we were gods, we were kids

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

he refuses to run away from her even as she picks him apart, because she’s what he runs away from everything else to, because she’s the death he craves, because she’s the one person that makes him feel like he tangibly matters for something larger. she destroys him piece by piece and takes every chance she gets to break and humiliate and knock him down farther, but he is nevertheless the center of her life and career, no matter how totally she argues otherwise, and she owes so much to him that she will never, ever give. they’re a binary star system—neither would be moving if not for the other, and in the end, one or both of them is bound to be consumed. isn’t it a sort of terrible devotion?