The Other Me

A/N: This one-shot is about Marty pondering the (brief) existence of his counterpart in 1985-A. Chronologically speaking, it fits in sometime early in third film, between the time Doc and Marty uncover the Delorean, and the time Marty travels back to 1885...though of course, the precise time setting isn't really important to understanding the story.

There wasn't really much to do in 1955 this time round. Doc had suggested, and Marty had agreed, that it would be best if he confined himself to Doc's house and garage. After all the tampering the space-time continuum had endured in the past several days, they had both decided it would be best if Marty ensured that this time, his interference in this era would be negligible.

So he would spend most of his time serving as a lab assistant to Doc, helping him fix the recently unearthed Delorean, while at other times, he would read up on the Old West from the books Doc had borrowed for him from the library, specifically on Hill Valley's history at the time. After all, given his immediate plans to travel back to 1885, it would be best if he familiarised himself with the era to some extent.

But Marty couldn't read and help work on the Delorean all the time. So, inevitably, his mind would often wander. And it was but natural that his mind would wander most on his unforgettable, almost unbelievable, mishaps in time.

He thought often about his family, the 'new' happier version of his family, whom he remembered pretty well by now. He sometimes spared a thought for his 'old' family, now erased from existence, no more than a faint memory at the back of his mind. He thought about the future; both the technological wonders of 2015 and the excruciatingly painful weakness of his future son.

But, he realised that often, his subconscious mind gravitated towards a far more disturbing subject-namely, the hellishly horrifying, positively dystopian reality he had returned from just a few day ago; or as Doc had labelled it, '1985-A'.

He hadn't told this Doc (the Emmett Brown of 1955) about that horrible world; he knew Doc didn't want to learn anything more about the future than necessary, even a future that had been averted. So Marty was left alone to the nightmares he had of that world-of bikers, and polluted air, of a Mob shooting at Strickland's house and of the smashed cars and the overall carnage; and most of all, of Biff's Pleasure Paradise that was in fact anything but pleasurable, and the horrors that version of his mother had suffered under the rich and corrupt Biff Tannen.

But even more than any of that, he had off late become perturbed by the plight of one particular resident of that horrifying, and now thankfully erased, reality-himself.

The Marty McFly of 1985-A.

Though there had been no sign of him, Marty knew that another version of him had existed in that reality. After all, with the Doc of that reality in an asylum, that Marty wouldn't have been able to travel back in time on October 26th 1985, and would therefore still have been in the present on the day he and his Doc and Jennifer had arrived back from the future. Someone was attending a school in Switzerland, that was for certain...

So Marty often found himself consumed by curiosity about this 'other him'-a Marty McFly, who, at the tender age of five, had known the anguish and grief of losing a father; who had spent his growing years under the iron fist and abusive care of Biff Tannen; who had been separated from what remained of his family and shipped off to boarding school...a Marty who had probably never befriended Doc, probably never even met Jennifer...a sad, lonely and depressed teenager who probably spent every night praying for deliverance from his hellish existence, if indeed there was a God in that God-forsaken reality.

What troubled Marty even more, in hindsight, was something which should have in fact re-assured him-he had already delivered 'the other him' from his miserable existence by burning the Almanac and restoring the normal timeline...in fact, he had erased that entire hellish reality forever, and in doing so, erased a version of himself! There was perhaps no escaping the fact that he had arguably killed a version of himself...perhaps that wasn't the way it would be explained scientifically speaking, but it was how he sometimes felt, when he pondered about the other version of him.

He tried to reassure himself by reminding himself of the fact that the 'other Marty' was merely the product of a skewed timeline; a hypothetical version of himself who was in fact never meant to be; given life in a shattered space-time continuum by Old Biff. But that didn't alter the fact that, for Marty at least, this other version of himself had existed during those few hours in which he had visited 1985-A. In fact, it only made things worse...he, Marty, by giving Biff the idea of using the Almanac in the first place, was indirectly responsible for creating a version of himself forced to endure a living nightmare, only to snuff out the existence of that other self...there was some part of him which, against all logic and reason, felt the burden of guilt for what he'd done...what he'd had to do to preserve his own reality...

He sometimes found himself wondering about the 'other Marty'. Did he have the same tastes in music? Possible, but perhaps unlikely, given his vastly different upbringing. Did he skateboard? That seemed definitely unlikely-no one in his or her right mind would skateboard through the crime-ridden streets of that 'Hell Valley'. Perhaps most pertinent of all-did the other Marty even consider the possibility of time travel? Had he ever believed that if time travel were possible, the hellish existence he had endured all his life could be erased, as though it had never happened? Had he ever sensed that his entire life as he knew it was itself a product of mis-used time travel? That seemed unlikely in the extreme, but Marty could not but help remain curious.

Ultimately, what bothered him was that whoever and whatever the Marty McFly of 1985-A had been, there was no one to remember him; not even the space-time continuum itself. He had been but a possibility; the result of a hypothetical chain of events that would now no longer come to pass. There remained not even an imprint of him on the fabric of the universe...he was gone; gone such that he'd never even been there.

And that only made Marty wish that there was some way the daily struggles and torments of this other Marty had in some way been preserved. He wished that he had found out more about his other self before erasing 1985-A. That there was virtually no time to do so was a consideration he often overlooked. Sometimes, he even found himself wishing that he somehow, by the miracles of the ripple effect, remembered the life of the other Marty. That was not an entirely unrealistic hope-after all, he did remember, albeit more faintly now, the life he had 'originally' led before he first time travelled, that had now also been erased. But somehow, the universe had decreed that not one trace of 1985-A was to remain...not even the memories of one of its unfortunate denizens.

Well, there wasn't much Marty could do about it anyway. All he could do was look to the future, not to the past. Kind of ironic, that; considering that the past he was pondering about lay thirty years in the future, and his immediate future was concerned with travelling back to the past...but this was reality for him now; it would continue to be until he returned to his own time for good.

So he would try not to think too much about the 'other Marty'...and hope that in time, the nightmares of 1985-A would fade away much like the words 'GEORGE MCFLY MURDERED' had...