Have you seen dilf!jason in the dc ko comics? (If you haven’t read it and plan to, this ask contains slight spoilers!)
The grays in his hair, his big ass build 🥵 if you wanted to do something angsty, say Rose had passed. How would an older, single dad Jason go about life after losing someone who he finally felt safe enough to commit to? Maybe he’s unraveling a bit, burning the candle from both ends with parenthood and vigilantism. Do you think he could trust himself and his skills to keep both his daughter and a civilian love interest safe, or would he fall for another vigilante?
Here's... not this but it's been in my head since 7:30 this morning.
"So," the pretty interviewer said, crossing her legs at the ankles and adjusting her glasses, "Your sophomore novel comes out this week and early reviews are raving."
"I uh, yeah. It's been wild after the first book, to be honest," Jason said, rubbing the back of his neck.
"Your first book had a completely different feel. What happened? What was the catalyst-"
"I got married," Jason snorted.
She blinked at him, adjusting in her chair. "Was it love at first sight?" she asked, giving him a tight smile.
"God no. She spent an entire Semester breaking my balls."
"A professor?" Her eyebows raised and her pen stopped.
"Classmate," he chuckled. "Out thought me, out wrote me- I spent an entire semester ready to wring her neck. It infuriated me every time I had to pair up with her for edits. Right off the back of my first book getting panned to hell- she was out here writing things that just- God, I hated her."
"Does she know that?"
"Probably. I called her a stuck-up bitch to her face at least once."
"So how did that affect your style?"
"Well, when I stopped being a whiny little punk, I listened. Really listened. She would come to class with something she didn't agonize over. She just wrote it. All of it exactly as she felt it. Exactly as she saw it all play out." He broke off and smiled to himself a little, picturing his wife zoned out at dinner, turning pieces over again and again until they fit. "Once I realized I can't FORCE it, can't write if I'm disconnected- it didn't get better, but I didn't practically give myself an aneurysm trying to write dialogue."
She nodded and tapped her pen against her lips, "Interesting. So you were disconnected somehow from your previous writing?"
"I felt like I had to be," he said nodding. "I had this idea in my head that if I told the story I really wanted to tell no one would want to see that. I don't think I really stopped feeling that way until- well, until I heard my wife say to a classmate, 'Shakespeare played to the cheap seats; why can't I?"
"This doesn't exactly feel like playing to the cheapseats," she laughed.
"Neither does Shakespeare- and I think that was her point."
_________________
Jason set his bag down at the door and ran his fingers through his hair, taking a deep breath. He'd never get tired of this, he didn't think. The smell of cake batter scented candles and Amish wood soap.
The clean, calm, and warmth.
Something that, at 21 he didn't think he deserved and didn't want. His first book had been a nihilistic mess. Angry. Stilted. Raw but not real. Something that, at 29 felt completely alien.
"Baby?" he called, "I'm home."
"Up here," comes the answer. From the 2nd floor and the shared office space.
"Hard at work," he muttered, smiling to himself, keying in on the rapid clicking of typewriter keys.
He climbed the stairs and ignored the ache in his left knee, idly wondering if it was going to rain- last time it was his shoulder, and it did rain that night. But he pauses at the door, watching.
A book and papers litter your desk. Post-it notes frill you computer screen. Trinkets line the shelf behind your head and the air is filled with a sense of frenetic energy. Like your mind is moving faster than you can get the words out of your head.
Pre-writing, he notes. Ideas, ideas, ideas. And nothing to stop things from coming out. Don't examine; there are no wrong answers. Just go. Think later. Read later. Go now.
Crossing the floor, he sank into his own desk chair, propping his foot up on a bank box full of old journals, and leaned back. Hands behind his head as he turned to look at the timer you had set- it stopped who knows how long ago, and you're still going.
So he waited.
You always came back to him eventually. You just had to get all this out.
But for now, he just closed his eyes and listened. The patter of quick typing, the paper feeding, the ding at the end of the line.
So many nights he'd come looking for you and found you here. Curled like a question mark, reading glasses half off your nose. Only to look up surprised to see him, blinking the haze out of your eyes and smiling like you forgot he was even in the house.
When you finally did stop, he opened his eyes and nudged your chair with his foot, "Anything good cooking?"
"Good? No. Interesting maybe," you sigh, stretching, "How was your interview?"
"I think she was disappointed I was married," he teased.
"Oh? Was she pretty?"
"Enough," he snorted. "Objectively. But she's not you."
You roll your eyes and stand up, coming to sit on his right thigh. "What'd she say?"
"She said my command of metaphor is 'marvelous'."
"She didn't say anything about your spicy scenes?" you pout.
"Well, she probably meant to- except I'm married."
"Rude," you huff, "We did a lot of research for those."
"Well maybe," he hummed, smirking as you kissed his nose, "we should go do some more research- I clearly don't have a handle on it."
