"Scott Hunter queer elder" is all fun and jokes until Scott Hunter baby gay to the rest of the world queer elder to his immediate workplace makes you burst into tears. hey did any of you guys also have gay dads who never got to be out. unrelated question
Before Ryland is sent to Tau Ceti, Matt is the one who carries the most obvious physical scars in their relationship
His scars from the chemicals burning his eyes, his scars from his time with Stick, his scars from his nights as Daredevil
Ryland loves these scars because of who they belong to, and the fact that it tells a story of what his husband had gone through
But he hates the scars that mar his own skin
(He won’t ever remember Matt the first time he calls him out on his hypocrisy and loving his scars for him, just like Ryland loved Matt’s for him)
The only scars Ryland kept into adulthood are the cigarette burns his father had given him, that he had hidden from his mother, from Court, from Colt
(Colt eventually found them anyway, after Court had been taken away from them)
But Matt?
Matt is the only one he chooses to show those scars
(Not even Colt had seen them on Ryland’s own choice, having seen them one night in one of the many foster homes before the Grace family)
Not because he’s blind and can’t actually see the skin that’s blackened on the edges
(Edges that softened over time, but the blackened skin stubbornly refused to go away after nearly two decades)
But because he trusts Matt to not say anything as the pads of his fingers brush over them
(Partners in the past had commented on them, calling them ugly or calling him brave, and it left Ryland’s skin crawling where they touched after a comment like that)
Because he trusts Matt to hold him after a nightmare, and understand what he means when he says when he says he doesn’t want to talk about it, and lets Ryland cling to him like he’s going to drown without his touch
(He can never quite remember the nightmare, even when he was still on Earth, but he knows it’s the same one every time, and that it always leaves him shaking all the same)
Because he trusts Matt to accept him as he is, and Matt trusts Ryland to do so for him in return
(Ryland does, and he always would, especially through the growing pains they had gone through in college)
But after Adrian?
He couldn’t be prouder of his scars
The print from Rocky’s hand on his right arm is proof of his friend that he will carry for the rest of his life, even if Rocky wasn’t able to come to Earth with him
His ammonia burn that covers his left arm and part of his face is proof, to him, that he’s finally not a coward, that he can help the ones he loves
The fact that it all but erased the cigarette burns was a welcome side effect, even if getting them is one of the precious few memories from before the Project that he’s managed to recover from the amnesia drug
(He doesn’t remember the fact that he had gotten them because he had been brave, standing between his mother, crumpled on the ground, and his father yelling and with a broken bottle in his hand)
When he lands back on Earth, and Matt is the first one to meet him, his husband’s hands go to the new rough patch of skin
And he touches it with the same careful reverence he had touched the burns before
And he still doesn’t say anything, and still lets Ryland shake apart in his arms and still lets Ryland cling to him as his legs give out from under him
Had the funniest thought about the possibility of IronMary (Ryland Grace x Tony Stark) and AstroDevil existing in the same timeline
What if Tony Stark was Ryland’s rebound?
Doesn’t really matter if it was short term relationship or a one-night stand, but I find it hilarious to imagine that Tony Stark manages to find a hot nerd who can outsmart him in a field he doesn’t know (engineering vs. biology) and said hot nerd would rather have the blind, guilty Catholic lawyer
Thinking about the fact that, in their respective books, Ryland Grace and Katniss Everdeen are unreliable narrators about themselves in the same exact way
Thinking about another AstroDevil scenario where PHM isn’t a coma dream, but they somehow still meet
Thinking they probably meet in undergraduate school in a library, and bonded over being lonely nerds, and Matt (being a pre-law student) helped Ryland find his teeth in terms of arguing his point
They get married a couple years before Ryland gets kicked out of academia, and decide to keep their names publicly separate on everything except their legal documents (Matt insists), where they’re hyphenated as Grace-Murdock
Sometime before they get married but after they’ve already gotten together, Ryland finds out that Matt is Daredevil and they have to work through that mess
Matt is the one who encourages Ryland to go into teaching, and the kids absolutely love it when he visits the classroom and Mr. Grace gets more smiley than usual, especially those first few years after his fallout with academia
But everything crashes down around Matt’s ears when he loses contact with Ryland, and he can’t find him at all until he gets word that his husband has been kidnapped by some new dictator-type, but he doesn’t have to go get him because he’s back home by the weekend
That’s the beginning of the end, though
Just two short years later, Matt is standing in front of an empty grave with one half of a ring pair, and a voicemail weighing heavy in his pocket
He then bullies his way onto the team prosecuting Eva Stratt, petitions to add the charge of the murder of Ryland Grace-Murdock, and that voicemail goes from a last plea sent to a spouse to the last condemnation of Eva Stratt
(If you want a happier version where Ryland doesn’t go to space, you can use attempted murder instead)
He already knows how to accommodate for someone who “sees” with sound, even if he doesn’t remember why
He knows what sounds concerning when it’s actually fine, and what sounds fine when it’s not because he had to learn how navigate that at the same time Matt did
And when he remembers that he was married, he breaks down and is a mess for weeks, because how could he forget his husband?
And then later he remembers Stratt saying “you have no immediate family, you don’t even have a dog
And his immediate reaction is “I do. I have a husband. I have brothers and sisters (Matt’s fellow vigilantes that stop by occasionally). I have a kid (potentially Peter depending on how you write it).”
And all he can think is how much he regrets not making his relationship with Matt even a little more public, even though that would have made separate issues regarding Matt’s activities as Daredevil
Imagine when they tell each other about their partners, and, even though Ryland doesn’t remember Matt at first, he has a vague feeling that he had someone back on Earth
Of course Rocky never forgot Adrian, with an Eridian’s memory being almost perfect, and Rocky is horrified to realize that one of those things Ryland forgot was his mate
Imagine much more horrified Rocky would be to learn that Stratt tore him away from his kids, not just his student, but Peter, who he had come to see as and look out for as his own
It would! However, Earth would already have guardrails in place for population devastation, it wouldn’t be as unexpected. If anything, the astrophage infection might just convince Thanos it’s not worth the effort on the grand scale of things
But a benefit of setting PHM within the MCU: they have jump points. Which makes the likelihood of Ryland coming back that much higher. They don’t know about said jump points before the Hail Mary is on her way, but before she gets to Tau Ceti, they figure out jump points
Someone (whether that be Captain Marvel, or an Earth-origin crew) come to save Ryland and then they meet Rocky and they get him back to Erid (and establish regular communication for Ryland and Rocky’s benefit) before heading back to Earth
The first one to meet him on the ground is his husband, who just listens to Ryland’s heartbeat and breathing and taking in the changes his time in space had brought to them and settling into the rhythm as he listens to Ryland’s voice over top of it
Peter’s definitely still a high school kid, maybe a freshman, when he’s bit and ends up meeting Daredevil after he strays into Hell’s Kitchen one night
Matt realizes how young the kid is and invites him to Foggy’s, which is where Peter meets Ryland, who Matt has not told is Spiderman, trusting that Peter will tell that when he’s ready
And he does, sometime a couple months in and probably following some big fight that leaves him feeling conflicted about something, which then leads to Ryland using a significant portion of his paychecks that would usually go toward personal stuff toward researching exactly how Peter’s metabolism and powers, which leads to more than one breakthrough in how Peter leads his life with his powers, and probably significantly helps with the medical side of things surrounding dosages of meds that makes Claire want to platonically kiss him when they figure out the painkiller and anesthetic doses respectively
I’m thinking Peter is probably in his sophomore of junior year of undergrad, and pursuing a microbiology degree, when the Hail Mary launches, and he doesn’t know that Ryland was launching until it was too late or that it wasn’t voluntary until years down the line, and thinks he’s just lost another parental figure, because everyone knows that the Hail Mary is a one way trip
And then they’re told about jump points and it’s not a one way trip anymore.
Peter is nearly 40 by the time Ryland comes back to Earth
He’s one of the first people after Matt and Colt to meet him once he has his feet back on dry land
