The war he built was made of paper, whispers, and carefully chosen bullets.
Most people only saw the last part.
They called him "The Big Fellow" because he moved through rooms as if he already owned them, all broad shoulders and easy confidence. But in the back office on crowded Parnell Street, hunched over maps and ledgers, Michael Collins felt more like a very careful accountant of risk and blood.
On the wall: a map of Ireland, peppered with pins.
Different colours:
– RIC barracks.
– Sympathetic priests.
– Local IRA units.
– British troop concentrations.
– Known or suspected informers.
[Intelligence] and [Analysis] turned the pinboard into a living thing in his mind. Threads of loyalty, pockets of fear, routes of least resistance.
"The temptation," he told his small staff one night, "is to attack everywhere. To show the world that every field and lane in Ireland is a battlefield."
He tapped the map with a knuckle.
"The smart thing is to make the enemy feel like that, while we actually hit only where it costs them most."
"How do we know where that is?" a young officer asked.
"We look at their books as well as their barracks," Michael said. "Every destroyed road, every burnt truck, every wounded soldier is a cost. We choose targets that give us the greatest return. Bridges that take weeks to repair instead of days. Lines of communication that force them to reroute convoys through hostile territory."
He glanced at another map—this one of balance sheets.
On it, he'd scrawled estimates: cost to London of garrisoning Ireland; cost of replacing destroyed infrastructure; cost of campaigns in the press when American newspapers printed photos of burned-out cottages and dead civilians.
[Finance] framed each ambush as a line item. The empire bled not just in men, but in money and legitimacy.
"Remember," he said, "we're not trying to defeat them in a glorious battle. We're trying to make their ledger scream and their Parliament ask, 'Why in God's name are we still paying for this?'"
His intelligence system reached everywhere.
In Dublin Castle itself, a clerk with a talent for going unnoticed quietly memorised documents and reconstructed them at home. Every time he handed over another set of notes, [Analysis] skimmed his face.
Nervous, but steady. Feels seen for the first time in his life. Needs small gestures of appreciation to stay steady; money alone won't do it.
Michael made sure to ask about his family every visit, to slip in a joke about some pompous official they both disliked.
Elsewhere, an RIC sergeant in a small town, disgusted by the behaviour of the Black and Tans, passed along information in exchange for one thing only: a guarantee that his own neighbours would not see him as a traitor to Ireland.
"We'll remember you as a man who did right when it mattered," Michael promised. And meant it.
When suspected informers were identified, he insisted on verification.
"Everyone's angry, everyone's scared," he told his intelligence officers. "That's a bad time to trust first accusations. I want patterns. Independent reports. We are not running a vendetta; we're running a war."
It didn't eliminate all injustices. Nothing could. But the worst of the pointless, panicked killings were blunted.
Bloody Sunday—the operation against British intelligence in Dublin—still happened. It had to: Cairo Gang, double agents, the need to break the Castle's grasp.
But the planning was even tighter in this timeline.
"In and out," he told the men assigned. "No bravado. No flourishes. Clean shots, clean exits. And if a target isn't where you expect, you do not improvise. You withdraw."
When the day came, the teams moved like clockwork.
The British intelligence community in Ireland was decapitated in under an hour.
Later that day, at Croke Park, British forces still fired on civilians at a football match, trying to prove their strength. The blood on the grass was just as real.
But Michael's network got word earlier. Warnings spread. Some families stayed away from the match. Some children who would have died in another history lived simply because someone knocked on a door that morning and said, "Keep the young ones in today."
A small difference. A dozen lives. But those, too, were part of the war he was fighting.
He kept one eye always on the Dáil.
When Sinn Féin swept the 1918 election and formed a parliament in defiance of Westminster, he saw it not as a symbolic gesture but as the real heart of the struggle.
"This," he said in a packed, smoky committee room, "is our skeleton of a state. If all we are is a band of gunmen, they can call us bandits forever. But if we run courts, collect taxes, build roads—even in a limited way—they'll be negotiating not with rebels, but with a government."
As Minister for Finance, he ran the Dáil Loan like a modern, disciplined fundraising campaign.
[Finance] helped him structure it: clear terms, proper records, appeals to both patriotism and prudence. He understood, in a way most around him didn't, how important trust was in financial systems.
"If we lose a few ledgers, people will forgive us," he told his small department. "If we lose track of who loaned us what, and word gets out, we'll never raise another penny. Treat every subscription as sacred."
He reached out to the diaspora with more method than passion: letters to Irish-American businessmen framed not just as pleas, but as investment pitches.
"Loan us this now," he wrote, "and you help create an Ireland that can buy your goods, send you students, negotiate with you as equals. You will have the gratitude of a nation, yes—but also a trading partner."
At the same time, [City Design] flickered in the background, a reminder: these funds weren't just for guns. They were for the day after.
He pushed for a portion of money to be earmarked—even on paper—for future infrastructure: roads, railways, housing.
"On paper?" one colleague scoffed. "We're fighting a war and you're ring-fencing funds for trams?"
"I'm ring-fencing an idea," Michael said. "The idea that this government sees beyond the next raid. That will matter when we ask ordinary people to trust us over the long haul."
The British adapted, clumsily at first, then with increasing brutality.
Martial law. Raids. Curfews.
But they also had their own ledger, and it was groaning.
Reports went back to London: villages where their courts were boycotted in favour of Dáil courts; towns where their officials could not move without escort while Sinn Féin organisers walked openly to cheering crowds.
In Cabinet rooms, across polished tables, men who had never set foot in Ireland argued in chilly tones.
"We command the roads," one said.
"And yet they go around you," another replied, tapping a report. "They do justice, they collect taxes, they publish proclamations. We hold the railway stations and they hold the conversations in every field."
By 1921, both sides knew the war could not continue indefinitely.
The British worried about cost and reputation; the Irish worried about exhaustion and the risk of a crackdown so massive it would break the country's spine.
When the truce came in July, Michael was ready.
He had spent months not just fighting, but networking within the movement, applying [Analysis] in quieter, more delicate ways.
He mapped not just British structures, but Irish ones: who followed whom; where rivalries lay; who trusted de Valera, who trusted Griffith, and who trusted him.
He saw, even more clearly than his original self had, the jagged line where a civil war might split the movement.
And he was determined to sand that edge down before it cut.
LONDON, 1921 – TREATY TALKS
He'd left London as a clerk. He returned as a plenipotentiary.
The city was the same filthy, roaring organism. He was different.
So was his approach.
Before they even sat across from Lloyd George, he convened the Irish delegation behind closed doors.
On the table: a sheet of paper with three headings.
Non-Negotiable
Negotiable
Sacrificial
"We're not walking into a fog," he told them. "We're walking in with a map. Disagree with me if you like, but we need clarity."
Under Non-Negotiable, he'd written:
– Irish control over internal affairs.
– Irish control over taxation and expenditure.
– Irish parliament with full sovereign powers domestically.
– A status that allows future constitutional change by Irish decision, not British fiat.
Under Negotiable:
– External association vs dominion wording.
– Naval bases duration.
– Oath wording.
Under Sacrificial:
– Symbolic ties to Crown in the short term.
– Use of the term "Free State" vs "Republic" in documents.
Dev wasn't there—he'd chosen to stay in Dublin, something that had baffled and angered Eoin in his old life.
In this one, Michael had pushed harder before leaving.
"Come yourself," he'd urged. "If you oppose compromise, you should be in the room, not in Dublin to disown us after."
Dev, haunted by his own principles and calculations, still refused. Some patterns ran deep.
So Michael compensated in other ways.
He insisted that minutes of the negotiations be sent back to a broad committee, not just a small inner circle, and that each stage be explained in plain language to Dáil representatives.
[Politics] nudged him: transparency now to avoid accusations of betrayal later.
When he finally sat opposite Lloyd George, he did so with a moderately unified team behind him, not a fractured one.
The British Prime Minister was shrewd, mercurial, a man who liked to corner opponents in moral and rhetorical traps.
[Analysis] watched him move, cataloguing tells: the way his gaze hardened before he made a threat, the slight smile when he thought he'd boxed someone in.
"You understand," Lloyd George said one day, voice soft and dangerous, "that if you do not sign, there will be immediate and terrible war. And you will bear the responsibility for that."
In another timeline, that line had hit like a hammer.
This time, Michael let it pass through him.
"I understand that you must say that," he replied evenly. "And I understand that if we sign something our people see as a sham, there will also be war—only it will be within our own house. You will not be paying for that, Prime Minister. We will."
He leaned forward, letting [Politics] guide his words.
"So let us speak plainly. You cannot hold us forever without bankrupting yourselves and radicalising your own soldiers. We cannot drag this out forever without breaking the back of our country. We both need an agreement that can pass in our respective houses without turning us into liars."
He slid a draft across the table—one he'd spent nights crafting, informed by a century of constitutional experiments he'd quietly mined from his old-world memory.
In it:
– An Irish Free State with the full powers of a dominion—but with a clearly stated right to amend or remove the oath after a defined period without reference to London.
– A Boundary Commission with tighter wording, including explicit criteria that took into account not just unionist majorities but economic and geographic coherence.
– Joint Anglo-Irish councils for trade and infrastructure, framed as equals rather than as colonial committees.
Lloyd George scanned it, lips thinning.
"You are asking for the power to leave the Empire by the back door," he said.
"I'm asking for the power to grow up," Michael said. "If your Empire is confident, it can survive one small island making its own decisions in time. If it isn't, then you'll lose it no matter what this paper says."
He knew he could not get a clean republic in 1921. The British public would not accept it; their military would not tolerate the humiliation.
But he could, perhaps, build a bridge that led there more smoothly than in his old world.
In the end, the Treaty they signed was still a compromise. It still hurt. There was still an oath. There were still partition provisions.
Yet there were also deliberate escape hatches and phased revisions built in.
"Within ten years," he told the Dáil later, "this arrangement can, by our will, be something very close to a republic in all but name. And within a generation, perhaps in name as well. If we are clever. If we are united enough not to tear ourselves apart before then."
The debate was fierce. Dev opposed the Treaty, convinced it fell short of the Republic declared in 1916. Many saw him as the guardian of that ideal.
But this time, the split was less clean.
Michael had spent months before the talks talking not just policy but emotion with key figures.
He used [Analysis] to sense where wounds might open and tried to stitch before cutting.
With some hardline Volunteers, he didn't argue by saying, "This is good enough." He said, "This is a phase. Sign, consolidate, build our strength—and then we move the line further when we choose, not as supplicants but as an established state."
With clergy uneasy about continued violence, he stressed the chance to end raids, reprisals, civilian terror.
With labour men, he quietly promised: "If we get control of our own budget, I will not forget who fought for the working man during the war. Help us pass this, and I will back your demands when we build the new state."
The vote was still close. The Dáil still split.
But when it passed, and he rose, pale and tired, to speak as Chief of the Provisional Government, he did something he hadn't done in the old timeline.
He turned to de Valera.
"Éamon," he said into the charged silence, using the first name deliberately, "I ask you, as a man I've admired even when we've disagreed: don't walk out. Don't break this house. Help us shape what comes next."
The chamber held its breath.
[Analysis] flared. Dev's pride. His purism. His sense of personal destiny. His fear of being associated with compromise.
Appeal to stewardship, it advised. To his need to be the guardian of Ireland's soul.
"If this Treaty is a danger," Michael went on, "then surely you are needed all the more inside the tent to watch every clause, to argue every adjustment, to make sure we do not drift from the Republic. I am asking you not to give me a blank cheque. I am asking you to be the counterweight within, not the spark outside."
It was not a magic spell. It did not turn Dev into a wholehearted supporter overnight.
But it shifted him, just a little, off the path of absolute opposition.
Instead of walking out to lead an immediate resistance, he stayed, reluctantly, to argue for amendments, for interpretative declarations, for a more republican constitution within the Treaty's framework.
There were still armed men opposed. There were still barracks occupied in defiance, mutters of betrayal.
But the centre held longer.
When shots were finally fired between pro- and anti-Treaty forces, it was skirmishes, ugly and frightening—but Michael threw every ounce of [Politics], [Management], and sheer personal risk into preventing those skirmishes exploding into a full-scale civil war.
He personally went to some hotheads' camps, unarmed, to talk.
"Will you fire on me?" he asked one group in a draughty hall. "On the man who smuggled you rifles and fed your families? Over words that can be amended in a few years if we keep our heads?"
They didn't know how to answer.
Some never forgave him. Some never forgave the Treaty.
Yet the war that in his old memories had torn Ireland apart for years, burning bridges that took generations to rebuild, became here more of a prolonged, bitter political struggle with outbreaks of violence rather than its defining monster.
He slept little. He aged fast.
But he lived.
Béal na Bláth never happened. The convoy that would have been ambushed took a different road on a different day because [Intelligence] had made it a habit to constantly randomise routes, and because one small report from a sympathiser in Macroom reached his desk at the right time.
He read it, felt a chill, and simply wrote in the margin: Avoid.
History shuddered and, quietly, rewrote that footnote.
DUBLIN, MID-1920s
The city smelled of dust and mortar rather than cordite now.
Standing on a viewing platform at the edge of a building site off the North Circular Road, Collins watched as rows of new brick houses rose where condemned tenements had once sagged.
Children ran along unfinished pavements. A woman with a pram peered curiously into a half-built living room.
"These will go to slum families first," he said to the officials beside him. "Decent rents. Solid construction. No more families ten to a room."
The housing officer—a thin man with ink-stained fingers—nodded. "We've the lists drawn up. There'll be grumbling, of course."
"There's always grumbling," Michael said. "We listen, adjust if we must, but we do not let the perfect be the enemy of the warm and dry."
[City Design] fed him details: street widths to allow for trams; small green spaces every few blocks; mixed-use zoning so that shops and workplaces weren't all crammed into one smoky centre.
He'd pushed for this programme hard, knowing how future Ireland had struggled with housing.
"Start early," [Finance] had insisted. "Set the expectation now that the state has a role in housing. Get the mechanisms working while the population is smaller."
In cabinet meetings, he'd argued:
"If we leave this to the market alone, we'll end up with slums in new shapes and landlords in new suits. Building decent homes is not charity; it's infrastructure. It pays off in health, productivity, social peace."
Some colleagues balked at the cost.
So he showed them numbers.
Projected healthcare savings from lower incidence of TB. Productivity gains. The political capital of being the government that rehoused thousands.
In the evenings, he met separately with union representatives and builders' associations, using [Politics] to balance their demands, keeping wages fair without letting costs spiral.
"If we do this right," he told a sceptical contractor over tea, "you'll have steady work for years instead of boom-and-bust builds. Think bigger than the next contract."
He applied the same ruthless, forward-looking logic to transport.
On another day, he stood in a draughty hall with engineers, maps spread like treasure on trestle tables.
"Motorcars will come," he said, tapping roads. "But if we let them dictate our cities, we'll choke ourselves. Trams, trains, and buses first. Roads built to serve them, not just private vehicles."
He advocated for a national transport board earlier than in his old life, one with the power to plan rail and road in concert.
A line from Cork through Limerick to Galway. Better links between Derry and Dublin. Modernised ports in Waterford and Belfast, negotiated through careful cross-border agreements.
[Politics] worked overtime with Northern leaders.
"I'm not asking you to love our flag," he told a hard-faced unionist businessman in Belfast. "I'm asking if you like money. This rail line will reduce your costs. This joint port authority will increase your throughput. You keep your identity and your parades. We both make profit."
Slowly, pragmatism wormed its way into spaces where only grievance had been.
He didn't pretend sectarian fear could be solved with trains. But economic interdependence was a thread he intended to pull.
The Church was another matter.
In his old memories, he knew how dominant it would become in mid-20th-century Ireland—controlling schools, hospitals, maternity homes, crushing dissent.
Here, he moved earlier, and more carefully.
He met bishops in paneled rooms that smelled of polish and incense.
"We're grateful for what the Church has done," he said. "You kept the language alive in places, kept hope alive. And faith is at the heart of many of our people."
[Analysis] picked up responses: nods, pride, suspicion.
"But governance," he continued, "is a separate thing. We need a civil service that serves all citizens, of any or no faith. We need schools that teach science and critical thought alongside catechism."
He proposed a compromise: state-funded schools with boards that included both clergy and laypeople; a civil service code that enshrined neutrality; hospitals with professional standards set by the state, not solely by religious orders.
Some bishops bristled.
"Are you trying to drive God from Ireland?" one demanded.
"No," Michael said calmly. "I'm trying to ensure that when some future priest fails, people do not confuse his sin with the state's policy—or with God's will. Separation protects both Church and Republic from each other's mistakes."
It was not a clean victory. The Church still wielded huge influence. But the constitution, when finally drafted, contained clearer barriers than in his old life—subtle clauses that future lawyers could use to keep theocracy at bay.
Late nights at his desk became the norm.
He'd sit with his jacket off, tie loosened, surrounded by stacks of reports.
[Management] helped him triage: which decisions could be delegated; which required his own judgement; which long-term projects needed quiet nurturing rather than flashy announcements.
He read proposals for rural electrification and saw, with [City Design] and [Finance] both humming, how they could change everything if done right: light for farms, power for small factories, radios bringing the world into Irish kitchens.
He pencilled in pilot schemes, insisting that the national grid be planned with future expansion in mind, not stuck around a few towns.
He drafted legislation for land value taxation, determined not to let speculation carve his cities into chaos, as it had in the Ireland he remembered.
He set up, over the objections of some, a small Economic Advisory Council with real powers to collect data, track trends, and warn of bubbles before they burst.
"Isn't this all a bit… much?" an old comrade asked him once over a rare glass of whiskey. "You're talking like some professor instead of the lad who used to sleep on floors and run from patrols."
"I liked sleeping on floors," Michael said dryly. "Less paperwork. But we didn't fight all that just to end up poor with better uniforms. If we don't think like this now, we'll be patching holes for the next fifty years."
He didn't say: I've seen what we can become if we don't. He couldn't, not without sounding mad.
Sometimes, alone, the weight of his two lives pressed hard.
He'd walk through a Dublin street at dusk and see, superimposed on the faces around him, the ghosts of what might have been: young men who, in another world, would have died in ambushes or executions; tenement blocks that, in that other timeline, would still be standing, damp and crumbling, in the 1960s.
He'd catch sight of himself in a window: the set of the jaw, the eyes people now trusted or feared. Michael Collins, hero, statesman, bogeyman, depending on who you asked.
And under that face, like faint writing beneath new ink, he'd sense Eoin Kelly from Cork—angry protester, internet ranter, man who'd once felt utterly powerless.
"You got what you wanted," he'd murmur to his own reflection. "A chance to be in the room where it happens."
Then, more softly, "Don't waste it."
On one such night, he returned to his office and found, on his desk, the old copybook he'd carried from the farmhouse in Woodfield to London to Frongoch to Dublin.
The first page still bore the heading he'd written as a young man in a borrowed body:
Strategic Plan for Irish Independence and Governance
Underneath, in his more mature, hurried hand, were scribbled ticks and notes.
Next to "Secure independence with minimal bloodshed" – Partially achieved. Do better yet.
Next to "Avoid or minimise Civil War" – Narrowly. Maintain bridges.
Next to "Lay foundations for effective governance" – Ongoing. Never finished.
Next to "Avoid excessive Church power" – In progress. Watch this.
Next to "Move towards unity with North peacefully" – Plant seeds. Patient work.
He added a new line.
Ensure that every child born in Ireland has more choices than their parents did.
He stared at it a moment, then underlined it.
No system magic guided that stroke. No skill beeped. It was just a human vow.
Outside, Dublin's trams rattled. Inside, the lights burned.
He picked up his pen and turned to fresh pages, sketching plans for a new university campus on the western edge of the city—one that would, in time, send engineers, doctors, planners, and poets into a world in which Ireland was not an afterthought, but a contributor.
"Right," Michael Collins—Eoin Kelly—murmured. "Round two."
And the work of building a very different 20th-century Ireland went on.