Work Text:
Even before everything, Marty’s dreams were always strange. So strange, in fact, that when he’d told his sister about them one time, she’d looked at him with a concerned look and told him he needed help.
Marty never told anyone else about his dreams after that. Not even Jennifer.
He did tell Doc, on the few occasions he remembered. Doc never judged him. Doc was often too busy tinkering with his experiments to judge. His theory on Marty’s strange dreams was the fact that Marty had a “creative imagination.” This Marty didn’t really understand, but accepted as a plausible explanation.
But aside from that, Marty told no one.
And then came his adventures through time. The different lifetimes—he might as well call them lifetimes—he’d lived and experienced. And after those, he stopped telling even Doc about his dreams.
Because the dreams he was having were more often than not nightmares, and they often involved Doc. Doc being shot to death by the Libyans. Doc bleeding out as Marty stood by, helpless, until he, too, was shot and killed. Doc being confined to a mental hospital for the remainder of his life. Doc being shot again, this time in the back by Buford Tannen.
They always had him waking up in a cold sweat, panting hard, tangled up in his bedsheets. It would take him a great deal of self-control to wait until morning to see if Doc was really alright. He’d frequently spend the entire rest of the night awake, tossing and turning, focusing on anything other than the dream he’d just had.
He was getting less sleep now, and he knew people were noticing. His mother—the kind, observant figure she was in this timeline—asked him more than once if he was alright. Even kept him home from school at one point.
Doc was noticing, too. Marty could tell from the little glances he gave him out of the corner of his eye, the way he asked him to do less around the new workshop that had been installed into the side of the house he’d bought for himself and Clara and the children. He, too, asked if Marty was feeling okay lately.
But Marty had waved him off and flashed him a smile and said he was fine.
He couldn’t tell them. He couldn’t tell any of them.
He could deal with this by himself.