If Libby made the mistake of thinking herself too small, then Nico would gladly consider himself too vast by contrast. If anything, the opportunity to swell beyond the ceiling of his existing powers ignited him. Why not reach further, for things beyond the limits of his current grasp? Even when the options were to reach the sun or collide flaming with the sea, safety was a uselessness Nico de Varona couldn’t abide.
So he started with the easiest tasks: unraveling clusters that had formed around the little gapings of the house. Magic was then thinner at the points of disentanglement, so he reinforced them with his own, sealing them until power flowed smoothly instead of being sucked up into little vacuums of inefficiency. It was a mix of push and pull, easing the entropy of decay into orderly avenues of traffic. The house itself resisted, straining a little, and sweat dripped in thin rivulets down the notches of Nico’s spine. His neck ached a little from a muscular knot he’d hardly noticed before, but which throbbed now with discomfort and strain. Evidence, he surmised belatedly, of his weeks of physical misuse while working with space. It wouldn’t be the first time he would be instructed （or berated） to stretch.
He ignored the pins and needles in the nerves that pricked up the length of his neck, shoving aside the pinch that reverberated upwards, thudding, to his head. A headache; marvelous. Possibly he was dehydrated, too. But stopping now would mean having to start up again later, and Nico loathed a task unfinished. Call it hyper-focus, but his fixations were what they were.
Finding no further bird-nests or clumps, Nico set himself to the task of metallurgy, purifying the toxicities that were the result of erosion over time. Briefly he became aware of something nagging at his memory, an old half-attended lecture; magic cannot be produced from nothing much as the case with energy there is no difference Mr de Varona would you be so kind as to lend us your attention please, and then there was an echo of laughter as Nico must have replied irreverently and yes, fine, this unit of study belonged to the principles of time, didn’t it? The inconvenience of knowing his mind had tucked away things for future use, which were in fact too late, because the truth of the matter—that Nico was a mere human currently trying to power the regeneration of a physical structure vastly more sizable than himself—was hardly helpful now that he’d started. He felt the rumble of the ground beneath him; something else slipping out from his control. He may have miscalculated the velocity at which this house would drain him, greedily suckling at what he had intended to carefully measure out. He’d cut himself open too widely, bleeding magic without being able to keep pace or cauterize the wound.
Hm. What to do, at this point? Keep going was the only answer Nico had ever known. Failure, stopping, ceasing to be or to do was never an option. He gritted his teeth, shivering with a chill or a shudder of power that left him like an expulsive, painful sneeze. Ouch, fuck, bless you, the sort of burst that could ultimately break a rib or burst a blood vessel, which most people were not aware a sneeze could do. Funny how that worked; the innocent fragility of being human. There were so many ways to break and so few of them heroic or noble.
At least Libby could use his eulogy as a posthumous lecture, or so he assumed. “Nicolás Ferrer de Varona was an idiot,” she would say, “an idiot who never believed he had limits despite being heartily assured so by me, and did you know it was possible to die from overexertion? He knew, of course, because I told him so plenty of times, but, surprise surprise, he never listened—”
“Varona.” He heard Libby’s voice from somewhere in the pit of his stomach, the chatter of his teeth limiting him to nothing more than a grunt in reply. “Jesus Christ.”
She sounded as disapproving as she always did, so there was no telling whether she was real or imagined. The pounding in Nico’s head was deafening now, the ache from his shoulders to his neck enough to blind him with the pressure between his eyes, behind his sinuses. He could feel the fabric of his shirt being peeled from his chest and stomach, probably soaked through with sweat, but there was no stopping, not now, and why waste it? He had fixed the cystic areas of magical build-up and rot, and so turned his attention to the vacancies and gaps.
He could feel himself being dragged toward heat, waves of it unevenly covering him through flickers of what must have been flame. The so-called ‘great room’—the room for which there was a drawing room to begin with—had a hearth, so presumably Libby, if she were actually there and not merely in his imagination, was doing her damndest to keep him from a chill. She must have had plans to sweat out the fever of his effort, which was a lovely thought, all things considered, but possibly insufficient. Worst case, it would be no different from the bandages Nico was currently affixing to the house’s decay; makeshift decoration to slow an eventual demise.