Chapter Text
“I dream of a grave, deep and narrow, where we could clasp each other in our arms and I would hide my face in you, and you would hide your face in me, and nobody would ever see us any more.”
—Franz Kafka, The Castle
He finds Ives where he expects: sitting in the empty hold of the last Chinook to return to staging, duffel between his feet, one hand wound in the straps for safekeeping. Ives’ attention snaps his way the minute he breaks the edge of the open hatch.
Ives’ brow furrows as he rises to his feet, his glove creaking around his tightening grip.
He rests a boot against the ramp and smiles the easy, practiced kind of smile. “Relax, Ives. I’m long gone.”
Ives looks him over with quick, sharp motions: finds the sharp line interrupting the beard on the edge of his jaw, the nick in his left ear. He lifts an arm as further evidence, shows the punctuated pockmarks of an old laceration and the staple-scars it left behind.
New-and-old damage, things Ives witnessed himself over the years and battles that brought them here.
Ives lets the duffel fall slack against his thigh. “Thought you were dead, boss.” There’s not much fondness to the word, today. Not much deference, either.
“Guess I did a good job, then.”
“Should’ve known better,” Ives answers, and shoves roughly past on his way out the door.
Ives lets his boots drag him to a halt as the brisk salt air hits him in full, eyes falling shut for a second. Two.
He can’t presume what the man’s thinking. Doesn’t know what the two of them said, before he let Neil walk away one last time.
All he knows is he’s been feeling the weight of Neil’s hand on his shoulder for days, leading up to this. And that ghost is years behind him, not minutes.
There’s a tension twining Ives’ words tight: “He thought you were dead.”
I know, fuck, of course I know, he wants to say. Don’t you think I know?
“Couldn’t see a way around it,” he says instead, calm and measured. “This was the only endgame that worked.”
This was how it went.
Neil walked in alone. Neil didn’t hesitate, because what did he have to turn back to.
“You’ll be heading back with those,” he says. He knows.
He and Ives never crossed paths, not directly. He’s been preoccupied with moving his chess pieces, building his resources in reverse-time - but inverted personnel require resources, so he knew of that older Ives, on a slow, isolated journey back to the limits of inversion. He knows everyone in the convoluted web of Tenet. Moving forwards, moving back.
“Like the past better,” Ives retorts, and he blinks in surprise at the blunt emotion of the words. Scowls. “What do you want?”
“One last thing,” he says. “And then we’re done.”
One last trip back to a Tenet-held turnstile. Ives keeps the algorithm close, irritation written in the tight angle of his shoulders. “Just got this damn thing,” he points out, as they step into the thudding dark of the turnstile. “Now you want to bring it back there.”
“Could leave it here,” he suggests.
“Absolutely not,” Ives retorts.
He eyes the bulky, utilitarian walls, duffel tucked close to his chest - looking like he half-expects some paradoxical space-time bubble to pop around them with the algorithm's inversion.
“Don't worry. The rest of the algorithm’s hidden,” he offers. “Will be hidden.”
His younger self will head forward into the future, for awhile. Get the pieces secured out of a dead man’s reach. There’s Priya to attend to, and grieving, and fighting the desperate want to turn back, try something different...
It’s taken every cold bastard part of him to walk past this inflection point a dozen times over, the turning point of his life: his greatest victory, his greatest loss. But he’s done it. Again and again and again.
He’s spent years fighting, building, calculating. He’s slotted every piece into place for a victory he won - in his own personal concept of time - years ago.
(He’s found Neil. Loved him. Sent him on. Walked away.)
And now—
One last thing. A selfish thing.
He knew Ives wouldn’t say no, of course. Not that he’s studied the outcomes of this trip. He just knows Ives.
...what he doesn’t expect is the punch.
They step through the turnstile. Ives sets the algorithm down slow on a cot snugged up tight against the wall. The two of them carry through the motions of stripping away their tactical gear, setting their weapons aside. Settling in for a day’s wait in the stale air of the antechamber.
Ives eyes the proving window, waiting for their past-selves to shuffle backwards out of view.
Then he throws a right hook, nearly perfect in its execution. His fist catches him right on the jaw and sends him crashing sideways. The only thing that keeps his knees from meeting concrete is the shelves he manages to grab with one outflung hand.
He hangs there a moment, ears ringing, blood-laced spit flooding his mouth. He probes at his molars with his tongue, tasting blood and the white shock of stunned nerves, but nothing feels loose.
Ives stares at him a few seconds, glances down at the bright beads of blood forming on his split knuckles.
Then he shakes his hand out, grabs up the duffel and settles onto the nearest cot.
It’s how it had to go.
He knew.
That breathless moment with Neil on the Magne just before Stalsk, seeking out the blind want that had been burning in them for days. Providing what he thought was a nervous distraction for a man he didn’t know, going into it. Open lust, nothing more.
But there was a moment during that rushed, foolish thing that he couldn’t forget: the cold sweat of the hull beading under his skin as he pressed into Neil, the way he felt Neil’s fingernails digging into his back and felt the hitch in his chest and the way he looked sharply away - that was when he realized Neil wasn’t just nervous, wasn’t just afraid. This was something else, something like grief.
And he knew, standing there in the desert, watching Neil go. Felt everything cinch up into a terrible understanding.
Has some kind of poetry, doesn’t it? Neil losing him first.
He did his job. He set the field, recruited Neil, recruited Ives and Wheeler and a hundred others… and he waited for a bullet. He was glad that he wouldn’t have to live through that June day one more time. Selfishly assured that he would be… somewhere else, by then.
Nowhere. Everywhere. Or maybe just back with Neil, if the universe had some kind of mercy to it. Some kind of justice.
But the bullet never came - surprise, surprise - and he realized, with a humor verging on madness, that it wouldn’t come.
He had to walk away. Play the puppeteer one more time.
The pieces fell into place, June drew close all over again, and all told - dying the second time wasn’t as hard as he thought.
He picked a nice day in August. Woke Neil one last time - ran a hand through the chaotic morning tangle of his hair, pressed a kiss to his forehead, and let him lapse back into sleep.
He went.
Here - heading for his last mission - he doesn’t sleep.
He spends much of the day with his head back against the wall and an icepack pressed to his jaw, listening to the harsh silence haunting the corner.
He watches the hours roll back.
Marks the moment Neil’s head snapped with the unnatural tug of reverse recoil.
Ives doesn’t speak.
He doesn’t ask for explanation. Clarification. There’s nothing more that he needs or wants to know. The both of them are tied up in a paralyzing understanding of time.
He doesn’t sleep. How could he? He has a dead man’s hand weighing down his shoulder. A dead lover’s skin, burning against his own.
He saved one piece of the algorithm. The lynchpin. Kept it close for years, before setting it on a coffee table in a Budapest apartment: watched as Neil puzzled over it, explained slow what it was, what it meant.
A chess piece. The critical piece. Everything they were fighting for and against. Neil sat with that key piece - ugly triangle-block of a thing - clasped in his hands, frowning at him in that frustrated-and-amused way of his.
“So we’re the ones that start it?” He turns the algorithm piece over slow, mouth turned in curiosity. “We’ll be the ones to plant this in Kiev.”
“You’ll start it,” he explained. “We’ll finish it.”
One of him, anyway. A younger him. A stranger, to Neil.
Neil took the algorithm. Nodded along.
That trust burned worse than anything.
The clock hits 36 hours. They gear up in dead men’s clothes, borrowed from the post-Stalsk clean-up. He’d found a few in the right size, scrubbed out the blood, patched them up. One for Ives. One for him.
Logistics gets them as far as they dare - chopper noise carries farther, out here with nothing but rocks and dirt to absorb it. They spend a full day hiking through the barren foothills of the Urals, letting the dark carry them the last of the way into Sator’s old town.
The easiest place to hide is in plain sight: beneath. They rappel into the hypocenter, finding a secure enough hold among the rough rocks to settle down and watch the gangplank above.
He doesn’t miss the way Ives shifts around, eyeing the long drop into the hypocenter’s core, below. He settles an arm across his lap as he eyes the walls. The rather radioactive walls. A handful of iodine pills can only go so far.
“You weren’t looking to have children, were you?” he asks.
That, at least, startles a grumbled, “For fuck’s sake,” out of him.
The circle of sky far above is going gray with dawn before Ives asks, “You have some notion of when?”
“Close as we can get,” he answers, eyeing the empty gangplank above.
One dead man getting carried out of the tunnels - no one will give a damn, if they can get close enough to the battle. They must’ve done something right, anyway. There hadn't been a dead body waiting, when they rappelled past.
Ives fixes him with a dry look. “Not your usual precision.”
“I only want to do this once,” he replies.
Ives sets his jaw, falls back into silence.
Dawn turns to morning. Hours to go.
They listen to Sator’s technicians move in and out of the tunnels overhead. Setting charges, planning for the world’s burial.
Then they’re gone. Back to their own low breathing for company, the occasional creak and rustle of the scaffolding and chains around them.
Could’ve sabotaged the lock, Ives should say.
Could’ve sabotaged the lift, could’ve given Neil better armor, could’ve packed dynamite, could’ve blown a charge right when they needed it.
We’re here we’re right fucking here—
He feels his pulse beating in time on his bruised jaw, feels that hand on his shoulder, that last touch before Neil turned and left, walked of his own free will (but it never was, was it, it was always him, pushing Neil gently along towards the inevitable)...
Ives doesn’t say anything. He understands. Damn them both for that.
Half an hour before the explosion, the last of the technicians walks away, up above. He complains loudly about the dust of this place as he secures the door behind him with a low clack.
He catches Ives’ eye through the dull shine of the gas masks.
He nods once, and they move to free up their rappelling hooks, head back for the catwalk.
The body’s there, of course. Traveling slowly back. Waiting for them to carry it out.
In twenty minutes, Neil will take a bullet to the head; twenty minutes ago, Neil took a bullet to the head, and he lays forgotten. Twisted and graceless with the suddenness of the bullet that had killed him. Blood drips in a sluggish, confused counterpoint between the grating, as the forces of the world push its inverted state back into forward-time.
For all he’s thought about this, he still freezes in place, for a moment, as he kneels down on the gangplank, one gloved hand dangling just above Neil’s arm. Tugging at the strange counterinstinct of willing inverted flesh to move, rather than reaching for it.
He’s still warm. Of course he’s still warm, minutes dead. He can only give Neil’s head a quick, cold assessment: mask cracked and hissing with leaking air. Blond hair stained dark.
Ives shoulders against him. Moving with calculated efficiency: getting his legs bound up, slapping him on the elbow to get him to do the same with his hands. Make him - it - the body easier for transport.
He lets blank, rote motion take over: pushing him onto his back, getting his hands secured. Letting the glaring red painting the inside of Neil’s mask wash past him and through as old regret sings a familiar refrain: did this, you did this, you did this.
He doesn’t react to the first punch on his shoulder. Turns when Ives grabs his elbow and jostles him, glancing up the corridor, fearing someone’s coming - but Ives grabs him by the facemask and forces his face around, pointing at Neil’s mask.
Pointing at the thin crawl of condensation across the cracked glass, not blooming but shrinking.
An exhale in reverse.
He stares.
Ives moves: jostles him aside as he tears his own mask off, pulls Neil’s free. Doesn’t hesitate at the bright tear of red across Neil’s face, white flash of bone. Too close to the eye, He doesn’t see how...
Doesn’t matter, he breathed, he’s breathing—
Choking, for however long, inverted air slipping past the damage in his mask.
There’s no dramatic sudden revival when Ives gets the intact mask secured and connects in Neil’s inverted air mix. His shallow, barely-there breathing doesn't change at all. He could be sleeping. Could be dead, should be.
But as he tears a glove free and reaches for Neil’s throat, there’s the twitch of a pulse, thin but there. The hiss and pop of the air regulator, feeding a fresh bolus of inverted air.
“Get that fucking door open,” Ives orders, slapping the discarded scatter of lockpicks against his chest. “Let’s go.”
“What the fuck is that?” Volkov snaps, crouched in the shadow of the tunnel with tripwire spool in hand.
“Dead,” he answers, letting the mask muffle his subpar Russian. Ives grunts in agreement, shifting the body on his shoulder higher.
Volkov’s mouth twists in irritation. “Get them out of here.”
Ives nods his affirmation, moving fast enough to keep Volkov from staring overlong. Out in the glare of daylight, Ives eyes the cacophony of the Hind hovering overhead, waiting to ferry Volkov from the entrance to the dead drop.
He catches Ives’ eye and nods, reaching up to take Neil’s limp weight. Ives grabs hold of the rope, climbing up for the cockpit at a rapid pace.
He finds a good place to wait, settling down against a concrete embankment with Neil pressed tight to his chest. One glove settling against the damp of his hair, straining to hear the click-and-hiss of every inhale past the rising noise of the battle forming around them.
The pilots perform admirably with Ives’ gun to their head: they deliver Volkov, set the helicopter down, and run like hell, as instructed.
“This stubborn asshole,” Ives murmurs, as he helps him get Neil settled on the helicopter floor. He balls a shirt up tight to cushion his head as best he can. “Didn’t see this, did you?”
“No,” he admits.
Ives stares at him, looking for the truth. His eyes widen, and fall back down to Neil. “Christ.”
It’s bad, it’s bad—
But he’s breathing.
Ives releases a stress-pitched sigh and starts dragging the first aid kit free from his pack. “Hope you know how to fly.”
He eyes the cockpit up ahead, considering the sliver of paneling he can see. “I’ve dabbled.”
“Tell me you’ve done a little more than dabble.”
“Got the basics,” he replies, and shoots him a smile: delirious, genuine. He pries the first aid kit off the helicopter’s wall and throws that Ives’ way, too.
Doesn’t say, Keep him alive. Doesn’t dare put that hope out there for the world to snatch away.
But he’s breathing, he’s breathing—
“One last thing,” Ives says, before he even looks up to where his old boss frames the doorway. The both of them still coated in a patina of Siberian dust, still chasing spots of their friend’s blood out from under their fingernails. Utterly out of place in the sterile halls of a private hospital.
Ives watches him soberly. “Tell me honestly. You didn’t know?”
“Still don’t, do I,” he says. Neil’s in a surgeon’s hands, now, trapped between will they and won’t they. He continues, “Everything I know tied up back there. With him—”
Dead. Such was the plan. The inevitability.
Ives cuts him short. Drags him back down with a curt, “What did they say?”
“They won’t say anything until he’s awake.” He pauses. “But they’re optimistic.”
Ives gets to his feet, picks up the duffel and drags it over his shoulder. He doesn’t move aside. Doesn’t quite know what else to say, but feels like there’s more, piling up in the back of his throat. Apologies and explanations. He’s overflowing with explanations, all of a sudden, but no one seems much interested in hearing them.
“Now’s your chance,” Ives says. “Die right, this time. Sounds like you and Neil do a pretty good job of it.”
“But you won’t look too hard,” he says, tugging on a years-old memory.
Ives smiles. “We’re not heading in the same direction, boss.”
Your faith is blind, someone told him once, years ago.
He settles into a pristine white room, bathed in frail far-North sunshine.
He takes Neil’s hand, running a thumb along the stark interruption of an IV line.
Warm skin. The steady rise and fall of his ribs.
He was sure, so sure, in the mechanics of the universe. The inevitabilities. He’d set the possibilities aside. Braced himself against the grief.
Your faith is blind, he’d said.
And: The rest is belief.
What he’s had, the last few years—
He wouldn’t call it belief.
But now - here - with warm skin under his palm, and that old rhyme in his head fading from you did this to a steady chant of we were wrong, we were both wrong...
Here, maybe, he can hope. Nothing big. First, for Neil to wake up: blink past the drug-daze, turn his way and crack a crooked smile, murmur some lame joke.
After that - there’s nothing but an open future for two dead men like them.
This is the best kind of hope: wide open, blue skies.
As soon as he wakes.
Chapter Text
Supposed to be dead, he thinks in those blood-soaked moments: shutter-stop flashes of consciousness, far slower to fade than he was hoping. Some part of him clings to this, to living, to breathing acid-laced gasps of air, and he’d really rather not.
Supposed to be dead.
Supposed to be—
Seeing his life flash before him, or something? Surely?
See him, but maybe that was too much to hope. Why would there be anything like an eternal happily-ever-after, for something as unimportant as him? Out of darkness, back into darkness. What’s there to be afraid of?
Why can’t he seem to stop breathing?
Reaching.
Would grab a hold of his hips, like so: pin him in place and say, “What does it matter, out there? This is here. This is now.”
“Have to think ahead,” he would say.
“Ahead, and behind, and sideways,” Neil would answer, “Stop.”
Why can’t he stop.
And if not stop, stay.
Stay here, safe from the red haze of pain; stretch an arm wide across the bed and find a warm pillow, at the very least, the near-ghost of him. His no-name lover.
Always rushing headlong towards something until he wasn’t—
There.
Anymore.
A younger man stared at him in the chill dark of the Magne's hold, eyes going wide with understanding. He didn’t ask, who did you lose? But he read it on him anyway, pried it out of clutching fingers and Neil wanted to say, Do you understand how ruined I am? It isn’t fair.
It isn’t fair that you should be enough, always enough—
That a few scant years of love - culminating and technically beginning in a rushed and messy fuck in the hold of a ship - should make all of this worth it.
The months and weeks alone. The peculiar agony of being stared at with frank incomprehension by a stranger he loves. Having to explain, in the face of that too-heavy compassion, that he has to let him go.
It shouldn’t be worth it.
All of this, for him.
(It is, though; if Neil can just reach, grab hold, keep him here. If time is flexible, if he could choose a moment and pin it down, it would be something hopelessly foolish: stupid things and small moments, feet tangling beneath the sheets. If he could have that, then he would consider this a debt paid in full.)
Neil wakes from that confused tangle of thought - rabbit holes of memories and thoughts and want, fleeing before his blind, reaching fingers - to warmth.
Warmth, and a wet weight on his face, and the tug of something strange in the back of his hand as he shifts his fingers. And someone grabs back: a steady pressure.
He opens the eye that isn’t buried in that damp weight, blinks at blurred smears of daylight. Blinks at the dead man leaning forward in his chair, lips parted around a word he seems to have misplaced.
This isn’t the young man he left grappling with the monumentality of an unkind universe. This is the one that left him with a kiss to the forehead and a fond mumble of, “Don’t get up just yet.”
Rushed off to die, as he rushed off for so many other things.
Neil should say: Oh. So it’s Heaven, then?
Neil should say: you absolute fucker, you’re supposed to be at the bottom of the Baltic Sea.
He should be weeping with joy, but mostly, he lays stunned.
He is - awake.
Alive.
There’s nausea climbing up his throat, that too-tight grip is pinching at the IV in the back of his hand, and he has the feeling that the slow drip on his peripheral vision is the only thing keeping the slow tectonic-plate grind of pain in his head at bay, but—
It’s his hand, pinching the IV. And him, leaning forward, scraping up enough of a voice to say, “I’ve been considering an afterlife. What do you say?”
Neil should have a witty rejoinder. He’s good at those.
He’ll gladly blame the drugs and that cloying fog of head injury for the fact that he simply reaches up and grabs him by the back of the head, dragging him into a kiss.
He certainly isn’t crying.
(Or at least, he isn’t the only one.)
When Neil does speak, it’s to say: “Explain. Everything.”
And he laughs, a sound Neil gathers up like gold, bears his face hard into his collarbone as he murmurs: “Happy to.”