Merry Christmas Eve, everyone! I have the penultimate post of Part II here for your holiday reading pleasure, and I'm hoping to give you the epilogue by New Year's Eve. I would love to hear what you've thought of this adventure and hope to see you in the upcoming installments! Til then, enjoy!

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
That Was Then

Saturday, November 12, 1955
9:41 PM

Marty had made a sport of hitching rides off the back ends of vehicles. The goal was never the same since the destination usually was. He was either going to school, to Doc's, or home, so the in-between was where he made his games. The challenge was that he knew the behaviors of certain cars now. That was good for a direct line to school when he was running late, but he sought out the unfamiliar, seeing if he could catch only white cars all the way to his house or surpass his record of eight swaps in one trip.

Admittedly, when he met the eyes of the driver in their rearview mirror, they weren't thrilled to see him. Some cars just didn't allow for a low profile. Several bumpers had almost fallen off at his touch, and one time, he made the mistake of hitching onto a Pinto with Tiff Tannen in the passenger seat. Luckily, he bailed before she made her boyfriend slam on the brakes. He hadn't touched a Pinto since.

Trying not to think about what would happen if Biff saw him in his rearview mirror, Marty braced himself against the wind, guiding himself along the Mole Richardson cables mounted on the fender to the impressively small gap between the two cars. The sulfury stink of the De Luxe's exhaust was thrust up his nose.

Doc carefully inched the DeLorean even closer to Biff's bumper. Emma was on her knees in the passenger seat, awed at her father's steady hand keeping them in tandem with the De Luxe. She tried to somehow see around the windshield, craning her neck at extreme angles as Marty let go of the time machine and stumbled onto the taillights. Emma instinctively hunched when Biff's head started swiveling at the ensuing thud.

Emma's head emerged from her shoulders when Marty gave them the thumbs up. Transfer successful. Doc reciprocated the gesture firmly before steering them away from the De Luxe and into the air. Emma wet her lips as Marty, Biff, and the almanac shrank on the road, trying to ignore the inconsistent waves of pain in her head. Doc hit the gas and banked the illuminated undercarriage of the DeLorean toward the forested hillside until they were out of sight.

"'Concussions are not an acceptable love language'?"

Emma made a face at the amusement in her father's tone.

"Well, they're not."

Biff snatched the almanac from the back seat.

Marty waited, hoping it might find its way back after Biff checked its contents against the college football scores, but it was discarded on the passenger seat. Mocking him. Again. He thought his Trig book was the most offensive book he'd ever encountered, but this thing was a demon incarnate.

"Shit."

He couldn't just reach over the door for it now, but he might be able to crack the door open, snake his hand in, and get it that way. Biff just had the car serviced after chasing him through town square on a makeshift skateboard the previous Tuesday. Marty would wager that Biff took better care of it than he did himself, almost guaranteeing the door was well-oiled and would not give him away with a dry, metal-on-metal creak.

The door handle did emit a tiny squeak that made him wince, but the hinges were silent. Biff's eyes were on the road, still smoldering menacingly as the blood from his nose dried around his lips. Next to him on the seat bench, not an inch from his thigh, the almanac spotted Marty. The corners of its pages waved at him.

Marty slowly brought his arm up. Holding his breath, he invaded the monster's den. His fingertips cried out when they touched the edge of the smooth cover – and so did Biff.

"You again?!"

Emma caught the time circuits display blinking out of the corner of her eye. She frowned at the obscure date. Doc hit the console again as they passed over the tunnel, and the correct date was reinstated.

"I thought you fixed that."

"So did I."

Emma took the drooping carnation out of her hair, gathered her loose flyaways out of her face, and pinned them down with the flower again as she stole glances at the dark landscape.

"Well, what's wrong with it?"

"If I knew –"

"It would be fixed, I know."

"I'll look at it as soon as we get Marty," Doc said, turning the DeLorean to see the end of the tunnel in wait of said assistant. "We won't risk the time jump home. Not after everything we've been through."

The jarring screech of tires brought Emma over his shoulder to look out his window towards the source of the sound. Below, the rear end of the De Luxe whirled out of the tunnel, brake lights streaking through the night. It jostled side to side when it came to rest. Emmett felt his daughter's grip clamp down on his arm. Marty was nowhere to be seen.

"Where is he?" Emma asked, already knowing the answer to her own question.

The instinctive alarm Doc experienced in the lab of 1985A washed over him. Cold dread suspended his heart in his throat. Marty was in danger, far greater danger than he anticipated. If he didn't do something, he would have the kid's death on his conscience again.

Doc flipped a switch, turned the DeLorean back the way they came, and floored it.

After nearly being crushed by several walls and a truck and suffering several blows to his already throbbing face, Marty had Gray's Sports Alamac in his possession with an incredible, inverted arc over the De Luxe.

He smiled at the book in the center of the road, triumphant. An imaginary fanfare rang in his ears. As wonderful as it felt to hold the almanac for the first time and feel its possibilities instantly enrich his dead-end future, it was nothing compared to the ripple of rightness coursing through his hands at that moment.

He did it. He got the book.

I got the book, Dad.

But Biff, once again, stood between him and his ride home.

The De Luxe squared up at the end of the tunnel, bathing him in a stretch of light teeming with treacherous intentions. Marty's smile waned until he looked over his shoulder – then, it vanished. The gray and white tunnel elongated around him, industrial sconces yawning down either side to a hole the size of his fist. The De Luxe snarled behind him and multiplied the distance with the fear it instilled in its prey. Behind the wheel, Biff's eyes were maniacal, black with the crazed intensity of a supervillain.

Marty stuffed the almanac back into his jacket and found his balance on the hoverboard. He kicked away the air separating him from certain doom. The hoverboard was slow getting up to the speed he experienced in 2015. Its hum took longer to sing at the appropriate pitch, and Marty heard Doc's voice in his head theorizing that it had something to do with the amount of moisture contained in the confined space. Enough of it could render the board useless.

Come on, McFly. Move.

The De Luxe growled over and over, licking its chops.

Watching and waiting.

Toying with him.

Then, Biff yanked the gearshift, and the tires squealed. The De Luxe howled.

Marty pumped his leg harder. The engine's fury reverberated with such lethal ferocity that Marty swore he felt the electromagnetic field beneath the hoverboard being displaced. His arms wobbled out at his sides, trying to maintain his balance. But as the De Luxe bore down on him, Marty knew he was only outracing the truth: his little pink hoverboard didn't stand a chance.

Enraged, the black beast shrieked again, bounding after him.

A panicked yell straggled out of Marty as his kicks grew desperate. He hunkered down on his left leg, putting every ounce of strength he had into his escape. His leg and abdomen burned horribly, but he churned through each rotation of his hip like a machine.

This was survival hijacking his body from him. He was amazed at how uninvolved he was in the process. His mind kept finding just that much more despite the fact that exhaustion and defeat had already clawed away his constitution, begging for this exertion to end.

Biff's laugh could not be heard over the powerful engine's sonance, but Marty's mind filled it in, amplifying it from the low chuckle on the casino hotel rooftop to a diabolical cackle. Marty outright screamed.

Soon, his ankle would be caught under the car's bumper, the De Luxe viciously sinking its teeth into him. Hopefully, when it happened, it would be quick. He didn't want to tumble out of this mauling just conscious enough to be in excruciating pain.

The De Luxe opened its jaws wide. Heat rushed up under the cuffs of Marty's jeans. The walls of his throat stuck together, bone dry from his labored breathing. The strap on the hoverboard didn't give him the ease of leaping through the car as he did in the town square last week, but a dramatic finish was at hand.

A light appeared in the middle of the road – a spotlight directing him downstage for his big finale. Just as he began to superimpose his chalk outline in the center of it, an unbelievably familiar string of pennants fell in front of him. Marty lunged for the lifeline and was immediately extracted from the De Luxe's path.

"Go, Doc!"

"Hold on, Marty!"

Marty squinted up into the kaleidoscope of lights on the underside of the DeLorean. Doc's wild hair danced on the edge of the aura. Emmett decelerated to stabilize the rope, but he kept Marty a good ten feet off the ground, safely out of reach of any motor vehicles. As a gust of wind sideswiped the DeLorean, the De Luxe screamed. Emma leapt to her side of the car and threw her door open for a less obstructed view, gripping her seat as she leaned out.

Her mouth hung agape at the divine presence of the manure truck. It unloaded its haul on impact, burying Biff and his beautiful car for the second time that week in a flawless cascade of the finest fertilizer this side of the Sierra Nevada. Marty's cheer freed the giggle trapped behind her widening smile.

He'd heard her amused grunts and inelegant snorts a hundred different ways by now – a favorite punchline in a rerun, Einstein chasing his tail for attention, another bite of a rubber band on his skin. But her laugh was the real deal, raw and silvery, showering over him like powdered gold as he looked up again.

Everything was looking up again.

"Are you okay?" she called.

"I am now!"

The front end of the DeLorean bucked in another sudden gust.

Marty wrapped the cord around his arm for extra support. The hoverboard continued to carry him despite how high off the ground he was, and he had a death grip on the string of pennants just in case the strap over his back foot slipped off. He twisted out of the way of a rogue branch as they cut across a dark patch of vegetation. He dared Biff to follow them through this tangle of brush right before a thunderstorm.

"Thirty seconds to the billboard," Doc said, further reducing their speed. Emma relayed the message to Marty, and his face slackened with relief as they came up on it; his muscles were quivering and wouldn't be able to hold on much longer.

When they were over pavement once more, Marty unwrapped his arm from around the rope and timed his landing. The hoverboard's standard electromagnetic field was reestablished a few inches off the ground, and Marty trusted the resistance, letting it bear his weight as his other foot touched down. Doc wasn't the premier pilot of the fleet, but he got him to safety in one piece despite the abundant lightning vying for his attention.

"Close the door," he said to Emma, doing so with his wing as he struggled to control the DeLorean in the rising winds. She grabbed the door handle and shouted down to Marty over a roll of thunder.

"We'll be down in just a sec!"

A blast of wind suddenly hit her from behind. She gasped, gripping the door jamb while clutching at the back of her head as the carnation was torn from her hair. Its petals fluttered rapidly all the way to the ground, ten feet from where Marty stood.

"Close the door!"

Emma finally obeyed as the DeLorean was tossed about in the sky. Lightning lurked in the clouds around them, making Emma shrink into her seat. Thunder rattled the equipment around her, and she looked back at the flux capacitor, scrutinizing its pulse for any irregularities. She bounced in her seat when the wind hit them from two different directions at once.

"Whoa!"

"Damn it."

A heavy, metal shuddering from behind. Emma's eyes darted from window to window, unsettled by the noise. They were a toy boat in an ocean of lightning.

"I want down now."

"Just sit tight," Emmett said through gritted teeth. He wrangled the wheel. "We have to do this right."

"Doc! Is everything all right? Over."

Emma pushed her feet into the floor as evenly as possible to brace herself as her father picked up the walkie-talkie from the dash.

"10-4, Marty, but it's pretty miserable flying weather." He shot Emma a look at her derisive huff. "Too turbulent to make a landing from this direction. I'll have to circle around and make a long approach from the south."

Another strong gust. Emma gripped the door handle.

"Why can't we just hover straight down?"

"From the direction and speed the storm is coming, the winds would upend us," Doc said. His shoulder was starting to get sore from repeatedly hitting the window. "We're too close to it, or I would be on the ground already."

He pressed the "talk" button on the radio again.

"Have you got the book?" he asked Marty.

Emma drew up to her window as her side of the DeLorean spun to face Marty. He could fit in the palm of her hand at this distance. Hair whipping wildly, he opened his black leather jacket and produced the almanac, shaking the trophy up in the air to show it to them.

"In my hand, Doc! I got it in my hand!"

"Burn it!"

Marty's hand went to his front pants pocket at the command, remembering the matchbook he'd taken from Biff's office in 1985A. He could do it.

"Check!"

Even as part of him wondered how he was going to keep the tiny, innocent flame of a matchbook match alive in the sustained near-gale, Marty kicked the hoverboard up into his hand and dashed over to the billboard. Behind it, in the DeLorean's honorary parking spot, Marty stretched for the crumpled bucket next to Doc's bicycle and threw it between his knees on the other side.

The almanac whispered to him the same way it did when he first saw it in the antique shop's storefront. Promises of fame, fortune, and untold wealth – more money than any silly, little side gig as a rock star would bring in. He could travel the world. He could take care of his family. He could build Doc the most advanced laboratory and give Emma everything, including a mansion for each month of the year, if she wanted. Glittering beaches and gleaming guitars lining every wall in his house. Yachts and fireworks and parties and The Marty McFly Museum.

He'd put the De Luxe at the entrance, too.

Covered in shit.

Marty slowly placed the almanac into the bucket. Miraculously, shielded only by his cupped hands, he kept the first match he struck alight. He tucked it under the crinkled pages and urged the flame to ignite the book until the fire kissed his fingertips. He dropped the match into the bottom of the bucket.

It caught.

Fire fanned over the cover, robust and hot. Marty fell back on his haunches with a great sigh. The smell of incinerating statistics was inky yet crisp, enriched by the glossy cover and the fears he cast away from his mind. When his eyes drifted to the transforming text on the matchbook, a baseball between the eyes couldn't have hit harder. It changed before his eyes, just like the newspaper of 2015.

Biff's "Pleasure Paradise" morphed into "Auto Detailing", the name of the business Biff owned in his 1985. Marty's breath hitched. That meant 1985A was gone – because they had reinstated the correct timeline. Elsewise, the matchbook would have evaporated from existence entirely.

Eyes wide, Marty reached into his back pocket. The newspaper article about his father's murder was still there, trembling in the gusts as he unfolded the page. He reeled when he read the unchanged headline, that his father was still murdered. But as he began to vehemently deny the words – they fixed it, God damnit; how could he still be dead? – those words, too, revised themselves.

GEORGE MCFLY HONORED

A dam broke in his chest and flooded him the certainty of success. The almanac began to blacken and flake next to him, motionless and silent as it was consumed by the effervescent flames. When the headline was fully opaque, Marty's elation made him spring to his feet and run into the road, voice louder than the next booming thunderclap.

"Doc! Doc, that newspaper's changed!" Marty cried through the radio. "Doc, my father's alive! That means everything's back to normal, right?"

Emmett immediately seized the newspaper sticking out from behind the passenger seat. Mental Ward B transformed into the Mayor's Office. The two orderlies restraining him in a straitjacket became the dean and a representative from the university, shaking his hand as he was commended for his work during his tenure with a grant.

Over the top of the newspaper, he saw Emma reach for the Disneyland photo she'd left on the dash after the cemetery. As Dolores faded from the bench, Emma swallowed the emotion that crept into the bottom of her throat. She flashed a sad, subdued smile at her father. Emmett gently laid his large hand over her wrist, met her eye, and squeezed.

"Mission accomplished," he whispered.

Emma nodded. She exhaled soundly and refilled her lungs with new air. Her father had said they must succeed, and succeed they did. This was how it was supposed to be. That she even knew a woman her mother could be for twenty minutes was a gift, even if she was scary in a scary way. But now, Emma was content to resume knowing her through her father's stories for the sake of the space-time continuum. She liked that version of her mother better anyway.

Doc regained control of the wheel as he lifted the radio again to answer Marty. Lightning strobed around them chaotically.

"That's right, Marty! It's the ripple effect!" he confirmed as Emma's smile brightened. "The future is back, so let's go home!"

"Right, Doc! Let's get our asses back to the fu—"

Emma screamed as a huge lightning bolt cracked across the sky. Its blue-white current encompassed her, whiting out her field of vision before obliterating a tree opposite the billboard. Emma's stomach heaved as the DeLorean dropped several feet then quickly swooped back up from her father jerking the wheel. She blinked away the blindness and pressed herself into the window, trying to see if Marty was okay. He was on the ground, but he wasn't under the burning hunk of tree.

A burst of static over the radio. "Doc, Doc! Are you guys okay?"

Emmett's fingers were going numb from how tightly he held the wheel. "That was a close one, Marty! I almost bought the farm."

Two more opposing gusts hit one right after the other. Doc threw the walkie-talkie up on the dash by the digital speedometer to get both hands on the wheel when a third nearly rolled them. Emma was pushing herself so deeply into the back of her seat that she would become part of it before long.

"Just land!"

"I'm trying!"

Marty sensed their struggle escalating in his chest. The winds were pitching the DeLorean to and fro, reckless and volatile. Marty had to compete with the deafening claps of thunder to shout over the airwaves, "Well, be careful! You don't want to get struck by lightning—"

The rest, they say, is history.

Every supercharged molecule of the storm descended on the DeLorean in a cacophony of electrical zaps, squeaks, and pops. An explosion with all the brilliance of an atomic bomb and depth of a sonic boom threw Marty on his back, arm raised to shield his eyes. Then, the air sucked back in on itself, the schwoom of a vacuum closing. A pair of swirled fire trails curled amongst the smoke and dispersed into a haze where the DeLorean had been.

Marty sat up, startled at the absence of the time machine. It wasn't to the left or right or above or below. No wreckage, no sound but the now-lifeless whistles of wind; whatever just happened to the DeLorean, it seemed to have taken all of the storm's brawn with it. He got to his feet, staggering towards the spot he last saw them as he tried to radio Doc.

"Doc? Do you read me? Over."

And over. And over.

Each silence roared in his ears louder than the last. Stunned still, Marty's gut wrenched painfully as the pennant rope that had been attached to the steering column of the DeLorean snaked its way out of the sky and dropped with a wet smack into the street.

Marty stared at the empty sky.

No.

The smoking end of the cord in his hand was like something out of a dream.

"Oh, no."

How many awful dreams had he lived through this week?

Rain came with the next roll of thunder. The patters on his shoulders cemented his reality, and he blinked up into the downpour. At his feet, amongst the coil of multicolored pennants, was the pink carnation Emma wore in her hair. Its delicate ruffles wilted in the heavy rain, defeated and dying from the inundation. Marty knelt, cupping its silken remains in his other hand.

They're gone.

He repeated the words aloud to make himself understand, exacerbating the peril driven into him with each unforgiving raindrop: "They're gone."

Sharp, infrequent gasps escaped him as his diaphragm spasmed in confusion. The confusion gave way to panic; what the hell was he supposed to do now? The time machine disappeared before his very eyes without warning, taking Doc and Emma with it. Did the lightning cause them to accidentally time jump? That's what happened the last time lightning struck the DeLorean.

He scrambled through his disjointed thoughts, trying to piece together something logical. That's all it was – a time jump. Not routine, but 1.21 gigawatts and all that jazz… The entire plan they had concocted and perfected over last week happened instantly, at the will of the universe.

But what happened if a time jump was attempted without first setting a destination time? Did that make the DeLorean disintegrate? Did it go back to their previous destination, like a default setting? If that were the case, and the almanac's ruin restored their timeline, the DeLorean would appear in the sky right down the street from his house in 1985, wouldn't it? Emma said the time circuits were already set to go home. They could just… come back.

Because he refused to believe they had just been irrevocably taken from his life like that.

Where are you, Doc?

They had to be somewhere.

His soft palette began to sting.

…Emma.

The weight of a distant light blanketed his back, glistening for a moment on the red pennant below his fist. The monotone drone of an approaching vehicle gave him a shred of hope before a spike of fear made him spin around; had Biff somehow gotten out of that pile of manure and driven out here to finish him off for good? The silhouette of the car behind him bore a striking resemblance with its round headlights and curved body style at first glance.

But it was an entirely different car. The windshield wipers flung the rain away from the dark figure in the driver's seat, but Marty couldn't make out a face. If it was Biff, his mind might implode. Drenched, frightened, and alone, Marty gulped as the man got out of the car. The storm opened up then, and the lightning revealed a stranger calling him by his real name over the thunder.

His heart hammered.

"Is your name Marty McFly?"

Doc's voice floated through his mind, Emma's overlapping his. At their urging, Marty narrowed his eyes at the man and answered in the affirmative as rain ran into his mouth.

"Yeah."

The man rolled his shoulders and came forward. Marty stood his ground, fighting his instincts. The man looked to be about to pull a gun on him, but Doc's presence in his mind demanded he stay put and trust this person in the fedora and trench coat.

So, he did.

"I've got something for you."

Quite unexpectedly, the man produced a protected document.

"A letter."