#i've had the 'stryker's had about 10 cosmetic procedures' headcanon for like 3 years now and i decided it couldn't hurt to publish it

[suddenfossilfightersheadcanons]

Stryker joined the Wardens at 18, in 1999, at the end of a tumultuous season of college, and worked his way up through the ranks with nothing but drive and caffeine addiction on his side. By 21, he'd earned a reputation as one of the most impressive fossil fighters in the ranks; Liu Ren continually pestered management with requests to see this young upstart promoted up to higher ranks in Fossil Park Asia. It took several more years for these requests to pass through, however, as Stryker was also a notorious vigilante. As far as criminals were concerned, this man was the law, and the law had a temper. While Stryker's always been exceedingly polite to his superiors, he's been notorious for ignoring or defying orders in order to pursue his ambitions. Sometimes, he would be completely uncontactable for days, or would request leave for inexplicable commitments for weeks at a time. He behaved best when under the least supervision, but when unsupervised, he was known for vanishing at inconvenient moments.

Still, Liu Ren's pestering worked in the end. At 23, Stryker was Vice-Captain of the Australian branch of Fossil Park Asia, and at 24, he got promoted to head of INTERFOL Asia, leading him to take up an office in Seoul. While Stryker did get more humble once given greater responsibility, he did retain his habits of overworking himself and then disappearing for weeks on end. Usually, these disappearances were very quietly planned trips to the hospital. His description of these trips tended to be 'work-related'. Few people doubted he was stressed enough to develop medical complications from pushing himself (which he did, but tended to ignore). Thus, Stryker seldom had to explain that by 'work', he didn't mean 'my tachycardia is back and my migraine's been going for 96 hours', but 'I got my nose fixed again'. Around the time Stryker thwarted the Blackraven Brigade's initial efforts to raise cain, people started making comments about the young vigilante who'd saved the world being drop-dead gorgeous. A few people then looked back through his old photos and found that while he had, indeed, always been good-looking, nobody naturally gets that much tighter a jaw over time.

Frontier began when Stryker was 35; by the time the possibility of infiltrating the Neo Black Whale loomed over INTERFOL, no amount of botox, blepharoplasty, and judicious filler could conceal the fact that Stryker looked completely exhausted. While he knew how to attend to his appearance, he tended to bury his troublesome health and generally burnt-out immune system beneath paperwork and scheming. Not long after the secret of Nibbles' creation came up, however, Stryker checked himself into hospital with heart palpitations, severe insomnia, and a vague sense of being run down. Doctors then ran a litany of blood tests, and found that in the midst of his stress, he'd neglected a raging case of Graves' Disease. He came out of that hospital stay with yet another surgery under his belt: a thyroidectomy.

Stryker jokes that as far as management are concerned, surgery is a more compelling reason to miss work than chronic illness. As much as he's joking, it's true that many of his supposed stints of disappearing aren't down to his purported caprice: instead, there are days when he can hardly move for migraine agony. Starting botox at 22 wasn't a matter of vanity, but of trying to manage symptoms; but since being chronically ill could invite judgement, he chose to curate an image that could be called vain, rather than weak (so to speak), at worst. While most people knew tangentially that Stryker would somehow be run-down under the pressure of his job, he tends to keep the worst details of his health incredibly close to his chest. Thus, not even Liu Ren knows that Stryker's work-life balance imploded not only due to work, but also due to the combination bomb of hyperthyroidism, Sjorgren's, migraines, chronic pain, and depression.