Fanfiction Fridays: non-definitive acts by lymricks

So I really enjoyed Pacific Rim. It was a delightfully diverse film with a fun and intelligent plot, but as these things tend to, it was missing one thing: canonically queer people. So as usual, when I got home, it was time to hit up Archive of Our Own to fill that void with fanfiction.

As two super-intelligent white dudes who bicker constantly and sassily but are still in sync enough to be Drift compatible, Drs. Newt Geiszler and Hermann Gottlieb were pretty much predestined to be the popular slash ship in this fandom. (Pacific Rim‘s Ao3 section confirms this, with almost 20% of the fics featuring this pairing.)

I do love the dynamic these two have, so I gladly took what the internet offered me, and in the end I found this story. non-definitive acts picks up a few months after the events of the movie, and deals specifically with the ongoing psychological issues Newt and Hermann have to deal with as a result of their mid-movie Drift with a dying baby kaiju.

It didn’t go well for Spock, so what chance did these two morons really have?

Doing something as mentally invasive as performing what is basically a mind-meld for the first time, using cobbled-together equipment to see into the mind of a totally alien species, joined with a person who you don’t even know if you’re compatible enough to do this with—it would be lazy for a writer to assume that this would have no long-term psychological effects.

Thankfully lymricks takes no such shortcuts. Although this fic is slash, the build of Newt and Hermann’s relationship is very, very slow, and comes logically from the events of the story. When the story starts, they’ve been avoiding the potential psychic problems of their hodge-podged Drift attempt since the day the world didn’t end, because neither of them are the sort to sit down and talk to each other about what happened. However, when they start sharing nightmares over the what’s left of their botched link, they’re forced to confront what they shared with each other and reevaluate their relationship.

I really liked everything about this fic, from the characterization, which was spot-on, to the style, which avoided the over-artsy wordiness I’ve seen in a lot of post-Drift fics. I also appreciated that the story took their relationship slowly. As despite the chemistry my slasher brain insisted they had, it was refreshing to see it play out realistically rather than being rushed for the sake of romance or porn.

non-definitive acts clocks in around 12k words, and you can check it out here!