Atlas Six (Atlas Series, 1)
Atlas Six: Part 5 – Chapter 20

It stood to reason, given Eilif’s appearance in his bathroom sink, that the wards had a hole of some kind. Not that magic was so easily simplified to concrete matters of holes or solidity or otherwise, but for all intents and purposes, the wards intended to keep people out of the Society must have been faulty on the basis of precisely that: they were intended for people.

The library’s archives, at least, had seen fit to provide Nico with something of a primer on creatures and their respective magics, for which he had required Reina’s knowledge of runes and antiquated linguistics to fully grasp. There had been no recent treatises on the subject, owing first to hunting and then to the (not-dissimilar) prospect of academic study that was hardly distinct from captivity. The practice of “conservation” where it came to magical species had become so mistrusted among the creatures themselves that, according to Gideon, most had either disappeared or chosen to align themselves—as his mother had—with fairly dubious magical sources.

“My father is either dead or hiding,” Gideon had explained to Nico once, “not that it matters which, as I don’t expect to ever hear from him. I’m quite sure I have siblings all over the world, belonging to any variety of species. Doubtless he acknowledges none.”

Gideon had said it in a factual manner at the time, wholly unemotional about the prospect, and Nico hadn’t bothered to question him any further. Gideon already had plenty of psychological trauma without adding a father fixation to the mix, so if anything, the absence of Gideon’s father was probably a blessing.

Nico’s single concern was, as always, keeping Gideon’s mother out. Once the Society’s perimeter was secured, he could return his attention to the study of Gideon’s remaining fractures without fearing he’d become responsible for a massive security breach.

Despite trusting Reina to accurately translate runes for him as he’d requested, Nico had hoped not to have to explain the reasons for his little foray into rare extracurricular study. True to form, Reina required little explanation.

“As far as I can tell, magic is magic,” she said, hardly looking up from where she scanned the page in the reading room. She sat with her legs curled under herself on the chair, her entire frame defensively enveloping the book as if she feared someone might suddenly snatch it from her hand. “Most creatures’ genetics are no different from a human’s than an ape’s. Just a matter of evolutionary distinctions, that’s all.”

“Mutations?”

She glanced up, eyes slightly narrowed. “Genetic, you mean?”

Nico bristled at the implication that he might have meant aberrations. “Of course,” he said, perhaps more passionately than necessary.

“No need to be brutish,” she remarked, expressionless. Then she returned her attention to the page. “The difference in magical ability appears to lie in the customary form of usage,” she said, eyes roving over the page with only the slightest break in motion; a sidelong glance to what Nico guessed was a back-talking plant somewhere in the corridor. “That’s true,” she conceded grumpily, presumably to the plant, though she slid her attention upward to fix Nico with a studious look of contemplation.

“It’s smaller,” she said.

He frowned. “What is?”

“The—” She paused, cursing quietly under her breath, or so he assumed. “Output,” she eventually produced from somewhere in her multilingual lexicon. “Usage, power, whatever the word is. Creatures produce less, or rather, waste less.”

“Waste?”

“Ask Tristan,” she said.

“Ask Tristan what?”

Nico spun at the sound of Libby’s voice to replace her lingering in the doorway, hesitantly half-in, half-out.

“Nothing,” said Nico, at the same moment Reina said, “How much magic humans produce.”

“Humans,” Libby echoed, flitting inside with a flare of interest. “As opposed to what?”

“Nothing,” Nico repeated, more emphatically this time as Reina returned her attention to the book, muttering an unblinking, “Creatures.”

Libby turned to look at Nico, expectant. “Creatures, Varona, really?”

Her brow was arched beneath her mass of fringe, which he positively loathed. It was one thing for her to be nosy, and another thing entirely for her to regard him with so much palpable doubt.

Just what did she expect him of bollocking up this time?

“I wanted to be certain of something,” he supplied evasively, with the tone of blistering impatience he knew she would replace repellant. There was always a chance she’d leave if he pestered her enough.

“Okay, and what does Tristan have to do with it?”

Evidently her curiosity had been all too successfully piqued.

“I haven’t the slightest idea,” Nico retorted, though much to his dismay, that was enough to make Reina finally remember to explain herself.

“Tristan can see magic being used,” she said from behind her curtain of black hair.

“How do you know that?” asked Libby, which to Nico’s ear sounded unnecessarily accusing, as if she resentfully suspected Reina and Tristan of having some sort of weekly brunch wherein they discussed their private lives and secret wishes.

“Observation,” Reina replied, which Nico could have told Libby was the obvious answer. Reina spoke little and saw much, though what Nico liked most about her was that she considered most of what she viewed to be substantially unimportant, and therefore not worth discussion.

Unlike Libby, who felt precisely the opposite.

“Tristan,” Reina continued, “can see magic in use. As I was explaining,” she said, cutting a demonstrative glance to Nico to indicate a return to her previous subject, “creatures have a more refined use of their own magic. They channel it better, more efficiently. It’s—” Another pause for the lexicon. “Thinner. Narrow. Spun like thread, not like—” Another pause. “Fumes.”

“I suppose Tristan has used the word ‘leak’ to describe magic before,” Libby murmured thoughtfully to herself. “Though we could probably ask him to explain it more fully.”

The idea of asking Tristan Caine for anything that was not a scowl or muttered clip of sarcasm was enough to sever what remained of Nico’s limited patience.

“No,” he snapped, and would certainly have summoned the book from Reina’s grasp and stormed out if not for the way she shielded it with her entire body. “This isn’t about you, Rhodes.”

She bristled. “What’s it about, then?”

“Nothing. Certainly nothing I need you for.”

Libby’s eyes narrowed, and Reina curled more determinedly around the book, tacitly assuring them both that she had no interest in what would follow and would certainly be of no help.

Nico, who had fought often enough with Libby Rhodes to know when a larger explosion was impending, abandoned the matter of the book and spun to take the stairs, irritated. He had done well enough for himself without a library’s help before. He would simply see to the matter of the wards without further discussion.

Or not. Behind him, Libby’s unshakable footsteps were dogged and crisp.

“Varona, if you’re planning to do something stupid—”

“First of all,” Nico said, spinning curtly to address her as she stumbled into his back, “if I were to elect to do something stupid, I would not require your opinion on the matter. Secondly—”

“You can’t just run around playing with things unnecessarily just because you’re bored,” Libby retorted, sounding matronly and exhausted. As if she were his mother or his keeper, which she resolutely was not. “What if you’re needed for something?”

“For what?”

“I don’t know. Something.” She glared at him, exasperated. “Perhaps it stands to reason, Varona, that you shouldn’t do stupid things simply because they’re stupid. Or does that somehow not compute?”

“If I’m bored, you’re certainly bored,” Nico offered in retaliatory accusation. “Just because you won’t admit it doesn’t make it any less true. And following me around to see what I do wrong gives you a bit of a thrill, doesn’t it?”

“I,” Libby replied hotly, “am not following you around. I’m putting myself to good use. I’m using the research we’re learning and applying it where I can, which is precisely what you should be doing.”

“Oh, truly? How magnificent for you. How scholarly you are,” Nico gushed in plaintive mockery, reaching out to pet her head. “That’s a good girl, Rhodes—”

She swatted his hand away, the air around them crackling with the sparks of her intemperance. “Just tell me what you’re up to, Varona. We could go about it faster if you just asked me for—”

“For what? For help?”

She fell silent.

“Would you have asked me for help, Rhodes?” Nico countered, aware how thinly skeptical his voice sounded. “We aren’t different people now just because we’ve come to a single agreement. Or have you forgotten we’re still competing?”

He regretted it the moment he said it, as it wasn’t what he meant. He hardly needed to make an enemy of Libby, and certainly did not aspire to waste time on any rivalries beyond what was necessary for initiation. He did, however, need her to stay out of his private business, and in this case, he very much did not want to hear the inevitable lecture on how he’d inadvertently allowed a misbehaving mermaid into the house. He doubted it would be brief, and he knew it would be followed extensively with questions, none of which he planned to answer.

“So that’s your idea of an alliance, then.” Libby’s voice was flat with anger.

No, not anger. Something more bitter, less malicious than that.

Brittle sadness.

“Let’s not pretend this is something it isn’t,” Nico said, because the damage had already been done, and it wasn’t as if she’d ever been known to forgive him. “We’re not friends, Rhodes. We never have been, we never will be—and,” he added, giving in to a burst of frustration that mixed unrelentingly with guilt, “since I can’t simply ask you to leave me alone—”

She spun away, the last glimpse of her expression one of hollow disappointment. Nico watched her dismount the stairs, taking a sharp turn to disappear from sight as a little echo of Gideon suddenly tutted softly in his head: Are you being nice to Rhodes?

No, of course not. Because there wasn’t a person in the world who could make him feel less adequate simply by existing, and besides. He had wards to fix.

Nico slid irascibly up the remainder of the stairs, taking a turn at the gallery in the opposite direction of the painted room and bedrooms. He would need privacy to work uninterrupted, which meant the ground floor was not an option, and upstairs contained plenty of unnecessary stages for empty grandeur where no one ever went. He closed himself into one of the gilded drawing rooms (it had long ago stopped being a place for aristocratic dances or whatever purpose the British required rooms to draw) and set himself to the task of mindful pacing, once again engaging the twitchy need for motion he habitually found expelling from his limbs.

Ultimately the wards were gridlike, ordered, and therefore easily surveyed for something out of place, which at first glance was nothing. The six of them had designed the structure of the security system in a spherical globe, within which a tightly woven fabric of magical defenses cloaked the Society and its archives. Physical entry would be easily repelled by the shell of altered forces surrounding the house, while intangible magical entry was readily sensed by the internal system of woven, fluid sentience.

How, then, had Eilif managed to slip them in order to wind up in his sink?

Probably best to check the pipes.

Nico closed his eyes with a grimace and examined the house’s plumbing, feeling at the edges for the warps of magic he recognized as his own, or possibly Libby’s. In terms of magical fingerprints, their signatures were almost identical; a consequence of similar training, perhaps. Nico felt another bristle of guilt or irritation or allergies and shrugged it away, trying to focus more, or possibly less. Intuitively it didn’t matter which specific element of magic belonged to him. Libby’s or his own, it would respond just as obediently, mastered by the skill regardless of the hand that cast it.

Sure enough, upon closer inspection there were numerous bubbles and blemishes, little bastardizations of security from what Nico could feel around the pipes and then, upon further scrutiny, between the layers of insulation in the walls. Not enough to prevent a person from emerging corporeally through the cracks—compression was a difficult task, requiring enough energy to set off the house’s internal sensory wards before any conceivable success of entry—but for Eilif, or for some other creature attempting entry? Possibly, if what Reina said about refinement of power was true. It wasn’t as if air ducts or other methods of entry had never been neglected before, and in this case, Nico could feel the way the house’s infrastructure strained beneath their wards, corroded by magic and hard water and whatever else eroded metal over time. He wasn’t much of a mechanic, but perhaps that was precisely the problem. The medeians elected for the Society were academicians, not tradesmen, and they certainly weren’t chosen for their efficiency at knowing when an old house required maintenance. Sentient though it may have been at times, it was still a physical structure, and Nico’s element was physicality. Perhaps this was always meant to be his (or Libby’s) responsibility to maintain.

Magic was no different from rot, corrosion, temperature change, overuse. Contractions and expansions and chipping and peeling and movements of time and space. Funny how laughably simple everything was in the end, even when it belonged to the immeasurable, or the invaluable. Nico would simply have to repair the areas where the wards were weakened, reinforcing them with custom bandages where they may have waned and warped.

Whether his remedies would hold would be a matter of adhesion, which was… slightly difficult, but hardly impossible. Nico would simply bend back into shape what he could and then cover up what he could not.

Distantly Nico was aware he was considering something Gideon would deem “irresponsible”—or possibly it was Libby calling it that, and Gideon was standing somewhere over her shoulder in Nico’s head, grimacing in agreement. Max would not care either way, which Nico foggily pieced together was something he positively adored about Reina. He could go and grab her now, he thought, considering that the extra burst of energy he seemed to consensually borrow from her might be wise to have at present, but at the disastrous implication he might have been behaving unwisely (“Something stupid,” Libby irked snottily in his head) he promptly nudged the idea away, flicking it aside with a twitch of dismissal.

So what if he overexerted himself, just this once? His power was renewable, easily replenished. He would be sore for a night or three and then the discomfort would pass, and no one would have to know the mistake he’d made initially by overlooking it. If Libby lorded it over him that he was more tired than usual, so be it. It wasn’t as if he was much use in the realm of time, anyway. He had no interest in fountains, youthful or otherwise.

The bristle of recalling his current uselessness was enough to secure Nico’s decision. He disliked the anxiety of listlessness, which was as constant to him as Libby’s unrelenting undercurrent of fear. Fear of what? Failure, probably. She was the sort of perfectionist who was so desperately frightened of being any degree of inadequate that, on occasion, the effort of trying at all was enough to paralyze her with doubt. Nico, meanwhile, never considered failure an option, and whether that was ultimately to his detriment, at least it did not restrain him.

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.

But of course he was only being dramatic. He was not going to die.

“You insufferable manchild. You idiot prince.” Her fondest derivative for him, or at least her most frequent. So much so it felt like something he may have accidentally colonized and put to use. “You are not going to do something so utterly unforgivable as to waste your talent and die, I won’t have it,” Libby informed him, jerking his shoulders upright.

He would have mumbled I know that Rhodes shut up had he not been busy focusing on the task of not dying, and more specifically, on aiming what was currently oozing out of him, which was probably something he needed to survive.

“You deplorable little Philistine,” Libby said. “What on earth were you thinking? No, don’t answer that,” she grumbled, shoving him none-too-gently so that his back rested against something hard, like the leg of a Victorian chair. “Just tell me what you’re doing so I can help you—even though I ought to defenestrate you from that window instead,” she muttered in an afterthought, ostensibly to herself.

Nico grunted something in response, because what remained to be done would be exceedingly draining and, at the moment, impossible to explain in words. Nearly everything that could be sealed or reinforced had been sealed and reinforced, and all that remained were the areas of decomposition, spoiled and thin and requiring less a bandage than an amputation, reconstruction from the inside out. Reversing damage, asking chaos to be structure, was enough to sap him completely, wringing out what little remained. He could feel it in the convulsions of his intestines, the way magic was now being taken from his kidneys, his heart, his lungs.

“You can’t just give yourself away like this,” Libby scolded, ever the admonishing schoolmarm, but then she had taken his hand gruffly and laced it with hers. “Just show me.”

Most likely the moment she touched him she could already feel the direction his power had taken. They’d had a knack for it from the beginning, a way of becoming the other’s beginning and end. They typically declined to do so, of course, because it was invasive. Because him using her or her using him was like temporarily trading limbs, swapping joints. For the rest of the day he would feel like he was lifting Libby’s hand instead of his own or bending Libby’s knee to take a step, and he knew she felt the same way. He would look up to catch her eye and she would grimace like he had taken something from her, and yes, whatever she’d taken from him was equal in value as what she’d had before, and it wasn’t as if either of them had done it on purpose—but still, she was missing something that he now possessed, and vice versa.

They struggled to properly disentwine, or worse. They each became strange, molded copies of the other.

It was only when they had started using their magic to replicate the effects of space that the sense of borrowed power and stolen limbs had stopped feeling like a gruesome, halfhearted sex act and more like true synchronicity. There was a harmony to it when they were reaching together, like the gratified spreading of a broader pair of wings. Difficult to explain what the difference was, except for the sensation of having finally uncovered a proper use, an ideal purpose. They were still inhumanly powerful, yes, but they had been without aim, without direction, so that alone the use of their abilities felt retroactively clumsier, less refined. Combined it was purified and focused, untarnished and distilled.

Nico took a breath without strain for the first time in several minutes and registered with private relief that the joining of Libby’s power with his own had done more than simply alleviate his task. It left him in a cleaner, more precise stream, less the leak that Tristan might have called it (and that Nico would not have called it before if not for realizing how un-leak-like it now seemed to be) and more sleek, contoured and smooth.

Within minutes the pipes had been fixed. Seconds later the wards pulsed without disruption. Nico spent what power remained on a thorough sweep of their spherical perimeter, which left him in an unsteady rush. No faults this time, no little skips of error. No flaws to snag on the wave of his surveillance.

Libby released him and shifted, dragging slightly as she moved.

“Why?” she said after a moment.

Nico opened his eyes with difficulty, the bleary image of her manifesting at his side. The red of the walls with its gold accents seemed to blur beside her hair, the silhouette of her closed eyes. She wasn’t fully exhausted, not like he was, but there had definitely been a toll. She had shouldered some of his burden for him.

“I’m sorry.” He managed to croak it out, rasped and insufficient though it was.

“You’d better be.” Libby slid a hand to the floor, pressing her palm flat against it. “Still a little tremor,” she noted.

“Is that—” Fuck, his mouth was unbearably dry. “Is that what brought you here? A tremor?”

“Yes.”

Of course it was. She’d make a big fuss of it, naturally, of the disruption he’d caused and how little control he possessed over his abilities, when really, she was the only one who could feel it. Per usual it would be his fault, and inevitably she would lord it over—

“You are unfairly talented. Upsettingly good,” Libby sighed with a tactile hum of envy, and then her eyes fluttered open. “Doing that much magic…” She twisted around to look at him, fixing him with a scrutinizing glance. “I would never have attempted it alone.”

“I shouldn’t have attempted it alone.” No point denying that now.

“Yes, but you almost managed it. You might have done fine without me.”

“‘Almost’ and ‘might have’ wouldn’t count for much if I’d been wrong.”

“True, but still.” She shrugged. “It wasn’t as if you didn’t know perfectly well I’d come.”

Nico opened his mouth to argue that of course he’d known no such thing, but on second thought, he wondered if she wasn’t a little bit right about that. There was a safety net, whether he acknowledged it to her or not, when she was around. He couldn’t get away with much without her noticing, and surely he’d known that on some level, consciously or otherwise.

“Thank you,” he said, or possibly mumbled.

She looked pleased, or smug.

“Why were you repairing the house on your own?” she said, briskly shoving their repulsive moment of benevolence aside. “Reina could have helped you,” she added as an afterthought.

Nico found it miraculously tactful that she had not suggested herself, so as a reward, he offered, “If I were going to ask someone for help, Rhodes, it would have been you.”

“Empty words, Varona,” was her reply, equally accommodating. “You never ask anyone for help.”

“Still, it’s true.”

She rolled her eyes, leaning over to press a thumb to the pulse at his wrist. “Slow,” she observed.

“I’m tired.”

“Anything else?”

“Headache.”

“Drink water.”

“Yes,” he growled, “I fucking know that, Rhodes—”

“Any aches? Swelling?”

“Yes, yes, and yes; yes to all of it—”

“You should probably sleep,” she commented blandly.

“For fuck’s sake, I just said I—”

“Why?” she interrupted, and though Nico was exhausted, though he did not want the argument that was sure to follow and though he would have very much preferred to crawl into his bed and sleep for at least the next twelve hours, he still said the one thing he knew she would not accept.

“I can’t tell you.”

His voice sounded dull, even to him.

Predictably, Libby said nothing. He could feel the swell of her tension beside him, anxiety curling defensively around her like Reina’s arms had wrapped around the book. Something of her own to protect, to keep safe, to keep hidden.

Much as he hated to admit it, Nico resented himself most when he made her feel small.

“Just… please don’t make me tell you,” he amended raggedly, hoping the last-ditch effort at sincerity might persuade her not to suffer more.

She was quiet for a moment.

“You said it was an alliance,” she said.

“It is.” And it was. “It’s an alliance, Rhodes, I promise. I meant what I said.”

“So if you need help…?”

“You,” Nico assured her quickly. “I’ll come to you.”

“And if I need anything?”

She was primly juvenile, tit-for-tat. For once, though, he didn’t begrudge her that.

“Me,” he confirmed, relieved to be able to offer something. “I’ve got you, Rhodes. From here on, I swear.”

“You’d better.” She sounded satisfied with that, or at the very least relieved. “You owe me big time after this little jaunt of idiocy.”

“I knew you’d eventually get self-righteous about it.” He added a little groan, just to maintain some semblance of decorum. No need to frighten either of them with too brisk a departure from their usual animosity.

“Still,” she sighed. “You’d tell me if you were in any real danger?”

“We’re not anymore.”

“That’s not an answer, Varona.”

“Fine, yes.” Another groan. “I’d tell you if we were, but for what’s worth, we’re not.”

“But we were?”

“Not danger, exactly. But there were some… oversights.”

“And now?”

“Check the wards yourself if you don’t believe me.”

“I already did.” She paused again anyway. “The pipes, really?”

“What, you don’t grasp the fundamentals of home ownership, Rhodes?”

“God, I hate you.”

Ah, normalcy.

“Likewise,” Nico agreed, struggling to his feet. Libby, true to form, did not attempt to help him, instead merely watching with amusement as he dragged himself upright from the foot of the chair.

Instantly, Nico suffered the swift retribution of a muscle contraction in his thigh, a stab of pain that reverberated through his leg while he struggled unsuccessfully to remain aloft, stifling a whimper.

“Charlie horse?” Libby guessed tonelessly.

“Shut up,” Nico gritted through his teeth, eyes supremely watering.

“Don’t be such a baby.”

She waved a hand and the ground slid out from beneath him, sending him sprawling forward with an unsteady lurch. The heels of his hands hit the sheets of his bed, the room tilting to deposit him fully within the walls of his bedroom until he collapsed there in a fit of throbbing limbs, not bothering to protest.

“Thanks,” Nico managed to slur into his mass of pillows, tumbling headfirst into bed without any effort to fully undress. His shirt, he realized with faint but fading awareness, remained resolutely elsewhere, probably still soaked with sweat, and worse, he still hadn’t drunk any—

Nico blinked as a glass of water surfaced pointedly atop his nightstand.

“Fucking Rhodes,” he muttered to himself.

“I heard that,” came Libby’s reply outside his door.

But by then Nico was already well on his way to sleep, dreamlessly out like a light.