Dear god, I've pushed the boundaries. A Hitler one-shot, Kyman, Gutters (Goth/Butters) and now this. Back to the Future. This is going to be Doc/Marty, and will be a secondary project until I finish Grounded by Fear. Due to the ball of yarn the Back to the Future franchise made of their storyline, this takes place between Marty and Doc Brown's first meeting and their first adventure with Marty going back in time. I'm placing it around 1984 because I flippin' can XD.

Rig

Marty McFly sighed and rapped his knuckles impatiently on the garage door. "Emmett Brown? You home?" he asked, leaning his head close to the garage door. Of all days, this was the day his amplifier had decided to fail. The thing had merely crapped out on him in the middle of a playing session, nearly shattering his eardrums in the process. Now he found himself a few doors down at the resident madman of the neighborhood. Great. Just fucking great.

But it wasn't like he had any other options.

The electrician in town was off fixing people's cable and his father had the car. So it was either deal with a busted amplifier and play it off to the guys, or confront the odd hermit he'd heard so much about in the garage on 1640 Riverside Drive. "Look, Doc, you in there?" Marty lifted himself up on his toes to peer into one of the hideously filthy, rectangular windows on the garage door. "I need an amplifier fixed and I was wondering if you could help me out." He raised his voice, hoping the man was home.

The amplifier in question lay on its back on his skateboard, having been irritably kicked and prodded down the road to its surgeon. Marty settled back down to earth and raked his fingers through his brown hair, ruffling it up. His eyes trailed to the white van in the driveway with its advertisement painted on the side: "Dr. E. Brown Enterprises: 24 Hr. Scientific Services"

"Twenty four hours my ass." Marty muttered. He was about to turn away and prepare to kick his poor amplifier back home when he heard a door open. He lifted his head and peeked around the corner of the garage. "Doctor Brown?" he asked, seeing the wild-haired figure pause halfway out of the doorway and turn rather wide, wild eyes toward him.

Marty took a minute to study the person he was walking towards. Jesus Christ…I think I saw hair like that once at a Van Halen concert. He thought to himself, clearing his throat. The Doc was wearing a long white lab coat that reached to the middle of this thighs, stained brown slacks, and a shirt Marty was pretty certain had been burnt enough to warrant the trash can.

Doctor Emmett Brown stared back at him, a sandwich in one hand which Marty had to take a double look at. "Uh…" he winced at the greenish bread, seeing the Doc's eyes follow his. Marty pointed at the bread. "Is that…?"

"Benign food mould, nothing to worry about my boy. He said, waving a hand dismissively. "What can I do for you?"

Marty jerked his thumb back to the driveway. "I've got an amplifier that just crapped out on me in the middle of a playing session. You think you could fix it?" he asked. "The sign on the van said you repair things, and my mom pretty much told me I'd have to do it myself if I wanted it done so….I figured I'd come down here."

"Go ahead and bring it in. I'm working on something at the moment so you'll have to excuse me. I've got some very volatile equipment that can't be left alone for long."

And just as quickly as he appeared, Emmett Brown disappeared back into the confines of the garage, shutting the door behind him. Marty rubbed his neck and looked at the moss-ridden wooden slats on the side of the garage as he headed back out to the driveway. "What kind of nutjob lives in a garage?" he mumbled under his breath, guiding the amplifier to the tiny, cracked side door with his feet. The pavement between the garage and the nearby fence felt claustrophobic, and Marty had to guide the skateboard around a few cracks and bumps in the walkway. "Doesn't take really good care of the place does he?" Marty sighed and pushed the skateboard into the garage.

He stopped and stared.

A room like this would give his mother a heart attack!

Papers were strewn everywhere on the floor, books piled to the ceiling and threatening to crash into the garage door. A few workbenches groaned under the weight of mechanics that Marty couldn't even begin to name. Old clothes, burnt rags, chemical vials and strange jars, crates, boxes, abounded with no sense of rhyme or reason. Even some weirdly out of place things like an alto saxophone and a dog bowl overflowing with dried-out wet dog food were strewn here and there. Marty swore he saw something move under the mattress half- buried under an engine block.

In the midst of it all Doc Brown was holding the mouldy sandwich in between his thin lips while tinkering about with something that looked vaguely familiar. The cart stood at least a foot above the Doc's head, whirring noisily away. "Is that the back-up generator for the school?" Marty asked in shock.

"What? No!" Doc knelt quickly and yanked a thick brown blanket over the device. "I'm conducting an experiment based on Nikola Tesla's coil. If it works I should have the world's first functioning force field. You wouldn't happen to have a car between six and eight feet long would you?"

Marty blinked. "Uh…"

"Never mind, I'll find one somewhere." Doc gestured vaguely and his eyes flicked to the skateboard, spying it amongst the mess. He waded over, stepping across a pile of books that wavered for a moment. "What did you say your name was?" he peered at the amplifier closely then stood and fought the mass obstructing him from a large tool cabinet.

"Marty McFly." Marty said.

"Doctor Emmett L. Brown at your service. I actually haven't had a customer since that blasted kid had me help him with his physics final, but failed to specify exactly what sort of physics he was studying. Kid put the terminal in terminal velocity." Doc muttered, tossing tools this way and that until he found a screwdriver. He whipped around suddenly. "Are you the one that lives up the road with the small white car?" he asked, pointing a pair of needle-nosed pliers at Marty.

Marty shrugged. "Yeah, but it's my father's car. So what do you think is wrong with the amp?" he nodded to the downed machine. No wonder everyone in town says to stay away from him…guy obviously has a screw loose. Marty thought to himself.

"Ah yes bring it over!" Doc gestured with the pliers to the bed, not even turning from the cabinet. "Just set it there next to the engine. That foul contraption of a DeLorean…I'm about to put a kilogram of Cyclotrimethylenetrinitramine under it and blow it to the blasted moon!" He stuck the screwdriver between his teeth and shoved the tool cabinet's drawer half-closed. He twisted around a table full of empty dog cans and dishes and approached the amp that Marty was grunting and yanking over to the bed.

Marty had the distinct feeling that his poor amp was about to be butchered like a mad doctor with a particularly interesting patient. "Go on and come back tonight with your father's car and I'll have your amplifier. Meet me at the Twin Pines Mall around eight." Doc said, unscrewing the back panel to the heavy amplifier.

His father's car? What did Doc Brown want with his father's car? "I don't think that's such a good idea, Doc." Marty said, but he was met with an impatient gesture from the wild-haired scientist.

"Just bring it, I'll explain everything later to you, Marty McFly."

________________

"This is crazy, this is crazy. He could cut apart your car, or steal it or something. Your dad's never going to forgive you." Marty muttered to himself. "Fucking Christ…what the hell am I doing? The Doc's obviously insane. He broke out of some mental asylum somewhere and he's after your frickin' car. Who knows what he did to your amplifier…" He pulled into the dark, empty parking lot at Twin Pines Mall, spying the Doc's white van parked haphazardly in the middle of the parking lot.

He sighed and pulled up next to it, putting his family car in park and getting out to the vision of Doc Brown pulling out a large black box with an L shaped arm attached to the top of a steel spire, with several thick cables running from the bottom of the box to the very same generator Marty had seen in the haphazard home.

"Come here and help me with this Marty! This is going to be brilliant!" Doc had a gigantic smile spread on his face as he struggled over to the car. "We need to put this on the roof." He grunted. Marty grabbed the edge of the box and helped stabilize it on the top of the car.

"Hold on a minute, Doc…" Marty said, looking at the contraption as the Doc adjusted the arm of the thing to touch the ground around the car. It extended out a good four feet from the side of the car.

"Ah yes your amplifier! I made some modifications to it. There was just a stripped wire that was rubbing up against the speaker and causing a short out." Doc said, awkwardly detaching himself from the McFly family car and running to his van. "Einstein get out of there." The older man said irritably, shooing a large dog that seemed to be at least half sheepdog out of the van. Marty eagerly looked over Doc's shoulder and blanched.

"Doc…is that my…"

"You bet it is. Here, look. The output wasn't nearly adequate when I plugged it in myself, so I recalibrated it to put out a much larger spectrum of sound. Now it should oscillate perfectly with any type of stringed instrument." Doc said proudly, pulling out the Frankenstein-like amplifier. The black casing had been cut open and now wires protruded out and sunk back into small holes in it. The speaker had been replaced with something that sat awkwardly inside, and somehow it seemed twice its original size. "Just trust me, Marty. Once you plug your instrument into this it will never want anything else. Now, to the experiment at hand. If my calculations are correct, this car will funnel the Tesla coil's energy down into the frame, and effectively ground the car to the asphalt. The electricity will form a wormhole effect around the passenger, who will remain completely unharmed!" Doc made a grandiose gesture. "Einstein! Come here boy!"

Marty stared, openmouthed. "Doc, Doc you can't do that to my dad's car! He'd kill me if you blew it up."

"Who said anything about blowing anything up?" Doc asked, seeming as bewildered as he was. "No no this is a simple electrical experiment. The car I was talking about performing an exothermic reaction on was the damned DeLorean behind my garage, not your car." He said as he opened the car door and ushered in the sheepdog to sit on the seat. "Come here." He grabbed Marty's upper arm with a swift movement and brought him over to the generator.

"Property of Hill Valley High School. This is the damn generator! You stole it." Marty said, his voice filled with more admiration than anger. Imagine if Strickland got wind of this! Doc must be some sort of genius in order to lift it from the school's boiler room. Sure, he was as crazy as everyone said he was, but he would make a hell of a prankster.

"I borrowed it, Marty. They would have never let me borrow it and I needed it." Doc said, a bit remorsefully. "I'll apologize to the school board later. Right now science prevails, and since we're at a quiet locale I don't think we stand a chance of getting caught anytime soon. Now, as you can see Einstein is safely sitting on the seat. Note that he's been trained to sit still so that none of his body parts touch the metal of the car. Doing so could be disastrous."

Marty took a look at the dog, ruffling his hair nervously. "Looks to me like he's scared shitless." He said. Well, the madman had his car and there wasn't anything that was going to change that from the looks of it.

"Never mind him, he trusts me. Don't you Einie?" Doc called to the dog. Einstein gave Doc a look that even Marty labeled as nervous through the windshield. "Alright, let's see how this works." Doc clapped his hands together. "Marty, go grab a pair of rubber gloves out of the van, I'm going to need your help."

Marty sighed as he walked around to the passenger side of the van. "This is heavy." He muttered under his breath.