Chapter 9 #2
Newt's whole body jolts. He makes a noise that he is going to be mortified about later, Malik knows—a high thin sound, almost a whimper, torn out of him without permission—and his hips rock forward against Malik's thigh, once, involuntarily, and the magic sings.
Malik can feel it threading through the bond like a plucked string, taut and perfect and tuning itself finer with every escalation of contact.
The ward tightens. A piece of plaster that had been about to fall settles back against the ceiling and stays.
Malik slides his hands under Newt's shirt.
The skin there is warm. Warmer than he expected.
Newt flinches at the contact and then leans into it, a shiver running the length of him, and Malik spreads his palms flat against Newt's stomach and feels the muscles there jump under his hands.
He drags his palms up Newt's ribs. The quick frantic rabbit of his heart.
The flat of his chest, where Malik's thumbs catch on the raised lines of old scars, and Malik does not react to them, does not pause, simply learns them under his hands and keeps going.
Newt makes a sound that is almost a sob.
"You're doing so well," Malik says, against his throat, because it is true and because he cannot stop saying it. "Newt. Look at this—" The ward. The perfect, humming, flawless ward. "—look what you're doing. Look what you can do."
"Malik—"
"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 a please 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 Newt sobs into 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."
His fingers slip lower.
He doesn't crowd. He doesn't push. He slides two fingers down, down through the soft slick folds of him, and finds Newt absolutely drenched—he is so wet Malik's fingers glide through it without resistance, and the scent of it rises between them in a warm green cloud, and Malik has to shut his eyes for a half-second because the scent alone is enough to make his own cock throb against the seam of his trousers.
He circles his fingertips at Newt's entrance.
Light. A question. Newt's hips chase the contact and Malik presses the pads of his fingers inside—just inside, just past the tight ring of muscle—and Newt cries out.
Malik withdraws immediately, and Newt's hands fist in his hair, hard.
"No, I'm sorry," Newt gasps, "no, I didn't mean—don't—please, please don't stop—"
"I'm not stopping." Malik kisses him. Soft. Sucks Newt's lower lip between his teeth and lets it go. "I'm not stopping, love, I'm—"
The word is out before he has authorized it. He files it. He will deal with it later.
He slides his fingers back into the wet heat of him.
Two, this time, pressed together, and he goes slow.
He goes slow because Newt has never been touched like this, has never been touched at all, and the clench of him around Malik's fingers is so tight Malik can feel every small adjustment of his body, every little flutter of muscle.
He pushes in to the second knuckle. Pauses.
Lets Newt adjust. Lets the stretch settle.
And Newt makes a broken shattered sound into his shoulder that is going to haunt Malik for the rest of his very long life.
"So good, Newt," Malik breathes. "You're doing so well—"
He curls his fingers. Just a crook, just an exploratory drag along the front wall of him, and Newt's hips snap forward off the wall with a strangled noise and the light fixture in the hallway blows out with a pop of glass and a shower of sparks that Malik does not bother to acknowledge.
He strokes that spot. Slow, firm, unhurried, the pads of two fingers rubbing in a steady rhythm while Newt shakes apart against him, and he gathers the wetness on his fingers—so much of it now, slick running down the inside of Newt's thigh, soaking the ruined fabric of his open trousers—and drags it back up.
Up through the folds of him. Up to the hard aching peak of Newt's cock, and he spreads it there, slow and deliberate, using Newt's own slick to lubricate him, painting it over the swollen sensitive head of him in a slow wet circle that has Newt keening into his mouth.
"Malik—"
He sets a rhythm. Two fingers inside, curled, pressing; thumb above, circling the head of Newt's cock in tight slow strokes; the heel of his palm grinding against him with every push.
Newt is making a continuous helpless sound now, a broken little string of vowels punctuated by gasps, and his hips are rocking forward into the heel of Malik's hand and back onto his fingers and he has no idea he is doing it, Malik can tell.
His body has simply taken over. His body has waited for this and it is not waiting any longer.
Malik strokes him. He varies it—firm pressure of the flat of his thumb, then the lighter drag of his fingertip, then the wet tight circle of two fingers pinched around the base of him—and Newt's breath shatters with every change.
The slick between them is obscene. Malik's wrist is wet to the cuff.
The whole air of the room smells like Newt, like honey and crushed green things and the electric afterscent of magic pouring out of a body that has held it too long, and Malik is, himself, shaking.
He is shaking. He has not shaken against a partner in his lifetime and he is shaking now.
"Malik, I—I'm going to—I can't—"
He curls his fingers. Drags along that spot inside. Circles his thumb tight and wet over the head of Newt's cock.
"Please—"
"Newt." He kisses him. Hard. Filthy. His fingers working in steady perfect rhythm. "Come. Come for me. I've got you, come for me, my good boy—"
Newt comes with a sob that is half relief and half something else, something Malik cannot put a name to, and his whole body clenches down on Malik's fingers in a long rhythmic pulse and then releases, a long shuddering unwinding, and the magic that has been building in him for twenty years pours out.
Pours, cleanly, in one long unbroken flood, into the ward, which takes it and locks it and seals itself around the house like a shell.
An eggshell. Perfect. Flawless. The crack in the ceiling knits itself closed.
The shattered window—Malik hears it, distantly—re-forms, glass finding glass, seam by seam, until it is whole.
Malik works him through it. He keeps his fingers moving, slow now, gentle, coaxing out every last pulse, every aftershock, until Newt is whimpering against his shoulder and twitching with oversensitivity and his hands have gone limp in Malik's hair.
Malik withdraws his hand, slowly. His fingers are slick to the second knuckle, glistening with it, and he has to exercise the full weight of years of discipline not to bring them to his mouth.
He settles for wiping them, discreetly, on the inside of his own shirt, and refastens the button of Newt's trousers because it seems like the thing to do.
Brings both arms around him and holds him, just holds him, while the magic settles into silence around them.
Newt sags against him.
Malik catches him. Eases him against the wall, other arm wrapped firmly around his back, and feels him shaking, feels the aftershocks of it rolling through the small body pressed against his own.
Newt's face is tucked into the hollow of Malik's throat.
His breath is hot and uneven against Malik's collarbone.
Malik, who has never stood against a wall with a partner afterward, finds himself entirely unable to move.
"You're alright," Malik says. He does not recognize his own voice. "You're alright. You did it. Look at what you did."
Newt makes a small wet sound against his throat.
Malik presses his forehead against the top of Newt's head. He breathes in—that sweet botanical warmth, now shot through with the salt of sweat and the particular electric afterscent of spent magic—and he closes his eyes and he thinks, very distinctly, the single clearest thought he has had:
What the fuck have you done?
The ward hums around them, perfect and unbroken. Newt's hand finds his and curls into it, small and trusting, and does not let go.
Malik does not let go either.
He tells himself it is because Newt is still shaking. He tells himself it is because the magic needs another moment to settle. He tells himself a number of things, standing there with his forehead pressed to the crown of Newt's head, and he does not believe any of them, and he does not let go.