Author's Note: I'm not usually this pessimistic, I assure you. But I've had this story lying around on a drive for a while, and I decided it might be a good idea to brush it up and post it.

Disclaimer: I don't own Back to the Future.

It was 11:00pm at the Doctor Emmett Brown's residence. The garage door was closed, the windows were covered, and not a sound emitted from the apparently vacant house, other than the loud, scraping sound of metal.

The Doc had been working for nearly five hours straight on his latest invention: the time machine. But his objective for this particular invention wasn't to get the contraption up and running again, but to dismantle his work, once and for all.

The Doc scooted out from underneath the DeLorean on a mechanic's dolly, holding a long metal pipe in his hands, and flinging it across the room.

"Where did I go wrong?" He muttered to himself, for about the one-hundredth time that night.

He had invented the Time Machine to help further the potential of mankind, but all that he'd managed to do was corrupt timeline after timeline, and lose his only good friend, the young Martin Seamus McFly, in the process.

It was ironic to think of how long he'd wanted one of his own inventions to work, only for it to be the ruin of him in the end.

Or better yet, the ruin of others.

Shaking his head, he pulled out the last vital instrument to his time machine; the Flux Capacitor.

With that gone, there was no going back.

Once that piece was removed and destroyed, the possibility of time travel (as best as Doctor Emmett Brown knew it), no longer existed.

And he hoped that with the time machine out of commission, that the fabric of time could no longer be manipulated or further thinned by him, or anyone else that wished to reap personal gain from it.

He only hoped now that him doing so was making the right choice.

Lord knew how many times he had gone back in time to try and save Marty from disappearing, and look where that got him;

In a warped reality with no friends.

And nothing he could invent would fix that.

Or so he now felt.