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jayteacups · 2 years

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The Absence of Warmth

“What about you, Levi?” Furlan asks. “What do you dream of doing, when we get up there?”

Dream? No, he hasn’t done such a thing in a long, long time. All this time, it’s been one foot in front of the other, never looking further ahead. He can’t afford to do much more than simply survive; doesn’t deserve to do much more.

“I’ve never given it much thought.”

Or; On a cold winter night, Levi, Furlan and Isabel dare to think of a life aboveground.

Tags & warnings: Mostly pre-canon and in the pre-ACWNR era, ACWNR spoilers (obviously!), angst and manga spoilers towards the end (canon-era events are not the focus of the story so they’re not mentioned much, but there are some spoilers still ahead, beware), mostly gen fluff and platonic wholesomeness featuring some Levi x Furlan crumbs, grief and mourning towards the end, mentions of Kuchel.

Word count: 3k

A/N: My moots (namely @happybird16, @levmada, @theferricfox) had a phase of writing lots of kid/teen Levi angst, and some of that inspired me to write this little piece featuring the ACWNR trio!! It’s not reader-insert like I usually write, so hope you guys like it nonetheless. Anyways I hope you guys enjoy. I’ve also posted it on AO3. Reblogs and comments are much appreciated <3

Winters are harsh on those who live on the surface, but they are absolutely unforgiving to those with the misfortune to be born in the sewers.

Despite the precautions he, Furlan and Isabel have taken, the cold always finds a way in. The Underground is home to all sorts of thieves: pickpockets, robbers, muggers, con artists, but none are so effective as the cold.

See, here’s the thing: the cold creeps in without any effort on its part at all, making no more noise than a spectre. It comes and steals away precious warmth as it pleases. It does not matter how many thin blankets they have managed to salvage, or how many pieces of all-too-rare coal they set alight, or even how close they press up against one another in one last desperate attempt to stave the cold away. It does not matter; the cold will always make itself an integral part of your home.

And so this is where Levi finds himself, curled up underneath meagre scraps of fabric that barely count as blankets, pressed up against Isabel’s shivering form. Her nose is tucked into the crook of his neck—it’s ice-cold. Furlan spoons Isabel from behind; the two have an unspoken agreement that every winter, she sleeps in the middle. She’s always been the worst at dealing with the cold. Even now, she shivers the hardest, small groans and curses escaping from pale, chapped lips.

It’s some time past midnight. The fire is dying, but the golden light is just strong enough for Levi to make out the hands of the small clock resting near the make-shift hearth. Shadows dance as the flames dwindle to embers, which, one by one, begin to fizzle out and leave dull lumps of coal in its wake. He’ll have to feed the fire a few more lumps soon.

“I’ll do it,” Furlan offers before Levi can curl his half-frozen fingers around the edge of the blanket and leave their little cocoon. In the rays of dying light, he can see Furlan’s hands. Reddened knuckles that lead to drying, flaking skin. He doubts his own hands look any better, but there’s nothing to be done about it. To buy a tin of soothing salve for their skin would cost Levi a kidney and then some. “She’ll throw a fit if her favourite human furnace gets up and leaves.”

“You’re my second favourite human furnace, though, so don’t get up, please,” Izzy mumbles over her shoulder.

“Second favourite? Not exactly high praise when there’s only two to choose from.” Furlan quips, and doesn’t hesitate in lifting up a portion of the blankets so he can get up. Izzy’s reaction is almost instinctual; Levi’s sure he’s going to have bruises all over himself in the morning with how hard she’s clinging onto him, flinching away from the cold. The blankets aren’t much, but in winters like these, they make all the difference.

“Jeez,” Isabel gasps, though she dares not lift her face out of the blankets, “c’mon, give a warning before you do that. It’s cold!”

“Sorry!”

Levi reaches over and rearranges the blankets around her, as Furlan shuffles across the room and feeds the dying fire with a few fresh lumps of coal. There isn’t much left in the bag, Levi realises. He’ll have to go out and get some soon.

“Merchants should be back down here in two days,” Furlan says, evidently thinking of the same thing. “We can get more coal then.”

With a sigh, Levi beckons Furlan back with a wave of his hand. He’s already started to shiver, curling in on himself. Paired with a significantly thinner frame (for food has been scarce; the winters have been harsh on the harvests up above, or so the merchants say) and darker shadows underneath Furlan’s eyes, it’s difficult to reconcile the man in front of him with the ambitious gang leader that had reached out to him in the first place. Something twists in Levi’s chest at the sight of Furlan looking so worn.

He doubts he looks any better, though. He’s been sneaking as much of his rations as he could possibly afford onto either of their plates when neither one is looking, and taking on longer and longer watch shifts. Having something as simple as four walls and a roof around you makes all the difference. In a lawless place like this, a house could belong to you one day and a complete stranger could raid you and make themselves at home the next, and nobody would bat an eye.

“I’ll go buy the coal when they get here,” Levi grumbles, lifting the blankets for Furlan to get back onto the shitty mattress that hardly fits the three of them. Whenever the merchants come, there always comes the risk of a fight breaking out, starving, freezing people clamouring for even the slightest of necessities. The last thing he wants is to drag them into it, even if Furlan’s bartering skills come in handy. Though he lacks his partner’s talent with words, Levi can barter perfectly well on his own. (Well, Kenny’s old pocket knife does come in handy whenever the merchants fancy themselves shrewd businessmen.)

“No. It’s okay, you went last time.” Furlan settles in the same position from the last time, and loops a lanky arm around both Isabel and Levi’s small frames. His hand grazes Levi’s side, and Levi tries not to think about it too much. It’s unsuccessful. He’s always been hyperaware of Furlan’s touch in a way that he isn’t with Isabel, and he’s not sure why.

Throat dry, Levi swallows. His voice sounds hoarse when he speaks up again. “The last time you went, people tried to shank you when they saw you walking home with the bag of coal. I’ll go. You’re not doing it again, and hell will freeze over before the day I ask Izzy to do it.” The words come out stonier than he’d intended. He can’t help it—Levi remembers it vividly. He remembers the panic clawing at his chest and throat as he paced the room, growing more and more restless with every extra minute the front door remained closed. He remembers the overwhelming flood of relief the moment Furlan returned—only for it to turn into white hot anger upon seeing his bruised jaw and the the tears in his clothes that could only be produced by the blade of a knife.

He remembers sneaking out of their shelter later that night armed with rage and his trusted blade, thinking the others had been asleep, only to feel Furlan’s larger, smoother hand curl around his wrist. Oh, how he remembers the way he’d stopped in his tracks upon hearing the soundless plea in Furlan’s gentle touch. In the end, Furlan hadn’t managed to persuade him to let it pass, but he sure had gotten close.

Kenny would piss himself laughing, if he could see how weak Levi has grown.

Furlan sighs. Something familiar gleams in his eyes, something soft, sad. Levi’s chest, once again, aches just looking at him. “Stop sneaking your food onto my plate when you think I’m not looking, then.” Furlan looks away before he finishes speaking, directing his gaze towards the barely patched-up ceiling. Isabel gasps at the revelation. “I won’t even ask how long you’ve been doing that. I only figured it out the other day.”

Gritting his teeth, Levi internally curses, and refuses to address the food dilemma. “I wasn’t asking your permission to go.”

“If you were, I wouldn’t grant it. You need rest too, you know.”

“Furlan, I’m going, and that is final.”

Before Furlan can retort, Isabel cuts the disagreement short. “Guys. Please… Now isn’t the time to fight.” A finger pokes at Levi’s chest. “Furlan’s right, y’know. You’ve gotta eat too. And you…” Isabel lifts her head ever-so-slightly to fix Furlan with a watery glare. “He also has a point. Seeing you come home like that was terrifying.” She sniffs. “You can always both go, if you can’t decide. I can hold down the fort here. Just quit arguing about it now, please?”

Levi’s hands twitch at the idea of leaving Isabel alone, and one quick look at Furlan’s clenched fists tells him he feels the same. Even with her ability to defend herself, people are desperate for a roof and four walls, and he knows all too well how dangerous desperation can make a person. It’s why they’d set up the system in the first place of having two people at home whenever possible in the first place.

But Isabel’s quaking in his arms, and it isn’t entirely from the cold anymore. So he keeps his mouth shut, and nods.

“Okay,” Furlan says, reaching over to squeeze her hand. “Okay, we’ll stop. We’re really sorry. We can talk about something else, yeah?” His voice drops quieter as he adds, “I don’t think any of us can sleep right now.”

“Hm.” Levi feels Isabel nod against his neck as she hums. “Like what?”

The room lapses into comfortable silence for a moment as Furlan contemplates the question. “The Surface,” he gets out, eventually. “What we’d do when we get to the Surface.”

You mean ‘if’, Levi adds silently. It takes some restraint to not say it out loud. He’s always never been particularly optimistic in the way his two dearest friends are. Instead, he offers, “we’d get a house that stops the draught from coming in.”

“That goes without saying, though.” Furlan smiles sheepishly. “I meant what we’d do, or want to do, that we can’t do down here. Y’know?”

Her face lights up. “Perhaps… working with the wildlife as a vet. Or flowers! Florists are a thing up there, right?”

“Oh?”

“I hear that the gardens they have are beautiful,” Isabel whispers, awestruck. Flowers had always been fascinating to her. The merchants bring them down all the time, and it hadn’t taken much for both him and Furlan to notice her longing looks at the bright petals that positively glow in the dark, dreary shadows of the Underground. They’d had saved up and brought her a singular flower once; the merchant had called it a magnolia. She’d adopted the flower as a surname the very next day, and bore it proudly as if it had been the family name she had been born with. “Imagine an entire stretch of land filled with them!”

Levi tries. He comes up empty. All he can think of is the one and only time his mother ever bought flowers, the only gift she could afford for his sixth birthday, and even then, he only remembers having to throw the wilted forms out when the water pumps in the area stopped working. (Sometimes, he dreams of those flowers. He’d mournfully held onto the last flower, hesitant to part with the gift. They must’ve been a pure, glowing white once, because he remembers dulled white petals falling loose into his palm, remembers saving the final withering flower and pressing it between the pages of a diary Kuchel was growing too sick to write in.)

Furlan must be seeing something he can’t, because he’s quick to respond. “If we save up, we could buy a cottage. One with a little bit of land outside that you could turn into a garden for the flowers you sell.”

Beaming, Isabel nods, more enthusiastic than she’s been in days. It is as if she no longer feels the cold. “And you?”

“As a job, I’d probably go for something simple. Maybe the town we pick might need a mechanic of some sort, I could do that. Granted, it wouldn’t pay me much, but it’s about the most useful thing I could do. But really, I think I’d like to study the stars,” the blond boy responds quietly. “Wouldn’t that be something?” Furlan turns his head to stare at the ceiling again, and this time, he smiles wistfully. As if he’s done this before, replacing a mouldy wooden roof with a limitless sky that Levi couldn’t even begin to comprehend. “To live under a limitless, ever-changing sky, to watch the sun rise and fall every day… wouldn’t that be a sight?”

Across the room, the fire burns bright, bathing Furlan’s handsome profile in warm orange. Levi has to turn away from the sight to catch his breath.

A sight indeed.

He feels Furlan’s eyes settle on him. Isabel shuffles backwards a little so that she can look at his face, too, and he finds himself a little warm under their expectant gazes. “What about you, Levi?” Furlan asks. “What do you dream of doing, when we get up there?”

“I’ve never given it much thought.”

Isabel’s breath hitches in her throat. “Not even once? Not even when you were a kid?”

“Did you enjoy the tea, Sunbeam?”

He nods, giggling. “It was really good, Mama! Nice ’n warm.”

Kuchel beams, and presses her lips to his forehead. “A little bit of warmth goes a long way, sweetheart.”

Levi swallows. It’s hard to breathe all of a sudden. If he puts it into words, it becomes more than just a silly childhood dream. He’s faced many a daunting task, but to bare himself like this might just be the scariest of them all. To truly desire something pure in a world like this seems futile, and yet, there’s a spark kindling in his chest that Furlan and Isabel have managed to revive from charred embers that his mother’s death had put out years before.

“Isabel,” he croaks, “d’you think there’d be room for some tea plants in your garden?”

The smiles both of them give him are brighter than the sun could ever be.

------

Every night after Furlan and Isabel’s deaths, Levi sits up on the rooftop the way they did before that expedition, and stares up at the night sky.

It’s beautiful. Dazzlingly so, in a way that evokes both awe and dread. It makes him feel so small, so useless, so insignificant in the face of it all.

The night sky leaves a bitter taste in his mouth at first, but it doesn’t stop him from sitting up and stargazing every night. He starts taking a notebook and pen up with him, starts sketching the constellations each night. He starts to write what the sky looks like, how the wind blows and the flowers bloom. Driven by a strange force, Levi tries day and night to see the world the way they would’ve.

He’ll be their eyes, he decides. He’ll see for them, live for them. He owes them that much at the very least, after everything they have done for him.

After he’s officially discharged from both the military and the hospital, the first thing Levi does is write a letter to Historia.

Due the complications with Jaegerists heavily controlling communications between Paradis Island and the rest of the world, the Queen’s response arrives a month later. Levi finds a thick envelope on his doormat after getting lunch with Gabi and Falco, and for a moment, forgets of his own injuries in his haste to pick it up and open it.

Dear Captain,

The documents you have requested are in the envelope. The papers have undergone some damage, but the team I sent to the Underground recovered the majority of your friend’s designs. I hope it is enough to build your teahouse to your liking. The diary you requested could not be found, unfortunately. The establishment that you directed us to seems to have been abandoned and demolished.

I am pleased to hear that you and the others are doing well and that you are recovering from your injuries. Perhaps it is optimistic to say, but I do hope that one day, the situation will settle and we can communicate freely. You are the godfather of my daughter, after all, I hope she grows up with you in her life in whatever way possible.

Wishing you all the best,

HRM Queen Historia

The second thing he does when he moves into his new house, is ask Onyankopon to drive him out to the nearest garden centre. They come home with a magnolia tree sapling, and Levi plants it in his back garden alone, cheeks damp and hands shaking. A bed of snowdrops—the type of flower he’d pressed in his mother’s diary all those years ago—follows soon after. The clear memory of the flowers had come to him in a fever dream. Over the year, Levi fills his back garden with tea plants and almost every type of flower imaginable, painting the empty area with explosions of vibrant reds and purples and blues all around the tree in the centre.

It takes almost a year and much of his financial reimbursements to turn Furlan’s rough designs for his shop into a reality. His eyes burn when he looks upon the finished building; it is almost an exact copy of the sketches born from his friend’s hand.

The teashop takes off wonderfully. It’s a home away from home, but something still doesn’t feel right. All he’d ever wanted was to walk under the moonlight with them with no other worries in the world, and living out their dreams for them in a desperate attempt to keep their memories alive won’t ever come close. Kneeling in his garden and watering his plants only makes him wish he could hear Isabel’s laugh. Staring up at the night sky, sketching the constellations, he only wishes he could see Furlan’s smile one more time. Sometimes, when he drinks his tea alone at night, he thinks of wilting snowdrops and the chipped teacups that his mother couldn’t ever earn enough to replace.

Because the world, for all its natural beauty, is cold without them.

Masterlist

#aot #attack on titan #aot fanfiction #aot fanfic #attack on titan fanfic #snk #snk fanfiction #snk fanfic #acwnr ova #acwnr #a choice with no regrets #levi ackerman #isabel magnolia #furlan church #farlan church #fuck knows how ur meant to spell it i just said fuck it and used the former #featuring some #levifar #(only crumbs tho SORRY)

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enneamage · 2 years

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can you expand more on why you feel like wilbur has npd/a cluster b disorder?

Oh god a direct excuse to talk about it I thought this day would never come

I’ve been an NPD truther to varying degrees of intensity for a while now. I knew it was a possibility, but things were pushed over a line after a while, and that was when I had a little (big) research arc around learning the ins and outs of NPD. It was eerie how much of what I learned lined up with what I was seeing.

I see this essay passed around in the actuallynarcissistic tag on tumblr a lot and I can see why, it’s probably the most comprehensive ‘here are the actual symptoms beyond grandiosity and here’s what they’re connected to’ list I’ve seen. There’s a lot of shoddy info about NPD out there because it’s a sensational topic that’s easy to get imprecise about, so I strongly suggest reading it to get a sense of what the condition can look like. I see a lot of Wilbur’s ‘quirks’ on this list, there’s a reason I keep linking it.

Starting off, Wilbur would fall on the ‘fragile’ or ‘covert’ end of the NPD spectrum, which presents differently than the grandiose end. There’s generally fluidity between these two points, but most of what we’ve seen of Wilbur leans more towards the covert end, having grandiose fantasies while remaining self-deprecating and sensitive in real life.

Internally/Externally Inconsistent

It’s not unusual for people in general to have different parts of their personality come out with different contexts, but NPD can push this into an extreme. The different levels of development across the different parts of himself are… wide. He knows how to handle a controversy like a politician but the closer he gets to his more vulnerable center the more childlike he can get, and time has revealed that the unstable part is the constant.

Wilbur has a lot of need, emotionally and practically. Narcissistic Personality Disorder is based on being self-preoccupied, concerned with combatting feelings of helplessness, despair, and irrelevance through their ego and external environment. Those with Vulnerable NPD tend to lean more openly anxious and depressive, playing down their grandiose fantasies but remaining passive aggressive and sensitive to criticism. They turn to their environment for praise, care, and validation, trying to balance out a feeling that can range from profound existential anxiety to internal deadness.

I’ve talked about how Wilbur used to threaten to cry as a power move, which is a layered thing to do. His despair is real, and he feels as vulnerable as he acts, but he has a way of throwing himself on the ground as a defensive move and playing dead to try and ward off arguments that he knows he can’t win. He will still occasionally pout to try and diffuse situations, leveraging pity as a tactic to try and make other people ‘the bad guy’ by engaging further. He will try to guilt people into caring for or catering to him by projecting his helpless self-image when he feels burnt out or cornered, to varying results; this is fairly pronounced Vulnerable NPD behavior.

At the same time, people with NPD tend to have an over-developed capacity to create temporary social masks in order to get what they want. Wilbur is good at making promises, short speeches and temporary impressions that make him look very promising and reasonable as a person. He may even believe what he says in the moment, as NPD has a kind of dissociative quality when it comes to being inconsistent, but most of these behaviors are geared towards short-term satisfaction over long-term payoff; praise for being impressive now is better than having to work to keep a promise later. Wilbur has a lot of unfulfilled promises in his life, and he's even sung about his ‘short sighted’ impulse control.

Obsessively Oppositional

Wilbur has very pronounced authority and control issues that show up in big and small ways.

He’s has said before that he ‘cannot’ work for someone else, and he’s even aware of that fact that it’s because he’s disagreeable. While I don’t know the exact extent that this has gotten him into trouble before, the fact that it’s affected his ability to make money and live is pretty telling. I’ve talked in less sensational terms about how Wilbur is very sensitive and defiant to feeling undermined, but it’s a really big part of what makes him self sabotage in certain situations. Wilbur can get resentful of prolonged social cooperation and may begin to rebel against it consciously or unconsciously by dragging his feet.

Wilbur also gets stubborn about weird little things a lot. The MCC skin thing is a perfect example of a petty ongoing thing, where he wants to push back against control by not participating in team skins for vanity and control reasons. In life he pushes against the petty things that he can get away with as acts of rebellion to feel more in control.

I feel like it’s not controversial to say that he’s got weird politics and his fixation on freedom shows up in them a lot, both in being a hopeless ameriboo and being connected to libertarianism. His whole dirty crime boy bit was kind of suspicious as well, being basically resentful of laws. He seems to hate having rules placed on him, especially by authority figures.

Emotional Dysregulation

Wilbur’s emotional control is not where it should be for a man his age. Even for someone socialised male, his raw anger at things some days suggests a very sensitive set of nerves, and the things that set him off are very telling. People with NPD, particularly the covert variety, are very sensitive and reactive to shame, criticism, and feelings of inadequacy, and will notice them everywhere. This is muddy because it overlaps with the depressive and anxious symptoms, so his sensitivity can be passed off as stemming from them instead of all being connected to something larger.

This is a death by a thousand papercuts thing. It’s generally simmering in the background, reacting with a bit more anger and intensity than he should to things in his environment, particularly if they set off his shame response. Wilbur fires back at chat defensively, getting into his condescending voice at things that range from mildly irritating to innocuous. He knows to not pick an outright fight with his own chat most of the time, since thousands on one is a stupid fight to pick, but he once made a comment along the lines of “Five minutes in and insulting chat, that’s not good” which suggested that it’s a thing he has to actively stop himself from doing. He tends to play off his need to cut people down as an English personality/humor thing, but the genuine anger underneath it makes me think twice.

The Love Life Problem

His history comes into this because he’s indirectly stated that he experiences the idealise, devalue, discard cycle that people with unaware NPD tend to experience with romantic relationships. This is the process where the internal sense of lack and instability in someone with NPD crosses with their emotional impulses and they find someone in their environment to project their hope of stabilising/fulfilling themselves onto.

They tend to use whatever people skills they have to woo and appeal to the person of their choice, hoping that this person is basically going to be the one. They can have a very complimentary view of them in this phase, idealising them and putting their hope towards a perfect future with them. After a while a sort of disgust builds towards the person for not serving the purpose that they had initially reached out to them for, as well as being ‘fooled’ by the social mask. An agitation builds up from feeling dead and isolated despite being around the other person, turning to resentment. They then start to devalue their partner, acting out and being dismissive. (Your Sister Was Right is him outing himself.)

This is why I find it so eerie when Wilbur goes into romance mode with somebody, there’s a good chance that he’s setting himself up to resent them as a consequence of his own actions. The part inside of him that ‘needs’ the most will never reach the person that he’s wooing if he dips into a false self, but his inner self has a bitter disposition and a deeply vulnerable amount of need, so it makes sense why he doesn’t lead with it.

(This is a weird little thing that happened with ghostbur actually, he began to resent that people liked the mask better than him and were so easily ‘fooled.’)

C!Wilbur

You know how Wilbur is a critblr gateway drug because he compulsively tells on himself in bizarre ways and you’re left holding the puzzle pieces whether you wanted them or not? I’ve really got to emphasise that c!Wilbur fits the profile of someone who has NPD having a meltdown to an uncanny degree. It’s fiction so it’s larger than life, but It’s like Wilbur stored the symptoms of NPD inside him like a fridge. Everyone knows that pogtopia was meant to be c!wilbur’s mental health spiral, but they never go as far as naming what all those symptoms were connected to. The fact that he hit every branch on the way down is way too much to call a coincidence, even though I’m sure it was unconscious on Wilbur’s part.

His character starts out making what NPD literature would call a shared fantasy, a kind of conceptual space where his vision spreads to others and they buy into a story that he makes about the world, as well as his role in it. He sells people on the value of this vision, and by extension the value of himself. Wilbur has an ongoing fascination with both politicians and cult leaders, and they feel very relevant here.

L’manburg is based on dismissing Dream’s authority as admin and substituting his own, disavowing Dream as a tyrant and declaring liberty and freedom and fuck-you-I-do-what-I-want. He invites people to the secret clubhouse and they elevate the legitimacy of the whole thing, but things quickly begin to unravel as they don’t feed the power fantasy in the way that he wanted.

While he publicly tries to play the charming social role, behind the scenes he is breaking down. His emotions are unstable in public and explosive in private, intense crying episodes and rage for feeling useless and ineffective in spite of his position. He can’t tolerate not being the ultimate power so he tries to force legitimacy through cheating (implicitly believing that he would not win legitimately), which backfires on him permanently.

He spirals, giving in to the part of himself that is terrified of his own insignificance and desperate to prove importance and agency, even if it means self-destruction. He declares himself ‘the bad guy.’ He makes constant grabs for power, trying desperately to remain in control, resorting to threats of violence against himself and others (the tnt). He obsessively cuts down his most devoted ally, Tommy, trying to compensate for his inferiority and jealousy. He experiences persecutory delusions, which are a lesser known symptom of NPD under stress, breaking with reality and falling into a state where his mind invents information independent of the world around him. While all of this is going on, he keeps lying to his father about how his life is going, trying to maintain the illusion of success.

While most people with NPD wouldn’t necessarily use violence, the extremes of behavior resorted to because of an internal crisis can be a serious issue, outward or inward. NPD has cluster B status for a reason, and it’s still a disorder, which means that it is still associated with dysfunction. People with NPD have something of an infamous cycle where they can create concepts and plans with the new people they meet, time passes and the fantasy decays, and then something comes crashing down that makes them leave or gets them cut out of other peoples lives. They then move on to somewhere new to start the cycle over again, hoping that this time they’ll be able to step into their fantasy for real.

The Rust roleplay never got that far but Wilbur immediately created another leader with imposter syndrome who needed to manipulate people in order to keep his position, and what an interesting thing for a successful streamer who dislikes streaming to do.

I can’t know exactly what role delusion plays in Wilbur’s life, but we do know that he is a hypochondriac. Certain manifestations of hypochondria are a mix of anxiety and delusion, becoming obsessively and unshakably convinced that you’re going to die because of a given illness. Feelings of persecution and impending doom are a feature of NPD, an episodic or baseline anxiety about feeling like something is either approaching or about to break.

How do you know it’s not something else?

On their own these things might not be that convincing, but taken all together as the dynamics of one dude it becomes the simplest answer. While he might have a number of issues as symptoms, most of his behavior can be traced back to the unique way that NPD would be affecting him.

I understand why Borderline and NPD are neighbours in the DSM, because they share a lot of common ground, but they come from different structures and dynamics. BPD splitting shows up abruptly in the moment, while NPD relationship devaluing can be a more subtle ongoing process with more shades of grey.

Fin

Overall this is why I’m convinced that he’s got a foot over the line into NPD territory. If you’re left with the feeling of “but he’s just a guy” when you think of him or see him next—he is, at the end of the day. People with personality disorders are still people, and individuals before all that as well. He won’t be a walking bag of symptoms all the time, but he’s prone to behaving and processing things differently from someone who doesn’t have his personality adaptations. He’s still capable of being reasonable and right and relatively functional, he just has a bunch of other stuff going on as well.

#anon you came to the right place #there's a lot more but these are the easiest bits to talk about #it makes sense to be sceptical because there's a lot of plausible deniability #but NPD doesn't always have to escalate to criminal or abusive extremes to be there #Also I know that the phone video lady may seem odd but she describes the cycle well so just tab out and give it a chance while you scroll #if you want #wlbr 3w4 #featuring some #loreposting #NPDbur tag #gen wlbr tag

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