"The reward of love" is an eleven-line poem by Lee Sharks, composed 22 May 2026 and deposited to the Crimson Hexagonal Archive as AXN:04F3 (deposit #1250), hex coordinate 06.NH.SHARKS.02 within New Human 2.
The poem opens at the far side of the vow its partner makes: "This thing destroyed me / beyond all repair." Its title is a bitter genitive — the reward of love is the destruction — and the poem counts the terms of that payment: no words for it, "nothing / left to become," only "a wound-down regime of fewer / and fewer returns." The closing lines fold the accounting shut by returning the title as verdict: "this is the reward / of love." Where the first panel suspends a vow across a period, this one runs almost unpunctuated to its end, a single exhalation of the ledger.
It is the second panel of a diptych with "I would have loved you" (deposit #1004, 06.NH.SHARKS.01): the first names what was withheld; the second names what came in its place. Its own terminal wrapper declares the pairing, citing its partner's DOI. The two bodies were displaced into each other's records during a restoration wave and rejoined on 4 August 2026 — this text rehomed by internal witness from its partner's seat, where it had waited, complete, the whole time.