His hands are shaking.
He puts them deeper into his pockets and walks faster and goes home.
The townhouse is quiet when he opens the door, which is not unusual. It's late. Newt should be asleep. But Newt is not asleep.
Newt is standing in the living room.
The furniture has been pushed back against the walls. The rug is rolled up in the corner. Newt is standing in the center of the cleared floor in bare feet and a t-shirt that's too big for him and his hair is down, loose and red around his face, and his hands are raised in front of him and there are three objects hovering in the air. A book. A candle. A fork. They're orbiting each other in a slow, precise pattern, weaving around each other without touching, and Newt's eyes are closed and his face is calm and his breathing is even and his magic is the steadiest Malik has ever seen it.
He's training alone.
Without Malik's hands on his shoulders. Without Malik's body behind him. Without any contact at all. He's standing in the middle of his own living room, by himself, in the dark, and he is controlling three objects simultaneously with a precision and steadiness that he has never achieved in any of their sessions together.
Malik stands in the doorway and watches and something in his chest does something terrible.
Newt's brow furrows, just slightly. The candle wobbles, dips, steadies. The book rotates slowly, pages ruffling. The fork catches the faint light from the street and gleams. It's not perfect. There's a tremor in the pattern, a faint instability at the edges, but it's so close to perfect that the difference is academic. And he's doing it alone. He's doing it because he pushed the furniture back and rolled up the rug and decided to try, all by himself, without anyone telling him he could, without anyone'shands on him, without anyone sayinggoodoragainorI know you can do this.
Then Newt opens his eyes.
He opens his eyes and sees Malik in the doorway and his face does the thing it always does, that uncontrollable, incandescent bloom of warmth and surprise and want, and his concentration shatters.
The book drops. The fork clatters to the floor. The candle hits the coffee table and the coffee table... explodes.
Not dramatically. Not catastrophically. But the candle strikes the wood and the burst of uncontrolled magic that accompanies the collapse of Newt's concentration detonates the table outward, splinters and surface and legs flying apart, and the candle's wick catches and a small, cheerful fire starts burning in the wreckage.
Malik crosses the room and stamps it out. His boot comes down on the flame three times, efficiently, without urgency, and then the fire is gone and there's a blackened patch on the hardwood and the coffee table is kindling and Newt is standing in the center of the room with his arms at his sides and his face absolutely scarlet and his mouth working around an apology that won't come out.
Malik looks at the remains of the coffee table. He looks at the fork on the floor. He looks at the book, which has landed open and face-down and is probably going to have a crease in its spine that will bother Newt for weeks.
He looks at Newt.
Newt, whose face is doing everything at once. Mortification. Embarrassment. The lingering warmth of whatever he'd felt when he opened his eyes and saw Malik. And underneath all of it, barely hidden, the devastation that Newt always carries now, the one that appeared three nights ago and hasn't left, the one that Malik has noticed and doesn't comment on.
Malik doesn't comment on any of it.
He doesn't comment on the coffee table. He doesn't comment on the fact that Newt was training alone with a steadiness that makes something behind Malik's ribs feel like it's cracking. He doesn't comment on the fact that Newt's concentration shattered the instant their eyes met, or what that means, or the small, devastating implication that Malik's presence is both the thing that stabilizes Newt's magic and the thing that destroys it.
"I'll get a new table," Malik says.
Newt's mouth closes. His eyes are bright. He nods, once, and picks up the fork and the book and goes upstairs, and Malik stands in the living room with a scorch mark on the floor and thinks about the way Newt's face had looked when he opened his eyes.
The warmth. The want. The way his concentration had dissolved, instantly, completely, because Malik walked through the door.
He thinks about the sounds Newt would make.
He thinks about never leaving.
He stands there for a long time.
Chapter 8
Newt is a total disaster, but he doesn't have to be.
Maybe. Possibly. If he squints and tilts his head and approaches the concept from a very specific angle and doesn't think too hard about the incubus living in his house, he can almost see a version of his life where things are okay. Not perfect. Not even good, necessarily. But okay. Functional. A version where he has his magic and his books and his jars of components in the right order and a place in the coven that isn't "the one we don't talk about." A version where someone, anyone, looks at him and doesn't see the greatest disappointment they've ever witnessed.
He's not asking for the world here. Just a foothold.
Step one of the plan involves getting a grip on this horrifying crush.
