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Author's Chapter Notes:

Jim's head, only this time, he's awake. Set at the same time as the previous chapter with Pam, only Jim's POV this time.

Jim woke up to discover, to his dismay, that he’d slept for two whole hours. Two hours of Pam Beesly sitting out in the waiting room, waiting for him, and he’d wasted them on sleep. Of course, as the nurse reminded him when she peeked in to take his vitals and found him awake, that meant he must really need the sleep—certainly, he thought, he had never imagined spending the first full day after Pam told him she loved him sleeping. Or meeting her mother, come to that, although he had no regrets about having met Helene Beesly. She impressed him as the polar opposite of his own mother: where Betsy Halpert was the quiet calm center around which a maelstrom of Halpert energy whirled, the eye of the Halpert Hurricane, if you will, Helene Beesly struck him as the motivating force of the Beesly household, that which energized her comparatively passive family. It wasn’t that Pam was actually passive, he mused—after all, he’d seen her do absolutely brilliant things on her own initiative, both in pranks on Dwight and in her own life—but that she drew energy from those around her, and he could suddenly see why. Who could not when they had someone like Helene standing behind them from a young age? Of course, that had meant that when someone like Roy came, she drew negative energy from him. Jim frowned. He had already made a dozen resolutions not to be like Roy—here was another for him to make. He would strive to be a source of positive energy for Pam, or if he couldn’t do that, to tell her as much and not suck energy back out of her.

 

He wrenched his mind away from Roy—not the healthiest of thoughts, he knew—and back to Helene. She had seemed very eager to meet him…wait a minute, didn’t the Beeslys live two hours out of Scranton? Pam had said once that she never got to see her mother as much as she wanted because of how far away they were. Revise very to almost alarmingly. Though on the other hand, was it really alarming? Wasn’t it a good sign that Helene was so eager to meet him, so pleasant to him? But god, he must have been crazy to ask her all those aggressive, intrusive questions! Thank god it seemed she’d taken them in the spirit he’d offered them, as playful indications of how much he cared about Pam, not (as he now shuddered to realize they could have been taken) as the rude and meddling questions of someone who didn’t know what they were talking about and devalued her relationship to Pam. Of course she knew how good an artist her daughter was; where did he think she had gotten the initial encouragement before she met Roy? And there was the reason, he realized, that Helene had taken his questions in the right spirit. Roy had taken that confidence away from Pam; no degree of rudeness in support of Pam was going to register negatively with the Beeslys now. Still, he needed to do better. He owed it to Pam, and he really, really wanted her mother to like him.

 

He had a vision of Thanksgivings and Christmases Future, if Helene Beesly did not like him. No, definitely a situation to be avoided. He didn’t want to be the boyfriend…the fiancé…the husband someday…who had to dress up in a sweater vest and slacks just to try to deflect attention from his usual slovenly mistreatment of their daughter. Of course, he knew, he’d be the boyfriend dressed in a sweater and slacks because he liked it, but that was a different matter. He wasn’t going to let himself become someone who had to compensate with the Beeslys for the reasons he’d given them to dislike him. He was going to make them like him out of the gate, if he could do anything at all about it.

 

Thinking of family events brought his mind around to Larissa. Damn, he owed her. Big time. He’d been petrified when he’d realized how she’d hunted down Pam, on June 10 of all days. He was so glad he hadn’t known that was her plan in advance, because if he’d been conscious he’d have been going into cardiac arrest. The odds of her calling Pamela Anderson had been far too high for him to contemplate, and he wasn’t sure which would have been worse: Pam not coming because she was on her honeymoon with Roy, or Pam coming and sitting by his side while wearing another man’s wedding ring. Alright, he knew which was worse, and it was, as it always had been, the one where Pam was not with him. It was still a terrifying possibility, though, that she would have had the second ring on her hand while she held his. But Larissa had been right (as always, he grumped) to call, he realized. Even a married Pam would have helped him recover, even if she would have broken his heart further. And the Pam she’d found? The unmarried, in-love-with-him Pam who was out there in that waiting room? She was beyond words. He wondered what alternate universe Larissa had pulled her from through a black hole, because she was impossibly, wonderfully perfect. He owed Larissa more than even she knew—and from the glances and smirks she’d been sending his way, she knew a lot.

 

And she and Pam got along. Not that he’d ever doubted it, but my god, the opportunity to see it with his own eyes! He’d been too much of a coward to invite L over to the office…too afraid she’d see beyond what he’d already told her and his family over the phone and at family gatherings to the heart of the matter…the fact that Pam Beesly owned his life. And he hadn’t been sure if he could have taken it if she and Pam had gotten along as well as he’d thought they would while she was still dating Roy. To have Pam joking along with his sister, treating her like her own family, making in-jokes with her, while wearing Roy’s engagement ring would have been heartbreaking in its own right, because it would have been another glimpse of a world he couldn’t have.

 

Except he could. He lay back and smiled. Pam Beesly was waiting out in the waiting room for him, with Larissa-the-always-right keeping her company. He wondered when she’d find the pencils, then wondered again how Larissa always knew the right thing to do. He supposed he should take some credit for that—they’d been inseparable for years, after all, even if he had let her fall from a tree—but just like he couldn’t bring himself to actually think he had anything to do with Pam actually being out there, in love with him (it had to be divine providence of some kind, or a miracle at least), he also didn’t feel he could really place Larissa’s maturation at any door but hers. He’d just been lucky enough to be the big brother who got to see it.

 

And now, if he played his cards right, Pam would be the sister-in-law who got to see it too, someday.

Chapter End Notes:
Thank you all who have been reading and reviewing. This is now, I think, my most-read fic, and I appreciate each and every one of you.

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