#i think out of all of those the ones that'd probably actually freak verne out the most is the thing

[doctorbrown]

MCFLY JULY ‘24 ⸺ 「 2 / 31 * VIDEO RENTAL 」

“Uncle Marty! Hey!” Verne’s shout is more a hushed whisper carving into his back and it took two increasingly sharper shouts to properly pull his attention away from the back of Doc’s head as he followed him down the hall toward the lab where something secret lay in wait.

Come here! Verne beckons him over with an enthusiastic wave and Marty can see the irritation writing itself across his face, clear as day. Whatever it is, it’s either urgent or important, and Marty looks between him and Doc, needing only a moment to contemplate his next course of action.

“You go on ahead, Doc. I’ll catch up with you in a minute.”

“Sure,” comes the immediate reply without so much as a poke or a prod into what might have come up. “You know where the lab is. If you happen to see Clara, tell her it’s almost ready.”

Despite his mounting confusion, Marty readily agrees and Doc disappears down the hall without so much as a glance back over his shoulder.

“Good—you didn’t make Dad suspicious.” Marty knits his brows together, immediately catching on to the tell-tale signs of adolescence—sneaking around, not wanting your parents to find out about the things you were doing…

He’s been seeing more and more of himself in Verne at that age.

God help me and Jen when Ellie and Emmett are teenagers…

“So you know my birthday’s in a week, right Uncle Marty?”

That tone of voice makes him already certain of where this conversation is going before he even has to ask. Next week, Verne will be thirteen, and whatever he’s about to ask him about is something that Doc and Clara would either be vehemently against him having or something he thinks he can’t ask them for. “What do you want me to get you that you don’t want Doc and Clara to know about?”

Verne’s eyes go comically wide and in the span of a single minute, nearly the entire spectrum of human emotion flickers across his face, making it perfectly clear Marty had got it right on the first guess. He attempts—and fails—to play it off, the attempt at teenage indifference coming off horribly forced.

“It’s nothing bad, if that’s what you’re thinking.” Marty gives him a look. “Really! A couple of my friends were talking about a movie marathon—we wanna watch a bunch of horror films.” Verne jams his hand into his pocket and pulls out a sheet of paper folded in half and wrinkled.

“Eddie’s letting us watch at his place; we just need to get the films. And since none of us are old enough to get ‘em, I was thinking maybe you could, Uncle Marty.” “Uh-huh…” comes the non-committal reply as Marty unfolds the paper, reading through the five titles written there. The Exorcist, Alien, The Thing, Nightmare on Elm Street… “Jesus, Verne, you want to watch all of these? In one night? Some of these are seriously creepy—you’re not going to be able to sleep for a month!”

Verne waves a hand, puffing out his chest and grinning with all the confidence and arrogance of a teenager—almost—who thinks he’s impervious to anything and everything life could throw at him. For a split second, Marty is staring at an almost exact copy of himself when he was young, arguing with Dave that he wasn’t some stupid kid anymore, he was an adult. “They’re just movies, Uncle Marty. They’re not real.”

“Uh-huh…” If Verne catches the obvious scepticism dripping from his tone, he never comments on it.

Though it's hard to imagine anything more terrifying than time-travel and the constant fear that even the smallest mistake carried twice the destructive power of a nuclear weapon, with the potential to wipe out everything and everyone you ever knew or cared about—

“Please? I can’t ask Mom or Dad about this because Mom would say they’re too violent and you know Dad; if Mom puts her foot down, he’ll go along with it, even if he’d say yes on his own.”

“You’ve got a point there.” Marty folds up the list and stuffs it into his pants pocket. “I can’t see Doc ever saying no because it’s too scary. Yeah, he’s not a big fan of violence and I don’t think he’s ever really liked horror films—I remember him saying once they were all poorly made and very predictable—but that wouldn’t sway his opinion.” If anything, he’s almost certain Doc would let him watch it and even sit and suffer through the film with him to turn it into a valuable lesson.

Verne’s eyes sparkle. “So you’ll do it? You’ll get ‘em for us?”

“Alright, alright.” Something tells me I’m gonna regret this. He finds himself mentally apologising to Doc and Clara already. “I’ll bring them by in a couple of days.”

“You’re the best, Uncle Marty!”