Chapter Text
When Marty returned to the Delorean crash site, after Doc had whisked away to another adventure in his time-traveling train, he couldn’t help but feel… sad. After working with Doc for so many years, he struggled to imagine a mundane job he’d be willing to take, knowing what’s out there. He stepped back, Jennifer staying close to his side, and his eyes rested on the Delorean’s license plate.
OUTATIME
Next to it lay the flux capacitor, some of the wires still connected to the time circuits board. The flickering lights read OCT 27 1985. Marty brushed the thin layer of dust off of the glass of the flux capacitor, the circuits were still glowing faintly. There was the faintest glimmer of hope in the back of Marty’s mind. But the light was quickly snuffed out, I have no idea how any of this worked. Doc’s only information is with him, and he may never come back, he thought.
A train horn sounded in the distance and the railroad crossing lights flashed and the guards lowered, for a split second he thought Doc was coming back for him, but the sight of a regular, 1985 train barreling down the tracks made him drop that thought. He snatched up the flux capacitor, the time circuits, and the license plate and tossed them into the back of his car. Jennifer climbed up first into the passenger seat, then Marty into the driver’s, and they were off.
“Marty, you seem bothered. Tell me what’s wrong,” Jennifer pried.
“This is all just so much, Doc found his family and doesn’t need me anymore. It’s all just too real,” he ran his hand down his face as they rolled to a stop.
“Oh Marty, just because you’re not in his lab recording for him anymore doesn’t mean he doesn’t still care deeply for you. He came back to you the moment of your return because he was worried about you,” Jennifer tried to console him.
“I guess I just hoped we would still be partners in crime, and not just metaphorically, we saved each other’s lives more than I can count.”
“Not everything is forever, remember what he told us, our future isn’t written, you can still see him.”
“Yeah, well, unless I can figure out how Doc assembled the machine in the DeLorean, I don’t get a say in any of that,” he thought back at the still-warm flux capacitor in the back seat of his car.
“Well I don’t want to see you obsessing over it either. Doctor Brown seemed to spend more time with his machines than with people, and that just isn’t right.”
“Oh, don’t say that Jennifer, Doc had plenty of friends. There was me and… uh… Einstein?”
“The dog, Marty? This is exactly what I mean. I still want to marry you, like we saw in the future, but I also want to feel more loved than a machine and an old employer. You got that?”
“Yeah, yeah, I got it,” Marty said absentmindedly, pulling into his driveway, being cautious not to hit Biff’s as he was pulling out.
“I mean it Marty! Don’t go pursuing crazy sciences!”
“Okay, sorry, sorry,” he held up his hands defensively, smiling as he and Jennifer went inside, leaving the time machine’s pieces on the back seat of the car.
—--
After Marty had driven Jennifer home that night, he carefully lifted the pieces out of his car and placed them methodically on his bed, before sitting in front of them. It was like a puzzle, though Marty never particularly enjoyed puzzles, if he could find enough of the pieces, he could make out what they are supposed to become. Marty decided that the next day would be dedicated to finding these pieces.
—--
The next day came so suddenly that Marty couldn’t be sure that he wasn’t dreaming. He slowly moved to the kitchen where his mother was standing over the dishes in the kitchen. It was going to take a while to get used to this new version of his mother. But there was no time for that now. Unlike just two days ago, Marty did not have all the time in the world, but hopefully soon he would.
His Toyota seemed slower than the day before, like he couldn’t go any slower on his way to the railroad crossing. When he arrived there was nobody there, not too odd for a Hill Valley Tuesday morning, but he still scanned the area.
Marty was relieved that nobody had come to clean up or even investigate the wreckage, and he began sifting through it. Sharp bits of the car’s frame, bolts that may have been significant in the car before, and shards of glass made up most of the wreckage.
This was precisely why Marty disliked puzzles. This piece could have gone here, or that piece maybe fits into this other one. It’s too many things going on at once, he usually had Doc’s quick wittedness to help him solve things. But he would have to learn to do that on his own, at least for the time being.
He searched each and every piece that remained on the side of the tracks, which took him a large part of the day. A few pieces were thrown into the wooden box he had brought for that express purpose. A dented, burnt-out pipe that looked as if it once had circuits connected to the back of it, The cartridge that would have held the plutonium if there were any left, and the speedometer that was attached to the dash, a small crack in its smudged glass.. He looked for the temperature gauge used in 1885 but only found fragments, blown apart from the collision with the train.
He finished at around 12:30, and when he was finally satisfied with his haul, he sat in the grass where his car was parked, back against the wheel. His next stop would be Doc’s lab, but Marty felt like he needed a break.
He put his palm against his forehead, 'what am I thinking?' He thought to himself, 'You don't have the brains to re-create Doc’s machine, even with his blueprints and studies.' But Marty McFly was no chicken, he had started this and now he would finish it. If he wanted his old friend back, this was the only way to do it, and what harm could it do to try?
—--
Marty arrived at Doc’s lab, unlocking the door with his key from under the mat. The clocks were all still ticking 25 minutes slow and Einstein’s bowl was still overflowing with the stinking food Doc insisted on feeding him.
“God, Doc! Why didn’t you turn that thing off before leaving?!” he said aloud, cleaning up the mess.
Silence met him, and he remembered again why he was here. The drawers in Doc’s cluttered desk were closed, but Marty knew that they were near-bursting with papers from experiments, mostly failed. Marty wondered if he could find his studies on mind reading that he walked in on him doing back in 1955.
No time for that. Focus.
“Right, right. The time machine,” he took the tape that still sat in the video camera, Doc explained a lot in that. He spent another few hours looking through the most recent documents, finding an essay on the properties of plutonium, a few blueprints of the DeLorean and its time-travel modifications, instructions on home installation hover technology, dated 2015.
The stack that Marty had amassed by the end of the night was quite large, enough to fill a small novel, and there was still the matter of reading through it all, which he spent another few hours doing until he fell asleep on the couch, a research paper on the spacetime continuum still in his hands.
When he woke in the morning, some of the stack had fallen to the floor, and the folded picture of him and Doc in front of the clock tower had fallen out of his front pocket. He sat for a while, staring at that picture as if the other person in that photo was dead.
He looked up at the clocks littering the room.
10:20
“Shit!” Marty gasped, it was 10:45 already, he had to get home!
He gathered the papers and his photo and carefully locked the door on his way out.
Marty McFly had found a new adventure, one he would do on his own, to get his trusted friend back.