"I've got you."
He does not have him. He does not have him in any way that is sensible or advisable or that Malik has any business pretending to. But he says it, and Newt shudders against him, and the scent of him in the air is so thick now that Malik can taste it at the back of his tongue, that honey-sweetness, that green crushed-herb warmth, and it is the single most intoxicating thing Malik has encountered in centuries of being made specifically to be intoxicated by things.
His mouth is back on Newt's throat. He has not consciously chosen this, but his mouth is on Newt's throat, open and hot, and Newt's hands have left his shirt and are now in his hair. Fingers slid up into the silver of it, gripping, and then—tentative, exploratory—one hand finds the base of a horn. Wraps around it.
Malik makes a noise he has not made in longer than he can remember.
"Sorry," Newt gasps, pulling his hand back, "sorry, I didn't—"
"Keep touching me," Malik says, into his throat.
Newt grabs onto them and holds on.
The magic spikes. Malik feels it rip through the bond like a flare going up, and some distant detached part of his brain notes that whatever he is doing is working, that the pressure is bleeding off in great clean waves, that the vessel is finally beginning to empty. The rest of him is a problem. The rest of him has Newt's hand on his horn and Newt's hip under his palm and he is sliding the palm down, down, to the waistband of Newt's trousers, and he is getting the button open.
He pauses.
He pauses because Newt has gone very still, and because there is something Malik wants to say and cannot find the exact shape of, and he settles for pressing his forehead to Newt's and breathing.
"Still with me?"
"Yes," Newt whispers. Immediate. "Yes, please, Malik—"
"Tell me if anything isn't—"
"I will, I will–"
Malik slides his hand past the waistband.
And finds what he doesn't expect.
His hand stills. His lips pause on Newt's skin. He registers the information and files it, and is already reaching to kiss Newt again because it does not matter, it changes nothing, it is a fact about Newt's body the way the freckles are a fact about Newt's body, and he has spent eight hundred years in the business of bodies and he does not flinch at any of them—
But Newt has gone rigid beneath him.
The flush has drained from his face. He is white. Paper-white, down to his lips, and his eyes have come open and they are huge and very wet and he is starting to pull away, starting to stammer something, starting to scrape together a sentence that Malik can already hear the shape of, an apology or an explanation or aplease don't laugh, and Malik is not going to let him say any of it.
He bites Newt's jaw. Not hard. Just enough.
"Do you want to stop?" he says, directly against Newt's ear. His voice has gone rough in a way he cannot quite control. "Newt. Listen to me. Do you want me to stop?"
"I—I thought—"
"Do you want me to stop touching you?"
Newt makes a noise. Something stuck in his throat. He shakes his head and says, desperate, "No—"
Malik kisses him.
He kisses him filthy and open-mouthed, the way he has wanted to kiss him since roughly the third time Newt set a fork on fire looking at him across a breakfast table, and his hand goes back where it was, and Newtsobsinto his mouth, and Malik gentles the kiss without gentling the hand, and learns him.
He learns him carefully. He cups him first, palm-flat over the whole of him, because Newt is small and Newt is trembling and Malik does not want to startle him. Newt's hips jerk forward into the heel of his hand. Once. Involuntary. Malik feels the heat of him through his palm, the slick already soaking through, and something very old and very hungry in him uncoils a half-inch.
He shifts his hand. Two fingers find the hard little peak of Newt's cock where it stands proud of him, swollen and sensitive, and Malik circles it. Slow. Deliberate. A tight firm ring of his fingertips around the base of it, learning the shape, and Newt's whole body bucks against the wall and Newt's mouth breaks from Malik's on a ragged open-mouthed gasp that Malik can feel against his own lips.
"Oh," Newt breathes, "oh—"
"You’re doing so good," Malik murmurs, into the corner of his mouth. "I've got you. Just breathe."
