He wipes down the shelves. He reorganizes the jars by use: healing components on the left, casting components in the middle, volatile components on the right, well away from the stove. He sweeps the chalk dust from the hardwood, gets down on his knees to scrub at the more stubborn patches with a wet rag, and pushes his hair back from his face with his forearm because his hands are covered in chalk and dust and something faintly glittery that he suspects is the moonstone.
"You could also enchant a broom," Malik offers from the armchair. He hasn't moved. He looks perfectly comfortable. He looks, in fact, like he could sit there for the next century and not feel the need to shift positions. "Most witches do."
"Most witches also don't accidentally set their brooms on fire," Newt says, and Malik's eyebrow goes up, and Newt points a dusty finger at him. "Don't. Don't ask. It was one time and the broom had it coming."
The sound Malik makes is not quite a laugh. It's close, closer than anything Newt has heard from him, a low exhale through his nose that carries a vibration in it, a rumble, and Newt's stomach flips and he goes back to scrubbing the floor because looking at Malik when he almost-laughs is not something Newt's nervous system can handle right now.
He works his way through the living room. The scorch mark on the ceiling gets a pass because he can't reach it and he's not getting on a ladder while Malik watches. The crack in the plaster gets a tentative attempt at filling with a paste made of chalk dust and water that will absolutely not hold but makes Newt feel productive. He rearranges the components shelf twice, changes his mind about the volatile section, moves the yarrow, moves it back, and argues with himself out loud about whether dried sage belongs with healing or casting until Malik says, without looking up from his tea, "Casting," and Newt puts it with casting and doesn't question how Malik knew what he was debating.
The townhouse is starting to look less like a warzone. Newt stands in the middle of the living room and surveys his work and feels something quiet bloom in his chest. Not pride, exactly. Something adjacent. Something that says:this is mine. I did this. I made this space livable and organized and I know where everything is because I put it there with my own hands.
He is sweaty. He is breathing hard. His threadbare t-shirt is sticking to his back and his loose pants are dusty at the knees and his hair has come half out of its tie, strands clinging to his flushed neck and his damp temples. His arms are tired from reaching and scrubbing and lifting. He has chalk dust onhis forearms and moonstone glitter on his cheekbones and he probably looks like a very small, very disheveled disaster.
He pushes his hair back with both hands, tilting his head back, and exhales.
When he drops his gaze, Malik is looking at him.
Not at the shelves. Not at the organized jars. Not at any of the domestic improvements Newt has spent the last two hours making. At Newt. And the expression on his face is not the raised eyebrow or the quirked lip or any of the small, controlled tells that Newt has been learning to read. It is something else. Something unguarded and intent and very, very still, and Malik's eyes are on the line of Newt's throat, on the damp collar of his shirt, on the strip of stomach where the threadbare fabric has ridden up from reaching overhead, and the purple of his irises is so vivid it almost doesn't look real.
Newt's hands are still in his hair. His arms are still raised. He freezes, caught, pinned by that gaze the way a moth is pinned by light, and the warmth that was in his chest drops about a foot lower and becomes something else entirely.
Then Malik blinks. His gaze lifts to Newt's face, smooth, neutral, and he picks up his tea and takes a sip and says, "You missed a spot by the fireplace."
Newt's hands drop. His face goes scarlet. He turns to the fireplace and pretends to look for the spot and his heart is pounding so hard he can hear it in his ears and he doesn't know what just happened but he felt it, he felt it all the way through, and he's going to be thinking about the way Malik looked at his stomach for the next three to five business days minimum.
"Right," Newt manages, and his voice is not even a little bit normal. "The fireplace. Yep. I'll just. Get that."
He doesn't get that. He stands there facing the fireplace and not seeing it and trying to remember how to breathe, and behind him he can hear Malik set his teacup down on the armrest, andthe silence between them is full of something that Newt doesn't have a name for but that makes his skin feel too tight.
Their spell sessions are getting to be a problem for him.
This is Newt's clinical assessment of the situation, arrived at after careful consideration. A problem. Italicized. Underlined. Possibly bolded. Their spell sessions area problemand it is mostly Newt's fault and he is handling it very poorly.
The thing is that he's getting better. Actually, genuinely, measurably better. And he's getting better fast enough that Malik keeps pushing him, keeps raising the bar, keeps asking him to do things that a week ago would have seemed impossible and that now, with Malik's hands on his shoulders and Malik's body behind him and Malik's voice in his ear, are merely very difficult.
The inanimate objects become animate. The spoons that became forks become forks that become daggers. Then the daggers become snakes, and that's where things get complicated, because creating something animate is creating something that you must control, and control has always been Newt's greatest issue.
There are three snakes on his living room floor.
They are, admittedly, very good snakes. They're sleek and dark and coiled with a muscular weight that suggests he did a thorough job of transmuting them, and their tongues flicker in the air and their scales catch the light from the window. They are also equipped with bladed tongues, because Malik had asked him to try that, and Newt had managed it, barely, with Malik's hands gripping his shoulders hard enough to bruise, and now there are three snakes with scimitar-sharp tongues slithering around his living room and Newt is responsible for all of them.
It's terrible. It's absolutely terrible.
It's not at all the way conducting an orchestra would feel, which is the analogy he'd reached for optimistically beforerealizing how catastrophically wrong it was. An orchestra follows a conductor. An orchestra has rehearsed. An orchestra knows the piece and responds to cues and operates within a framework of shared understanding. These snakes don't know anything. They are pure magic given form and intent and the only thing between them and chaos is Newt's concentration, which is currently being split three ways and is losing structural integrity with every passing second.
It's more the feeling of controlling three puppets on strings, except the strings are alive and the puppets are venomous and the stage is his living room and the audience is an ancient incubus standing behind him with his hands on Newt's shoulders and a foot of space between them that doesnotfeel as far as it did a week ago.
The snakes are getting closer together.
Newt tries to push them apart. He reaches through the magic, through the tether of intent that connects him to each snake, and pushes, and instead of the snakes moving apart the sofa slides three feet to the left. He pushes again and the armchair rotates forty-five degrees. He pushes again and the bookshelf shudders against the wall and a stack of books tips over and he is no longer controlling the snakes at all, he is rearranging his furniture with his mind and the snakes are doing whatever they want.
On the one hand, the furniture is moving with a precision that would have been completely impossible two weeks ago. Every piece slides cleanly, without scraping, without tipping, landing in its new position with a gentle thud. His telekinetic control, at least, seems to be improving. That's encouraging.
On the other hand, the snake on the far left is now approximately four inches from the snake in the middle and their bladed tongues are flickering toward each other and if they collide someone is going to lose a belly and there is going to be magical snake viscera on his hardwood floor and he just cleaned.
"Malik," Newt says, and he can hear the strain in his own voice, the way it pitches upward when he's losing it. "I can't hold them. I'm losing them."
Malik's hands are still on his shoulders. They haven't tightened. They haven't pulled away. And the sigh that Newt hears from behind him is not exasperated. Newt knows what exasperation sounds like. He has been on the receiving end of exasperation from every person who has ever attempted to teach him anything, from Mathilde's thin-lipped displeasure to Annabeth's clinical impatience to the rotating cast of coven tutors who lasted, on average, about three sessions before declaring him unteachable.
