He's not even in her room in the first place.

He takes the sunglasses and goes.

"What's up with the sunglasses?"

She has a bad feeling. She's not entirely sure why, Jeremy doesn't look hurt or anything, but something about— sitting next to him?— feels really uncomfortable.

"They're enchanted. Designed to protect your eyes during shop, but I bet they're not just good for that."

"Oh. Cool! Hey, want to trade math for Greek lit—"

"Yeah. Sure. That sounds great."

He finishes breakfast as fast as possible and finds a group leaving for his first class.

Briar's an idiot but she won't stay an idiot forever.

He really wants an excuse to just not talk to her for a bit, but even if he says he's busy with a project and can't study with her, he still needs to worry about meals.

(Maybe if he's a little more conservative about pulling malia, it'll take longer for her to notice?)

(He knew she'd be angry. He's fine with her being angry. Delaying doesn't actually help him.)

(Why does she get the useful scary affinity that she's barely even using. It's not fair.)

He goes to classes. He eats lunch. He's not planning on pulling malia tonight anyways. It's not like he's going to get any more obvious.

It's not until the end of that week that he notices he's building mana more slowly, and having more trouble drawing it out again from his storage.

He— knew that would happen eventually. He wasn't expecting it to happen already. Everyone knows the risks of using malia, but— 

Complaining about how unfair it is won't make it not true. If he wants to be sure he can respond properly to threats, he needs to either start carrying around mice with him, or start drawing more malia, more often.

He spends half an hour trying to figure out if there's any reasonable way to carry around mice in his backpack that'll still leave them accessible in an emergency before he gives up. (In hindsight it was stupid waste of time, he should've realized it sooner— but that's not helpful.)

(The pair of mice in the tank he goes for scurry away from him.)

This time, pulling malia feels more like turning a spigot than anything else. It flows into him, and for a moment he's unequivocally confident that everything is going to be fine. Then the mouse stops breathing, and he wants more— there's another one in the cage, and its mate is already dead— no. He's not stupid. He's not taking more than he needs to to top up his reserves.

He feels a little less sick. He hadn't even noticed he was feeling sick in the first place.

(In the morning, he feels sick again.)

Two weeks after the term starts, Jeremy misses breakfast.

It doesn't have to mean he's dead. 

Most of the other things it could mean are still bad, though.

She's trying to figure out if she knows anyone in his classes when she practically runs into him on the way to her second class.

He's wearing a pair of leather gloves.

"Oh! Hey Briar, sorry, I need to get to class—"

"What the hell do you think you're doing?"

He glances at his hands. "I don't know what you're talking about."

(It was the aura, not the hands, that clued her in. Not that she's going to tell him that.)

"You— you can't just be a maleficer—"

It's not a good argument, and she knows it. Clearly he is a maleficer. But— what do you even say to that?

"Leave me alone, Briar. I said, I need to get to class."

She grabs his wrist. "Fuck no! You— you're going to get yourself killed—"

(and it's evil, and I never thought you of all people would do something like that, but you know it's evil, how can you not—)

(The rest of the hallway is giving them a wide berth at this point. Anyone they were walking with has moved on; it's stupid to randomly abandon someone you're walking with for no reason, but that doesn't mean you stick with them while they're getting into a screaming match in the hallway.)

"Let go of me!"

He starts an incantation, the fastest one he knows, just to push her away from him.

What is he doing to her— she, she does minds, she has to be able to do something—

She staggers backwards. It's a fast incantation.

Lots of mals aren't very smart. They'll avoid prey that's obviously a lot tougher than them, or that's obviously not worth the effort, but they can't tell the difference between two random people with similar mana capacity.

Other mals are smarter than that. Smart enough, for example, to identify when two tasty bags of mana are distracted.