Epiphany

Chapter 2: The Problem

centrepretender

Please see the A/N at the bottom.

Marty went straight to the Doc's. He knew that Doc Brown was sometime else, but Marty needed to think, alone. It was painfully obvious that his mother had remembered him from the past, and now Marty had to figure out what to do. The Doc not being here doesn't help much. Now I have no idea what to do.

"What the hell am I gonna do?" he said aloud, raking his hands through his hair. He found his way to a chair and pushed the junk off before sitting down. "I can't tell her that it was me and that I time traveled. Who would believe that?" Marty slouched further down in his chair, and was completely surprised when someone answered his question. "Only a mad scientist or his friend, apparently."

Marty sat up straight. "Doc, is that you?" he asked, hoping that his friend was back from his time travels.

"Indeed it is, Marty," Doc Brown replied, coming around the corner with several newspapers in hand. A huge grin was on his face, and at the sight of the mad scientist Marty grinned too. "Doc! I'm so glad you're here. Something heavy has happened-"

"I heard," the Doc interrupted. "Marty, talking to yourself is a bad habit. People might think you're not quite stable. Anyway, your mother has finally figured it out?" Doc sighed and set the newspapers on a cluttered table as Marty confirmed his suspicion. "It was only a matter of time, I suppose. I'm not sure how this will affect the space-time continuum, so we'll have to play it by ear."

Marty stood up and began pacing, not looking unlike the Doc when he was thinking. "So what are you saying, Doc? That I should just tell her the truth?"

Doc Brown snorted. "Hardly. You should subtly find out how much she remembers, and then try and persuade her that she's imagining things." Marty ran his hand through his hair again, frustrated at what was happening. "Doc, I think she's pretty much figured it out. I mean, she probably doesn't know that you made a time machine out of a DeLorean, but I'm pretty sure that she knows it was me."

The Doc shrugged his shoulders as he continued to walk around his lab, straightening things as much as possible. "What else can you do, Marty? Maybe if you ignore her she'll just forget that she ever remembered."

Marty stopped pacing and stared at the Doc. "Maybe…I'd better go home and try to fix this nightmare."

Lorraine was pacing in Marty's room, echoing what her son had been doing not ten minutes earlier at Doc Brown's. Trying to figure out exactly what was going on was giving her a migraine. "I know that, somehow, it was Marty back in 1955, and he's the one who got George and I together…Damn, I wish I could remember more about that night!" She stopped pacing and looked out of the window to see if her wayward son was home yet. Just to her luck, he was. He was walking up the path to the front door, his shoulders stooped slightly in resignation.

Maybe he'll confess and I won't have to trick him into telling me, she thought, waiting for Marty to enter the house.

Marty stopped walking when he reached the front door to his house. He thought he would tell his mother part of the truth, but he was beginning to change his mind. The idea of him going thirty years in the past and hooking his parents up was absurd, so denying that it happened would be the most logical thing to do. So what if it made his mother sound like a grade-A wacko? Marty was sure that there was something with the space-time continuum involved, endangering life as we know it…blah, blah, blah…

He decided to lie.

A/N: Okay, first off I'd like to apologize. I have this incredibly bad habit of writing a chapter for a new story in a heated passion, and then forgetting about it for months. I'm not one of those people who write the entire story before posting it. I'm also sorry that this is a short chapter, but it's all you'll be getting for a while. Just a warning: don't expect an update any time soon. If that makes me lose some readers, so be it, but I just don't update that quickly.

On another note, thank all of you who like this. I'm glad. :) I won't abandon this fic, I'll just go slow. Maybe it's better that way. Once again, thank you for reading and reviewing.