Time, which he'd bullied and bargained with for decades, finally stopped caring who he was.
He stepped back from day-to-day government in his late sixties.
Officially, it was "to make room for a new generation of leadership."
Privately, his doctor had wagged a finger at him and said words like "stress" and "heart" and "you're not twenty-five and dodging patrols anymore, Collins."
So he became what every retired revolutionary secretly feared: an elder statesman. A man they rolled out for commemorations and speeches, whose words mattered more as symbols than as orders.
He tried not to be insufferable about it.
"I'll haunt you if you turn me into a statue before I'm dead," he told a junior minister once.
"Noted, Taoiseach," she said, trying not to laugh.
"Ex-Taoiseach," he corrected. "And if you insist on putting my name on anything, make it a sewage plant. Keep me humble."
They named a small bridge after him instead. He pretended to be annoyed.
Free from Cabinet papers, he wandered more.
He went back to Woodfield, the farm where he'd woken up twice in the same body.
The house was neater now, electricity humming quietly in the walls. A young couple lived there, with a baby that grabbed at his finger with fierce determination.
"You related to the Collinses?" the man asked, offering him tea.
"In a manner of speaking," Michael said. "I knew them well."
He walked the fields and hedgerows, feeling the old land under his shoes. Two lives' worth of memories overlapped here—childhood games from Michael's first run, and hazy images from Eoin's once-upon-a-time internet searches of "Michael Collins birthplace" for an essay he'd never finished.
At the edge of one field, he stood and looked toward a horizon that hadn't changed in thousands of years.
"I did what I could," he told the sky, to nobody in particular. "The rest is on them."
The wind, as usual, offered no comment.
In Belfast, he saw something he'd never been sure he'd live to see.
It wasn't a grand signing ceremony or a dramatic pulling-down of flags. It was a council meeting.
He sat in the visitors' gallery of a cross-border infrastructure body—one he'd argued for in early Treaty drafts as a way to keep lines open.
Around the table: unionists, nationalists, neutrals, technocrats, a few bored-looking lawyers.
On the agenda: a new electrified rail line linking Derry to Sligo and Galway, crossing the old border like it was just another line on a planning map.
"Well?" whispered the civil servant beside him. "What do you make of it?"
Michael watched as a unionist councillor argued passionately for a slightly different route—not to avoid the South, but to make sure his own constituency got a stop. A nationalist sniped about funding allocation, then agreed to a technical compromise. The chair tried to keep them on time and half-succeeded.
"It's beautiful," Michael said.
The civil servant blinked. "They're arguing," he said.
"Exactly," Michael replied. "They're fighting over money and timetables instead of over identity. That's progress."
The constitutional status of the North was still… complicated. Referendums had been held; agreements made; structures layered like sediment. There were institutions with names only a bureaucrat could love.
But this much was true: people crossed the old border every day to work, shop, study, or watch football, and most of them thought more about roadworks than sovereignty.
He'd take that.
In his eighties, his world shrank to a house by the sea.
It wasn't a grand mansion, just a solid place on the coast of Wexford that looked out over water he'd once thought of as a barrier and now thought of as a road.
He spent mornings walking the strand with a stick he refused to call a walking stick, afternoons reading reports he no longer had to act on, and evenings sitting by the fire with visitors who came to ask the same questions in new ways.
"Did you know," a young historian asked him once, "just how different things would be when you changed course at the Treaty?"
"No," he said honestly. "I knew the direction I was pointing. I didn't know the exact shape of the road."
She scribbled that down. He sighed inwardly for whichever student would have to memorise it.
Another visitor, a gangly teenager dragged along by his mother, blurted out, "If you had your time over, would you still… you know, do all that?"
"'All that' covers a lot of ground," Michael said. "But yes. I'd still throw the British out, and I'd still fight like the devil to stop us becoming as bad as them."
He hesitated, then added, "I'd be kinder where I could be. I'd make sure a few more lads went home to their mothers. But the bones of it? Yes."
The boy nodded, eyes wide.
"Good," he said. "Because I've this idea for a citizen's assembly on climate policy and they're saying it's too ambitious, and Mam said I could ask you and—"
Michael held up a hand, laughing.
"Relax," he said. "You don't need my blessing. It's your turn to be the awkward one making demands now. Make them big."
He listened as the boy described his plans: random selection, deliberation, binding recommendations. It was all very polished.
[Analysis] ran automatically, even now: the boy's earnestness, the mother's mixture of pride and fear, the way the world's new problems knotted with old habits.
He didn't offer detailed policy advice. He just said, "Find allies. Track the money. Don't let anyone tell you the way things are is the way they have to be."
Standard wisdom, really. But you could do worse as a rule of thumb.
Towards the end, he knew the system was still there—the skills, the strange HUD that had greeted him at that farmhouse mirror.
He didn't see the floating text anymore. Maybe he'd stopped needing the special effects. But the abilities never fully left: the way he could still read a room in a glance, instinctively see where a new road would choke a neighbourhood, or why a seemingly tiny change in tax code would cause a housing bubble ten years later.
One night, his heart stumbling more than usual, he sat up in bed and spoke to the dark.
"We're square, you and I?" he asked whatever had yanked Eoin Kelly into Michael Collins's life. "You gave me tools. I used them. No third act twist where I wake up as some poor devil in another mess?"
Silence.
He huffed. "Fine. I'll take that as consent."
He thought then, briefly, of 21st-century Eoin's Ireland. The one with too-dear rent and underfunded hospitals and potholed roads and a thousand small kindnesses happening in spite of all that.
Did that world still exist somewhere, unchanged by his detour? Or had he—Eoin—vanished from it the moment a car horn blared on O'Connell Street?
"Sorry, lad," he murmured, to the ghost of his first self. "I stole your death, at least. Maybe that's something."
He lay back, listening to the sea.
If there was a judgement coming, he suspected it would look less like a tribunal and more like a montage: faces of the dead, faces of the living, the balance sheet of his choices playing out in a country that would never stop being imperfect, infuriating, and alive.
He could live—or not—with that.
When the end came, it was as ordinary as any man's.
No last stand. No dramatic assassination. Just an old heart giving up after a lifetime of sprinting.
He felt himself sinking, not into panic, but into something like tired amusement.
"Right," he thought, as the world blurred at the edges. "That'll do."
Years passed. Then decades.
Children grew up in the estates he'd ordered built, took trains he'd sketched routes for, complained about governments that had never heard a British order and never feared a priest's word in quite the same way their grandparents had.
His picture hung on walls, but fewer and fewer of them were in bars with dusty tricolours. More were in classrooms, council offices, history books with eye-watering price tags.
People argued about him, as he'd hoped.
Some said he'd compromised too much at the Treaty. Others said he'd pushed secularism too far. Still others claimed he hadn't gone far enough, that he should have nationalised this or privatised that or resigned sooner or stayed longer.
Good, he would have thought. If they ever stop arguing, it means they've stopped caring.
One rainy November, in a bright, overheated archive room in Dublin, a young researcher opened an old box.
Inside, carefully wrapped in tissue, was a battered copybook. The ink had faded in places; the edges of the pages were soft.
On the first page:
Strategic Plan for Irish Independence and Governance
She smiled despite herself.
"Of course he called it that," she muttered.
She read.
As she turned the pages, she saw not just the big strokes—independence, civil war, Church, North—but tiny notes in the margins.
Remember: justice processes after war must be merciful as well as firm.
If we ever get a TV service, beware propaganda.
We need more women in Cabinet. Men ignore half the problems.
She snorted at that last one, then realised it was written in the 1920s.
On the second-last page, she found a line underlined twice.
Ensure that every child born in Ireland has more choices than their parents did.
She sat back, staring at it.
Her own parents had been the first in their families to go to university. She was doing a doctorate on the early Free State's housing policy and its long shadow. Her younger sister worked remotely for a company in Berlin while living in Galway.
Choices. Messy, sometimes overwhelming—but real.
She looked around the archive room: the humming lights, the faint smell of dust and old paper and new coffee.
Outside, she knew, trams rattled, buses hissed, cyclists swore at drivers, teenagers filmed short videos on phones to complain about the latest budget. North and South, people went to work or stayed in bed or marched in protests or read manifestos.
She picked up her pen and wrote a note in her own notebook:
Question for chapter 5: To what extent were Collins's reforms consciously future-oriented vs emergent? Could he really have seen this far?
She paused, then added, almost as a joke:
(If I ever get time, write a speculative piece: "What if Collins hadn't had this plan?")
At the edge of her vision, for the briefest moment, she thought she saw a flicker of text, like a glitch in an old computer game.
You have gained a new skill.
[Perspective:] You understand that history is made of thousands of choices, not just a few great men—allowing you to see your own time as changeable, not fixed.
She blinked.
The room was just a room.
She shook her head, smiled at herself, and bent back over the copybook, turning the page to the very end, where one last, cramped note waited.
To whoever's reading this: Don't ask "What would Michael Collins do?" Ask "What can I do with what I know now?" Your world's different. Use it.
She stared at that for a long time.
Then she closed the book gently, as you might close someone's eyes.
Outside, the city carried on—untidy, unequal, loud, hopeful, infuriating, funny.
Ireland, still under construction.
Exactly as he'd intended.