Only a matter of time — a BTTF fanfiction
Hello hello! No art today, but I decided to try and write some fanfiction since I haven't in a hot minute. Hopefully you guys'll like it and forgive my writing skills for being not too great (English is my second language) 😭 Honestly I just needed an outlet for more Doc and Marty. Please enjoy!
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Up on a cliff side, overlooking the jagged horizon in the distance, two men stood under a sky so blue.
“Bitchin’ view.” Marty spoke in tandem with a chuckle.
“Isn't it?” Doc replied.
The time train sat, parked just behind where they decided to recline against a large rock and facing the uneven surface of the desert far below. The two men looked around them in awe of the present details as they pointed them out.
Grass lay scarcely scattered around them, like green sprinkles on a chocolate cake, however a patch spread conveniently around the rock they leaned against and cushioned them.
“Check out that cliff, Doc.”
“Hm?”
Marty drew his pointer at a cliff not so far in the distance. Doc still had his eyes stretched open in inquisition.
“Look, that one, it's like — all leaning over. You'd think something that heavy would keel over and break off already.”
It had taken a few passing moments for Doc to reply.
“Hm,” he hummed, not eyeing the cliff as intently as his friend. “Well it's only a matter of physics, of course.”
“Yeah?”
With Marty's ears fully peeled, the scientist explained thoroughly the reasoning for the fenomena to be so. Marty might have caught a word or two that he understood, but to everything else he just nodded and hummed.
When Doc was finished, they would speak of other things, mainly about home, their respective families, and Verne's continuing insistence to learn to skateboard.
Soon they were gazing back at the view, and Marty let out a sigh in an awe that he knew would not go away soon.
“Still admiring it?” Doc then asked, a smile about his tone.
“Who wouldn't? Doc, it's gorgeous.”
“I knew you'd like it. Though, in my search for a spot like this, I worried the terrain would've been too… Grey looking.”
Marty perked up, he raised an eyebrow at that statement.
“Doc, what're you talking about? It's red as a — bottle of Heinz ketchup.”
Doc hummed at his own misinterpretation, he blinked slowly.
“Yes well — perhaps I wasn't looking the right way last time.”
“Right.”
Then the view became their focal point once more. Marty watched as wildlife emerged into the frame of his sights, and a mass of bulls and their calves sprinted towards the edge of the desert. Dirt and dust were picked up in a clouded mass by the stampede, and trailed behind them like a great cape, and they sped off to a somewhere that Marty and Doc would never know.
“They're sure in a hurry.” Marty remarked, his eyes still cast toward the disappearing herd.
“Who?”
At that, Marty paused, during which his set of auburn eyebrows raised. He looked at his friend, and there was a look of plain innocence on Doc's wrinkled visage, the same look he'd give him multiple times already. Marty let out a hum of his own, but as his lips began to part in asking, he stopped himself. In that moment he'd caught the cloudy haze in Doc Brown's irises, and he would not press on.
Marty remembered then, that where the train had taken them had no say in where their bodies reside in, and for the two men, it was 1999, and Doc was 95 years old.
“Nevermind, Doc. I was just seein’ things.”
Doc shrugged at that, he continued looking onward towards the blurry blue before him. He began to speak, but of other things. It was of history regarding the cliff, how, a hundred years prior to “now”, a family used to take residence there and lived their lives until a great storm swept their home away.
Marty listened, but he heard nothing at all. Perhaps too preoccupied with watching the wrinkles on his friend's face stretch with every opening of his jaw, every smile and eventually the frown that Doc would give him after a moment of silence.
“Are you alright, Marty?”
For some reason Marty's ears managed to catch that.
“Don't try me and say that you're fine, I'm getting bored of hearing that.” Doc said again.
It wasn't in Marty's intention to deflect, age had proven to weather his barriers down — if only a little.
Marty sighed and his gaze shifted back to the open landscape they sat facing. His eyes followed a cloud that trailed away slowly from view, he shook his head.
“Y’know I used to feel like we had all the time in the world.” He chuckled, however humorless and dry it was.
“But now I dunno — feels like time's biting us back in the ass.”
At the last few words Marty's voice was brought up to an accidental high note, and it cracked. He'd fix it with a clearing of his throat, but by that time, Doc had begun his reply.
“It sure isn't doing a bad job on you, Marty.” He smiled.
“Doc, c'mon.”
“I'm serious, you look practically the same as the day I met you.”
Marty scoffed.
“Yeah well you can thank the lack of growth for that.”
Then it was silent again. They looked in different directions, in different expressions. Marty and Doc had the misfortune of being born as men, and it was in the hard wiring of their upbringing that they would not speak truthfully about the inventory of their hearts. Marty cursed himself for shifting the mood and he began to speak,
Only for Doc to speak before him
“I used to wonder, Marty. Wonder what my passing would be like — if it had happened naturally from old age, of course.”
It seems that age has weathered Doc's barriers much further than Marty’s.
Marty registered his words a second too late for comfort, and he shook his head and would not look at his friend.
“Don't say it like that.” Marty said, but Doc had already continued.
“I imagined myself being rather content, albeit somewhat unsatisfied that I hadn't cracked every scientific secret the world had to offer.”
Doc gazed at the sky as a cloud passed over the sun.
“I'd be sad by that time, because Einstein would have probably been long gone before me, but I'd also be happy, because if heaven or some form of an afterlife existed, I'd be able to see him again, and if it didn't — well, I wouldn't be able to feel sad about it.”
“Doc,”
“But I knew that aside from everything I just said, my passing would be a happy one, because you would've been there by my side,”
“How lucky I am that I get to have Clara and the boys as well.” Doc concluded.
Marty tasted salt before he realized he was crying. He wiped away frantically the tears that raced in escape from his eyes. Becoming a family man was surely a contributing factor to his ever weakening restraints.
“You're not gonna die, Doc.” He said, a crack marking the end of each word spoken.
Doc brought a long and lanky arm around his small friend, and pressed him to his chest. Marty trembled in the hug, and returned it in a clutching manner that made Doc wince.
“You're not gonna die.”
“Even so, I know that my end in this world would be a happy one.” Doc breathed.
“And I would have you to thank for it.”
-
The turn of the century had no means of celebration, because in the spring of 2000, Marty would be standing before the grave of Dr. Emmett “Doc” Lathrop Brown.
The way he passed was as predicted, old age taking its natural course as his family and Marty sat by his side, soothing him as the withering of his soul brought his eyes to a peaceful close.
The grass beneath marty crunched with the shifting of his loafers.
The man — once a boy — had witnessed the many deaths of Doc Brown, deaths much more gruesome in method, much more tedious to prevent. However none were as frustrating as the one that became his last. This time, there was no need for bulletproof vests, no 1885 to rescue him from, no Mad Dog, only the natural breaking down of an old man's organs.
Marty bit back a sob, but one came out anyway. Even as the funeral ended hours ago, the Brown family — Marty included — would not leave the scientist's side.
It was then, that as Clara sobbed and Marty gripped her shoulder through her side, he spoke softly in a voice nobody but Doc could hear.
“We've always had enough time, haven't we, Doc?”
