When Roy had pushed his way into the Almanac, he’d shoved the automatic door hard enough that it hadn’t quite hissed closed, which had meant that Pam was able to slip into the room (apparently) unobserved. She wasn’t sure exactly how long she’d sat out in the hallway, but she didn’t think it had been that long—except that Roy was already midway into some kind of rant, drink in hand, so it had to have been at least a little while. She was shocked to see Jim sitting by Roy (she’d expected the Almanac to be empty) and so she came to a halt by the doorway, watching them both with worried eyes. Neither had seen her, because Roy was turned towards the far wall and Jim was half looking at him, half finding the ceiling fascinating. Seeing Jim made her heart flutter—when had it started doing that?—and seeing him looking so uncomfortable made her listen more carefully than she might otherwise have done to Roy’s little tirade. Usually she made it through his orations by setting her audio implants to skim for keywords (like her name) and mentally reviewing the day’s tasks until he ran out of steam. She felt vaguely guilty about this, but at the same time he so frequently went over the same old territory that wasn’t of any particular relevance to her (most often whether the Philly teams had won or lost whatever sport happened to be in season, and what he would do if he were in charge) that she didn’t think she’d have been able to stop herself from rolling her eyes without some kind of assistance.

She supposed, in retrospect (which was always so much clearer than things were in the moment, sadly) that this should have been a, if not the first, sign that she and Roy were not as well-matched as she’d always thought. She should have been consumed with guilt the first time she’d programmed that skimming function; instead, she’d felt proud that she’d managed to reuse one of the things Jim had taught her for a more practical purpose all by herself. Sure, he’d been using it to generate an AI that would respond to every time Dwight said “actually” by asking “are you sure?,” and she was using it to ignore her fiancé, but eh, dehydrated po-tay-to, dehydrated po-tah-to.

Now she was actually listening to Roy, and she was definitely not enjoying what she was hearing. She perked up when she heard him agree with Jim (well, actually, she perked up when she heard Jim talk about marrying her as if it were his highest ambition on—or more relevantly, off—Earth, but she remained perked when Roy agreed) but she was crushed by the logic behind his agreement. Sure, it was good that he wanted to marry her, but the reasons why were hardly flattering, and even as she heard him insist that he wanted to get past their wedding in order to be married to her (for whatever reason) she realized that she was engaged in exactly the opposite calculation: she had been focusing on their wedding in order to forget the fact that she would be married to him after it.

After all, he was going back into the Warehouse, wasn’t he? She’d be married, but she wouldn’t really have to deal with being married for years of subjective (let alone objective) time. Wasn’t that basically the same calculus that Roy was running, but in reverse? Why were they even getting married if each of them was thinking past the idea of actually being together in the here and now?

She was working up the courage, the mental space to tell Roy that when she heard him start joking about his bachelor party—and about Angela of all people. It brought her right back to that stupid day when Ensign Howard had accidentally (he said) caused an emergency shutdown by flash-irradiating all the food onboard at once and overwhelming the training ship’s radiation protection from the inside and they’d all had to stand outside the training facility playing silly games that Jim had come up with. When asked who he’d want to be trapped in an escape pod with in order to repopulate the human race, Roy hadn’t answered her, as she’d been confidently expecting, or even a joke answer like Jim’s (“Kevin, he’ll smuggle snacks with us, and I figure we’ll just need to discover how to reproduce asexually anyway if there’s only two humans left”—everyone, Kevin especially, had been roaring with laughter). No, he’d smirked and said Angela (albeit only after having to ask her name). It left Pam feeling devalued—even if she didn’t want him to only want her if she were the last woman left alive, she’d have preferred that he would want her to be the only woman alive if he had to be in that situation. And apparently this was a real thing, she was realizing—her fiancé had a thing for another woman onboard.

And just to make her even more annoyed, he couldn’t even be bothered to give her her proper title. It was one thing to call Pam herself Pammy—even if it annoyed her, he did have the legitimate excuse that he’d called her that for years—but it was another to take a(nother) highly qualified woman with an important title onboard and turn her into a purely sexual object. To say nothing of what Angela would think of being treated that way…before Pam could think about it she was interrupting, and it suddenly became the most important thing in the world to her to make clear to Roy Anderson right now exactly where he could put his history of disrespect and neglect.

But she wasn’t him. She wasn’t going to do this in public. And as such she needed him alone. So she asked Lieutenant Halpert as politely as possible to clear out. And she asked him as “Lieutenant Halpert,” not Jim, not even Halpert, because this needed to be about her and Roy, not about her and Jim (for all that every thought against Roy came with its own matching reason why Jim—Jim who loved her, who respected her, who planned her the perfect wedding to the wrong man—was exactly as right as Roy was wrong for her). She bent that rule enough to let Jim (who had a vaguely frightened look on his face as he exited) know that she appreciated his quick acquiescence with a little “Thanks, Jim” and then she was all business again.

But of course Roy couldn’t make this easy by shutting up for once. Instead he was talking—but Pam was done with listening.

“No, Roy. We need to talk, but right now that means I need to talk. And you need to listen.” Her voice was flat, unnatural—but this was like pulling off a band-aid or jettisoning one part of a ship to save the rest. You had to do it quickly, efficiently, and without getting bogged down in the details of what, exactly, you were doing. And the thing was, it worked. Roy’s words ground to a halt, and he stared at her, glass in hand.

For some reason that damn glass offended her, and she walked over, took it out of his hand, and pushed it into the recycler. Standing at her full height (and realizing that after months in low-G, she was actually taller than she’d been, while Roy, who had been horizontal in the Warehouse, hadn’t grown, so she actually came up to his chin) she forced eye contact.

“Roy, this isn’t working. I don’t think it had been for a long time before we started this journey, actually, but the last few months without you have taught me I can be my own woman. More than that. They’ve taught me I need to be that. I can’t be with you anymore. That’s just not me anymore.” She nodded, firmly. “That’s all I wanted to say. I’m sorry, Roy.”

He goggled at her, and she turned to go. His arm snaked out to grab hers, and instinctively she slapped down and forced it away. He was unused to the lower G on shipboard and stumbled, and she took a few steps away before his voice caused her to turn around again and face him.

“Goddammit, Pammy, if that’s how you feel, how come you agreed to marry me?”

She sighed, and tried hard to remember that for him that was only a few days ago at most. She’d been without him for months, but he hadn’t been away from her for the same time, subjectively, and she owed him at least some explanation. She suddenly felt a surge of pity for him, and realized that pity could never replace love. Not that she didn’t love him—she’d always love him a little, because he was her first love—but she definitely wasn’t in love with him, and she didn’t see that changing anytime soon.  She smiled sadly and shrugged.

“I guess for the same reason you insist on calling me Pammy. Because I was to used to it to change.”

He stared at her and suddenly she saw his whole face crumple and the tears begin to flow. That was how she knew that something had actually gotten through to him—he was reacting with something other than the knee-jerk anger and frustration that she knew all too well. She floated over to the bar and grabbed a towel, then handed it to him.

“For the tears.” She struggled to find the right way to express it. “They don’t fall the way they did in full G. I’m really sorry, Roy.”

“But, Pammy…I mean, Comms?” He visibly corrected himself. “That’s what you want me to call you, right? Can’t we fix this? Make it work again?” He looked down at her hopefully, but blenched again as she shook her head.

“I’m sorry, Roy. I…I’ll talk to Ice. I’m sure she’d be happy to keep you up for the extra three days, or send you back down, depending on what you want. But I don’t think we should see each other anymore. I’m just not the woman who agreed to marry you anymore. And I can’t see myself getting back there.”

She glanced at the hatch, which had mercifully slid closed. I can see myself going in a very different direction, she thought, thinking of a different man she’d seen crying in front of her only…was it really yesterday? And she couldn’t help but smile a little to herself to realize that her very different reactions to their tears were such a strong indicator of how she actually felt about them both, even though one had been her fiancé and the other officially nothing but a crewmate. She could comfort Roy, give him a towel, keep talking to him because he’d become a familiar stranger; Jim was too important to her for her to be able to watch him cry.

Roy must have seen her glance, and maybe he wasn’t quite as oblivious to her as she had thought because he immediately guessed something of what she was thinking. “Is this because of Halpert?”

“No, Roy,” she said. “It’s because of me.”

“But you do have feelings for him, don’t you.” It wasn’t a question. “The way he looked at you…I always knew it.” He was working himself into a rage, she could see.

“No, Roy, it…”

“Are you really going to say you never did anything with Halpert?” He glared at her.

She hesitated. On the one hand, she could see Roy pushing back into the more familiar territory of anger and she was loathe to give him fuel for that unhealthy a reaction; on the other, she did want a clean break, and that meant total honesty.

“I didn’t.” She reached a hand out. “I turned him down, Roy.”

“So he did proposition you. I’m gonna kill him.” He started to push off towards the hatch and she found herself interposing her body between him and the hatch.

“You are not,” she snapped. “What happened here has to do with you and me, Roy. No one else.” She poked him in the chest. “And you are not going to get out of acknowledging what I’ve said to you by putting the blame on Lieutenant Halpert. We’re done, Roy.”

“Fine.” He glared down at her but something about her eyes must have cowed him because he couldn’t meet them for more than a moment before glancing away. He pushed off towards the other hatch into the Almanac instead. “Screw this. I’m going back to the Warehouse. And Comms” he said the word like it was a curse. “If I ever see you again, it’ll be too damn soon.”

She sighed as he passed through the hatch. That hadn’t gone as well as she’d hoped, but she had to admit it had gone a lot better than she’d feared. And if he was going to go back on ice…there were worse things, she had to admit.

Now that she’d dealt with Roy, of course, she knew she had to deal with Jim—and if she knew him, which she was pretty sure she did, he had given her the room like she’d asked, but he hadn’t gone one foot further than he’d had to outside.

Strangely—or perhaps, given it all, not so strangely—she found herself looking forward to the encounter. She didn’t think it was quite right to jump straight into something with Jim, at least not until Roy had either worked his head of steam off or actually gone back into the Warehouse. But looking back on the last few months with Jim, she was pretty sure this wasn’t just a rebound. She was ready. If she was honest with herself, she’d been ready for quite a while, because she’d been relying on Lieutenant Jim Halpert exactly as her mother had suggested she should: exactly like, she thought, she ought to have relied on Roy back when he was her fiancé.

Back when. That was a freeing thought, and on the strength of it she pushed off towards the hatch behind which (she was sure) Jim was waiting. It felt symbolic, putting Roy’s exit literally behind her and floating off towards Jim. But beyond the symbolism, it also felt right: like for the first time since Jim had told her he loved her, she was on the right track.