Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

Doc wasn’t sure how he had ended up in this odd place; he had just found himself here, surrounded by walls of pure white stone—an odd marble that had no impurities, it looked like. He hadn’t even been aware that such a type of marble even existed.

His footsteps echoed, booming with every step he took down a white corridor. He then realized he was wearing his old boots and his white radiation suit from Los Alamos. Why was he back in these infernal things?

“Hello…?” he called.

His voice echoed off of the stone walls, which rose to a height he couldn’t even determine.

“…Where am I…?” he wondered aloud. “…Or is it when am I…?”

He continued down the corridor, footsteps echoing as the hallway seemed to open into a large circular room. In the center of this room was a large, rectangular marble object, as white as everything else, on a large platform.

“I must be in some ancient ruins…” Doc realized aloud. “…But how do I get out?”

The was the long corridor from where he had come; perhaps the other direction would be the way out…

He turned to go, but then he froze, hearing a tiny, weak voice call out to him; the voice sounded very muffled.

“Doc…!”

The color drained from Doc’s face, leaving him looking almost as white as everything around him.

“No…” he quietly pleaded, for even as indiscernible as the voice’s origin, the sound was, at least, certainly emanating from directly behind him…

…Which was where the marble object was—an object that he realized, to his dismay, was none other than a sarcophagus.

He was standing in a tomb. And the other voice speaking could only be its occupant.

“Dooooooooc…!”

He opened his mouth, but no sound came out—even as he turned and stared at the marble sarcophagus.

“Doc, don’t leave me—please, don’t go!”

Almost robotically, he stepped towards the center of the tomb.

“DOC, PLEASE…!” The voice trailed off, breaking into sobs.

And Doc felt like doing the same as he drew close enough to discern the words carved upon the marble—

The scientist placed his hands on the marble lid. The carved words and the disembodied voice, which was still sobbing, weren’t enough. He had to see—had to confirm with his own eyes…

By all accounts, he shouldn’t have been able to shift the heavy stone slab, but it moved as though it was light as a feather. And as Doc looked upon the face of the tomb’s occupant, his worst fears were confirmed.

Marty’s skin was as pale as the marble he had been laid to rest in—he was even wearing a white suit instead of his usual casual clothes. And as the disembodied voice continued to sob, Doc could see the sorrow equally reflected in the dead boy’s face.

And now Doc crashed to his knees in front of the sarcophagus, letting out a sob of his own…

Doc drew a gasp of air as his eyes snapped open. Shaking, he looked around; the vast whiteness was gone, replaced by the darkness of his bedroom. A movement by his side caused him to glance at his wife, stirring as she responded to his sudden awakening.

“Emmett…?” Clara mumbled, sleepily. She glanced at him and at how gaunt he looked, and her expression changed to one of sympathy. “Oh, Emmett…”

“It’s… it’s nothing; go back to sleep,” he managed to say. “Just a bad dream…”

But Clara switched on the bedside lamp.

“I know you take your dreams and visions seriously,” she said, her voice a gentle whisper.

“…Rather ridiculous for a man of science, wouldn’t you say?” he asked, ruefully.

“I don’t think so,” she promised. “Isn’t that how the flux capacitor got started? The other dreams and visions you’ve talked about also seem to have some precognitive elements to them, as well.”

“If that’s what’s happening now, then…” Doc shut his eyes to hold back his tears. “Marty is going to die.”

She took his hand in hers, squeezing it tightly.

“If there’s any way to stop that from happening, I know you can find it,” she insisted.

“Oh, I know how to stop it from happening,” Doc sighed, opening his eyes again and glancing at the ceiling. “But Marty isn’t going to like it—I’d have to forbid him from any further trips through time.”

“…You’d end up losing him a different way,” Clara warned. “If you pushed him away like that, he would be furious—especially after you promised him that you wouldn’t do that after everything that’s happened. Not to mention that he’s embraced the idea of becoming a Bard of Time; if you took that from him—”

“But he’d be alive, Clara.”

“Emmett, do you really expect me to believe that you would accept the resentment and anger that would ensue from this?” Clara asked. “And he would have every right to feel that way—you owe him more than that.”

“I owe him everything,” Doc pointed out. “You and I—our entire family is alive because of him.”

“Yes, I know—it’s incredible to think about,” she agreed, thinking of Jules and Verne asleep down the hall. Her head spun at the thought of it—that this one boy was responsible for their happiness. She gave a wan smile. “You know, when I first met the two of you, I just assumed he was your son. …But it turns out I wasn’t that wrong, was I?”

“Not really,” Doc admitted. “I have one timeline’s worth of memories where I took him under my wing to give him the guidance he wasn’t getting at home—two outcasts thrown together because he broke into my lab one day. Now I have a second timeline’s worth of memories where the rest of the McFly family dragged me into their family happenings, and I was there for all of his milestones—you know I held him in my arms the day he was born?”

“You only mentioned it at least fifty times…” she smiled. “Along with the solar system mobile you got for his crib.”

“Hey, it’s never too early to get a kid into science,” Doc said, managing a weak chuckle, but he quickly sobered again. Marty’s entire future—not just with the Brown family, but as a Bard of Time, as a rock star, as Jennifer’s husband, and as a father to Marty Jr and Marlene—was in danger of being snuffed out. “He’s so young and he has so much to do and see, but… are we really doomed to lose him?”

Clara drew him close, her heart twisting as she could feel his suppressed trembling.

“I believe that you can find a way to save him,” she insisted again. “A way that won’t drive a wedge between you, either. Everything that you and Marty have been through has only strengthened the ties of friendship and family between the two of you; you save each other—that’s an unwritten rule of the universe by now.”

Doc let out a deep sigh.

“I just hope the universe can get with the program before tomorrow,” he said, after a moment. “That’s when we’re supposed to run the final tests on the spatial disperser—the counterpart to the flux capacitor.”

“It’s been working fine in all of the other test runs, right?” Clara asked.

“So far, but…” Doc couldn’t hold back a shudder any longer. “With how reckless both of us tend to get when time-traveling, I just have this feeling that something horrible is about to happen.”

Clara said nothing; she just gave his hand another gentle squeeze, hoping that, for all of their sakes, that Doc’s intuition was just a nervous miscalculation.