the thing about driverjacket is genuinely, truly, i do think that driver and jacket like each other. just not romantically. like their relationship only works for me as (a little bit more than) friends with benefits; their most recent relationships are just too raw, too close, for them to try and enter each others' lives like that just... doesn't feel right, to either of them.
they do depend on each other, though, at least for a while. in my head they're only together for a year or two (after '86 but before '89) but that time they do spend together is really important. they don't know each other, not truly, at least, but there is an understanding between them of loss. sure the sex is great and all (...as good as it could be between two grey-ace bastards who don't really have sex all that often, especially outside of the time they'd been together) but intrinsically, there is just... something about the other that inclines them to stay.
i think driver, as the older of them, sees a lot of himself in jacket. and i think that is something that both draws him to it and also makes him not want to get Too close. car guys of little words with shitty childhoods and insane devotion complexes that makes them borderline obsessive? it's almost like you copy and pasted his base traits to make an entirely different human being, it's hard for him not to be drawn to it. in that same breath, though, it's hard for him to stare in the mirror for so long. it's hard knowing that jacket is, in all likelihood, going down a similar, if not worse, path than his and knowing in his heart there's not really much he'll ever be able to do about it. so despite how much he likes jacket (which he does, probably more than jacket likes him if he's being completely honest with himself), he just thinks it best that their relationship stays like this. not that there's any real drive (haha) for him to think of jacket as a boyfriend, just that. well. it makes things easier. and he desperately wants to have something easy, even if it's not meant to last.
jacket harbors some of the same feelings because it's really not difficult to see how similar the two of them are, and that's something that it likes because it doesn't have to make so many second guesses about how it should act; it knows that driver just Gets It. but it fully realizes it's kind of just using him as a bandaid for its grief. driver has had losses as well, it doesn't know specifics but it knows enough to know that there aren't many good reasons as to why he ended up in miami. but losing beard and the ghost wolves has truly been something that has ruined it, and deep down it knows that it can't just use driver to fix that gaping wound that will haunt it for the rest of its life. but it still tries. what little foresight it has realizes that what they have will not last forever (because its learned to realize that 'forever' is just not something its allowed to have). but it enjoys driver's company more than that of most other people its' ever met in its life. and driver enjoys its company, too. and they've not often been graced with that kind of mutuality.
idk! there's just 🤌🏼 something about their theoretical dynamic to me that's just so compelling
