#like - other dimensional counterparts existing on other worldlines

[doctorbrown]

MCFLY JULY ‘24 ⸺ 「 17 / 31 * DAVE'S NIGHT OFF 」

March 3, 1986, Twin Pines Timeline(β)

Five months since Marty’s sudden disappearance. 

Linda doesn’t even have to pretend she doesn’t know exactly where she’ll find Dave when he’s not at home. If he’s not working, busting his ass taking whatever job that pays so he can keep funnelling it into the supplies to stock this cursed garage, he’s hunched over on the couch, buried up to his brain in papers that may as well be written in Greek for all he can read them. 

It’s the same place he spends most of his free time these days; surrounded by ghosts and a couple of Mom’s swiped bottles of vodka.

Not like she notices when a couple of them go missing. 

Dave once said he could hear Marty in here. Like he was still alive. Still here, because Marty’s not dead. He’s somewhere, God-only-knows, but he’s not dead because they only found one body in that parking lot and Marty had to be there because he was Doctor Brown’s fucking shadow—but since Marty’s body wasn’t there, just that truck and that poor dog—Einstein or Edison or whatever; some dead scientist—lying next to the body, according to the cops, that meant someone must have kidnapped him.

They're faint echoes, Linda, he'd said, three-quarters deep into a bottle, but he sounds happy.  

It sounds like bullshit, but it's far more than anything they have at the moment.

And it means, regardless of however tightly she has to wring her own heart to get even a single drop of hope out of it, there's a chance Marty is still alive. 

“How long have you been here today?” Dave pretends not to hear her. Or maybe he wilfully ignores her. Once, she knew how to tell. “Dave, face it. T—”  

“Shut the fuck up, Linda,” Dave snaps, and it takes every ounce of her resolve not to march up to him and slap him in the face for that. 

It’s grief that made him an asshole. It isn’t him. It has a way of burrowing into the deepest, most vulnerable parts of a person and poisoning them from the inside out until they were but shadows of their former selves. 

It’s already hollowed her out, stuffed her full of ice and made a cold, heartless bitch out of her until she was numb to the world. She figured that out when her mother’s broken sobs didn't spear her through the heart like they used to. As if it was her fault.

Why weren't you nicer to him that night?

That shouldn’t be an excuse. But she lets it be for Dave’s sake, and her own, because maybe, as fucking crazy as it sounds, they’ll just find that one in a million breakthrough scattered in the ramblings of a dead man. 

Who apparently claims he learned to leap through time. 

Some good that did him if it was true. He’s buried in Oak Park Cemetery, looking like Swiss cheese. Wasn’t time-travel supposed to help prevent exactly that?  

Maybe it could have saved Marty.  

Maybe it’s exactly what stole Marty away from them.  

“They’re going to tear this place down, Dave. In two weeks! T-w-o. And they’re not going to stop the bulldozers because you’re glued to that fucking couch. What good are you going to be dead? Do you know what that’s going to do to Mom?” She puts her hands on her hips and might have inwardly shuddered at how much she sounded like Mom if she had the energy.  

With Marty gone, she didn’t expect to be an older sister again. 

After a long, tense silence, she finally sighs. She didn’t come here to fight. “Did you eat anything today?” He’s swimming in his T-shirts now; they’re all but falling off his shoulders.  

Dave huffs, dragging his fingers through his shaggy hair. “Jen left about twenty minutes ago; she’s grabbing Chinese. You know, that place...where...”

Yeah. I know.

“I gave her some money. Then we’re gonna go back to this.” He spreads his arms, gesturing to the mess of paperwork that makes just as much sense as it did four and a half months ago.

“Are you staying?”

Linda says yes because a part of her, too, is trapped within these four walls.