"It's okay."
"It's not."
"I know," Newt says, softly, "but I'm saying it's okay."
Malik opens his eyes.
Newt is looking up at him from the edge of the bed. His hair is a mess—it came loose during the beating and has fallen around his shoulders, some of it plastered to his temple with sweat, some of it dark at the ends with what Malik thinks might be blood—and his lower lip is split and swelling, and his eyes are red-rimmed but clear. He is looking up at Malik the way Newt looks at him when he is pleading without asking, which is a look Malik has come to recognize because Newt has used it a great many times and Malik has said yes every single time.
"Please don't go," Newt says. "Please just stay with me. Please."
Malik says nothing for a long moment. He can feel the pulse of his own rage. It is slow and steady and it will not go anywhere. It will sit in his chest and wait, and maybe tomorrow he will find the men at the bar and maybe he will not, but right now, right now, Newt is asking him to stay.
He sits.
He sits beside him on the bed, the mattress dipping under his weight, and Newt immediately, wordlessly, leans into him. Presses his face into the hollow of Malik's shoulder. Malik brings an arm around him carefully and holds him, and Newt does not cry, but Malik feels the shudder run through his whole body, once, and pass.
They sit like that for a long time.
"You brought me to you," Malik says, eventually. His voice is low.
"Mm."
"Newt. Do you understand what you did?"
Newt shakes his head, just slightly, against his shoulder.
"You summoned me through a half-formed portal without an incantation. Without a circle. Without the bond being consciously drawn. You reached for me, and I came. You created a portal in a place I could not perceive and pulled me through it." He is quiet for a moment. "That is not a thing a hedge witch can do. That is not a thing most witches can do, ever."
"I just—"
"I felt it. I was in the townhouse, Newt. Reading. And then I wasn't."
Newt presses his face harder into Malik's shoulder. "I'm sorry."
"Don't apologize."
"I didn't mean to scare you, I didn't—"
Malik puts both hands on Newt's shoulders and peels him back, gently, so he can see his face. Newt's eyes are wet. Malik cups his jaw. Runs his thumb along Newt's cheekbone. The one that is not already starting to purple.
"You are remarkable," Malik says. "Do you hear me? You are remarkable. That thing you did. No one has done that in my lifetime."
"Malik—"
"No one."
"I only did it because—"
"I know why you did it."
"—because I needed you."
The words land like a thrown stone.
Malik is holding very still. He is aware, distantly, that his hand has tightened on the side of Newt's face. He is aware that hispulse has done a strange uneven thing, a trip and a skip, and that something in the center of his chest has gone hot and tight.
He should not respond to those words. He should not let them do to him what they are doing to him. He has heard variations of those words in a thousand beds in a thousand cities over eight centuries,I need you, I want you, don't leave, and they have been smoke, they have been vapor, they have meant nothing because they have been spoken by mouths that needed the idea of him, the shape of him, the experience of him. Newt is saying them with a split lip and blood on his teeth and a bruise blooming across his ribs and a portal closing at his back, and he is saying them as though they are a small ordinary fact he is reporting.
