Loyalty Always Matters

"Hearts will never be practical until they can be made unbreakable."

[madeunbreakable]

             I will fight for you no matter how I am despised                       Portrayed as cruel and heartless, I am might                                    I am power, I’m due process, I will smite

                                       I’ll be your hero, just hold on...

                                            Independent, semi-selective                                        General James Ironwood of RWBY

                                                    ask | rules | about

[madeunbreakable]

[ logs in to change James' icon to his demi icon like a company putting a rainbow over their logo ]

[madeunbreakable]

[ One of my hazho/hellaboss friends is watching rwby and just got to v6 and I'm just shaking them violently by the shoulders because I know they'll understand me once they hit the Atlas arc ]

[madeunbreakable]

[ me, desperately calling the hospital that runs the clinic I got my diagnosis at because uh apparently their direct phone number doesn't work, leaving voicemails, and DMing my provider directly: can I get a beta blocker? can I PLEASE get a beta blocker??? ]

[madeunbreakable]

[ I've lost access to the feds, Florida, Wyoming, and Felix, I think...... maybe I should........ make them a sideblog over here.......... ]

[madeunbreakable]

[ James could pass a tilt table test with flying colors I fear ]

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[ "alright potential autonomics appointment, are you ready to get my blood pressure and pulse readings standing for one and three minutes and also for sitting up?" "we said laying down." "YOU'RE GETTING SITTING UP." ]

[madeunbreakable]

[ mmmm sneaky munday pic ]

[ the temptation to post a work selfie was strong, but instead you can have me on the way to go see iron lung with the husband ]

[brokenclockwork]

"This, children, is what happens when you cross Atlas. They sick winter upon you. May James take pity on us before we all freeze."

[madeunbreakable]

"If you're asking me to call off the literal embodiment of winter, I'm afraid I can't help you. She's having too much fun in the snow."

[madeunbreakable]

[ should I go put my ironwood plushie in the snow ]

[madeunbreakable]

[ whimsy incoming ]

[madeunbreakable]

[ should I go put my ironwood plushie in the snow ]

[madeunbreakable]

Disability Headcanons: Food Edition

This one goes under a cut because the subject matter is sensitive, even though the eating disorder in question is not based in body image.

This man does not eat. There's various reasons as to why, but this man doesn't eat. The biggest reason is that he forgets, he normally has to set alarms to remind himself, or he has Penny do it for him in his later years. He has an awful tendency to "mark hunger as read" via Mettle and try to power through, which usually results in him not knowing he's hungry until he's nauseous. He expresses a lack of interest in eating in general: it's more often than not a stressful experience and that makes it difficult to enjoy.

Early on in his recovery, he had feeding issues stemming from a fear of choking on or aspirating food: adjusting to the repairs done to his body made him incredibly aware of even involuntary functions. He also had difficulty keeping food down for quite a long time following his injuries, and the reluctance to vomit became quite a large part of his difficulty eating.

Prior to the Fall of Beacon, his primary means of nutrition was small snacks throughout the day or meal replacement drinks and bars, rather than larger meals, for the most part. Or he would schedule food delivery. However, when his paranoia ramped up... these became less and less viable for him. He slowly lost the ability to trust food he didn't make, or watch being prepared, and on particularly bad days, this even extended to packaged food like store-bought trail mix or snack cakes. Dining facility food on-campus/on-base tends to be safe, because he's aware of precisely what they're ordering and where it comes from to stock those kitchens, but he still needs to check security cameras occasionally while the staff is working.

He trusts precisely five individual people to bring or make him "safe" food by the Gravity fight in v7 (Pietro, Penny, Clover, Elm, and Winter), but watching any of those people eat food they were handed at the same time as him does not automatically allow him to eat it. He did trust Oz, I think the hot chocolate debacle was just his brain deciding liquids were a choking hazard and he wasn't allowed to have any just then.

His various difficulties with food make him largely unable to eat in public, seen in Cordially Invited, when his plate (like Winter's) is still mostly full while Clover's can be seen pretty depleted. In the wider shot, it looks like Robyn, Jacques and Camilla have been eating as well. There's probably other explanations for this, but he doesn't appear to have even tried to pick at his food. It's cut, unlike Winter's, but that's easily something someone in the kitchen could have done passive-aggressively. This visible difference between what he was served and what everyone else was probably didn't help the brain.

He excuses his poor appetite and reluctance to eat with a myriad of excuses, but his most popular fallbacks are that he's on a diet, either medical or military (he does adhere to an older caloric intake limit, but doesn't quite maintain the rigidity of how he intakes those calories), that he has a procedure coming up and can't eat for a certain amount of time before it (he almost never does and most of his bodywork does not require anesthesia anyway), or that he's on a new medication and it's making him nauseous while he adjusts to it (he hasn't started a new medication in ten years).

Re: the flask in particular; he can't actually drink alcohol. It gives him chest pain and messes with his autonomic nervous system. The flask in v2 contained ice water to cool down the hot chocolate Oz was handing him. It's just more socially acceptable to carry a flask and tip its contents into a drink than it is to just crack open a bottle of Dasani and dump it into a mug of something warm.

His difficulties with food come from a mix of OCD-like traits (mostly developed via trauma) and from diagnosable ARFID. One of his doctors might have him diagnosed with ARFID on paper, but either he was never informed of this, or he heard it but chose to ignore it because "he can't possibly have an eating disorder, his reasons for not eating make sense." Which is one of the things that does prevent people from getting diagnosed with ARFID.

[madeunbreakable]

Disability Headcanons: Clothing Edition

James wears a mix of standard and adaptive clothing: most of the very outermost layers, at least in uniform, tend not to be adaptive clothing to maintain his appearance, even though the adaptive clothing he wears is well-made and one can't usually tell at a glance what it is.

He has a few sweaters that open along the side with magnetic closure (ex: tommy hilfiger), has a few that pull over his head, some quarter-zips with extended or ringed pulls (tommy again), it depends on the day. Some of his uniform dress shirts are adaptive, with magnetic closures at the front, but some are standard button-front shirts (he can do and undo buttons one-handed, but a buttonhook makes this far easier -- he primarily uses buttonhooks post-v7).

Most of his baselayer undershirts (t-shirts, tank tops) are not explicitly adaptive: these garments are things that are pretty easy to work with at baseline for him.

Uniform pants, slacks, and even the one or two pairs of jeans he owns tend to be varying levels of adaptive: mostly, they have hook-and-bar closures (ex: iz adaptive) as well as zippers with ringed pulls. Some have buttons in addition, most don't. He's also shockingly fond of joggers, and these don't tend to be adaptive in his case: the drawstring works just fine for him. He doesn't normally need an elastic waist, and prefers toward friction-closure belts (you ever see an official Boy Scouts/"Scouting America" belt? those. I love mine and I'd wear it more if I had more need for belts) off-duty, though he does own standard-issue leather belts and doesn't have a prohibitively hard time using them.

He prefers the features on his clothing that make it adaptive be subtle, or at least appear to add to the fashion (example: he'd wear this jacket from iz adaptive even though there's a zipper down the back because it looks intentional). The easiest way to get him to refuse an article of adaptive clothing is to put fucking velcro on it.

He prefers heavy jackets and thick sweaters when in public out of uniform or otherwise able to wear whatever he wants, but he will also settle for simply wearing multiple layers. This is because it smooths out his silhouette.

This is also, largely, a moderately stupid idea in most climates because even single amputees may tend toward overheating because their heat regulation is disrupted due to reduced organic surface area, let alone double and triple amputees. He was not having a good time at all in Vale (probably misread the forecasts), Mistral would be hit-or-miss (like Vale, depends on the time of year), he avoids travel to Vacuo at all costs (sand, heat, doesn't matter that it's dry), and the thought of venturing to Menagerie makes him ill (tropical, surrounded by water, so it's gonna be humid).

When traveling outside of his native climate, he tends to linger in climate-controlled environments and prefers not to venture into unknown territory (rooms with thermostats he can't access in some way.)

[madeunbreakable]

@brokenclockwork from x

"I... don't appreciate your tone."

Quite bold, really, coming from a man whose skin was quickly going gray from the blood loss: not only does he simply have less blood to lose, if the blood has started to seep through his clothing enough to be visible, he's been going for a while. He wears more layers than the average Atlesian at all times, both on and off duty, and yet somehow, not a single one of them is ever kevlar. Yes, there's always the lingering question of whether he could even feel the injury, and whether preventing himself from feeling it was keeping it from healing as quickly as another fighter's same wound might, but it's hardly relevant when he's practically saturated an undershirt and sweater already.

The fact that he isn't currently seeing it as blood but is rather seeing an unidentifiable gray/black sludge spreading out and down from the inside hem of his jacket is irrelevant.

Despite the bleeding, he's still upright. Of course he is. In spite of the ringing in his ears and the way that the other colors are slowly draining out of the world around him and rendering his vision gray and he can practically feel the blood left in his body rushing downward. He might even be swaying on his feet if his right one didn't function as a pretty immovable anchor.

But... since it's just the two of them, he's already tugging open his jacket, shaking fingers slipping on the buttons at the top and fussing with each far more than he normally would. Then the sweater, opened at the shoulder like he's peeling it off, which... from the damp splat that comes from him dropping it to the ground has been doing a great deal of heavy lifting to disguise the true severity of the bleeding. Then the dress shirt, that's thankfully a magnetic closure, so that just comes open with a little tugging that also serves to untuck it from his waistband. And finally, undershirt, which just gets pulled up to expose... hm.

The wound itself is… considerable. It looks like someone has drawn a line through his flesh as though it were icing on a cake, though it's less of a single finger and more like someone's whole hand. Textbook example of a second- or third-degree laceration, hard to tell with all the blood.

"See? I'm fine. No bone, you can't even see fat layers."

[thyming]

[madeunbreakable]

“Wouldn’t you prefer a better job than ‘babysitting’ me?” for @brokenclockwork's oscar | x

"I don't consider this babysitting, but if a cynical answer would make you feel better, I spend a good portion of my day technically babysitting already."

Case in point: there's texts from Winter, taking some lost time. Will notify you and Penny when I return, and Clover, incident report for training room 3 incoming: Schnee got a personal call this morning and needed to blow off steam. Great. Oh, and a notification from Penny, 1500 tour group beginning now! (ten minutes early) Avoid the lower levels until at least 1545 to avoid contact with visitors! And... Qrow, are you gonna keep avoiding me or what? Damn it, he'll deal with that later.

"You're a much more pleasant charge than most, at least."

[candycandymemes]

Loyalty sentence starters.  

“Just because I work for you doesn’t mean you have my loyalty”

“I’m here because I want to be here”  

“I trust your judgement completely, really I mean it”  

“I’m starting to question why I follow your lead, this is ridiculous“  

“Say the word and I slit their throat”  

“Nothing could take me away from you.”  

“Your parents put me in charge of you, so I won’t be leaving your side no matter if you agree or DISAGREE with it”  

“A servant shouldn’t be in love with the person they’re supposed to be serving”  

“No one disrespects my lord/Lady and gets away with it.”

“As your assigned guard I swear to protect you from all harm’

“You know this is breaking the law, right?  I know it too and yet I’m still following your lead. How did things end up like this?”   

“I’m not worthy of even being protected”    

“Just leave me alone, you following me around like that is creepy”  

“Thank you for always staying with me.”  

“Wouldn’t you prefer a better job than ‘babysitting’ me?”

“Take another step closer and you’re fired. Don’t think I won’t fire you.”

“You know you don’t have to hover around me right?”

“I don’t care if it goes against your orders, they hurt you and so they must die”  

“Stay with me forever”  

“I couldn’t imagine being anywhere but with you”  

“People can say whatever they want about you but I know the truth. I won’t abandon you when you need me”  

“You’ve treated me kinder than anyone else”   

“I thought my feelings would never be returned”   

“We can’t be together”  

“You’re not just a servant,  you’re my best friend”   

“It’s not easy protecting you when you leap into danger ten times a day” 

“You gave me a heart attack”   

“If they touch you again they’re dead”

“Awe but my job is to stab.”   

“Why do you make me do these things?” 

“You’re superior to anyone I’ve ever met.”

“It’s nothing, just a flesh wound.”  

“I punched them”