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.