Chapter Four - King of a Small Kingdom

The house Samantha owned was an average looking one, blue clapboard siding, two stories, and two cars in the driveway. One of them was pretty beaten up, so Scully assumed that it belonged to Chip. The other car was newer, and better maintained. It doubtlessly belonged to Samantha or maybe Charlie.

Just then Scully remembered the question she'd never asked. "You've mentioned that your mom isn't sick. What about your dad?"

A sudden sadness filled Chip's eyes. "My dad died when I was five. He was in a car accident." Before Scully could say that she was sorry to hear that, the boy had bound ahead with keys in hand, ready to unlock the front door. Chip disappeared inside, not noticing that they were lagging behind.

Leaning into Mulder, she asked him in a low voice. "Does it make me a horrible person for thinking that no Charlie in this world means one less problem to deal with?"

"I don't think so."

"It's not that I don't feel for Chip but..." She shrugged. "The Charlie he knew was only little more than a baby when he was copied from the brother I knew."

"Coming?" Chip shouted his question from the stairs. "I thought you wanted to meet the kids." Scully sighed. One part of her did. The rest of her was terrified.

"I'm pretty sure Ezra and Mckenna are up in my room," Chip told them as he led the way to the stairs.

"You'd let them die? Even the children?" The words echoed though Scully's brain as they followed Chip into his room, where his niece and nephew were napping on his bed.

"Sorry about the mess," Chip said self-consciously. "My mom was going to set up their cribs in the guest room this afternoon but it looks like she got distracted...She's in the middle of doing it now, actually," he added, as if to reassure them that his mother hadn't left the children alone in the house.

He continued to speak, but Scully had stopped listening. Like most toddlers, Ezra and Mckenna had surrendered themselves to sleep with complete abandon. If they'd been stressed, she would have expected them to be huddled together with tangled limbs like puppies, but they seemed relaxed, as if their visit to their aunt and cousin's was no big deal. Lying on Chip's twin bed, they were small enough to make it seem huge, and they'd each sleepily staked out their own spot. Mckenna, the elder child, slept with her arms flung out, and had a pacifier hanging out the corner of her slack lips. Ezra, on the other hand was curled into a little ball. Scully wondered if they had blue eyes, because they'd definitely inherited her red hair. Dana's, she reminded herself, not hers. Not really. Still it was a wonder to see how her DNA and Mulder's could have been combined - if things had been different.

"How old did you say they were?" Her voice was a little hoarse.

"I don't think I did, but they're fourteen and twenty-five months," Chip said. "Their birthdays are the same day of the month."

"Didn't waste any time," Mulder said, but Scully barely heard him.

She pushed away an internal voice that whispered that they were young enough to forget their real parents, to be fooled into accepting ersatz copies, to not give away what would be a flawless kidnapping scheme... Scully shook her head to clear it. They were there to help Fox and Dana, if they could, not to steal their children.

Ezra stretched one leg, making her wonder if he was waking up, but he drew it back again. As he did, she noticed that there were trucks on his sock. How could they put a pattern on a sock that small?

Ezra and Mckenna. They weren't names she could picture herself having chosen, since she'd imagined naming her hypothetical children more traditional things like Thomas and Heather, but her path in life had diverged from Dana's years before so even simple things like the appeal of names very well may have changed. Mckenna's name, at least, she could understand. Her great-grandmother Maureen's maiden name had been Mckenna, and the old woman, already ancient by the time Scully had been born, had been an important figure in her girlhood. She had died peacefully in her sleep at the age of 87. Scully had been twelve. Erza, on the other hand, was a mystery. Perhaps, she thought, it was a Mulder family name. Or maybe an homage to Mulder's esoteric taste in music...assuming that that part of Mulder had been cemented before he and Fox split.

"You said your mom was going to set up the cribs today." Mulder's voice broke through her wondering, so she turned to look at him as he addressed Chip. "How long have Dana and Fox been sick?"

"Since Saturday morning," Chip told him. "The three of us had gone fishing at dawn, and they both got real sick, so we had to come back home. By yesterday morning they were so sick we brought them to the hospital. And today, well, you just saw them."

"It's only Monday. It is Monday here, isn't it?" Mulder asked.

"Yeah, it's Monday here too," Chip said. "This thing works fast."

Scully bit her tongue, not wanting to say how fast it worked. The victims only had about ten days at the outset before they were completely consumed by the virus. She shot Mulder a look, but he didn't seem inclined to tell the boy the truth either.

Instead, Mulder said, "I wish there was a way to know conclusively if the alien virus is what they have."

"It makes sense to proceed as if they have it," Scully said, joining the conversation. "Given that time is of the essence."

"Were you around either of them when they fell ill?" Mulder asked. "If so, did you see anything that looked like oil soaking into their skin?"

"Um..." Chip frown. "I swear I saw flat worms when Fox got sick. I just couldn't imagine what they were doing there. Night crawlers, yeah, since we were fishing, but how did flatworms get on the dock?"

"I guess it could be said to look like flat worms," Mulder said with a shrug. "It's a sentient oil, anyway."

Scully sat on the edge of the bed, and admired the sleeping toddlers. Despite the not terribly quiet conversation, they slept on soundly. She balled her fists in her lap, so she wouldn't give into the urge to touch them, just to see if they were real.

If either of the men thought that she was acting strangely, it didn't show. Instead they continued their conversation until they heard a door slam somewhere in the house.

"Chip?" an unfamiliar voice called from down the hall.

"In here Mom!" Chip called back, turning away from Mulder.

Mom.

Mulder shot Chip look, but the boy was already heading towards the door. After everything in happened over last couple hours, Mulder had forgotten that "My mom" was Samantha. That puzzled him; shouldn't the fact that he was meeting a Xerox of his dead sister stick his mind?

Before his mind could followed that with the prediction of what Samantha would look like, she was walking through the door. Straight brown hair. Taller than Scully by three or four inches, so their mother's height, actually. She looked little like the women that were supposed to be clones of her, and he thought that maybe he'd always suspected that it was a lie. Or that they were.

But no, he corrected himself. Once, standing on a bridge, he'd thought them genuine enough.

As she entered the room the woman's eyes, no Samantha's he corrected himself a second time, were on the sleeping children, but they soon lifted. To his. They were the same eyes remembered from childhood, one is that laughed and accused, or occasionally cried. When they met his, those eyes softened with recognition, clearly remembering him too. He felt frozen in time.

At last, Samantha broke the spell. "Fox. I didn't really believe James that there was another world..."

"Everyone calls me Mulder," he informed her gently. "I haven't been Fox for a long, long time." When she gave him as surprised look he almost told her the truth; their parents finally acquiesced to his request just after she'd been taken. It made him suspect that in a way his parents were trying to erase the family that had once been Teena, Bill, Fox and Samantha. They replaced it with Teena, Bill, and Mulder. Mulder, they could pretend didn't still need them the way Fox did.

"Okay, Mulder it is," Samantha said with a tiny nod. "I guess that will make things less confusing."

"Thank you," Mulder replied, never taking his eyes off of her. It was not until he heard one of the kids stirring that he even remembered that there are other people in the room. Even so, it barely registered when Chip bent over the mattress, and picked one of the kids up.

"C'mon, Kenna, let's go try the potty." Chip brushed past Mulder, with the little girl on his hip.

The child rubbed her eyes and pushed a damp coppery curl out of them. "No potty, Chip."

Chip ignored her and took her out of the room. Mulder glanced down at the little boy, and saw that he was still sleeping, so he looked back at Samantha. "Well."

It bothered him when Samantha gave him an anxious look. "Fo- Mulder. James wouldn't tell me what happened to the Samantha from your world, he just said that I could go over if I wanted to...she's dead, isn't she?"

"Oh." It wasn't a story that he expected to be telling, at least not to someone who was like his sister. "Yeah, she died."

"I'm sorry to hear that," Samantha said. She watched as the woman who looked like her sister-in-law threaded an arm around Mulder's waist, comforting him. "It must hurt to see me, then, looking so much like her."

"Not really, she died young. The last time I saw her she was only eight, so I don't, or didn't, know what she would grow up to look like."

Samantha opened her mouth to reply, but as she did a small figure hurtled across the room and threw itself at Scully's legs. "Mommy!"

Scully looked down at the little girl in shock, but Chip was in hot pursuit and extracting her little arms a moment later. "No sweetie, that's not your Mommy." He handed her to his mother. "I think it's time for me to bring Mulder and Scully to see James."

"Sure." Samantha nodded over the top of her niece's head. "It was, um, nice to meet you both."

Mulder nodded distractedly. His eyes were on the puzzled face of the toddler held in Samantha's arms. "See you."

On the way out of Samantha's house, it was Mulder's turn to comfort Scully. Part of her wanted to tell him that she didn't need to be guided by the elbow, but she wasn't sure if she would have followed Chip and Mulder if left completely to her own devices.

Mommy. The little girl had called her Mommy. It was something both sweet and horrible. There had been a time when she'd longed for a little girl, not a whole lot older than Mckenna, to call her that, but that child had died. The only time that girl had called her mommy was during a hallucination.

"Scully are you okay?" Mulder had leaned so close to whisper it that his breath tickled her ear.

"I'm fine." Her voice was toneless.

"Scully..." The helpless look on his face hurt her, so she squeezed his hand.

"It's time to see the great and powerful Oz, Mulder."

This evoked a weak smile from Mulder, but Chip turned and looked at her with a dismayed expression on his face. "James doesn't think of himself like that."

"How then?" Mulder asked. "Isn't he the king of this world?"

"It's complicated," the boy muttered. "Get in the car, would you? It's too far to walk."

Up close it looked even less like a car Scully would ever want to get in, but after Mulder opened the door, she dutifully slid across the backseat. Mulder got in back too, and she wondered if this would cause Chip to complain that he felt like a taxi driver. He didn't, but then she wondered how well he drove...

When the car had been in movement for three minutes without smashing into anything, Scully let her body relax, and allowed her head to sink back against the seat. Her eyes stared out the window at passing scenery, but she didn't really see anything. Instead her thoughts turned inwards, thinking about what it would be like to have some child call her Mommy without it hurting for being a lie.

The building that Chip pulled up in front of was almost big enough to be as castle. Peering out the window, Mulder thought that it was probably what real-estate agents would refer to as "Victorian," however. It was three stories and sprawling with turrets and gingerbread trim.

"All it needs is to be painted black and the Addams family could move in," Scully muttered, opening her door. They climbed out of the car and gave Chip an expectant look. The slightly mulish look on his face suggested that the charm of being the guide was beginning to wear thin, which was fine with Mulder; he was thoroughly sick of being led. No one seemed eager to go to see the man pulling all their strings.

Without knocking, Chip opened the front door and let them in. Inside the building was stark. It lacked all the finery expected in a home that size, of that expense. No art work, no curtains, and scarcely any furniture to speak of. Mulder guessed that he was glad for that, because the idea of having to make his way out through a maze of antiques made him faintly anxious - no doubt an echo of childhood reminders to be careful in the antique stores his mother had enjoyed visiting every summer. Back then, however, it had been Samantha's small hands that had caused him more heart-stopping moments than his own.

"He's probably down the hall," Chip told them, his voice breaking into the perfect cadence their steps made on the hard floors.

Without any ceremony at all, they entered the room where Chip correctly surmised that James would be in.

It seemed like an unworthy thought, but Mulder was a little surprised that there wasn't a throne. Instead James sat on a white loveseat, with his legs thrown over the arm in an abandon he never had shown as an intense adolescent boy.

To his surprise, Mulder's emotions upon seeing his long lost friend were not joy that he was alive, not even gratitude that James had kept a part of his dead sister alive. Instead, he was really pissed off. "You're really alive after all this time," he accused.

"I'm really alive," James replied easily. If he felt any emotion, he kept his mask well in place.

Bile rose up in Mulder's throat and flowed out with his words. "Do you have any idea what your disappearance did to your brother? A ten-year-old boy who'd been raped and held captive, and he'd thought that *he'd* been the lucky one because at least he'd gotten away and found his way home."

The pleasant look fell from James' face, and was replaced with one that Mulder remembered well - one that wanted to explain something he wasn't sure the intended audience would understand. It made Mulder bristle, but he let the man speak uninterrupted. "Why don't we all sit down and talk about everything that's happened?"

"Yes, let's," Mulder growled, sitting reluctantly after Scully and Chip had taken seats. A childish part of him wanted to remain standing out of spite, but he looked at Scully and tamped the urge down, if only for her sake.

James seemed to relax a little, but he was having trouble getting his amiable mask to settle back into place. "I didn't realize the effect it had on Jordon until years after it was already too late."

Mulder was about to tell him that it was bullshit, but a look from Scully made him bite the comment back. "So you assumed that he and your dad merrily got on with their lives after your mother was murdered and you disappeared?"

The comment made the dark-eyed man wince. "As far as I knew, none of that happened."

"As far as you knew?" Mulder mocked him. "So you not being with your family wasn't a big enough clue for you?"

"I was with my family," James said evenly. "I left your house and headed home for dinner. I imagined I heard my mom getting shot, but found myself down the road. I ran back to your house, had dinner, then waited for my dad to come get me. When I got home my mom was fine, and so was Jordon."

The protest tore itself from Mulder's throat. "That's not what happened!"

"It is, and it isn't. You have to understand, Fox-"

"Mulder."

James didn't miss a beat. "-Mulder, that I didn't know at age eleven that this wasn't 'the real world'. As far as I was concerned, the events that you know to have happened were all just a brief, yet horrible, waking dream I once had. It wasn't until I was in my late teens that I discovered that this world wasn't the same one I'd been born into."

"How did you discover that?" Scully asked quietly.

"I fell through. One minute I was in 'my' world, and the next I was in yours. It took me a long time to figure out what happened, but I think I finally did."

Mulder stared at him.

"I think my fear, and grief, let me create this place. There's a lot of energy in powerful emotions-"

"I've got friends who would love to print this story," Mulder told him. "And while this is all very...interesting, it doesn't explain why you brought us here."

James shrugged. "You're the only one who can help."

"I'm Obi-Wan Kenobi?" Mulder asked sardonically. "Oh wait, that movie came out in 1977. You probably don't know it."

"I'm familiar with Star Wars, yes." James began to sound irritable. "And I don't appreciate the flip comment."

"I'm not sure I care," Mulder said with an exaggerated shrug. "Go on, you were talking about how we're your only hope."

"As I started to say, I am familiar with Star Wars, and nearly everything that's gone on in your world since I left it. Which is why I'm sure that you two might be the only people on Earth who can stop this virus from killing everyone here over the age of twenty-nine or so."

"Why that age?" Scully asked suddenly. Both men turned to look at her. "Do you have any idea why no one younger than that has been affected by the virus? And how many people have been, anyway?"

"So far 60 people have been stricken, and I'm sure it's just the tip of the iceberg." He suddenly sounded very tired.

Mulder was tempted to point out that Chip's claim that most of the adults were sick was an extreme exaggeration, but Mulder realized that he had no idea how many people they were talking about total. Had only Chilmark been recreated, or was this false world larger still?

James went on. "As for why the younger people haven't been infected, my theory is that they got the MMR vaccine, and the older people didn't."

"But we've all been vaccinated against measles, mumps and rubella," Scully protested. "And both Mulder and I were infected by the virus, but were lucky enough to survive."

James shook his head. "But you didn't get the MMR. The separate vaccines were developed and administered in the 60s, but the MMR wasn't first administered until 1971 - which is coincidentally the first year of birth for people who seem to be immune to the virus."

"I don't know..." Scully trailed off doubtfully. Mulder could read her thoughts on her face: she was thinking about Texas.

"Do either of you have a better theory?" Despite the question, his voice didn't imply a challenge. When neither of them said anything, he asked them the question they'd been expecting all day. "Do you think that you can help us?"

It didn't surprise Mulder when Scully turned to him. She couldn't remember being cured herself, after all. "I don't know, maybe," Mulder said finally. "There's nothing we can do from here, though. If we figure something out, can we come back through, or would we need an escort again?"

"If you know where to go, anyone could go through," James replied. "The same doesn't hold true in reverse for reasons I've yet to figure out."

"What's to keep people from our side from wandering in on a regular basis, then?" Scully asked, giving him a curious look.

"The area is low traffic. But I wouldn't be surprised if we've had a visitor or two who got a few feet in and turned around abruptly, thinking they were imagining things."

Mulder stood up. "It's been nice seeing you, James, but I think Scully and I need to go home now. If there's anything we can do for your people, we'll be back."

"They're not 'my people,' Mulder," James told him.

"Sure." Mulder gave him a disbelieving look. "Tell me, James, who calls the shots around here?"

His erstwhile friend said nothing, and yet gave him his answer.

Scully scrambled to her feet, shocked at Mulder's abruptness. She half ran to catch up to him, not caring that Chip was lingering, making apologies from what she could surmise from his tone of voice.

"Mulder, wait!" After a couple more steps he stopped. "How could you give him false hope? There's nothing we can do for these people."

"That's not true, Scully. If we had a quantity of the vaccine, we might be able to save some of them."

"But we don't have any of the vaccine," she broke off, frustrated.

"Actually, we do." She gave him a surprised look that he pretended not to notice. "When I found you in Antarctica something strange happened when I began giving you the vaccine - the line I injected it into began to shrivel up, suggesting that it might have been organic material. Reminded me of when Wayne put salt on a slug." He shuddered a little. "Anyway I decided to inject the rest into you once I freed you. But you were okay, so doing that slipped my mind. I still have the rest in a safe place."

"You do?"

"Yeah...there isn't much though," he apologized.

"We may not need much," she said, looking relieved for the first time.

"Hope so," he said. "I'm not fan of James, but I can't take it out on these innocent peo-" Chip's sudden appearance made Mulder stop talking.

"You're really going to see if there's a way to help?" Chip asked them as they got into the car. "Really? You weren't just saying that to get James to shut up?"

Scully thought his word choice was interesting, and wondered if there was no love lost between James and Chip as well. "If we can help, we will."

"Good. Because if you don't, we're all doomed."

No one said another word after that cheery pronouncement, not on the entire drive back to the break between the two worlds.