End of the Future, Part 23
Like Skywalkers
Please Read and Review. I'd like to know what I'm doing right (to keep doing it), and what I am doing wrong (to correct it).
Hill Valley, California, USA
McFly House
Marty and George exchanged a heavy look, both nodded at the same time. George went to get Lorraine, while Marty explained a bit to their guests, now gathered at Asuka's provisional room.
"So, guys, it's time to get Mom in the know. It's a conversation we were not looking forward to, but we have to. We will return in… I'm not sure, maybe half an hour, maybe more."
Asuka pressed her lips together, forming a very thin line. "Got it. You need support, call us."
Shinji and Rei nodded, their eyes serious and their faces set decisively.
Marty had a forced smile on his face as he went out of the room.
"Lorraine, Marty and I need to talk to you, very seriously." George said.
"Marty! Did you get Jennifer pregnant? Was it before going to Japan? I have to talk to her parents!"
"What?" Marty exclaimed, "No! No! No one is pregnant!" Marty was red as a tomato.
Softly, George pushed Lorraine to sit on the sofa. "No, Honey. It's much more complicated than that. We… um… well… you see…"
Seeing his father hesitate brought memories to both Marty and Lorraine. A bit of the old George was showing. Marty took the old Yearbook and opened it at the Enchantment Under the Sea pages. "Look, Mom. I know it's incredible, but I assure you, it is the truth. I know what happened at the dance."
"Well, yes. Your Father and I have told you the story. That was where we kissed for the first time."
"Yes, I know."
"He knows more, Lorraine." George looked at her with infinite love, "You see, um… Marty?"
The teenager breathed deeply, "Look at him, Mom." He pointed at the guitar player in the picture, "Really, look at him. You remember that guy?"
"Yeah, that's Calvin Klein, he was in town to visit his Uncle Emmet; your friend, Doctor Brown."
"Uh, Dad..? Could you wait outside for a minute?"
Marty's worried eyes were reason enough for George, "Sure. I'll go get, you know… the tape."
"You do that."
"What tape?" Lorraine asked, a bit worried.
"Later, Mom. Right now, please look at Calvin Klein. And remember that week, that whole week." He gave her a magnifying glass.
"Marty! He looks exactly like…" she gasped.
"Like me." He paced around the room, "I know it sounds impossible, but I was Calvin Klein back then. Gramps hit me with his car, took me to your home while I was unconscious, and when I woke up, you were calling me Calvin Klein because that was the name tagged in my underwear."
Lorraine dropped the Yearbook. "That's impossible! That was thirty years ago! I never told anybody about how I found out his name! How can you know that?"
"I know because I was there." Marty said, trying to keep calm.
"But then, you… you… And I…" Lorraine went terribly pale all of a sudden.
"Look, I won't pretend that didn't happen. I tried to dissuade you all week long, and once you… um…" both flushed crimson. "Well… you yourself felt it was wrong and dropped the matter, okay? No harm done."
"But…"
"Look, really, I can't judge or anything. It was an impossible situation, you couldn't have known. I couldn't tell you and stay out of the loony bin. It didn't go beyond that. Just like Luke and Leia, okay?"
"Does your Father knows? It looks like he already knows." Her fingers ran over each other, as she always did when she was nervous.
"Of course not! He knows most of the rest, he found out about the time travel by himself, and we have been discussing how to let you know without making you freak out."
"I don't think I wanted to know." Lorraine wrung her hands.
"I would have preferred to leave things as they were, but, ah… there are a lot of things you need to know, and we don't want to keep you in the dark."
Hill Valley, California, USA
Brown Enterprises Warehouse
"Sure, Dr. Brown. Tomorrow at three. Egon is right with me now, Jack Burton is finishing the delivery as we speak. I'll call Winston to tell him. Um… er… Egon detected some strange activity with the gel containers. Unusual PKE. Like a sleeping ghost, if that's even possible."
Dr. Ray Stantz paused, listening to the telephone.
"Uh-hu. No. We put them in a Faraday Cage. To prevent contamination."
Another pause.
"No, very low-level, but we didn't want any problems later. Better to prevent and all that. Okay. Sure. See you tomorrow, Doc."
He put the receiver back on its cradle. "He says it's to be expected. That it's very inert stuff, and he will explain everything tomorrow. Right now, he still needs to pick his dog up at the veterinarian, and sleep off the flight."
Egon Spengler shrugged, "Very well, but just in case, let's check our proton packs are in working order."
"I hope we won't be needing them, Egon."
"So do I, Ray. I'm not sure I want to go back to ghostbusting. Not unless we miniaturize the equipment a lot."
Hill Valley, California, USA
McFly House
George returned to the reliving room. He knocked at the door frame, peeked in, and said, "Can I come in?"
Marty and Lorraine exchanged a look that basically said, "Not a single word of it."
"Sure, Dad. Let me tell Mom my side of the events first."
Lorraine McFly considered herself a sensible woman. The challenges of motherhood had, theoretically, prepared her for many things.
Time-travel induced paradoxes were NOT included in that list.
George inserted a tape in the player, but didn't push the Play button. "Lorraine, honey. Please try to keep an open mind. Marty really did meet us back in 1955, the Doctor Brown from then helped him to return to our time, but they had to make sure we fell in love, or Marty, Dave and Linda would cease to exist." He pulled at his hair again, "Though, from what Marty told me, things were very bad for us in the original timeline. We had no future. I was trapped in a dead end job doing my work and Biff's, you were a chronically depressed borderline alcoholic, the kids were despondent, and we had Biff breathing down our collective neck. We were, as Strickland likes to say, 'useless slackers'."
Lorraine's eyes grew very wide, her face paled terribly, and seemed close to faint. (1) For a long moment, under her husband and son's gaze, she remembered that strange week in 1955.
After swallowing hard, she felt her mouth was very dry; she nodded convulsively, and exhaled a breath she hadn't realice had been holding in. "Why are you telling me this? Why now, I mean."
George stood up, and paced around, pulling at his hair as he ordered his thoughts. "The End of the World is coming. Late 2000, a man-made catastrophe will wipe out half of the world's people. Then, as if that hadn't been enough, in 2015, gigantic alien life forms will attack, and in early 2016…" his shoulders slumped, "Mankind will be erased from the face of the Earth."
"…God…" Lorraine whispered in horror, with a very small voice, she looked first at George, then at Marty, "No one survived?"
George knelt down in front of her, took her hands in his, rubbing the backs with his thumbs. "Two survivors. Shinji and Asuka."
"How..? What happened?"
Marty sat next to his mother. "It's complicated, very complicated, Mom. Especially with Rei. Doc found out about it by sheer accident. He wanted to see the future, and arrived to the ruins of the town. He was very shocked when he came back." He looked down, organizing his thoughts. "Remember the day we stored Doc's car in our garage?" Lorraine nodded, "that was the day he came back. He couldn't stop his hands from shaking. Jennifer and I took him to his place."
"That was months ago!"
"Yeah. Next day, he showed us the tape he had recorded in the future. It was horrible."
George added, "Like a horror film, Lorraine." He pushed the Play button on the VCR. "This is real. It's not a hoax, not a joke, and it's not a mirage." (2)
By the time the tape finished, Lorraine was crying quietly.
Marty added, "Jennifer and I went back with Doc to gather more info. It is worse than a ghost town. The silence hits you like a hammer."
"You went with him back to that horrible future." She said, her voice flat. "Why?"
"To find out what happened, to make sense of it. We found out that it had happened in Japan. They called the catastrophe in 2000 'Second Impact', and the final apocalypse 'Third Impact'."
"That's why we went there… then…" he shook his head, "Man, trying to manage the tenses is a problem… I mean, we went to Japan in 2016 to find exactly what had happened, and maybe a way to either stop it, or at least mitigate the effects."
"That and because I hoped you'd like it, dear. But we are getting way ahead of things." George shifted his weight, wincing. He stood up and sat next to his wife, hugging her. "I got involved because I… well… I looked into Doc's car, saw his controls, and suddenly, weird things from 1955 began to make sense. It was like the plot of a novel. But before I could find a way to ask you without looking like a loon, I had my accident."
"I thought you were dying!" She sobbed. He hugged her tightly, rocking her, until her sobs receded.
When she calmed down, she asked "Did… did you go to the future?"
"No. Back then, I was just fresh from a reconstructive surgery, so I got into the planning role. Doc and I decided to get funds to finance our way into stopping the catastrophe. Once we had the means, the first step was to go to Japan and check things by ourselves, well… Doc and Marty and Jennifer. That involved Doc traveling back in time to set up several ways for us to get money and other things."
"Mom." Marty said, leaning forward in his seat. "Doc has been working with the Ghostbusters to invent tech to stop the Impacts. They don't know what will happen in fifteen years, much less in thirty. We will meet with them to get them up to speed and we think you must be there. They don't know our end goal yet, and we will hold a meeting with them to get them in the team. But we don't want to do it behind your back."
"I… okay. I understand." She dabbed at her teary eyes with a handkerchief. "What about Shinji and Asuka?"
Marty waved his hands around. "They, and Rei, we're right at the middle of things. Shinji and Asuka barely managed to survive for a few months in the ruins, they… they…"
George intervened. "They were badly traumatized. Even before Third Impact. Afterwards, they were more alone than anybody in the whole history of humankind. Even now, they carry the scars. Shinji had a bit of a nervous breakdown in Japan. We managed to calm him down."
"And Rei? She is very reserved but doesn't seem to be that bad. And the other two act very… normal. Just a bit off, but I guessed it was just cultural or their personalities."
"Rei is a special case. But just how special can wait. Shinji and Asuka are very good keeping masks on, especially her. We are trying to help them."
Lorraine nodded, pressing her lips together. "I'm in. I don't know anything about time travel or catastrophes, but I will try to do the best I can for them. I think they need a family more than anything else."
"They do." George said sadly.
"You can take that to the bank and cash it, Mr. McFly." Asuka commented as she entered the living room. "Our biological fathers were… um…"
Rei followed, "Not up to the task. Beyond providing basic necessities, and not even for all of us."
Shinji looked down for a moment, before gathering his courage, "Gendo Ikari used all of us in an insane plan to end the world. For the sake of a woman who decided to embed herself into a giant monster and turn herself into an eternal monument to Humanity." Lorraine looked at Marty, he confirmed Shinji's words with a look.
Asuka nodded emphatically, "Please don't take it the wrong way, Mrs. McFly, but we three are poster children for mental trauma. I…" she breathed deeply, and exhaled a very tightly controlled breath. "We all have abandonement issues and PSTD in different degrees. We…"
Shinji segued, "We will be hard to relate to. Hard to understand."
Rei put a possessive hand over the shoulders of her two companions, "It is not something we want. Both my brother and Soryu have made great strides in the way to recovery, but true normalcy may be forever out of our reach."
Lorraine stood up, with hesitant steps walked to the three teenagers, and slowly enveloped all three in a loose hug. "I…" Her own problem forgotten, she had no words, but her actions spoke for her.
Both Shinji and Asuka stiffened for a moment. Shinji was the first to relax, and he desperately surrendered to feelings and emotions he had thought forever out of his reach. Asuka took longer, but Lorraine's shampoo was strawberry scented, very similar to the one her mother favored. That was the last push for her, and she gradually relaxed too. Rei reacted in a more curious and intelectual way, registering and analyzing everything; until her instincts kicked in, and surrendered to the first true maternal contact she had felt in any and all her existences.
Had she continued with her analysis, probably her words would have been "This feels nice. It's so good."
Author's Notes:
(1) Though it is never said or shown directly, I think in the original timeline no one stopped Biff from actually abusing Lorraine. It fits with Biff's behavior both in OT 1985 and changed 1955. This would explain Lorraine's depression and low self-esteem. George would have been her only emotional support then, and she would have married him even without real love between them.
(2) A little nod at the blurbs DC Comics used to put in their covers, in the 1970s, IIRC. "Not a dream! Not a hoax! Not an Imaginary Story!" During the 1950s and 1960s, a common practice in DC was that the editor commissioned an outrageous cover for a book, and then dropped it onto the creative teams with orders to plot a story around the cover. Things like Green Lantern selling functional réplicas of his power ring at $1.00 each, or Batman turned into a baby, or Jimmy Olsen turning into (or marrying) a gorilla. More than once, the writers resorted to simply plot a story where the cover scene would be either a dream, a hoax, or an imaginary story. It's worth noting that the imaginary story concept has been explored by both big companies. Marvel with the "What if..?" title, where they usually show a story diverging from a set point in canon continuity, like "What if… the Hulk kept Bruce Banner's Mind?" Or "What if… Gwen Stacy had lived?"
DC, on the other hand, established the Elseworlds line, taking characters out of their usual context, and developing a new story. For example, having Superman adopted by the Waynes instead of the Kents. Or Batman in the Victorian Age vs Jack the Ripper.