"...so are the two of you dating, too, now, or?" Scorpius wonders, finishing up his fly and moving onto shoes.

"Frankly, I could not possibly tell you."

"Is it not usually a binary state?"

"No."

"I suppose the definition is kind of academic if we are all spending so much time together and occasionally you choke on Lex's dick."

And he is presently dressed.

Edmund is also dressed! And blushing.

"It's incredible how you still blush like a virgin even though I saw you with his cock splitting you open not an hour ago."

"Shut up."

"You looked very fetching with my cock splitting you open," Scorpius agrees.

Their belongings reacquired, they can start their way to Lex's. "Actually I saw you carrying a book earlier, what was it?" he asks Edmund. "It looked fancy."

"-oh! Right - the library was trying really hard to keep us away from you -"

Edmund picks the book off the desk where he left it. "It does look fancy," he muses. "And - no label, so... Lex, do you actually read Sanskrit?"

"No, I'm an idiot who decided to colonize a carrel in a region I don't know the -"

He stops.

"Holy shit."

"Don't open it, let's not give the library any ideas, but show us it when we're back at yours."

"...yeah. Yeah... Pevensie, give it to me, I know how to cosset a spellbook."

Edmund hands it over, squinting only slightly.

And Lex, as they walk, begins... singing. Crooning a quiet tune, barely audible over their footsteps, in what must be Welsh. He's also stroking the book, gently and in swirling loops that trace the gilding on the cover.

He has the best boyfriends. The best.

The library doesn't try to keep them this time, and the lights stay all of them on. When they emerge from the stacks to the main reading room, it's deserted: the evidence of the fight that happened there is still visible everywhere, and apparently everyone decided it was time to flee after Scorpius dealt with the whatever they were.

That's less true of the actual hallways leading downstairs to the junior res hall, though, as they do see scattered groups of people moving this way and that. By the way they look at Scorpius the news has traveled, but then again it would be more surprising had it not. Either way no one really tries to approach the trio.

In that case they can get to Lex's room with a minimum of fuss, right?

Yep here's his room!

Lex pulls the box of crystals out from under his bed, keeping the book in his other hand. He hisses in a breath when he sees them, and starts rifling through. "Drained, drained, drained... okay... it looks like I killed two-thirds of my stash."

"I'm gonna need to go through you, if I try to feed your crystals directly I think there's a pretty high chance I'll break them."

"...yeah. And - the drained crystals need to be reattuned before we can fill them. It's gonna take a while. And I don't think even you have twenty Radiant Mind crystals' worth of power in your reserves."

"Not... twenty crystals, probably, but—I think I have ten to twenty times your reserves in right now? So however many crystals that is."

"My maximum capacity is about half a crystal. Where I'm at now, about a quarter... so, hmm... if you really want to give me a boost you could fill about five."

"What's it take to reattune a drained crystal? Do you have to do it yourself?"

"No, but it's incredibly boring. You have to feed it a constant thread of mana, in and out, for about an hour. I hate it - you can't even generate mana off it, since it's magic."