Scorpius runs a hand against his scalp, again. A nervous tic, maybe. "I don't, don't really know how to do this. There's not much point? It's usually more obvious than, than this was, so usually I..." Let them, he doesn't say. "The part of me that was raised by my mother wants to apologize to you but every other part of me wants—" He shakes his head. "Something else."

"...apologize for saving my life, you mean."

A corner of his lips twitches. "Yes, I do mean."

"Well. I... accept your apology... but I think that the rest of you is probably on the right track. I guess it probably wants to pick me up and shake me until all the idiot comes out."

He giggles again, a little bit less strangled this time. "Almost word-for-word what I was thinking."

"Would that it were so easy. I've tried half a dozen times to just... forget about it. My affinity's great for utility, but it can't quite manage that."

"Should I assume your affinity is not water-weaving, then?"

"Ha. I bet it looks that way, doesn't it? No, I do memory. Write, rewrite, erase. It's saved my life more times than you have, I think."

He raises both of his eyebrows. "Was there anything specific you wanted to forget?"

"I was a linguistically inclined child. By the time my parents caught on I had scraps of Spanish, Italian, Japanese... Dad traumatized me out of languages, but my seat was in serious jeopardy until I got my first mana spurt and ripped them out by, heh, the roots."

"Is my name an infohazard, then?"

"I've got Latin and Greek. You've got to have something, even for creative."

He grins for a second but then gets more serious again. "I feel intensely selfish asking this, but... Are you going to try again? Should I just... get out of your way?"

"This is the first real conversation I've had in three months."

Scorpius chokes on his spit and has to spend a few seconds recovering his breath. "Three months? You—how about your enclave, your siblings?"

"My enclave - Nigel's the only one who gives a shit and he doesn't really, even, he gives a shit about me because he knows without me he'd have no one, and Ella and Adrian are a clave within the clave. And. I can't talk to Peter. It's almost the end of term. And he'd, he'd drop what he's doing in a second, he'd let a sword cool brittle if I walked into shop, he'd kill himself to get me out of this funk. I can't talk to Peter. And Susan - Susan's lucky, she's got a million allies, but I know she's working herself to the bone keeping them together because she's Susan and she'd never let herself let go of one. And - it's all more important than me. And if I tried to talk to anyone else it'd be - politics or charity - not real."

"Do you think they would agree that it's all more important than you?"

"People's lives are on the line every day here. Me not - not getting enough enrichment - doesn't rate."

"...I have no idea how to explain how wrong you are, but perhaps more to the point is the fact that 'lack of enrichment' was what put your own life on the line, here," he says, air quoting the expression.

"Dammit, Edmund Five Minutes Ago."

Scorpius laughs then starts to say something but immediately jumps to his feet and casts a wordless hum of an incantation to blast the ooze that had just started to leak through the gap between the door and the floor.

"Fucking hell I thought my spell was going to hold for longer than that," he says, and almost as if to punctuate his statement a dome of energy around the two of them buzzes into visibility as a moonflapper drops onto it from above. It starts pecking at the energy barrier and he says something in French that causes a beam of electricity to shoot from his eyes at the creature, overloading its metal carcass and frying it from the inside.

Edmund squeaks involuntarily, then hops to his feet. "Come on, go, get back to your deranged night patrol - I'll be fine, go -"

The junior shoots two beams of hyperconcentrated heat at two more maleficaria before they can even hit the dome of energy surrounding them and laughs in a somewhat manic way when he processes Edmund's suggestion.

"I do not think you realise—" There's a loud thump from the door as something slams bodily against it. "Do you even have a good enough shield spell to hold the fort while I try to leave through the hordes amassing outside?" Scorpius asks lightly and, "Glacial," he cries in a French accent, freezing another ooze-like creature that had just jumped from a hiding spot in a shelf up above to try to glomp them. The mals that come from above all seem to slide sort of lamely off the barrier spell like its surface is coated in some slippery substance, and after this fourth one drops onto the floor something punches through Edmund's drain to grab its frozen corpse to eat it. "I'm afraid you're stuck with my charming presence for the night."

Edmund looks - almost relieved.

"Um. I can shield, but I probably can't shield well enough to hold off an army, you're right. Should I even be participating in this siege - I know you're kind of a demigod, here -"

"You should not!" he says brightly, sending three targeted fireballs at more stuff dropping from the vent and then one jolt of energy down the drain. "Your job for tonight will be to sit there looking pretty and if you want to call me nice names like 'demigod' you should save it for when you actually want to flirt with me." He whirls around and sends a jet of semi-solid energy in a straight horizontal line along the bottom of the door where a strange purple smoke had started coming from. Said smoke is immediately absorbed by the semi-solid blob of energy and crystallizes it into a thin layer of glassy material on the floor.

Also he's glowing now. That's a thing that's happening. Faintly, mostly concentrated around the eyes, but getting more noticeable the more mals he kills.