How Harsh the Cold

Some background info; there is now space between BTTF 1 and 2. Doc took the DeLorean back to his house to fix the problems caused in 1955, as well as modify some systems now that he had actually used it.

Doc always worried about his friendship with Marty, just a little bit. In the back of his mind, a small voice always niggled at him when he saw Marty in town, skateboarding around with no real friends but Jenniffer, spending all his time with an ostracised social outcast.

He did his best to hide from Marty how much the older generation avoided him and how much the younger generation tormented him. They didn't know about the time machine, didn't know about Doc's one great success.

But Marty knew. He watched as Doc's excuses for having a cut from a thrown rock became more and more thin and eventually stopped. He never said anything, just handed his older friend the first aid kit any time he walked into the garage to see Doc with another scrape or bruise.

So when he went to Doc's house one frosty, snowy, Saturday evening in late November, toeing off his shoes and throwing his jacket and skateboard in the corner, it wasn't entirely unexpected to see a scrape across Doc's cheek. It was surprising, however, when Doc grabbed him by the arms and propelled him back against the kitchen table. "Marty!" The inventor hissed. "Get out of here!"

Marty absorbed the sight of the chaotic mess of a garage and the deranged-looking inventor. There were papers everywhere, parts and bits and pieces of inventions strewn all over the floor and tables, and when Marty took a closer look at the DeLorean's open gull doors, he could see the flux capacitor and the time circuits were gone. Doc's wild hair was even more disheveled than normal, his bright eyes bugging out with a manic energy. "What are you talking about Doc?"

"No time to explain! You need to leave. Now!" Marty asked no more questions, backing towards the door and scrambling to find his shoes.

But he was too late.

The door crashed open, nearly flying off its top hinge. Doc reacted before Marty did, shoving him down behind the table and taking cover himself behind the edge of the DeLorean's stainless steel bumper.

Only seconds later, both of them had been hauled to their feet, Marty with his hands in the air, Doc with his fingers laced behind his head. The foreign model pistol was jammed tightly into the bottom of Marty's rib cage and he tried not to breathe too much. A second one was pointed at Doc's head.

"Hello, Dr Brown." The tallest man of the group strode between two of the men, sneering at the hostages, the slightest hint of a foreign accent coloring his voice. The fluorescent lighting of the workshop reflected off his dark hair and pale, almost ghostly skin, giving his face a hollow, hungry look. "We hear you have something of value. A car that can vanish in a flash of light and reappear again, in a different spot."

"What are you talking about?" Doc managed to look puzzled. "Who gave you that idea?"

Marty couldn't hold back a gasp as the pistol was jammed further into his stomach. "Dr Brown, we both know that your Libyan friends were too idiotic to keep a secret. They came running back home telling stories of the demon car that caused them to crash into a bus stop."

The tall man prowled around the room, circling the silver DeLorean, Marty, and Doc.

"So tell us, Dr Brown. Is this it?" He ran one hand lovingly over the hood of the DeLorean. Pushing one of the gull wing doors further open, he looked inside. "It looks a bit of a mess. Perhaps you have taken out the necessary parts? Clearly, you expected our little visit?"

The man crossed to Doc. They were almost exactly the same height, their eyes lining up, the harsh eyes of the new man meeting the eyes of the inventor.

A small smile grew on the gang leader's face. "Clearly, Dr Brown, you do not understand the gravity of the situation. We have you, and your young friend here, totally surrounded. You are at our mercy." His lips thinned. "And how small my mercy is."

He turned to his friends, barking out a harsh command in a language Marty didn't recognize. The man holding the gun to Doc's head and the one with the pistol in Marty's ribcage-slash-stomach didn't move, but the rest began to trash the workshop, throwing parts everywhere.

Another man, the sixth member of the little gang, stuck his head in the door and shouted a few lines in the foreign language. The Leader's face creased in irritation, outlining a thin scar that ran along his jawbone, snarling back. Marty chanced a slight movement to look out the small front window and saw his parent's car, pulling into the driveway. Why were they there? He didn't know. Please, don't come in. Stay away. Marty shouted mentally at the car containing his family.

"Out the back. Now."

The teenager struggled as the huge man holding him shoved him forwards toward the back door with one arm. Twisting, Marty managed to get the man's arm in his mouth, chomping down for all he was worth.

The thug didn't even react, aside from a tightening of the muscles in his neck. A moment later, Marty was gasping as his head rang from the force of the punch that had struck him. He went limp, Doc's small cry when the blow had hit Marty echoing through his ears. Stumbling, Marty was pushed out the back door, Doc right behind. Marty had taken his shoes and jacket off when he entered Doc's house; now the cold was burning his feet and bringing goosebumps on his bare arms.

There was a large black truck waiting behind the building; Marty couldn't help but struggle again at the prospect of being shoved into it and taken away. Doc winced, the gun barrel cutting a thin line on his forehead as he pushed against the man holding him. "I am not going in there. Neither is Marty. It would be in your best interests - " He was cut off as a wave of sweet dizziness washed over him, erasing everything and sending him tumbling into blackness.

BTTF BTTF

George McFly knocked at the door to the workshop again. He knew Marty was there; there were skateboard tracks in the driveway, not quite covered with fresh snow. The lights were on and he would be prepared to swear he had seen movement when he was in the car. Sighing, he knocked a fourth time. They needed to go; they were going to have dinner with some of his clients and Marty needed to get home and change, since he was no doubt wearing a t-shirt.

He tried the handle; it didn't open. George scrambled around in the falling snow for the spare key, which had been kicked from under the doormat, and unlocked the old door. It creaked open and George was met with disaster.

The shop was a mess, parts everywhere, papers strewn on all surfaces. Something bright caught his attention and he frowned. Light bounced off the wheels of Marty's skateboard, sitting by the door with his son's shoes and jacket. But the boy himself was nowhere to be seen.

"Marty?" George took a few hesitant steps inside. "Dr Brown?" It was ominously silent.

The garage was empty; Marty and Doc were gone.

BTTF BTTF BTTF

When Doc started waking up, he was freezing. He could hear the wind howling and the cold biting and even before he hauled his eyes open, he knew he was laying on a pile of snow. And when he did open his eyes, things only got worse.

Faint beams of moonlight from a hole in the ceiling slid across the interior of a small shed, illuminating a high ceiling, drafty walls with snow blowing in, and a very bloody Marty McFly curled on the floor in the corner opposite him. Doc gasped, ignoring the rest of his surroundings in favor of quickly crawling over to his friend.

"Marty. Marty, wake up." He shook the boy carefully, pulling him away from the corner he was in and moving him towards the area that seemed least windy, based on the lack of snow there. "Marty."

Marty groaned, eyelids lifting as if they weighed a thousand pounds.

"Doc…?" He asked, scanning the area around him and focusing on the face hovering prominently in his field of view. "When did you wake up?"

"Only a couple of minutes ago. Listen to me, Marty, I need to know what they did to you so that I can try to fix it. Marty?" For Marty had curled back up on himself, arms wrapping tenderly around his stomach.

"'M cold, Doc. And my head hurts, and my ribs."

"What did they do, Marty?" Carefully, he touched the large gash on Marty's forehead, the dampness of the blood indicating that it hadn't occurred too long ago.

"We got here, 'n they woke me up. Wanted to know where the rest of the car was." Marty coughed, a wet sound that made Doc shiver just listening to it. "'nd I didn't know and wouldn't say anyway so they threw me in a tub of water and I think I breathed some of it in and, um, I didn't know what was going on. The big guy, the one from the 'shop? Hit me on the head with something. And then they threw me in here and you were already here."

Marty coughed again and Doc could feel something straining in his chest, bruised or cracked ribs covering lungs that probably had some freezing cold water in them. "Right, Marty. We need to get you out of here." Doc looked around for something to work with, finding only bare ground and snow piles covering one rusty bucket.

Feeling Marty's shaking under his hand, Doc shed the lab coat he was still miraculously wearing and draped it over his young charge, heart sinking when the teenager didn't protest. "Hang on, Marty." Doc put his foot through the rusted bucket, using a sharper edge to saw a few chunks of dry-er wood out of the walls and locked door. Frantically, Doc dug a small pack of matches out of his pocket- he was more glad than ever for the absent-minded tendencies that had placed them there earlier- and tried to start a fire. The wood was wet and old; what was dry burned bright and fast and what was wet barely smouldered but let off very little heat and large quantities of foul smoke. But it was better than nothing.

As Marty curled around the small fire, Doc borrowed back the coat he had dropped over Marty earlier and cut a few long strips from the bottom. "Marty. I need you to sit up so I can take care of your head." Marty gritted his teeth, but did as instructed, pushing with his legs until he was upright and leaning against the taller frame of his companion, who had seated himself next to him.

Doc began to use cleaner handfuls of snow to wash the blood off Marty's forehead. The amount was worrying- even though head wounds bleed more heavily than other cuts, it was alarming how much liquid coated the boy's face. Even more concerning were the heavy coughs that Marty still succumbed to every few minutes, trying to desperately rid himself of the water in his lungs but not finding the energy.

Doc was finally tying the lab coat strips around Marty's head when the door to the shed burst open, revealing a shiny new padlock, a heavy snowstorm, and a very angry group of terrorists.

"Where is the machine? Where did you put the rest of the machine?" The leader shouted, the same slimy man who had spoken in the workshop. "We drove that car for nearly an hour and nothing happened! We know you have modified it and hidden part."

Doc stood, hovering over Marty and facing the leader. "I don't know what you're talking about! The car is intact." The scientist kept a straight face with difficulty, trying and failing to supress the anger in his voice. "Let us go, there's nothing that car can do."

"Let you go, let you go, no. No! We will keep you until you tell us about the machine!" The pale man's face flushed high on his cheekbones as he smiled again, the small, thin, cruel smile. "And if you do not tell us, we will kill your friend. And you will watch him die."

"Doc." Marty breathed. But when Doc looked down at him, there was both fear and determination in the teenager's eyes. "Don't." He coughed harshly again, making the pale smile widen slightly.

"Ach, your friend's lungs, they sound bad. A shame that you are not near a hospital and have no medical help. But perhaps if you were to tell us where…" He left the sentence hanging.

"No." Marty rasped again, pressing a hand to his ribs. But Doc could feel him shaking, trembling through the bravado and loyalty.

Doc took his own deep breath. "No."

"No?" The pale leader repeated, almost amused. "Well, then. No it is." He nodded once, almost a twitch. "We will see you later, Doctor Brown."

Now. Now. Doc could feel his chance leaving and he lunged forwards, swinging one hand forwards in a punch, letting the other slide into the leader's left pocket in a rare bit of coordination. To his great satisfaction, both movements did their job, leaving Doc with a small key that he carefully slipped up his sleeve in the moment of distraction and leaving the pale leader with a bruised jaw and a small tracking device on the inside of his pocket.

The leader drew back his own hand and smashed his fist into Doc's stomach before turning as if the bruises on his face didn't matter and leaving the shed, henchmen in tow. But despite the wind outside, neither Doc or Marty missed the distinctive snick of the padlock clicking closed and the words floating on the sheeting wind- "You will pay for that, Brown."

BTTF BTTF BTTF

It had been nearly two hours since the men had left and Doc was starting to get desperate. His little maneuver had cost them both the matches, since they had fallen from his pocket and been crushed by someone's boot, and the existing fire, which had gone out in the time they had taken for that little discussion. And while he had wanted to wait as long as they could to allow search teams to find them, it seemed that time was quickly running out.

"Marty." Doc nudged his friend, who was dozing next to him, spooned into Doc's leg to conserve some body heat. "Marty, we've got to go."

That only seemed to confuse Marty. "Go? Go where?"

Doc held out the key. "We've got to get out Marty. No amount of luck is going to save us if we don't act. Now is the time to put our minds to it."

Marty took a deep breath. "But we don't even know where we are." None the less, the teenager started to push himself up.

"We'll have to follow their tracks carefully until we get close enough to somewhere to call the police. I had wanted to wait longer, to increase the probability of someone finding us, but the odds are too risky to wait any longer for our captors to come back."

"Okay." Marty coughed again as he used Doc's arm to pull himself to his feet. "We can do this."

Doc forced a smile. "My thoughts exactly. Wrap this around you." Marty did as he was told, then seemed to notice for the first time that he was wearing Doc's lab coat, leaving the older man in only an undershirt and a plaid long sleeve.

"No way, Doc. You're going to need this."

"Marty, please," Doc waved away his objections. "I'm not going to argue, we don't have time."

He turned away and carefully slid one of his hands through the larger hole in the siding, near the door. A minute later, the lock clicked and Doc swung the door open, letting a gust of air into the already-freezing room.

"Right. We'll follow the car tracks to start."

An hour and a half later, things had gone from bad to worse. They had slogged in the snow that was still rapidly falling, filling the van's tracks and making it hard to see. Neither spoke, but Doc knew that Marty had to be freezing, his lungs killing him and his head aching the longer they waded through the muck. It was now early morning, the sun shooting beams of light over the edges of the horizon.

And then the car came.

They were too slow, too tired to get off the road fast enough and before a handful of seconds had passed, a duo of voices were calling at each other in the night, one instantly recognizable as that of their head captor. Doc pushed Marty down roughly behind a log, hoping the protection, meager as it was, would give him an advantage, but there was no time to hide himself.

Even as he wheeled around, both men were approaching. The leader and a cronie, recognizable from the earlier encounter in the shed, both bearing short metal clubs and probably (Doc mused in the few seconds he had available to him) other weapons as well.

But there was no more time to talk. He ducked as the first swing entered his vision but missed the second, getting clipped on the shoulder but not enough to even slow him down. Adrenaline filled his cold body, waking him up more than he had been for the last ten hours.

Doc scooped up a branch from the ground, using it to block a second hit from the leader and accidentally catching the man on the fingers, making him snarl. His heart dropped as he saw the thug turn towards him but out of the corner of his eye Marty flashed into view, nailing the man in the side with a large rock and following up with his own shoulder despite his bruised ribs.

A sudden jolt of pain sent Doc back to his own fight as the leader struck Doc's kneecap, the awkward angle making it hard, but not impossible, to get in a good hit on the scientist's legs. Doc grunted, but was distracted again when the henchman threw Marty off of him and into a nearby tree stump, clearly knocking the wind out of him. Even as Doc frantically blocked another hit at his own ribs, he started to panic as Marty didn't get up and the big man raised his club.

"NO!" Doc screamed, abandoning the leader and perhaps startling him for a moment, as he didn't immediatly follow the flight with another blow.

And then many things happened at once. There was a screech from the leader, but Doc blocked it from his mind as he landed on his knees next to Marty and threw up his left arm to shield his friend, Marty's cough's echoing through the cold air and cutting through the wind even as the teen's hand reached up towards the hired thug's belt.

Half a second after he landed, a blinding pain burst through Doc's mind as the club made contact with his arm, breaking the bone squarely in half. Everything went grey for a second, the agony blotting out his surroundings. But he yanked himself out of it, hearing Marty scream near his knees and knowing that he couldn't check out yet, not now.

He came back to the world with Marty's face twisted into pain. The thug had slipped, his momentum was thrown off by Doc's unexpected appearance, and one of his knees had landed squarely on several of Marty's already hurt ribs. Doc could hear the crunching footsteps of the leader approaching through the snow behind him, but focused instead on two things: the wall of fur that had erupted in front of him suddenly, and the short black pistol that Marty had pulled out of the thug's belt and into the snow.

Einstein had clamped himself down on the henchman's dominant arm and since Marty had snatched the metal club the man was blows weren't harming the dog, only making him bite harder. Assured that the threat was gone for the instant, Doc made a split decision.

He had never killed a person before. But despite only having used a gun a few times in his life (at an uncle's farm as a small child), he was ready to save both of their lives now. The leader was taking the last few steps towards him, probably raising his club to strike at Doc's exposed back or head. Doc could see Marty nod at him, and before he could think about it any further, the inventor flicked the safety off, swiveled around and used his good arm to shoot twice, gritting his teeth as the gun's kick sent waves of pain through his broken arm.

The leader was knocked back, snow blossoming red under him, and didn't move.

Doc wasn't going to spend time checking on his health; he spun to see the henchman running away, unarmed, through the untouched snow.

Letting out a harsh breath as the adrenaline started to fade, Doc looked down to see Einstein sitting next to Marty, his friend's hands buried in the dog's fur. "Right. We need to go." He dragged in another breath, looking down at his left arm. He could tell, even with the shirt on, that it was broken.

"Marty, I'm going to need you to cut a few more strips from the bottom of the coat." Marty startled at the strain in Doc's voice, then whitened further when he followed the inventor's gaze to see the broken arm, now easily visible through the morning light and the sudden end of the snowfall.

"Damn…"

Doc ignored Marty's swearing and forced himself to his feet, crossing to the leader and trying not to look at him as he picked up the second club. He wasn't going to try and set the bone, not with only one arm, and he wasn't going to make Marty do it. It would heal how it would heal and damn the consequences. But between the pair, they managed to tie the rod to his arm, stopping it from moving and strapping it to his chest.

"Okay." Marty's breathing was ragged, Doc's arm in pieces, but they were both standing once again, now in the early morning light of the full sunrise. "We can't be too far if Einstein is here."

Doc did nothing to disabuse Marty of this notion, and instead addressed the dog. "Einstein, I need you to go get help, okay boy? Go get help."

Maybe he understood, maybe he didn't, but Einstein began to trot off in a direction nearly opposite the way the henchman had gone and about thirty degrees off their previous track. He looked back once, barked, and trotted off, soon out of sight in the trees.

An hour later, Doc, Marty, and Einstein were in a police car, speeding to a hospital.

BTTF BTTF BTTF

The moment Doc woke up, he needed to know where Marty was. But instead, all he got was a 'He's fine, Mr Brown," a sling to hold the cast against his chest, and a trip to speak with the police. He told them most of the truth, leaving out the part about the time travel and only saying that they wished to steal one of his experiments that was incomplete.

"Have you created a weapon of some kind, Doctor Brown?" asked one of the policemen, who seemed polite enough and had otherwise accepted his explanation.

"No," Doc answered, putting on his best bewildered expression. "Nothing of the sort. I'm afraid they were entirely misinformed."

He gave the approximate location of the leader in the woods, the direction the henchman had gone off to, and where the hut had been. Descriptions of all the men followed.

"May I leave now?" Emmett Brown was standing before he heard the answer, tired of this game. "I have a fellow patient that I need to visit."

"Of course, Doctor Brown." The policeman smiled. "And we've also cleared your dog. We could use a dozen like him in the force."

Doc smiled back briefly and hurried from the room and down the hall to Marty's.

He was the only person in the hospital room at the moment.

"Marty?" Doc asked, voice low as to not bother the teenager unduly. "How are you?"

"I'm okay, Doc. Can you turn on the lights?"

Doc flipped the switch to find Marty grinning at him, clearly tired and hurting but much better than he had been. His head and ribs were properly wrapped and the rattle in his voice and breathing was gone. There were blankets layered over him, and the color had come back into his skin.

Now that he thought about it, Doc himself probably looked a lot better, too.

"Just so you know, there isn't a time traveling car in the police report. They'll probably question you. It was an experiment, you don't know what it did, and have no idea why there were terrorists. I've already told them where to find the leader's- " Here Doc took a deep breath "- body in the woods."

Marty seemed to pick up on his pause. "Hey, Doc." He took a breath and smiled a little. It was no bigger than the leader's oily smile but was warm and understanding. He reached out and tapped on Doc's cast, peeking out from the sling and the sleeve of the shirt Marty's parents had brought him. "Thanks for the save."

Doc smiled back. "For you a thousand times, Marty."

There was a moment of quiet.

Then Marty asked the question. "So where did you hide the parts so well they couldn't find them?"

Doc shook his head and grinned. "Just under the seat of the car."

This was my first ever prompt, from Starscream's Biglover. I got it some time ago and have been working on it ever since. We had a little conversation, threw some ideas, and this was the result.