary. And if he was, he could always send Pam off to hide while claiming he was just doing the training the admiral had permitted him to do. That would be a lie—he was supposed to be working on fleet logistics, not bridal prep—but it would probably confuse Dwight long enough for him to get away with it.

 He pulled her into secondary and gestured towards the communications console. “Go ahead, have a seat. I’ll just be a second.” She looked surprised to see secondary command online, but sat down and pivoted the chair to watch him as he flung himself over towards the central console and began frantically gesturing, bringing up all the plans he’d spent their shift together making. “Now, imagine this is the multipurpose chapel space.” A pair of quick slashes through the air and the turn of an imaginary crank and the central computer projected a model of the compartment in question in the air between them. Pam nodded her recognition and looked a question at him. He grinned. “Keep up with me now, Beesly, we’re going to make some quick changes.” He poked and prodded and the otherwise undifferentiable space sprouted chambers, corridors, rooms. “I’m thinking of this as the nave,” he gestured to the long central space that had grown chairs like mushrooms, “and this as the chancel,” pointing to the hovering platform at the end of the nave.

Pam was silent, but he could sense her attentively studying the model. If anything, it reminded him of how she used to be at their (rare) actually important briefings during training: not the ones Captain Scott organized, full of flailing and failed metaphors (the universe is like a grapefruit, because it sucks! Hah, Flenderson, got you to write it down! Joke’s on you!), but the ones run by the highly competent veterans and higher-ups who had clearly been doing this for years. Those had frequently devolved into Captain Scott-led silliness, but during the truly relevant parts (here is how you triage damage if you’re hit by space debris; here’s the order of operations for evacuating the craft via emergency pods; here’s how to safely do a spacewalk) Pam had been quietly intent, taking the occasional note and limiting her doodles (which, during Captain Scott’s so-called lectures, ranged far and wide as her mind wandered) to amazingly realistic sketches of the described behavior. He suspected she learned best that way, visually expressing her internal understanding of a situation, and indeed he could see her hands involuntarily flexing as if looking for a pen and tablet right now—the only sign of motion in her otherwise still body.

He forced himself to stop looking at her hands and continue. “So far, so normal, right? Roy stands at the front” he made a small figure appear on the chancel and did his best to suppress the grimace as he made himself stop imagining this as his and Pam’s wedding and admit that she was going to be marrying Roy “and you float down the nave towards him.” Another figure appeared at the far end of the aisle. He made a complex series of pre-arranged gestures and the figure rose slightly off the ground. “A little carefully applied gravity, and you could actually float.” He wafted the figure down the aisle for a moment, lost in the thought of Pam walking down the aisle on her wedding day, then shook himself and carefully avoided her eye as he rewound the scene. “But you know all that. The real secret here is what happens before you float down the aisle.”

“Before?” It was as if Pam had forgotten he was standing there, as if the word just floated out of her mouth without volition or intent.

“Before.” He continued motioning and the two figures receded, the groom’s through a small door that appeared beside the chancel, the bride’s up the nave and then around a corner. Then at another gesture the scene zoomed into the bridal figure. “You won’t be coming from command, or from your berth. You’ll be coming from here.” The scene zoomed back out again to reveal that the figure was no longer in the nave, but in a small but well-laid-out room covered in metallic butterfly figures. “I…uh…took the liberty of decorating it in your personal crest.” He gestured at her suit, on which the large figure of a butterfly was prominently featured both front and back. Each of their suits had a similar indicator, intended to identify them in the case of an emergency in which helmets were on (foiling facial identification) and radio or other audio communications were disabled. His own suit had a bear in place of her butterfly; Lieutenant Schrute’s a beet; Stars had a cat; Ice (after a long and he was sure intricate discussion with operations) a surprisingly detailed portrait of Brad Pitt. Since they had all had the choice over their own image (as long as it did not overlap with another’s—he had chosen the bear precisely to annoy Dwight in case he’d wanted to choose it) he was pretty confident that butterflies had some special meaning to her, though he’d never specifically asked. And even so, of course, a butterfly seemed a strangely appropriate image for a bride getting dressed on her wedding day.

Pam was still silent. He coughed and went on. “And, um, of course Roy will have one as well.”

He didn’t dare to look at her as she continued to stare at the image projected in the air before them, not saying a word. What was she thinking? Had he overstepped? Had he messed this all up somehow? He had been so sure when he spent the shift creating the actual parameters of the bridal suites that he’d finally found something he could do for her that she’d actually appreciate: not that she didn’t really appreciate him normally, but not in the way he wanted her to, of course. He was sure that this time he’d hit on it, something selfless, something so obviously and clearly not about getting her to be his that she couldn’t help but see that his feelings were genuine: itself perhaps a selfish motivation, of course, but one he’d have to allow himself if he was to continue functioning, and (after all) it seemed harmless given that it was all part of a goodbye, part of giving her the sendoff she deserved as she married someone he was so confident didn’t deserve her.

But now she was just standing there, staring at it, and he was beginning to worry that it wasn’t harmless at all. That somehow he’d managed to give their friendship a deathblow just as he was thinking he had saved it. What had begun as tactfully giving her her space to react to his reveal was now a paranoid panic that if he looked at her even once she’d burst into tears, or yell at him, or just run out of the room—do something that told him, definitively, once and for all, that he’d fucked this up even more than he’d thought possible.

And while a small part of him was hoping for that reaction—hoping that she’d be offended, or upset, or bothered by it so he could finally move on, finally have a reason that Pam Beesly wasn’t as well suited to him as he had always thought she was—most of him was absolutely terrified of losing her. Not losing her love: that ship had blasted off a long time ago, well before he actually met her in fact, when she’d pledged herself to another and (despite his self-delusion) apparently never been tempted to change her mind. Losing her presence in his life: her friendship and her laughter and her vitality: the way she made him feel alive. If you’d given him a shuttle and enough fuel to get to the DM Stamford or any other survivable, realistic destination in human space the night she’d rejected him, he would have taken it without hesitation. He’d have been a thousand lightyears away, trying to get over Pam Beesly by distance if he couldn’t by logic. But he hadn’t had that ship; he hadn’t had that escape; and the last twenty-four hours had shown him that he didn’t really want it anyway. He’d have to heal from her rejection, true; but it wouldn’t be true healing if it required all that distance. Maybe it required a little distance: after her marriage, obviously, they couldn’t be quite as close as they’d been before. But a healthy recovery from loving Pam Beesly had to include being able to be in the same room with Pam Anderson. And he was deathly afraid that the gesture he’d intended as a solution to that problem was instead the final straw to break that camel’s back forever.

Pam wasn’t entirely sure what it was she was seeing here. Oh, it wasn’t like she’d been struck blind (a risk, Lieutenant Schrute was somewhat overly happy to remind the crew without being asked, of staring too closely into a star—though as she and Jim were always happy to remind him in turn, only if you were within actual local visual observation distance of the star, which they would not be of any known celestial object for most of the rest of their journey). It was just that she was so underprepared for Jim to have done this—for him to have put all this thought into this—while she was under the impression he was giving her the cold shoulder. Yes, she thought, he probably should have asked first, though she supposed this might constitute asking; after all, it wasn’t as if she had shown up on her wedding day only to find these preparations in place. There was still time for her to tell him off, tell him this wasn’t appropriate, he wasn’t responsible for this, her wedding day was hers to plan thank you very much. Strangely, though, she didn’t find those words crowding to pour out her mouth. Instead, she was consumed with what seemed like trivialities: “how did you do this?” or “I didn’t know this was possible,” “you were actually paying attention when I showed you how to make patterns with the bots?” or “how many bots does this design take, anyway?” She was afraid to ask him what his plans for Roy’s room were, partly because she was afraid he’d ruin the perfection of what he’d done with the decoration of her room by doing something crass or crude with Roy’s, and partly because she was afraid of exactly the opposite: that somehow this caring, ridiculous, inspired man in front of her would have found the perfect medium, some way of creating a room that simultaneously spoke to Roy’s interests and was entirely appropriate to the aesthetic of the wedding as she’d been planning it (and as he’d confirmed he was paying close attention to while showing her his plans). She wasn’t sure which would be worse, and she was entirely sure she didn’t dare find out which was true.

She was silent because she had, not no idea of what to say or how to say it, but simply too many ideas at once, and no clear way of prioritizing them. She knew what she felt she ought to say, she knew what she wanted to say, but none of them would come out. Instead, after letting Jim babble on for far too long (and a distinct part of her in the back of her brain couldn’t help but think that someone needed to teach him when he should just shut up and let her process something: he needed serious practice just staying still after dropping big news) she let forth the single most inane observation rattling around in her head, for lack of a better.

“So, um, Jim?”

“Yes?” He instantly snapped to attention from wherever his flailing had led him mentally, turning all his attention to her with a remarkable intensity that almost unnerved her again.

“You, uh, do know how many wings butterflies have, right?”

“What?” He glanced back at the model, then started visibly counting…and blushed, hard, when he passed two, moved on to four and continued to six. It was cute, she thought. “Uh…” he rubbed the back of his neck nervously. “I don’t supposed I could convince you these were some alien analogue of butterflies that evolved under particularly wing-friendly conditions on a distant planet?”

She shook her head. “Nuh-uh.”

“What if I told you it was the effect of forming a cocoon in zero-G?” The red was fading from his face, but his hand was still nervously working the back of his neck like he’d lost the keys to the shuttlebay back there and needed to find them before Captain Scott got back on shift. “Or that they’re really examples of the rare Malagascan Butterfly that has disjointed wing sets due to an endemic parasite?”

She surprised herself by starting to laugh. It wasn’t the hysterical, absurd, laugh-because-you’ll-cry-otherwise laughter that she’d found herself slipping into in the observation dome. It wasn’t even the normal laughter she indulged in when Jim made a particularly funny comment, or pulled a face, or got Dwight to believe in something absurd—like, say, the parasitical experience of Malagascan butterflies. No, it was catharsis, she realized: the kind of laughter that came as a result of her mind and body coming to the joint conclusion that things would be OK, and that it was alright to indulge herself. Because Jim could still make her laugh. They could still do this. She could give him an opening, and he could run right through it, and they could be a team.

The idea of “giving Jim an opening” stuck in her mind, and she found herself fighting a blush. Where had that come from? In order to avoid the thought, she reached out and patted him on the shoulder, instantly freezing when she realized she had initiated physical contact (and when had that ceased to be something she did? Was it before or after he confessed he was in love with her and turned her life upside down?). She forced herself not to overreact, not to pull her hand away or apologize. Instead she patted him once more, forcefully, and found the strength to say what she had been going to say before the thought of touching him loomed so large in her mind.

“No, but I don’t mind if you tell Dwight that when he sees them.”

For a moment he grinned at her like old times, and the thought “that’s my Jim” flitted through her mind, small enough and light enough that she couldn’t pin it down and force it to admit where it had come from, or what it meant. She shook herself and continued.

“I love it. This is lovely, Jim. I can’t believe you did this for me.” She took a breath and looked him in the eyes. It was hard, partly because he was half-ducking his head in a way that made it actually physically difficult to force him into eye contact, and partly because she could still see the ghost of the night before lurking in there: the little expression in the back of his eyes that she now had to admit she’d been seeing for months without putting a name to it, the one that now served to remind her how he felt about her. That he loved her.

But meet his eyes she did, and forced herself to ask the question she needed the answer to more than any other. “We OK?”

His eyes flitted away from hers towards the model for a moment, then refocused on hers, and he nodded, slowly. “Always.”

“OK.” She made herself smile—and found it actually wasn’t as hard as she thought. “Then I have some duties to attend to.” She realized her hand was actually still lying on his shoulder and gave it another pat. “Not all of us get to go off-duty when we get off-shift, after all.” Not that she didn’t usually shirk her additional responsibilities as communications officer: filing Captain Scott’s repeated (and pointless at interstellar distance) requests for Admiral Levinson-Gould to visit the ship herself for a “private inspection” was not actually her idea of a good time. But she needed some space, some distance from Jim, to process the last two days’ worth of revelations and discoveries, and she figured catching up on her more pointless duties was a good excuse.

“Yeah, right, Comms” he said, and she couldn’t stop the flash of disappointment across her face as he called her by her job rather than her name. She supposed it was only fair—after all, she’d told him just last night that they needed to have a more professional and less personal relationship, so what did she expect?—but it still hurt. He must have noticed (when did he fail to notice anything, she wondered?) because when she was about to duck through the connecting bulkhead into the rest of the ship he stopped her with his voice again. “Hey, Beesly?”

“Yes?” She had to grab the hold bar to stop herself from slamming into the wall, she turned so fast.

He wasn’t grinning, but something in his voice almost sounded like a caress. “Don’t forget to send me anything embarrassing in the captain’s letters.” Now he was grinning. “Besides his obvious obsession with the admiral, of course.”

“Sure thing.” She gave him a mock salute and ducked into the corridor and hurried down the length of the ship towards primary, where she wasn’t technically on-shift, but where she could most easily deal with Captain Scott’s lengthy and self-involved “correspondence.”

But she was, apparently, not destined to get that filing done today, because halfway down the corridor she was intercepted by a flying Ice missile. Kelly gave Pam the biggest hug (to be fair, she always gave the biggest hugs—being embraced by Kelly was active practice for being entrapped by the gravitational pull of a black hole, Pam sometimes thought—but this was a particularly large one) and dragged her into the cryogenic control chamber, chatting merrily the whole time.

“Ohmigod Comms, I’ve been looking for you! You slipped away so quickly after shift that I didn’t get to ask you! I got Kevin to run some numbers, and I have a super-mega-important question for you! And I just want you to know, Pam, you really owe me for this one, because he spent like the whole time staring right at my boobs, even though you, like, can’t even see them in this suit! I mean, I know they keep telling us that they’re all designed for sudden impacts and they’re all air-tight in case we run out of oxygen and have to recycle it, but don’t you think they could at least have done a better job of making them, like, interesting to look at? I mean, when they tell you they’re going to put you in a form-fitting jumpsuit, wouldn’t you think that that would be a good look? I mean, not for you, obviously, but for me? But then they insist on all this extra padding and you know how they say a camera adds like ten pounds? I swear a regulation jumpsuit adds like fifteen! And I was going to replace them all with these, like, perfect suits I’d gotten from a friend of a friend who totally makes fashion jumpsuits for celebrities—she made one for like Britney’s second cousin, and you know those two are just like that—but then Toby found out and he made me put them back. Can you believe that? I mean, it’s like, sure, I want to live in the event of a crash and all that, but do you really call this living? I mean, how is Ryan supposed to notice how cute I am if I’m in this old thing? And, and, don’t even get me started on the color. Like, I put in this perfectly reasonable request for a white jumpsuit, and when they asked why, I told them it was an emergency, and it totally was, because I look absolutely rocking in white, and they had the nerve to say that only command staff get to wear white! Do I look to you like someone who doesn’t get to command? I run my own section! And I am not an easy person to manage, let me tell you! Doesn’t it just seem fair that if they’re going to make me wear this like total bag, I should at least get to pick the color? Doesn’t it, Comms? Seriously?”

Pam gently disentangled herself from the enthusiastic embrace of the cryogenics officer. “Sure, Ice! I’m sure they should let you wear whatever you want. But…what was it you wanted to see me about?”

“Oh right! I got Kevin, before he was staring at my boobs—OK, maybe partly while he was doing it, but that’s not the point anyway, though why it is that Ryan won’t stare at me the way Kevin does—not that I want him to stare that way you know but I swear that boy wouldn’t notice if I wandered around naked—do you think I should wander around naked?—anyway, I got him—Kevin, not Ryan—to run our energy, food, and water budgets for the next three days, and I can totally afford to revive Roy today even though I already revived Madge too instead of the day before your wedding! And I thought, ‘Oh! Comms will love this!’ and I was totally going to do it, and then I realized it’s like totally bad luck for the groom to see the bride before the wedding—like, I know it’s really all about the dress, but I wasn’t sure how you felt about it, and I wasn’t actually sure how much you cared, since it’s not like your dress is all that flattering, but then I thought I should just ask you! And then you weren’t there, and I was just going to go do it and then I ran into you and it’s just fate, you know? So what do you think?”

Pam stared at Kelly. “Are you telling me we have the energy budget to wake up Roy right now?”

“Yes!” squealed her friend, bouncing on the balls of her feet, which made her look vaguely like a pogo stick in low-G. “So, should I?”

Pam lowered herself into one of the crash couches in the cryogenics chamber and let her brain grapple with the question. Should she ask Kelly to wake up Roy? What would she say to him? What would she do with him?

And when had her thoughts about Roy slipped from “what would they do together” to “what would she do with him”?

She knew that yesterday’s Pam would have jumped at the idea and had Ice defrost her fiancé on the spot. She’d have made plans about how Roy would help with the last-minute preparations for their wedding, rejoiced in the chance to share her bunk with him, and been relieved to have him with her after the stress of waiting alone for their wedding day.

Or at least she’d have told herself all of those things. Because all around the periphery of the idea of waking Roy up were the whispers in her head that said that none of that was true. That she’d actually been quietly relieved that Roy was not going to wake up until their actual wedding day dawned: that she wouldn’t have to undergo his begging for “last unmarried sex” or wait for him to get back from spending a bachelor party getting hammered on jet-fuel hootch in some cargo bay somewhere or hear him tell her “whatever you want” as she asked him to please, just have some opinions on some basic elements of their wedding so that she didn’t have to shoulder the whole load. It was easier to plan the thing herself—well, except for Jim’s help—because Roy was in the Warehouse frozen cold than to do the same because Roy just wasn’t interested. It was nicer to sleep alone because Roy wasn’t awake or, technically, alive-as-we-know-it than because he was out with the boys. It was better to worry about the color of the decorations or the chance of Captain Scott saying something inappropriate than about whether Roy would show up sober—or even show up.

And all of those thoughts had been there before Jim Halpert turned her world upside down. Before he told her he loved her, but also before he showed it to her, turning the skills she’d always known he’d had (no one could hack and prank Lieutenant Schrute like that without real ability and drive) to her direct benefit—and his own discontent, she realized. It was before she’d heard her mother tell her that she could and should trust Jim; before she’d started wondering, or more accurately letting herself admit she was wondering, about what a wedding would be like with an engaged groom; one who didn’t have to be drunk, or marking his territory, to set a wedding date, one who was and wanted to be physically present with her, one who knew her well enough to know her favorite food and drink from the automat, her favorite animal, her favorite style of decoration even. All of those thoughts had been before she’d even let herself think beyond the binary question of to-Roy-or-not-to-Roy, a question that had frightened her in its stark binary. Not being with Roy was something she didn’t really know, not as an adult, and she now realized that reducing it to the mere negative “not Roy” had been a form of letting herself off the hook from thinking about all the positives that came with “yes Pam.”

But was this all just cold feet—hers, for once, not Roy’s? And was it fair to Roy to be thinking this way when he was not just not there to defend himself but actively sleeping the sleep of cryodeath beneath her feet? She couldn’t be sure about the first but she was definite on the second. No, it was not fair—to him or to her, because while he deserved a chance to defend himself, she deserved a chance to see him try, and to remember what was good about their relationship.

She looked up at the rare sight of a silent Kelly hovering above her seated form and wondered how long she’d been sitting there pondering the question. Well, there was no time like the present for an answer.

“Wake him up,” she said.

Jim could not for the life of him figure out whether that had gone well or poorly. The part of him that thought it had gone well pointed to the fact that Pam had not run screaming out of the room when he revealed just how much time and effort he’d put into planning a wedding for her that wasn’t even his. It also emphasized how she’d actually reached out and touched him when she hadn’t had to, even leaving her hand on his arm, seemingly without realizing it, in one of the more quietly intimate moments he could remember actually having with her without either of them pulling away. Most crucially, it noted, it had been Pam who had checked in about whether they were OK—who had intentionally and directly met his eyes to ask. After all the pulling away that they had both been doing over the past day, his optimistic part concluded, that had to be a good sign.

His pessimistic—it would say realistic—side was equally adamant that none of that was a good thing. She wants to go back to the way things were, it screamed. She just wants your friendship, nothing more. She wants you to be OK with your stomach burning and your heart in a twist; she’s happy laughing with you and touching you precisely because she’s convinced herself there’s nothing there.  But if Jim had realized one thing in the past twenty-four hours, it was that his knee-jerk, instinctive desire to run was deeply self-sabotaging, because Pam “just” wanting his friendship was not actually the end of the universe. It sucked, no doubt, but she didn’t actually owe him her love—at least not her romantic love—especially because she had been clear from the outset that she was with someone else. She’d never actually led him on; she’d just let him in, and he refused to let himself be the asshole who didn’t accept that when she was clear about it. She’d been right when she asked him if what he’d done had actually looked like love. It hadn’t. It had looked like possessiveness, like the need to ensure that she was his and not Roy’s—and while he might prefer that outcome, if he really loved Pam, if he really respected her, without which love wasn’t really love, he had to accept her choice. And that in turn meant that he couldn’t, in all fairness to either of them, tell her that they couldn’t be OK if she didn’t love him. His friendship was not a hostage to be bartered or ransomed for her love.

He’d need space, of course. He was still going to be up in primary for the wedding, not in the chapel; he was probably going to have to pull away at least a little bit from her once she got married, just to protect himself. But that pulling away couldn’t be a punishment—she didn’t deserve that and he wouldn’t let himself do that to someone he genuinely cared about. It would just be the natural consequence of her binding herself more tightly to someone else: “forsaking all others” as the old language in the vows used to put it. And even though she didn’t think of him that way, she would be forsaking him as she married Roy, and that would naturally put a distance between them. Their relationship would change, and that change itself would protect him. He hoped. If he couldn’t be more than that he’d be less than that, because it was really being that that hurt him: being the one who was there for her, who was closest to her, without being the one who was most important to her. A husband—even a boorish, frozen one like Roy—was meant to take that place, and while he’d mourn being pushed into a further orbit, at least this one was less likely to plunge his heart into the sun.

As he was contemplating this new reality (O brave new world, that has Pam Anderson in it!), he noticed a strange indicator pinging across the display in secondary command. Secondary command, of course, as the name implied, was still a command station and so all the signals routed to primary command were duplicated here as long as it was powered up, even though it was not technically a duty station outside of emergencies, takeoffs, and landings. This wouldn’t normally have distracted Jim, as he was used to filtering the command display instinctively and ignoring all but the most crucial or unusual information it projected (while at the same time letting his subconscious mind look for patterns or trends in the more prosaic information it put forth). This, however, was not ignorable: there was a distinctively power surge typical of the equipment in Cryogenics, a ping from the Warehouse, and a responding signal from Cryo that was triggering the movement of a cryopod into the resurrection chamber.

Now, this was scheduled to happen about every second or third day, starting today with Madge, who had been designated as the first resurrection due to her exemplary work record, and then Roy for his wedding. But Madge’s resurrection had already gone through during their shift: he’d noticed, not just because of the distinctive energy spike but because Ice had disappeared for a good twenty minutes to go orient their new passenger and the bridge had fallen deathly silent until Kelly had come back chattering about how Madge had enjoyed waking up so efficiently because she, Kelly, was the best at what she did. So if Ice wasn’t resurrecting Madge, because she’d already done that, who the hell was waking up?

Fortunately or unfortunately, he knew he had the access from here to find that out. He briefly considered the self-restraint that he’d shown earlier in the day by not looking at Pam’s logged-in console, and then decided that was no longer appropriate in the current circumstances. He was a bridge officer, even if he wasn’t actually at the primary bridge or on-shift right now, and that meant it was his duty to investigate unexplained or unusual power drains. Especially ones that weren’t the result of his own pranks on Dwight.

Actually, he thought as he frantically pushed buttons and gestured towards the central console, looking for the command screen he was sure had to exist, this would have made a perfect prank. Fake a resurrection spike—since the initial power readings didn’t actually indicate where the energy use was coming from, just that it existed (leaving it to the trained analyst to note that certain equipment typically used certain quantities and types of power) this would be relatively easily done by simply causing some other system to artificially spike to the same level from the same source as Cryogenics typically did. Then have an accomplice in the Warehouse send a message to another in Cryogenics in such a way as to suggest that the two systems, rather than two individuals, were communicating. This deception would be surprisingly easy. After all, almost no officers ever went down to the Warehouse; even Ice managed it remotely from Cryogenics, and the one time they’d let Captain Scott down there he’d almost run over two cryopods using the manual setting on the forklift and they’d all been formally warned from using that again except in an emergency. It wouldn’t be a deep, lasting prank, of course, because the follow-up readings would clarify both the specific source of the power surge and the nature of the communications between the bays, but it would probably cause the officer on duty to freak out—just as he was doing now, in fact.

However, for all that it would make an excellent prank (and he was definitely filing this one away for reference) he was pretty much certain that was not what was going on right now. He’d finally reached the screens he wanted and the power surge definitely did originate in Cryogenics, and the body count in the Warehouse was one short (well, two if you considered Madge). He briefly pondered the possibility of hacking that system or manually hiding a cryopod for the sake of a prank then noted the corresponding second surge out of Cryogenics that indicated someone had, in fact, been awakened—or at least, was currently being so, as the real resurrection spike (as opposed to the one that indicated only the start of the complex process of bringing a human back unharmed from cryodeath) was a prolonged event that was not yet finished. Since interfering with a cryo-revival was, both legally and ethically, murder, he waited out the spike lest anything he was doing should interrupt it, and then went back to the Warehouse records to examine whose pod might have been revived.

It didn’t take him long to figure out that it was Roy’s.

He decided he needed a drink.

Technically, the room he entered (after closing down secondary properly and floating down several corridors) was the Climate Analysis and Crop Projection Room, a small area of the ship only used after arrival at the destination planet to help determine optimal colony locations for the habitability and long-term stability of the new settlements. In that capacity, Chief Human Officer Flenderson would run it from orbit while the rest of the crew did more hands-on activities to ensure a safe planetfall for their passengers—or, as Captain Scott tended to put it when the subject, “Toby, no one wants you on the planet because you smell bad, so you have to stay up here.” It was widely believed that Toby also preferred to keep an entire atmosphere between him and the captain, when possible.

Informally, however, the Climate Analysis and Crop Projection Room was known by the name of the publication whose role it would take in the future colony: the Almanac. And since it was intended to remain unused until they reached their destination, it also served (by mutual agreement) as a place for the crew who would have to remain awake for the whole trip to blow off some steam, put up their feet, and come to grips with life. In other words, a bar.

Jim didn’t really frequent the Almanac, but he was very glad of its presence right now. Someone had set up an automat in the corner and hacked it to dispense alcoholic beverages of much higher proof than was authorized for shipboard consumption: as of yet, no one had reported it to the maintenance system as broken, and Pam had sworn she’d even seen Stars and Schrute having a long debate that had ended with Angela agreeing to suspend judgment until they arrived “at the site of a proper authority.” Since this was for many of them a one-way trip, that was as good as a promise not to interfere at all—though since Pam had also said that conversation had been ended with a kiss, Jim still stood very skeptical that it had ever happened. Still, the Almanac was still operable, and one could always get moonshine, or even a beer (as long as you didn’t mind the lack of hops onboard). He programmed in a dark ale, took his dispensed glass, and leaned up against a projecting surface intended to provide detailed readings of watersheds.

Roy Anderson was awake.

Pam wasn’t sure exactly what she’d expected when Roy was woken up. Kelly hadn’t told her—which was odd, since Ice usually couldn’t help herself from talking, and indeed had been talking a steady stream of vaguely excited words for the duration of the resurrection project—and she could only vaguely remember what little they’d been told about the act of resurrection during orientation. Oh, to be sure, she’d been paying attention at the time, because she’d been aware even then that Roy would be undergoing the process, but she hadn’t internalized it for whatever reason. It just hadn’t seemed all that important, she supposed.

Now of course she was paying for that little bout of forgetfulness, because she was waiting on pins and needles to figure out what was going on and whether it was normal or OK or any of those things. Roy was snoring now, louder than she remembered, but she wasn’t sure if that was her memory or an actual change. After all, she was realizing, she’d been without Roy for the longest time she’d ever been without him in her life in the couple of months that the DM Scranton had been underway. She wasn’t used to him anymore; his unkempt beard (the hair continued to grow in the cryodeath, which was one of the ways it was distinguishable from, well, actual death, but it grew slower than usual) wasn’t just the result of a few nights of debauchery when the mornings had been too consumed with hangovers for shaving to appeal to him; the way his mouth gaped open as he snored no longer seemed cute—though if she was entirely honest, it had ceased seeming so after the first week or two that they’d lived together, which was definitely long enough ago by now to make it distinctly uncute. She supposed she’d been infatuated then, and loving enough when he went into the Warehouse to not care. Now it was annoying, and she was worried by the change.

He rolled over towards her, his eyes blinked open in confusion, and the noise he was emitting changed abruptly from a snore to a groan. She rushed to him in a burst of sympathy—it must be awful waking from such a sleep, and such a cold, to the real world again—and his eyes focused on her as she gripped her hand. His mouth opened and she awaited his first words to her with apprehension. What was he like, this man she’d agreed to marry and then not seen again for months?

“Hiya, Pammy. Turn off the alarm will you?” And he rolled over and began to snore again.

She was disappointed for a moment, then remembered that, of course, for him it had felt like a single long night of sleep. Of course he wasn’t thinking of how long it had been for her, or how strange it was for her to see him again. It was just normal. He’d gone to bed and she’d been there when he awoke. As she always had been, except for a few days of intensive training of course…and if she was honest, the many more nights when he’d stumbled home after she’d gone to bed and crashed on the couch—or made so much noise and fuss coming in that she’d voluntarily foregone sharing the bed with him to sleep on the couch herself. But still…she’d hoped for more.

Kelly was puttering around them both, unhooking some kind of wires and tubing that she’d hadn’t even noticed linking into Roy’s back. Pam had never really seen Ice in her professional element before: it was mesmerizing to watch. To her surprise, Kelly almost never spoke to Roy, though she had kept up a pretty constant chatter with Pam before his awakening. Rather, she took care of his needs almost before he became aware of them, providing water and wafers and even a bucket for vomit (Pam repositioned that last right before Roy filled it, remembering from years of practice that he always pulled to the left while upchucking). Apparently, she whispered conspiratorially to Pam, they had done studies (with her voice! Can you imagine, they thought she was important enough to study for the whole colonization project!) and they’d discovered that the newly awakened did not like talking to their cryogenic techs. Apparently there was something about the transition between the deep sleep of cryodeath and a sudden need to follow human conversation that was aggravating.

In that context, Pam supposed she shouldn’t be too bothered by Roy’s laconic treatment of her. She wasn’t the cryotech, of course, but she was still present at his awakening, which meant the same statistics should apply to her. Even if she was his fiancée…

She felt a little vindicated in this thought when, after about half an hour of Ice running various tests and diagnostics, Roy was released from the bay. He immediately slung an arm around her shoulder and gave her a big smacking kiss—though he had apparently misjudged how she’d turn towards him when he touched her and the kiss landed squarely on her cheek. He had extensive morning breath, but then again, he had been asleep for months. He squeezed her tight and leaned in low.

“Heya, Pammy. I feel awful.”

“Oh, I’m so sorry, Roy, how about we…”

He didn’t even seem to notice she’d spoken as he continued. “There anywhere to get a drink on this spaceship?”

She was so surprised that this was his first question for her that she answered immediately: “Just the Almanac.”

“Thanks, Pammy.” He pulled out his datasleeve and punched in a few commands. “Let’s go there.”

“But Roy…”

“Not now, Pammy. I need a drink.” He suddenly grinned, showing the dimples she loved. “After all, I haven’t had one in a couple of months.”

So somehow she found herself trailing behind Roy as his datasleeve showed him the directions to the Almanac. She kept trying to engage him in conversation—did he know how far they’d come? Was he excited for the wedding? What were his thoughts on food for the reception afterwards in the mess hall?—and the most she got out of him was a “whatever you like, Pammy, it’s your day.”

The lack of response from him bothered her at a deeper level than she’d expected. Somewhere in the last two or so months of flight, she was beginning to worry, she might have idealized Roy. She had remembered all of the good parts of being with him—the security, the comfort, the familiarity—and none of the bad. Or else it hadn’t been bad, back then. Maybe she’d been OK with being called Pammy (a name she privately despised), with monosyllabic responses, with immediately and constantly repairing towards the first bar available. She couldn’t be sure: had she changed, or had he? And if either of them had changed (which she had to admit, because she was distinctly not happy with the last half an hour) when had it happened?

Had she gone on living her life with Roy in the Warehouse and become someone different? Or had the change come earlier, and she hadn’t been willing to see it? She began to remember some of the moments she’d…not repressed, because it hadn’t been even that conscious, but de-emphasized during their journey. The time Roy had practically slobbered all over the quartermaster when she’d come by to check on the status of the individual cryosleeves (called “purses” in shipboard slang) in the Warehouse. The times he’d refused to let her even consider a career in or even adjacent to her love of design because it “just wasn’t practical—everyone needs a communications officer, but only like one person gets to design all the ships.” The nights spent alone, waiting for him to come home from some stupid game night or pub crawl. How he’d always justified them by saying “there won’t be pubs where we’re going, will there? So I’m just getting it all out now.” Only now that he was awakened again, here they were going to the damn pub.

“Hey, Pammy, which door is it? My sleeve’s on the fritz.” Roy’s voice broke into her reverie.

“Seriously, Roy?” She didn’t know what exactly made her choose that moment to stand her ground—maybe it was the realization that once Roy got into the Almanac he would undoubtedly keep drinking until the next shift started and she had to go to her bunk to prepare for the next day, so she had to do this now—and she wasn’t sure why this was the hill on which she chose to die, but she was not letting him keep calling her Pammy. “We’re on a ship underway. I’m the communications officer. You can call me Comms.” A feeling of guilt fluttered into her gut as she remembered one person on board who definitely did not call her Comms. “Or Pam. But not Pammy.”

“Aw, Pammy, c’mon…” He reached back for her as she crossed her arms.

“I’m serious, Roy. I know it’s not a big thing, but it’s important to me.” She looked up into his eyes, hoping to see…she wasn’t sure what. But certainly not the annoyance that flashed across his face.

“But I’ve always called you Pammy.”

“I know. And I’ve always told you I hated it.” Less and less as the years wore on, because he’d worn her down, she realized. “Remember when we were in the crèche together, and the teacher started calling me Pammy because you did, and I threw a temper tantrum so bad my mom had to come get me?”

He laughed, a deep booming belly laugh. “Pammy, we were five.”

She shook her head. How could he keep coming so close to the point and miss it? How could he remember something from when they were five, but not remember that she didn’t like being called Pammy? “I know, Roy. And I haven’t started liking it anymore since.”

He peered down at her, and finally she saw something like concern start to appear in his eyes. “But I thought that was just when other people called you that! I thought that was what made us special, that I called you Pammy. Like a boyfriend-girlfriend thing.”

One battle at a time. She did not have the bandwidth right now to remind him also that they were engaged, not just boyfriend and girlfriend. “No, it just meant that because I loved you I was willing to forgive you for forgetting. I still didn’t like it. And I’d like you to try to remember now. We’re getting married in three days, after all.” There, she’d gotten the reminder about their engagement in anyway.

Unfortunately, Roy chose to latch onto a different aspect of what she’d just said. “Three days? What did you go and wake me up for then? I thought we were getting married the day I woke up.”

She stared at him in disbelief. “Because I thought you’d like to be actually involved in our wedding, Roy.”

“Aww, c’mon Pammy. You know I’m happy with whatever you choose. Just send the boys to get me when it’s time.” He shook his datasleeve and it gave a little ping. “Oh hey, it’s back online. This door then.” He pushed open the door to the Almanac and slid inside, throwing a little aside back over his shoulder. “Love ya!”

Pam waited a moment before following him in. Was this seriously the man she’d been planning to marry her whole life? A man who had no interest in being involved in their wedding beyond getting it over with? A man who ran immediately to the first bar he could find and apparently planned to spend three days straight in there? A man couldn’t remember even while she was actively reminding him what name she wanted to be called? The last thought spun out in a different direction, as she wondered what it would be like to be engaged to someone who actually called her Comms. Or Pam. Or Beesly…and for some reason all of those names were said, in her imagination, by a slightly different voice than Roy’s. A voice she’d almost never heard call her “Comms” but often enough heard call her both “Pam” and “Beesly.” A voice she’d never heard toss off an unthinking “Love ya” but had recently heard, wracked with emotion, say “I’m in love with you.”

She rested her head against the door to the Almanac and sighed.

One benefit, if you could call it that, of the terrible alcohol the automat produced, Jim reflected, was that it served as an active disincentive to actually getting drunk. Oh, he doubted Staff Specialist Palmer felt that way—her approach was that the worse the alcohol, the more you should drink in order to get to the point where you no longer cared—but for him, it was true. The awful impression of beer that he was sipping on was only his second, because for all that he’d wanted to gulp the first one down he’d found himself unable to swig it any faster than a slow sip, and so it had taken him the best part of an hour to finish it off. The only reason he was still here was that he was alone, and it was nice to have a space to be alone with his thoughts that wasn’t his duty station or his bunk. He briefly pondered what it would take to reprogram the machine to produce real beer the way he’d tricked the system into producing real tea for Pam, but the thought of pouring that sort of effort into anything non-Pam-related was exhausting, and the thought of it being Pam-related made him just want to drown his sorrows, even in terrible beer-adjacent alcohol drink.

He took another sip, but that sip was not destined, as it turned out, for his stomach. Instead, it hit the wall across from him as he spat in surprise when the door swung open forcefully and Roy Anderson walked in, bellowing something about “getting something to drink on this spaceship.” He waited for a beat to see if Pam would follow Roy in—she had to be with him, right? He’d only just been resurrected and there was no way he knew his way around the ship already, though the datasleeve might have directed him—and then gestured over towards the automat before letting himself think any further about why Roy might be yelling for a drink already.

“Over there, man.”

“Oh, hey, thanks Halpert.” So Roy did recognize him. Great. Not that he was surprised; it wasn’t like there were all that many people on the ship, or at least awake on it, and he was nominally one of the leaders of the crew at that. But he would have preferred to continue wallowing in his own head, rather than having company, and Roy had apparently taken the mere courtesy of pointing out the automat as an invitation to join him. He slid into the couch next to Jim’s, something rotgut-y in his hands (it definitely did not smell like beer—given the state of the ship’s beer offerings, of course, that was probably a benefit).

“So, Halpert, how’s it going?”

Oh, just deeply in love with your fiancée and wishing you back in the Warehouse where you belong. “Eh, same old.” Ain’t that the truth.

“Hah. You tell me.” If the conversation had lapsed there, it would have been a typical interaction between Jim and Roy. Beyond being involved with Pam, the only other thing they really had in common was their upbringing back on Earth, in the vast metroplex west of Philadelphia, which meant a shared appreciation for certain sports teams and aversion to others. But Roy was apparently in a talkative mood—as Jim supposed he would be too after months of cryodeath. So he didn’t take Jim’s grunt as an indicator of disinterest (which it most certainly was) but as an opportunity to prolong the conversation in a new direction.

“So, you have any idea why Pammy’s decided to wake me up three days early?”

Something about the question made Jim want to jump to Pam’s defense, but more than that it made him wonder two things: why Roy was asking him this, with no Pam in sight, rather than having a conversation with his fiancée, and why Roy would think he’d know. This last, he decided, he could safely express.

“I dunno.” For some reason, around Roy he reverted to the communication patterns of his early teens. As a lieutenant in the colonization force, he was obviously capable of stringing three words together—or even more on occasion—in the pursuance of his duties. Around Pam, he could wax lyrical, and actually often had to stop himself from doing so. Bring Roy into the picture, though, and he became taciturn, laconic, curt (and wasn’t it ironic that he could think of more synonyms for his behavior than words to say out loud?). He supposed it must be at least partly the old, pre-spacefaring man in him coming out, the one who wanted to grunt and slug Roy in the face and take Pam back to his cave.

He desperately hoped that his face had not gone red at that thought, or that if it had Roy assumed it had to do with the alcohol instead of his lascivious thoughts about Roy’s fiancée.

But Roy wasn’t really paying him all that much attention, he realized. Instead, he was throwing back the rotgut like it was going out of style. And apparently he had mastered the art of talking and drinking through the same mouth at the same time (reportedly an ability they had gene-engineered into the inhabitants of Omicron Perseii VIII, Jim recalled, due to the incredibly dry conditions requiring all colonists to be constantly imbibing liquids at all times lest they dehydrate—but he did not think Roy was a native of that world) because he had taken Jim’s little “I dunno” as a license to go on the rant he’d evidently built up.

“I mean, don’t get me wrong, Pammy’s the best, but it’s not like there’s anything for me to do between now and the wedding, ya know? Well, besides Pammy, but then she’s on duty all the damn time anyway” he slapped Jim on the shoulder, causing him to jump, and continued “like I guess all you poor bastards are. That’s why I never signed up for shipboard duty, even though Pammy kept suggesting it. Told me it’d mean we got to spend more time together! Like time working under someone crazy like Captain Scott is worth living. I’d much rather spend my journey nice and asleep, and that’s what I told her. She was welcome to join me, but she’s stubborn like that. Most of the time she’s just what you’d want in a woman, you know what I mean, but sometimes she just gets these ideas in her head. Like that design work she wanted to do, or the stupid idea of going to advanced technical academy to get shipboard duty. Or this thing with me working on the ship. Me! Usually she just gives it up when I point out how dumb it all is, but sometimes it’s like she’s just so damn stubborn it makes me crazy. Like this wedding thing! All that stuff’s chick stuff, you know. Not like I care. I’m going back in the hold anyway, three days or six, doesn’t matter. And it’s not like I don’t care about her, it’s just…I don’t care what color artificial flower they grow to put in my buttonhole, and I don’t care if I have a buttonhole, I just want it over with, you know?”

He paused and looked over at Jim, which seemed to imply for the first time that some response was needed or indeed wanted. Jim was fidgeting with the glass of almost-beer in his hand, just to have something to do to work out the frustrations that were boiling up inside him. Did Roy really not realize how good he had it with Pam, or how much he worked (apparently intentionally, if naively not understanding quite what he did) to crush her? Did he really think that time with Pam was worthless if it came with the occasional addition of Captain Michael Scott? Because Jim was quite willing to reassure him of just how wrong he was about that…

Only maybe he wasn’t wrong. Because when push came to shove, Pam had decided to be with this man, and not with him. Apparently time under Michael Scott didn’t count, because if it had, wouldn’t she have reacted differently when he’d told her he loved her? Not necessarily jumping into his arms (he’d already gone through all the variations of how dumb that idea had been) but at least not being quite so shocked?

So Jim had no idea how to respond to Roy, because he could kind of see the logic of what he was saying, in the way that you can almost but never quite get to the speed of light in an Einsteinian universe—the logic seemed solid, but it kept receding as he looked at it. But he did know how he would feel if he were engaged to Pam (treacherous but delightful thought!) and so he had, at least, a response available to the last question Roy had asked, if not to the whole spiel.

“Yeah. Like, you’re marrying her, that’s what matters, not the details, right?” Because if he were marrying Pam (oh, if only he were!) he wouldn’t care. Sure, he’d want her to have everything she’d want, and he had some ideas of his own too (dangerous to admit, but true) but as long as the crucial facts were still in place—him, Pam, wedding, married—nothing else would truly be critical.

“Right!” For a moment, a horrifying but at the same time steadying moment, he thought he and Roy were on the same page. That even though he hated this man’s guts and envied him his life with a painful degree of emotion, they were at least united in their shared love of one woman, their shared belief that marrying Pam would be the most important moment in their respective lives—one when it happened in the natural course of things, the other in his fervent imagination.

But then Roy kept talking again.

“Like, why does she have to bother me with this shit? Why wake me up early? I had a good thing, man. I got Pammy on lockdown, right? And at the same time, I don’t gotta do nothing—I’m cold storage, right, so she can make it everything she wants and not bother me. Then we get married, we have a party, we have a wedding night” he waggled his eyebrows suggestively and Jim wondered for a moment where Roy Anderson got the idea that he, Jim Halpert, was the right guy to share lascivious thoughts about Pam Beesly with—not that he didn’t necessarily have them, but maybe they weren’t best shared with Roy “and then I’m off to cloud-cuckoo land again until we dock. Perfect. And now she and Ice go and wake me up three days early. Like, what the hell? Now I gotta kill three days onboard, awake, wasting my time.” He threw back the last of the rotgut and reached out his hand absentmindedly to order a refill from the machine. Suddenly he turned to Jim and his face brightened. “But hey, if I’m here, that means I got time for a bachelor party. Whaddya think, Halpert? Wanna get shitfaced and party our guts out? Sounds like a great time.”

“Yeah, sure.” Had Roy Anderson just asked him to his bachelor party?

“Great. Tell me where and when, man, and I’ll be there.” Roy started pouring the next drink down his throat with equal gusto to the first. “And if you want to get some entertainment…” he grinned at Jim. “Maybe that little hellion from astrogation…what’s her name?”

“Chief Astrogator Angela Martin. Stars to you.” Pam’s voice rang out across the Almanac and caused both Jim and Roy to jump, turn, and stare at her. How long had she been there, Jim wondered. What had she heard?

His question was at least partly answered by the next words out of her mouth, which should have overlapped with Roy’s loud “Pammy!” but were said in such a flat, crisp monotone that they seemed to shrug Roy’s words off as one would a spacesuit upon entering from an airlock. “But don’t worry. You won’t be needing that party.”

Jim stared at her, and then at Roy, who apparently hadn’t registered Pam’s crossed arms or the deadly calm of her voice, because he continued on as if nothing was wrong. “Why, you have a better idea?” He grinned at her and repeated the eyebrow wag he’d given Jim a few minutes ago.

“Yes, Roy.” Pam turned to Jim with exquisite politeness. “Lieutenant Halpert, can we have the room?”

She never calls me Lieutenant Halpert. Am I in trouble? “Yeah, sure.” He put down the beer and made for the exit. As he passed her she whispered “Thanks, Jim.” Maybe I’m not in as much trouble as I thought.

And then he was out in the corridor, leaning against the wall, and wondering if he ought to be heading somewhere else, anywhere else, on the ship. But he wasn’t. He was leaning, and he was waiting, and he would be damned if he was going to go anywhere until Roy and Pam were finished in that room.

When Roy had pushed his way into the Almanac, he’d shoved the automatic door hard enough that it hadn’t quite hissed closed, which had meant that Pam was able to slip into the room (apparently) unobserved. She wasn’t sure exactly how long she’d sat out in the hallway, but she didn’t think it had been that long—except that Roy was already midway into some kind of rant, drink in hand, so it had to have been at least a little while. She was shocked to see Jim sitting by Roy (she’d expected the Almanac to be empty) and so she came to a halt by the doorway, watching them both with worried eyes. Neither had seen her, because Roy was turned towards the far wall and Jim was half looking at him, half finding the ceiling fascinating. Seeing Jim made her heart flutter—when had it started doing that?—and seeing him looking so uncomfortable made her listen more carefully than she might otherwise have done to Roy’s little tirade. Usually she made it through his orations by setting her audio implants to skim for keywords (like her name) and mentally reviewing the day’s tasks until he ran out of steam. She felt vaguely guilty about this, but at the same time he so frequently went over the same old territory that wasn’t of any particular relevance to her (most often whether the Philly teams had won or lost whatever sport happened to be in season, and what he would do if he were in charge) that she didn’t think she’d have been able to stop herself from rolling her eyes without some kind of assistance.

She supposed, in retrospect (which was always so much clearer than things were in the moment, sadly) that this should have been a, if not the first, sign that she and Roy were not as well-matched as she’d always thought. She should have been consumed with guilt the first time she’d programmed that skimming function; instead, she’d felt proud that she’d managed to reuse one of the things Jim had taught her for a more practical purpose all by herself. Sure, he’d been using it to generate an AI that would respond to every time Dwight said “actually” by asking “are you sure?,” and she was using it to ignore her fiancé, but eh, dehydrated po-tay-to, dehydrated po-tah-to.

Now she was actually listening to Roy, and she was definitely not enjoying what she was hearing. She perked up when she heard him agree with Jim (well, actually, she perked up when she heard Jim talk about marrying her as if it were his highest ambition on—or more relevantly, off—Earth, but she remained perked when Roy agreed) but she was crushed by the logic behind his agreement. Sure, it was good that he wanted to marry her, but the reasons why were hardly flattering, and even as she heard him insist that he wanted to get past their wedding in order to be married to her (for whatever reason) she realized that she was engaged in exactly the opposite calculation: she had been focusing on their wedding in order to forget the fact that she would be married to him after it.

After all, he was going back into the Warehouse, wasn’t he? She’d be married, but she wouldn’t really have to deal with being married for years of subjective (let alone objective) time. Wasn’t that basically the same calculus that Roy was running, but in reverse? Why were they even getting married if each of them was thinking past the idea of actually being together in the here and now?

She was working up the courage, the mental space to tell Roy that when she heard him start joking about his bachelor party—and about Angela of all people. It brought her right back to that stupid day when Ensign Howard had accidentally (he said) caused an emergency shutdown by flash-irradiating all the food onboard at once and overwhelming the training ship’s radiation protection from the inside and they’d all had to stand outside the training facility playing silly games that Jim had come up with. When asked who he’d want to be trapped in an escape pod with in order to repopulate the human race, Roy hadn’t answered her, as she’d been confidently expecting, or even a joke answer like Jim’s (“Kevin, he’ll smuggle snacks with us, and I figure we’ll just need to discover how to reproduce asexually anyway if there’s only two humans left”—everyone, Kevin especially, had been roaring with laughter). No, he’d smirked and said Angela (albeit only after having to ask her name). It left Pam feeling devalued—even if she didn’t want him to only want her if she were the last woman left alive, she’d have preferred that he would want her to be the only woman alive if he had to be in that situation. And apparently this was a real thing, she was realizing—her fiancé had a thing for another woman onboard.

And just to make her even more annoyed, he couldn’t even be bothered to give her her proper title. It was one thing to call Pam herself Pammy—even if it annoyed her, he did have the legitimate excuse that he’d called her that for years—but it was another to take a(nother) highly qualified woman with an important title onboard and turn her into a purely sexual object. To say nothing of what Angela would think of being treated that way…before Pam could think about it she was interrupting, and it suddenly became the most important thing in the world to her to make clear to Roy Anderson right now exactly where he could put his history of disrespect and neglect.

But she wasn’t him. She wasn’t going to do this in public. And as such she needed him alone. So she asked Lieutenant Halpert as politely as possible to clear out. And she asked him as “Lieutenant Halpert,” not Jim, not even Halpert, because this needed to be about her and Roy, not about her and Jim (for all that every thought against Roy came with its own matching reason why Jim—Jim who loved her, who respected her, who planned her the perfect wedding to the wrong man—was exactly as right as Roy was wrong for her). She bent that rule enough to let Jim (who had a vaguely frightened look on his face as he exited) know that she appreciated his quick acquiescence with a little “Thanks, Jim” and then she was all business again.

But of course Roy couldn’t make this easy by shutting up for once. Instead he was talking—but Pam was done with listening.

“No, Roy. We need to talk, but right now that means I need to talk. And you need to listen.” Her voice was flat, unnatural—but this was like pulling off a band-aid or jettisoning one part of a ship to save the rest. You had to do it quickly, efficiently, and without getting bogged down in the details of what, exactly, you were doing. And the thing was, it worked. Roy’s words ground to a halt, and he stared at her, glass in hand.

For some reason that damn glass offended her, and she walked over, took it out of his hand, and pushed it into the recycler. Standing at her full height (and realizing that after months in low-G, she was actually taller than she’d been, while Roy, who had been horizontal in the Warehouse, hadn’t grown, so she actually came up to his chin) she forced eye contact.

“Roy, this isn’t working. I don’t think it had been for a long time before we started this journey, actually, but the last few months without you have taught me I can be my own woman. More than that. They’ve taught me I need to be that. I can’t be with you anymore. That’s just not me anymore.” She nodded, firmly. “That’s all I wanted to say. I’m sorry, Roy.”

He goggled at her, and she turned to go. His arm snaked out to grab hers, and instinctively she slapped down and forced it away. He was unused to the lower G on shipboard and stumbled, and she took a few steps away before his voice caused her to turn around again and face him.

“Goddammit, Pammy, if that’s how you feel, how come you agreed to marry me?”

She sighed, and tried hard to remember that for him that was only a few days ago at most. She’d been without him for months, but he hadn’t been away from her for the same time, subjectively, and she owed him at least some explanation. She suddenly felt a surge of pity for him, and realized that pity could never replace love. Not that she didn’t love him—she’d always love him a little, because he was her first love—but she definitely wasn’t in love with him, and she didn’t see that changing anytime soon.  She smiled sadly and shrugged.

“I guess for the same reason you insist on calling me Pammy. Because I was to used to it to change.”

He stared at her and suddenly she saw his whole face crumple and the tears begin to flow. That was how she knew that something had actually gotten through to him—he was reacting with something other than the knee-jerk anger and frustration that she knew all too well. She floated over to the bar and grabbed a towel, then handed it to him.

“For the tears.” She struggled to find the right way to express it. “They don’t fall the way they did in full G. I’m really sorry, Roy.”

“But, Pammy…I mean, Comms?” He visibly corrected himself. “That’s what you want me to call you, right? Can’t we fix this? Make it work again?” He looked down at her hopefully, but blenched again as she shook her head.

“I’m sorry, Roy. I…I’ll talk to Ice. I’m sure she’d be happy to keep you up for the extra three days, or send you back down, depending on what you want. But I don’t think we should see each other anymore. I’m just not the woman who agreed to marry you anymore. And I can’t see myself getting back there.”

She glanced at the hatch, which had mercifully slid closed. I can see myself going in a very different direction, she thought, thinking of a different man she’d seen crying in front of her only…was it really yesterday? And she couldn’t help but smile a little to herself to realize that her very different reactions to their tears were such a strong indicator of how she actually felt about them both, even though one had been her fiancé and the other officially nothing but a crewmate. She could comfort Roy, give him a towel, keep talking to him because he’d become a familiar stranger; Jim was too important to her for her to be able to watch him cry.

Roy must have seen her glance, and maybe he wasn’t quite as oblivious to her as she had thought because he immediately guessed something of what she was thinking. “Is this because of Halpert?”

“No, Roy,” she said. “It’s because of me.”

“But you do have feelings for him, don’t you.” It wasn’t a question. “The way he looked at you…I always knew it.” He was working himself into a rage, she could see.

“No, Roy, it…”

“Are you really going to say you never did anything with Halpert?” He glared at her.

She hesitated. On the one hand, she could see Roy pushing back into the more familiar territory of anger and she was loathe to give him fuel for that unhealthy a reaction; on the other, she did want a clean break, and that meant total honesty.

“I didn’t.” She reached a hand out. “I turned him down, Roy.”

“So he did proposition you. I’m gonna kill him.” He started to push off towards the hatch and she found herself interposing her body between him and the hatch.

“You are not,” she snapped. “What happened here has to do with you and me, Roy. No one else.” She poked him in the chest. “And you are not going to get out of acknowledging what I’ve said to you by putting the blame on Lieutenant Halpert. We’re done, Roy.”

“Fine.” He glared down at her but something about her eyes must have cowed him because he couldn’t meet them for more than a moment before glancing away. He pushed off towards the other hatch into the Almanac instead. “Screw this. I’m going back to the Warehouse. And Comms” he said the word like it was a curse. “If I ever see you again, it’ll be too damn soon.”

She sighed as he passed through the hatch. That hadn’t gone as well as she’d hoped, but she had to admit it had gone a lot better than she’d feared. And if he was going to go back on ice…there were worse things, she had to admit.

Now that she’d dealt with Roy, of course, she knew she had to deal with Jim—and if she knew him, which she was pretty sure she did, he had given her the room like she’d asked, but he hadn’t gone one foot further than he’d had to outside.

Strangely—or perhaps, given it all, not so strangely—she found herself looking forward to the encounter. She didn’t think it was quite right to jump straight into something with Jim, at least not until Roy had either worked his head of steam off or actually gone back into the Warehouse. But looking back on the last few months with Jim, she was pretty sure this wasn’t just a rebound. She was ready. If she was honest with herself, she’d been ready for quite a while, because she’d been relying on Lieutenant Jim Halpert exactly as her mother had suggested she should: exactly like, she thought, she ought to have relied on Roy back when he was her fiancé.

Back when. That was a freeing thought, and on the strength of it she pushed off towards the hatch behind which (she was sure) Jim was waiting. It felt symbolic, putting Roy’s exit literally behind her and floating off towards Jim. But beyond the symbolism, it also felt right: like for the first time since Jim had told her he loved her, she was on the right track.

Jim lounged against the corridor wall and amused himself by attempting to imagine what the same corridor would look like in zero-G, when he could choose any orientation. Would it be funnier if the door was in the floor or on the ceiling? How would it feel to be upside down? Because right now he felt pretty damn upside down; he couldn’t be sure what was going on with Pam (though he thought it had to be something good—for him that was, in that he thought it was bad for Roy, and he was afraid possibly not good for Pam either). He wasn’t sure what his place in her life was, although he’d be damned if it wasn’t going to at least be “best friend.” Hopefully more.

But he couldn’t count on that. He would just have to focus on being the best friend to her that he could be—after all, she was definitely aware by now of how he felt about her, and he didn’t think she’d forget that quickly. So he tried to keep his heart-rate down, and appear relaxed. Because if he appeared calm, maybe, somehow, he’d be calm. And that would be a nice change.

Try as he might, though, his heart-rate spiked back up as the door started to open. For a fleeting moment he worried that Roy was about to step through the door and deck him—but before he could even move off the wall he realized that was not the case. It was Pam stepping out of the Almanac, datasleeve to her face as she finished dictating some kind of message.

“…said he was going back, so he might be joining you. Comms out.” She bounced over toward him—literally bounced, pushing herself off the far wall and turning on a dime to stand in front of him. “Hi Jim.”

He cleared his throat. “Uh, hey Pam.” His treacherous hand slid up behind the back of his head to rub at his neck.

She mimicked his gesture. “What’s up with this, Jim?”

His hand stilled. “What?”

She grinned. “Come on Halpert. What’s with the nervous tic? Afraid I’m going to bite?”

One of the problems with having told Pam how he felt about her was that now he was apparently incapable of shutting off the overactive part of his brain that thought about her sexually. It wasn’t like he had never thought about Pam that way. He’d spent a lot of time thinking about her that way in fact. Pretty much every night in his berth. Alone. A lot of nights before they took off on this journey, too. But he had always been able to shut it off when they were together, or at least shut it down enough to make sure that he never said or did anything out of line. Now, though, he couldn’t help but think about the ways, times, and places he would most definitely not object to her choosing to bite him, and now he was blushing and he still hadn’t said anything and this was going to be so awkward.

Was she…laughing at him?

She was definitely laughing at him.

It was not helping the blush.

Well, with embarrassment as with black holes, the only way out was through. “Just wondering how you’re doing.”

“Honestly, Jim?” She twirled in a little circle as her datasleeve pinged with an incoming message (which she ignored). She reached out to touch his arm to stop her angular momentum and stood still in front of him again. It felt like his skin burned where she touched it, though his suit’s feedback informed him this was merely a psychological manifestation because his ambient temperature was unchanged. He focused instead on her face, which broke into a gigantic grin. “I’m great.”

He stared into her eyes. “Really?” He hoped his voice hadn’t cracked. It probably had. Just his luck.

“Really, truly.” For a brief moment he was terribly worried that she and Roy had patched everything up—after all, the last time he’d seen her look this happy was when she heard that Roy had set a date. What if all this happiness was just because she’d found a way to excuse Roy’s boorishness yet again, and had decided that getting married was, once again, the most exciting thing in the world. Something of this must have showed in his face, because she tightened her grip on his arm and moved her head slightly to ensure eye contact. “Do you know why I’m happy, Jim?”

“No?” He hadn’t meant it as a question, but apparently his voice wasn’t actually doing what he wanted it to do anymore.

“Come on, Jim.” She reached out and grabbed his other arm; it was all he could do to stop from pulling her into his arms. “You know me better than anyone.” She laughed. “Ask my mom.”

“What?” This was definitely a confusing conversation, and he wasn’t sure he would have been up for a more straightforward conversation, given the way her close proximity was affecting him.

“Never mind. Tell you later.” She smiled again, not a grin this time but the kind of wide smile he mentally associated with her bending over a sheet of paper, sketching or coloring something. “Just guess, Jim. Guess why I’m happy.”

“Uh…you really, really like bad beer?”

“Jim.”

“Fine…” He started to tread lightly in the direction he was most afraid of. Best to know the worst first. But something held him back from being too direct—probably the months and years of beating around the bush before yesterday’s ‘I’m in love with you.’ “You’re happy because you’re getting something you want.”

“Right!” She squeezed his arm again, both arms, actually this time, and he was beginning to worry what it might be like if he ever did get to do anything more intensely physical with her, because just that little squeezing contact was enough to make him feel like he was having a heart attack. “I get to be free.”

“Free?” Did she mean what he thought she meant.

“Free.” She nodded, and suddenly (he was never sure, even later, exactly how—but then again, movement in low-G was often surprising to the human eye, evolved as it was for full-G maneuvers in which mass played such a big role) she was cuddled up against his chest.

He found it very difficult to pay attention to her words with her right there, but something told him they were probably crucially important, so he worked hard to keep his mind off her body and on her mouth. Or her words—because focusing on her mouth was if anything more dangerous to his ability to keep his mind on what she was saying.

Apparently Pam was in a reflective mood as she nestled into his arms, ignoring another ping on her datasleeve. “I think this had been a long time coming, honestly.” She shrugged, which produced a very interesting sensation that Jim had a very difficult time not responding to. “And not just because he was down in the Warehouse while I was up here. Even before that he…had changed. Or maybe it’s more accurate to say that I had. He’s still the same guy he was when we got out of the crèche, or maybe a little worse for wear—after all, when you don’t change for that long, sometimes the world changes around you and it makes the things you do and say seem different. And I changed with that world, or maybe even changed beyond it, thanks to you and the rest of the crew. I became not just Pammy, not just even Pam, but Comms. I got a purpose here, while Roy just got a sleeper car to a new planet. So I don’t feel sad, even if I feel like I ought to. I just feel free. And I like that. I like that I get to be me, no Roy, no obligation, just me.”

She leaned her head against his shoulder while Jim tried to process what she was telling him. On the one hand, she was definitely broken up with Roy. Score one for Team Jim. But on the other…she liked being free. “No obligation.” She didn’t want him. Score negative million for Team Jim.

But she was still snuggling into his arms. He wasn’t sure where that left the score. But it left Jim Halpert in a pleasant muddle.  One that he should probably just enjoy, but then again, when had he been good at keeping his mouth shut? Besides every time he’d thought of telling Pam how he thought before last night, that is. But he was always a sucker for a joke—and he could tell that Pam was waiting for some kind of response.

“I’m happy for you.” And he was. He’d made up his mind to be happy for her even if she married Roy—he couldn’t help but be happy for her now that she wasn’t, even if that meant she didn’t want to be with him. But he couldn’t stop himself from pushing, just a little. He supposed he’d evolved past just keeping his mouth shut when it came to Pam. “So…I suppose that means you won’t be needing that bridal room after all, huh?”

“Not yet, anyway.” She was still leaning against his shoulder. “But it was a nice gesture.” She suddenly whirled in his arms to face him, a giant grin across her face. “Ohmigod, we should totally use that tech for a prank on Dwight!”

“Way ahead of you, Beesly.” He described the plan he’d had in place before deciding to use it for her wedding instead. She nodded along, still not moving from between his arms, and bounced with glee when he mentioned the possibility of bringing in the walls in previously unpartitionable space so slowly that Dwight wouldn’t notice them coming up. The bouncing was…rather distracting, but he managed to keep describing the prank. “And then…”

“We drop all the walls!”

“Exactly.” He smiled down at her.

“And we get Captain Scott…”

“…who won’t have been paying attention to any of this, naturally…”

“…to tell him that there never were any walls in the first place.” She hopped up and kissed his cheek. “Have I told you recently that you’re amazing?”

“Uh…not recently, no.”

“You’re amazing.”

“Thanks.” He was blushing again.

“My pleasure.”

Her datasleeve let forth another plaintive ping, and he couldn’t help himself. “You ever planning to get one of those, or…”

“Oh, it’s just Ice.”

“So? Are you, or are you not, a communications officer, Comms?”

“Since when do you call me Comms, Lieutenant?”

He shrugged. “First time for everything, right? Why does Ice keep pinging you?”

This time, she blushed. “Probably because I told her Roy and I broke up and he was looking to go back in the Warehouse and then hung up on her.”

He stared at her. “You hung up on Ice after dropping that juicy tidbit?”

“…Yeah.”

“You should probably answer.” She looked a question at him and he shrugged. “She’ll only keep pinging you if you don’t.” He finally gave in to what his instincts had been screaming at him to do ever since she touched him and folded her in his arms. “I’ll be right here while you do, for moral support.”

Pam relaxed into Jim’s arms. This felt right. This felt safe. How was it that they’d never done this before?

Oh, right. She’d just broken up with Roy—and Jim was too much an officer and a gentleman to be cuddling her while she was with someone else. Just as she had been too wrapped up in that relationship to acknowledge her own need for him. What was it her mother had said? “You can always count on Lieutenant Halpert for whatever you need.” Even her mother had been able to see it.

Well, what did she need?

She needed Jim.

It really was that simple, she’d realized. Oh, she needed professional and personal fulfillment, but Jim would support her on the way to that—and she was closer to achieving it in the last few months with him around than she ever had been. And she had needed to be free of Roy, and of all the various neuroses and complexes she’d accumulated around that relationship. She’d needed to rebuild herself as something—someone—other than Pammy Beesly-soon-to-be-Anderson. But she’d done that. She’d done it herself (with a little help from her friends over the course of the last few months of spaceflight). She’d become this Fancy New Person, “Comms,” and she’d found the inner strength she’d needed to tell Roy that it was over.

And now she needed Jim. Because while Comms was free, part of being free was being able to choose what you wanted to do. And she definitely wanted to do Lieutenant Jim Halpert.

Ahem.

Maybe it was just the presence of his arms around her, but that was feeling more and more likely with each passing moment. Given that he’d confessed he loved her—scratch that, was in love with her, and could you come up with a clearer, more specific declaration that it wasn’t just brotherly love if you tried?—just yesterday, and he’d showed her today the amazing plans he’d made just for her for her wedding day, she was pretty sure it was more than just possible. But she knew Jim, and she knew she’d have to find a very clear way to express it to him: clearer even than “I can’t,” because she had to overcome the wariness he was probably feeling given that she’d managed to reject him just last night. Still, she figured, telling him about Roy probably helped. As did forcibly insinuating herself into his arms, as she’d just more or less done. She’d just have to find the words to follow up on those actions.

Speaking of words, he’d just pretty much told her to answer Kelly’s call, so she might as well do it.

“Comms here.”

“OHMIGOD COMMS! I KNOW YOU DID NOT JUST HANG UP ON ME AFTER TELLING ME YOU AND ROY BROKE UP.” She was grateful for the volume adjustment on her datasleeve, which meant that Ice didn’t actually blow out her eardrums. She glanced up at Jim—nice angle, this—and decided against switching the call to her suit’s earbuds. Instead she winked up at him and shrugged, trying her best to silently convey the thought “this is why I didn’t answer before.”

He grinned down at her. Message received, she supposed.

“Sorry, Ice. I had something to take care of.” She raised an eyebrow at Jim, who stared blankly back at her. Message only partly received, apparently.

Kelly, of course, had taken that little bit of information and run with it, fortunately at a slightly lower volume.

“Ohmigod! Was he still with you? Did you have to push him out of the compartment? How did this happen? Seriously, Comms, I’m dying down here, I need details! Ohmigod, is this why you had me wake him up? Was it because you wanted to break up with him? You should have told me! I could have, like, dosed him with one of those tranquility drugs or something, or maybe a truth serum! Seriously, there’s like a billion bottles down here, there’s got to be something that would have made it easier for you. But why did you break up with him? Was it because of the drinking? His blood-alcohol content was still super high when we loaded him into the Warehouse, you know. Like, I’m not really supposed to check those things or anything, but it’s on the screen, and it’s not like I’m not going to look, you know?  Anyway, you are so much better off now, I bet, though it’s sad you’re not going to have the wedding. Can I still be a bridesmaid? I know that doesn’t really make much sense when you’re not going to be a bride, but I had the best little modification planned for my suit and Ryan was just going to die when he saw it and I can’t bear to not wear it now. I can’t believe you’re not getting married! We’ll have to have a girls night out! Or I guess in, it’s not like we can get off the ship or anything, but you know what they say—after enough drinks in the Almanac it’s not like you can tell! We need to celebrate your freedom! Just don’t go after Ryan, he’s all mine. You can have Toby though. His office is across from mine and he’s always making the weirdest faces. Ohmigod! Roy’s here! I have to go! Call me! We’ll get drinks!”

And the line shut off.

Pam giggled. She’d been doing a lot of laughing, actually, in the last twenty-four hours, which seemed odd given that she’d also done so much crying when Jim had told her how he felt. But after the tears there was really nothing left but laughter, and everything was just so absurd and despite it all, she realized, she was just so happy. Because something about hearing it from Kelly (which meant that everyone else on the ship would know in a matter of a single shift, if she knew anything about shipboard gossip) meant that it was no longer in her control; no longer her problem. She and Roy were done, and she could just move on. A little part of her, the part that still loved Roy for all the years they’d been together, was glad to hear that he’d actually made his way to Cryogenics—not just because if he was back in the Warehouse she didn’t have to feel like she was disrespecting him by telling Jim how she felt, but also because it meant he hadn’t gotten lost or hurt on the way there, or decided to just hole up with an automat and drink. He’d be OK in the Warehouse. And he wasn’t her responsibility there—literally, he was Ice’s, and morally, he was his own.

She looked up at Jim as the giggle fit faded away and was surprised to see he wasn’t joining in with her laughter. That was one of the things she loved about him—yes, she could admit it to herself now, she loved it about him—that he was so open to her moods. So why wasn’t he laughing now?

He gently disentangled her from his arms and set her down on the solid flooring of the corridor. In her surprise,  she let him, even as every fiber of her being was screaming “no.” What was going on?

He smiled sadly at her—she’d never noticed that he could look like Toby before—and finally spoke.

“Ice is right.” He gave her arm a squeeze and released it. “You should go enjoy your freedom. No obligations, right?”

“I was!” What was his problem?

“Then I’ll leave you to it.” He turned to go.

Suddenly it clicked for her. He knew she was referring to Roy as an obligation, that she was savoring her freedom from him. But he thought she meant any relationship; that her freedom was from having to consider someone else, rather than from having to let her thoughts be dominated by what Roy wanted to do. That wasn’t it at all. She was free, yes, but freedom wasn’t freedom if it didn’t include the option to share it with someone else. And not just someone else: Jim.

She grabbed hold of his hand before he could walk away and used it to propel her upwards. Thank God for low-G she thought as she rose above her tiptoes to the level of his face, then used his arm to stabilize herself. He had frozen in place—all the better for her to maneuver around him.

She stared into his eyes. His head jerked, as if eye contact with her was difficult, and she reached out a hand to move him back into eye contact with her. She left her hand on the side of his face, stroking it.

“But if you leave, I won’t get to do this.” She leaned forward slowly and kissed him.

For a moment he didn’t respond, and she was worried she’d somehow misjudged the situation, just like she’d accused him of doing the night before. But then his arms slid around her, and she let her legs slide around him, and they were kissing for a moment that seemed to stretch into infinity, like a beam of light wrapping itself around the event horizon of a black hole. It might have been a second, a minute, an hour: she wasn’t aware and she didn’t want to be. After that undefined, limitless time they pulled back and she could see his face was heated. She was sure her own was too.

But he was smiling, and she knew from the ache in her lips that she was also doing that as well.

“Well,” he said. “We wouldn’t want you to miss out on that, would we?”

She shook her head no, then realized it was probably a good idea to say something out loud. This is Jim, she thought to herself. Just be honest.

“What would be the point of being free if I couldn’t do that?”

“I don’t know. Maybe having no cares, no worries, no obligations?”

She pecked him lightly on the lips again, and had to restrain herself from another round of more intensive kissing. “You aren’t a worry or an obligation.” Another peck. “But I do care for you.”

“Not just about me?”

“Not just about you. For you. I love you, Jim.”

This time he definitely kissed her, but otherwise the effect was much the same as that first time—only neither of them pulled back until her datasleeve pinged again.

“You gonna get that?”

“Not on your life, Halpert.”

Low-G was a very good thing, she decided. Otherwise, she’d end up with a crick in her neck from leaning up for all this kissing. Not that it wouldn’t have been worth it, but still—it was probably better when they were the same height. And if it wasn’t? They’d have plenty of opportunities to find out.