"It'd ruin my figure."

"You know what will also ruin your figure?" He extends a hand and—no, he's holding out an apple, he'd been holding it since they left the cafeteria. "Skipping two meals in a row."

Lex stares at it.

"I'm not fucking you for a Red Delicious," he says acidly. "And if you're going to do me a favor, it should be looking where you're walking."

"I have never been jumped by a mal on my own in my life," he says, the apple still in offer, although he is actually looking where he's walking, if still too casually for comfort, "and when I'm with other people they tend to go out of their way to avoid me. We'll be fine. And I'm not trying to bribe you or—look, Lex, I meant every word I said, okay? So just take the damn apple to have literally any sugar in your blood, and if you want me to give you a selfish reason to do it, it will be better for both of us walking down these stairs if I don't have to worry about you fainting from lack of calories."

Lex takes the damn apple. He eats the entire thing, core included, over the course of a blessedly silent minute.

He—smiles, a bit, to himself, and does not fill the minute with any sounds other than their steps.

At the end of the minute, though, he says a short sentence in French and his left hand starts glowing to make up for the increasingly dark hallways with their increasingly dim oil lamps. It's enough to cover them all the way to the workshop, whose door is standing slightly ajar. Just enough to show its oppressive darkness which is surely holding something that wants to jump them and eat them and—

—and Scorpius pushes the door open without even checking for a digester or anything worse and walks in.

...Lex follows him in. Maybe the inevitable lurking horror will be another soul-eater.

No inevitable lurking horrors spring at them. Scorpius tries turning the lights up, with no luck, then shrugs and sighs, making his way around the far-too-cramped space with far too many chairs to go to one of the supply chests. "Anything in particular you want?"

"...scrap. If your aura of inevitable success makes there be titanium rods and diamond dust instead, I'll take it and trade some to Sophie for her scrap."

He makes a beeline for the scrap bins and opens one of them—with his actual hands, no matter that they're bare other than the glow that wasn't even hot enough to feel warm around—and grabs a few big flat pieces. After shaking them rather violently and beating them against the side of the nearest table with the put-upon airs of someone who's only doing this for someone else's peace of mind he asks, "Anything else? No titanium rods and diamond dust in the bin that I could see."

"...pliers. Are you also going to open the tool chest with your bare hands."

"Yup!" he says brightly, doing exactly that to show off several neat rows of hammers, screwdrivers, spanners, hacksaws, many pliers for Lex to choose from and... an honest-to-God drill, the kind of thing the school just basically never offers like that. Certainly no one in their junior hall has one.

And not a single one of the tools jumps at Scorpius or tries to bite his fingers off of hurt him in any way.

"Holy shit. ...I'm going to assume this happens to you alternate Tuesdays, but we're taking that fucking drill home with me. And a pair of pliers, and, I don't know, hacksaw's nothing and hammers I've got main force but let's pick up a screwdriver for funsies."

He takes the sheet metal so Scorpius can pick out the tools. "I assume you know how to check for bad tools," he mentions, "if that's another thing that doesn't happen to you I can pick them out."

In lieu of replying, or even grabbing the things Lex asked for, he instead gets a hammer—a large, hefty one—and in one smooth motion steps over to Lex and smashes it down over his shoulder, slamming the forehead of something one of the dull metal chairs behind him had turned into. A mimic, its mouth full of jagged silver teeth opening along the seam where the seat met the back.

"Fuck! You're rubbing off on -"

He looks over his shoulder.

"- oh. Oh that's not good."

Four other chairs seem to be collecting their own legs in to charge at them, so "not good" is something of an understatement. Scorpius starts chanting a metal-forging spell, and the nearest mimic, the one that was just currently recovering from the hammer blow Scorpius dealt it, starts glowing red-hot. He hits it with the hammer again, which at this stage of melting gives it a neat hole and makes it shriek as it falls over dead.

The others, though, seem intent on going for Lex, so Scorpius drops down to his knees and yells, "Jump!"—

- and Lex has dropped the sheet metal and he's muttering and waving one hand with the other clutching his crystal and there's a rending-tearing-screeching metal sound and the mals scream in agony as they crumple and implode.

Lex falls to one knee. "Mana," he grits out. "Please."

—okay seems like Lex has this well in hand then, no need for him to electrocute them all.

He doesn't want to do it without touching, he's not great at mana control and if he tries to cross the air between them he will absolutely send too much, so instead he quickly scurries over to Lex to put a hand on his shoulder and yep there we go that's mana.

That sure fucking is mana. Lex stands up and brushes himself off. He pats his crystal gently, pushing in a little more than he drew out with a whispered apology. Walks over and picks up the smooth, shiny orb of compressed aluminum.

"If I wanted a doorknob made out of mal," he muses, "this would be great."

That was really hot, Scorpius absolutely does not say, except maybe with his eyes for a second or two.

"So," he says instead, not quite reaching conversational as he turns back around to go back to the tool chest, "that one is usually meant to be used on people, isn't it?" Pliers, drill, screwdrivers, he can check them for maleficaria but they all seem kosher.

"How'd you guess. For extra fun, if the target's made of flesh, it leaves it alive." He picks up the sheet metal and puts the aluminum in his pocket - he's sure somebody'll pay for, heh, maluminum. "Well. 'Alive.'"

He pauses and looks at the crumpled mal then back at Lex and says, "H-how d—no, actually, you know what, I do not need to know what you mean by alive there, this is something I will never have reason to need to know I am sure." He bumps the tool chest shut with an elbow and walks back over to Lex.

"The heart beats," Lex says unnecessarily. "On top, like a rosette on a Christmas gift."

He makes for the exit. Thanks God he has a good belt, he can feel the metal sphere in his pocket trying to pull his trousers down.

And Scorpius carries everything else and follows along, focusing very strongly on how much Lex does not want to fuck him, thank you very much.

"I'm curious about something," Lex says abruptly to disrupt the companionable silence. "You're not in charge of New York."