He was all that she had.
He may have been insane, but to her, that was beautiful. His paintings told of a tortured mind, a tarnished, guilty soul. He was the epitome of destructive emotions, the definition of torture.
Somewhere in that pool of madness, she found a kindred spirit.
Maybe she related to him because she was living in a form of torture herself.
She had found splashes of his murals speckled throughout a good number of the previous test chambers. Her fingers had brushed across the rough, colored cement and metal as if comforting a friend. Comfort was something that they both desired. She couldn't give, and she couldn't take, so she did what she could, even if it was symbolic.
In all likelihood, he was dead. Still, sometimes she heard nonsense through his walls, and she was filled with a burst of hope.
The voices were painful and frightening to listen to, but she cherished them.
Perhaps if she had stayed in the painted tombs, if she hadn't quickly moved on, she would have found him.
But, then again, maybe not.
Maybe the voice was his ghost.
No matter how silly the idea, confronting something so untouchable, so unfixable, terrified her.
She couldn't defeat something that was undefeatable.
She couldn't be saved by something that was unsaveable.
And, she couldn't be brought back to life by something that didn't even have one.
So she observed the whispering walls, and then she left them behind her (but she never forgot).
His words had followed her from the very beginning. At first, she had disreguarded them as ramblings of a test subject gone mad, one that had gone through the test chambers before she had and couldn't handle the stress. But then, near the end, she saw the words for what they really were - help. He was trying to help her.
He cared for her.
Of course, her deprived mind failed to realize that the words could have potentially been left for another test subject days or weeks or even years before.
She realized that now, but it didn't matter, because after waking up and finding a mural of herself, she knew what had been assumed previously was the truth.
And now, in ever growing amounts, she craved his company. She craved his madness, his companionship, because she had gone slightly mad herself.
Chell sat, huddled, on top of an air vent in a circular room, staring at another piece of him. She bit down her fear and listened to the voice.
She would wait for the voice to stop, and then, when it did, she would wait for him to return.
He had to - because now, his words wouldn't help her.
She needed him.