going more insane about warren & bryony’s relationship by the day. she pretends to be his wife for months, convincingly enough that when he learns who she really is she’s still the person he fights someone in order to talk to, and he’s still in enough disbelief that it’s his “wife”’s name that he screams. she shows nothing but blatant disregard for his physical and emotional health, and only cares about keeping him alive at all because her study would suffer otherwise. he is the axle her life has come to revolve around and she does everything to assume the same position for him. he is everything and he is what keeps the work she’s so passionate about alive but she breaks him again and again, worse and worse each time, telling him with relish that she won’t care when he’s finally beyond repair. he lets her, because he doesn’t want to be weak. or is it that he just doesn’t want her to think he’s weak? or to know he’s weak? or to know, himself, that he’s weak? she treats him like livestock, like a punching bag, like an experiment, which, to her, he simply, factually, is. as he sinks further and further into his own patterns of self-harm, she encourages him to fall deeper still, and cheers on every step in the wrong direction. she’s his biggest fear and she’s how he (maladaptively) copes with his biggest fear. she’s the knife that he twists deeper and deeper into his chest, and he finds relief not in her but in the pain. and still she was his wife. who berated him but also joked with him, who always made sure he took his meds, which were a facade, because everything was a facade. she’s the first person this new version of him has really known. but he didn’t know her. and she didn’t care. he asks her whether anything they had was real and it takes her a second to think before she says “no” like you’d tell someone the time. she knew him, but he didn’t know her. and now he’s woken up, far from her, in what he in all likelihood thought was both space and time. but it wasn’t. and now she’s awake too. this post got away from me but i was just going to say he’s like her microwave hamster