Er. Short version?  In the alternate universe, Buffy died a year ago and they're still trying to cope, but we start in our regularly scheduled fandom, just after Mulder and Scully's office was burned.

Many thanks to my wonderful betas - Rhi, Devo, and Anaith.  Any mistakes that remain are mine and will be swatted when I find them.

Disclaimers: The X-Files characters belong to 1013 Productions.  The BtVS characters belong to Mutant Enemy.   No infringement is intended.

Rated:   PG-13

Crossovers100 Prompt:  #25 Strangers

Summary:   Mulder takes an unexpected journey to a universe where the paranormal not only exists, it's trying to take over.

Chance governs all

Hoover Building
Assistant Director Walter Skinner's Office
May 20, 1998

The choking smell of smoke and water-soaked charred wood followed Mulder as the elevator took him away from the ruins of the X-Files basement office.  He'd punched the down button by force of habit, too preoccupied to realize his mistake until the doors opened and the stench of fire and ash blew in through the open doors of the elevator.  He took a deep breath to steel his resolve for the coming interview with Skinner.  There was no need to look upon the charred remains of his professional life.  He'd carry the memory of the smoking ruins with him like a scar across his psyche until the men who sought to destroy the truth were brought to justice.

The elevator stopped to collect more passengers on the main floor and Mulder obligingly moved to the rear of the car.  The too-obvious glances everywhere but at him were familiar reminders that he was still the odd man who lived in the basement - even if his basement office was now nothing more than trash waiting to be hauled out to the dumpsters.  Joe Talbot, an old friend from his days in Violent Crimes, sidled through the crowd to reach him.

"Sorry to hear about your office, Mulder," he said with genuine sympathy.  Talbot had been one of the few people who'd understood Mulder's drive to establish the X-Files and was one of the even rarer men who'd bucked popular opinion to congratulate him openly when he left VCU.

"Any chance we'll get you back in VC?" Talbot asked with a hopeful look.  Mulder could practically hear breaths being held as the other agents in the car waited for his reply.  It gets lonely being the resident maverick.   The unit could use some shaking up - I think some of the guys have begun to fossilize," Talbot added with look of mock concern.  Talbot cared even less for popular opinion than Mulder did, but his solve rate was too high for anything more than a few withering looks from his superiors.

Despite already having made up his mind, Mulder allowed himself the wicked pleasure of imagining SAC Hindemith's reaction if he showed back up in VC.  It was tempting, but Mulder knew the Bureau would never allow him that kind of freedom again.

"Who knows?" Mulder replied with a slight tilt of his head to tell Talbot that hell would probably freeze over first.  "It's up to A. D. Skinner," he added for the benefit of the eavesdroppers.  Let them think they had him neatly caged for as long as possible.

"I'll keep a light on for you.  If you need a recommendation, I'm your man," Talbot said in his best overly-serious tone and a nod in return to indicate that he understood the situation.

The elevator stopped on Skinner's floor with a slight lurch.

"Watch your back, Mulder," Talbot said as he stretched out his hand to take Mulder's, ignoring the other men in the car busy ignoring his gesture of support.

Mulder nodded and then pushed his way out into the familiar hallway leading down to Skinner's office.  Talbot's irreverent whistling of the Notre Dame fight song followed him down the hall like a banner.  Trust Talbot to find his own unique way of telling him to kick ass.

As he'd expected, Scully was already in Skinner's waiting room.  She was sitting ramrod straight on the coach, her face devoid of emotion except for the residual hint of anger Mulder could see in her eyes.  Although he was certain she'd heard him come in, she didn't turn her head or even acknowledge his presence.  Mulder saw Kim's eyebrow raise in a question as she assessed the situation.  She looked puzzled.  Mulder gave her a smile and went to a chair on the other side of the room from Scully.  They'd had their discussion; for twelve endless hours over the preceding two days they'd talked about his plan and Scully had left him in no doubt about her feelings.   She disapproved.  Mulder suspected that if Skinner had not ordered both of them to appear in his office this morning, Scully would have been somewhere else.

Mulder wished he'd been able to tell Scully everything, but he'd hoped she would have accepted his word that he wasn't reacting emotionally.  Her scathing comments about his inability to take care of himself had stung.  The discussion gradually deteriorated into a smoldering argument.  It became clear that Scully had no idea how valuable she had been in keeping him focused, in forcing him to refine his theories under fire, and ultimately how much he trusted her to watch his back.  At the same time, her reaction to his plan and her scalding comments about his abilities made it clear that she felt her presence had been the only thing keeping him alive and even moderately successful.  Mulder hadn't been sure which misconception to address first and had ended up botching the whole thing.

Now, looking at her, Mulder wondered what had happened between them.  They had both paid a heavy price in their search for the truth, but when had that search become only his mad search for an unattainable truth?  When had she stopped considering herself part of the search and assumed the role of a victim of his obsession?  Bitter words were hurled in the heat of anger, but Mulder suspected that they carried more truth than Scully would have admitted otherwise.  It was plain she believed he was giving up and somehow that translated into a callous indifference towards her sacrifices on his behalf.   Mulder had no idea how to convince her otherwise.  In the end, they parted with stiff words of reconciliation that could not bridge the gap between them.

"Assistant Director Skinner will see you now," Kim said in a firm, official tone that gave no hint of her feelings.  Mulder wondered whether she sympathized with Scully, who was paying the professional price of being associated with the screw-ball in the basement, or whether she was relieved to see the back of both of them.

Following a half-step behind Scully, Mulder entered the office of a man he'd never been able to clearly define as an adversary or a friend - a bit of both, Mulder conceded as he came to attention in front of Skinner's desk.  The rehearsals were over, the play was about to begin, and for the first time in two days, Mulder felt a sense of calm settle over him.  This was right.  This was what he needed to do.

"Agent Mulder.  Agent Scully.  It is the decision of the Bureau that the X-Files unit be shut down until its purpose can be reviewed and evaluated," Skinner said in a officially bland tone looking directly at them, but never quite meeting Mulder's eyes.

Mulder waited.  This was all going according to the script.  If Scully had been more willing to listen rather than lecture, Mulder might have been able to tell her that he'd had a long talk with Skinner the night after the fire and knew what was in store for them.  Skinner's grim news of shut-down and humiliation had been the impetus which had forced Mulder to consider his future.   Mulder wished he'd had time to warn Skinner of his decision, but the sense that he was being watched made the risk too great after their initial meeting.

Scully remained silent - the perfect soldier at attention awaiting orders.  Mulder hoped his guess about what the Bureau would do with her when he left was correct, but he did trust Skinner to do whatever it took to look after her.

"SAC Kersh has two openings in Domestic Terrorism.  You will report to him and assume whatever duties he sees fit to assign to you.  They will, however, be desk duties.  Your field status is another matter under consideration."  Skinner's expression was almost unreadable, but Mulder saw the faint crinkle of his nostrils as if he'd stepped in a pile of fresh dung.  Kersh had a reputation as a hard-nosed, ambitious man - someone calculated to put Spooky Mulder on a short leash and yank it hard and often.  Mulder had met Kersh only once and immediately recognized someone who liked being in control and liked holding his agents on a tight chain.  Mulder almost felt a twinge of sympathy for Kersh's disappointment when he learned that he wouldn't be getting Spooky to tame.

Mulder took a deep breath.  Showtime, he thought.

"No, sir, I will not be reporting to Domestic Terrorism.   I'm not going to sit around playing office boy until the Bureau decides I've learned my lesson," Mulder said quietly.  Reaching into his pocket, Mulder pulled out the terse note he'd written resigning from the FBI and laid it in front of Skinner.  "I assume this is what you've been waiting for?" he added with just a hint of sarcasm.

Mulder tried to ignore the hiss of exasperated anger from Scully.  He'd made it clear that he wanted her to come with him, to continue their partnership as independent researchers, but she had adamantly rejected the idea.  Perhaps, to her, safety lay within the fold of the FBI.  For her sake, he hoped his departure would satisfy their enemies and that they'd allow her to return to the life he'd interrupted.

"I can't take this, Agent Mulder," Skinner barked.  His expression was stern, but Mulder saw sadness and understanding in his eyes.  If anyone would understand his need to choose his own battlefield, it was Skinner.

"You have no choice, sir.  It's over.  I'm tired of beating my head against a brick wall.  It's time to go," Mulder said with what he hoped was the right amount of tired resignation in his voice.  Skinner almost blinked then coughed back what sounded suspiciously like a chuckle.  Mulder had depended on Skinner being able to read him.  If Skinner had honestly thought Mulder was throwing in the towel, he would not let go until Mulder had changed his mind.  This way, Skinner might not know what was going on, but at least he'd know that Mulder wasn't giving up.

"You're certain about this?" Skinner asked carefully.

Mulder nodded to the unspoken question even as he replied to the overt question.  "Yes sir, I am."

"Well, then, it's been an experience working with you, Mr. Mulder.  Good luck," Skinner said impersonally as if Mulder no longer registered on his radar.  Mulder caught the barest flicker of a nod before Skinner turned to Scully.

"I gather, Agent Scully, that you do not concur with Mr. Mulder on this issue?"

"No, sir," Scully snapped.  Mulder winched at her cold tone.  He wondered how many years would pass before she forgave him for what she saw as abandonment.

"Fine. Then we need to discuss your future once your temporary assignment in Domestic Terrorism has been completed," Skinner said warmly as if welcoming her back into the fold.  Mulder sensed that something was off in his tone, but couldn't determine what it was.  Maybe Skinner was genuinely glad to have Scully back and safely set back on her professional course.  Mulder shrugged off the urge to analyze the nuances of Skinner's reaction.  Scully was safe.  That was all that mattered, now.  With a twinge of regret, he laid his gun and badge on Skinner's desk and stepped away from life as he had known it.

"Now, Mr. Mulder, if you will excuse us?" Skinner said politely as he gestured towards the door.   "Agent Scully, please sit down."

Mulder hesitated for a moment, willing Scully to look at him, but she kept her eyes resolutely forward and Mulder knew that he'd been dismissed in more ways than one.  Sadly he accepted her decision and walked away from the past into a very uncertain future.

*=*=*=*=*=*=*

Sunnydale, California
November 1999
Rupert Giles' residence

Fox Mulder climbed out of the taxi and gave Giles' house an admiring once-over before turning to pay the driver.  The neighborhood had a settled, almost stodgy look which Giles probably found reassuring and useful at the same time.   Mulder wondered how his neighbors would react if they knew they had a master mage living among them, one who had actually exorcised a demon.  Probably not well, providing anyone could convince them that demons existed.  Perhaps it was just as well the average person went through life completely oblivious to the horrors being held at bay, he admitted ruefully as he slung his duffel bag over his shoulder and headed for the front door.  Giles said that he wouldn't be home, but left careful instructions for locating the spare key he'd promised to leave out.  He'd told Mulder to make himself at home.

The weather in Southern California was definitely living up to its reputation and Mulder began to give serious thought to Giles' perennial plea for him to move to California.   He knew Giles had ulterior motives, not the least of which was keeping an eye on him.  Standing here in the warm sunshine, Mulder began to wonder if his reluctance had as much to do with his dislike of being watched as with simple stubbornness.  At least he trusted Giles more than most people.  Giles had sounded pleased that Mulder had turned to him when he needed a place to relax and think things through.  They had gone their separate ways since Oxford, but had always stayed in touch.  After all, banishing a demon was the sort of thing that formed a bond between two people, provided they survived.

Carefully picking up the key from under the ceramic frog among the potted plants, Mulder wondered what Giles had meant when he warned that using the key hidden in the frog's mouth would be extremely unwise.  Giles was a master of understatement and Mulder found it very easy to restrain his curiosity.  He might stick his fingers in every unknown substance he came across, but disregarding the warning of a mage who battled demons was going too far even for his rampant curiosity.  That didn't mean that he wouldn't pump Giles for information later, but right now he simply wanted to get inside, shower off the last of the D.C. dust, and relax.

Mulder opened the door to a pleasantly rumpled room full of books and papers.  Before he had time to take more than three steps into the room an explosion of light blinded him.  He felt himself lifted up and hurled backwards through some unimaginable barrier.  Somewhere between hitting it and blacking out he would have sworn he heard an irritated British voice.

"Bloody hell."

*=*=*=*=*=*=*

Sunnydale, California
May 1998
X-Files Special Task Force Field Camp

"Where in hell is that medic?"

Mulder heard the words from a distance and the part of his brain that didn't believe he was dead or dreaming categorized the tone as stressed and worried.  The voice was unfamiliar, but for some reason it drew him out of the numbness and towards the novel idea that he wasn't dead.

"Sir, we're getting help.  Hang on," the voice continued heartily, but Mulder sensed the stress was increasing.

Focus, Mulder suggested to himself.  If he wasn't dead, then the explosion might not have been real and he was just waking up after a particularly bad nightmare.

"The demon is dead, Major.  It was a Nazar type, but I couldn't tell whether it had started to feed."

Mulder's disorganized brain perked up.  Now this was a familiar voice.

"Giles?" he croaked in a hoarse whisper that startled him even further into consciousness.  He was lying on concrete, but he was definitely dressed in something bulkier than the shirt and slacks he remembered wearing on the plane.  As always, a mystery was enough to jump start his curiosity and he decided to sit up and open his eyes.

A hand pressed down on his chest as he tried to rise.  To his dismay, it didn't take much pressure to abort his attempt to sit up.

"Not yet, sir.  Let the doc check you out before you sit up," the stressed voice urged.

"I'm here, Mulder," Giles' voice responded.

Thwarted in sitting up, Mulder decided to try for the second option, opening his eyes.  Faces poised above him swam in a milky blur for a moment.  He batted his eyes, then tried to refocus.  To his relief, his vision settled down.  Giles was standing over him, looking concerned, but giving him a reassuring smile.  The owner of the voice and the hand was a stranger dressed in military fatigues and body armor.

"What happened?"   That wasn't exactly what Mulder had intended to ask, but it was appropriate.  His brain was desperately trying to sort through a hailstorm of disjointed pieces of information.

Why was he surrounded by a squad of very jumpy, very well-armed military men?  Why did one of them keep referring to him as 'sir'?  Why was he dressed in body armor?  So many questions and not an answer in sight.

"A Nazar demon snuck past our perimeter guards and attacked you," replied the man kneeling beside him.  Mulder noticed the insignia on his uniform and deduced that this was the major Giles had referred to.  "Do you know who you are?"

"Mulder.   Fox Mulder," he replied cautiously.

"Good.    The Nazar hadn't started to feed," Giles said with an explosive sigh of relief.

"Who are you?" Mulder asked poking the Major with a hand that, to his surprise, was gloved.  He didn't remember wearing gloves.  In fact, he was sure he hadn't packed any.

"Damn," the Major blurted out.  "I thought a Nazar took it all or nothing at all," he said, looking up at Giles.

Mulder lay still, trying to fit all the pieces together.  His head hurt as if he'd been thrown through a wall, which fit in with his last coherent memory, but he was beginning to come to the conclusion that something was badly amiss.   In his experience, people, especially military types, didn't usually speak so casually about things like demons.

"The demon didn't feed, but it did attack.  Do you think any of you would still be standing if it had fed?" Giles asked sarcastically.  Mulder heard murmurs that seemed to indicate agreement.  Mulder's mind flinched at the realization that military personnel were calmly agreeing with a mage that a demon had tried to attack him.

"This could possibly be an after-effect of the attack.  Most people don't react well to being thrown through sheetrock," Giles said with what Mulder considered to be an extremely blasé understatement.  Understating crises was Giles' trademark so at least one part of this made sense; a very tiny part, Mulder conceded.

"Where is that medic?"  The major, whose nametag read Clawson, was beginning to sound more irritated than worried.  A hopeful sign, Mulder decided.

"Busy elsewhere, Major.  I assume that a doctor will do, instead?" a very familiar voice chided, with just a hint of cold iron in the tone.

Mulder had never seen anyone managing to kneel and spring to attention at the same time.   It was impressive and quite understandable.  He was having to fight the urge to lie at full attention.  Scully often had that effect on people.  At least his delusions had a firm grounding in reality, and it was nice of his dreams to bring her back into his life.

The major hastily scooted to one side as Scully knelt down beside Mulder.

So much for this being a dream, Mulder thought with some dismay.  Even in his wildest dreams, he had never envisioned Scully dressed in battle fatigues with a rank insignia similar to the major's.  The wide white armband with a red cross seemed at odds with the very large gun holstered at her side.  Doctors usually didn't go armed, at least in the reality he was familiar with.

"What happened?" Scully asked as her hands swept over him checking for damage.  Her expression was achingly familiar: part concern, part exasperation, and a hefty dose of affection.

Mulder started to shake his head, but stopped when the soft staccato of bongo drums beating inside his head swelled to a couple of dozen steel drums being pounded by brass hammers.  He groaned and closed his eyes.  If there was a god in heaven, he'd wake up and find that he had just had a very odd dream.

"A Nazar demon got past the sentries and attacked A. D. Mulder," Major Clawson offered helpfully.

"Nasty," Scully commented dryly without a hint of sarcasm.

Mulder's eyes flew open.   Had he just heard Scully openly accepting the existence of demons?  The fact that a military officer had also referred to him as an A. D. seemed almost irrelevant beside the unsettling idea that Scully had become a believer.

"Well, we were lucky.  I suspect there's a slight concussion and the usual assortment of cuts and bruises, but you'll live, Mulder."   Scully rocked back on her heels with a relieved laugh.   "And one of these days, Mulder, you're going to have to explain why you keep landing on your head."

"Dr. Scully, can he be moved?" Giles asked abruptly.  There were sounds suggesting that a major battle had just erupted a few yards away.  The major scrambled to his feet. 

"OK, men, rest time's over.  Let's go kick some demon butt!"

Mulder struggled up to a half-sitting position propped on one elbow and saw two dozen men run after the major down a long earthen tunnel.  They carried an odd assortment of weapons and Mulder could swear he saw at least two large crossbows in the mix.  He wasn't certain, but one of the people following the major seemed to be a bear.  Despite the fact that repeated attempts to close his eyes and switch dream channels hadn't worked so far, Mulder was tempted to give it one more try.

"If we're careful.   Right now he's showing all the symptoms of a concussion and I would really prefer that he didn't get another knock on the head before this one has a chance to heal."

"Scully?" Mulder ventured in an uncertain tone.

"You'll be fine, Mulder.  Let Giles get you back behind the lines.  You've fought enough demons for today.  Let Major Clawson have his share," Scully added with a smile.

Mulder decided that either he was dead and this was a very strange hell or he had simply gone insane.  His skeptical partner was casually ribbing him about fighting demons in a way that suggested she not only believed in them, but accepted their presence as an unpleasant routine.

With quick efficiency, two soldiers shifted Mulder onto a stretcher and then lifted the stretcher onto the back of a Jeep.  After a final check, Scully squeezed his hand before picking up a backpack marked with a large red cross.

"I'll set up a triage base here, Giles.  Tell Colonel Doggett where I am and to send my orderlies along with an escort.  If you'd send Ahiga and Oz along with them, I'd be grateful.  There's fighting all along the line, but I think we've just found their main thrust."  Scully gave her orders in a crisp, no-nonsense fashion that hinted of dire things that would happen to any demon who messed with her patients.

"I'll make the call as soon as we clear the interference," Giles promised.  "Willow and Xander should be here shortly.   I informed them of the major's SOS.  They were plugging up one of the diversionary holes.  As soon as that's done, they know to come here.  That should be enough to hold this area until Doggett's forces arrive.  Be careful.  We nearly lost Mulder today, we can't afford to lose you," Giles warned.

"We'll be careful.  If these two soldiers will set up the smudge pots, we should be safe enough." Scully laughed and gave Mulder a thumbs-up.  "Trust you, Mulder, to think of putting blessed incense in smudge pots as a perimeter defense.  I'll see you later."

Mulder dropped his head back on the stretcher and decided that fainting was the only logical course of action in the face of a massive hallucination.

*=*=*=*=*=*=*

2 hours later
Emergency Ward, Sunnydale Military Hospital

"Mulder?"

Mulder surfaced from a chaotic nightmare with some relief.  To his surprise, he wasn't at home, and it felt like he was in a real bed.  The sheets had the crisp, starchy feel of hospital linens.  As he moved his head, he felt bandages scrape across the pillow and grimaced.  Ending up in a hospital bed was not exactly a promising start to his new life.

As he clambered up towards consciousness his brain began sorting out a confusing pattern of sensory perceptions.  His first impression of being in a hospital was confounded by the strong odors of frankincense and sage instead of antiseptics and disinfectants.  Hospitals were usually cool places, but his face and hands were registering strong heat, as if he were on the beach.  Added to the beach scenario was the faint whiff of a sea breeze.

"Come on, Mulder, wake up.  We need the bed," Scully prodded.

Mulder's eyes snapped open.  Unless he'd been out a lot longer than he thought, Scully should be on the other side of the continent.

To his dismay, the chaos of his nightmares seemed to have followed him into the waking world.  Scully was dressed in hospital scrubs, but she was also wearing the rank insignia of a major on her lab coat along with a very official-looking badge.

"How many fingers am I holding up?" Scully asked with a half-serious grin as she waved all ten fingers at him.

"Ten," he retorted as he glanced around the room trying not to stare.  The fact that Scully was in a good humor told him all he needed to know -- he was fine.  Unless he had truly passed through the looking glass, a worried Scully wouldn't joke about the traditional test for patients coming out of a dead faint.

His first impression had been correct.  His bed was a standard hospital-type bed, but the room was anything but a standard hospital room.  There were six beds lined up on the opposite wall and out of the corner of his eye, Mulder could see beds to either side of his so he assumed that there were six on his side of the room as well.  Every bed was occupied and he could see nurses, or what he assumed were nurses, moving around the beds doing very unhospital-like things such as drawing circles and runes around some of the beds.  Giles looked up from supervising one of the drawings and gave him a relieved smile.

Bright sunlight beamed into the room from skylights in the ceiling.  Over in one corner, Mulder could see a cluster of sunlamps.  The walls were made of some sort of metal polished so that they resembled mirrors.  A tray of medical flasks stood at the foot of the bed across from him and from here, Mulder could make out one of the labels.  Wolfsbane wasn't on any approved hospital pharmacy list that he knew of.

Where in hell was he?  Mulder closed his eyes and sent a very stern message to his imagination to stop with the tricks and let him wake up.

"Come on, Mulder.  Giles will drive you home and I want you to stay there for 24 hours before you even think about coming back to work.  I've signed you off for desk-duty only for the rest of the week.  Get some sleep," Scully urged as she carefully levered him to a sitting position.

Careful not to jostle his head too much, Mulder nodded.  He wasn't sure where home was in this Twilight Zone world, but it had to be an improvement over where he was now.  Besides, he could see a stretcher being wheeled in with another patient.

"John has sealed the hole and has men patrolling the perimeters.  Ahiga's team is scouting for any strays we may have missed.  Talbot and Dolworthy are good agents and should be able to handle anything short of another breakout attempt.  Go home and sleep, Mulder.  You've been up for most of the last thirty-six hours," Scully scolded.

Mulder gave her a lopsided smile and resisted the urge to ask her when the world shifted on its axis.  He wasn't sure what was going on, but Scully seemed to feel it was under control.  Of course, this implied that it often wasn't under control.

"The Hellmouth isn't going anywhere.  It will stay quiet for a day or two.  Even demons need time to regroup and talk themselves up to another assault.  Meanwhile, let the Marines do what they do best -- push back anything that tries to move out of the Hellmouth," Giles said with a weary smile.  He looked as tired as Mulder felt and his eyes belied the smile.

With Giles's help, he pulled on a plain black suit with a badge similar to the one Scully was wearing except that his was circled by a wreath of silver leaves.  As Giles leaned in to assist him with the jacket and he could see a similar badge on his jacket with a pair of crossed sticks under the badge.  Obviously, the different decorations signified something, rank perhaps, but the badge appeared to be a straightforward federal badge with the addition of a small pentagram.  More mysteries, but clues, nonetheless, to whatever new reality he'd landed in.  Still clinging to the hope that this was a particularly vivid dream, possibly the result of a hallucinogenic drug, Mulder allowed Giles to steer him towards the door.

Scully was busy with the newly arrived patient before Mulder and Giles had gotten halfway to the door.  As much as Mulder wanted to talk with her and find out what was going on, he doubted that she had changed very much from the Scully he knew.  Give her a reason to doubt his sanity and he'd find himself in whatever passed for a psych ward in this here and now.  Of course, this time he might really have gone insane, but he wanted to explore other options before accepting that his mind had finally collapsed.  Giles might be a safer person to tackle with his questions.  At least the Giles he knew believed in impossible things; this one might be more open to the idea that Mulder was simply lost, not insane.

*=*=*=*=*=*=*

Within two minutes of leaving the ward, Mulder knew that without Giles he would have been lost in the labyrinthine hallways.  If the rest of this new reality was as strange as this hospital, there was no chance in hell he'd be able to hide the fact that he wasn't their Fox Mulder.  Somehow, he had crossed the boundaries between realities and ended up in one where the paranormal openly co-existed with conventional science.  It also appeared that here the supernatural was extremely aggressive.  So far he had easily identified common folklore defenses against werewolves, vampires, and demons.  Apparently, in this reality, Spooky Mulder's theories were accepted to the point where he, or rather this Fox Mulder, had been given Marine assault troops to fight back demon incursions.  His headache wasn't getting any better as he grappled with the idea that he going to have to fake being a commander in a war zone.

As they turned down yet another curving corridor, Mulder happened to glance down and almost stumbled in surprise.  There were seeds, or pebbles, scattered along the edges of the wall.  Following his glance, Giles smiled.

"We caught a natural just the other night.  Youngster, of course," Giles said calmly.

Mulder tried to follow this confusing narrative without betraying the fact that he had no idea what Giles was talking about.  Natural vampires? Versus what, he wondered.  Unnatural ones?

"We notified his clan and one of their elders came to pick him up with the usual profuse apologies."  Giles looked amused and resigned at the same time.  Apparently, this wasn't the first time he'd dealt with this sort of thing.

"The Hellmouth erupted before I had a chance to tell you.  In fact, we owe that clan a thank-you.  The elder said that he felt trouble in the air and Colonel Doggett put his men on full alert.  We might not have gotten to you as fast otherwise."

The Marines dressed in battle fatigues at the front door checked them over with a mirror before asking them to step through what looked like a standard airport metal detector except that it didn't detect Mulder's watch, the keys in his pocket, or his badge.  Satisfied, the Marines saluted.

"Get to feeling better soon, sir," one of them told him with a grin.  Giles got a friendly nod before both Marines went back to proper guard position.

Mulder tried to imagine what calamity had occurred in this reality that had placed him in genial collaboration with the military.  If he understood correctly, a Marine colonel was his right-hand man.  Wherever this was, it wasn't home.

"Giles, can we stop somewhere to eat?"  He was operating on the assumption that the Fox Mulder of this reality kept as little food on hand as he did.

"Actually, I thought I'd offer you my spare bedroom.  Dana asked me to check on you periodically and it would save me the round trips.  I have the room and a bed that won't require a major excavation to find," Giles added with a straight face, but Mulder could tell that he was being ribbed.

Nice to know some things never changed, Mulder thought to himself as he climbed into Giles' non-descript SUV.  Ignoring the armor-plating and reinforced glass was harder, but Mulder was beginning to get the hang of allowing the inconsistencies to slide through his brain like grease through a pipe.  Sooner or later the pipe would clog up, but at this point, Mulder just wanted to get somewhere safe where he could try to sort through all the contradictions with his own reality.

To his relief, Giles' house looked exactly as his house did in Mulder's home reality.  Unconsciously, Mulder found himself slowing down as they walked up to the front door.  When Giles opened the door and gestured for Mulder to go in, he tried not to flinch.  The last sane moment he could remember was stepping through this doorway.  When Giles gave him a puzzled look, Mulder screwed up his courage and stepped in.  Given all the other precautions, Mulder suspected that Giles had a ward set up and refusing to enter might have serious consequences.  Better to tempt fate than face a suspicious mage.

Once inside, Mulder stopped worrying about falling through another rabbit-hole.  To his surprise, and dismay, he was greeted by a very large cat . . . no, he corrected himself, it was a puma.

He backed up before he could impose a manual override on his instinctive urge to run.  Standing very still, he watched as the puma gave him a thorough sniffing-over before sitting back on his haunches and surveying him with intelligent eyes.

"Well?" Giles prompted impatiently from behind him.  The vague academic tone was gone, replaced by a crisp, professional tone Mulder remembered from a wild night twenty years ago in Hampshire.  Mulder was not reassured.  The last time he'd heard that tone, Giles was addressing a demon.

The puma gave a very credible imitation of a shrug.  Mulder was surprised it didn't speak.  After all the shocks he'd experienced so far, a talking puma wouldn't be any stranger.

"Thanks," Giles replied in a weary, resigned tone.  The puma stood up and padded off towards the rear of the house.

"That was a puma," Mulder blurted out before he could catch himself.  He was tired, bewildered, and by this time it was obvious he hadn't been doing a very good job of camouflaging the fact that he didn't know what the hell was going on.

"That's Ahiga.  Fox Mulder would know that; he and Ahiga are friends," Giles snapped.  "Whatever you are, you aren't a demon.  Ahiga knows their scent no matter how well they try to hide.  You passed the tests at the hospital and crossed my ward without so much as a flicker, so I have to assume you're not some new elemental.  However, you are not the Fox Mulder I know.  Who are you?" Giles sounded more puzzled than threatening, but Mulder knew that this could change.  He was on Giles' home turf with no answers, only a lot of questions.

For a brief moment, Mulder's temper teetered.  His growing fear that he had landed in a reality he wasn't prepared to cope with joined with fury at whomever, or whatever, had sent him here.  Yelling at Giles had its temptations, but alienating the one person who just might have some answers for his questions ranked low for even his precarious sense of self-preservation.

"Yesterday, I would have sworn I was Fox Mulder, but right now either I'm not who I think I am or I got pushed down a rabbit-hole."  Mulder let his tone veer into sarcasm.  The Giles he knew would take that as a warning that his frustration levels were reaching critical overload.

Giles stared at him, then gestured towards a comfortable-looking couch.  His expression was a hair less hostile, but he was careful to keep several paces away.  Mulder shrugged and sat, or half fell, on the couch.  His headache was back and there was a peculiar wavering in the air.  Giles seemed to slip out of focus for a moment as the bottom dropped out beneath Mulder.

"Enough!"   Giles' command set Mulder's head ringing like a bell; after one long nauseating moment of feeling like pulled taffy, the world settled back down with a resounding snap.

"Damn," Mulder groaned as he collapsed onto the couch and tried to curl into a tight ball.  He felt his fingers dig into the cushions as if they were a rock he could cling to in a high wind.

"Oz, Ahiga did either of you feel anything?"

From the sound of his voice, Giles was standing over him, but Mulder refused to open his eyes.  His stomach was willing to stop lurching back and forth as long as he could maintain the illusion that he was not about to fall into the maelstrom he had just seen open before him.

"Not a thing, but I can smell something in the air.  What just happened?" a man's voice asked from somewhere across the room.

"Nada," was the clipped reply from a younger man moving towards them.

"If I didn't know better, I'd say that someone tried opening a gateway.  No one should be able to push that much power past my wards.  It nearly took our guest as well as half of my living room," Giles said with what Mulder considered the classic British stiff-upper lip in the face of disaster.

"Should I call the colonel?" the first voice asked.  Whoever it was didn't sound very enthusiastic about the idea, but he also sounded worried.

"This isn't the Hellmouth unless we have a major demon attempting to come through and in that case Doggett's men aren't going to do much more than irritate it."  Giles hesitated.

Mulder lay still trying to gauge whether this Giles was close enough to the one he knew to be able to read his moods.  When Giles continued it sounded as if he'd made a snap decision and was hoping it was the right one.

"Oz, call Willow and tell her to get over here.  I want this place closed down tight until I find out what's going on.  Cordelia and Xander are to hold themselves ready to assist Doggett if I'm wrong and the Hellmouth has found another gate though my living room." Giles's tone suggested that if that was the case then the first demon that came through was going to be a very sorry demon.

"Ahiga, talk to Doggett and see what Intelligence has to say about the latest attack, then go find Dr. Scully and don't leave her side,"   Giles' tone stopped short of a command, but it was obvious that he was giving orders to people accustomed to following them.

"I'm on it," Ahiga said.   "I'll also pass the word to my team to set up a patrol in the neighborhood.  It'll be good practice in being inconspicuous."

A moment later, Mulder heard the front door open and close.  Ahiga was the name Giles gave for the puma.  Unless pumas had developed opposable thumbs and used English, the puma was also a man.  Werepumas?   Mulder thought with a sinking feeling that he was in way over his head.

"As for you."

Mulder flinched as Giles took his shoulder and started carefully uncoiling him.  There was surprising strength in Giles' grip and Mulder decided it was easier to comply than to fight.  With help, he managed to sit up.

"Here, drink this."

As Giles wrapped his fingers around a hot mug, Mulder could smell strong tea with a dash of something . . . brandy, he thought.   Taking a cautious sip, he felt the world settle back down and he dared to open one eye.  To his relief, the air was still.   Giles was standing over him, holding another steaming mug and sipping from it as he surveyed him.

"What in hell just happened?" Mulder asked plaintively.

"Hopefully nothing to do with Hell.  Something tried to open a gate and I think you were its target.  I'm beginning to think that you might just have fallen down a rabbit-hole.  There are theories of parallel worlds where each of us exist, or not, in multiple variations stemming from some event.  So, you are Fox Mulder in another world and somehow found yourself in this world where the Fox Mulder branched off from your timeline at some point.  Who hates you this much?  Or, maybe it was our Fox Mulder someone wanted out of the way."

Staring into his mug of tea was an obvious stalling technique and Mulder half-expected Giles to call him on it.  He didn't have enough fingers to count off the people who hated him enough to terminate him.  Enemies he had in abundance.  Enemies who commanded the amount of power required to cast him out of his world and into another were another matter.   If the aliens or their Consortium quislings had technology this advanced, they would have taken a more direct approach to conquering the world.   Admittedly, science wasn't his strong suit, but he suspected that science probably hadn't even admitted the existence of parallel universes, much less developed the technology to achieve a transfer.  Forcing means into the equation of motive and opportunity reduced the viable suspects to zero.  That left a rather unpleasant hypothesis, one he was hesitant to mention to Giles.

"If you're at all like the Fox Mulder I know, you just came up with a nasty theory and you're trying to figure out how to break it to me gently," Giles said conversationally.  His smile was a little strained, but his manner suggested that he was used to his Mulder's oddball hypotheses.  "After all the Hellmouth has thrown at us the past year, I really don't think anything you can propose would surprise me," he added with a slightly better attempt at a smile.

A year of battling demons and apparently this world's Mulder was still sane?  Mulder gave his counterpart a mental high-five and tried not to contemplate filling his shoes for the rest of his life.  He had encountered a demon - singular - before.  The idea of waging war against companies of demons made him long for the simplicity of the alien-human conspiracy.

"I don't have any enemies powerful enough to do something like this to me.  Science, in my world, doesn't even acknowledge the existence of demons, and the idea of parallel worlds is the stuff of science fiction, not hard science.   Could your world's scientists manage something on this magnitude?" Mulder asked.  It would be nice to believe that this attack was aimed at the Mulder from this world.

"No, though our scientists at least acknowledge that demons exist.  I think having a demon pop up in a national conference of physicists at Berkley was pretty convincing.  Those scientists who didn't faint proved to be remarkably adept at constructing improvised defenses.  I'm told that the demons greeted Doggett's arrival with an almost human relief," Giles said with a sly chuckle.

Despite his own tendency to find the humor in the most unlikely situations, Mulder was startled to find that Giles could laugh about demons.  Maybe familiarity did have its advantages.

"Demons come in all shapes, sizes, and personalities, Mulder.  Some of them are worse than your worst nightmare.  Others apparently took lessons from the Keystone Cops.  You're a psychologist, or at least the Mulder here was one," Giles commented with only the hint of a question in his tone.  At Mulder's nod, he looked off into space with a contemplative expression that reminded Mulder of the Giles he knew.  So many things appeared to be exactly the same, yet their worlds were so far apart.

"How do we tell when our timelines branched off?" Mulder asked as he considered the problem.

"Simple, really.  We find out the last common memory you share with the Mulder of this world.  Did you go to Oxford?" Giles asked, settling back with his hands cupped around his tea mug.

Memories of ancient bull sessions over beer and pretzels flooded back and Mulder realized how much he had missed Giles.  This Giles was far more battered and strained, but the essential questing mind was still there.

"That's where we met, or rather we met in a very damp churchyard." Mulder pitched the ball back into Giles' court.

"Did Phoebe survive in your timeline?"

Mulder grimaced as he remembered the painful encounter with Phoebe years later.  In some ways he was grateful that she'd tried to play the old lover card rather than the lover with the stupid chump who played along with her attempt to raise a demon card.

"I take that as a yes," Giles said.  "She was lucky to get off as lightly as she did.  You proved to be the surprise," Giles offered as he batted the pitch back at Mulder.

Mulder sighed and decided that he'd had enough of going after the departure point incrementally.  "This could take all night, Giles.  Yes, I helped you banish that demon although I think my part mainly consisted of keeping its attention off what you were doing.   Now, stop me when I hit unfamiliar turf," Mulder said briskly.   Giles nodded.

Mulder had made it up to his faked death before Giles leaned forward.  An impatient wave of his hand told Mulder that they were getting close to where Giles suspected the timelines branched.

"I was re-instated in the FBI and worked in the X-Files until earlier this month when my office was firebombed and I decided to take you up on your standing offer to come visit." Mulder waited.

"The Mulder I know faked his own death and was re-instated as head of the X-Files.   Two months later, he was appointed Assistant Director of the special task force you saw in action yesterday.  It's a combined FBI-military operation with a mandate to control demonic incursions from the Hellmouth.  I gather you have no memory of this?" Giles asked intently.

Mulder shook his head.  He wasn't sure what good it would do knowing when their worlds had branched off, but if he had to spend the rest of his life here, at least there was only a year's worth of experiences to learn.

"I wonder how many people are aware that they are witnesses to the consequences of a divergence in history?  You must come from a timeline where my Slayer did not die," Giles said with a look of sorrow so intense that it could easily be mistaken for pain.

Giles paused for a moment, then shook his head.   "My apologies, obviously you have no idea what I'm talking about.  The Mulder of this world didn't know either until I explained. If you don't find a way back to your timeline, then I'll explain, but if the Giles in your world hasn't told you about the Slayer, then I must bow to his decision.   And I thought my conversations were cluttered before," he added with a rueful smile.

Mulder had no idea who, or what, a Slayer was, but it appeared that a Slayer was one of the focal points of history.  The 'great man theory' had fallen into disrepute in his time, but one of his college professors had insisted that great men might be history's way of providing a pivotal moment in the development, or collapse, of a civilization.   Apparently, the death of such a person had the power to cause the world to branch off into two different futures.

"Do I have a chance of getting back?" Mulder asked hopefully.  "The Giles I knew was a mage and I gather that you're one as well.  Isn't there some spell to reverse what was done to me?"

"There are spells, but I presume that you'd prefer to return sane and in one piece.  Pushing people through world barriers isn't child's play.  Someone looking for revenge wouldn't care if you went insane or ended up broken into several pieces."

"Are you saying that I can't get home, or your Mulder either?"

Mulder wondered if he could adjust to the life the Mulder of this world was living.  He'd never seen himself as a leader of men, much less military men, but apparently he'd learned.   If his counterpart could learn, then presumably so could he; whether they had the luxury of time for him to play catch up without anyone catching on was the problem.

He supposed that if he did have to stay, then the inner circle would have to know in order to help him cover up any lapses.  How would they feel knowing that the leader they trusted was an imposter?  To be more precise, how would Scully react?

"I'm saying that returning you to your own timeline is problematical.  Any return must be balanced by a return of the Mulder of this world.  In this time, you are the symbol that holds the resistance together.  Your belief in the unknown was vindicated and men who had opposed you found themselves under fire.  Even your belief in an alien-human conspiracy has been thoroughly investigated by a government desperate to keep the fight on one front only.  Your old boss, Walter Skinner, had a grand time rooting out corruption in high places," Giles commented with a satisfied smile that reminded Mulder of a cat nursing a large bowl of cream.   "If there were aliens, they've either left or are being very quiet.  Other than several dozen toxic green puddles, Skinner hasn't found any trace of them.  He's keeping an eye out, though."

Surprised, Mulder started to ask how much Giles knew about the aliens when Giles continued, "Mulder briefed me about the toxic properties of alien blood after we found one of those puddles.  The demons don't seem to like them any more than we do." Giles' satisfied smile suggested that there was more to this story than he was willing to tell now.

It was a bit much to absorb.   From being the scorned outsider, Mulder had become the symbol of a dogged fight to keep Hell from taking over.  He wasn't the Mulder who had done this, but he could understand Giles' reluctance to risk losing even a pale copy of the man who was leading their resistance.  Mulder sighed.  It always seemed that every choice he made had an impact on other people.  As a determined loner, this never ceased to puzzle him.

A young man with bright red hair walked into the room carrying a platter of sandwiches and a large pitcher of iced tea.   He looked like an ordinary college student, but something about him suggested that there was more to him than met the eye.  Setting the platter down in front of Mulder, the young man gave him a half-smile.

"Oz," he offered as introduction.  "Sorry, no beer," he apologized with a grin as he poured tea and ice into a large goblet.  "Dr. Scully has strong opinions," he added.

Mulder gave him an understanding nod.  Scully's opinions were often vehement and she didn't like it when people didn't listen.   Some things apparently didn't change.

To Mulder's surprise, the queasiness in his stomach vanished after the first bite of roast beef sandwich.   He devoured one sandwich and was halfway through a second before he slowed down.   The world stopped twitching and he felt solid for the first time since he'd woken up.

"That should help ground you," Giles said as he helped himself to a sandwich.  "When you're finished, I'll show you the spare bedroom.   Take Dana's advice and get some sleep.   I've called in reinforcements so you can sleep without worrying where you'll wake up.   Tomorrow morning will be plenty of time to try to unravel this mystery.   Besides, I need to do some research.   If you need anything, call Oz.   He'll be on watch tonight."

After a moment's hesitation, Giles looked at Oz with an unspoken question.   Oz shrugged and nodded, and Giles went on. "Oz is a werewolf.   There shouldn't be any reason for him to change, but the way this day's been going, I wouldn't be surprised at anything that happens."   Giles sounded resigned, exasperated, and fatalistic and Mulder couldn't really blame him.

Oz grinned and gave Mulder a thumbs up.  His grin made him look even younger than the twenty-something years Mulder estimated he was.   Mulder gave him a tentative smile back.   Why should having a werewolf on staff be more unlikely than the idea that he was in a position to give orders to a Marine colonel?

"Go to bed, Mulder," Giles ordered as he extended a hand to help him off of the couch.   Giles gave him a quick tour of the house before opening the door to a small guest room complete with its own bathroom.   The walls were lined with bookshelves and Mulder wondered if this was where the overflow from the living room shelves ended up.   Some of the titles looked intriguing, but he was more interested in the very comfortable-looking bed.

A few minutes later, Mulder had stripped down to his shorts and crawled under a quilt without bothering to pull down the sheets.  When he first closed his eyes, he felt dizzy.   Gradually, the spinning sensation receded as he lay there listening to the sound of voices coming from the living room.   One of them seemed to be female, so that was probably the Willow person Giles had asked Oz to call.   Mulder fell asleep wondering if Willow was an elf or some other figure out of mythology.  Everything else seemed to be here, why not elves?

*=*=*=*=*=*=*

2 a.m. Giles' Apartment

An explosion of light sent Mulder hurtling through a barrier that shredded him into a thousand pieces.  His scream was echoed by each of the shards of himself as they flew apart.   He came awake thrashing with his throat still hoarse.

A coyote bounded into the room, hackles raised and eyes scanning the room for danger.  Hard on the heels of the coyote came Giles, looking disheveled in T-shirt and shorts, but alert and wary.  To Mulder's embarrassment, Giles was followed by a Oz and a red-headed girl whose waif-like appearance stood in contrast to the wicked-looking axe she held at the ready.  She blushed slightly when she realized Mulder was staring at her chosen weapon and dropped it to her side with a look of 'Axe? What axe?'

"What happened?" Giles asked as the coyote padded around the room sniffing at windows.  Mulder wondered whether Giles was running a hostel for intelligent animals on the side.

"Just a really vivid replay of my entrance into this world," Mulder mumbled, fighting embarrassment and the sheets tangled around his legs.  On the rare occasion he had nightmares, he usually managed to avoid an audience.  Even rarer were the times he actually woke up screaming.  Most of his nightmares had better manners; they were terrifying, but they were a familiar terror.

"Oh, good," the girl said brightly with visible relief.  A muffled thump suggested that the axe had been propped against the hallway wall.

"I was going to wait until morning to ask you if you remembered anything about the spell that sent you here, but your memories might be sharper right now.  Why don't you pull something on?" Giles said as he half-turned to make a shooing motion at the girl.  She gave him an indignant look, but turned and headed down the hallway.

Mulder considered refusing; he was still very tired and his head hurt.  Unfortunately, Giles was right.  For the moment, his memories were sharp and focused.  Giles didn't need a houseguest with screaming nightmares and Mulder needed to be sure that when he did go to sleep, he'd stay asleep.  Yawning, Mulder nodded his assent and resumed untangling himself from the sheets.  At least the room had stopped spinning.

Pulling on the clothes he'd peeled out of earlier, he wished whoever had sent him here had managed to send his luggage along with him.   Hopefully, Giles would approve a visit to his apartment soon.  Deciding that shoes were too much trouble, Mulder padded down the hall.  Following the voices, he ended up in a comfortable kitchen. Giles was pouring tea into a mug for the girl . . . Willow was her name if she was the reinforcements Giles had asked Oz to call in.

"Tea is ready if you want some, or Oz is making coffee.   Amber is back on patrol outside," Giles said as he sat down at the table beside Willow.

His casual demeanor was at odds with the serious look in his eyes.  Mulder recognized the technique: relax the suspect before beginning the interrogation.   He gave Giles a good-natured scowl and went over to watch Oz make coffee.  Two could play at this game and Mulder had more experience in how the game was played.  He had more questions than answers, but he was gradually beginning to piece people and names together.  Apparently Amber was the coyote, but that was like knowing that Everest was the name of a mountain; it didn't begin to describe the mountain.

"Strong or weak?" Oz asked, pausing with a small scoop of grounds poised above the coffee-maker.

"If the spoon stands up in the cup, it's too strong," Mulder replied, prompting a quick smile from Oz.

Once the coffee had started brewing, Mulder had no more excuses for not joining Giles at the table.   He wasn't looking forward to the questions he knew Giles wanted to ask, but he understood why they had to be asked.  If there was something in his memory that might help this was the time to probe, with the nightmare fresh in his mind.

Sitting across from Giles, Mulder tried to relax.  He wasn't sure he wanted outsiders present, but Giles seemed comfortable having the girl and Oz present.  Perhaps they had been part of this world's Mulder's inner circle of confidants.  Offhand, he couldn't think of a good reason to ask them to leave.

At the moment, Mulder was coming closer than he ever thought possible to understanding how people with multiple personalities felt.  Clinically, he understood the syndrome, but now he was coming to terms with the fact that there was more than one of him out there.

"Willow is one of our best researchers and an up-and-coming witch.   If anyone can make sense of what happened to you and find a way to reverse it, she can."   Giles gave Willow an odd look that combined fondness in equal measure with wary caution.   Obviously, magic wasn't as cut and dried as hard science.

Willow seemed very young to come so highly recommended, but the Giles he knew wasn't one to compliment without cause.   If his shaky memory served him right, Willow was one of the people Giles had said would be arriving to help contain the demon break-out.

"Oz you've met.  If we can't find a way to send you back, he's one of the people who can help get you up to speed with what you need to know.   He's one of the few werewolves who have joined us and Ahiga thinks he'll make an excellent scout once he has the transformation under control." Giles smiled fondly at Oz who looked uncomfortable at Giles' frank discussion of his talents.

Mulder flinched at the thought of taking up where this world's Mulder left off.  He preferred to continue half-believing that this was all a particularly vivid dream.  Eventually, he'd wake up and find himself back in his normal life.   The longer the dream ran, the harder it was to maintain the illusion that this was a dream, but Mulder was stubborn enough to try.

"You're a friend ... I mean Mulder was a friend ... I mean you look like Mulder, you even talk like him, so you're not a pod-person, right?  This is so confusing," Willow said plaintively, looking to Giles for help with the muddle she was making.

"Looks the same. Walks different," Oz spoke up. "Mulder a year ago," he explained, giving Mulder an apologetic shrug.

"Same package, different contents," Mulder offered laconically in a strained effort at humor.  To his relief, no one pretended to laugh just to humor him.  Oz did smile and Mulder sensed that of them all, Oz came the closest to understanding his mental predicament.   Maybe being one person who had to learn to cope with two physical forms gave him more insight into the problem.

"If I'm correct about when our two timelines branched off, then there's only a year's difference between the two Mulders," Giles pointed out.  Willow looked dubious.

Giles got up to set out some cheese and crackers, giving Mulder a much-needed respite before the questions started.   The Mulder here was an acknowledged leader and appeared to command the respect of the people he worked with.   Acquiring that sort of confidence must have been hard and Mulder didn't see an easy way to fake it.   Oddly enough, Giles and the others never touched on the possibility that he wouldn't step into his counterpart's shoes.   They seemed to take for granted his willingness to take on the job, while making an even greater assumption that he was capable of carrying on with his duplicate's mission.

Oz got up and brought back the coffee pot and set it in the middle of the table.  Mulder took as long as he dared pouring himself a cup and selecting pieces of cheese.   Giles wasn't fooled, but he made no move to call him on the delay.   He saw sympathy in Giles' eyes.   This wasn't easy for him, either, Mulder reminded himself.   Giles and the Mulder of this world shared a brotherhood cemented by shared dangers.   He'd once known something like that with Scully, before everything collapsed between them.   For a moment, Mulder envied his counterpart and wondered how he was coping with the transfer.

"What happened just before you came here?"  Giles' question was direct and to the point.   Mulder allowed himself a reminiscent smile as he recalled Giles' angry and indignant questions to Phoebe all those years ago.  Skinner could teach Giles a few things about interrogation, but they both favored the direct approach.   For the first time, Mulder felt the comforting sense of being on familiar territory.

"Clearly, or the bits and pieces that don't make any sense?" Mulder responded with one of his best disarming smiles.  He heard Oz turn a laugh into a cough.

Giles gave him a stern look, but his eyes softened ever so slightly.   "We'll try for clarity first, then venture into nonsensical."

Fair enough, Mulder thought.  He took a sip of coffee while trying to remember exactly when his world shattered.   The others sat quietly and gave him time to collect and collate his memories.  It might have been just yesterday when he arrived, but the memories were already getting hazy.

"Coming in your front door," Mulder replied slowly as he tried to piece together the moments before the explosion of light blew him out of his own time.   "There was someone there. I didn't see who, but I remember hearing a voice as the explosion hit," Mulder added with surprise.  He hadn't consciously remembered seeing anyone, but he remembered the words he'd heard in his nightmare just before he woke up screaming.

"Do you have any idea who?" Giles asked with intent interest.

"Not a clue.   I vaguely recall thinking it was strange, because you'd said that you wouldn't be home until late and that I was to let myself in.  You were quite adamant about which key to use.   I remember being angry, as the explosion went off, because I had used the correct key: the one under the frog, not the one in its mouth," Mulder added.

Giles looked startled.   "How interesting. I wonder what the statistical probability is that I and my counterpart would come up with the same diversionary tactic for hiding keys?" he asked with a far-away look.

"Then what happened?" Willow asked eagerly.  Mulder glanced at her intrigued expression and realized that she was fascinated by the story of magic gone awry.  If this had happened to anyone else, Mulder acknowledged to himself that he would probably also be intrigued.  Payback had a nasty sting.  He recalled several past cases where his curiosity and passion for the unknown had pushed hard on the edges of rudeness.   The universe should have better things to do than to teach him humility.

"There was an explosion of some sort, as if I'd walked into a fireworks display.  I felt myself picked up and thrown backwards, then I passed out.  Just as I hit the wall, I heard someone say 'Bloody hell.'  The voice didn't belong to anyone I know, but that's a British curse and I seem to recall that the accent was British," Mulder said slowly as he stared at Giles.  A sickening thought was occurring to him and from the appalled look on Giles' face, he was thinking the same thing.   He had been in the wrong place at the wrong time.   This wasn't a plot against him, or even this world's Mulder; it had been directed at Giles.

"Ethan," Giles said sharply.  In an instant the comfortable, rumpled English professor had been replaced by a cold-eyed, intent person that Mulder had last seen in a dark, damp English churchyard.   That time the look had been directed at a demon, then at Phoebe, with only a passing glare sent in his direction.  Since then, Mulder had become aware that Giles had a rough side carefully controlled and even more carefully hidden.

"Oh, no!" Willow's dismayed cry broke the silence.  

Oz looked grim.  Giles started muttering something in a foreign language that prompted a rather surprised look from Willow, who scooted her chair a few inches away from the glowering Giles.  Oz shimmered for a moment as the outline of his body seemed to shift.  He looked between Giles and Mulder with intent curiosity and more than a little wariness.   Mulder caught the slight, protective move that put Oz between Giles and Willow.   They made an incongruous couple, but recognizing them as a couple made some of the undercurrents he'd been catching a lot clearer.

Mulder didn't need a cue card to tell him that 'Ethan' had a counterpart in this world and wasn't one of the good guys.   Finding out that he'd been sent here by accident didn't help matters.   As long as there was a chance that this exile was some sort of payback for his search for the truth, or even in response to the actions taken by the Mulder of this world, he had managed to maintain some control over his temper.   Now he wasn't in exile, he was in the middle of someone else's screw-up.   Mulder wanted to beat the living hell out of whoever was responsible, or the next best target.   At the moment, that seemed to be Giles, but even Mulder's temper wasn't about to hurl him into a suicidal confrontation with the person looking out of Giles' eyes at the moment.   Mulder recalled Giles saying something once about going through a wild phase that included raising demons.  Looking at him right now, Mulder believed every word.

"I should have killed the bastard when I had the chance," Giles said with a snarl that raised the hair on the back of Mulder's neck.

"Anyone want to tell me what's going on?" Mulder asked after several minutes of battling the urge to demand answers.  He did try to choose his words carefully while letting Giles know that he wanted the truth.

"Ethan is a devotee of Chaos.  A long time ago, we used to hang out together doing the sort of thing I reprimanded Phoebe for," Giles confessed.   To Mulder's relief, Giles appeared to have regained control of his temper.  There even seemed to be a slight tinge of embarrassment in his tone.

Stunned speechless, Mulder began to understand why Giles had been so angry that night.   Phoebe had been a dilettante; raising the demon had been secondary to the more lascivious aspects of the ritual.  If Giles had encountered the real thing, no wonder he was furious with someone who thought demons were nothing more than an aphrodisiac.

"So this was a move against you, or rather the Giles in my world?" Mulder clarified once he had worked through all the ramifications of Giles's confession.

"It appears that way," Giles conceded with a wry look and a slight shrug.  "It also makes getting you back a bit more difficult."

"I could send you back easy," Willow said with bright smile and a snap of her fingers.  "Getting you back alive ... well ... " Willow paused and seemed to be trying to find a gentle way of breaking the bad news to him.  "Ethan simply opened a door and shoved you through it.   I'll bet he wasn't expecting our Mulder to come flying back through." Willow frowned and muttered low enough so that Mulder wasn't sure he was meant to hear, "Hope Mulder landed on him and squashed him like a bug."

"Flak jacket," Oz said succinctly, evoking a startled look from Willow and a soft 'damn' from Giles.

Mulder gave them all an exasperated, frustrated look.   "What?"

"Right.   By any chance were you wearing a flak jacket in your home universe?" Willow translated.

Mulder shook his head.   "Jeans, T-shirt, and jacket.  They frown on ex-FBI agents wearing flak jackets on airplanes.  It unnerves the other passengers," he said with an attempt at his normal verbal jousting humor.   "Your letter forgot to mention that I might need one, Giles."

"No mass.   Wow.   Didn't know you could do that," Willow responded with her eyes lighting up with curiosity.

"Don't even go there, Willow.  Ethan doesn't pay attention to rules or consequences.   You have to," Giles reminded her.

Willow scowled then acknowledged the point with a casual, "OK."

"This is a problem, then?" Mulder asked carefully.  He felt like he was dodging through a stampede of problems.

"Spirit transference isn't something undertaken lightly.  There are all sorts of ways it can go wrong.   It just means that we're going to have to spend a little more time researching a spell that will return you safely," Giles assured him.   His expression didn't quite match the hearty assurance in his voice.

"Then I'm stuck here," Mulder said as he felt his temper begin to slip.

"It doesn't help, but I am sorry," Giles said after a moment or two.   His voice was under control and there was no sign of the dangerous person who had looked out of his eyes a few minutes ago.

Suddenly, Mulder felt his own temper soaring out of control.  Standing up, he shoved his chair back so hard it bounced against the wall.   For a brief moment he was tempted to tell Giles to go to hell, but even teetering on the brink of rage, he remembered that in this world, they were literally at the gates of Hell.   Out of the corner of his eye he saw colors begin to form haloes around Oz, Willow, and Giles.   Without a word, he fled.

Rage had always seemed to give him the ability to perceive the emotions of the people around him.   There was more nonsense than sense written about auras, but the serious research on the subject suggested that auras were always present and even that some people had the ability to see them.  Normally, he didn't see auras and, considering some of the evil he had encountered, Mulder was grateful.   He considered the possibility that rage opened some sort of channel to his inner psychic.   If so, it was always at a terrible cost to himself and occasionally to others.   If he was angry enough to see auras, then it was time to put distance between himself and those who might get hurt.

He had no idea where he was going except somewhere away from here.

"Mulder?" Oz's voice from behind him made him jump.  Engrossed in his rage, Mulder hadn't heard him approach.

"Want to talk outside? The porch is secured and you look like you need fresh air," Oz said in a conversational tone as if approaching a raging madman were an everyday event.

Mulder looked down and saw the dents in the front door and felt fresh bruises on his hands.   His hand was wrapped around a doorknob half-pulled from the door.   He didn't remember attacking the door, but at least it was an inanimate object, not a person.

"I understand anger.   Besides, I can run faster," Oz added.

The non sequitur puzzled Mulder and his expression must have betrayed his confusion.

"If you lose control, I can dodge a lot faster than Willow or Giles," Oz explained with a smile that managed to convey he understood exactly how Mulder was feeling; half in control, half wanting to rip something, or someone, to pieces.

With a bitter laugh, Mulder stepped back from the door and allowed Oz to open it.   The cool night air felt good with a brisk breeze coming in from the ocean miles away.   Oz hopped up on the railing and sat quietly, watching and waiting.  Mulder took several deep breaths and tried to release the tension and anger generated over the past few days.  Make that weeks, he conceded as he realized that this rage had been building since the day he had knelt in a dilapidated greenhouse waiting for a bullet to end his life.  Betrayals, losses, shattered hopes, and now exile with only a slim possibility of return had finally coalesced into a rage that wanted blood.

"If you need to hit something, I'm sure we can scare up a stray demon," Oz offered in a conversational tone.

Turning to glare at him, Mulder saw sympathy, not mockery and felt some of his anger seep away.  Oz had every reason to resent having the man he trusted and followed swept away and replaced by a pale imitation, yet here he was offering sympathy.  If their situations had been reversed, Mulder wasn't sure he'd be as magnanimous.

"Anger won't bring him back.   If there's a way, Willow will find it.   If not, we need you." Oz stared out at the night, letting his words drift back to Mulder.

Anger.   Resentment.  Fear.  Loneliness.   Emotions chased themselves through his head like manic cats - most of all fear.  Why him?   Why did everything always depend on his shaky shoulders?   He couldn't protect his sister, his partner, or his life's work.   What had happened in a year to change him into the sort of man a Marine colonel saluted and a werewolf respected?

"I'm not the Mulder you knew," Mulder said quietly when his emotions had run their course and had abandoned him to numb exhaustion.

"Neither was Mulder when I first met him.  Nearly bolted when he saw his first demon.  He learned.  We all did.  You can."  Oz's half-smile suggested that he might have been present on that occasion.

Oz's succinct summation startled Mulder out of his self-absorbed funk.  It hadn't occurred to him that his counterpart might have been scared shitless in the beginning.   Suddenly, his counterpart seemed less like a stranger - less of an icon and more like himself.   Scared shitless aptly described his feelings about spending the rest of his life in this world.  For the first time he stopped to consider the problems his counterpart must be having in his world - provided he'd survived the trip.

In the end it all came down to the unpleasant, but simple fact: he didn't have a choice.

"If I quit, they win," Mulder whispered softly to a memory of a moment now lost in a world out of reach.

Oz cocked his head as if to ask a question, but didn't actually speak.   His silence offered companionship and understanding without the need for intrusive questions.   At the moment, Mulder was tired of questions.  Actually, now that he thought about it, he was worn out with answers that he didn't have questions for.   For nearly a year he'd been living on adrenaline and willpower.   Maybe Scully had been right after all.  Maybe he had been running away, deluding himself that he was merely looking for a more secure battleground.

Out of the pot and into the fire; Mulder's luck, he thought.  Surprised by the note of resignation rather than the bitterness he expected to feel, he tilted his head back and stared at the sweep of stars clustered in familiar constellations.  Well, he'd certainly found a different battleground.   He'd have to remember to be more careful about how he phrased his wishes.

Back home, the stars represented the source of all the problems that had plagued his life.  Here, they were simply stars: beautiful and serene, but only distant suns sending out their light across the universe.   Searching the sky, Mulder found the constellation of Leo, a childhood favorite before he lost his sister, Samantha, and his childhood.   He'd never felt less like a lion, but he was going to need a lion's courage if he was going to follow in his counterpart's footsteps.

He wondered if this world's Mulder had ever found out what happened to Samantha.   With the conspiracy smashed, Skinner may have found answers if there were answers to be found.   Possibly Giles knew, or, if the Gunmen were here, he could ask them.

"Ready?" Oz asked quietly.

Mulder didn't look at him, but gave a last, long look at the stars.  "Just show me where that backhoe is," Mulder quipped with far less bite than he originally intended.  Oz looked puzzled and Mulder took pity on his confusion.   "Someone once told me that if they hid the truth in the middle of a desert that I'd ask for a backhoe."

"No backhoes, but you have us and a bunch of eager Marines.   And shovels," Oz countered with one of his rare smiles as they walked back into the house.

Mulder gave him a thumbs up for the return and made a mental note to never underestimate Oz.   He might not say much, but he packed a lot in a few words.

When they reached the kitchen, Giles and Willow broke off their debate and looked up expectantly.   Several very large, old books were scattered around the table; some had bookmarks hanging out of various pages, one or two lay open revealing odd designs and lines of scrawling, handwritten notes.   Mulder had always suspected that Giles' library had contained books not commonly found.

"I'll give it a try," Mulder said and winced at the relief in Giles' eyes.  Willow grinned, making her look even more fey.  Somehow, it made perfect sense to find her delving into the sort of books Mulder suspected littered the table.

"Good. I'll ask Dana, John, Ahiga, and the rest of the gang to come over tomorrow - no, this evening," Giles corrected himself as he glanced at the clock on the wall.  "Dana is already asking a few questions," Giles mentioned cautiously as Willow busied herself in a book.

Mulder winced, but he wouldn't expect anything less from Scully.   Better get everyone up to speed.  If this Scully was anything like his Scully, she needed to know everything as soon as possible.  Granted, he was supposedly suffering from a mild concussion, but he'd be willing to bet she had noticed that something wasn't quite right.   At least this Scully was open to extreme possibilities.   If she could casually accept demons and werewolves, a little matter of soul transference across parallel universes should be a piece of cake.

"Mulder, go back to bed.  You look ready to fall asleep standing up.   Willow is going to help me design new wards that should keep out anything short of a major invasion."

"Who the hell is Ahiga?   And while I'm at it, who was that coyote that bounded into my room?" Mulder demanded.   Giles was beginning to answer questions and Mulder didn't feel like giving him a chance to recover his natural reticence.

Giles sighed and gave in, to Mulder's relief.  "Ahiga is a Navajo wer, but one who can shift shapes at will rather than a wer tied to the moon phases like Oz.  It seems that one of the Navajo shamans, a man named Albert, is spreading the word that the skin walkers are needed in your battle.  We've only had four respond. Amber was the coyote in your room.   She's on Ahiga's team.   Ahiga is hopeful that a chance to redeem themselves in a battle against evil might go far in easing their isolation from their tribes.   Mulder, our Mulder, and Ahiga were close friends.   He's reserving judgment about you.  I suspect he's already talking to Albert about the situation and getting his advice.  Happy?" Giles asked without sarcasm.

"Shapeshifters would be more useful here than code-talkers," Mulder said absently.  He nodded as he tried to wrap his numbed brain around everything that had happened to him in the last thirty-six hours, but now that he'd made the decision to fight, he felt drained.  Tired didn't begin to describe his condition.  Exhausted almost came close.

It was a sad commentary on his life when he couldn't remember that last time he'd gotten more than five hours sleep in a row.   Without a word, he turned and stumbled back to his room.   Asleep on his feet, he simply collapsed across the bed.   He never heard the soft footsteps of whoever followed him in and carefully spread a quilt over him.

*=*=*=*=*=*=*

Dust motes were dancing in a late afternoon sun beam when Mulder finally roused enough to take notice of his surroundings.   Bleary-eyed, he glanced around the room trying to place where he was and why he was there.   Sorting out dream from reality was going to have to wait until he was more awake, he decided.   Werewolves, witches, demons, and glowering accountants were mixed together in a confusing hodge-podge of hazy memories.   A hot shower was called for, followed by several large cups of coffee.  With luck, the parts that he had a sinking feeling were reality would turn out to be particularly vivid dreams.

A bright neon orange Post-it note attached to the partially open closet door caught his attention.  The room swayed for a moment when he stood up, then settled down as he stumbled towards the note.

The message was simple enough for his half-asleep brain to cope with: "Look down." A large arrow added a visual aid to the message.   Amused by the laconic instructions, and faintly uneasy by the hopefully unintentional allusion to Lewis Carroll, Mulder pulled the door open and looked down.   Someone had retrieved his emergency duffel bag from his apartment.  If he and his counterpart were anything alike at this point in their timelines, he now had two complete changes of clothes and clean underwear, and a dopp kit with assorted essentials like a razor.

Half an hour later, showered, shaved, and dressed, he finally felt awake enough to cope with people.  He dumped his dirty clothes in a pile by the bed and began thinking seriously about food.  It was obviously too late for breakfast, and he'd probably slept through lunch.   Before he faced another meeting with people who were going to have to adjust to the fact that the Mulder they knew was somewhere else, he needed something solid to eat.

When he emerged from his room, he ran into a tall young man who gave him a penetrating, not-quite friendly stare.   Hastily reviewing the cast of characters Giles had mentioned calling to the meeting, Mulder decided that this must be Xander.   Like Willow, he looked too young to be one of the top leaders of a resistance movement battling demons.  Still, there was an air of dogged competency about the young man that belied his boyish appearance.

"Oz said you'd probably be awake.   Giles said go ahead and eat and don't wait for him." Xander's tone was brusque, which matched the suspicious expression in his eyes.   His attitude suggested that Giles had done a preliminary briefing while Mulder had been sleeping.

"Thanks," Mulder said as he heard his stomach rumble.

"Oz and Willow are in the kitchen.   Gotta run," Xander said as he turned and walked quickly down the hall and around the corner.   A moment later, Mulder heard the front door open and close.  Obviously, Xander wasn't in the mood to chat.   It didn't take a profiler to discern that Xander wasn't happy with the idea that there was a new Mulder in town.

The smell of sizzling steak pulled Mulder towards the kitchen.  Willow was buried in books, again, and Mulder began wondering if this was her natural habitat.  He supposed that mages needed to spend a lot of time researching, but Willow seemed more at home with books than with people.   Of course, he was drawing conclusions on an extremely limited exposure to her.   It would have been nice if the spell that had sent him here had managed to include a few footnotes.   Assaulting a mage capable of throwing him across dimensions probably wasn't a wise thing to attempt.   Wise or not, Mulder decided that if he got back to where he belonged, he was going to have a serious talk with the offending mage that might include a few physical punctuation marks.

"Rare or medium?" Oz asked, looking up from the grill where two large rib-eyes were sizzling.

"Medium rare," Mulder replied, trying not to drool.

"Potatoes in the oven.  Beer, tea, or coffee around," Oz said as he waved a large fork in the general direction of the coffeemaker and the refrigerator.

Tempted as he was by Giles' excellent beer stash, Mulder decided to stick to coffee.   He had a feeling he was going to need all his wits about him for this meeting.  By the time he'd plucked a hot potato from the oven, poured himself a large mug of coffee, and started slathering the potato with butter, Oz handed him a platter with a steak, easily a one pounder.  Taking the other steak, Oz carefully moved books out of the way and cleared a space for them to sit down at the table.   Willow looked up, gave Mulder a vague smile and Oz a much warmer one, then disappeared back into the large, leather-bound book she'd been reading.

They ate in silence.   Oz, obviously, wasn't a man of many words and Mulder found himself at a loss for them.   They had just finished clearing the dirty dishes when Oz suddenly looked up.   A moment later, Mulder heard the front door open.

"Good ears," Mulder complimented him in the laconic style Oz seemed to enjoy.  Oz smiled as he went over to nudge Willow.

"Company," he said, cutting off Willow's impatient brush-off.   With a sigh, she carefully bookmarked her place and closed the book.  Grabbing a large glass mug of tea, she headed out to the living room with Oz close behind.

Mulder hesitated before following them.   Not normally shy about confronting a skeptical audience, this time he found he was downright bashful about facing his counterpart's close friends.  They had a right to resent his presence and he wouldn't blame them a bit, but as long as he was stuck in this world, he had to do what he could to fill his counterpart's shoes.

To his surprise and dismay, Scully came into the kitchen.  Of all the people he didn't want to face alone, she topped the list.  She walked towards him until there was barely an arm length's distance between them.  Mulder fought equal urges to step back or to pull her close to him and relax in her embrace.

"Giles explained what happened," she said in a quiet voice.   She was like, and yet unlike, the Scully he knew.   This Scully had learned that not only did the paranormal exist, but it could kick back.  He wondered what the price of this knowledge had been.   He could only guess what that knowledge had done to the bonds she shared with this world's Mulder: strengthened them beyond anything he had with the Scully of his world, he suspected.

"If I'm alive and intact, it stands to reason your Mulder is alive in my world," Mulder offered in response to her unspoken fears.   She looked startled for a moment, then gave him a sad smile.

"I don't doubt for a moment that all the Mulders in all the parallel worlds have learned to bounce," she retorted with a tartness that made Mulder's heart ache.  This was the Scully he remembered from a year ago, before the conspiracy had clouded her spirit.

"Now I know I've fallen through the Looking Glass," Mulder retorted with an attempt at a laugh.

"Empirical evidence has confirmed the existence of demons, vampires, and werewolves," Scully opined in a serious tone that dissolved into an amused smile.  "Parallel worlds aren't that big a leap.   Your presence is supporting evidence for other worlds touching ours.   Either those worlds exist, or else you've gone insane and taken Giles and Oz along with you.   I find collective insanity, in this case, unsupportable," Scully argued with a confidence Mulder envied.  He still wasn't entirely sure he hadn't gone insane.

"So, did Giles send you in just to make sure I'm not insane?" he asked teasingly.

"Giles told me that in your world, things were different; my counterpart never accepted the paranormal and you and she had parted ways.   It seemed best to explain my relationship with your counterpart here in private." Scully paused and bit her lip in the familiar way she had when she was trying to put emotional subtext into words.

Greatly daring, Mulder rested his hands on her shoulders, then quickly removed them when she flinched.   Smart move, he chided himself.

"Sorry.   It's not you," she assured him, still obviously fumbling for words.  "Damn it, this is harder than I thought it would be," she conceded with a frustrated expression.   "Mulder and I were lovers," she blurted out with a spark of defiance.

Mulder blinked and swallowed hard.  Obviously, his counterpart had taken the step he'd only dreamed about.

"That was a year ago.   My safe, comfortable scientific reality had been overturned by the hard fact that demons existed and were on the offensive.  It started out as comfort, but ended up being an affirmation of our belief in each other."   Scully paused and Mulder fought for emotional footing.   He wasn't used to Scully being this open about intimacy, emotional or physical.   With a deep breath and a controlled expression, she continued, "After a lot of discussion, well argument, really," Scully conceded with a look of affectionate exasperation, "we decided to back off and give ourselves time to think about the consequences.  Maybe our time as lovers was simply a way of promising ourselves a normal life if we ever manage to shut down the Hellmouth."

"I'm not that Mulder," he pointed out softly, trying not to re-open the wounds of his parting with this Scully's counterpart.   He recognized the familiar signs of Scully trying to distance herself from emotions that cut too deep.  Despite the year's difference in experiences, this Scully was close enough to the one he knew for him to recognize the signs of grief held rigidly at arm's length.   If she grieved, she would do it privately, and most certainly not in front of the imposter who had taken her Mulder's place.

"No, you're not, but that's going to be hard to remember.   You're different, but all the physical triggers are still there.  I wanted you to understand," Scully added hesitantly.

"I do.  I'll try not to presume.   Willow thinks, or rather hopes, she can reverse the spell," he offered hopefully.

"It's not going to be easy for either of us," Scully admitted.   "We're going to stumble over things we expect the other person to understand.  It may be illuminating to be the one having to explain the paranormal to you for a change," she said with a laugh.

Mulder responded with a rueful laugh.   Having the tables turned on him was going to take some getting used to, but he looked forward to hearing Scully expound on demons and vampires.

"Now, the others are waiting for us.   John and Ahiga are probably going to be the hard sells.  Ahiga was very close to Mulder, but if he accepts you, that will go a long way to persuading John.   Cordelia, well, Cordelia is . . . unpredictable."

Scully paused in the familiar way she had of carefully choosing her words.  "We've all lost people we care about in this fight.   Xander in particular lost a very close friend, someone I think he was half in love with.   Giles will explain later.   We never met Buffy, but she was the leader of this crazy gang of kids who were fighting demons here before we ever knew there was a demon problem.   Her death hit her friends very hard.  Xander is stubborn, but if Willow approves, he'll go along, although it might be months before he actually trusts you," Scully offered in quick summation as she briefly touched his hand before turning and walking towards the living room.

Taking a deep breath, Mulder followed.  Show time, he told himself, and braced himself for suspicion and doubt from people who were being asked to accept a dubious substitute for the man they had come to trust and depend upon.

Scattered around the living room were the seven people who appeared to have been closest to his counterpart.   Oz and Willow were sitting together and Willow broke off whatever she was saying to him when Mulder entered the room.   Oz smiled and gave Mulder a thumbs-up.  Giles looked worried, and more than a little tired in Mulder's opinion.   He wondered if Giles had gotten any sleep at all.  A tall, dark-haired young woman, most likely Cordelia, was sitting in a chair looking slightly bored, but the look she gave him as he walked into the room gave Mulder the impression that he'd been weighed and measured.   Xander was standing against the wall with an inscrutable expression that nonetheless managed to convey a "show me" attitude.   A man in his late thirties, early forties, dressed in a military sweater was sitting by the small desk with a neutral expression on a face that leaned towards sternness.   A tall, lean Native American, probably Ahiga, was sitting cross-legged on the floor beside the couch.  Mulder couldn't tell what he was thinking about him or this whole substitution idea.

"Everyone has been briefed on what we think has happened.  If anyone wants a detailed explanation of how the Mulders of two parallel worlds traded places, they can talk to Willow later.   I don't think we need to be concerned with why right at the moment.   Our current opinion is that this is Ethan's doing, in which case I doubt if we want to understand his motives.   This Mulder, who comes from a world where the Hellmouth is contained, has agreed to take the place of the Mulder of this world until we can effect a reverse of the spell.   Discussion?" Giles summed up the situation and sat back indicating that the floor was now open to discussion.   He gave Mulder a weary smile that told him he was on his own and good luck.

Mulder wondered if he was expected to present a defense and decided not to try.   There really wasn't anything he could say.  He was here, not by choice, and had agreed to step into his counterpart's shoes to help out.  The fact of the matter was that he didn't know what this involved and he was going to need everyone's cooperation to make it work.  He had no intention of being a figurehead, despite his lack of experience.

"How do we know this isn't a demon infiltrator?" Xander asked bluntly.

Mulder had no idea how to answer that.  He felt like himself, but it was a reasonable question from Xander's point of view.

"Doesn't smell like one," Ahiga rebutted stiffly.   Mulder got the sense that Ahiga and Xander were not exactly bosom buddies.

"He passed through wards designed to catch every type of demon we know of and a few we only have references to in old books," Scully added with a look that suggested she was somewhat amused by not being the resident skeptic.

"OK, so he's not a demon.   How do we know he's one of the good guys?   Maybe his world tossed him out because he was someone just as nasty," Xander argued.

"How does he know we're the good guys?" Giles asked in return, prompting a frustrated grimace from Xander.

"You nearly had a major bust-through right here and you don't find that conveniently coincidental?" Xander retorted testily.

"Actually, that 'bust-through' as you call it is strong evidence in favor of his story," Giles returned with a smile.   Xander snorted.  Doggett looked interested and made a 'carry on' gesture.  "It took some time before I realized that the only person who could have penetrated my wards was myself.   Unless I turned evil in another world, the Giles in this Mulder's world was making a supreme effort to retrieve him.  If I hadn't countered the attempt, we might not be having this conversation.   Unfortunately, I did, and it might take some time before we can make an attempt from this end."

"I don't believe I would care to see an evil version of you, Giles," Doggett said with a tight-lipped smile, but immediately went back to the problem at hand.   "Judging whether a man is evil or good is hardly in our jurisdiction.  We need Mulder.   The question now is whether we trust this man to be the Mulder we need?  I'm not going to lose men because we gave command to someone who isn't up to the task."

"Presuming that this Mulder is essentially the same as ours minus some hands-on experience fighting demons, then he can learn quickly.   John, you didn't join us until the second month of the initial breakout.  Our Mulder learned on his feet and on the run.   By the time your Marines arrived, we had already started developing strategies to confront the breakouts.   You gave us the manpower and firepower to strike back more efficiently even if all we can do is hold the line.   Mulder gave us the stubborn belief that we could fight back." Scully sounded far more certain of this than Mulder did, but it did give his competitive nature a goal to strive for.

"Backhoes," Oz said with a sly grin directed at Mulder.   Scully started, then laughed.  The smile she gave Mulder invited him to remember a moment common to both their worlds.

"Sick leave would give us time to bring him up to speed," Willow offered.  Scully nodded approvingly and Giles looked relieved.  It was a delaying tactic, but it might work.

"Providing that I approve his progress before allowing him to lead my men, I can go with this," Doggett said after a long pause.  He was obviously not convinced, but willing to be convinced.   "If we want to keep this substitution quiet, I'll have to give him the necessary physical training and bring him up to speed on our weapons.  I don't see how we can do this in less than two weeks at bare minimum.   How do we explain a man recovering from a concussion undergoing intensive physical training exercises?"

"A close encounter with a demon has been known to scramble a victim's reflexes.  I'll authorize three weeks desk duty with mandatory physical exercises to retrain the muscle memories.   This will provide cover for any difference in physical reactions under combat stress," Scully said with a triumphant expression.

"Has anyone considered the fact that this transference might be a good thing?" Ahiga asked in a voice barely above a whisper.  His words seemed to catch everyone off guard, except Xander who glared at him.

"Right.   Losing our leader is supposed to be good?   Isn't that carrying the power of positive thinking a bit far?" Xander asked sarcastically.

"I'll spare Xander the theological details behind my reasoning; it's just more Indian spirit talk," Ahiga said with enough bite to suggest to Mulder that he and Xander had a long-running feud going. "To put it in plain English, we got lucky.   Instead of losing Mulder to a demon attack, we find ourselves with a fresh Mulder.   Chaos sometimes works in our favor, or so I'm told by my Elders." Ahiga went on to add something in what Mulder took to be Navajo.   It sounded vaguely ceremonial, although Mulder's exposure to Navajo was limited to one Blessing Way Ceremony during a near death experience.

Ahiga looked over at Scully who had a tense, controlled expression as she took in the implications of Ahiga's comment.  "Dr. Scully, there's no reason to believe that our Mulder didn't arrive safely in the other world.   The fact that someone tried to grab this Mulder back strongly supports the idea that they found themselves with a strange Mulder." Ahiga paused for a moment, then gave Scully a mischievous smile.   "Look on it as the spirits deciding that Mulder really needed that vacation he kept putting off."

Scully stared at him for a moment, then sighed and shook her head in an achingly familiar gesture of exasperated resignation.   She mouthed a thank-you.   Mulder decided that the sooner he was briefed on the dynamics of this team, the better.

"Ahiga might have a point," Giles said with a look of startled comprehension.

"Oh, this should be good," Xander griped, then shut up at a glare from Doggett.

"I'm interested in your reasoning, Giles," Doggett said.

"It's something Dana said.  We've reached an impasse with the demons.   We can hold them, but we haven't been able to come up with any new strategies to drive them back into the Hellmouth.   I sincerely doubt if Ethan intended anything but harm, but, as Ahiga says, Chaos has a way of twisting our intentions.   We've just been handed someone with a fresh perspective, someone who hasn't spent the past year hammering back wave after wave of demon assaults," Giles argued.

Doggett considered the matter, then gave Giles an approving nod.  For the first time, he stared directly at Mulder.   "You might end up hating me by the time you're ready to go into the field again."   He paused, then gave Mulder a grim smile that made Mulder wonder if he should have started running before now.   "Mulder hated my guts while I whipped him into shape, but we became friends in spite of that.  For his sake, and because my men need you, I'm willing to give it another try."

Mulder nodded.   He didn't doubt that his counterpart hated being put through the kind of physical training a Marine thought was necessary.  He wasn't looking forward to the process either, but it beat sitting around pining for a world he might not see again anytime soon.

"If anyone has any objections, now would be a good time to bring them up.  After tonight, we'll proceed as if this Mulder is the one who has been with us from the beginning.   If you can't live with that, speak up now because w