"—I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I can't—"
"Newt."
The ceiling crack widens. A chunk of plaster the size of a fist breaks free and strikes the floorboards three feet from them and bursts into white dust. The ward is still holding—miraculously, the ward is still holding, it is even strengthening, rolling out in wave after wave of pristine protective magic—but the overflow is tearing the house apart around it.
Malik makes a decision.
He turns Newt in his arms.
It is not a graceful movement. Newt is stiff as a board, every muscle locked around the effort of containment, and Malik has to physically pivot him, has to take one hand from his waist and the other from his chest and bring them up instead to cradle his jaw. Newt's eyes fly open. They are wet. He is trembling.
"Malik—"
"Hold still," Malik says, which is the only way he knows how to sayI’m sorry, and then he kisses him.
He has kissed a great many people. He has kissed emperors and handmaidens and creatures who did not have mouths in any conventional sense and he has never, in eight hundred years,kissed anyone the way he kisses Newt now, which is badly. It is a bad kiss, by Malik's standards. It is too hard and it is off-center and it lands half on Newt's mouth and half on the corner of it, because Newt has gasped at the contact and turned his face, and Malik corrects with his thumb under Newt's jaw and kisses him properly, and Newt makes a sound against his mouth.
A small, broken, astonished sound. A sound like something breaking open that needed to break open for years.
The magic responds.
It responds instantly. The pressure against Malik's chest, the hum in his bones, the terrible building weight of a vessel about to rupture—it doesn't disperse so much as it redirects, pouring itself into the ward, into the bond, into the point of contact between their mouths, and the sound in Malik's head, the sound he did not know he was hearing, cuts out. The rattle of the windows stops. The groan of the floorboards quiets. The crack in the ceiling stops walking.
Newt is kissing him back.
Clumsily. With his whole body, which is not how one kisses, usually, but is very much how Newt does it. He has fisted both hands in the front of Malik's shirt and he is pulling, pulling Malik closer, as though there is any space left between them, and his mouth is soft and wet and uncertain and he keeps breaking the kiss to breathe and then surging back into it, and Malik—
Malik is in very serious trouble.
He pulls the tie from Newt's hair. He does it without thinking about it. The leather cord comes loose in his fingers and he drops it and his hand is in Newt's hair, all of it at once, that heavy red fall of it that he has thought about more than he would ever admit, and it is as soft as he thought it would be, and Newt makes another sound, this one into Malik's mouth, this one breathy and startled and wanting.
The ward surges. Malik feels it close. A snap, a shimmer, and then a settling, the dome of protection humming around the house like a note held on the edge of a bell.
The magic is not done. The magic is nowhere near done.
Malik can feel it in the bond, the leftover pressure, the great store of power that the kiss has opened but not yet spent. The vessel is cracked but not emptied. And some tactical part of his mind, the part that has survived centuries by reading rooms and reading people and reading appetites, registers this information and understands what it means and accepts it, and the rest of him—
The rest of him walks Newt backward until his shoulders hit the wall.
Newt gasps. His head tips back against the plaster and Malik follows it, mouth on his jaw now, mouth on the soft place beneath his ear, and Newt is shaking but it is a different kind of shaking, it is the shaking of a body that has never been touched like this and cannot decide what to do with itself. His hands are still fisted in Malik's shirt. He is holding on.
"You can tell me to stop," Malik says into his throat. His voice sounds wrecked to him. "Newt. Tell me to stop and I will."
"No," Newt breathes. "Please, I want—"
Malik slides a thigh between Newt's legs.
Newt's whole body jolts. He makes a noise that he is going to be mortified about later, Malik knows—a high thin sound, almost a whimper, torn out of him without permission—and his hips rock forward against Malik's thigh, once, involuntarily, and the magic sings. Malik can feel it threading through the bond like a plucked string, taut and perfect and tuning itself finer with every escalation of contact. The ward tightens. A piece of plaster that had been about to fall settles back against the ceiling and stays.
Malik slides his hands under Newt's shirt.
The skin there is warm. Warmer than he expected. Newt flinches at the contact and then leans into it, a shiver running the length of him, and Malik spreads his palms flat against Newt's stomach and feels the muscles there jump under his hands. He drags his palms up Newt's ribs. The quick frantic rabbit of his heart. The flat of his chest, where Malik's thumbs catch on the raised lines of old scars, and Malik does not react to them, does not pause, simply learns them under his hands and keeps going.
Newt makes a sound that is almost a sob.
"You're doing so well," Malik says, against his throat, because it is true and because he cannot stop saying it. "Newt. Look at this—" The ward. The perfect, humming, flawless ward. "—look what you're doing. Look what you can do."
"Malik—"
