That was yesterday. Today, they have to train.
Their sessions continue because they must. The contract requires progress. Mathilde is watching, the coven is watching, and Newt's magic doesn't stop needing discipline just becausethe two people responsible for disciplining it can barely look at each other. So they stand in the living room, in the cleared space between the pushed-back furniture, and Malik puts his hands on Newt's shoulders, and everything that was warm between them goes cold.
Newt flinches.
It's barely there. A fractional contraction of the muscles beneath Malik's fingers, a tightening that lasts less than a second before Newt forces himself still. His shoulders square. His jaw sets. His spine goes rigid in a way that Malik recognizes from their earliest sessions, before the touching became easy, before Newt started leaning back, before the warmth and the trust and the scent and the leaning and all the things that Malik had taken for granted because he is, apparently, capable of taking things for granted after all.
The bond between them is a wall.
Not warmth. Not the low, steady thrum that used to pulse between them when they worked together, that hum of connection that Malik could feel in his sternum. The bond is there, technically, the contractual tether intact, but what flows through it is blankness. Careful, deliberate, constructed blankness. Newt has built a wall on his side of the bond and Malik can feel it, smooth and featureless, and behind it... nothing. Nothing Newt is willing to let him see.
Malik hates it.
He hates it with an intensity that catches him off guard, a hot flare of something that burns through his chest and lodges in his throat. He should prefer this. This is distance. This is detachment. This is the professional arrangement he told himself he wanted, the contract without complication, the familiar bond stripped of everything that made it dangerous. Distance is his natural habitat. Detachment is what keeps him safe. He has been retreating behind his own walls for years andhe should welcome the fact that Newt has finally built walls of his own.
But Newt used to lean into his touch.
Newt used to relax against him, used to let his weight settle backward into Malik's chest, used to make a small, unconscious sigh when Malik's hands found his shoulders. Newt used to radiate warmth through the bond, that bright, reckless, unguarded warmth that Malik had never asked for and never deserved and had absorbed greedily every single time it was offered. And now Newt stands rigid and the warmth is gone and the absence of it feels like a wound, an actual wound, a place in Malik's chest where something has been removed and the space it left is raw.
"Whenever you're ready," Malik says.
Newt nods. He raises his hands. He begins.
The spell fractures almost immediately.
The magic that had been so beautifully stable against the wall, that had poured out of Newt in clean waves and sealed a ward around the house with flawless precision, is chaotic again. It shudders and sparks and jerks in directions Newt isn't steering it, and Malik can feel through the bond that the problem isn't power. The power is there. The power is always there. The problem is the blankness, the wall, the careful constructed distance that Newt is maintaining between them. The magic requires trust. The magic requires openness. The magic requires Newt to lean in and let go and he is doing neither, and everything they've built is crumbling.
Newt gets frustrated. A chair catches fire.
Malik crosses the room and stamps it out with his boot, the way he stamped out the coffee table, and the parallel is not lost on him. "It's fine," he says.
"I'm sorry," Newt says. His voice is tight and small and he's not looking at Malik. He's looking at the scorch mark on the chairwith an expression that is directed at the chair but is not about the chair.
"Don't apologize. Let's try again."
They try again. Worse. A bookshelf collapses, the shelves tearing free of the brackets with a shriek of wood and metal, and books cascade across the floor in a wave. One of them is the incantation book Newt has been reading, the one that's too simple for him, and it lands face down and open and the spine cracks audibly and Newt flinches at the sound.
"Again," Malik says.
Newt swears.
It is so uncharacteristic, so unlike the boy who sayssorryreflexively andthank youcompulsively andpleaseas though the word is load-bearing, that Malik almost smiles. The swear is small, muttered under his breath, barely audible, but it's there, and the shock of it on Newt's face when he realizes what he's said is almost enough to crack the blankness in the bond.
Almost.
They try a third time. The floor cracks. A line opens in the hardwood, splitting the boards along the grain, and Newt stares at it and his eyes go bright with tears he is refusing to shed. His hands drop to his sides. His shoulders curve inward, that familiar collapse, that making-himself-smaller that Malik has seen a hundred times and hates more each time he sees it.
"I think I need a moment," Newt says.
Malik nods. He pulls his hands away. He watches Newt sink onto the sofa with his head in his hands and his red hair falling around his face and his elbows on his knees, and the bond between them pulses with the first thing Newt has let through the wall since yesterday, which is exhaustion. Not physical. Something deeper. The exhaustion of holding yourself together when the pieces don't fit anymore.
Malik rights the bookshelf. He picks up the books and stacks them in an order that he knows is wrong but that approximates the arrangement Newt prefers. He replaces the brackets. He does this silently, methodically, and he does not look at Newt on the sofa, because looking at Newt right now would require Malik to feel things he is not prepared to feel, and the list of things Malik is not prepared to feel has grown considerably in the last twenty-four hours.
There comes a knock at the door.
Brisk. No nonsense. Two sharp raps, knuckle on wood, the kind of knock that does not expect to wait.
Newt lifts his head from his hands. He looks at the door, and something in his face shifts, a small resignation, a muscle memory of dread, and Malik recognizes it. Malik has seen that particular shift on the faces of people who know exactly who is knocking and what it means.
