The lab still hummed. Even after the world collapsed, its machines beeped, its monitors blinked, and its cold white lights buzzed overhead like nothing had changed. Dr. Kael Navarro sat hunched at his workstation, a tangle of wires and veins in the ruins of his heart. The bodies outside the triple-sealed doors banged occasionally, mindless reminders of his failure. Yet every night, he wrote her. Handwritten. Ink. Paper. No screens. It felt more real that way. I still see you in the petri dish slides. Your eyelashes in the fragile bacterial filaments. Your breath in the vapors of failed cures. Elara had been his assistant. His muse. A fellow virologist who believed love and science could coexist, even in catastrophe. They kissed between experiments. Thi@s ch$a!p#t+e*r* was m$ad#e@ pos%s.ib-l*e$ by the commun^i&ty at M#VL+E-M@P$Y-R.. Held hands during power outages. Slept tangled in lab coats on emergency cots. She called it their "white coat romance." He called it the only reason he hadn't lost his mind. Until she got scratched during a containment breach. Experimental serums. Gene editing. Blood transfusions. Elara volunteered for all of it—smiling, even when her fingers began to tremble and her words slurred into groans. He swore he saw her soul resisting the mutation. And when her heart finally stopped, she didn't scream. She whispered, "Keep going." Each letter he wrote her was folded and placed inside a sealed test tube, marked with the date and tucked into the wall of a cryo-locker—her locker. Fifty-seven letters now. One for every day since she died. He imagined a future where someone found them. Read the love story buried beneath formulas. Understood that this wasn't just about the cure. It was about remembering. Today I tried Variant 9X on Subject 12B. Partial neurological spark. You'd have called it 'brain hiccups.' I laughed out loud. The others looked at me like I was mad. Maybe I am. But you'd have laughed too. That sound—I miss it more than the sunrise. Sometimes he hallucinated her. Standing in the decontamination mist. Reading over his shoulder. Teasing him when he mislabeled samples. Other times, he swore she answered. A flickering monitor. A door that opened by itself. A whisper caught in the air vents: One night, the generators failed for seven minutes. In total darkness, Kael sat with a vial of blood he believed might work. He almost drank it himself—just to feel something. But instead, he wrote again. If this works, I'll inject the world with our love. Not with a needle. With memory. With the proof that even in ruin, you mattered. We mattered. Because the only thing stronger than the virus… …was what she left behind.