Chapter 3 #2
It's reflexive. Automatic. The kind of smile that hasn't been filtered through thought or calculation, that just exists on his face because Malik walked through the door.
It happens every time. Every single time Malik comes home, regardless of the hour, regardless of how long he's been gone, Newt looks up and smiles at him, and every time it happens something in Malik's chest shifts in a way that he does not have the vocabulary for and does not want to acquire.
"Hey," Newt says, and his voice is sleep-soft and warm and the sweater is still sliding off his shoulder, baring the line of his collarbone and the faint scatter of freckles across the bone, and Malik doesn't look at that. He doesn't.
This is the pattern. Has been the pattern since Malik started going out.
Malik leaves, Malik feeds, Malik comes back, Newt smiles at him from the windowseat, and they don't discuss it.
Malik suspects Newt doesn't know where he goes.
Or if he does, he hasn't said anything, and Malik hasn't offered, because explaining to a twenty-year-old virgin that his familiar spends three to four nights a week having sex with strangers to avoid having sex with him is a conversation Malik does not want to have.
Not because he's embarrassed. Malik has never been embarrassed about a single thing in all his years of living.
But because the explanation would require Malik to say out loud why he won't feed from Newt, and that would require him to examine the reason, and examining the reason is something he has been carefully, deliberately avoiding.
The first time, Newt had smiled and said hey and Malik had gone upstairs and that was that.
The second time, the same.
The third time is different.
Malik comes back, and Newt looks up from his book, and the smile starts and then freezes, half-formed on his face, and his eyes drop from Malik's face to his throat.
Malik has forgotten about the bruises.
The half-giant had been enthusiastic. Enormously, vigorously enthusiastic.
His hands had been around Malik's throat for the better part of thirty minutes, squeezing, crushing, thumbs pressing into the hollows beneath his jaw while he fucked Malik into the mattress so hard the headboard cracked the plaster, and Malik could feel him in his stomach and couldn't breathe and his vision went white.
It had been consensual. Explicitly, enthusiastically consensual, on both sides.
The man had asked to choke him and Malik had said yes, because Malik has been choked by things far worse than a half-giant with big hands and a bigger cock, and because the energy exchange during rough sex is always stronger.
Fear and pleasure tangle together in the blood and the result is rich, intoxicating, a meal that could sustain him for days.
The bruises are a byproduct. They'll fade by morning. They always do.
But Newt doesn't know that.
Newt's book hits the cushion. He's on his feet and across the floor before Malik has the door shut behind him, and his hands are reaching, and then they're on Malik's arm, carefully, fingertips barely pressing into the fabric of his sleeve, and then they're hovering over his throat, carefully, so carefully, not quite touching the mottled purple that rings Malik's neck from jaw to collarbone.
"What happened?" Newt's voice has gone high and tight.
His eyes are wide. They're scanning Malik's throat, cataloguing the damage, and then they're scanning the rest of him, checking for more, and the concern on his face is so raw and so real and so completely unguarded that Malik feels something seize behind his ribs.
"Did you get into a fight?" Newt asks, and his hand is on Malik's arm again, gripping now, steadying, as though he thinks Malik might fall over.
As though Malik, who is a foot taller than him and could level a city block if properly motivated, needs to be steadied by a witch who weighs a hundred and forty pounds soaking wet.
"I'm fine," Malik starts, but Newt is already talking over him, the words tumbling out fast and breathless in that way they do when he's anxious, when his brain outpaces his mouth and everything comes out in a rush.
"Sit down, you should sit down, I can brew some tea to help with swelling, I have some in the kitchen, just sit, let me get a compress, I have a compress somewhere, I think, actually I might have used the last one on my elbow when I hit it on the counter but I can make another one, just sit down, Malik, let me. .."
And Malik should laugh at him.
He should. The impulse is there, sitting right behind his teeth, because this is absurd. This naive boy, this sheltered, innocent child who thinks Malik has been in a fight, who has no idea, no concept whatsoever, of what actually happened tonight or any of the other nights.
This ridiculous little witch, with his careful hands and his tea and his enormous worried eyes, is so innocent that he looks at the evidence of Malik's feeding and sees violence.
Sees someone who needs to be cared for. Sees a fight that Malik lost, when the truth is that Malik won, spectacularly, and came home buzzing with energy and licking his lips.
The laugh is right there. Ready. It would be easy.
It would be the thing Malik has always done, the deflection, the redirection, the sardonic quip that puts distance between himself and whatever is happening.
He could say something cutting. Something arch.
Something that would make Newt flush and look away and drop his hands and retreat back to his windowseat and his book and his careful, wary distance.
Malik doesn't laugh.
He doesn't say anything at all. He stands in the doorway of the townhouse with Newt's hands on his arm and Newt's worried face tilted up at him and the bruises on his throat throbbing faintly with each heartbeat, and he says nothing.
Newt takes his hand.
It's gentle. His fingers wrap around Malik's, smaller, warm, a little rough at the tips from the chalk he uses for diagrams, and he tugs. Not hard. Not demanding. Just a suggestion. A request. Come here. Sit down. Let me.
Malik lets himself be led.
Newt walks him to the sofa and sits him down and Malik goes, unresisting, which is a thing that has never happened to him before.
No one leads Malik anywhere. No one takes him by the hand and guides him to a seat and tells him to stay.
He is the one who directs. He is the one who moves other people where he wants them.
He has been the one in control for years and he does not know what to do with the feeling of a small, warm hand wrapped around his, pulling him forward, asking nothing of him except that he sit.
He sits.
Newt disappears into the kitchen and Malik can hear him moving, the clink of a mug, the hiss of the kettle, the soft rustling of him rummaging through cabinets for something.
The sounds are domestic. Familiar, already, after only a couple of weeks, and Malik sits on the sofa and stares at the dark window across the room and thinks about the fact that he could have told the truth.
Could have said I wasn't in a fight, I was being fucked by a half-giant who likes to choke, and I liked it, and I'm fine.
Could have watched the realization dawn on Newt's face, watched the embarrassment bloom, watched him pull his hands back and retreat and never touch Malik again.
He thinks about that. The not-touching-again part. The idea of Newt's hands pulling away and not coming back, of the careful concern on his face being replaced by something closed and guarded and distant.
He doesn't like the way that thought sits in his chest.
Newt comes back with a mug of thistle tea, steaming, and a damp compress that he's folded into a neat rectangle.
He sets the mug on the side table next to Malik's elbow and then he sits, not across from him, not at a distance, but right next to him on the sofa, close enough that their knees almost touch.
He holds up the compress and hesitates, just for a moment, his eyes flickering to Malik's.
"Can I?" he asks. Quiet. Careful. Asking permission to touch him even now, even when he thinks Malik is hurt, even when every line of his body is straining forward with the need to help.
Malik nods. He doesn't trust his voice.
Newt presses the compress against his throat.
His other hand comes up to brace against the other side of Malik's neck, steadying, and his fingers are cool and gentle and Malik can feel his pulse through them, fast but steady, and the thistle in the compress is sharp and herbal and cuts through the amber scent that Malik carries and replaces it with something green.
Newt is close enough that Malik can see every freckle.
Can see the faint dark circles under his eyes from staying up too late reading books that are beneath him.
Can see the way his brow is still furrowed with worry, the way his lower lip is caught between his teeth, the way he's holding the compress with such deliberate, practiced gentleness that Malik thinks he must have done this before.
Not for someone else. For himself. After whatever the coven did to him that Malik hasn't asked about and Newt hasn't offered and the scars that Malik has glimpsed beneath the collar of his shirts speak to loudly enough.
"Does it hurt?" Newt asks.
"No," Malik says, and it's the truth, it doesn't, but it comes out rough and Newt's eyes flicker to his and then away, quickly, and his flush deepens.
They sit like that for a long time. Longer than the compress needs.
Longer than the tea needs to cool. Newt holds the cloth against his throat and his fingers are gentle and his breathing is soft and the townhouse is quiet around them, just the two of them in the dark with the single warm lamp from the windowseat casting long shadows across the floor.
Malik thinks about the half-giant. About the vampiress.
About the minotaur and the officer and every other body he's pressed himself against in the last two weeks, every exchange, every feeding, every clean and efficient transaction.
He thinks about the way he left them. The turned backs.
The closed doors. The deliberate, practiced absence of anything beyond the act itself.
He thinks about the fact that not one of them, in all of that, ever pressed a compress against his throat afterward.
Not one of them ever made him tea.
Not one of them ever looked at him the way Newt is looking at him right now, which is with so much worry, so much unearned tenderness, that Malik feels something crack in the wall he's been building between himself and the boy beside him. Just a hairline fracture. Barely visible. But there.
Newt adjusts the compress, his thumb brushing the underside of Malik's jaw, and Malik closes his eyes.
"You don't have to do this," Malik says.
The words come out before he's vetted them, which is unlike him, which is a lapse in the control he has maintained for centuries, and he doesn't know what he means by them.
Doesn't know if he means you don't have to take care of me or you don't have to be kind to me or something else entirely that he can't bring himself to shape into language.
Newt is quiet for a moment. His thumb stills against Malik's jaw.
"I want to," he says. Simply. Like it's obvious. Like the idea that someone would choose to take care of the demon living in their house is the most natural thing in the world and doesn't require explanation.
Malik opens his eyes and looks at him and Newt is already looking back, and there it is, that thing in his chest, that crack in the wall, and he watches Newt's eyes and thinks: You foolish, reckless, impossibly kind creature.
You should not be wasting this on me. I am a thing that takes and leaves and you are offering me something I don't know how to hold and you should stop. You should stop before I let you.
He doesn't say any of that.
He drinks the tea. He lets Newt hold the compress against his throat until the herbs go cold. He sits on the sofa in the quiet dark and lets this boy take care of him, and he doesn't know why.
He doesn't know why, and that is the most dangerous thing that has ever happened to him.