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.”