He knew he was supposed to stay away. They’d fired him; Pammy had not just told him they were done but actually listened to him and talked him through why they were done, and he thought he finally understood; he’d picked up his final paycheck, apologized to Halpert, all of it. His business there was done.

But it wasn’t like he had much of a friend group outside the warehouse, you know? Sure, he had the guys he’d hung out with through high school and beyond, but they were all getting married, moving on, moving forward with their lives. He might have finally found a place from which he could go forward, but it sure as hell hadn’t started happening yet. He might not be stuck in the mud, but it was still all over his clothes. So he wasn’t going to hang around with them, especially not the ones like Jack and George who’d been…well, they’d been his closest friends for a while, but thinking about it now he realized they were friends because they all made fun of the people they thought were beneath them. The nerds, the losers, the pansies. And he was well aware that right now he was one of those people. He didn’t feel like a loser; he felt like someone who was waking up from a very long dream and needed to get out of bed to make it all real. But he knew that all of it—getting maced by a guy like Dwight, losing the girl to a guy like Halpert (and then apparently having Halpert not even interested in the girl, if he was to believe Pammy, though he thought she might be missing some things), getting fired—it all made him a loser in their eyes. He wasn’t trying to judge them—maybe they’d still accept him, they had a long history—but those weren’t the influences he needed in his life right now.

And Kenny was family, but he wasn’t enough. He’d been all aboard the Halpert-murder train, after all, and while he was a loyal guy and a good guy and someone Roy was definitely not cutting out of his life or anything, he was still bound up in all that. Roy needed some space from that kind of thinking, and hanging out with Kenny was an invitation to wallow in it. To feel sorry for himself. To think all the thoughts he’d finally realized he needed to be better than.

No, he needed the warehouse guys. It was Darryl after all who’d told him he shouldn’t go after Halpert, time and time again. It was Lonnie who’d, with a small shrug and a clap on the shoulder, started picking him up for work every day when his license was suspended after the DUI. It was Madge who silently cut him off every time the group went out drinking and gave him the stink eye if he tried to get more. They were supportive in the right way, and he needed them now.

But because of that, he had to come by. Not a lot, and not when he expected to see the upstairs people, of course, but enough to still be “part of the group,” you know? He’d meet them out in the parking lot and head over to Poor Richard’s together, or pay Lonnie back by giving him a ride to the poker game. He just wanted to still belong, and they were at least willing to tolerate that, if not always happy to have him.

It was one of those days when he pulled up to the Dunder Mifflin parking lot and realized he had made a grave miscalculation in assuming the office staff wouldn’t be there.

It didn’t take long to figure out why they were all outside: that idiot Michael was up on the roof, and…well, after the DUI and The Incident combined Roy didn’t like to joke about suicide, but it looked like one except that he couldn’t believe Michael would do that.

He looked around and he saw them. Pammy and Halpert, standing next to each other. Not holding hands or anything—in fact, further apart than he’d usually remembered them being, if he was honest—but cooperating, talking to each other, gesturing towards…was that a bouncy castle in the back lot? He wasn’t sure what the hell was going on there. But as he sat in his truck—and thank god no one had noticed him, he really wasn’t supposed to be there—he watched the two of them.

He watched how Pammy seemed to have more backbone in her stance than he’d remembered, how she held herself tall and talked with a little more assertiveness (he couldn’t hear the words, but he could sometimes see her face, and he could see the others’ reactions to her well enough). He watched how Halpert seemed…well, weird. Like he was having to hold himself back from something, or remember how his body worked. Roy could recognize it from the time he’d pulled his ACL back in sophomore year of high school: there was that period of re-acclimation when you’d technically healed but you didn’t trust your body to distribute weight properly, when you could cut on the leg but didn’t. And that was the most dangerous time, because your whole body was ready but you were using it wrong. You were more likely to reinjure yourself by compensating than you would be by just going for it—so you needed your mind to catch up to your body. Halpert looked like that, like there was something going on upstairs that wasn’t letting him act like his body wanted—needed—to do.

It was funny. He’d spent so long looking at Halpert, straining for evidence of whether this guy wanted to steal Pammy, that he was almost as familiar with Halpert’s behavior as his own. So he could tell: this guy still wanted Pammy. And he was willing to bet—if anyone would be dumb enough to take that bet—that that was what was pulling Halpert off. For some reason he couldn’t relax into his old routine, his old familiarity with Pammy, and it was throwing everything else off. Too bad, since Pammy obviously had a thing for the guy, and if he’d just get back to normal—plant on that leg, make the cut, drive downfield—it’d probably all work out.

Or maybe not. It wasn’t his business anymore. But he wished Pammy well, and it was obvious by now that she wanted this, so he wanted it for her too. He was proud of her though: she wasn’t pining, she wasn’t begging for Halpert’s attention, she was just being her. And while Roy was still sad that being Pammy now apparently meant that she couldn’t be part of Roy and Pammy, he was glad she could still be herself.

He just hoped Halpert noticed.

Something had changed with that dumbass on the roof, and Roy could see the gathering outside breaking up. Before someone could see him and call him out for being there, he texted Darryl that he’d meet the guys at Poor Richard’s, turned the truck, and gunned out of the lot.

He didn’t need to look after Pammy anymore anyway. It wasn’t his job. She could take care of herself.