Welcome to Part 2.5 of the Time Circuits Series, in which we follow Doc and Emma through their eight months in 1885 before Marty shows up. This will be a novella-length companion piece, and it'll be updated at a more leisurely rate while I get Part 3 ready for summer-ish. Please enjoy and drop me a line! Welcome to 1885!

JANUARY
From Time to Time

Thursday, January 1, 1885
5:26 AM

A small, northern Californian town in the shadow of the Sierra Nevada mountains, Hill Valley was emerging from its infancy in 1885. A new generation gathered around their grandfathers' Civil War stories and followed their father's assertions of gold in these parts. Hill Valley was rumored to have a thick vein of silver, and that was enough to turn a prospector's camp into a hardy community.

It came with your standard saloon, stables, and Sunday preacher. Dedicated working men outside of the mining game made their businesses in farming, transportation, livestock, and carpentry. It had recently earned a stop on the line, new platform and all, and the commitment to the town's longevity was solidified with the new courthouse being erected across from the saloon.

Hill Valley also had a modest inn at the time, one in which Emmett rented them a room before daybreak.

The room was tidy but crowded – a double bed with an aged patchwork quilt, fireplace, writing desk, and a chest of drawers. There was also a basin for washing up on top of the bureau, curtains on the window, and two oil lamps.

Once inside, Emmett got a fire going. Its heat graciously warmed the space enough that Emma could endure it in her frosty satin dress without being bundled up in her father's black overcoat. She took it off and handed it back to him when he rose off bended knee, satisfied with the healthy pops and cracks of the burning wood.

"I have to go for a while," Doc said, putting his coat back on. "I don't want you leaving this room."

Emma's stomach churned. She didn't want him out of her sight.

"Go where?"

"I'll bring back clothes first," he said, taking inventory of the items in his pockets. "Then I have to find a way" – he frowned at his wristwatch – "to secure the DeLorean. I'll likely be gone the rest of the day seeing to that. Do not open this door for anyone but me."

Emma nodded vacantly, eyes wondering around the room again. Another wave of unease crested within, and she slid her bare arms over her abdomen. Some privacy to digest what was happening didn't sound so bad. She needed some time alone, time to force a good cry so it was out of the way and she could think straight. It had been rising in the back of her throat for an hour now, stinging her eyes and clawing at her composure.

"Emma."

Her breath hitched, a sharp sniff as she looked up at him. Doc gently laid his hands on her shoulders and drew her to him, and her shuddering sigh reverberated through his ribcage. The side of his face dropped to the top of her head as she put her arms around him under the coat. He stared at the post at the foot of the bed, feeling the shape of her small hands on his back. He spoke into her hair.

"It's going to be alright."

She nodded again, but it wasn't acknowledgement enough for the weight he attached to his words. Emma kissed his cheek, threw her arms up around his neck, and hid behind his shoulder from the unfamiliar world beyond the bedroom door.

"I know." Her voice was muffled against his collarbone. "There's nothing you can't do, Dad. I believe that."

Her tender reminder enveloped him with her love, and Emmett squeezed her tighter. He hadn't known he needed to hear those words in that moment, but he did, and they fortified him. The curtains on the far wall grew a shade lighter as he held her, and he swallowed before pressing a kiss to Emma's aching temple and letting her fall from her tiptoes.

"I love you."

"Love you, too."

"I'll be back. Door stays shut."

Emma sighed as the door closed on her. She followed the pattern in its woodgrain to a large knot that reminded her of the great storm raging across the face of Jupiter. She was swept up and trapped in a similar typhoon, unable to see or think or scream over its will.

It angered her that she hadn't been nearly this upset when she and Marty escaped the Libyans into 1955. What was different?

Her life wasn't on the line as it was the first time she accidentally time travelled, where the adrenaline had pushed her mind into a state of denial. It took her three days to break down over their situation in her stay room in the mansion. The fight with Marty may have been the catalyst, but it was her fear that kept the fire going through that night.

Instead of a few days' lead time, her emotions were flooding in now, unabashed and uninvited. She was out of her own time again with a brick of a time machine, and Marty was alone. He was out there, a lifetime away, staring at a black sky, probably more scared and confused than she was.

Emma stared into the fire at the foot of the bed. Her lip wrinkled.

They were supposed to be fixing the amplifier in the lab while she mentally composed her fugue essay. Walking Einstein on their way to Burger King to guilt Dave into giving them free milkshakes. Or applying new proximities to their seating arrangement on the couch as they half-watched another episode of I Dream of Jeannie, both of them too nervous and impatient to experiment with the positions of comfort that surpassed friendship.

She was about to get everything she wanted.

Emma collapsed on the edge of the bed, digging the heel of her hand into her eye as her face disintegrated.

And now I'm here.

Doc returned two hours later to find Emma balled up in the middle of the bed with the blue quilt cocooned around her. Only a lock of her hair was exposed to the gray morning light filtering through the curtains. The fire was quieting, more coals than flame, allowing the few carts and horses in the street to contribute to the ambience.

Emmett laid an armful of clothing on the edge of the bed, causing Emma to stir. She propped herself up on an elbow and squinted at the tall hat on his head from the shadows of her makeshift hood as he stretched to put another log on the fire. Her head throbbed.

"You a cowboy now?"

"I've got clothes for you here," Emmett said, separating his from hers. He put them up on the pillows, on the other side of Emma. "Simple is best for now, but it seems there are still excessive undergarments involved."

Emma sat up and leafed through the selections. Her father was notorious for making horrible choices where her wardrobe was concerned, and he didn't disappoint this time.

She held up the top of a bright blue and vibrant green plaid day dress, flabbergasted. She didn't even know colors like this coexisted on clothing in this era. A line of navy buttons halved the length of the torso.

"Where do you find this stuff?"

Emmett looked up from his pile, frowning in confusion. "What's the matter? It's a perfectly nice dress. Wool," he added, gesturing toward the blustery January air outside the window.

Emma let it go. In any event, she hardly planned to hit the social scene. That, and the other two dresses weren't eyesores. Both were of a more relaxed fit. One had tiny black and white gingham squares, and the other was a simple, solid brown. Beneath the dresses, a union suit, a chemilette, a nightgown, and an apron. A pair of boots sat on the floor by the bed.

"Something else," Doc said, pulling a thin, rectangular box out of his coat. "To help you stay occupied."

Emma threw the quilt off her shoulders and took the stiff, red paper box from him. It slid open like a matchbox. The contents rattled as she dislodged the stubborn cover, and inside she found a fountain pen and dropper. She looked back up at her father, smiling when he extended a small book of lined paper bound in black leather. She immediately recognized the comfort he offered with this gift: nothing held the intrigue of untold possibilities quite like blank paper. A place to escape.

She thumbed the soft corner of the journal. "Thank you."

"Mollie is the innkeeper's wife," Emmett said next as he stuffed his new clothes into the drawers. "I've arranged for her to bring you meals while I'm gone. Dark braid, a little taller than you," he said, flattening his hand midair to indicate her approximate height. "Her boy will leave more firewood outside the door before dinner."

"Are you sure you don't need my help?" Emma asked, getting off the bed.

Doc steadied the basin when he shut the top drawer. "I'll need your help soon enough, but for now, I need you here for my own peace of mind. Do that for me."

"Okay." She picked up the gingham dress, draped it over her arm, and turned to him at the door. "If you're not back by morning, I'm coming to find you."

"I don't see myself out long past nightfall," Emmett said, straightening his new hat in the doorway. "I'll have to at least check on the DeLorean, but most of my business will be in town otherwise."

In May of 1985, the State of Illinois Center opened in Chicago. It is a stunning contrast from surrounding properties; boxy, rectangular prisms crowned in dated art deco tolerate the sweeping slope of glass seventeen stories high in the heart of the Loop district. Met with praise and criticism alike, the unique architecture piques our interest and provides us some insight as to how one might understand a fugue.

Fugues are sound structures, reliable and pleasing. Like a tourist gazing up into the enormous skylit atrium of the State of Illinois Center, we can see a subject consistent throughout the entire work. The uniform layers of the seventeen staircases are predictable, necessary, and comforting, like the structure of a fugue. Exposition

"We'll be out of money in two weeks."

Emma put down her pen in the center of her open journal. Doc sat on the edge of the bed, facing the door after he closed it.

"And that's if I can pass off the older bills with the current ones."

Emma studied the perturbed creases in her father's face. This was really bothering him. But she needed him to help get her head on straight already, so maybe he just needed her to do the same for him. He was just overlooking a simple solution in the face of all this uncertainty. She ran her hand over her mouth, turning in her chair.

"Don't you have anything a little newer? Anything that just looks similar?"

Emmett shook his head. His eyes fixed on the same Jupiter knot Emma fell into earlier. There was plenty of Civil War-era currency, some of which he might be able to spend with the right person, but he didn't have anything else issued before the series of 1902. He could hear one of the eagle-eyed proprietors slowing as he counted his money: "Who is this… William McKinley?"

"I tried to buy a few months in the livery near the courthouse," he told her, "as somewhere to keep the DeLorean while we repaired it, but the landlord won't take the old banknotes."

"What are we going to do?" Emma asked. "We can't live in a cave with the DeLorean."

"I've got us the room until the end of next week," her father said, standing to hang his hat by the door. "By then, we'll need some form of income just to keep us fed and out of the cold."

Income? How long was he planning to be here?

"Dad, we've got to fix the time machine."

"And we need to be alive to do it," he countered readily as he stood. Her eyes rolled in frustration, thinning his patience. "I'd love to say it's an easy fix, Emma, but we may be here a while. We need to get on our feet. Survive."

Emma glowered into her journal, rapping her fingers on the desk in thought. He was right. They needed time and privacy to tear down the DeLorean and fix it, and they couldn't do that until they were living comfortably enough. She skimmed through a few ideas until her eyes grew, and she sat straight, looking to the spot under the bed where she'd hidden her pink pumps in her blue dress. She leapt up, knelt by the bed, and stretched to reach for the bundle.

"Might the landlord be interested in a trade?" she asked.

Her father looked over his shoulder when she surfaced, unfolding the satin dress on the bed. She shook a shoe in each hand, cast aside the one that didn't rattle, and upended the one that did over her hand. Two large earrings fell into her palm, and she extended them to Doc. He held out his hand curiously, having only vaguely been aware of them in the chaos of the last couple of days.

"Part of my room service uniform," she said, watching him tilt them in the firelight. "They're real."

Emmett bent his brow at the good fortune. He was quite unable to digest it. While rubies held more value than diamonds in this era, they were still a treasure to possess and would fetch a decent price. Especially with the size and clarity of the prominent stones. Did he really have Biff Tannen to thank for their salvation?

"There must be four, five carats here."

"Six," Emma corrected with peeking grin, recalling the figure she'd overheard as they groomed her in the bowels of the casino hotel. "What'll that get us?"

It got them the livery.

It would be the landlord's problem when the space-time continuum reclaimed the final remnants of 1985A and those diamonds evaporated. Their transaction was finalized before he got on a train to Baltimore, so Doc couldn't be held responsible for their disappearance when the time came. With that hurdle jumped, Doc was off to the races.

In the ten days he and Emma stayed at the inn, they spent sunup to sundown preparing the large barn for their occupancy. There wasn't much work to be done; the town's former blacksmith disappeared in the dead of night right before Christmas with too much gambling debt to his name, abandoning the shop while the fires were still hot.

The space was split nicely into thirds: the main entrance welcomed customers into the livery, the middle was a modest forge for blacksmithing, and the other side of that was to be their private living quarters once it was cleared out. Emma didn't see what made the living quarters so private; the horses had more privacy in their stalls. Outside of that, it was one big, open space.

Emma stood in what was to be the living space, mentally erecting two walls that would corner off a room for her. Her father was directing several young men in the placement of some more blacksmithing equipment and the assembly of two workbenches – one straddling the livery/ shop space and the other, the shop space and living quarters. He stood inside the large barn doors, pacing as he gave instruction so nothing would be put in that area that they couldn't move later when the DeLorean joined them.

Emma sighed at the imaginary wall. It didn't look right. It was already crooked and splintered in her mind. She wanted the seclusion, but part of her knew she wouldn't find it in this specific spot. She needed to be… more detached somehow, without leaving the barn.

She scanned the whole of the barn, spirits sinking at the prospect of having to build new walls.

Until her gaze landed on the ladder by the horse stalls and followed it up to a hayloft.

It was a decent space. Twelve feet off the ground right above the barn doors, about twice as deep as it was wide from the ladder's vantage point. The benefit of building her own walls was that she could decide how big the room would be, but she could settle for this little platform. She'd always loved the idea of sleeping in the top bunk of a bunk bed as a child, and this felt like some manifestation of that unspoken wish.

It was a small hayloft that would keep hay in reach for the three horses they intended to keep, but there was a bigger loft on the other end of the barn she would promise to tend in exchange for this space. She'd have room for a mattress and a trunk of clothes. She'd find ways to utilize the space. Instead of walls, she could hang a rail along the perimeter for drapes. Get a pulley system going for things she couldn't carry up and down the ladder. Maybe even lay a rug to insulate the floor from the huge doors below.

This might not be so bad, she thought. At least she wouldn't share a wall with her dad.

"Emma, dear?"

She walked to the edge of the platform at her father's call, holding fast to the post by the ladder.

"Yeah?"

Emmett's expression shifted. The question on his tongue receded when he saw the distinct, bright eyes of brainstorming announce her intentions. His mind was made up for him, but her innocent excitement shined and sought honorary permission. His lips pulled to the side in thought. The condition of the underside of the loft and its three open sides was acceptable for hay, but as a bedroom?

"You'll fall."

"I'll nail some boards up," she said, painting imaginary rails from one corner to the other with a wave of her hand. "Haul up an empty trunk or two for my stuff, a mattress –"

"What's wrong with a bed on the ground floor?"

"I get to sleep in a bed on the ground floor the rest of my life. Let me have this."

Emmett put his hands on his hips and stepped out of the path of the boys bringing in the bathtub. If she woke up and forgot where she was or misjudged the space in the dark, there was no emergency room to set her broken bones, provide effective pain relief, or prevent and treat major infections. He may be the most medically knowledgeable man in the entire county right now. But this did give her something to put her energy into, even if for a short time. She hadn't looked more herself in weeks.

"You sleep down here until it's to my liking."

She obeyed for the one night it was required of her. Over the weekend, they nailed up two sets of boards around the perimeter, and Emma hung the rail of privacy curtains she wanted. It ran the spectrum of beiges, comprised of crudely sewn-together sections of canvas and sacks. Another layer of boards reinforced the floor underneath the loft. Then, with the rug and mattress and trunks hauled up into place, Emma set to making the space her own.

At the top of the ladder, she pushed a crate to the right, up against the wall. It was covered with the remnants of a flour sack before she pushed the length of the mattress up against the wall, too, just behind the crate. There. A little headboard so her pillows didn't fall off the mattress every night.

The two trunks were cattycornered from one another beyond the foot of the mattress, one along the wall and one along the far edge. She stuck an empty milk cannister between them directly in the corner and fastened an oil lamp to it. There wasn't room for a desk, but there was room for a piece of smoothed wood to pull onto the bed when she needed a sturdy writing surface after all of the workbench lamps were extinguished for the night. It conveniently propped up between the mattress and dress trunk, perfectly within reach from the comfort of her bed.

On their last trip out to the DeLorean's cave to prep it for its journey to the livery, she came back with a few mementos to personalize the space. She strung the surviving pennants across the slatted window above her bed, the corner of her mouth rising when the sunlight penetrated them and left echoes of colorful triangles on her canvas walls. She trimmed the Disneyland photo of her and her father to fit in a little oval frame she found and placed it on the headboard crate.

Marty's Walkman was meant to be kept safe in the bottom of her personal trunk, but it resided more nights than not just under the edge of her pillow. The oils from his fingertips stained the playback buttons. The headphone cord wasn't the irrevocably twisted mess most kids sported, and the "VAN HALEN" scrawled on the cassette was one of the neatest displays of his handwriting she'd ever seen.

She chuckled, sliding the tape back into the Walkman as she laid down for the night.

He loved his music so much.

Emma severely missed microwaves.

Well, she missed a lot of things: cold food, Andy Griffith, electricity, feminine hygiene products, sneakers, peanut butter, normal bras, and mint toothpaste, to name a few.

But the microwave topped the list right now.

The last thing she wanted to do after sneaking the DeLorean back to the shop and tearing it apart all day was cook dinner. But Archimedes threw a shoe in their rush to get the time machine under their roof before sunup, and her father was now dealing with that. The lack of clean, running water really hindered the process, taking what little she knew of cooking from scratch and throwing it out the window.

So, once again, she put a plate of bacon and eggs in front of her father for dinner. She bit her lip and sat across from him at the first workbench. His smile was flimsy; he was grateful but understandably tiring of her signature dish.

"Thank you," he said, also accepting the heel of yesterday's attempt at baking bread.

"We're out of eggs, so tomorrow's dinner will be different," she promised quietly. She cut into her eggs with the side of her fork. "I know I'm a gifted individual, but I don't know that I possess the talent to burn mashed potatoes that badly twice."

"Speaking of burning," – Doc sighed around the food in his mouth, voice low – "the flying circuits are shot. The lightning completely destroyed them. They're gone for good."

While having a flying DeLorean was awesome, Emma found herself shrugging.

"Okay. I don't need the car to fly, Dad. I need it to do a time jump."

"Well, now you've gone too far."

His attempt at humor was too sullen. Emma froze, staring at him as she lowered her fork.

"Given that's what it's supposed to do, I don't think so."

Emmett picked around the rubbery pieces of egg, not looking at her. Emma's lips parted.

"Dad."

"It's worse than we thought, Emma," Doc said carefully, piercing her with his soft-spoken sincerity. He laid down his fork and wet his lips. "I believe some of it can be repaired –"

"Some of it?"

"But I'm not optimistic."

"What does that mean?" Emma bit out.

"It means," Doc said with some heat in his voice, "that the time circuits are severely damaged, and we may not have the necessary means in this era to adequately repair them. I'm confident I can see to most of it, but there's a microchip that's shorted and a vacuum tube that's busted, the flat tire, the flux box –"

Emma shut her eyes. She swallowed her panic, sank her hands into her dirty apron under the table, and forced herself to breathe. This is just the initial assessment, she told herself. Black fuses and dented stainless steel were discouraging, but once they took a step back to rearrange the pieces, they could tackle the problem anew. She heard what he was saying: he was a scientist, not a miracle worker.

But he'd worked miracles before.

Successfully warding off the black clouds on the edges of her psyche, Emma took another restorative breath and silently picked up her fork again. He was beating himself up enough without her help.

"I'll get more eggs in the morning."

Emmett gave a tired smile. "No mashed potatoes then?"

"Pancakes sound so much safer."