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“—MY PINE!!!” DeLorean hears, directed at Marty but, given that Marty is sitting inside of her, she receives the words first. “WHY YOU! YOU SPACE BASTARD, YOU KILLED MY PINE!!!”
“And you almost killed my driver, numbnuts!” she shouts back at the old man wielding a shotgun. “Who’s gonna get us outta here if Marty gets sniped, huh?!”
The old man hears none of that, but that’s to be expected.
It’s November 5th, 1955, and the world’s first human time traveler is currently driving for his life in the world’s first time machine. The machine in question is sitting on her own physical form’s roof and angrily glaring into the darkness that the old man is rapidly disappearing into.
”Marty, drive us out,” she says through gritted teeth, even though he, of course, doesn’t hear. “Not just out of here. Out of this time, kid, you hear me? You got us in, you get us out.”
Scolding him like this makes her feel better.
The truth is, though, she doubts he even can do anything. An erratic, irrational, carefree teenage boy, with a sweaty forehead and eyes so blue and so innocent they’d fit better on a kitten. She still wonders how he managed to get on Dr. Brown’s good side - and stay on this good side, enter his house, pet his dog, touch his inventions and call him Doc…
No- no, no, NO. She forbids herself from thinking about Dr. Brown. It’s been ten minutes - and minus thirty years - since that moment in the parking lot, and she forces herself to only think about Marty. Because Marty’s here, and Marty’s alive.
Though… thinking about Marty is also unpleasant. He drives the car as fast as he can, which, coupled with the roads of 1955, is pretty rough on her inexperienced wheels. He keeps mumbling some comforting nonsense to himself, which all boils down to “it’s just a dream”, and it makes DeLorean furious. She wants to grab him by the shoulders and shake him so violently for so long that he HAS to believe he isn’t dreaming, but alas. Being a projection isn’t easy.
The sun is out, which doesn’t help DeLorean’s mood in the slightest. It’s the sun of thirty years ago, it’s not even that bright, and while it helps humans generate energy in their bodies, it does nothing of the sort for cars.
”If only there was a solar panel somewhere on me,” she laments grumpily. “A really powerful solar panel. Then I’d just drive around in the sun for a while, and we’d have the 1.21 gigawatts, and everything would be alright…”
The kid goes on to exit the car and stares dumbfounded at the ongoing construction of the new city district. It’s boring to sit on a car that isn’t even moving, so she climbs off and walks up to him to study his face.
”That’s not good,” she muses. “I can’t rely on a driver that looks like he’s seen a ghost. What, will this be your home district or something?”
It might have been, given how determined he’d been to drive specifically here - god, this kid doesn’t know a thing about thinking four-dimensionally! If something exists in the future, it doesn’t mean it existed in the past, it’s elementary, Marty, how in the hell—
Never mind. He’s seemingly over his stupor. DeLorean can see the gears turning in his head when he considers his situation: alone, years before he was even born, homeless and helpless, with only a time machine that can’t travel in time, and to add to it - wearing completely era-inappropriate clothing! She thinks she may be feeling bad for the kid. The key word being “may”.
She notices Marty trying to talk with the locals that drive by him. They, understandably, are terrified of the sweaty, panicked teenager in a weird suit driving a weird car, and it only reminds DeLorean that he’s the one her fate depends on.
Bummer.
”Look, kiddo,” she says when he enters the car, “I know you’re panicking. But right now my life depends on you. And your life depends on you, too, unless you make some allies here - and I doubt you can convince anyone you aren’t crazy! So—“
She shuts up when he hurriedly takes off the radiation suit and slowly pushes her behind the nearby billboard. “Live in the home of tomorrow… today!” it advertises joyfully, and she only scoffs at it. The only place she can live in today is—
Marty lets go of her and frantically looks around. She raises an eyebrow, trying to figure out what is he planning, until she sees him collecting some branches from the ground.
”No you aren’t, young man!!” DeLorean tries sounding as angry as she can. “You’re not covering me in THESE. Anyone- eurgh!” She gets interrupted by a branch landing on her face. “Anyone with a working pair of eyes will see that I am a car, who someone thought to hide, therefore it must be valuable, and…”
She gives up and buries her face in her hands. Yes, she does understand that the alternative is to attract all sorts of unwanted attention in the city proper, but… she’s a car, and no car, sentient or otherwise, wants to be stolen.
She also understands that Marty doesn’t hear her.
”Whatever,” she says, resigned. “Do what you want.”
Marty shoots one last glance at her and walks off to the city.
***
A downside of being the projection of an inanimate thing’s self is that you’re tied to this thing. You can’t leave. After all, this thing technically is you, and you can’t exactly leave yourself, can you?
DeLorean has tried, of course. Back in the day, when she wasn’t DeLorean and wasn’t even any car at all, instead being a pile of wires and glass and circuits, she’d regularly try to run far away from her body. And every time she’d stably see the same result - her projection would slowly disintegrate into thousands of snowflake-like silver particles, before reassembling back near her physical form. After a few times, it became boring, and she didn’t try this anymore.
Now this fact pleases her even less than usual. She can’t feel physical sensations like humans do, but she can still see the dull sun, the infuriatingly empty road and the branches that hide her worse than a trenchcoat hides two children pretending to be an adult. The billboard portrays a saccharine-sweet happy family, and if DeLorean could, she’d punch the smiling faces.
”You’re lucky,” she hisses to the smiling kids. “You have a father, here he is, happy as a hippo. You never had to learn how not to walk right through him. You never had to witness him getting gunned down.”
She spits the last two words out like poison.
Existence is a tiny bit more bearable now that she’s said that.
***
It’s still November 5th, 1955, but DeLorean knows that only by virtue of being a time machine. Feelings-wise, she’d say it’s already December at the very least.
There’s nothing to do. Nothing. Just sit near the billboard, or stand near the billboard, or clip into the ground near the billboard. Every second of existence is infuriating, and if she hadn’t known Marty needs her to come back home, she’d think he just abandoned her.
“When I see you, kid, I’m ripping your head off,” she swears to thin air. “Or- no, I suppose I won’t be able to. Then I’m… closing all doors, and windows, and suffocating you to death. Or hitting you with electricity. Or…”
Not helping. Coming up with death threats to a hapless teenager is fun - unless you’re a car that realistically can only kill him if he walks right under your wheels, and she doubts even he’s that stupid.
So instead she just sits back down, crosses her arms, leans against the billboard, trying her hardest to not clip through it, and tries to at least fall asleep.
She tries.
And tries.
And tries more and more, but falling asleep is ridiculously hard when you’re thinking about so many things, and none of them are pleasant.
She’s lived with Dr. Brown for almost thirty years. She’s seen him age, and change, and create, and through all of that he’s stayed her treasured creator. She doesn’t know how did she manage to acquire a consciousness, but she theorizes that it was because of Dr. Brown somehow - which makes him as close to being her father as anyone can be to a car.
And… he’s gone.
He’s gone, and while there is a way to save him, it falls into the hands of… Marty. The useless, bumbling kid who knows nothing about science as a whole and time travel specifically.
HE, of all people, must save Dr. Brown.
DeLorean feels the gasoline boil in her fuel tank.
She prefers to stuff these thoughts deep inside and sleep.
***
Glowing yellow eyes open groggily, and it’s still November 5th, though to her relief it’s already close to ending.
The boy is still nowhere to be found. Neither is Dr. Brown. Neither is anyone at all that can help with time travel matters. She’s still very alone, and the grass is still very uncomfortable, and the billboard depicts the same goddamn smiling family!!!
Enough to drive a regular person insane.
But DeLorean isn’t a regular person, not even a regular car, she’s tailor made for time travels and all the hardships they can bring. Still, she wishes she could at least leave her physical body - just to run into town, find Marty in his horrible red vest, make sure he knows what he’s doing, maybe even…
She chases away all the thoughts that can lead to thinking about Dr. Brown again. At least, she tries to, but a very curious paradox of any consciousness is that, when it tries to not think of something, it only thinks of that something and nothing else. Thoughts about Marty, about 1955, about herself - everything leads her back to Dr. Brown, and to what happened in the parking lot.
To distract herself, she tries singing a song. The problem is, the only one that creeps into her head is the anthem of the Soviet Union, of all things, and she doesn’t know a single word of Russian. So she resorts to just whistling the melody and hoping it gets her mind off what happened and is happening.
Eventually, even the anthem bores her.
She sits down, again, because it’s not like she has many options. She looks up at the black sky and tries to feel the same way she felt in the parking lot, before everything went to hell. Unsurprisingly, she fails.
The night just doesn’t feel like she can go anywhere she wants.
She understands clear as day (ha) that until someone comes for her, she can’t go anywhere at all.
And— hold on to that thought a little. “Someone”? Not just someone, she needs it to be Marty, or else…
Once more, DeLorean gets reminded that she’s just that - a DeLorean, a car; and cars, especially cool-looking futuristic ones, are prone to getting stolen.
“And I can’t defend myself,” she whispers out loud, “unless I intentionally break down or something… but oh, that would hurt…”
A feeling she’s never felt in thirty years of relatively peaceful existence, yet has been feeling non-stop for the last few hours, resurfaces again.
She feels fear - deep, all-consuming fear, and it makes her angry, because she’s a time machine, for goodness’ sake! Time machines are supposed to be useful! They aren’t supposed to sit on the grass, hugging their knees, getting startled every time they hear even the tiniest noise…
“If there’s a thief,” she says to herself, because the silence is deafening, “I’ll shut down the time circuits. The flux capacitor. I’ll… I’ll disable everything at all…”
Her breathing is labored now, and she’s trying very hard to not let it reflect on her physical body. She doesn’t want to lose fuel.
”But— but if someone thinks I’m just a pile of junk, then they’ll just take me apart, right…”
That’s because you are, DeLorean. A pile of junk. A trough on wheels, capable only of looking semi-cool. Literally anything, from a treadmill to a fridge, would make a better time machine than you. You should’ve exploded the day your creator first started working on you, so that you’d never endanger him and his friend and yourself…
”I’m great!” she shouts in response to her own mind. “I’m the coolest! car! in the world! I can take people anywhere and anytime, I can—“
Cause your creator to die over you and an innocent teenager to get stranded in an unknown time? Do nothing useful except sit on the ground and weep over how overestimated you are? Dr. Brown considered you his pride and joy, the project of his life, and you repaid him with getting him killed?
DeLorean clutches her head in her hands.
”Shut up,” she says quietly, and if she had bothered to make herself proper tear ducts she’d begin to sob. “You aren’t even real. You’re just thoughts in my mind that I need to work on. I’m not even supposed to have a mind in the first place. You shouldn’t exist.”
Neither should you, right, DeLorean? You’re a mistake. The next stage of science doesn’t deserve to be represented by you. Useless piece of steel. Failed experiment.
”I’m not getting told I’m a failure by anyone other than my creator!! He knows if I’m really failed or not!”
He’s dead. And the only one that can fetch him for you is a brainless teenager with seemingly zero social skills. And you’re the one who….
Light.
DeLorean instantly throws her head up.
There’s a car approaching her, an unknown car, and it’s driving right at her.
Someone knows she’s here. Someone came here specifically for her, and the branches definitely won’t hide her, and someone will break into her, and drive her, and use her, and—
She curls up into a ball, ready for the inevitable. The glow of her flux capacitor is almost gone.
The doors of the other car open, and…
”There’s something wrong with the starter, so I hid it… Here.”
Marty?
Wait.
Dr. Brown?!
The man who exits the car, accompanying the kid, is none other than DeLorean’s creator. Thirty years younger. Confused. Real. Alive.
She doesn’t even register the branches finally being cleaned off her, as she comes out of her trance and practically throws herself onto him. The key word being practically, as even in her unimaginable joy she remembers that she cannot actually hug him. Still, she tries.
”Doctor Brown,” she mumbles, breath erratic, “Doc… I wanna stay in this time, y’know? Since… since you’re here…”
She knows damn well he doesn’t hear her. She’s not about to let it stop her.
”After I fell off my toilet,” the doctor says, in disbelief, “I drew this.”
He pulls out a crumpled piece of paper.
DeLorean looks at it from behind Marty’s shoulder, almost reverently. A hastily scribbled drawing, barely even qualifying as a blueprint, captioned “flux compressor” in the handwriting she loves so much.
She reaches out to intangibly touch the paper.
”So this is me,” she whispers.
Marty clearly wants to demonstrate, so she plays along, turning on the capacitor and making it pulse as prettily as possible. The kid looks back at his friend, as if to say “see? It works.”
”It works,” DeLorean says, quietly. “I work.”
The look on her creator’s face is enough to make her smile - awkwardly, but warmly, and her eyes begin to glow brighter than usual. He’s happy, he’s proud, of himself and of her, Dr. Brown is proud of her, she could explode into a fiery blast right here and now and die happy.
”It works…! Hahahaaa!!” he exclaims, patting her roof.
”I work!”
“IT WORKS!!!”
”I work!!!”
“I finally invent something that works!!” He grabs Marty by his vest, looking so proud, so happy…
”You do,” DeLorean now grins uncontrollably, unable to resist the sheer delight. “You invent me. I work. I actually work.”
She slumps onto the grass that suddenly isn’t that uncomfortable, actually.
“You bet your ass it works”, and even though Marty’s eyes are shadowed by the foggy night, DeLorean can see that he, too, feels pride for her.
”If I know anything about the doc here, it’s that he’s stubborn as a mule,” she says, examining this… deceptively idiotic boy. “To convince him of anything is a Herculean task. So how in the hell did you…”
She considers all of his interactions with Dr Brown. How they smile at each other. How her esteemed, if not by many, creator trusts him, and how terrified the kid was when… alright, DeLorean, you can say this now - when present-Dr Brown was shot.
For some reason, now that the doctor of this time is here, she’s having a much easier time thinking about him.
And about Marty, she supposes.
”Somehow, we’ve got to sneak this back to my laboratory,” Dr Brown says, in his trademark frantic manner. “We’ve got to bring you home!”
DeLorean sighs, finally reaching some semblance of contentedness - and then, simply out of principle and to spite this godawful day, proceeds to get angry.
”HEY! How about bringing ME home?!”