A Disservice to Public Society 🎸

To summarise (the fic is 12k words so bear with me):

It is set after bttf3, where Doc, after leaving Marty and Jennifer at the tracks, goes straight to 2015 again to check on where Marty ends up. Make sure everything is okay.

This creates a timeline where Doc leaves and, as far as this iteration of Marty is concerned, does not return.

Believing Doc abandoned him and chose his new family over him, Marty gets a bit miserable. Jennifer, who is at this point extremely frightened by the life she saw in 2015 and not getting much in the way of reassurance from Marty, tells him Doc will probably be back and that he needs to knock it off or she’s going to leave. Marty continues to mope. Jennifer warns him a couple more times and then ultimately leaves him, probably shortly after they graduate.

This leaves Marty with no one to talk to about the fact that his family isn’t his family anymore, because he can’t exactly talk about that without getting shipped off to the nearest asylum.

Marty believes, well and truly, that he killed his old family. And the new ones? Well, they aren’t his.

He moves to LA with the Pinheads because if they think if they’re ever going to get anywhere with their music, it’ll be in the second largest city in the US.

They struggle for two years. Though the McFlys are decently well off in the Lone Pine timeline, Marty never reaches out to his parents for financial help. Partly out of shame, but mostly because they are not his parents and that feeling has only grown as he’s been away from them.

Money is very, very tight. The band plays much less than they used to because the time is better spent trying to keep the fridge stocked and the lights on.

The result of all this, Doc leaving, Jennifer leaving, the constant money and job struggle, is that Marty feels like his entire life has spiralled out of control. That loss of control is the integral characteristic that makes what happens next possible.

In 1987, Marty dies. To mimic the respawn mechanics of HLM, when Marty dies, he can reset time (up to an hour). The reason I give for this is flimsy, but something something he became the cause of his own existence so dying loops him or something. The mechanics of it don’t matter.

The fact that he can’t die, and a scene where one thing finally goes right, makes him feel in control of something for the first time in almost two years.

He becomes a hitman. How he gets the job isn’t important (though it is described in the fic). The first time he kills someone his reasoning is: he can’t die, money is tight and this pays well and they’d actually be able to eat, and he already killed his family, so this isn’t any different.

It is vastly different. He regrets it immediately.

But he keeps taking hits because he’s actually killed someone before, now, and with just the money from his first job, they’re no longer imminently going to be evicted and they can eat and the control feels good.

That reset ability becomes micromanagement. If something goes wrong, he kills himself to redo it. This started as something he did to make sure his hits went exactly right and make sure he never got caught. It turns into shaping reality around him as he pleases.

Time goes on. It’s all about control. The Pinheads start making it more, start doing better, now that they can actually practice and take gigs again.

And to fund this, a couple times a month, Marty commits a massacre.

Eventually, things happen, and during a hostage situation he just so happens to take Jennifer. It’s a small world. He kidnaps her after.

He tells her about his reset ability, but also makes the mistake of slipping that it only works for up to an hour. After being held captive for a few months, and her first attempt to leave ending in Lee’s death, she works around this hour limit to ensure her freedom.

Marty flees. A national manhunt for him begins. But he can’t be caught.

Doc, in 2015, sees that his beloved mentee/ son figure is wanted for murder and kidnapping and has been for nearly 30 years and is like HUH???

He plans to confront him, but sets up a contingency (a bit convoluted but does work kind of. details not really important), because he has the forethought to think if he brings the time train to this version of Marty, he might steal it. Which he does. Steal it, I mean.

Jacket!Marty (1989), in the time train with the intention of stopping himself from taking Jennifer a few months prior, gets sent to 1985 instead, where a Doc of 1985 is waiting because a future version of himself told him to?

There is a confrontation. 1985 Marty shows up, sees his future self shoot Doc, and decides then and there that he is never becoming that. This coupled with Doc deciding he needs to stick around means Jacket!Marty gets erased.

Aaaand that’s it. I tried to cut out as much as I could but there is just. so much.

Does he like hurting people? Depends on the definition of hurt. He likes inflicting damage on others, likes the feeling of the human body destroyed by his hands. But he doesn’t like when they cry or scream or otherwise get emotional because people’s emotions are so volatile and he gets very frustrated when trying to control them. They just never seem to do what he wants them to.