♦ Ice - 1987 ♦ Colorpage WiP (part 2)♦

Sappy old stupidly cute men ARH D,: I love them sm it's actually unreal

This is the second part of that ice skating comic! <3 Rick actually got hurt only like a year or two after part 1 (he was shot in the back close range on the field back when he was still working for New Rosea police, saving his partner Lisa), which is when he got the cane and things started progressively getting worse </3 it wouldn't be until 1981 that he had that car crash, and only a few years after that until he actually just had to give up on the leg and get it amputated so... it was a bad decade, to say the least :,)

The thing about Rick and his mobility issues is that he wasn't exactly brought up being necessarily cared for. Like I mentioned in part 1, he was always alone, which was the preferred fate compared to the abuse he suffered in both his father's, and Kendle's hands. Being hurt and showing pain was what Rostya wanted, a satisfaction Rick simply refused to give him and after years of pushing his feelings about it down, this Stoic persistence was what gave him a big advantage against other young Underground fighters when Kendle first brought him in.

Once Rick got shot, though, years after Rostya has been long dead and he was thousands upon thousands of miles away from Kendle, this behavior came out in an ugly way, and he wasn't exactly a huge fan of getting help, or even admitting his mobility issues were, in fact, disabling him. He wouldn't even accept the cane for quite a while, even though he could just barely get around without it since his back was hurting so badly.

The leg injury only destroyed his perception of himself more. Because he was always such a big guy, his physical advantage was always very intimidating all on its own, and because he felt so vulnerable and soft emotionally, he clung onto his "scary" outwardly appearance as much as possible, which was not exactly something he felt he could do with a cane or a wheelchair. To him, it was a visual representation of his inner self, a proof that he was vulnerable, an easily broken link, and he did whatever he could to prove that stigma wrong, even when he was actively further destroying his health doing so.

It was among the main things that caused conflict between him and FJ ever since late 1970s that would eventually lead to their few years apart. FJ simply couldn't understand why Rick was perfectly capable of showing such deep love and compassion to others, but couldn't even give himself the grace to even so much as rest when he needed it.

It would take up until he lost the leg for Rick to finally kinda calm down about this. After he was kind of forced to face the damage he did to himself and his body, and his family along the way, he did give himself some more grace in his later years <3 He definitely reclaimed the disability as something that was a part of him without needing to constantly prove to himself and others that he was not affected by it in any shape or form. It never got easy, it never stopped being a nuisance he was bothered by, as any chronic pain would be, but he found comfort in help he did get, in small things in life that brought him joy.

Above all, swinging a cane, pizzazzling his prothesis and running over people's toes with his wheelchair when they annoyed him wasn't all that bad, anyway haha