"It's a valuable service, you know. No one should have to walk the halls alone."

"We are in agreement, then. So hurry up, I'm a junior not a sophomore, I don't get as much time as you to waste around having a grand old time in the shower."

"I didn't have any kind of grand old time! I had to wash your clothes and mine beforehand, that takes time even with magic soap."

He dresses as he talks, though, and he's decent soon enough.

So out they can go, then, to the cafeteria, to feed the rumor mill more gossip than it can handle.

Someone near Lex is saying something about Scorpius Lake. Lex doesn't care about Scorpius Lake. He is determined not to care about Scorpius Lake. The extent to which he wants to know anything about Scorpius bloody Lake, especially his storied sex life, is sub-nil.

"-all night with Pevensie, and invited him to breakfast with New York."

"Peter? He's a senior, though!"

"Edmund. - younger. Sophomore."

"He goes for that?"

"He goes for anything. But he hasn't spent the night with someone before - or at least I don't think so, who can keep track of everything he gets up to - I heard he and -"

Lex slams his thermos on the table. It's metal, and the table is metal, and he's strong, and the resulting sound is substantial. "Will you people shut up about Lake's antics before I puke," he says, quietly, without turning around. "Please."

There's a lengthy pause, and the gossip turns to whispers. That'll have to do.

Lex returns to his absolutely tragic lunch, his mood almost as thoroughly soured as his stomach. Someday he thinks he'll kill Scorpius Lake. (Someday maybe he'll kill everyone in the world.)

He gives it up as a bad job. "Rest is free," he says aloud, and stands, taking his thermos and his bag and heading for his room. To study. Without thinking at all about stupid gossip.

No one is going to take his lunch. They'll probably think it's poisoned. He's the kind of person who'd poison someone for no reason, apparently.

Or maybe he hid a mal in it or something. They actually inch away from his lunch when he leaves, as if they hadn't already been giving him a wide berth.

Yi Liu, with her nearly-floor-length straight black hair and her jet black fingernails and her eyes that sometimes look like they were fully white before you convince yourself it was just a trick of the light, was one of the people sitting nearby, and not participating in the conversation, just existing around other people for safety. She throws him an anxious look—walking places alone is not safe here, he's going to—she doesn't need to care, she's sure he'd yell at her if she cared, so she doesn't, and instead returns to picking at her food with almost no enthusiasm.

(And someone else is watching him walk away like that, too. Metal on metal is loud, and Scorpius Lake is always watching his surroundings with more attention than most New York enclavers, so this is not surprising.)

Lex is not devoured on his way back to his room. This may be a minor miracle, but it's the kind that he makes for himself; his eyes are sharp, watching the corners and the ceiling and the floor ahead of him. He may be in a foul mood, but he's not an idiot. He's survived this long, at least.

Constant vigilance has a meditative effect. By the time he's back at his room, he feels much more human. He sits down at his desk, and takes out a block of wood and a small knife, and starts whittling. He is unutterably shit at whittling.

He's got a mana crystal by his left hand. He's got a thermos of lukewarm tea by his right hand.

He's got a soul eater seeping through his door, barely visible but for a faint purple haze.

And now what he also has is a quickly melting doorknob, then a hole on his door where it used to be, and then he has the school hero blasting through said door, hands ablaze, grabbing the ooze with his hands and causing it to screech and melt into an increasingly dead puddle.

When the soul-eater has been entirely killed he stops to catch his breath, leaning down on his own thighs as his hands return to a less glowing-hot state. By the way he has a thin sheen of sweat on his forehead, he'd probably been running this way.

Lex reacts appropriately. Which is to say he swivels around in his chair, beholds this, and pinches the bridge of his nose like he is feeling extremely put-upon.

"What the fuck," he asks, "are you doing."

Scorpius points at the puddle of dead ooze spreading itself all over Lex's room's floor, but given the way the putrescent smell hits Lex's nose right then that would not have been necessary, probably.

"Yes, I see that you have melted a perfectly good soul eater. Maybe I was imprecise. Why did you feel the need to sail into my room and save my dark and curséd life? Why were you even here, there's ten minutes left of lunch."

Scorpius looks up at Lex, eyebrows raising slowly, but out of all the things he could have picked to say to that he goes for, "'Curséd'?"

"Oh, fuck you too. I was channeling public opinion."

"Do you do that a lot?" he asks, sounding genuinely curious. He straightens up and gives the putrefying ooze a look, wrinkling his nose.

"No. The public can lick my arse. Do you care to explain why you decided to follow me home like a lost puppy?"

"Had a hunch," he says, shrugging. "They're usually right. My hunches."

"Sadly, your hunch was wrong. Not only did you melt my doorknob, probably splinter half the frame, and fill my room with noxious slime, you did it for no damned reason."

Lex cracks open a nearby spellbook to a silken bookmark. "For the Unraveling of Souls. Incantation - let's skip that bit. Gesture: crook and twirl finger forty-five degrees. For ideal results - I'm not doing that. Mana cost, irrelevant. Effects on humans, obvious and devastating. Effect on a soul eater: peels the bloody thing like an onion, leaving behind a wisp core."

He closes the book, stroking its spine gently for a moment before replacing it with its fellows. Turns back to Scorpius. Raises an eyebrow. "Do you know what Sophie Hara could do with a wisp core?" Before Scorpius can answer, he answers himself: "Neither do I. Nor will I. Ta."

"—why the hell do you have that spell?"

"Picked it up at fucking Waterstones, what do you think? The school gave it to me!"

"No fucking shit it did, what were you pulling for to get that?"

"My blanket was coming apart and I wanted to get as much out of it as I could for the next. My wording was... imprecise."

(His blanket, Scorpius may notice, is clearly hand-knit; he's not very good at it, but there are no significant gaps. It's just uneven and raggedy.)

Scorpius does, in fact, glance at Lex's blanket, then at Lex's face, then at the other books he has there, then at Lex's face again.

He starts to work out the implications of this in his head.

And what he asks is, "What happened to Jack Westing?"

Lex - laughs. If you can call it that. It's not a happy sound.

"Not going to ask what happened to Luisa?"

"Westing happened to Luisa."