A/N: Well, this is it: the last chapter. I've gone back and reordered the oneshots into chronological order. Also, some dialogue from this story is directly taken from the movie and obviously does not belong to me. Thanks for reading!

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Saturday, October 26, 1985

...

Although the parking lots of Lone Pine Mall had been crammed with hurried people and cars aiming to get into the last spot available not too long ago, it was now an expanse of empty pavement marked by painted white lines. The last shopper had left hours ago, and the sea of cars had slowly gone away until only a single van and eighteen-wheeler remained.

From the driver's seat of his project, which currently resided within the eighteen-wheeler, Emmett fixated on the digital clock near the dashboard. The numbers on the clock, which read 1:08 AM, seemed to drag forward at an agonizingly slow rate. Despite it being the middle of the night, he was not tired in the least. His eyes did not feel heavy; instead, he felt more energetic than ever, despite having pulled more than a few all-nighters recently. He was practically overcome with anticipation, and wondered if he should call Marty from the phone in his car and ask if he had forgotten to come.

Ultimately deciding to wait for the boy, he didn't make the call. I've waited thirty years for this precise moment in time. I can handle waiting a few more minutes, he thought. Besides, he'd called him only a few minutes before to ask him to pick up the video camera from his garage.

As he waited by himself, it was quiet, the only exception being the occasional whine of a passing car on the roads nearby. That allowed his many worries, which had been suppressed over the past week with hours of hard work, to come to the surface. The experiment he was about to test was very delicate, and if even the slightest thing did not go according to plan, the consequences to the fabric of the universe itself would be disastrous. If the machine failed, or himself and Marty became injured (or worse), the time stream would be altered dramatically. Besides, he didn't think he'd be able to live with himself if something happened to the kid because of an experiment that he had conducted.

Shoving those thoughts to the back of his mind, he chose to focus more on the positive side of things. The DeLorean time machine was finally finished, and he knew it had worked in at least one other timeline, if Marty's visit in 1955 was any indication. If all went well, history would soon be made in the seemingly quiet mall parking lot. It would be a monumentous day, the one he'd been waiting to come for thirty years! After the weeks and months and years he'd spent waiting, it was finally October 26, 1985.

1985! Thirty years ago, the year had sounded like some far-flung future looming in the distance. It was almost like a different planet. Now that it was finally here, it had lost its mystery. The portable cameras and tiny music players with earphones he'd once seen as fantastical was commonplace; the strange fashion and hairstyles could be seen on every street corner. It was typical now; just reality. The gradual passing of time had made the changes easier to swallow, and it wasn't like the sudden jumps forward like Emmett had observed in the things the boy from the future had brought back from his time.

"Einstein? Hey, Einstein? Where's the Doc?"

A muffled voice from outside interrupted his thoughts. Even from inside the car, he could recognize it as Marty. Emmett smiled. It was time to begin the experiment.

He pulled a small remote control and pressed the button to operate the door of the eighteen-wheeler. Once that was completed, he turned the ignition and set it to reverse as the door opened. Driving the project out of the eighteen-wheeler, he could see Marty, video camera in hand and the dog Einstein at his feet, for the first time that week.

During the week, he was unable to see Marty because himself and Einstein had taken up residence in a motel just out of Hill Valley. If something happened with the terrorists and they decided to show up early, the last thing he wanted to do was get Marty caught up in it all. He would be put in enough danger in a very short time. As much as he didn't want to turn to the group of Libyan terrorists for his invention's fuel, he saw no other option. The deadline had been coming quickly and nothing else had come close to being able to power the time machine which was currently exiting the larger truck.

The DeLorean made quite the entrance, descending onto the pavement in a flourish of smoke. Its stainless steel body and exposed cables gleamed under the dim light of street lamps. The outside of the car had obviously been modified, to say nothing of the alterations on its interior as well. Complex machinery was mounted to the back of the car, giving it a futuristic look.

"Marty! You made it," he said, opening the gull-wing doors of the car and stepping out.

The teen's only reply was a stunned "Yeah..."

"Welcome to my latest experiment. It's the one I've been waiting for all my life," said Emmett. After one miserable failure and useless invention after another, it was exhilarating to hear that he would one day succeed at something. That news had kept him going on the times when he wanted nothing more than to quit and forget the machine ever existed. He wondered briefly how, without that extra motivation, his cross-dimensional counterpart in the original timeline had succeeded at all without giving up.

"Um, well...It's a DeLorean, right?" Marty asked.

"Bare with me, Marty. All of your questions will be answered. Roll tape, and we will proceed," said Emmett while fumbling with a radiation suit. It was perfectly understandable for him to question the strangeness of the situation, but Emmett wanted the full explanation of how the machine worked on tape for posterity.

"Doc, is that a-"

"Never mind that, never mind that now," Emmett interrupted, cutting him off mid-sentence. He was running low on time and was itching to test the machine before the inevitable arrival of the terrorists, and needed to give Marty time to get away. He wasn't wearing a bulletproof vest under his shirt and denim jacket, unlike Emmett, who wore one under his lab coat.

Marty, without further questions, held up the camera and begin taping the experiment, recording the very thing Emmett remembered watching in the past.

He took a deep breath and begin to speak. There was no turning back now.

"Good evening, I'm Dr. Emmett Brown. I'm standing in the parking lot of Lone Pine Mall. It's Saturday morning on October 26, 1985, 1:18 AM, and this is Temporal Experiment Number One."

...
Gunshots. Yelling. Cursing. The squeal of tires against asphalt. Sonic booms. A crash, no, an explosion, so severe that Emmett could see flares of light and flames entering his peripheral vision. The assault on his senses was so loud it made his head throb and his eardrums ring in protest.

After an indiscernible amount of time (it could've been seconds or hours and he wouldn't have known either way), the barrage of sound returned once again to silence. His stomach ached from the bullets fired point-blank at him from such a short distance and his subsequent fall to the ground, so he laid in a crumpled-up position in the parking lot for a moment. He allowed himself to process everything that had happened. Staring up at the sky from his vantage point and remaining completely still, he almost couldn't believe it all.

After a wait that seemed to go on forever, it was all over now. The plan had worked! The machine had escaped the terrorists and Marty had successfully driven off to 1955. There would be no more wondering about what his future held or worrying over whether any kind of action he took would disrupt the time stream. It was truly the end of an era.

After a few moments, Emmett became aware of another person's presence next to him. He felt a hand on his shoulder.

"Doc. Doc. Oh, no..."

He recognized Marty's voice, despite it being more distraught than he'd ever heard it. Of course, from his perspective, he'd just watched his friend get gunned down in the middle of a parking lot by angry terrorists. Emmett wanted to reassure the boy of his fears.

It was then that he finally sat up and became aware of the world around him. He quickly took note of the terrorists' nearby van, which had smashed into a photo booth and was reduced to a demolished pile of splintered wood and fiberglass. He also saw Marty's face hovering over him and saying, "You're alive?"

Emmett unzipped his radiation suit to reveal silver-colored bullets lodged in a bulletproof vest.

"Bulletproof vest? But how did you know?" questioned an astonished but relieved Marty.

Emmett pulled Marty's letter out of his pocket. After thirty years, the crisp white paper had become yellowed and tattered, and the tape was falling off. The words were still legible as ever, though; they still bore the same warning. Although the paper didn't look like much, it was of the utmost importance. Without it, he would not be sitting up at all.

"But I never got a chance to tell you...what about all that talk of screwing up future events, the space-time continuum?" Marty continued. Marty. The kid who gave him companionship and whose warning saved his life. He was no longer a memory that existed in his mind; no longer a mere name in the birth announcements section of the newspaper or a strange kid he didn't know, but a real, existing person who had chose to become friends with him.

He'd waited a long time for it to happen and gave up a lot just for that one teenage boy and one DeLorean-turned-time-machine. There had been ups, downs, and everything in between, but he didn't regret it. If he had to, he'd do it all again. However, he did not plan to relive his own past like that. What was finished was finished. It was time to begin looking towards the future, or perhaps a distant time that he'd only ever known from stories. He did still have a time machine in his possesion, after all.

Before that night, his destiny, if a bit vague, had been known. He was painstakingly careful about making sure everything happened as it was supposed to and that everything that was on schedule.

Now, aside from getting trapped in the Old West, which had been made known to him during Marty's second visit, the future was wide open. It was a blank slate that could contain whatever he made of it. He was entering a whole new chapter of his life. Who knew what new adventures and discovery it could hold? The possibilities were infinite...

He turned to Marty, who he certainly had to thank sometime for everything he'd done. A smile spread across his face as he replied to his question.

"Well, I figured...what the hell?"