Chapter 12
Things are very awkward.
Malik does not do awkward. Awkward is a human condition, a social malfunction, the province of creatures who haven't had eight centuries to refine their ability to navigate discomfort.
Malik navigates discomfort the way water navigates a riverbed, smoothly, without resistance, finding the path of least friction and flowing through it.
He has seduced royalty and charmed monsters and talked his way out of contractual disputes with entities that could unmake him at the molecular level.
He does not get flustered. He does not get nervous.
He does not sit across a breakfast table from someone and fail to find words.
He is failing to find words.
Newt had walked out this morning. He'd said I need some air in a voice that was crumbling and he'd walked through the living room and pulled on his boots and left, and Malik had sat at the kitchen table with his tea going cold and his toast untouched and stared at the door and known, with the certainty of someone who has spent years reading people, that something between them had broken.
He'd cleaned up. He doesn't know why. He'd washed his cup, cleared the table, put Newt's uneaten toast in the bin.
Domestic tasks he has never performed in his life, executed with the clumsy deliberation of a creature trying to communicate something he doesn't have the language for.
Then he'd put on his coat and left, because the townhouse was too quiet and too full of Newt's scent and the walls still hummed with the ward they'd cast together and Malik could not sit in that space alone without thinking about the sounds Newt made and the way Newt had looked at him across the table this morning with an expression that was trying so hard to be okay and wasn't.
He'd walked. For hours. Through Haven's streets and its parks and its bridges, and he hadn't fed, hadn't found a bar, hadn't even considered it.
The thought of touching someone else had made his stomach lurch in a way that was viscerally, physically unpleasant, and that was new.
That was a development. That was his body telling him something that his mind hadn't caught up to yet, and by the time he came back to the townhouse Newt was sitting on the kitchen floor in the doorway and his eyes were red and he looked up at Malik and the expression on his face was so carefully empty that Malik felt something in his chest crack along a line that was already fractured.
Newt had stood up. He'd said, "I'm going to go lie down for a bit." He'd walked upstairs. He'd closed his door.
Malik had stood in the kitchen and looked at his washed cup on the drying rack and thought about the precise, surgical inadequacy of every decision he'd made in the last twelve hours.
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 because the 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 and he 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 chair with 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 says sorry reflexively and thank you compulsively and please as 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.
Newt goes to answer it.
The witch on the doorstep is one Malik recognizes from the coven.
Young, relatively. Sharp-featured, efficient, wearing the neutral expression of someone delivering a message they have no personal investment in.
She looks past Newt into the townhouse, her gaze landing briefly on the cracked floor and the scorch-marked chair and the recently-righted bookshelf, and her expression doesn't change.