#i almost did this one with ellie and doc in the future as a parallel to how marty would often go to him for advice/tutoring

[doctorbrown]

MCFLY JULY ‘24 ⸺ 「 29 / 31 * 24 HOUR SCIENTIFIC SERVICES 」

March 1983, Twin Pines Timeline

“It’s hopeless, Doc. I’m never gonna figure out this chemistry stuff in time for the test tomorrow.” Marty sighs heavily, dropping his pencil down on the table. His head follows suit barely a second later, his forehead thunking against the workbench. “Can we run through it again?”

Emmett sets the circuit board and screwdriver he’d been tinkering with down on the table, pushing the remnants of their late dinner aside. Burger King again, at Marty’s insistence, when their study session had gone well into the late evening and Marty’s growling stomach had reminded them both that—again—they’d forgotten to eat, lost in their own world. “It’s getting late, Marty. It’s already past eleven; you should get going, get some rest before the morning.”

“One more time, Doc—let’s just run through it again.” Marty lifts his head up and trains his big, pleading eyes full-force on Emmett. “I’ve almost got this balancing equations thing down. Let’s just do one more.”

He shouldn’t—he should send Marty on his way for the night, clean up their small mess, and turn his attention back to his own plans, work out a solution to the conundrum he’s been putting off and putting off until the moment was right. But Marty looks at him as if the entirety of his fate hangs in the balance of his answer and if he really is still having difficulties with this, he can’t very well turn him away when there’s still time to drill the material into the boy’s head.

But something tells him there’s far more to it than that.

“Alright, we’ll go through it one more time. But first I want you to let your parents know you’ll be staying late so they don’t wonder where you are or think I’ve kidnapped you for use in one of my nefarious experiments.”

Marty appears to visibly shrink into himself, confirming Emmett’s suspicions. A hundred and one questions leap to his lips but he keeps his mouth shut, waiting for Marty to answer. Something has been up recently—it has been written all across his face, in his eyes, clear as day after all this time getting to know him. Marty wears his heart on his sleeve and it didn’t take him long to understand all the boy’s little quirks and mannerisms, to know when to push and when to give him the space and freedom to open up on his own time and fall into a comfortable synchronisation that he can hardly imagine his days without, now.

Lately, he has been reluctant to leave even after spending all of his free time after school here, helping about with various tasks, practising his music, or even just sitting on the couch, working through his homework with his headphones on and Einstein curled up against his side.

He hasn’t pried yet. This, whatever it is, he knows Marty will open up about when he’s ready, but it’s enough to keep him from wanting to return home.

“Yeah, alright Doc. Dad might still be up.” Marty walks to the phone as if he’s being marched to the gallows. After a few minutes of silence with the receiver held up to his ear, he looks over as if to say well, I tried, only for his brows to fly up when someone must have finally answered.

“Dad? Yeah, it’s me, it’s Marty—no, I’m—I’m gonna stay at Doc’s place for a while. No—no, Dad! We’re in the middle of something big and Doc needs my help. Yeah. I’ve got them. Okay. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

Emmett raises a brow as Marty turns triumphantly away from the phone. “’In the middle of something big?’”

Marty rubs the back of his neck. “I—didn’t want to tell him why I was really here. Sometimes I think Dad gets disappointed that he can’t do everything, you know? He knows a lot of things about sci-fi, but he’s not a scientist and he doesn’t know a thing about chemistry. So I didn’t want him to feel bad that you were helping me.”

“Ah.” It’s a rather thoughtful lie on Marty’s part, all things considered, and not one he feels he has the personal experience to contest. “Alright, let me grab my blackboard and you read me out one of the problems you’re having trouble with.”

Emmett slides a few miscellaneous boxes out of the way in order to roll the blackboard over to the living area and Marty sits himself down on the couch, paper and pencil in hand. “You were working on combustion reactions, right?”

“Uh—yeah, I think so.” Emmett writes the equation down on the board as Einstein decides he, too, wants to hear the lesson and takes a seat on the couch, ever the attentive student. It has been years since he gave a lecture like this, even one as unofficial and impromptu as this, but he finds he slides back into the role of instructor quite easily, old habits returning with each stroke against the board.

His explanations are careful, methodical, and Marty has always been more of a visual learner, he’s noticed, easily picking up on things that are shown to him rather than learning through mindless lectures being thrown at him, so he accompanies his explanations with drawings, breakdowns of each individual molecule.

Once he’s arrived at the answer with all the work to show for it on the board, he turns back to Marty, finding the kid flopped over on the couch using Einstein’s back as a pillow. Emmett lifts the study sheet off his lap, grabs the pencil off the ground, and looks over the problems he’d already solved.

They’re all correct.