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It takes a couple of years for everything to settle. There are turnstiles in Sator’s grasp, turnstiles that belong to future you, abandoned turnstiles (future you will make sense of those at some point, probably), and the whole unearthing of the Tenet network that you created. Sometimes you dig a little too close for future you’s comfort, but there are always warning signs (or crumbs, really) that pivot you away from death by space-time paradox of getting too close to a counterpart of yourself in the same timeline.
Future you is kind of a dick in the way that he sends you enough cash to get going, but drops absolutely no clues on what you should be doing. Or have done. You’re sure future you is laughing at your expense; because you know yourself, through and through. (Or you should.)
You’re not CIA trained for nothing—you chart out a plan and hit your missions. Recapture all possible turnstiles, find out their history, where and when they were built. Scourge for all remaining inversion technology, find all who has had an in to this mess. Of course, on occasion, you take a trip in the turnstile to settle posterity matters.
You keep yourself busy, because saving the world doesn’t end just there, at one point in time. There are loose ends out of loose ends, and despite how thorough you think you are, future you sends you a blank letter with a piece of scrap in it that says not yet.
Future you is an unhelpful dick.
But the doing keeps your mind focused on things that matter—not that you think about things that don’t. Not like wondering about the people future you has already met in your past, people you have met, people you are going to meet.
Not like Neil.
At some point you think, fuck it. Future you is somewhere pulling the strings in the shadows. He can deal with the aftermath, or whatever’s left. You’ve gathered enough intel to know where all possible turnstiles are in the past—you chart a rough timeline, where can you go and when you can stop. You know this journey needs to be made, Neil or not. You need to put things in place for past you. For Tenet. For this dumbass time apocalypse to securely end.
You’re going to be future you, the cryptic dick.
Ives meets you for the last (maybe not last, the future’s vast after all) time. He doesn’t kill you. He helps you run through things that you might have missed, and check your equipment for your half-decade long journey. The furthest back you can go is about five, maybe six years. Sator’s just built the turnstile in the Oslo freeport, and you’ve been there enough times to know the place inside out. (You hope the two times are enough.) It’s the least guarded one at least—relying on the security of the freeport who knows nothing of the true importance of the turnstile, rather than Sator’s own men. There, Ives tells you, you will meet Mahir.
Of course, six year inversion journey for a human is unheard of—yet. You’re ambitious, but you’re not stupid enough to go for it all at one shot. Future you will know it, and you’re counting on him being you. You plan stop-overs, inversion trips that last weeks, or however long the oxygen-fed sealed container can give you. They’ll journey and stop at turnstiles that future you will have acquired for reversion, before regrouping and inverting again for the next trip further back in the timeline. There’s a network in place that future you has painstakingly built for you to make the trip—you thank him just this once, only to realise that you are going to have to do all that hard work soon enough.
Fuck.
Six years is a long time.
You work out.
You plan.
You sleep.
You dream.
You reminisce. Or ponder.
One of those.
It’s that coin on a red string that keeps popping up in your head. In the opera house, on his mysterious savior. In the dead-drop location, just past the gate, on the dead soldier on the floor.
And then on Neil’s backpack, when he’s smiling as beautiful as the sunset.
Future you will recognise these thoughts for what it is later: grief.
It’s odd in a way. You’ve never had attachments. You’ve been the perfect pick to be an espionage agent because of this. You’ve cared for your teams, but they’ve never been more permanent than a couple of missions. Death is the rule rather than the exception, and once you’ve attended one funeral for your brother in arms, you’ve attended for them all.
Neil is different.
He wasn’t exactly your team. He was a subcontractor, a person borrowed from Pyria, or so you had thought. Or maybe, Neil is different because he had said goodbye, like friends do.
When you’ve reached your last stop, you slip in the freeport as planned. Security is both tighter and lighter than you expected. There’re more patrols, but when the alarms sound, you’re not left locked in a room where oxygen is displaced. (Later, you’ll learn that that extra security measure is your fault.) You make it through the turnstile, out of the storage unit and into the airport cargo hold. Security is fast on your heels, and you don’t exactly want to kill people that early in the game.
You duck under some cargo, waiting and holding your breath.
Mahir finds you, in his highlighted vest and helmet, and that’s the start of everything.
2016.
You’ve brought cash with you. And a whole lot of information. In three months, the United States will vote to elect their new president.
Ah, you think. You should’ve known that’s the beginning of the world’s end.
Your first mission is not to find Neil. In fact, you wonder if you should at all. Perhaps, inevitability, you will— what’s happened has happened. But something deep inside you hates that sentence. A young death shouldn’t be fate, or reality, or whatever the fuck it is. You will not play into the motions. Neil can wait.
(Maybe, Neil can wait until it’s all over.)
Instead, you search for Barbara. She’ll be crucial for getting a grasp on the inversion technology for Tenet.
You’ve done your research, so you know that she’s a post-doc in a lab in Cambridge, the UK. She absolutely doesn’t know that she’ll be the first in a linear timeline to study and make sense of inversion technology before its inventor. You’ve done some reading yourself but you’re a practical guy—you’ve been quick to adapt to the physical effects of inversion, but the theoretical much less so. You’ve been hand waving it all along; thinking about it too much hurts your brain. However, you acknowledge, you need to know some basics.
It’s time to go back to college.
Mahir helps you lay low for a bit. He’s one of the most chilled and rational people you will ever know, so he absolutely doesn’t believe your story that you’re from the future and about an incoming world war three, but he doesn’t tell you you’re insane either. In the meantime, you start accruing wealth from stock trading over the internet.
Mahir finally believes you when you buy the entire building of the crappy apartment you’re both staying in a week later.
In hindsight, you’ve just established Tenet Inc. very first headquarters.
Money gets you absolutely everywhere in this world. And information. Still, it’s hard work trying to coordinate many pieces to fall into place. (You wonder how easily Neil had done them for you, oh god—) You fake some undergraduate certification, write up a CV, donate extremely generously to the university, and get yourself a place in the Physics master’s programme in Cambridge just a month before the semester starts.
It’s a way in to Barbara’s lab—that’s your main intention, and you’ll learn something useful along the way. Probably.
You’re offered a room in their graduate halls for the year. It’s a formality, especially for mature students, but you decide to take it anyway, since it’s the closest building to the Physics department. (It’s too much hassle to buy university property...if it’s possible.) After all, you don’t have to live there if it doesn’t suit.
It’s relatively nice, a quaint old building with kept gardens on the outside. It’s even older on the inside, though there are some attempts at modernisation with the lifts. You avoid other children—teens—fuck, you’re feeling your age looking at these young adults —scurrying the hallways with their things, moving into their new dorms. You eventually find yours on the third floor at the very end of the corridor near the stairwell.
Huh. The window at the stairwell shows that you are directly behind the Physics labs; it can’t get more convenient than that.
You jangle the keys you’ve received from the receptionist, and open the door to your new home for the foreseeable year.
Nothing prepares you for the sight of an old friend.
It’s Neil.
It’s Neil.
It’s Neil.
“I’m Neil,” Neil —NEIL— says with that fancy accent you remember the first time you met him.
Neil is...he’s young. There’s no six o'clock shadow on his chin, just smooth skin all around. He’s paler and leaner than you remember. Hair’s shorter, in a lighter blonde and an undercut. He’s wearing skin tight jeans. It’s kind of bizarre.
“And you are…?” Neil trails off when all you do is stare.
“Your roommate, apparently,” you answer.
It’s a miracle your voice doesn’t shake. You take the outstretched hand he offers and gives it a shake, but don’t offer anything else. You can tell Neil is waiting on a proper answer, but is too polite to repeat his question so soon.
“I called dibs on the bed nearest to the window, hope you don’t mind,” Neil continues.
Half the closet and the desk near Neil’s designated bed is already filled, so it’s not like you can say no.
“No problem,” you answer, setting your luggage towards your corner.
The heater is warm in the room, so you strip off your suit coat and loosen a couple of cufflinks. Maybe you should’ve thought better about wearing your tailored suit to a student dorm—but suits, the snobby bespoke ones, are like your armor now, and it definitely opens doors more quickly with less questions.
“So…” Neil starts again after there’s silence after silence in their tiny room. “Where are you from?”
“America,” you answer. “You?”
“Barnes. It’s a district in Richmond,” Neil adds. “I’m English, basically.”
You snort. “I never would’ve guessed with your accent.”
“But it’s my poshest one!” Neil exclaims in mock offense, and you chuckle.
Ugh, fuck, you weren’t supposed to be this easy.
“Anyway, I’ve got to get to class,” Neil says rummaging some stationary to put into his backpack, where no coin on a red string lies. (Well, it’s a different backpack too.) “We should talk about roommate etiquette later.”
“Sure,” you say, and then it dawns upon you— “What class? Don’t introductory lectures start next week?”
“I’m a 4th year med student,” Neil replies, slinging his backpack over his shoulder. “Classes started three weeks ago for me.”
Later, as you unpack, you keep thinking about Mr I-have-a-master’s-in-Physics.
Neil is a fucking liar.
Okay. This is fate. Destiny.
Reality, whatever.
You meet Neil even when you aren’t looking for him. It’s fine. It’s all fine. It won’t cock up your current mission to build Tenet from ground up. You’ve laid plans to follow through.
It’s always slow on the start up, and that includes classes. On most days you’re cooped up in your room making sure to rake in profits from your stock investments, getting hacking help for surveillancing Sator’s activities or following the million and one things on the checklist you compiled for yourself to do once you got here. Neil is barely in the room in the day time since he’s living the med student life, but he stays up well into the night cramming his textbooks.
It’s weird to see this side of Neil, drugged up on high doses of caffeine, often looking barely awake, and sometimes barely coherent. But you also recognize the Neil you know; his laser sharp focus when he mutters his syllabus under his breath, or his steady, gentle hand that offers you a cup of tea at 4 am in the morning, because you’re both bad at keeping healthy circadian cycles.
It’s hard to sleep when a ghost of your memories is in the same room as you. Maybe you should look for some other available flat nearby to keep sanity.
“Thanks, but I don’t really like tea,” you say, staring at the cup of chamomile.
“Who doesn’t like tea,” Neil raises an eyebrow, like he’s personally offended. “Take it. It’ll help you sleep.”
He’s British, so maybe it is an insult. You look at Neil’s other hand, where he’s sipping from a mug of dark black coffee, the damn hypocrite. It’s his sixth one in the last ten hours—yes, you’ve been counting.
“I need to keep awake, I have a practical in four hours,” is Neil’s retort.
“Well, I have a deadline,” You gesture to your laptop, where you’ve been typing an essay for coursework. You did come here to learn after all. “Get me a diet coke the next time.”
“Artificial sweeteners aren’t good for you,” Neil says, and then comes close enough to lean over your shoulder to squint at your screen. “Also, you spelt ‘Archimedes’ wrong.”
College is no joke—it’s been years for you, and your brain has aged since then. It’s a struggle to keep up with the required reading despite having a relatively little number of lectures. You pour over multiple Physics 101 textbooks to even write one coherent paragraph for your essays.
Avagadro's Law. Ohm's Law. Coulomb's Law. Stefan's Law. Pascal's Law. Hooke's Law. Newton’s Laws.
The list of laws goes on. You’re sure you’re going to need glasses by the end of the semester, with the amount of squinting you make. It’s frustrating but it’s better to know what you’re talking about when you meet Barbara—this time, you ’re going to be the one introducing and explaining this space-time mind fuck to her.
Neil sometimes peaks over your shoulder when you’re hunched at your desk for too long. This time, you’re writing an email to Barbara under the guise of a Master’s student interested in a project with her.
Oh wait, you do need a project and supervisor for your grade.
“A time inversion machine, huh. That’s ambitious,” he remarks.
You swivel in your chair, partly to respond to him, but also partly to block your screen—you hadn’t exactly heard him come in, and that’s unforgivable for a seasoned agent like you. It’s slightly worrying.
“Do you think it’s possible in our lifetime?”
“Not in the way that you’re proposing,” Neil replies. “The way I see it, time inversion could be a consequence of flipping the polarity of the particles. It’s similar to the Feynman-Stueckleberg interpretation of matter or anti-matter interactions. Theoretically, you could possibly build a chamber that reverses the entropy of objects, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that time changes.”
You sit back, trying not to smile at the casual fling of jargon. “Go on.”
“We already have devices that reverse entropy. Just think about...like, water—you can heat it up or freeze it either way. In that sense, a fridge is an entropy inverter. But it doesn’t mean that time goes the other way in the fridge. It’s not like my food becomes fresher when I stick them in there.”
“Okay,” you say. “But what if it can?”
Neil barely even ponders it. “Then it’ll be the end of the world as we know it,” he continues when you stare at him. “We’ll probably use the technology to end civilization or something. We’re human, of course we’re going to screw up everything possible. You don’t have to look any further than ah, Brexit.”
“That’s…a rather depressing outlook.”
“Am I wrong?”
It’s about two weeks to the US elections...and you know who’s going to win.
“No,” you hum. “But we’ll save it too.”
Your email does get you a response from Barbara—you know this is all up her alleyway. She agrees to meet for a chat in the lab. It’s nothing like the one you visited in Scandinavia. Paint is peeling off the walls, and papers are strewn everywhere. Other people in the office, colleagues, have their faces glued to their computer screens.
She looks stressed. Harried. There are tired circles around her eyes, making her look almost the same age as you remember. (The joys of academia and chasing grants, she’ll tell you later when living under the job security you’ll provide.)
You can tell that she isn’t expecting you to be, well, you —a thirty over old man looking more like a professor on tenure than she does. Maybe you should have traded your suit for a more casual look. She gestures you into one of the empty meeting rooms around. She explains that she doesn’t have resources like desk space or a computer to provide, but if you’re happy working off simulations on your own laptop then she’ll agree to advise you on your project.
“Simulations?” you repeat. “No,” you shake your head. “I want to build a time inversion device.”
She looks at you with a glint when she realises you’re dead serious. “Simulations first,” she says.
You know enough coding to do hacky, related to espionage, things, but not things like a thought experiment simulation.
“...What if I show you that it’s already possible?” you hedge.
She stills and recollects herself. It’s easy to tell that she’s trying to be patient with a clueless Master’s student. She takes the time to explain why it hasn’t been proven possible, and ends up saying the same thing as Neil did.
“—but what you’re proposing here is not a simple matter of just reversing entropy, but that time is affected. In other words, it’s quite a bit of an extrapolation to assume that there’s a connection with having the internal clock of your “inverted” object going backwards.”
You nod along, but you also know that you have to get your hands on an inverted object to show her. You don’t own any, considering everything on your person reverted when you came through the turnstile. You’ll either need to get to a turnstile again, or maybe steal some inverted gold from Sator.
It’s heist time.
You need a more direct in to Sator’s operations without busting your identity, and Priya turns out to be the answer. Your answer. You stumble across her quite unintendedly actually—you had plans to meet her about a year or so later, when you’ve settled things with Barbara and a proper Tenet network in Europe.
(And Neil, maybe. Maybe not.)
You were watching the news, because while 2016 is a clusterfuck, you don’t remember all of it—and there was a report on a Mumbai native who’s drawing some attention for bidding to buy Antilia, a private home that’s named the world's most valuable private residence at approximately 2 billion. (You know he’ll change his mind and buy the Neelam Shree Vardhan Tower instead.) The camera catches a quick flash of him entering The Lanesborough, having arrived in the UK recently for business.
Behind him, half hidden by their entourage of bodyguards, is Pyria.
The hotel is just an hour and half train or car ride away, and after some thought you think you’ll take the trip.
Neil is sleeping under the bundle of his blankets, as he always does early on a friday night. You glance over, thinking about how normal his life is—was—until you come in. Maybe Neil should be living his youth as a medic in a UK hospital serving the NHS, a noble cause, instead of learning how to be combat ready and taking a deep dive into existential crisis worthy physics.
Maybe you don’t really need him on this mission to save the world. Someone else could do it too.
You try not to think about what’s happened has happened on your way to London.
There’s no Neil to help you break in this time, but you’ve had enough experience by now to navigate heavily guarded buildings. It’s just your luck that Pyria is alone in her room—husband and wife sleeping separately, huh—and she’s remarkably calm despite the gun you have pointed at her. Her gaze flickers to her handbag which is just three steps away from her.
“You won’t reach your panic button in time,” you tell her.
“Or, I could scream,” she says, still calm.
“You’ll have you take a chance on my reflexes then.”
She considers her situation in a pause. “...What do you want?”
“I want information on one of your clients,” you put forward.
“My husband handles the business.”
“Someone who’s buying arms from you,” you continue. “Your husband’s business is legitimate. Mostly,” you add a beat after. “You handle the dangerous stuff.”
She smiles then, still showing no teeth. “You’ll have to be specific then.”
You lower your gun as she turns her back to you to pour you two a drink. She doesn’t mention Sator by name, but she does share that she’s in talks with a Russian oligarch to start a deal trade.
“Make the deal,” you say.
You think it might be too soon to share the truth of what Sator will do with her guns and bullets, so you waffle some nonsense about why you’re interested. Pyria, of course, doesn’t buy it.
“I know how men look like when they lie to me,” she says after taking an opportunity to stab you with a fruit knife she’d hidden under her sleeve while making your drink earlier.
You forget that there had been no hesitation when she ordered the kill order on Kat. This is Pyria six years younger with an edge you haven’t worn down. She knows you won’t kill her—you’ve had plenty of opportunities to and you’ve already made the case that you need her.
The knife was blunt, and the wound on your arm stings like a bitch.
“You have a way out?” she asks, unconcerned about the blood seeping into your sleeve.
“Always do,” you mutter, and hightail it out of there.
You reach Cambridge at approximately 5am in the morning. You don’t know why you’re surprised that when you climb through the window, Neil is there watching you flop onto the floor.
He looks half surprised, probably because he’s only half awake.
“There’s a door,” he gestures helplessly. “...Is that blood?”
You glance at your arm—you’ve tied the wound tight so the blood has already clotted, but the stain is stark on the fabric. You don’t answer.
“Why are you up?”
“Why are you,” Neil counters.
You shrug. “Had a party.”
“A bar fight, huh,” Neil says, although you can tell he doesn’t buy it. “Come here, let me look at the cut.”
“It’s fine,” you say, but Neil insists that he’s a trained medical professional.
It’s weird to be sitting on your bed with your shirt off and Neil is dabbing some kind of alcohol on your bloodied skin.
“It looks pretty bad,” Neil says. “You sure you’re fine?”
“I’ve had worse.”
“Uh huh,” he nods, giving your body a side glance.
You have dark skin so the scars aren’t that obvious, but you’ve collected a fair share.
“So who exactly are you?” Neil prods, unrolling a bandage. “You still haven’t told me your name, you know.”
“You haven’t needed to use it,” you point out.
“Yeah, but I can’t keep referring to you as “my CEO roommate” now can I?”
You glance at him, and he has a cheeky smile on his lips. “I’m a what now?”
“You’re clearly the boss of some fortune 400 company,” Neil states with conviction. “You walk around in these tailored-to-your-arse suits. You have a watch that’s custom made, sometimes you disappear for hours in the night or weekends, and you’re always looking at the stock market or answering calls or emails on your phone,” he continues. “You clearly don’t need to be in university, so why the hell are you?”
You look at your watch, the one Ives had given everyone before the last mission.
“How do you know my watch is custom made?”
“I googled,” he replies shortly. “There isn’t anything like it.”
“Why?”
“I like it. I wanted one too,” Neil huffs. “And stop deflecting.”
You sigh. “...I do need to be in university,” you say eventually. “I need to learn Physics. I’m not lying.”
Neil levels you with a look. “Alright, Mr CEO. But you don’t have to go out of your way to keep things from me. I’m not going to sell your trade secrets. There,” he pats your neatly wrapped arm. “I should charge a fee, since you can afford it.”
You roll your eyes. “Don’t you have an OSCE in one hour?”
“Oh bloody fuck—“
Pyria meets Sator earlier than you expect. Maybe she’s throwing you for a loop, annoyed at your room invasion those days ago. You’re in the middle of a lecture on electromagnetism when your phone pings. You’ve set up trackers to watch Pyria—nothing that a little 2022 technology, hacking help and Mahir can’t do. Her activity patterns are unusual this afternoon, and when she heads to Portsmouth you have a feeling.
Sator and his stupid yachts.
It’s dead winter so you highly doubt there will be sailing. You hope. You didn’t exactly have a good time on the last ship you were on. You squeeze out of the lecture theater while Mahir is running you instructions for the fastest transport there.
When you reach the Solent Yacht Charter, it’s remarkably easy to slip in. The GPS on Pyria tells you that she’s somewhere along the docks. You take a guess easily enough—the fanciest boat out there has a couple of tough looking men hanging around; bodyguards. Actually, you recognize Sator’s personal bodyguard, the one who threw you a few punches before.
You wait a good distance away, cursing the weather until you see Pyria stalk calmly out of the said boat. Her own company is carrying silver suitcases…the deal has been made.
Your phone screen lights up at the very moment to show a text from an unknown number.
Show me what he’ll do with the goods.
Damn, how did she get this number? You immediately slot out the sim card and break it for another clean one. There’s no time to really dawdle on Pyria’s text because Sator is on the move. You can see him exiting the boat with one of his henchmen carrying a crate—and he’s heading out towards the carpark.
You really hope you don’t have to do a car chase; the last experience was nasty. You take a deep breath and put on your work face, focused on your smartphone—a few steps and you angle yourself into the trajectory of Sator’s group, a few more and you “accidentally” stumble into the one carrying the crate of arms. A quick hand sleight, a fake sincere apology, a “I really don’t have time for this” air, and you’re off safely away from the Russian oligarch, with a tracker on the guns.
From there, you sit back in the rented car, watch the black dot travel on the the map over a quick bite (the fish and chips are pretty good), and chart your course.
The blackdot stays stationary after a 30 minute ride, stopping at Goodwood Racecourse. Of course, race horses are a classic property of a billionaire, you shouldn’t have expected anything less.
There are no races on at the moment, but there are enough tourists and jockeys in training around to blend in the light crowd. You slide on a cap and pair of sunglasses looted from passersby, and pretend that you absolutely know where you’re heading towards. No one stops you even when you head through a door that says “personnel only”. You duck when you glance Sator across the horse stables at the corner of your eye. He’s too far away to hear what he’s talking about, but there is some angry shouting or whatnot.
You peek just in time to see a metal bar—a gold metal bar—fly straight up into Sator’s hand, defying gravity, before he slams it onto someone’s head. (You think. There’s a pathetic mewl of apologies.)
That’s...that’s inverted gold.
Okay, that’s good enough for you. You wait in the stink of the horses stables until Sator and his men go away before vaulting quickly over. There’re crates hidden under a lump of hay, and bingo—that’s where Sator hides his gold. You grab one, it’s fucking heavy dammit, and stuff it into your chest pocket.
You probably should’ve thanked the gods for the opportunity and left right there, but you don’t see the crate of firearms so you start peeking into the other boxes. The horse in the stall neighs at your presence—loudly.
You try to shush it, but when you do a horse keeper stops right outside the stall and stares at you.
“You’re not with Mr Sator,” he says—and you put on your best grin.
“I am. He just stepped away for a moment. He’ll be back.”
The horse keeper looks at you, and then at the crate behind you. “Mr Sator doesn’t bring his clients here,” the other says.
You decide there and then that this guy is troublesome. Nope, you’re getting out of there. Your sudden movement causes the horse keeper to yell, and belatedly you realise that’s worse, especially when it attracts Sator’s men to come back.
You haven’t exerted yourself like this a while—zipping through the corridor and hightailing it to the nearest exit out back. Unfortunately you hear more yelling and loud footsteps, which means that they’ve gotten a glance at your figure. You make a break towards where you left your car, but a bullet sound makes you flinch your hand away from the handle. It’s a good thing too, because the window glass shatters.
Fuck, a gun fight with an army who just bought firearms? A fucking joke. You steel yourself and waste two bullets, which grants you enough leave to hop inside the car. Out of the corner of your eye you can see Sator’s bodyguard fire his pistol in rapid succession—you manage to start the gas, but a bullet hits you in the arm, in the same place as where Pyria had stabbed you.
Fuck, it hurts. You scowl, but you’re clearly disadvantaged in this fight so you step on the accelerator and turn out of the racecourse. Your hand is shaking, likely from the wound, but pull up Mahir’s number to tell him to arrange another car. You need to ditch this one asap; Sator’s men would’ve gotten a glimpse of your car plate so it’s not safe anymore. You speed down the highway and turn into the petrol station when Mahir tells you to, hopping into the other empty car waiting for you near the carwash.
Your arm is bleeding again but you have to suck it up with pieces of cleaning cloth you found in the glove compartment. You ditch the car for the second time when you reach Guildford just to be safe, and take the train back home.
It’s a good thing years of spy training didn’t go to waste.
You make it back to your dorm safely, subtly covering the bloodstain on your arm as you climb the stairs up to your room. You stagger when you reach the doorknob—and all too late, again, remember that Neil isn’t…
He isn’t who you knew.
“Bloody fuck, what happened to you ?” Neil hisses, eyes wide when you lean against the nearest wall after shutting the door.
You look at where he’s staring—oh yeah, that blood puddle doesn’t look too good. You look at the open textbook on Neil’s desk.
“Sorry for disturbing your study time,” you say.
“Fuck that,” Neil says, dragging the first aid kit out (he’d kept it since the last time). “Take off your clothes now.”
You raise your eyebrows at the demand. “I would but it hurts to raise my arm.”
“Useless,” he tsks, grabbing a scissors from his table. “I hate you for making me ruin your perfectly fit clothes.”
Neil manhandles the front of your suit anyway, yanking at it with more force then you think necessary. The gold bar plonks heavily onto the carpet in the movement, and Neil moves to pick it up once your suit is off your shoulders.
“Is that...—“ Neil jerks when the gold comes flying into his outstretched hand. “—a-a gold bar? Wait,” he pauses. “What the fuck.”
You would put your head into your hands, but you can’t because your arm hurts. You settle for one hand.
“Did that just—d-did it just...—what the hell,” Neil settles, staring at the gold bar.
“Um, can we focus on my arm first?” you ask, and Neil snaps back to you.
“You’re not going to divert this time,” he warns, setting the gold bar down.
He tosses it a suspicious look, and then raises his hand to it again. It flies.
“Fuck, ” Neil mutters again under his breath.
“My arm,” you remind him, and he cuts a hole in your shirt around whatever's bloody.
The alcohol stings like a bitch.
“Is this a gunshot wound?” Neil asks, inspecting it closely. “You need to go to a hospital.”
You shake your head. “No hospitals. You’re a doctor, you do it. Actually, I can do it. Get me a pair of forceps and an open flame.”
“No, you’re absolutely not. And I’m not yet a doctor. Come on, I’m dragging your arse to see a certified one.”
You’re firm on this matter. You’re supposed to be as incognito as possible in this timeline. You can fake identity records, but you cannot risk leaving biological samples in a hospital.
“I’ll tell you everything,” you bargain—beg. “Neil, please.”
Neil looks at you, the whole thirty years over worth of tired ass. He nods after a moment.
“This is going to hurt,” he says, and goes to find more gauze.
An thirty minutes later Neil is forcing you to hydrate while you lie on the bed with a pillow propped up behind your back. Your legs are working absolutely fine, but doctor’s orders.
The way Neil looks at you tells you that there’s no avoiding this one. You sigh after a very long pointed gaze from the other, and stretch out your hand towards the forgotten gold bar.
It’s slips straight into your grasp.
“So,” you swallow. “Inverted entropy.”
There’s a light that burns in Neil’s eyes at the two words. You haven’t elaborated on anything, but you know Neil has gotten it.
“Your time machine,” he murmurs. “It’s real, isn’t it.”
“Yes.”
Neil’s eyebrows furrow. “And—and you, you’re...you’re not a CEO of a billion dollar company.”
“Well,” you pause. “Technically, I do manage an organization.”
“Which?”
“Tenet,” you say.
Neil ponders the name. “...I haven’t heard of it. What does your organization do?”
You gesture loosely to the gold bar. “Stuff with that.”
“Stuff,” Neil repeats, deadpan. “I’m right, aren’t I? Bad guys want this stuff, that’s why you got shot. The world is ending, I knew it!”
“And I said we’ll save it,” you retort.
You notice Neil looking at you in a particular way a moment too late.
“‘We’,” he says, staring at you. “You really mean ‘you and I’, don’t you?”
The words to casually brush off Neil’s implications are stuck in your dry throat. Because it’s true. Sure you were there to get the algorithm out of the dead drop, but it was all Neil who aligned the pieces to make it happen.
Getting the gate open, getting the safety rope down, getting you the hell out of there before the bomb blew.
The world will be saved...only if it’s Neil.
“So,” Neil says. “I guess I’ve got to do this, huh.”
You jerk up, surprised at the response. You haven’t even asked.
“You really don’t have to.”
“No,” Neil shakes his head with conviction. “I’m going to. You...you have a way to do things, right? Can you fake me some high school credits? I didn’t actually take Physics for A levels.”
You blink. “What for?”
He grins. “I think I need to change my course.”