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.