Pam wasn’t entirely sure what it was she was seeing here. Oh, it wasn’t like she’d been struck blind (a risk, Lieutenant Schrute was somewhat overly happy to remind the crew without being asked, of staring too closely into a star—though as she and Jim were always happy to remind him in turn, only if you were within actual local visual observation distance of the star, which they would not be of any known celestial object for most of the rest of their journey). It was just that she was so underprepared for Jim to have done this—for him to have put all this thought into this—while she was under the impression he was giving her the cold shoulder. Yes, she thought, he probably should have asked first, though she supposed this might constitute asking; after all, it wasn’t as if she had shown up on her wedding day only to find these preparations in place. There was still time for her to tell him off, tell him this wasn’t appropriate, he wasn’t responsible for this, her wedding day was hers to plan thank you very much. Strangely, though, she didn’t find those words crowding to pour out her mouth. Instead, she was consumed with what seemed like trivialities: “how did you do this?” or “I didn’t know this was possible,” “you were actually paying attention when I showed you how to make patterns with the bots?” or “how many bots does this design take, anyway?” She was afraid to ask him what his plans for Roy’s room were, partly because she was afraid he’d ruin the perfection of what he’d done with the decoration of her room by doing something crass or crude with Roy’s, and partly because she was afraid of exactly the opposite: that somehow this caring, ridiculous, inspired man in front of her would have found the perfect medium, some way of creating a room that simultaneously spoke to Roy’s interests and was entirely appropriate to the aesthetic of the wedding as she’d been planning it (and as he’d confirmed he was paying close attention to while showing her his plans). She wasn’t sure which would be worse, and she was entirely sure she didn’t dare find out which was true.
She was silent because she had, not no idea of what to say or how to say it, but simply too many ideas at once, and no clear way of prioritizing them. She knew what she felt she ought to say, she knew what she wanted to say, but none of them would come out. Instead, after letting Jim babble on for far too long (and a distinct part of her in the back of her brain couldn’t help but think that someone needed to teach him when he should just shut up and let her process something: he needed serious practice just staying still after dropping big news) she let forth the single most inane observation rattling around in her head, for lack of a better.
“So, um, Jim?”
“Yes?” He instantly snapped to attention from wherever his flailing had led him mentally, turning all his attention to her with a remarkable intensity that almost unnerved her again.
“You, uh, do know how many wings butterflies have, right?”
“What?” He glanced back at the model, then started visibly counting…and blushed, hard, when he passed two, moved on to four and continued to six. It was cute, she thought. “Uh…” he rubbed the back of his neck nervously. “I don’t supposed I could convince you these were some alien analogue of butterflies that evolved under particularly wing-friendly conditions on a distant planet?”
She shook her head. “Nuh-uh.”
“What if I told you it was the effect of forming a cocoon in zero-G?” The red was fading from his face, but his hand was still nervously working the back of his neck like he’d lost the keys to the shuttlebay back there and needed to find them before Captain Scott got back on shift. “Or that they’re really examples of the rare Malagascan Butterfly that has disjointed wing sets due to an endemic parasite?”
She surprised herself by starting to laugh. It wasn’t the hysterical, absurd, laugh-because-you’ll-cry-otherwise laughter that she’d found herself slipping into in the observation dome. It wasn’t even the normal laughter she indulged in when Jim made a particularly funny comment, or pulled a face, or got Dwight to believe in something absurd—like, say, the parasitical experience of Malagascan butterflies. No, it was catharsis, she realized: the kind of laughter that came as a result of her mind and body coming to the joint conclusion that things would be OK, and that it was alright to indulge herself. Because Jim could still make her laugh. They could still do this. She could give him an opening, and he could run right through it, and they could be a team.
The idea of “giving Jim an opening” stuck in her mind, and she found herself fighting a blush. Where had that come from? In order to avoid the thought, she reached out and patted him on the shoulder, instantly freezing when she realized she had initiated physical contact (and when had that ceased to be something she did? Was it before or after he confessed he was in love with her and turned her life upside down?). She forced herself not to overreact, not to pull her hand away or apologize. Instead she patted him once more, forcefully, and found the strength to say what she had been going to say before the thought of touching him loomed so large in her mind.
“No, but I don’t mind if you tell Dwight that when he sees them.”
For a moment he grinned at her like old times, and the thought “that’s my Jim” flitted through her mind, small enough and light enough that she couldn’t pin it down and force it to admit where it had come from, or what it meant. She shook herself and continued.
“I love it. This is lovely, Jim. I can’t believe you did this for me.” She took a breath and looked him in the eyes. It was hard, partly because he was half-ducking his head in a way that made it actually physically difficult to force him into eye contact, and partly because she could still see the ghost of the night before lurking in there: the little expression in the back of his eyes that she now had to admit she’d been seeing for months without putting a name to it, the one that now served to remind her how he felt about her. That he loved her.
But meet his eyes she did, and forced herself to ask the question she needed the answer to more than any other. “We OK?”
His eyes flitted away from hers towards the model for a moment, then refocused on hers, and he nodded, slowly. “Always.”
“OK.” She made herself smile—and found it actually wasn’t as hard as she thought. “Then I have some duties to attend to.” She realized her hand was actually still lying on his shoulder and gave it another pat. “Not all of us get to go off-duty when we get off-shift, after all.” Not that she didn’t usually shirk her additional responsibilities as communications officer: filing Captain Scott’s repeated (and pointless at interstellar distance) requests for Admiral Levinson-Gould to visit the ship herself for a “private inspection” was not actually her idea of a good time. But she needed some space, some distance from Jim, to process the last two days’ worth of revelations and discoveries, and she figured catching up on her more pointless duties was a good excuse.
“Yeah, right, Comms” he said, and she couldn’t stop the flash of disappointment across her face as he called her by her job rather than her name. She supposed it was only fair—after all, she’d told him just last night that they needed to have a more professional and less personal relationship, so what did she expect?—but it still hurt. He must have noticed (when did he fail to notice anything, she wondered?) because when she was about to duck through the connecting bulkhead into the rest of the ship he stopped her with his voice again. “Hey, Beesly?”
“Yes?” She had to grab the hold bar to stop herself from slamming into the wall, she turned so fast.
He wasn’t grinning, but something in his voice almost sounded like a caress. “Don’t forget to send me anything embarrassing in the captain’s letters.” Now he was grinning. “Besides his obvious obsession with the admiral, of course.”
“Sure thing.” She gave him a mock salute and ducked into the corridor and hurried down the length of the ship towards primary, where she wasn’t technically on-shift, but where she could most easily deal with Captain Scott’s lengthy and self-involved “correspondence.”
But she was, apparently, not destined to get that filing done today, because halfway down the corridor she was intercepted by a flying Ice missile. Kelly gave Pam the biggest hug (to be fair, she always gave the biggest hugs—being embraced by Kelly was active practice for being entrapped by the gravitational pull of a black hole, Pam sometimes thought—but this was a particularly large one) and dragged her into the cryogenic control chamber, chatting merrily the whole time.
“Ohmigod Comms, I’ve been looking for you! You slipped away so quickly after shift that I didn’t get to ask you! I got Kevin to run some numbers, and I have a super-mega-important question for you! And I just want you to know, Pam, you really owe me for this one, because he spent like the whole time staring right at my boobs, even though you, like, can’t even see them in this suit! I mean, I know they keep telling us that they’re all designed for sudden impacts and they’re all air-tight in case we run out of oxygen and have to recycle it, but don’t you think they could at least have done a better job of making them, like, interesting to look at? I mean, when they tell you they’re going to put you in a form-fitting jumpsuit, wouldn’t you think that that would be a good look? I mean, not for you, obviously, but for me? But then they insist on all this extra padding and you know how they say a camera adds like ten pounds? I swear a regulation jumpsuit adds like fifteen! And I was going to replace them all with these, like, perfect suits I’d gotten from a friend of a friend who totally makes fashion jumpsuits for celebrities—she made one for like Britney’s second cousin, and you know those two are just like that—but then Toby found out and he made me put them back. Can you believe that? I mean, it’s like, sure, I want to live in the event of a crash and all that, but do you really call this living? I mean, how is Ryan supposed to notice how cute I am if I’m in this old thing? And, and, don’t even get me started on the color. Like, I put in this perfectly reasonable request for a white jumpsuit, and when they asked why, I told them it was an emergency, and it totally was, because I look absolutely rocking in white, and they had the nerve to say that only command staff get to wear white! Do I look to you like someone who doesn’t get to command? I run my own section! And I am not an easy person to manage, let me tell you! Doesn’t it just seem fair that if they’re going to make me wear this like total bag, I should at least get to pick the color? Doesn’t it, Comms? Seriously?”
Pam gently disentangled herself from the enthusiastic embrace of the cryogenics officer. “Sure, Ice! I’m sure they should let you wear whatever you want. But…what was it you wanted to see me about?”
“Oh right! I got Kevin, before he was staring at my boobs—OK, maybe partly while he was doing it, but that’s not the point anyway, though why it is that Ryan won’t stare at me the way Kevin does—not that I want him to stare that way you know but I swear that boy wouldn’t notice if I wandered around naked—do you think I should wander around naked?—anyway, I got him—Kevin, not Ryan—to run our energy, food, and water budgets for the next three days, and I can totally afford to revive Roy today even though I already revived Madge too instead of the day before your wedding! And I thought, ‘Oh! Comms will love this!’ and I was totally going to do it, and then I realized it’s like totally bad luck for the groom to see the bride before the wedding—like, I know it’s really all about the dress, but I wasn’t sure how you felt about it, and I wasn’t actually sure how much you cared, since it’s not like your dress is all that flattering, but then I thought I should just ask you! And then you weren’t there, and I was just going to go do it and then I ran into you and it’s just fate, you know? So what do you think?”
Pam stared at Kelly. “Are you telling me we have the energy budget to wake up Roy right now?”
“Yes!” squealed her friend, bouncing on the balls of her feet, which made her look vaguely like a pogo stick in low-G. “So, should I?”
Pam lowered herself into one of the crash couches in the cryogenics chamber and let her brain grapple with the question. Should she ask Kelly to wake up Roy? What would she say to him? What would she do with him?
And when had her thoughts about Roy slipped from “what would they do together” to “what would she do with him”?
She knew that yesterday’s Pam would have jumped at the idea and had Ice defrost her fiancé on the spot. She’d have made plans about how Roy would help with the last-minute preparations for their wedding, rejoiced in the chance to share her bunk with him, and been relieved to have him with her after the stress of waiting alone for their wedding day.
Or at least she’d have told herself all of those things. Because all around the periphery of the idea of waking Roy up were the whispers in her head that said that none of that was true. That she’d actually been quietly relieved that Roy was not going to wake up until their actual wedding day dawned: that she wouldn’t have to undergo his begging for “last unmarried sex” or wait for him to get back from spending a bachelor party getting hammered on jet-fuel hootch in some cargo bay somewhere or hear him tell her “whatever you want” as she asked him to please, just have some opinions on some basic elements of their wedding so that she didn’t have to shoulder the whole load. It was easier to plan the thing herself—well, except for Jim’s help—because Roy was in the Warehouse frozen cold than to do the same because Roy just wasn’t interested. It was nicer to sleep alone because Roy wasn’t awake or, technically, alive-as-we-know-it than because he was out with the boys. It was better to worry about the color of the decorations or the chance of Captain Scott saying something inappropriate than about whether Roy would show up sober—or even show up.
And all of those thoughts had been there before Jim Halpert turned her world upside down. Before he told her he loved her, but also before he showed it to her, turning the skills she’d always known he’d had (no one could hack and prank Lieutenant Schrute like that without real ability and drive) to her direct benefit—and his own discontent, she realized. It was before she’d heard her mother tell her that she could and should trust Jim; before she’d started wondering, or more accurately letting herself admit she was wondering, about what a wedding would be like with an engaged groom; one who didn’t have to be drunk, or marking his territory, to set a wedding date, one who was and wanted to be physically present with her, one who knew her well enough to know her favorite food and drink from the automat, her favorite animal, her favorite style of decoration even. All of those thoughts had been before she’d even let herself think beyond the binary question of to-Roy-or-not-to-Roy, a question that had frightened her in its stark binary. Not being with Roy was something she didn’t really know, not as an adult, and she now realized that reducing it to the mere negative “not Roy” had been a form of letting herself off the hook from thinking about all the positives that came with “yes Pam.”
But was this all just cold feet—hers, for once, not Roy’s? And was it fair to Roy to be thinking this way when he was not just not there to defend himself but actively sleeping the sleep of cryodeath beneath her feet? She couldn’t be sure about the first but she was definite on the second. No, it was not fair—to him or to her, because while he deserved a chance to defend himself, she deserved a chance to see him try, and to remember what was good about their relationship.
She looked up at the rare sight of a silent Kelly hovering above her seated form and wondered how long she’d been sitting there pondering the question. Well, there was no time like the present for an answer.
“Wake him up,” she said.
