Scorpius places a hand on his face, half-pained, half-amused.

    "Paying a debt, he said," says Magnus, in mocking imitation of Scorpius's voice. "What debt are you paying now, Lake?"

"No debt, Tebow, that was just the supply run," says Scorpius, lowering his hand again. "Now I'm enjoying myself."

    "With him? And how long will that one go for, two boytoys for half as long?"

"Actually we might be dating."

        "You what?" squeals the girl from earlier—Chloe Rasmussen.

"Might be, he says, the three of us spend an hour cuddling and he might be dating us. Have you ever seen a man so foreign to his own emotions. - thanks, by the way, you lot have helped immensely with that, I'm sure."

    "Lake. Scorpius. You can't be serious," says Chloe. "Are you—did London—"

"My plans for graduation continue to be indeterminate, but no, London has not tried to poach me."

        "Matter of time," mutters Magnus.

"I'm not an artifice!" Scorpius protests. "I can't be stolen!"

    "...you can be mind-controlled—"

"I'll let you run a divination through my head later if you wanna check," sighs Scorpius.

This little thing has taken long enough that a few of the NY enclaver freshmen who have the second half of the afternoon as work period show up in a small group. The junior hangers-on—a handful of them, none of them officially part of the New York enclave so none of them really feeling like they can contribute to this "conversation"—get up from their seats, because obviously actual enclavers are higher up in the pecking order even if they're just freshmen.

"Honestly, Rasmussen, you might be the one I hate least," Lex contributes idly. "'sides Lake, of course. Tebow obviously takes the gold. Why do you lot tolerate him, by the way? By this point I'd have bred a chayena in my room if I had to eat with him every day."

Chloe squeaks again when Lex directly addresses her like that.

"I promise he's nicer when he's not feeling threatened," Scorpius tells Lex.

    "I am not—"

"Spare me, Tebow, and give me some space to do homework with my boyfriend here while you guys figure out how to make nice." Chloe visibly winces when he says "boyfriend".

"Threatened," Lex mutters, mostly to himself. "Flagrant mischaracterization. Righteously pissed is more like."

Scorpius arranges the two of them seats in a sofa, and the other kids around look pretty resigned to this happening, now.

    "You're serious about the divination," asks Chloe.

"Yes! He's not a maleficer and I'm not under mind control and if that will give you some peace of mind I'll lie down for an hour under a score of crystals getting all of the bad juju scoured out of me."

    She flushes and brings the book she was reading closer to her chest, but she does say, "Thank you."

Lex sits next to him and opens the awful grimoire across his lap. He's too keyed-up to actually read it, but he can pretend.

Scorpius reaches a hand up behind Lex's head and neck to scritch him, barely thinking about it, and decides he does want to do any homework so with his free hand he rummages into his knapsack and eventually finds the book he needs to finish (or start) a paper summary on. The kids around them remain tense at first but when Lex does... literally nothing bad whatsoever... they slowly start to relax.

Apart from making an involuntary happy noise when scritched, yes, Lex does not do much of anything at all, let alone anything evil.

Scorpius eventually can't really excuse only reading and should really start writing his paper, so he apologetically stops petting his boyfriend to use both hands for this task. He's keeping his leg firmly pressed against Lex's, though.

(Also Chloe is intensely mortified by how—happy and cute Lex looks? This is not a way he should look, it's breaking literally every preconception she has.)

Once the petting ceases, Lex has (not coincidentally) relaxed enough to start actually reading.

He rolls his eyes after a few minutes. "I had such high hopes, too," he mutters, and snaps the book closed. 

Scorpius looks at him, then, humming a question in his direction, and even the other kids look at him with some curiosity.

(Not Magnus. Magnus is resolutely pretending Lex does not exist. Or trying to, but clearly failing, unless the constipated look on his face is completely unrelated.)

"Oh - remember the, uh, cleaning spell my wall gave me? I was hoping it'd have some more decent utility, but, well."

He flips through. "For the removal and preparation of skin. Bone shaping. Blood siphon - which actually wouldn't have been totally useless two hours ago. Marrow to hot lead." He makes a face. "It's not even well-organized! Who puts agonizing death after corpse preparation?"

    Magnus, despite his pretense, nearly chokes on his spit. "What was that about not being a maleficer, Lake?"

"You're doing this on purpose," Scorpius half-admonishes Lex. "Maleficers are people who draw most or all of their power from living things, Magnus."

    "Are you really going to argue about definitions now?"

"I'm sorry, do you use every bloody spell the Void gives you? I was complaining I don't want these."

"Why is the Void giving you these!"

"Are you under the impression I understand the whims of the Scholomance? It gives people spells. Lake it gives spells to make things explode. You, I assume it's trying to give you something to make your hair look less stupid. I get..." Gesture. "If having loads of nasty spells that kill things makes me a maleficer I have terrible news about your friend mister Lake."

Scorpius needs to pet Lex for that. Here, pet pet pet.

Also, unfortunately for Magnus, Lex's argument does make sense, so he just grumbles and returns to his languages assignment, unable to think of a real comeback to that.

    "Is your affinity like Scorpius's, then?" asks one of the NY freshmen that arrived after they sat there, a boy by the name of Terry.

He shrugs. "Seems to be. Though I don't get his little vampire bonus, more's the pity."

    "Vampire bo—oh! Draining mana from mals, you mean?"

"He does mean," nods Scorpius. "Does the blood siphoning work on mals? That would be useful to have, if you'd share that." And what he didn't say was that he was trading for it—which he normally would have, except... he's maybe flexing a bit. To whom is unclear, but the meaning will not be missed: you don't give gifts in the Scholomance, people kinda give Scorpius a pass on most things given how he has saved everyone's lives one time or another but even for him just asking for a free gift is a bigger declaration of romantic intent than anything else.

"It's in Coptic... but maybe I can get a translation out for my Creative Writing class instead of torturing that poor villanelle any more? Hmm. It'd be in-affinity, that's something... Let me try something."

He lays a sheet of paper out on the table and closes his eyes. He mutters to himself and starts freewriting.

    "Wait, you can just do that?" asks Chloe, but Scorpius lifts a finger to his lips and just watches. No reason to distract him.

He opens his eyes after a few minutes. Looks down at the page. "...it'd be barely functional in this state, this is too literal, but give me... three days, any longer and I'll procrastinate about it. - I forgot to ask if you wanted it English or Latin, right now it's Latin because that way the accent difference can't trip you up."

"Latin's fine, I can't speak it but I can read it and cast in it."

Also: what the fuck. Sure, creative writing is the way you get new spells as opposed to old ones, but most people need to work at it for multiple days, sometimes weeks, to get anything barely functional. Yet here Lex is, freewriting a new spell like it's nothing. To him, it probably is nothing.