Ask and ye shall receive. Here's my platonic IronFox AU (Iron Man x Project Hail Mary AU).
(This post is dedicated to @icedcoffee2809, @stuxkykeener, and everyone who liked the post I made like two days ago about this)
Bear with me, I wrote this in one sitting and spent like an hour and a half nitpicking details. I'm also not the biggest MCU fan; it's been a while since I watched the Phase 1 movies, and I have consumed a lot of fanon material. So. Just be warned about that.
Might make a fic for this. Might not. Either way, feel free to give it a shot yourself!
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Project Hail Mary x Iron Man AU where Ryland Grace is Peter’s science teacher, Tony has the hots for him, and Grace just wants to grade papers in peace, please, especially after surviving a kamikaze mission to space.
(It's very much Grace and Tony-focused. Sorry, Peter, you're a plot device, lol).
Playing fast and loose with canon. When does this take place in the MCU? Roughly after the Chitauri invasion in 2012. When does PHM take place? Technically, the 2030s, but we're ignoring that for the sake of the crossover. How does Grace get home after the movie? Who knows!
ACT I
Grace comes back to Earth for health reasons. As much as he desperately wanted to stay on Erid, humans were just not made to live there. With the crushing atmosphere and the lingering health issues from the travel to Erid (starvation, vitamin deficiency, hell, he had scurvy!), staying on Erid would have just killed him slowly. Still, he didn't want to go, but the entirety of Erid loves their Saving Grace and would rather let him go so that he would live rather than watch him wither away. It takes a long time, but Rocky, Adrian, and the rest of Erid convince him to return to Earth.
Grace is greeted by an Earth changed, but they still consider him a hero. He was--is--after all, the one who made discoveries that made Project Hail Mary even possible (how to breed the Astrophage and more), and sent the Taumeoba back to Earth and saved it from an icy death.
Despite this, Grace refused any medals, interviews, and talk shows. He just wanted to go back to teaching, and most are hard-pressed to go against this simple wish, though they did convince him to teach high school instead of middle school. He gives the world leaders and governments the bare minimum, like about where the Taumeoba originated, but he tells no one about Rocky, Erid, hell--even the fishing mission where he got the Taumeoba with Rocky in the first place. Nobody knows what happened to Grace in space, and he likes to keep it that way.
Anyway, what catches Tony's attention is that maybe Peter was given a mid or poor grade? Or Peter was caught making web fluid in the science lab. Tony, who kinda has taken Peter under his wing at this point, is either mildly offended or intrigued (if it's the former, wary that someone could figure Peter out if the latter). When confronted, Grace is no nonsense--he's more confident now, thanks to all of Erid's efforts to make him feel loved and welcome, and god, he misses home so much--
(If it's the latter, he promises he won't say anything.)
Either way, Tony becomes curious. He's heard all about Ryland Grace, one of the brilliant minds of their generation who made first contact with an alien species (the Astrophage--the Chitauri was the second alien contact), was shot into space, and saved the world. He won't admit it either, but Grace is a good-looking guy (he's totally smitten).
Grace, however, wants nothing to do with anything big. He just wants to teach and do nothing else (quietly, he's bitter; he's better than ever physically, but his home is light-years away).
Tony gets Grace by targeting his very specific niche: alien biology. Who did Grace befriend? An alien. What did Tony just fight? Aliens! What better way than to entice Grace by offering him the ability to study more aliens at a molecular level? So he offers Grace the opportunity to study a Chitauri sample.
It works because, beneath everything else, Grace is a scientist, endlessly curious.
ACT II
So Grace starts coming over to the compound Saturday nights and most of Sunday. Unlike the no-nonsense man Tony met, the Grace that shows up to his lab is skittish--not exactly timid, but so obviously ready to bolt, much like the fox on the sweater he wears so frequently.
Grace ends up liking JARVIS and Dum-E more than he does Tony at first. The funny thing is, the robots and AI warm up to him really fast too. JARVIS reminds Grace of Mary, the Hail Mary's AI, and Dum-E reminds him of Armando, the arm nanny bot.
As time goes on, Grace starts to relax; however, it's only when he does stay late at the lab that he opens up ever so slightly, usually to JARVIS or Dum-E. Tony usually has to be very quiet and not bring attention to the fact that he’s there, or Grace will clam up and leave for the night--and Tony, despite knowing that Grace is talking to JARVIS and Dum-E only, listens in because he wants to know what happened to Grace. After all, as I said, Grace has revealed nothing to the public.
Anyway, bit by bit, Grace grows a bit more comfortable, a bit more open, with Tony himself. At this point, Tony knows Grace won’t date him--the latter is entirely uninterested in romance and has made that clear (AroAce Grace FTW), and Tony isn’t the kind of asshole to ignore that. Instead, somewhere between the thinly veiled fondness through the banter and insults, Grace had managed to worm his way into the very small group of people Tony genuinely cares about.
ACT III
(Bear with me, the next stuff deals with my personal headcanons lol)
Grace absentmindedly mentions one day that he has had memory issues ever since he woke up in space with amnesia--he didn’t even know his own name at first! And it’s still affecting him to this day. His life before joining the project is a blurry mess. He’s accepted this, but he doesn’t quite realize how concerning it sounds to Tony, JARVIS, and Dum-E.
(He doesn’t tell them *why* he had amnesia in the first place. That French drug Stratt had injected into him after he threatened to sabotage the mission… that story is for another day.)
It takes a lot of convincing, but Grace reluctantly agrees to get a brain scan. But it’s only for Tony, JARVIS, and Dum-E’s eyes only. He makes them swear.
The scan reveals that Grace has permanent brain damage. His retrograde amnesia has signs of being chemically induced (again, Grace did not say it, in fact, was chemically induced)--and chemicals are a fickle thing, especially when it comes to the brain. The fact that Grace has remembered so much of his life before waking up on the Hail Mary is a miracle.
Grace is not as surprised or angry as Tony expected him to be. When asked, Grace just says it feels like something that happened to someone else. The memories that made up Ryland… Grace only has some of it, which is why he considers Ryland dead and a separate person.
Tony, JARVIS, and Dum-E aren't content, however, and start looking for what could have caused it. In the end, however, JARVIS doesn’t need to trace any French black markets.
It’s Grace himself who tells Tony what happened, finally ready to confront this part of his past that he’s been avoiding and repressing for so long. The brain scan and results had started him on a path of acceptance, and for him to accept what happened to him, he needed to say it out loud. To make it real.
...There was a reason he preferred to be called Grace rather than Ryland, after all.
(Ryland was just a scientist--the world lead for the Astrophage, sure, but he wasn’t an astronaut. That was Commander Yao Li-Jie, Olesya Ilyukhina, and Martin DubBois. Hell, it was even the secondary scientist, Annie Shapiro. Ryland was just a scientist. He wasn’t an astronaut.
But then the Baikonur Research Facility exploded, and Martin and Annie died.
There were three days before launch.
They needed a scientist.
But Ryland didn’t want to die.
So Ryland ran. He ran like a coward. Like a wild fox. Darting out into the field, running towards the fence. And he was so close. He just needed to reach out and--
And--
And he was tackled.
And Ryland was tackled and pinned down and stop it no you’re murdering me stop it no no no I’m not I can’t do this I’ll sabotage the mission stop stop help me help me help--
...
Ryland died on Earth, nails digging into the ground as they put a needle into his neck.
Grace woke up alone in the vast vacuum of the dark, more a blank slate than a man, with no memories and two corpses to greet him.
Ryland was dead. All that remained was Grace.
...
Ha.
Hail Mary, Full of GRACE--)
ACT IV
Grace doesn't come to the compound for a long while after that.
But when he does, he starts to bloom like a flower under care.
While he wasn’t exactly reserved, now that this invisible wall was out of the way, Tony could see how Grace had been holding himself back before. How wary, how scared, how shamefully he held himself as if being kidnapped and drugged and given permanent brain damage was shameful, and that he was a coward when no, all he had wanted to do was to live--
Overall, Grace was happier.
He starts sharing more bits and pieces about his time in space--about Rocky.
Tony internally preens every time Grace does so because Grace has literally never told anyone else this. He refused to say anything when he came back to Earth. It's *Tony* who gets that privilege, and so what if that strokes his ego?
Anyways, it ends with Grace realizing that, while he'll forever miss Rocky, Adrian, and Erid--the home of his heart--he can maybe learn to love Earth again too.
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And that's it!
I do have other ideas that could work as their own standalone, but same universe thing. Maybe I'll post those separately.
