“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.