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ziyechs · 2 months ago

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okay i'm here i'm sat i would love to hear more about this au!! as i said in my tags just now WHY would joe have left and drifted with someone else?? how could he do that to ja'marr like...no wonder he's upset!! and again i'll say that drift compatibility for them is SO perfect because i mean tbh the closest thing to that irl would HAVE to be the chemistry of a QB/WR relationship. especially one as unique as their's!

ohh boy okay strap in this got kind of long (plus this first part of it is almost entirely unnecessary world-building lmao so bear with me)

also here, here and here are my previous posts about joe'marr pacrim au in case anyone is curious as to what the hell i'm even talking about here

nowwwww, first things first: joe and ja’marr meet sometime in ja’marr’s first year at the jaeger academy and get paired up pretty much immediately due to their insanely high drift-compatibility

i was doing a bit of Professional Research (scrolling tumblr) and stumbled upon this incredible post, which i’m gonna be using as a reference when talking about drift compatibility and whatnot

now. important to note that joe, for the sake of kicking the plot of this whole thing into action, has an unusually high dci

(ja’marr’s compatibility index isn’t super low or anything, just in the lower range somewhere, which limits his ability to drift with other people and also restricts the number of potential drift-partners that are theoretically available to him)

(meanwhile someone like justin probably has a higher-ish dci, as evidenced by his ability to thrive in minnesota while playing under 293849074583274 different, questionably talented quarterbacks lol)

(sidenote, i reckon their respective compatibility indexes are somewhat allegorical to how the nature (and role demands) of their positions differ irl: quarterbacks need to have a pretty good, mutual connections with all of their potential receiving targets (which includes receivers, but also tight ends, or running backs). need to be on good terms with their o-lines, the people they rely on for protection, and have at least a basic awareness/understanding of cornerbacks/safeties to make accurate reads in the pocket)

(comparatively, receiver is much more of an isolated position, i would say. they obviously have to work closely with their quarterbacks (and some of the main back-ups), but apart from that it’s a very lonely position with few relationships you gotta maintain in order to be successful)

but, yeah, all of this is to say that joe would probably be a highly sought-after commodity in this universe due to his ability to sustain a stable neural handshake with pretty much anyone

probably gets fast-tracked through the academy and sent to one of the more prestigious shatterdomes (LA), in a move that’s honestly mostly a PR-strategy (i’m assuming this takes place around the time where the wall starts getting built and the public has begun losing trust in the jaeger program)

obviously gets sent out on missions pretty much immediately

helps with some of the developmental work necessary to refine the pons-interface and gets his ears talked off by a bunch of engineers who want to hear his opinion on this entirely insignificant piece of jaeger technology they have been working on

but they also task him with training the younger recruits that are arriving at the shatterdome (since it’s advantageous for them to have amore experienced partner to enter a drift simulator with when trying to fine-tune some of their abilities), so during his first year joe enters a lot of different simulators with a lot of different people

now, it’s been a while since i’ve actually watched the movies so i’m not entirely sure in how far (if at all) this is supported by the canon, but i would imagine that it’s probably not recommended to switch your drift partners very often due to some obscure neurological reason

(maybe it just takes too much of a mental strain on the brain when it is constantly being tasked with adapting (and reacting) to multiple drift partners with vastly disparate backgrounds, cognitive architectures and experiences? might also be important to take into account that he’s entering a lot of simulators with inexperienced pilots and young recruits. which most likely puts a comparatively high mental strain on joe’s brain, since he’s the one that's primarily responsible for stabilizing the drift and maintaining the connection)

i would also imagine that there’s probably not an awful lot of research on this particular topic, since joe is one of the first pilots who have had a high enough compatibility index, number of different drift partners and usage rate to trigger this phenomenon

the symptoms are barely noticeable at first: maybe a few minor migraines. his vision going a little blurry at the edges whenever he spends too much time staring at his ipad screen. tiny fissures in his memory; things he used to know blindly suddenly start slipping his mind—the access code to his room, the name of the new recruit he’s meant to be mentoring

but he hides it fairly well—probably doesn’t even really notice it in the beginning, chalks it up to the stress he’s been under recently, to the poor sleep he’s been getting. doesn’t mention it to anyone because what’s the point, really, it’s nothing bad, he’s doing alright, doesn’t want to worry anyone when there are much, much bigger problems that require dealing with (namely: the end of the world lol)

until it starts getting worse: he begins having more severe memory impairments. wakes up in the mornings with a headache that’s bad enough to make him dry heave into the toilet bowl. stays right there on the cold bathroom tile, desperately trying to breathe through the nausea, just keeps pulling air into his lungs—slow and deep and steady—, blinking red-hot, bleeding pain out of his eyes. cuts himself while trying to shave because he can’t stop his hands from trembling. gets out of the simulator one day and just. collapses.

obviously immediately gets rushed to the medical department where they spend the next twelve hours conducting various neurological assessments on him (asking a bunch of questions, checking for balance and attention and memory, trying to construct a timeline of his symptoms) until deciding that the whole thing is serious enough to warrant functional/structural neuroimaging. in order to assess the full extent of the damage iykwim

all of which ultimately culminates in joe sitting in a tiny, tucked-away room somewhere, listening to one of the doctors—an older woman with a steady voice and kind eyes—as she’s saying words like neuronal cell death and brain atrophy and protein aggregation like any of it means anything to him

joe doesn’t say a single word, just stares blankly at this horrible, multi-coloured PET-scan of his brain; black splotches where there used to be neural activity, like a lease that has run out

finally, weeks later, he receives official confirmation that he’ll be allowed to continue piloting as long as he restricts his partners to people he has previously drifted with: people he has no issues maintaining a stable connection with, people he knows well enough to ensure that the neural handshake is stable and balanced enough as to not cause any further mental deterioration

which, obviously, leaves a somewhat restricted number of people: tee, tyler, a few people he drifted with back in the academy (justin, clyde, terrace), and, of course, ja’marr

—

okay, i’m gonna go on a quick tangent here, so bear with me for a minute. i was trying to figure out a semi-logical reason for why (and how) excessive drifting with a multitude of different drift partners would cause this kind of decline in joe’s cognitive abilities (and, ultimately, would have most likely rendered him unable to drift entirely, had they not caught it in time)

the movie references the term ‘mental load’ a lot when talking about drifting. which, like, as far as i understand it, doesn’t really mean anything except for serving as a sort of blanket term for the mental effort it would require to pilot a jaeger. (but it doesn’t offer any actual explanation to how exactly it works)

so, naturally, because i am kind of an insane person, i read this paper on the basic mechanisms of neurodegeneration to come up with an (honestly still kind of questionable) explanation

now, from what i know, certain neurodegenerative diseases are in parts caused/exacerbated by high levels of stress (activation of the hpa axis, which elevates circulating corticosteroid levels in the brain, blablabla, the whole shebang)

soooo, maybe there’s an interaction between the high levels of cortisol in joe’s brain and the depletion of specific cognitive resources associated with maintaining the neural handshake

which could cause something like protein aggregation (a process in which mutated or improperly folded proteins accumulate and form aggregates), which ultimately results in a disruption in the mechanisms that are responsible for neural growth, recovery, neurogenesis and whatnot

like i said previously all of this is very Biologically Questionably (i am Not an expert) but whatever lol it’s good enough for me

i also feel the need to emphasise that joe should probably not be drifting At All anymore at this point, but i highly doubt anyone in this universe feels like they have the luxury of issuing joe burrow a permanent, blanket ban on piloting

(also, if anything, medical malpractice is kind of a prerogative when writing nfl fanfic lol)

ANYWAY like i said, all of this leaves joe with limited options: justin (who got stationed up in anchorage and has grown into an exceptional pilot and, like, has become an essential part of the organisation up there, so honestly good luck convincing KOC to ever let him go), tee, tyler, some of the guys that are still back at the academy and ja’marr

cue: joe starts not-so-subtly lobbying for ja’marr

the higher-ups in LA aren’t entirely convinced on him; he’s just coming off an injury that has sidelined him for months and—even though his and joe’s sim performances last year had been nothing short of excellent: thirty-seven drops and thirty-seven kills—ja’marr hasn’t been in a simulator for over a year now

but at the end of the day joe does get his wish and ja’marr is sent to LA

—

NOW. MEANWHILE. as all of this is happening, ja’marr is busy doing his final year in the academy

and he is Not Having A Good Time

it’s a really difficult year for him because so many of his friends have graduated, been scattered all across the globe, living lives that ja’marr only ever catches glimpses of through interviews on TV or hushed gossip in the hallways

and of course they all try to stay in contact as much as possible—justin tries to visits him every second weekend, their group chat is active enough that ja’marr has to comb through over two-hundred messages each evening before going to sleep, clyde sends him pictures of the sunset in melbourne, grant plays call of duty when ja’marr has trouble falling asleep—but it’s different

joe also comes by a lot in those first few months, but eventually his visits turn sporadic and increasingly short-lived as he starts climbing the ranks in LA

they don’t do much—ja’marr is still nursing a leg injury he got during combat training and it’s not like there’s much to do at the academy anyway—so they mostly just hang out in ja’marr’s room

ja’marr’s getting joe up to date on the latest gossip and how rehab is going

joe reciprocating by telling ja’marr about this hidden cove he found on one of his morning runs, how much ja’marr would like LA, how he can’t wait to show him one day

they have sex that leaves ja’marr feeling horrible and scooped-out, emotions all tangled up, spilling out wrong

(i don’t have a concrete idea of what exactly their relationship status would be like at this point in time. it’s a little complicated—except for all the ways in which it really isn’t; they probably started sleeping with each other sometime in the middle of ja'marr's second year in the academy and just. never really stopped. took a break for a few months, maybe, during that period of time when justin and joe were teaming up fairly regularly in the simulator)

but it probably started kind of like this:

they’re in ja’marr’s room after a session in the simulator. both of them on his bed (joe reading, ja’marr playing some random video game), legs tangled because it’s important to have that mutual point of contact when their minds are still reeling after a drop, trying to remap the boundaries of their own bodies

there’s still some residual shared sensory overlap:

ja’marr's trying to focus on his game but every couple of minutes he’ll be blinking and opening his eyes to a flicker of what joe is currently looking at; a page of his book—the letters all inky viscosity, blurring together, bleeding into one another, because joe’s too stubborn to wear his glasses—, a different angle on the TV screen—just off enough to make his body sway in place trying to compensate for the shift in perspective—, the shape of his own body—joe’s glance that’s climbing up the notches of his spine that are faintly visible through his t-shirt

before long ja’marr has given up on trying to play his game

is lying on his bed instead

head somewhere right next to joe’s heartbeat, one of his legs hitched over his thighs. nose brushing joe clavicle on every uptick of his breath

and it’s easy. uncomplicated, in a way that it normally isn’t because he doesn’t have to worry about plausible deniability in moments like these—there’s no need to masquerade the longing in his chest as anything other than not is

not when joe’s hands are quietly tightening around his hips like he’s scared ja’marr might slip away from him if he doesn’t hold onto him. not when ja’marr can feel each individual fingertip through the fabric of his shirt, can feel every point where their bodies are connected

it’s easier, in moments like these—when the aftereffects of the drifts are still clinging to his bones like wet cloth—, when both of them want nothing but being close to each other, closer closer closer, like the parts of their consciousness they had borrowed from one another are desperately trying to crawl back home

ja’marr still hasn’t opened his eyes

there’s no need to; not with joe’s eyesight that’s surging through his mind every few minutes

he sees his own eyelashes that are fluttering against his skin, long shadows bleeding all the way down his cheekbones

one of joe’s hands that is stubbornly curled into the hem of his shirt

his thumb pressing into the indentation right below ja’marr’s ear

and then suddenly

he hears his name being called; gentle and steady, quiet like a secret joe’s been carrying around for years and is only now entrusting to him

palm sliding down ja’marr’s face and curving around his jaw, heavy with the weight of something that has been building, building, building for months now

and then joe is leaning in and ja’marr is rising to meet him

feels himself kissing and being kissed at the same time—still halfway in between their two minds—and it’s barely more than a tentative brush of lips at first but it feels more intimate than anything they’ve ever done

because ja’marr makes a tiny, desperate noise in the back of his throat and joe licks it right ouf of his mouth and the possessiveness of it settles somewhere deep in his stomach

and it’s the closest ja'marr has ever felt to him, even though they’ve been in the drift enough times that he feels like he has known joe forever. carries a permanent imprint of him beneath his skin

anyway. from this point on. well. pretty regular post-drift sex that slowly turns into regular sex just. whenever they both feel like it. and it’s very messy because obviously they don’t talk about any of it

gets even worse after joe leaves for LA. their communication takes a big hit (both the frequency and the ease of it), since so much of it was predicated on living in each other’s pockets, seeing each other five hours a day during training and sim sessions, and literally dripping into each other’s consciousness for the majority of it all

like, if you’ve spent literal years living in the back of someone’s mind, i just feel like it would be so strange to suddenly not have that anymore

and having to sort of relearn how to communicate outside of the drift. figuring out how to read one another without the added help of that mental connection

ja’marr’s throat is closing up anytime he wants to speak up because everything feels strange and unsure and unspeakable now that they actually have to put it into words instead of letting the silent, unacknowledged truth of it ebb and flow through their shared consciousness

anyway, like i said, joe still comes by whenever he can make the time

all of their conversations are stilted and unsure

and it feels especially awful sometimes because joe will be talking to him and halfway through his sentence his accent slips into something else entirely—a pronunciation he borrowed from tyler, or that liquid drawl tee’s voice carries sometimes when he’s half asleep and his syllables start bleeding into each other. and ja’marr suddenly can’t bear to look at him anymore because it feels like the person he loves is slipping away from him minute by minute; like anytime they see each other there is another part of him that got lost in translation and ja’marr doesn’t know how to undo this slow, monstrous unraveling

doesn’t know how to love joe anymore, not when he’s like this—barely half of how ja’marr remembers him, almost a stranger, someone who has given so many pieces of himself away to others for safekeeping

doesn’t know how to hold onto him anymore, doesn’t even know if joe still wants him to

so, yeah, all in all ja’marr would not have a great time during that year, trying to rehab his fucked up leg and stubbornly refusing to acknowledge how lonely and heartbroken he feels

and some nights—in the privacy of his room, when he allows those feelings of abandonment and bitterness to bloom in his chest instead of closing his fist around them and suffocating them right there and then—he watches interviews with the people joe is drifting with in LA

and it makes him feel even more horrible about himself because they seem nice

(people he could have been friends with in a different life, under different circumstances)

(watches so many interviews and talkshow appearances that it almost feels like he knows them—and it’s easy to feel like he actually does because he has listened to tyler boyd talk about the drawing his daughter brought home from daycare the other day and the book he’s been reading to her over facetime whenever he knows he won’t make it home for bedtime. when he’s watched tee higgins ramble about cars and the jellyfish aquarium he’s been secretly keeping in his room in LA and how he got into sooo much trouble for it once it got discovered)

and, like i said, all of them seem sweet and kind and genuine

but every now and again ja’marr’s gaze catches on the way tee’s eyes go all squinty and tight when a camera shutter goes off right in his face, or when the beam of the studio lights hits him at a certain angle

or how tyler’s lower lip pushes forward into the little pout joe does sometimes when he’s been asked a question he doesn’t know if he has an answer to

all of which are mannerism that are so painfully familiar to ja’marr because it used to be him that was borrowing them

who traced the shape of them in the mirror; fingers trembling, each touch laced with reverence and awe

and suddenly there’s all this anger coiling up tightly in his stomach when he thinks about how much of joe he used to have—and how much of him is being stolen away from him

and ja’marr tries really hard not to think about how much time tee and joe must be spending together

how many hours in the simulator it must have taken for joe’s frown to leave such a permanent imprint on the ridges of joe mixon’s face

but i suppose it would also go the other way around:

one of the interviewers asks tee a question—softball, about growing up in tennessee, or his favourite restaurant in LA—and right before tee goes to answer, he does that little thing: a barely-there tilt of his head, shy smile stretching the corner of his mouth

and ja’marr suddenly feels like he might throw up

because he has seen joe do that exact thing before

in the privacy of ja’marr’s room, one of those weekends joe had come to visit, one of those afternoons they had spent in each other’s orbits, so close they were practically sharing breaths

when he thought that the world had narrowed down to the intimacy of that moment: joe’s fingers curled losely around his wrist, thumb pressed to his pulse point until ja’marr could feel his heartbeat resonating through both of their bodies—a steady badum, badum, badum—, his chest tight and heavy with the significance of the moment; like he was breathing for both of them, somehow, like he had two hearts pulsating against his ribcage

but in reality it hadn’t been private or intimate at all. instead tee higgins had been there with them; clawing at parts of joe, ripping him away rib by rib until there had been nothing left of him for ja’marr

—

ANYWAY fast forward to when ja’marr arrives in LA

gets brought up to date regarding joe’s health situation (and obiously clocks immediately what role they expect him to play in all of this. categorically refuses at first and it probably takes, like, an honestly absurd amount of doctors and neurologists and drift-scientists to convince ja’marr that joe is stable enough to enter a simulator/jaeger without putting him at risk of worsening his current condition)

i also think that this probably opens another whole can of worms where ja’marr is kind of beating himself up over the whole thing

lot of complicated emotions going on in his head—cause we obviously all know just how seriously he takes health issues—most likely some frayed anger at joe for being this careless, putting his body on the line without considering any of the long-term effects it may have on him. without considering what it would do to his loved ones (to his friends! his family! to ja’marr!!) if anything were to happen to him

and like, you know, it’s like. death is somewhat of an expected outcome in this universe, something that’s always lingering right at the edge of everyone’s awareness

and there is probably this small, angry, selfish part of ja’marr that’s like

i love joe and it should be MY privilege to die with him. if that makes sense lmao like hes soooo mad just thinking on repeat that

if joe so insists on doing all of this self-sacrifial bullshit, he should’ve at least do it with me, he should’ve done it with me so that i can have something of his when he is gone, something permanent, wallpaper in my mind or an oil stain on my fingertips or a tattoo something permanent something painful something real

and the more ja’marr is thinking about it, the more unfair it feels to him that he has spent all these years loving joe and how he barely has anything to show for it now: no biochemical traces in his brain’s anatomy, their ghost-drift long ameliorated, no physical scars to prove how well he has loved him, how much it has ruined him, how much of joe has shaped him into the person he is today

(he is VERY dramatic here lmao just imagine nineteen year old ja’marr chase at 2am furiously scribbling all of these thoughts into his diary lmao)

but yeah, i reckon there’s probably also a fair amount of guilt masquerading as some of that self-righteous anger

like maybe he should have realised that joe was not doing well, should have noticed that he wasn’t being himself those past few months

and he kind of did

(could tell that joe had been distracted and tired. not fully filling out the shape of who ja’marr knows him to be)

but piloting can have a big toll on the mind and he knows how hard joe was working and how many expectations had been placed on his shoulders, so he probably just attributed it up to stress

—

at some point��once ja’marr’s leg has fully healed and a little bit of colour has returned to joe’s face—they enter the simulator together for the first time in a year

and ja’marr shuts down entirely within the first few seconds, like the neural handshake just doesn’t work at all because you can’t take secrets into the drift

but ja’marr is so helplessly in love with joe by this point (and simulateneously absolutely convinced that joe doesn’t feel the same) that he can’t bear the humiliation of joe finding out like this, in the drift, probably hating him for it, never wanting to speak or drift with him again etc etc

(sidenote, literally none of this would ever happen lmao joe is pretty obviously to everyone except ja’marr very much in love with him too but like. they’re both kind of stupid lol)

so, yeah, their first drift attempt fails pretty spectacularly

and ja’marr pretty much runs away

(this is where all of this would take place, i suppose)

joe finds him a few hours later and they talk

and it’s very stiltled and strange and overall kind of horrible because they haven’t really talked in a very long time and ja’marr can still feel joe’s presence in the back of his mind

uncomfortable and misplaced and intrusive, scratching across the inside of his skull, the way it sometimes is after a failed drift

he used to be pretty good at reading joe but right now he kind of feels like a stranger around him, like there’s a language barrier between them for the first time ever

and no matter how hard ja’marr tries the words just won’t come out right, all of it strange and stilted and unfamiliar; sharp edges and ragged shapes that he’s cutting his tongue on

—

i do think they figure it out eventually

their drift compatibility probably takes a while to get back to where it used to be

but now

whenever they get out of the simulator

after the drift has dripped out of their bones and left behind two minds instead of one

joe will come up to him

brush their shoulders together, silent and deliberate, and as they walk back to their room, he doesn’t let go of ja’marr hand even once

and for the first time in a very long time ja’marr braves the thought that, maybe, they’re going to be alright

ANYWAYYYYY thank you soooo much for the ask and sorryyyyyy that it's taken me such a long time to get back to you 🥲🫶❤️ omg also re: what you said about drift compatibility being the closest thing to a qr/qb relationship I AGREEEEEE truly i am always thinking about that one poem by pablo neruda that goes like: I love you like this because I don't know any other way to love, / except in this form in which I am not nor are you, / so close that your hand upon my chest is mine, / so close that your eyes close with my dreams. like!!!!!!!!!!

#this does have a happy ending btw it just takes them a long time to actually get there #tee is probably like #sooooooo invested in this #meets ja'marr for the first time and says something funny and charming something that makes ja'marr do that #hyena cackling laughing noise of his #and tee's eyes light up eyebrows raised all the way up to his hairline #glances meaningfully at joe who's standing off to the side somewhere #involved in a conversation he seems to be actively trying to escape from #then looks back at ja'marr and then goes—all smug and self-satisfied—“oh so it's like THAT”#and ja'marr doesn't know what he means until later that week when he hears joe laugh at something #and it's the exact same way he does it; all nasally and bright #and he feels something settle deep inside of him #like #yeah #maybe it IS like that #makes him feel all soft and tender that joe had kept something of his #even after months of being apart #anyway i gotta find that oneeeee videoooo of joe laughing at like???? that random ass bowling ball story or whatever the hell that was #sounding EXACTLY like ja'marr cause that's what im kinda visualising here iykwim #joe'marr pacrim au #asks

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