Chapter 17 #2
Malik narrows his eyes. A slow, assessing narrowing, the kind that Newt has learned to recognize as Malik processing something unexpected. "You don't know?"
Newt flushes. He pulls the blanket up to his chest and shrugs, a small defensive motion. "I didn't read it."
"You didn't read the contract."
"I was flustered. You were half-naked. I just signed it."
Malik stares at him. The stare lasts long enough that Newt's flush deepens from pink to red and he adds, weakly, "It seemed like the right thing to do at the time."
Something flickers across Malik's face, something that wants to be amused but can't quite get there, and he lifts one hand, palm up.
A wisp of smoke curls between his fingers, dark and sinuous, and then the contract materializes in his hand.
Parchment, old, dense with ink, covered in script that Newt can't read from this angle.
Malik holds it with one hand and reads, his eyes moving across the text with the practiced efficiency of someone who has read a thousand contracts.
"Become familiar to the witch," he reads aloud. "Yes. Bind to him until his magic becomes stable. Yes. Contract is binding until terms are met or until the mortal perishes." He looks up. "The terms are met. Your magic is stable. The contract should be complete."
"But it isn't."
"No."
"So what are we missing?"
Malik reads it again. His brow furrows. He turns the parchment over, as though there might be fine print on the back, and Newt watches his face and sees the confusion there, the genuine, unperformed confusion of someone who has fulfilled a thousand contracts and cannot find the clause that's holding this one open.
Newt reaches out. He presses his hand against Malik's chin, gently, and turns his face to look at him. Malik's gold eyes meet his and Newt's heart is hammering but his hand is steady and his voice, when it comes, is quiet.
"What about you?"
Malik blinks. "What?"
"The contract has terms for me. Become familiar to the witch. Bind to him until his magic is stable. Those are your obligations. You fulfilled them." Newt's thumb brushes the line of Malik's jaw. "But what does the contract ask of me? What are my terms?"
Malik's hand stills on the parchment.
"If you've met your end of the bargain," Newt says, and his voice is very soft, "then what we're waiting on is me. The contract won't close until both sides are fulfilled. You did what you agreed to do. Now I have to do what I agreed to do."
"Newt..."
"You have to tell me what you want from me." Newt's eyes are bright. Steady. Clear. "And then the contract is complete."
Malik says nothing.
The silence stretches. It fills the bedroom, fills the space between them, and Malik is looking at Newt.
Not the careful neutrality. Not the controlled composure.
Not the raised eyebrow or the quirked lip or any of the tells that Newt has spent weeks learning to read.
This is naked. This is open. This is the face of a creature who has been asked a question he didn't expect and the answer is sitting right behind his teeth and he cannot make himself say it.
Newt gets nervous. The silence goes on and on and Malik is looking at him and not speaking and the air between them is thick and Newt reaches out, because Newt always reaches out, and takes Malik's hand. The one not holding the contract.
Malik looks down at their joined hands. He looks at them the way you look at something that has appeared in your possession without your knowledge, startled, uncertain, as though he doesn't quite understand how Newt's fingers ended up laced through his.
Newt smiles at him. It is not a brave smile. It is scared and hopeful and transparent and it is the best Newt can do.
"It's okay," Newt says. "I agreed. I signed the contract. Whatever it is, I can handle it."
Malik looks pained.
He looks physically pained, and for one terrible moment Newt thinks what?
what did I do wrong? and the familiar panic rises, the spiral starting, the assumption of failure, the certainty that he has miscalculated and the answer is something awful, something Newt can't give, something that will prove once and for all that he is not enough.
But Malik takes his hand and brings it to his chest.
He presses their joined hands against his sternum, palm flat over his heart, and Newt can feel it beating, that slow, ancient rhythm, and Malik's gold eyes are on his and his expression is not pained anymore. It is something else. Something that looks like it costs him everything he has.
"I want you," Malik says.
The words are quiet. They come out rough, as though they've been dragged up from somewhere deep, somewhere Malik has been keeping them locked away, and the saying of them changes his face.
The composure is gone. The detachment is gone.
The eight centuries of practiced indifference are gone.
What's left is a man, just a man, holding Newt's hand against his heart and saying the simplest, hardest thing he has ever said.
"I want you, Newt. That's my term. That's what I want. You."
Newt's eyes go wide.
His hand tightens around Malik's. His breath catches.
His heart is doing something complicated and enormous in his chest, something that feels like it's expanding past the boundaries of his ribcage, and his face is doing everything at once, surprise and disbelief and the first trembling edge of something so bright and so big it hurts to look at.
"You..." Newt starts. "You want..."
"You. Just you. All of you. Every morning and every night and every spell and every breakfast and every silence you fill and every fire I put out.
I want you, and I have wanted you since the amulet, and I was too afraid to say it because I have never wanted anything in eight hundred years and I did not know it would feel like this. "
Newt flings himself into Malik's arms.
It is not graceful. It is the opposite of graceful.
He launches himself forward, across the space between them, and the contract crumples between their bodies and Newt's hands find Malik's face and he kisses him.
He kisses him with everything he has, every week of wanting and every night of aching and every breakfast where he set a cup across the table and hoped, and Malik's arm wraps around his bare back and pulls him in and Newt can feel it, he can feel it through the bond, the thing that was behind the wall, the thing Malik has been hiding, and it is enormous, it is devastating, it fills the bond from end to end and it is warm.
Newt hears it. In Malik's free hand, the one that isn't pressed against Newt's back, the soft snick of parchment dissolving into smoke. The contract, completing. The terms, met. The binding, fulfilled.
Newt smiles into the kiss. He smiles so wide it breaks the kiss and he's laughing, laughing against Malik's mouth, and Malik is smiling too, Newt can feel it, and for one perfect, brilliant, incandescent moment everything is okay.
Then Newt pulls back.
Just enough to see Malik's face. Just enough to see the smile, which is real, which is the most beautiful thing Newt has ever seen, and he gets to look at it for the briefest of moments before it registers.
Malik's eyes.
Newt's smile fades. His brow furrows. His hands are still on Malik's face, one on each side of his jaw, and he is staring into his eyes and the eyes are gold. Still gold. Not purple. The contract dissolved, the parchment is smoke, the terms are met, and Malik's eyes are still gold.
"Malik," Newt says. His voice has gone very small. "Your eyes... they're still gold."
Malik goes still.
The smile disappears. Not slowly, not in stages. It vanishes, replaced by something that Newt recognizes because he's seen it on his own face in mirrors for twenty years. The expression of someone who has just been given something and had it taken away in the same breath.
Of course. Of course she wouldn't let him go.
Of course Mathilde would still have her wrinkled, ancient, patient claws wrapped around Malik's throat.
The contract between Malik and Newt is fulfilled, but Mathilde's original contract, the one that predates all of this, the one that binds Malik to her, is still there. Still active. Still gold in his eyes.
"The contract with me is done," Newt whispers. "But hers isn't."
Malik doesn't answer. He doesn't have to. The gold in his eyes says everything.
Newt's hands drop from Malik's face. He sits back on his heels.
The bond between them is open, fully open, the wall gone, and what Newt can feel coming through from Malik's side is not the careful blankness of distance or the controlled neutrality of composure.
It is anguish. Raw, unfiltered anguish, the kind that comes from a creature who has just said I want you for the first time and knows, already, that the wanting is not going to be enough.
Newt shakes his head. Not in denial. In refusal. In the small, fierce, stubborn refusal of a boy who has spent twenty years having things taken from him and has, finally, found something he is not willing to lose.
"No," Newt says.
His voice is quiet. Steady. The steadiest it has been in weeks.
"Newt..."
"No."
He is off the bed. He doesn't think about it.
He doesn't plan it. His body simply moves, carrying him to his feet, and his magic moves with him, and the air in the bedroom shifts.
The constellations reappear on the ceiling.
Not the gentle, whimsical stars of earlier.
These are bright. These are fierce. These burn.
Newt conjures clothes. Just thinks them into existence, the way you think of a word and say it, and he is dressed, t-shirt and trousers and boots, and the ease of it, the effortless perfection of it, is proof of everything Malik has given him and everything Mathilde is trying to take away.
He heads for the door.
"Newt, wait," Malik says, and there is something in his voice that Newt has never heard before. Not command. Not composure. Something raw and unfinished, something that sounds terrified.
"Are you coming?" Newt asks, from the doorway. He doesn't turn around. He doesn't need to.
Behind him, he hears the rustle of Malik pulling on trousers, the soft thud of bare feet on the floor, and then Malik is behind him, and Newt can feel him through the bond, bright and enormous and afraid, and Newt reaches back without looking and takes his hand.
Malik's fingers close around his. Tight.
Together, they walk out the door.