1. Paper Crane 

Three days to Pam’s birthday, and everybody knows it. For the past seven days, someone’s been leaving these little paper cranes at her desk decorated with The Number, the number of days until she turns a year older. It’s something too sweet for her not to do a Kelly-like squeal. Meredith winces every time she hears something sound so happy, Angela pretends like she can’t hear, and Phyllis just turns and smiles.

On the first day it happened, at D-10, as Pam likes to say, Roy came in for lunch break and she showed him the crane. “Thanks for this,” she said, and held the little thing in the hollow of her palm. She’d been smiling all day and couldn’t control it. “I love it.”

Roy’d nodded and smiled at her, pretended that he had come in early and placed it on her desk, shakes off questions like “Where’d you learn to fold them?” and “How did you get them here?” like they’re nothing. But he knows it wasn’t him, and as days go by and they keep appearing, his eyes grow harder and colder as they wander across the office, searching for the smallest hint of guilt. He suspects Ryan for a while, but the kid doesn’t even look up when Pam squeals every morning or when he casually strides up and makes a joke about beating him up. Creed’s too crass to do something like this, Kevin’s a lazy fatass and Toby would’ve owned up after he stepped into his space, casually bunny-punching at the walls of his cubicle.

For his part, Dwight stays silent when Roy walks in and only nods when Pam squeals, but he’ll never tell whose desk he slides origami paper into each morning and who came up to him seven days before and asked for crane-folding lessons. He suspects, though, that Pam already knows that it isn’t Roy – she can hide her glances and keep her mouth shut all she wants, but Dwight sees her looking at Jim expectantly and angling the cranes on her desk, the little paper beaks pointing like fingers at the back of Jim’s neck.

~~~!~~~

 2. Stairwell 

Kelly tells Ryan: “Omigod, omigod, omigod, omigod, did you see?”

They are overheard by Stanley, who tells Kevin: “Stairwell.”

Who snickers, and promptly tells Creed: “Dude, he did it.”

Who tells Meredith in a whisper as he locks the Germ-X away for the fifth time: “Them.”

Who tells Phyllis by the water cooler: “Finally!”

Who sends an email to Bob Vance, Vance Refrigeration that reads: “I win. 50 bucks, darling.”

Which is intercepted by Dwight’s spyware on Vance’s mail server, and immediately thereafter, he raises triumphant fists over his head: “Success!”

Which is heard by Angela, who looks over the partition just in time –

To see Jim and Pam coming through the door together, and in her hurry little miss slutty receptionist buttoned her shirt off by one. It would bother Angela if Jim hadn’t done the same thing, and if they weren’t the exact same shade of red. “You match.”

~~~!~~~

Roy’s not the kind of guy who admits failure easily. He likes getting drunk and pretending to forget, punching things and watching football to get his mind off. In the warehouse, he’ll lift the heaviest boxes and go as fast as he can to the truck with them until Darryl notices his red face and straining arms and tells him to stop before he blows something. Roy doesn’t have the strength by then to tell him that the red face and pulsing muscles aren’t from the boxes at all.

He’s learned from last time. He doesn’t get DUIs anymore, remembers to shave and avoids bars on nights when it’s really awful so that he doesn’t accidentally punch anybody out. With the extra money on his paycheck he buys a punching bag to fit in his empty apartment, dangles it in his room and lays into it on nights when the rumpled sheets and fading pillowcases look too empty for him to bear. It’s better than nothing, he says to himself, and sometimes he lets himself fall asleep watching the thing move back and forth, casting eerie shadows over his walls.

So he’s trying, and he’s pretty damn proud that nobody’s been hurt since he and Kenny trashed the bar. He’s trying, see, and maybe the world should give him something for it, maybe the world should lay off and stop punishing him, but it doesn’t, not by a long shot. Because one morning he brings a new load of wax paper up to the office and sees her by the watercooler, with new clothes and shoulders that aren’t so tight, and he drops the box and says hi and then she turns, she turns, and on her left hand where she’s holding the little paper cone is a ring five times better than the one she was wearing just a year ago.

Tension comes back to her shoulders and he walks out of the office, goes down to the warehouse and begs Darryl for some boxes to move. That night he rips a hole in his punching bag and gets in the car. Before he can stop himself, he’s at a bar, and he doesn’t even know what the hell he just asked the bartender to pour.

~~~!~~~