Girl standing by what's left of the water station, achieving remarkable parity of input and output by crying quietly over her water as she drinks it?

...oh, sweetheart. "Alright there, love?" he asks quietly.

snf

tiny headshake

Edmund will... pat her on the back. "Friends in Chicago?" he asks.

"No, that would be a good reason to be crying."

"Don't think it's a contest. If it was I think the new blood would be winning and they mostly don't seem to be crying at all, so maybe different people are allowed to be different amounts of upset?"

Dubious sniffle.

"Why don't you tell me what you are crying about, and I'll see if I can help?"

"...well, you see, three-quarters of the people in this building are going to die," she says, "and yet somehow that's the better outcome, and it's not like I did anything to deserve it, and I'd really like to have a way to solve the problem, but I don't, so instead I think I'm going to find out how much dedication it takes to walk into the void and not come back."

"Well - don't do that," Edmund says, very much as though this is a reasonable response to her statement. "Um. Are you in fact aware that it is not your responsibility to solve this problem, and that becoming a victim of your void wall does not actually spare another freshman their life."

"It spares me having to think about it," she says. "And spares me living long enough to end up in the same room as a maw-mouth. I think it's pretty reasonable, all told." Inexplicably, arguing her case seems to have cheered her up a bit; she's standing straighter and not sniffling so much.

I can't imagine being that selfish, Edmund can't say.

Don't you feel any sort of duty to your fellow man, he can't say.

"I used to feel that way," he says, very quietly. "But - even if you don't care about you, you can care about other people. Get killed doing something that's worth it."

"...that's not... that's not how this place works. And—it's not nothing—to find out. So anyone else who wants to can hear about it."

"So - you're killing yourself as a reminder? You think that's going to do more for people than helping them, building mana and giving it to people who need it or protecting the new blood from stuff they don't know about or - or anything?"

"—no, that's not—we don't know yet, right? Nobody's ever been confirmed to actually walk out into the void and not come back. So if I manage it then people know it works and then if they want to they can do it themselves. That's the only reason to bother telling anyone I'm going to do it, although I admit I was not expecting you to try to talk me out of it with appeals to altruism, I was expecting you to ask me to give you all my stuff first."

The worst part is that she still almost makes sense. If he takes it as a given that people dying with dignity is more important than wringing the maximum utility out of every human soul - if he carefully disables the part of his brain that shouts "you selfish bastard" in your ear when he thinks about writing a spell to stop his own heart - if he lets the voices that whisper it would be easy every damned night whisper a little louder.

"I think you're wrong," he says dully. "You - the best you could get is domino suicides. The more people that die, the less we all have. That's what society means."

"In here? In here, you'll say that? Who do I belong to, then? Who is it that has me, while I still live? Who is coordinating this joint venture? Will you appoint yourself king of the suicidal students?"

"I -"

She's right.

"I..."

A prodigiously tiny young man (who had been standing nearby but not obviously watching the conversation) runs over and grabs his wrist very firmly. "Edmund? Edmund. - what the fuck did you say to him? Edmund, we're leaving."

"n. I."

"We're leaving," the boy hisses, and he mutters some spell that makes them both considerably blurry, and pulls him away.

She probably shouldn't have said that.

But which part shouldn't she have said? She wasn't wrong about any of it! He's the one who came over to her and—threw his vulnerable selflessness in her face—how on earth did he expect her to react—how could you expect anyone to nod along to that logic—how could you, in the Scholomance of all places, tell someone with a straight face that they have to stay alive for the sake of strangers? Well, apparently if you need to believe in the unassailable strength of your argument or you'll have a breakdown in the middle of the cafeteria. So that's lovely.

Nigel stops moving once they are far away from that fucking girl.

"What did she say," he demands.

Edmund hugs him and starts crying.

"This is unhelpful," Nigel says balefully. "This is so unhelpful."

Eventually he hiccups for a final time and says "she - she was going to kill herself. I. Wanted to try to - help her. But - she was right. She's - right."

"No she's fucking not," Nigel snaps, "and you need to pull yourself the fuck together. Do you know what you do when someone's going to kill themself?"

"H-"

"You get their fucking room number."

Edmund grits his teeth. "Well, you already know mine."

"You're not going to kill yourself," Nigel says dangerously. "Do you know why you're not going to kill yourself? Because you're not Ed. You're not even Edmund. You are Edmund Pevensie, London, and unlike that indie bitch you have people who care about you, people who need you, and if you kill yourself I swear to God I'll drag you back from the Void with my bare hands because you are not done."

There's a long, painful silence.

"I should - apologize to her," Edmund says.

"You're never going to talk to her again," Nigel corrects him. "You're staying claved up for the rest of the evening if I have to break your Goddamned legs, and I am officially ordering you to eat some of your sweets when you get back to your room."

"Alright," Edmund says. "Alright."