Simon figures it's best to leave Noel alone for now. He fucked up first impressions, and maybe he can try and walk that back later, or maybe he'll get a better picture from a place of authority. Unfortunately, the way time travel works doesn't let you undo actions. If it did, they could just prevent the Rift, but nothing is ever, ever, ever simple.
So he goes and sorts the papers, and that's an easy task, relaxing, taking his mind off of the stressful situation of being seventy years in the past and worrying about fucking up the timeline. What if pissing Noel off means he does burn down 10 Downing Street on purpose, and then the Rift never opens? Maybe that's better, but does that split a timeline and solve nothing, does it change the timeline and mean he never went back and then paradox, and if it's a paradox, what does that mean? Does he disappear from existence? Is time broken? Is the world over? Will timelines collapse in on themselves in a blaze of dark matter and cold inferno?
It was made clear that it's a distinct possibility.
"Hey. Sorry about my brother."
The voice that breaks him out of his own anxious time loop is soft. He looks up, and there's Lee, leaning against the doorway. Simon's surprised that Noel doesn't listen more to his brother, considering that Lee is easily giving off what Simon would read as cool, especially with a musical voice like that.
Simon sits up straighter. "No, it's fine. I should apologise for coming out swinging like that."
Lee shakes his head. "I wish people came out swinging against him more often."
Lee comes into the room and sits across from Simon; Simon was sitting on the floor, arranging papers in piles on every side of himself, but Lee sits on the couch, leaning down to make eye contact on the same level. "So you're Mum's new assistant?"
There's an edge of nervousness in the way that Simon's hands shake so slightly that he's the only person who might notice. "I forgot to say that, but I suppose it's not hard to work out."
"And I suppose part of your job is working miracles, then?" When Simon looks at him, raises an eyebrow, Lee smiles. "As in, trying to keep Noel out of trouble."
"That bad, huh? Your mother did seem pretty exasperated about the whole situation."
"Yeah. He's, um," Lee says with a bitten lip, "well, he probably needs a therapist more than anything."
Simon sees frost, white mist rising from a gash in the earth. The Rift will have only a hundred or so known victims; most people will have plenty of time to evacuate, since it's only going to be getting about a few metres larger every year. The problem is that its rate of growth will be ever increasing, not slowing down, and the only hope they'll have to stop it is- well, Simon, getting back alive with an in-depth report of how the power that created it works.
If only he was allowed to change the past. How simple it might have been: just one therapist.
"Is that a thing you've tried?" Simon asks, careful- because as much as it would be horrible to learn that the Rift could've been prevented that simply, giving Lee the idea is potentially far worse.
"Oh, yeah." So scratch that. "He gets too angry, and he comes back acting like they haven't listened to him."
"Right." Simon nods slowly. "That's a tough one, I suppose." Despite anything he might want to say, it's important that he be relatively boring, providing no ideas and leaving no impressions. He cannot leave a mark on history. Leon Spencer may sit across from him, looking into his eyes and exchanging real words with him, but he will die in the Rift. Simon cannot save him, cannot warn him, cannot change what happens.
"He's gotten better," Lee says, almost to himself. He looks around the room casually, like he's searching for something, or else, maybe he just doesn't want to look at Simon for too long. "I can point out all the things I think a therapist would point out, anyway. He's trying to replace Dad, too macho to work through his emotions, externalizing his inferiority complex, you know."
Simon was writing labels on sticky notes, but his pen stops for a second in the middle of the word legislation. He looks up sideways and sees that Lee noticed, but in the second of silence Simon's trying to think through what that means and he doesn't get a chance to think through what to say.
"Sorry," Lee says after a moment. "Am I interrupting you?"
"No, no, no," Simon quickly amends. "You're fine. This isn't hard, and I guess it's nice to know I didn't piss off everyone in that room."
Lee makes a face. "None of Noel's shithead friends care too much, and what, Noel's mad you're telling him not to do childishly dangerous things? He's supposed to be an adult now."
"They're not your friends, then?"
Lee laughs bitterly. "Oh, no. They hang out with Noel because of course we've got influence now, and Noel's the kind of person to use it. That, and..." Lee looks at his feet for a moment and shakes his head. "Do you know about the thing?"
Fuck. Should Simon know about the thing? "If it's a thing your mother would think important to tell me," he says smoothly, surprised his mouth works that fast, "I would know it."
"If you knew the thing you would know the thing." So that was the wrong answer. "Anyway, there's a thing."
"A thing that makes people want to be his friend?"
"A thing that makes them think he's powerful, so, yeah. Pretty much everyone he hangs out with is just some rich fuckhead who tolerates his bullshit to get stuff from him." Lee's jaw is set in what Simon reads as anger; maybe protectiveness? Could he be angry that his little brother is taken advantage of? "No, I don't like any of them."
"So why do you spend any time with them?"
"Because keeping Noel out of trouble was my job first," Lee says, and Simon looks up to meet his eyes; there's a playful laughter in his voice when he says, "so rude of you to try and take it."
"I'd argue I'm simply here to assist you," Simon says, unable to keep the tiniest of smiles from his face. He looks down at the papers he's sorting, looks at his hands, because he doesn't want to look at Lee too much. He's the only one of them Simon hasn't weirded out yet.
There's a moment of silence. Simon's not a people person, doesn't usually do this; that's why they'll ask him, of all people, to give up everything and disappear into the past. They'll know there's a risk he won't come back. They'll know there's a risk that the Rift will have one more victim. They'll know, and many people they'll ask will decline, because they will have families and futures. Simon won't decline.
"Can I ask you a weird question?" Lee says, and Simon's mouth twists in an attempt to hide a small laugh. Simon can answer weird questions honestly- it's the simple ones like when's your birthday that he might have to lie about.
"Absolutely."
Lee hesitates for a moment, a hesitation possibly brought on by the seeming formality of Simon's answer. Simon felt it when he said it; it felt stilted, even though he's speaking to the Prime Minister's son, even though he technically works for Lee's family. Lee tilts his head and asks the question anyway. "If you could go anywhere in time and space," Lee finally asks, "where would you go?"
Simon looks up at him, and Lee is watching him with a completely unreadable expression. Lee knows; he must know. It'll be through the reports of Noel's friends that his power will be uncovered and he will be put to trial. How would his friends know, without Lee knowing? In fact, Lee referenced it earlier. Lee knows what Noel can do.
The testimonies will be clear. Simon won't watch the videos, just read the statements over an evening whisky to calm his nerves at the thought of disappearing into the past. They'll be written court transcripts of people describing how Noel had them hold hands in a circle, took them wherever they asked to go. Simon remembers the photos clearly; one person presented photos of the deep gashes on her leg from a velociraptor's bite. Another showed the pristine condition ancient Sumerian pottery that will sit at the time of Simon's adulthood in a museum, because it will be one of those things that despite its origin its importance to science is immense. Simon also recalls mention of ancient Greece, Elizabethan England, the Ice Age.
For some reason, the testimonies will only mention the past.
"I'd go to the future," Simon says, not because he's thought about it, not because he knows what his real answer would be. That's too tough of a question, too long of a thought, and he's already been looking at Lee's eyes, silent, for the longest moment. "To know what happens."
Lee raises an eyebrow. "Interesting," he says after a moment. "That's just about the only place I... wouldn't go."
There's a pause, and Simon can be sure Lee almost said don't. Simon wonders how often Noel takes his brother somewhere with him. "Why's that?"
"Knowing the future sounds horrible." Is this Lee's opinion, or is it Noel's, and that's why Noel will never appear to have gone to the future? Or did Lee manage to get that influence over him? "And you know what I have this weird fear of?"
"What's that?"
"Setting the future in stone." Lee's got his arms around his knees now, and he rocks back and forth slightly, looking out of the window at the bright light. The sky is grey, but the sun still shines upon them, it just doesn't make it warm in this room. "What if going to the future meant that whatever you saw was destined to happen, and if you hadn't gone it wouldn't have been set like that? Like Schrodinger."
Simon tries to wrap his head around what Lee's saying. In all the theories of time he had to go through, when they will sit him down and prepare him for this journey, they were all concerned with changing the past, and what could occur. No discussion of changing the future was needed. "Schrodinger's cat, you mean?"
"Well, yeah." Lee laughs a bit. "Like, it's alive and it's dead, but only looking at it will determine which is true. I think traveling into the future's a bit like that, don't you think?"
"You say this like you have some degree of certainty," Simon says.
Lee shakes his head. "I've never time traveled into the future, so don't worry about that. But that's precisely why I wouldn't."
If Simon is presenting as someone who doesn't know the thing, then surely it makes sense to ask, "...what made you ask me that question?"
Lee shrugs. "Says a lot about a person. Most people give their favourite historical period. I don't have a huge sample size, but, you know- I'd say choosing the future is an odd choice."
Simon nods. "What's your answer, then?"
"Mine?"
"Where you'd go? If you had one choice."
Lee bites his lip, still rocking back and forth a little. "Only one choice is difficult," he says with a bitten lip, "because every time has positives and negatives, right? And a lot of it depends on who you are. If you're a cishet white guy, 1950s America sounds pretty good, but not so much for anyone else, you know? A lot of places, it's nice if you aren't a slave, and it- would be kind of hard to feel okay just hanging around ancient Rome knowing there's slaves all around." Lee bites his lip. "I guess- if I could only go one place, not knowing enough about history and all that to know every possibility- do you know much about Timbuktu?"
"Timbuktu? No, other than people using it as a synonym for 'pretty far away.'"
Lee smiles softly. "You heard of Mansa Musa? World's richest man ever, like, way richer than every billionaire alive today? He built that city up in his time. Sometime in the fourteenth century, I couldn't tell you the date exactly. But it was a beautiful city, a trade city that a lot of rich people came to and furnished with public works, and they were flourishing out there in the desert. It had an important university, and it was one of the places where slavery was abolished and women had rights, all that. I'd go there."
"You know a lot about history," Simon remarks, but what he's really observing when he says that is the smile in Lee's voice, the fond memories he must have of when he went there.
"They don't teach you much history in school," Lee admits with a shrug. "Divorced, beheaded, and died, that's about it."
Simon has to search the dark corners of his brain for what Lee's referencing for a moment- and while he was taught about Henry the Eighth, that did not make up a large part of his English history class.
It was mainly about the Rift.
----
a/n: I am not a historian and a lot of this info is found from like 1 or 2 sources, so it may or may not be accurate. especially because in this chapter I'm referencing african history and there's 1 account of african history for every 600 european ones, at least that's accessible to me. so basically if my description of a place or time isn't historically accurate, feel free to correct me in the comments, but rather than get a history degree I will just write whatever with the caveat that something being canon in this story does not mean it is true in real life