The office should’ve been dark by now. The automatic lights click off at nine, but the hallway leading to the specimen refrigeration room is still glowing a sickly white. You pause in the doorway, coat half-on, watching Syd from a distance.

He’s hunched over a stainless-steel table, sleeves rolled to the elbow, body trembling in that barely visible way you’ve learned to look for. He doesn’t hear you—or he pretends not to. Lately, he’s been pretending many things. The room smells faintly of antiseptic and something sweeter, something metallic. The sight of him—shoulders shaking, breath shallow—punches a cold knot of worry into your gut.

You step closer, shoes echoing softly. “Syd?” His whole body jolts, not dramatically, but like a man caught mid-crime who’s trying very hard not to look guilty. He turns with a too-fast smile that never reaches his eyes. “Didn’t hear you.” You don’t believe him. You never do.

His hands are shaking when he sets down the vial he was holding, and you notice his mouth—his lips stained faintly pink, as though he’d wiped something away too fast. “Long night,” he mutters, grabbing for a glove he never actually puts on.

“You’ve been staying late every night this week.” You hear the accusation in your voice even if you didn’t mean to put it there. His jaw tenses; his eyes flicker to the refrigerated cabinet behind him, then back to you, too quickly.

“Just catching up,” he says. “Protocol updates. Tissue cataloging.” All lies. Bad ones. You take a small step forward, and he takes a small step back, bumping the counter. “Syd,” you say quietly, “I work here too. I know what’s normal. And this isn’t.”

For a moment he says nothing, staring at the metal table as if the right words might appear etched into it. When he finally speaks, his voice is cracked around the edges — brittle and exhausted. “You don’t understand.” It’s not dismissal. It’s fear. Fear of telling you the truth. Fear of losing your opinion of him. Fear of the thing he’s become.

He presses knuckles to his mouth, like he’s holding in a confession that’s poisoning him from the inside. When he drops his hand, you see it: the faint smear of dried crimson on his wrist.

Your breath catches. Not because you’re surprised, but because you suspected something close to this—just not this. Not him drinking from the preserved tissues of a deceased celebrity, Hannah Geist out of all people... whose virus nearly killed him. “Syd… what are you doing to yourself?” you whisper. He winces as though the question physically hurts.

“I’m not— It’s not—” He can’t finish. He doesn’t have the strength to lie anymore, not in front of you. His eyes meet yours finally, fever-bright and pleading. “I just needed—” His voice breaks. “I needed a piece of her.”

Silence fills the laboratory. Heavy. Horror-soft. And then he steps toward you, slow and unsteady, like he’s afraid you’ll recoil. “I know what you think this looks like,” he says, quietly desperate. “I know how it sounds. But she was the only thing keeping me alive. And now she’s gone. And I’m…” His voice falters. “I’m trying not to fall apart.”

“But you’re the only person who even notices I’m still here.” His breath shudders. “Please don’t leave.”