Disclaimer: I don't own anything at all, which point is made rock-poundingly clear by the story itself.

Author's Notes: Thanks many many to Kalena for pimping me to the fandom and for sticking with me while I wrote this. She didn't bail on me. Thanks also to Speranza (and to Heuradys) for giving it web home since I no longer have one. They both took a chance and I appreciate it. We may have to experiment with different versions, though.

Story Notes:

Parody
Drama (some scary moments)
Rating: Uh, call it R, for language and conversation topics Pairing: Kowalski/Fraser (among other mentioned character pairings. Slash, het, and, um, otherwise) Buddy-Only-"Pairing": Paul Gross and Callum Keith Rennie trying desperately to get the hell out of ANY kind of fic and back to reality. Uninvasive, respectful treatment, as characters, not as real people. Fic parody stuff.

There are notes at the end of the story. Since this is NOT an RPS but a SENDUP of RPS, using "due South"'s characters, stories, backgrounds, settings, and other such of that which made "due South" what it was, you may wish to check them out before you read the story. If not, don't worry; it's not necessary to read them to understand the story.

There is a tiny bit of French in here. It has no accents, because the French language speller that keeps brightly telling me to wave a magic wand and call for it does not come, and I know less about how to fix this problem than I do about phrenology, so my word processor program is currently incapable of including said accents. Therefore, yes, the French words are, technically, all misspelled. Them's the breaks.

I would like to thank my cheerleader, Kalena, for putting up with me while I wrote this damn thing. She didn't bail on me, and she helped with some sticky parts, and some more sage advice esp. concerning when something I liked was turning out to be hopeless in the context of the story. Thanks, Kalena.

Callum Keith Rennie (star for seasons 3/4 of "due South"): "Paul Gross is a delight. He had a great deal on his plate and hundreds of decisions to make, but he was always straight-ahead as both the executive producer and an actor. He's got terrific timing and a keen understanding of his craft. It was a joy to go to work every day...not to get mushy, but as an actor, when you have that kind of backing, you feel as if you can do almost anything, and we did."

Paul Gross (star and 3/4 seasons executive producer, head writer, and soundtrack consultant for "due South"), on his costar, Callum Keith Rennie; he is trying to get his laughter under control as he peruses a slash zine the interviewer has given him to ask him what he thinks of it. He has been reading passages aloud--he particularly likes a very purple passage concerning the color of his eyes--and the interviewer is becoming concerned that, since they are in a bar which is largely inhabited by a blue-collar crowd, at least one of them is going to get punched: "What do they do, masturbate to this stuff? I tell you, slash fiction is going to go crazy when they see the new guy. He's really good-looking and sexy, the dangerous side of Fraser. It will be totally homoerotic. How can I see this stuff? Where do I go on the Internet?"

Callum on being new to Due South: "I followed Paul around like Mutt and Jeff: 'Paul? Paul? Do you like me? Do I suck yet? Am I fired?'"

Pt. One: Making a Break For It

They were in the locker room, being eyed suspiciously by the characters milling about, who, suspicions or no, said nothing to them and went about changing their respective gear as they made their transits from one story to another. There was a hollowness about them, a presence of absence, as it were. Callum wondered briefly if he was losing his mind, as he realized the previous thought had actually made sense to him. But hell, if he were going to lose it at all, it would've been long gone by now--oh, shit. "Paul!"

To Callum's big-eyed chagrin--not at the action, but at the danger it might put them both in--Paul was pulling on his own jeans, muttering tightly "Stop freaking out, Callum, we don't have much time. If this is going to work we have to act fast. I still can't believe we managed to get out of RPS even temporarily." He shoved Callum's cased glasses into his alarmed co-star's hand.

Callum, still in his Kowalski voice, said "I can't argue with that, but I'm still waiting to hear why that nutcase bondage skit was better than yet another roll around your dressing room, even if we did have to do it in our own names. And if you keep breakin' the fourth wall in Fraser/Kowalski and anyone notices, our nuts'll be hangin' from somebody's rear view mirror. These people don't take no for an answer."

"Believe me, I've noticed that." Paul slammed the locker door, then slammed the door of the one he'd retrieved Cal's glasses from, then turned and threw the rest of a jeans-and-Henley outfit to the other man. "C'mon, Cal, shake your utter lack of an ass. We're getting out of here. And keep your voice down. These people may only be made-up characters, but a hell of a lot went into creating some of them. There may be enough to them that they'd realize what we're up to, here."

Callum started getting into his clothes at speeds normally associated with orbital breakaway, but continued "Just how do you think you're going to manage getting us out of here? Though I admit if we are getting out of here it oughtta be you managing it because you're the one who managed to get us stuck here. Talkin' about finding the slash on the internet's all well and good for you, Mr. Easygoing, but did you have to drag me along with you? God, this has gotta be why Marciano did a rabbit."

"I had nothing to do with that. I hadn't said what I said when David left; that was because of a contract dispute, and the fact that--"

"--that maybe he couldn't do his job right hanging from that freakin' chain, I'll bet that's what he was disputing."

"I still don't believe it," Paul was muttering to himself. He glanced around rapidly, and made a subtle this-way gesture to the now-dressed Callum. Both of them dodged behind a bank of lockers. "One little stinking quote. It's the damn Twilight Zone, I swear. One quote and here we are..."

"And calling me sexy to a reporter wasn't the brightest move in the world, either--"

"You are sexy, for pete's sake, you're intense, it's why I wanted you for Kowalski, and I'm married, I didn't say I wanted to jump you! How'd I know everyone was going to seize on it like this and write stuff about the two of us instead of Fraser and Kowalski? It's worse than that damn Kit-Kat thing. I'm gonna commit a felony if one more person gives me a Kit-Kat. I have grown to loathe Kit-Kats. I've got a drawer full of fucking Kit-Kats, half of which are probably shot full of rohypnol--"

"--but then," Callum was continuing as though he couldn't hear, "I forgot I'm talking to a man who let it be generally known that he cracked his own rib in the process of trying to cure his hiccups."

"--and by the way, you can stop talking like Kowalski now. You were born in England, for God's sake."

"Sorry. I guess it's reflex, being stuck in here. Speaking of which, not to misquote Star Wars or anything, but when you got us in here, did you have some kind of plan for getting us out?"

Paul had his head bent over something he held in both hands, his back to Callum. "You could say that. When I got us outta RPS into character fic, I mean, not when we got kidnapped into RPS in the first place. Let's see if it...okay."

"Hey. There weren't stairs here before--wait a minute, Paul, what are--?"

Paul looked up from the little notebook he'd been scribbling in, and shoved the aforesaid item into his back pocket, along with the pen. "Something finally occurred to me, somewhere between this stupid-ass bondage crap--and if that's good for anything but a laugh I'll eat my damn truck--and that last RPS we did; namely, that I'm a writer."

Callum blinked. "Uh...that counts? Like, from inside here?"

"I say it does, dammit. I'm also a professional, which means I outrank them in the reality department. My reality ought to be able to kick their reality's ass. I think."

"You just think?"

"Yeah, because possession is nine points of the law, and we're not out of here yet. But, without further ado..." He opened the door to the stairwell in front of him. "Let's find out. After you." He grinned.

Callum stared at the "exit" sign that now gleamed over the doorway leading into a shadowy stairwell. "You think you can keep us one step ahead of, uh, 'them'?"

"That'll be easier if you'll get it in gear."

"Yeah, sorry." Callum closed the door softly behind them. "So, you can just...write whatever you want? Like this side door out of the locker room?"

"No, it doesn't look that way. Until I figure out just how to write us out of this--all I've really done so far is dropped us off their radar--I've got to stay within the parameters of the show."

"How do you know?"

"I tried to cut to the chase a little."

"What?"

"Let's just say that when we didn't get beamed out of the locker room and rematerialized on set--the real one--I figured out there were limits. Besides, we don't want to attract their attention." He grabbed the handle of the door at the bottom of the last flight of stairs, then caught himself, pulling up abruptly, pausing. He let go of the handle and pulled out the notebook again, starting to scribble.

"What?" Callum wondered.

"I forgot to write anything out there."

"You mean we could have...vanished into limbo or something?"

"I don't know, Cal. I just don't want to take any chances. Let me think a minute..." He tapped the tip of the pen against his forehead lightly. "I'm wondering if I could use the set as kind of a transition point between this fiction reality and the real world; that's where the fiction and the reality connect."

"Hey, man, you're the EP. Do anything you want," Callum told him. "But if that's the way you think it might work, I suggest staying away from the location sets and the temporary studio sets. They changed too much."

"Yeah, that occurred to me, too." Paul opened his eyes and began writing.

"Where're you putting us?"

"The third-season consulate set."

"Just don't put us back in the damp part of the Henry Allen set."

"No, that wasn't the most comfortable experience of my life, either."

"At least I didn't breathe any pastrami breath into your mouth...how's it coming?"

"Faster if you'll be quiet."

Callum folded his arms and leaned against the wall with a sigh of exasperation.

Finally Paul said "Okay. Let's give it a shot."

"I'll let you have the honor of going first," Callum said, with a gallant gesture at the door.

Paul gave him a look and held out his hand. "C'mon, Cal. We go together. I'm not going to lose you in some kind of bizarre reality transition."

Callum sighed. "Yeah, yeah. Sorry, all the blood's still pounding in my head from swinging on that chain like a side of beef." He smirked. "Y'know, you're right--it'd've been funny if it weren't us."

Paul just gave him another look--this one speaking volumes of agreement--took a deep breath, and opened the door. He had to let go of Callum's hand as they rounded the edge of the door and he reached behind himself to maintain contact. Callum caught his wrist nervously as they went through.

And stopped dead, staring around.

"Paul."

"Shit..."

"Paul!"

"Keep your voice down," Paul hissed, pulling Callum against a wall, by the wrist Callum was still holding onto, now with something of a deathgrip.

"This is not the set, Paul--" Callum further iterated.

"I can see that!" Paul whispered back.

"So where the hell are we?"

"In the consulate, obviously, please keep your voice down," Paul muttered rapidly, leaning out from their dubious shelter and glancing up and down. "Somebody's probably here; looks like broad daylight outside."

"What happened to the door?"

"What? Which?"

"The one we just walked through!"

"I don't know, Cal, I suppose it went the way of all things. It doesn't exist in the consulate, after all...oh, Christ."

Callum was eyeing him. "That was your Fraser voice. And it didn't look like it was on purpose."

"I know, I heard it. And it wasn't. Shit. Okay, we're not out of the woods, but we may be a step closer to it."

"How is this a step closer!?"

"We were already one step closer doing a Fraser/Kowalski instead of an RPS, which, along with certain AUs and some really weird violence fic, is about the ultimate in unreality. We may have made another jump...we need to find out if we've made it out of fanfic and into canon."

"I'd almost settle for just making it to gen. I love you and all that, which is actually pretty incredible after everything that oversexed bunch has put us through, but to put it very mildly certain portions of me are getting tired, man."

"Same here--oh, shit!" Paul whimpered, reiterating his new favorite word, as a rustle and a thud came from Thatcher's office. A chair scraped.

"Oh, God--is that Thatcher?" Callum hissed.

"Unless she's grown considerably, it's Turnbull--run for it before he gets a good look at us!" As they both crashed into the front door, Callum realized he still had hold of the arm Paul was trying to use to open it, and let go. They bolted through and kept pelting until they were around the corner, out of sight.

Where they pulled up abruptly, looking around.

"We're..." Callum murmured.

"In Chicago," Paul finished. "Yeah." He was gazing through the distance toward the John Hancock building as he spoke.

"Is it the real Chicago?"

"Not with Turnbull in it. Hell, not with that--" he jerked his head toward the consulate, "--whole building in it."

"Uh...has it got us in it?"

"Obviously it's got us in it!"

"I mean the show us, Kowalski and Fraser! Or are we them now?"

Paul blinked. "Um...I don't know."

Callum was pacing in a tight circle, one hand to his forehead; after a moment of breathing, he said "Okay, now I know why the sidestep into a Fraser/Kowalski, even one that bad; you were trying to get us somewhere you could pull the writing trick. Okay--so, what, then? What now?"

"You're asking me? I know the rules?"

"You sure as hell sounded like you did!"

"Cal, I'm making it up as I go along. I just had to try something. Face it, we weren't going to last much longer. We were about to kill ourselves out of sheer embarrassment."

"Look--you said the magic words and got us here, and now you're writing the magic words that are supposed to get us back out. If you don't know the rules, nobody does, so invent some and get on with it!"

"I'm not sure how bright a move that would be. Not after what just happened with the jump from the stairwell--"

"Well, you've gotta do something. You're a writer, you came up with this idea, and I'm feeling pretty helpless, here, because ever since we got out of the locker room I've basically been existing inside your head! Which is better than existing inside some slasher's, but still."

Paul blinked. "Um. I hadn't thought of it that way. But we aren't literally in my head, we just--"

"And by the way, try to control your endearingly twisted sense of humor, would you? God alone knows what it might bring on."

"I will if you'll control your adrenaline addiction. God alone knows what that might...Jesus, I don't believe this..."

"All right, all right--stop looking shell-shocked and listen for a minute." Callum grabbed Paul's arm again and conducted him over to a doorway, out of immediate sight of anyone who might happen past the alley. He said quietly, "Like you said, you're a professional writer, and you wrote for the show, and that ought to mean you can at least get us out of fanfic and into canon. So we could be in canon right now. And you were saying that canon should be closer to the real world, because the show did exist in the real world, right? The canon show."

Paul blinked. "Yes, I was thinking...that canon would be closer to reality than fanfic for that reason, but the only problem with that theory, I've just realized, is that fanfic exists in the real world, too--"

Callum shook his head rapidly. "Stop thinking like that, or you'll end up on some existential plane where it's impossible to define reality, and we'll never get back. Think in terms of gradations, like you were before. RPS is about the ultimate in out-there, along with certain AUs and stuff. Character slash is a lot less out-there, but can occasionally be pretty damn silly, as witness that last gig; some of it's fairly realistic, though. Gen is sometimes stupid but sometimes good enough that it could actually be canon if it got studio approval; and canon is the realest thing next to reality, because the show is realer. Real people acted on real sets with real props and real legal binding contracts and--"

"And a bad tendency to get canceled and then sprung at the last minute more often than damn near any other show in history."

"Okay, okay, that can't help, but like I said, don't think like that. Think real. Think three dimensions. Think about the time you lost control during a foot chase scene in the granny boots because your heel came down on a rock, and you staggered off sideways at about eighty miles an hour and ran over the line producer."

Paul stifled a loud snort behind his hand. "Yeah. For a month after that, Frank wouldn't walk into a room where I was without taking a bearing on my trajectory."

"Yeah, now remember the shock? Remember how real it was? Remember all the times you screwed yourself up in action scenes? Remember the time you got stuck in the harness for an hour for a roof scene while some damn technical problem held everything up--and you really had to go?"

"Yeesh, don't mention that."

"Remember the time you nearly fell off the top of a moving train while it was on a bridge because you did a fight scene up there without the safety cables?"

"Okay, now I'll have to ask you to shut up."

"Whatever. Think of all the real things about the show, things that felt real--hell, if anyone knows everything about that show, it's you--you eventually did just about everything there was to do on it. You saw every fake front and dark underbelly and equipment screwup and scheduling disaster and budget crisis and legal dispute and general indicator of realness that it had, right?"

Paul took a deep breath. "Right."

"So, okay. Get in the mindset. And whatever you do, don't forget yourself and start thinking like Fraser!"

"Uh, no, getting into character head would not be a good idea, here," Paul agreed, taking another glance around to be sure they were still unobserved. "We might never get out again. I guess that was the only good thing about being stuck in RPS--we were at least us. So to speak. Are you having that problem, too? Creeping Kowalskiness?"

"Yeah," Callum said grimly, "and frankly I'm sick of being a Chicago flatfoot, though I've got to admit it's better than finding eighty-seven new ways to screw you every day. So how do we find out where we are exactly?"

"Well...we're not back in the real world, but we're also not still in RPF, because we'd be on the set, or in my office, or at one of our houses or something, not next to the real--uh--the unreal consulate, in some version of Chicago. Right?"

"Yeah. And if it were RPS in particular, we'd probably be screwing, too."

"Or one of us would be pining for the other one. Or there'd be mutual pining. Any pining at your end? Generalized horniness, anything?"

"Nah. Like I said, I love you, but I'd just as soon not fuck you."

"Yeah, same here. Okay. Stipulated we've definitely at least made it out of RPF. Unfortunately, that may be all we know right now--after all, the consulate, and Turnbull, exist in fanfiction--all kinds, except for RPF. This could be either canon, or almost any kind of character fanfic."

"How do we find out which?"

"Well..." Paul pondered. "Back to where we were for just a minute. We were in a Fraser/Kowalski."

"Yeah?"

"So where exactly were Fraser and Kowalski?"

Callum blinked. "Well...they could've still been around somewhere. Just because we didn't see them doesn't mean they weren't. Since it wasn't one of those twisted out-there fics where the actors meet the characters."

"Right, not one of those. So Fraser and Kowalski...oh, shit."

"What shit? What?"

"I read a fanfic once--"

"You read this stuff?" Callum stared.

Paul rolled his eyes. "You don't? You sounded pretty knowledgeable about it a minute ago."

"I'd kind of have to be by this time. I mean, how long have we been stuck here? Besides, I hear things. You wouldn't believe what's in some of my fan mail. But you read it?"

Paul shook his head. "Not exactly. It was a book of Star Trek fan fiction that Paramount published, award winners in some contest or something. I was ten, I was bored, somebody gave it to me. Can we move on now? Oh, Christ--" he put a hand over his mouth. "I've gotta stop doing that. Okay. It was called 'Visit to a Weird Planet Revisited', and in the story, when some of the actors ended up in the Trek universe, the guys they were playing ended up on the set in L.A."

"You think Fraser and Kowalski might be...in Toronto? Our Toronto?"

"Um...if it's canon, maybe. I mean, it's not like you can really think of some wacked-out amateur effort as a precedent, but right now we don't have much else to go on. What you were asking about earlier--are Fraser and Kowalski here? If they are, and we could find them, we could...well, use 'em as some kind of a barometer."

"We could what?"

"You know, see...how they act, what they do. If they do anything they never did in canon, we'll know we're still in fanfic. If they fuck, we'll know we're still in slash."

Callum smirked. "While it is, unfortunately, conceivable that if we're still in fanfic, they might let us watch if they did, that still might be no help--those two didn't do it in all the slash. Sometimes it's different characters. Like, sometimes you fuck Vecchi--"

"Not me, damn it, Fraser!"

"Right, right, sorry, gotta remember. Paul, I don't think that would help. Some of the fanfic is pretty straight-ahead--some of the gen especially, like I said."

Paul eyed him.

"So I'm told," Callum muttered, sounding just a bit defensive.

Paul shook his head at him, but only continued "But if this is canon, they should be following one of the scripts completely to the letter at any given point that we see them, assuming we see them in a scene that was explicitly included in the script instead of just alluded to."

"Would it even be possible to see them in an implied scenario? Wouldn't they only exist in the scenes that were aired?"

Paul rolled his head on his shoulders, rubbing at the back of his neck, with a pained expression. "I don't know, I told you I don't know the rules here, will you please work with me? For instance, I'm assuming here that if we are in canon, we're not in seasons one or two, or you wouldn't be having Kowalskilike impulses. God, I don't know if you'd even be here. But I can't guarantee that."

"Okay, so the only way to be certain we're in canon would be to see Fraser and Kowalski, or somebody in the cast, anyway, playing one of the scenes that actually aired. Or were filmed, at least...uh, oh..."

"No, no, we'll go with aired, we can't go wrong with that one; we won't take backup takes or scenes that got cut as any kind of indicator."

"I got another question."

"What the hell, let me have it," Paul sighed.

"If we are in fanfic, do we want to get to canon, or do we want to double-or-nothing right for reality?"

"Uh...okay, this is what I'm thinking. We're back to the other problem--writing the set. I think we need it as kind of a link, between the fictional world and the real world."

"You said something like that. It didn't work, obviously--"

Paul gave him a lowered-brow glare of exasperation. Unruffled, Callum finished "--but for the sake of argument--and also because I haven't got any better ideas--I'll go with that for now if you will."

"It's the specific reason it didn't work that's my point, here. Remember I said I've got to be careful not to dump us right back into RPF? Since the set and everything does exist there? That might be easier to arrange if we take it in steps--if we start out in something closer to reality than it is to RPF."

Callum nodded and pondered "So...what we need is to get to one of the sets. One where our presence won't freak everybody out. No, I mean--we need to get to one of the places the sets were depicting, so we can find out just where it is we are."

"Cal, that was scary--I think we're actually starting to get good at this. Where do you suppose...?"

"Well...we may have to...y'know, kinda hang around, since we don't know if the behind-the-scenes scenes exist in the canon world. If we happen to walk into the middle of one of those, that won't tell us anything until the action gets to a scene that aired. Right?"

"So if neither of us recognizes anything that we can remember as being word-for-word from a script, we're going to have to try to find out what's going on, so we know what script we should be waiting to hear from, and how long we're going to have to wait to find out if we're going to hear it."

"Okay. So...well, obviously, either we're gonna have to hide and make sure nobody sees us, which is not the fastest way to get the information we need, or we're gonna have to pretend to be our characters. Which is also not gonna be easy when we're trying pretty emphatically not to slip into character, here."

"Yeah. So...we saw Turnbull. Well, I did. Unless there's another Mountie as big as he is hanging around in Thatcher's office for some reason...but Turnbull's around a lot. Doesn't mean this is a canon ep..."

"Doesn't mean it isn't. But a lot of people think he's pretty cute--you should see Dean's fan mail some time--"

"Not much could shock me since that letter I got from the lady in the retirement village detailing exactly what she was going to do to me if she ever met me," Paul muttered.

Callum finished "--so we could still be anywhere from slash to canon, for all we know."

"Yeah. Shit."

"Get a new word, Paul."

"I will when we get out of this. I hate to say it, but it looks like we're going to have to..."

"...fake being them."

"Yes. Because I don't think we can get anywhere without talking to someone. Not as long as we don't know what the canon world's like, exactly; it'll just take too long to get the information we need any other way."

"Uh, how about if we could get at one of the computer terminals in the squad room?" Callum mused.

"They're police computer terminals; they're all passworded. Besides, we don't dare just stroll casually into a crowd of people who know Fraser and Kowalski, any more than we wanted Turnbull getting an eyeful of us. What if one of them's in the hospital with a broken leg or something? Or, worse yet, one of 'em's there in the bullpen? Assuming we haven't done some kind of switch-out with them, I mean."

"But we're still left needing the information. We still need to get somewhere that the sets depict."

"Like I said, we just were, and we just left like bats out of hell for very good reason--"

Callum waved both hands in a hold-on gesture. "I know that, but hear me out. The consulate's not a lot of help anyway if nobody's home but Turnbull. There are not a heck of a lot of canon scenes of him alone there, doing whatever he does all day, and none we could recognize even if there were. We could end up hiding in a closet for a week in there, if Fraser and Thatcher both happen to be in Ottawa or whatever in this fic. What we need is something that can place us either in canon or fanfic, and if it's fanfic, something that'll tell us what kind, so that we know what direction we're headed in--and, preferably, we need to find that out before we get too much older."

Paul sighed. "The station, then."

"It's a better bet. A lot more action with a lot more people goes down there, most episodes."

"There's another problem."

"And God knows just how bad we need another one right now," Cal sighed.

"If we are in canon--or we get there--and we land in something like 'Mountie on the Bounty'..."

"Oh. Right. Most of the action's elsewhere. Hell, Paul, there's only one way to find out. Unless you think your office or--Fraser's office or Kowalski's apartment is a better idea."

Paul shook his head. "One of us, at least--depending on whether one or both of them are at the station at the moment and if so, just who knows where they are and who doesn't--should be able to ask some questions of somebody there; whereas we might end up doing like you said and drooling on ourselves 'til we starve if we try someplace more private, lower traffic. So, the station it is."

"Um..." Callum looked around again, up and down the alley. "Got any idea which way it's supposed to be from here?"

"Yes." Paul pulled out the notebook and held it up, wagging his eyebrows in a "get it"? expression.

"Oh. Heh. Yeah. Sorry."

"Never mind." Paul thought, tapping the pen on his lip this time, then turned Callum around and set the notebook on his shoulder. "Sorry, but my handwriting's nearly illegible even with a surface to write on."

"Mi shoulder es su shoulder, just write."

Paul did, for a couple of minutes. Then he replaced the pad in his back pocket. "Okay. Let's go."

"Let's go where? I don't see anything different."

Paul pointed at the door at the back of the entryway they were standing in. "Walk through there."

"You know," Callum muttered, reaching back to grab Paul's wrist again, "this jumping thing--I have this vision of me developing a neurosis and never being able to walk through a door again without holding your hand."

"We'll address that problem if we ever make it out of here."

"Right."

"Well, that answers the question of whether Fraser and Kowalski's panicked butts are in our director's chairs right now," Callum muttered. "Of course, now we've got no explanation for our little identity crisis problem."

"Hell, Cal, for all we know that might just be habit--"

"It isn't in my case, at least. The props and what have you may be the same--I mean, the, the stuff, and the building or whatever--but it still does not look anything like the set to me."

"Me either, but I can't pull an endless series of facile explanations out of my ass without hitting the occasional wall."

"Thanks for that visual, and sure you can. You're a writer. Isn't that what you people do?"

"Shut up, Cal."

Callum was shaking his head, looking concerned, as he watched Kowalski talking to some unidentified inhabitant of the story they were in. "Paul, do I really look like that in person? That...geeky?"

"Um...just so it's out there, I didn't say what I said--what landed us here--because I think you're geeky. With that established...I'd have to say he's kind of probably, uh, a little bit better looking than you, actually. Well, not that I think he is, but--"

"What? Why? Well, maybe if we're in fanfic, since people probably idealize our appearances some, but--"

"Even in canon. Because he looks like you do onscreen, with makeup and specially engineered lighting and everything, except he looks like that without any makeup or lighting or anything."

"Jeez..." Callum sighed. "Guess it's true. I really have no ass."

"Actually, he's got a little bit more than you've got."

"You can feel free to stop setting me straight about these little items of import just any time now, Paul. I'd like to see your face when you see Fraser. I'm willing to bet when he wears the pants, he doesn't look like he's got a diaper on under there."

"You know, you've said you love me twice in the last half hour, but that's not the vibe I'm picking up, here."

"I'll compose you a sonnet later; we don't have all day. Somebody's gonna notice us eventually. You can't really lurk effectively in a police station; they have rules and stuff about that."

"Okay, fine, here I go--"

"Paul--wait, hold it a second. Fraser and Kowalski can only meet you or me in RPF, right?"

"Um...yeah."

"So if you walk up to that guy over there, does that mean we're in RPF?"

Paul blinked. "Shit. It might. You think--that if we're not, I wouldn't be able to speak to him?"

Cal thought a moment, shook his head. "Nah, I guess not. We've already been seen--"

"And recognized, in your case, at least," Paul muttered, referring to a confused moment at their arrival when they'd emerged walking out of the room they were currently hiding behind the door of, instead of into it--Paul's phrasing had apparently been a bit ambiguous in that respect. Their resultant stumble and subsequent scramble to hold each other up had attracted the momentary attention of a couple of passersby in the hallway, one of whom had nodded to Callum with a curious expression. Fortunately, whoever it was had been occupied in an intense-looking conversation with her companion, and hadn't pursued the matter.

Callum nodded, and finished "But if Kowalski...couldn't see you, if it were impossible for you to interact with him in anything but an RPF, then it ought to follow that no one in...in whatever reality this is would be able to, right? I mean, if we're here, we have to be able to be here. Whether we should be or not. Or something."

"Cal, that argument is eating its own tail."

"I know. My suggestion is we grab on and roll with it. And at the very least--even if we can't interact with anyone without this being an RPF, it doesn't necessarily mean we're still in RPS specifically."

"Unless the first thing Kowalski does is call me by my real name and bend me over the desk. I think there are stories where you and me, or David, end up in some version of--"

"Or Francesca does. Bend you over, that is. Or however that'd work."

Paul covered his eyes with one hand. "Shit. Real Person Het. I didn't even think of that. Is there such a thing?"

"Paul, buddy, I got no idea," Cal said in Kowalski's accent, then sighed in frustration and slapped himself. "At least I got your name right," he muttered. "Do your stuff. Just be careful. Remember, I'll never get out of here without you."

"Hell, no way I could leave you here now. You're the only one who's ever going to believe all this." Paul stepped away from the doorway. Callum faded back.

The dim, deserted filing room they'd taken refuge in had given them a spot to observe and reconnoiter--for example, to find out that Kowalski was present in the building, and that Fraser, according to a comment Kowalski made to Huey, was not. Callum folded his arms, leaning against the doorjamb, keeping the wall's shadow across himself, as he heard what must have been Kowalski saying "Frase! My God, what the hell happened?"

"Um...I haven't been having the...the most profitable day, Ray. Please forgive my appearance."

"That's it, Paul," Callum murmured. "Just don't lose it out there and forget who you really are..." Apparently Paul had figured out that if Kowalski had a few advantages over Callum in the appearance department because he didn't need help to look as good as Callum did when he was doing Kowalski, Paul was probably going to look like warmed-over death next to Fraser. At least to Kowalski.

"Christ on a crutch, Frase, siddown. Shit you're white. You caught that crud that's goin' around?"

Callum felt a frisson as Paul kind of fell into the indicated chair, obviously experiencing the same frisson as Callum. They hadn't even thought of that--at least one quick and easy way to determine whether they were in canon or not. Kowalski shouldn't have been able to say anything you can't say on network TV, if he were the canon character. This also meant they weren't in gen, or at least not the could've-been-an-episode-provided-it-was-professional-enough-and-contained-none-of-the-words-you-can't-say-on-TV variety, which removed them at least one more step from canon, possibly more. Callum smacked a palm into his forehead and groaned softly, just as Paul managed to choke out "Uh...language, Ray."

"Fuck language, and fuck this. You look like hell; I'm takin' you home. And no, not your home, my home, the Ice Queen'll just have you doin' some damn scutwork or other if you go back to the consulate."

"No--Ray. I'm not sick," Paul protested, as Callum swore internally again. The "I'm taking you to my place 'cause you're sick and if I take you to the consulate the Ice Queen will have you swabbing the decks" scenario was a common set up for slash scenes, especially in hurt/comfort stories. Fortunately, it wasn't the knell of death; it happened in some cussword-having gen, too, so they might still have made it farther than they thought.

"You always say that," Kowalski muttered, rolling his eyes, as he pulled on the jacket he was carrying.

"Really--well, I admit I'm a little nauseated right at the moment, but it's not due to--Ray! Goddammit--" Paul protested as Ray physically hauled him out of the chair, Paul gripping Kowalski's wrist hard where the latter had grabbed his jacket.

Ray froze, staring. Callum swore, quietly. Paul winced and shook his head at himself.

"Oh, that's it. That is it, buddy, you are fried and we are so outta here--"

"Ray. Please--" Paul paused, taking deep breaths, and said "I had planned to rest right after speaking with you. I...have some questions."

"Uh..." Kowalski considered, then finally sighed. "Okay. You promise me?"

"I promise."

"All right, shoot."

"We might want a bit of privacy for this."

"Supply closet?"

Paul sighed and rubbed his face. "It will do."

"No, wait, I think the file room's empty--"

Callum turned and lunged behind the nearest available cover--a bank of filing cabinets in the corner; they surrounded a small table bearing an ancient coffeemaker.

Paul didn't argue, probably realizing that it might be a good idea for Callum to hear this as soon as Paul did, thereby saving them what could turn out to be extremely valuable time. He did, however, stumble and crash against the doorframe, somehow managing to catch the knob and pull the door shut for a moment, presumably to give Callum the hint that he should get the fuck away from the door and hide, if he hadn't already. "Oh, dear. How clumsy of me."

"Fraser, are you drunk? What the hell is wrong with you? I mean, you walk in here, lookin' like all hell, and--"

"I don't feel much better, Ray, but this is important." The door opened again. "No--leave the lights off. I'm afraid I have a slight headache." The unspoken part of the sentence, Callum thought, no doubt went something like "...and I don't know whether Cal's managed to get all of his anatomy out of plain sight or not."

"Which for you translates to 'death is fast approaching'. Come on, Fraser, you are scaring me royally here. What's the matter with you?"

"I...I think I may indeed have some form of the 'crud', as you so succinctly put it earlier," Paul sighed. "As I said, I intend to rest soon."

"What about the Ice Queen?"

"Don't worry. She's cruddy too."

Callum swiftly raised a hand to his face to stifle a snort.

"Oh. Well, then she'll never know you're gone, right? And my bed's a lot more comfortable than yours--"

"We can talk about that in a minute, Ray. Um...there's really not any delicate way to put this..." Paul sighed. Callum acquired an expression of extremely grim amusement as he wished Paul the joy of finding a Fraserlike way to put this kind of question. "It's...rather a personal matter."

"There's not any delicate way to put that it's a personal matter? I think you just overdelicated me right out of knowing what the hell you want to know, here."

"Uh..."

"Christ, Frase, just spit it out. Stop worrying about being polite."

"That's not the problem. I really don't know how to put this," Paul sighed, sounding, unfortunately, like Paul--like Tired Paul, for that matter, who was a creature very seldom seen or heard.

"Frase..." Kowalski put his hands on Paul's shoulders, pulling him close, staring into his eyes. Paul looked back, waiting.

"You're...Fraser, c'mon, what's up? You're really not yourself, here--"

"In more ways than one. I'm...fuck it. I'm the guy who plays Fraser."

A moment of dead silence.

Then, in a "Don't fuck with me, I'm crazy" monotone, Kowalski said "What?"

"Where I'm from, you're a fictional character, and so is Fraser. I play him. I also write him sometimes."

"Where you're from? You mean Canada? Fraser--"

"Callum," Paul sighed. "There's only one way we're going to make him understand."

Callum sighed too, and got up. He came around the filing cabinets to stand next to Kowalski and Paul. "Hi," he said. "Callum Rennie. Nice to meet you. Though I guess in a way I have already, since at the moment I spend every workday being you."

Kowalski stared. Then he stared some more. Callum pulled his glasses off and raised his eyebrows at Kowalski. "Any better?"

Ray's eyes got really, really big.

Callum smirked. "Finally. Thought you might need yours," he said, waving his own glasses in illustration. "You know, I've heard people usually don't recognize themselves right off, because--"

Paul cut in "Uh-oh, I think he's gonna--" Kowalski started to go down; Paul caught him. "Erf! Some help here, Cal, I think he's a little heavier than you are."

"Oh, right. That lard butt." Callum put his glasses back on and helped, and they got Ray safely lowered to the floor. "You know, if we make a run for it while he's out, he might think he was hallucinating when he wakes up."

"We can't. I think this pretending-to-be-them idea can be considered a bust--"

"Not fighting you there. Schist."

"--but we still need information, and he's probably the only one we can get it out of without major risk. Anybody else is only going to think that me or you are Fraser or Kowalski--maybe with a bad hangover, and a case of amnesia, especially since Fraser's had that happen to him once. We have the same DNA, the same fingerprints...we could end up, I don't know, drugged to the gills in the psych ward or something--and God alone knows where, if anyone sees us all together. Anyway, this guy and Fraser are the only ones who are going to know we're not them."

"Yeah, well, Ray here isn't reacting all that well to us, to say the least; so what about Fraser? He's got to be in town and relatively okay last Kowalski knew, or the first thing he said to you--well, maybe after the 'You look like shit' part--would have been 'What are you doing here?'"

"We've already blown Kowalski's mind; the fewer people even know we're here, or why, the better. Besides, it'd probably be a better idea to see it through than to risk Fraser arresting us for God-knows-what until he can quote uncover the truth unquote--"

"He can't do that unless we're on Canadian soil."

"He can make a citizen's arrest. And he'll try. He did in--"

"He can't do that, either. I've been wondering where your head was when you let that stay in. He's not an American citizen."

"Didn't stop him, did it?"

"You mean it didn't stop you and the other writers."

"What was he going to say, 'I'm taking you down to the cop shop. You can come with me, or I can fuck you up and drag you, your choice.'? And since fanfic is based on canonically established--"

"Paul, you're grasping at straws for reasons not to get near Fraser. What--"

"Quiet, I think Ray's coming around."

"Ohhh, I get it. You're afraid you'll freak out if you have to talk to Fraser, aren't you, Mr. 'Hey Cal, he's actually got a better ass than--'"

"Shut up, I said."

"You shut up."

"Shut up times infinity."

"Paul, you're so fucking strange."

"That's rich coming from--"

Ray's head stirred on Paul's lap. His eyelids fluttered as Paul shut up mid-snark when he felt the motion. Ray graveled "I was gonna ask if you were Frase, but judgin' by the evidence of my ears, either I'm still havin' a nightmare or the answer's 'no'."

Paul, with a final embarrassed glower at Callum, who made a bug-eyed ooh-I'm-so-intimidated face back, said "I'm afraid you're right. My name's Paul. Paul Gross. But I am Canadian."

Ray's eyes closed again as he made a frustrated noise. Then he cocked one eye open. "Your name is 'Gross'?"

Paul rolled his eyes. "It's not an uncommon name in Canada. From 'le Gros'. It's a French word for 'large'."

"It's also an American word for 'disgusting'," Kowalski smirked. Well, Callum thought wryly, at least the guy didn't seem to be quite so gobsmacked any more. He resisted the urge to snicker at Paul.

"Believe me, I've been made aware of that," Paul muttered. "Starting about the day I was born, all right?"

Kowalski started trying to sit up; Cal grasped his arm and assisted. Ray was fine with that at first, then happened to glance up at Cal's face and jerked away abruptly.

Cal gave him a mildly evil look. "You know, if anybody should be getting pissed off about Body Thievery around here, it's me. You look like me, Ray. Not the other way around."

"So you say," Ray muttered. He edged a little closer to Paul, eyeing Callum with a tight-lipped expression.

Paul threw a quelling look at Callum and tried "Ray, we need your help. We're trying to get the hell out of this place and back to our own reality. I'm sure you don't want us around here any more than we want to be here, so the faster you--"

Ray pondered. "I ain't tellin' you anything sensitive, you know that."

"Uh, some of these questions could be considered sensitive, but they're of a personal nature."

"Yeah, that's what Frase--that's what you said while you were fakin' being Fraser."

Paul opened his mouth, was silent a brief moment, then shook his head, muttering "Oh, Jesus...Callum, how do I put this?"

"I don't know, but you probably want to get the gun away from him first."

"What?" Ray demanded. "Why?"

"Okay. I need to know what cases you're working on right now, I need to know--er--how things are going with you and Fraser, and I need--"

"Hold it, hold everything. Why you wanna know about my cases?"

"We're trying to figure out where we are," Callum said. "If we recognize your cases from canon, that might mean we're pretty close to canon--"

"--say, in an episode-involving fanfic," Paul finished. "That won't tell us for certain, but it's a start."

"What the fuck are you two goin' off about? Cannons?"

Callum shook his head, sighing. "I think this is going to take a while, Paul," he said.

"Holy SHIT!" Ray said, lunging backward and banging into Paul, who let go of his arm in the process of trying to keep his balance. Callum pushed Paul back upright from his other side. Ray was stumbling into his apartment, staring around in confusion. "Man. This is fucking, fucking psychotic. I do not believe this. I do not--"

"Ray, try to calm down," Paul said, coming over to rest a hand on Ray's shoulder. "I just wanted to save the time of the drive."

"You scribble a few lines and just go anywhere you want?"

"Not exactly," Paul admitted. "I have to know what to write. My...results haven't been without the occasional snafu so far. That's why we need information. We can't afford to be knocking around like pinballs through however many levels of reality exist in a fictional milieu like this; God knows where we could end up."

"You're getting the hang of it, though," Cal said. "We did end up at the station, right where we needed to be. And here."

"Those weren't so complex. I wasn't trying to get to another section of fanfic or canon or whatever. Or even to a different story."

Ray shot a glance at Callum. "Can you do that, too?"

"Um...not sure. I haven't tried."

"Why not?"

"Well, couple of reasons. For one, like he said, he's really a writer, been doing it for years. He knows how to get the concepts down the way he wants them, fast, and without leaving anything too ambiguous, which could result in our showing up in an inner circle of Hell or something, and I don't have much practice with that. It's not as easy as most people think. Also he's the EP, so I bet--"

"EP?"

"Executive producer. In short, he's The Man. If he doesn't like something, he's got the authority to burn it down and start all over."

"Okay," Ray was saying, looking pensive. "So...you said in the file room, all the stuff you told me about knowin' where you are, how to get wherever else, findin' your way back and all that, that's pretty much conjecture, right?" He moved toward the kitchen area.

"Yes, on both our parts," Paul agreed.

"Siddown, you two," Ray said, rummaging in the fridge. "And do it on the couch in there. Lookin' at you makes me nervous."

"We've heard that before," Cal muttered. Paul smirked at him as they sat on the couch.

"You guys hungry?"

Paul and Callum looked at each other. "I could eat," Callum said.

"Yes. Thanks," Paul said.

"Hey, it's lunchtime. Whatta ya do at lunchtime? Ya eat. Okay. So you need to know all this stuff, but your problem is you don't know what the best way to find it out is--you're not even sure what questions you should be asking. You also don't know what you might not know, and not know enough to know you need to find it out, right?"

"That's one way to put it," Paul agreed provisionally. "I think."

Kowalski was building sandwiches. "As Frase would say, have you considered the wealth of information available through the modern media?"

Paul and Callum were both startled quiet. Ray had done a credible Fraser voice. Not like Paul's, of course, but not bad for an amateur.

"I didn't know you--" Cal started.

"--were a cop who does undercover assignments?" Ray wondered, raising an eyebrow at them, then going back to the sandwiches. "You two hear what I said or are you still bein' stunned I know how to study a guy when that's my freakin' job? Though all they needed in this case was a warm body, apparently."

"Uh. Media. Yeah. Good idea," said Cal.

"Well, since ya don't know what ya need to know, ya know..."

"He's right." Callum reached for the TV remote. "You got CNN?"

"I got everything. Go for it." He put down his mayonnaise knife and reached for the phone. "Frase is droppin' some stuff off here in a little while, too. I'll tell him to pick up a news..."

Paul, stuffing the notebook back in his pocket, began to unfold the newspaper that had not been sitting on the coffee table a moment ago.

"...paper..."

"You get used to it," Callum said at Ray's disturbed look.

As Ray shook his head in bafflement and returned to sandwich preparation, Paul leaned over to Callum and said "I'd really like to flat-out ask him if he and Fraser are, uh, you know, but if we're not in slash, or we're not in an F/K, he could easily flip."

"I could poke around the place," Callum murmured back. "Might be some signs somewhere."

"Well, they're not living together, judging by what Ray said in the file room. So maybe there wouldn't be."

"There are usually signs when a person has a regular overnight guest, even if they're not living together."

"Good point. Give it a shot." Paul started scanning the front page.

Callum got up and started wandering around, allowing a touch of Kowalskilike nervous pacing to color his movements. He frequently stopped and turned to make a point of watching the TV--which at the moment was coverage of what was apparently some half-election, half-coup in the middle east; not a heck of a lot of help there--then he'd move off again.

Yeah, he was seeing signs of Fraserness--the CD's were arranged alphabetically, and the place, while cluttered, was clean and relatively dust-free--even the windows looked freshly washed, which might be more than could be attributed to Ray's mother coming in to iron his shirts and possibly do a little more general cleaning. Besides, as far as they knew, canonically she only ironed his shirts. There was a Martin Backpacker in a soft case leaning in a corner, like the one Paul--wait, Fraser--no, Paul--screw it, the guitar the appropriate guy was playing in "Mountie Sings the Blues". Though for all they knew this Ray played, too. Anything could happen in fanfic.

He was just getting ready to check out the bathroom, that goldmine of information for every nosy parker--and if Fraser did frequent overnighters here his gutcutter of a razor would be a dead giveaway--when Ray emerged from his creative sandwich fugue. He walked up to Callum, stuck a plate with a club sandwich on it into his hands, and sat him down at the table via the expedient method of putting a hand on his shoulder and planting him in a chair. Apparently Callum was not being as subtle in his observations as he'd hoped. Fortunately, all Kowalski said was "So, um, Callum, if he can do stuff like that, why doesn't he just..."

"I know it seems kind of all-powerful," Callum said. "But the first time he--uh--" Callum cleared his throat, decided that Ray didn't really need to hear about the very first part of the daring RPS escape, and continued "The second time he tried it, he was trying to get us to the consulate set."

"Consulate set. Yeah, TV show, like you said. I got beer and water." He turned from the fridge to display a bottle of said beverage in each hand. Callum pointed to the bottle of water.

"Him?" Kowalski made an abrupt gesture with his head to indicate Paul.

"Beer, probably."

"Okay. Keep talkin'."

"So..." Callum thought a minute as Kowalski uncapped the water and placed it on the table by Callum, "we ended up here, at your Fraser's actual consulate. And the last three things he did worked, but like he said, they didn't involve trying to get closer to our reality."

"And that makes you nervous enough you're scared to try it?"

Callum shot him a look. "I told you. There's reasons he's a better candidate for that job. I'd try if I had to. If he got run over by a bus or fell down in a coma or something." Callum took a casual bite of sandwich.

Ray watched him a moment, pausing on his way to take Paul's sandwich in and set it on the coffee table. With some care to make sure it sat on part of the paper, Cal noticed. Another possible Fraser association. Paul didn't look up from the portion of the paper he was currently scanning. Ray uncapped the beer he'd brought along and wondered "Am I gonna have to pour this over his head?"

Callum chuckled. "Probably. I've seen that look on his face occasionally; usually he's always right there, but at the moment he's speed-ingesting. He's turned into a human correlation device."

"A whatsawhosis?"

"Human. Correlation. Device. I happen to know you're not stupid, Ray, because I don't play you that way."

"You ain't in canon, buddy boy."

Callum winced internally. "Good point," he muttered. But if Kowalski could think of that after nothing but about a fifteen-minute indoctrination lecture in the file room, right after waking up from a faint, he still wasn't stupid.

"But I still ain't stupid," Kowalski said, making Callum do a double take. Ignoring it, Ray continued "You mean he's thinking about a bunch of stuff at once, tyin' it all together."

"Something like that. Hey, Paul!"

Paul blinked. "Huh? Oh. Thank you. Sorry."

"Any insights?" Callum asked.

"This doesn't seem to be AU, anyway, which would be right up there with RPS, and the stories where one of us kills the other one and stuff like that, as far as being as distant as possible from our own reality."

"You mean Fraser or Kowalski kills the other one."

"Yeah, that. Or one of them assaults the other."

Callum made a face. "Yeah."

Paul had started reading again, mechanically devouring his sandwich. Callum had seen Paul survive on caffeine and cigarettes when things got hectic, which they usually were, at least for Paul. But maybe there was something about this reality-slipping that gave a guy an appetite.

Kowalski came back and sat down near Callum. "He come up with some kinda system? For how close you are to home? You guys got, like, a conjectural map?" he asked, gesturing vaguely as he spoke.

"What we have are a lot of hypotheses we've got no way to test. I came up with the gradations idea, but he's running with it. That's why he wants to get to canon. Ending up at the consulate instead of on the consulate set rattled him pretty bad, I think. He about wet himself when he realized how easily we might have ended up right back in RPS if he'd made the mistake in a different direction."

"RPS?"

"Real Person Slash. Subcategory of Real Person Fic."

"Ff...oh, yeah, you said--the stories your show fans write."

"You may even have it here, for all we know, and it's just not something you'd be interested in; so you wouldn't have heard of it. Fraser, either."

"'Slash'? That like Night of the Living Dead Chainsaws or something?"

"No. It's when two characters of the same gender are paired in a story in...um...a...romantic...well, sometimes romantic...uh..."

"You mean they fuck?"

"I mean they fuck. Sometimes, anyway. Though even if they do, it isn't always graphically described."

"So...you guys were stuck in a story someone wrote? How is that possible?"

"Something Paul said seems to have acted as a kind of catalyst. Well, he's said that kind of thing more than once, but there's a particular quote that blew across slash fandom like a tornado and...well, the rest is history. So it's not always...uh..."

"Not always what?"

Callum shuffled around in his chair uncomfortably. "Characters. Not always the characters. Sometimes it's real people. Most of the fans actually find it really tasteless, but..."

"And...and you and him were...stuck there, you said."

"Yeah," Callum said, concentrating very hard on his sandwich.

"And you guys don't usually..."

"Hell, no. He's married, even."

Kowalski exploded laughing.

"It's not funny, asshole," Callum muttered. "Not when it's you."

"But how did...how could...why..."

"I don't know! It's like some kind of sick metaphor. Paul opens his mouth...and, uh...boom, there it is. It landed us here, and now he's trying to use kind of a similar technique to get us out."

"Magic words?"

"In short, yeah," Callum muttered, not meeting Ray's eyes.

"'Cept he writes them this time."

"Well, it was certain of the fans who wrote us in there, not him, but yeah."

"This happen a lot in your 'real world' world?"

"I have no idea," Callum sighed, taking a sip of his water. "If it did, it's not the kind of thing anybody'd talk about, believe me."

Paul was now avidly going over the society page. "If it's slash, it's probably not EIG--at least, not the kind where it's easy to be gay," he said. "Everything's straight in the regular papers. Closer to our reality?"

"I'd say so."

"EIG? What's that mean?" Ray wondered.

"Don't worry about it, Ray. By the way, I've got a question."

"Shoot." Ray got up and moved back toward the kitchen.

"You wouldn't happen to be zoomin' Frase by any chance, would ya?" he asked, doing Kowalski. The plate Ray was carrying hit the floor with a bang and spinning whong-whong-whong-clunk, but didn't break. "What?!"

Paul groaned and covered his eyes with one hand. "Smooth, Cal."

Callum ignored him. "You heard me. You and Fraser doing the wild thing?"

"What the hell does that matter?! Well, okay, it is kinda topical..."

"We need to know if we're in slash, and we've gotta start somewhere. It might not be you; for all we know it's Turnbull and for God's sake Welsh, but--"

"Oh, yeargh!" Ray protested. Paul looked a little put off, too.

"Sorry. But we need to know. Are you?"

Ray sighed. "This don't go anywhere?"

"Where the hell would it go except out of your universe with Paul and me?"

"Good point...um. Yeah. We got a...thing." Ray was futzing around dealing with the lunch stuff, not looking their way, speaking in a mutter.

"Don't worry about it, Ray. You wouldn't believe some of the things they've had Paul and me doing," Callum said. "There was this weird one with restraints and...well, we won't go into it." Cal shook his head, looking rueful, with a low whistle. "Really, really embarrassing."

"Feel free not to tell me about it," Ray said, with a light shudder. "That's really pretty rude, writin' about you guys. Be like somebody here writing about me. Doin'...stuff. Ugh."

"You do do stuff."

"Well, so do you, I'm assumin', if you aren't totally pathetic, but no matter what it is you do, you don't want people sittin' around imagining it, do ya? With stories and stuff? Eesh. Like tryin' to do it with an audience gettin' off to it."

"The idea doesn't do a damn thing for my digestion, I admit, but I can deal with it being out there," Callum said. "When you're in our line of work, there's a certain amount of weird shit you're going to have to put up with from fans; that's just part of the job. When you're confronted with it, you smile and act gracious, and then get the righteous fuck outta there and do your best not to think about it, because if you dwell on it you'll end up on a thorazine drip someplace with a permanent case of the heebie-jeebies. Makes Paul's Kit-Kat problem look like a vacation."

"His what?"

"Nothing. But in any case, actually having Paul's dick up my ass is a little farther than I'm willing to go for the sake of my career."

"Could be worse."

"How?"

"Could be my ass," Paul muttered, but quietly enough that they could pretend they hadn't heard him.

Kowalski continued "You coulda been stuck in there with...well, at least Paul's a looker, though I can see how that might not've been a big help to your head at the time. What'd he say, anyway? That got you there."

"He said I was really good looking and sexy, that the whole thing was gonna be totally homoerotic, and where did he have to go on the Internet to find that stuff?"

"Uh...but, he's, like, a producer on the show. And he got himself what he thinks is a good-lookin' co-star to boost his ratings. Sure he'd be doin' the happy dance, talkin' you up, gettin' people interested. Including the slash folks. Doesn't mean he really...uh..."

"I know. Throwaway comment, just talking off the top of his head, because he was tickled by the slash fanzine an interviewer brought him to look at. But you don't know some of these people. They can read something into *any*thing. I could trip and fall on my face, Paul could help me up, and *some*body out there would find something in it. Even though, c'mon, what the hell would he do, stand there going 'Swift move, Cal, ha ha ha' while I'm peeling my face out of the sidewalk? And that problem goes right off the scale when you deliberately plant seeds in people's heads. He keeps making these little comments..."

"Why's he do that?"

"Because his sense of humor is twisted like a Moebius strip and he thinks playing to the slashers is fun."

"I heard that," Paul muttered, turning a page, but he didn't look around.

Ignoring him as thoroughly as Callum, Ray wondered "You think maybe all that might be why you...actually got kind of sucked in? Some kinda Star Trek sort of fan overmind vortex?"

"Like Paul said, this is a lot more like the Twilight Zone. But God, I hope not, or we'll never get home. Not if they find us again."

"Find you again?"

"Paul dropped us off RPS radar, he says. But we really need to keep moving if we're going to stay ahead of the RPSers. What we do here is going to show up in whatever story we happen to be in...this is too surreal for words."

"Yeah, I noticed that when I opened the file room door to walk into the hallway and walked into my living room instead. And the newspaper...you gotta watch him every minute, don't you?"

"He's always been like that. Martha turns her back and when she looks back around, he's written a movie or something. Next he'll be writing rock opera--no, wait. He did that. Well, kind of."

"Martha his wife?"

"Yeah. She's an actor, too."

Kowalski nodded once, then went on speculatively "So, then...he's a lot like Frase."

Callum looked up, startled. "Uh, no, I definitely would not go that far."

"Well, y'know. He can do a lot of things, do 'em well, I mean. Never know when he's gonna come up with something outta left field, though I hope it doesn't make people want to whack him like when Fraser does it. He a pretty nice guy?"

Callum, with his lips pressed together in a remark-swallowing smirk at the hope-people-don't-want-to-whack-him part of Ray's comment, tilted his head a little to eye Paul sidelong before he answered; Paul seemed oblivious again. "Yeah, he's a nice guy. He's...well, an overgrown kid in some ways, but not the annoying ways. He's kind of all over the place. But he's got terminal modesty. He blames the fact that he can do damn near anything, artistically speaking--including the parts that aren't really art at all, like producing--on having a short attention span. There's people standing in line to kick his ass for not only being gorgeous and accomplished, but refusing to get an ego about it. He's got a reputation for being perfect. I think some people would like him better if he were arrogant."

"There, ya see? Like Frase."

"He's not in Fraser's category of nice by any stretch of the imagination," Callum said, shaking his head. "He's got some twisted shit in that pretty head."

"But nice twisted shit."

Callum shrugged. "Uh...not all of it. I admit I've wanted to slap him occasionally, but I've never really resented him..." he trailed off, shaking his head again, this time in exasperation, at the self-satisfied smile on Kowalski's face.

"Right," his alter ego said. "You're makin' my case for me, here. Fraser's kinda twisted, too. But nice."

"Ray, that isn't Fraser over there."

"Didn't say he was. I still think he looks kinda like Frase with the flu."

"I heard that," Paul muttered, again not looking up from his efforts.

Kowalski chuckled. "There's another thing. Mountie ears."

"He's a musician," Callum said, rolling his eyes again. "Of course he has good ears."

"He's a musician, huh, funny. So's Frase."

"Oh, for--it's not much of a stretch. Paul's a soundtrack consultant for the show. He sings, they had him sing. He writes, they used some of his songs. He's handy to have around when you're trying to produce a TV show. But if he's like Fraser, it's because Fraser's like him, not the other way around, like I said before."

"From your point of view, maybe. In your 'real' reality, maybe. But I'm willin' to bet this place is as real for me as yours is to--"

"Don't do that, don't do that, don't do that. I had to slap Paul back between the lines outside the consulate, too. If we start thinking like that, we're fucked. We've gotta concentrate on the goal. We got a plan, for all we can tell it's working so far. But that kinda thing'll fuck it up beyond all recognition if--"

"You always start to sound like me when you get pissed off?"

"Shit. Shit, shit, shit--" Callum leaned his forehead on his palm, elbow on the table. "No. I don't know, I guess the vibes get into us or something, Frase--SHIT--Paul's having the same problem."

"Well, you know...I ain't no fancy-ass actor or anything. But I gotta know how to play a role. And the best way to play a role is to put at least some of yourself in it, you know? You can't try to totally be somebody else and come off as anything but some dumb yutz tryin' to be somebody else. Take some of yourself and use it, just use it so it comes across like whoever you're playing. S'why maybe your guy there--"

"He's not 'my guy'."

"I mean in the sense that he's the only freakin' person on the planet from the same place you are, okay? Your guy, your teammate, your buddy. Relax."

"Sorry. You just don't know what it's like where we've been."

"Yeah, I gotcha. Okay, but what I was sayin', it's like your guy's like Frase because--okay okay okay, Frase is like your guy, whatever--because some of your guy's in him. Kinda has to be. He's a good actor, right?"

"He's done things I know I couldn't pull off. And I've never seen anyone as old as he is who can do 'winsome' so well."

"So, some of him...is here, and in canon, and wherever else. 'Cause he put it there. Right?"

"What you're getting at is that some of me is here, too, isn't it? In the fabric of the place. And..."

"Somethin' in there," Ray said, reaching over to tap Callum's chest, "can feel it, and it wakes up. And what happens is..."

"You mean--the way we react to that...we find ourselves getting into character, losing...at least some touch with our own identity. Because here...the characters are realer than we are. Oh, fuck it, I didn't need to think of that."

"So quit thinkin' it. Stick to your guns. You know which reality's really real." Kowalski gave him a half-smile and a wink. "For you, at least."

Callum wilted a little. Okay, so that was why Ray'd been commenting on the similarities between Paul and Fraser. God, he was starting to go existential himself. He rubbed his temples with both hands to keep his skull from exploding and said "I suppose it's possible. That's the scary thing about all this. Anything's possible, the rules could change any time, and we have to keep up with it--figure them out, then figure them out again, then figure them out again, every time the least thing changes...in any event, no matter why our...senses of self keep fading into the characters, we can't afford to let it happen; it could keep going until I actually start thinking I'm you, or at least until I can't think straight enough to focus on our little problem, and then we'll never get out of here."

"Good point." Ray reached over and took Callum's empty bottle. "Like I said. You got a plan, stick with it. Don't let the doubts creep in." He went and retrieved Paul's plate and bottle. Paul still didn't look up. As Ray passed by Callum again, he muttered "You're right, he's way worse than Frase. Listen--think about this." He set the bottle and plate down on the counter and turned to face Callum again, canting his weight to the side a bit, snagging one thumb into his jeans pocket and talking with the other hand. "Look what your bud there, and maybe you, can do. If you guys weren't from something bigger, and maybe something where he's got some kinda brass cojones to shake, over an' above whatever's makin' this place tick--he wouldn't be able to do shit like that, would he? So you guys are from...a place outside. A bigger place. A realer place. By your definition, at least. I gotta hit the can." He left the dishes in the sink and headed for the bathroom. Callum rubbed the back of his neck and sighed, started to open his mouth to speak to Paul--

--and the front door opened. Carrying a brown paper bag, in walked...well, it could damn well nearly have been Paul, but Paul was right again, on the appearance thing. If Callum was hot, Ray was a bonfire, especially so in the world of fanfic. And if Paul was shockingly beautiful--and he was, not that Callum planned on making a big point of it in any upcoming conversation, since that kind of thing had a tendency to make Paul duck and cover--then Fraser was blinding.

Fraser naturally didn't remark on Callum at first; in peripheral vision, Cal was indistinguishable from Ray--they even had the same glasses--and Fraser's eyes had happened to light first on Paul, who had looked up and around at the door opening, blinking. "Um...hi," Paul said, then winced. But then, Callum wondered, what the hell did you say under these circumstances, anyway? Maybe "Hi there, you're a cheap and incomplete rip-off of me, nice to meet you"?

Fraser paused, started to speak, paused again, put down the grocery bag and walked up to Paul, eyes trained on the other man. He reached down and lifted Paul's chin, scanning his face. Paul stared back up at him kind of desperately. Just before he started to get to his feet, Fraser let him go, turned away while rubbing frantically at his forehead, and then lifted his head, opening his eyes.

"DAD!" he bellowed.

"No!" Paul lunged to his feet, bumping into Fraser in the process. Fraser absently lifted a hand to steady him, but he didn't stop scanning the room, or speaking. "Dad, I am going to kill myself, hunt you down and wring your ectoplasmic neck if you don't get out here this very moment and--"

"Fraser! Fraser, I'm not another, uh, half-sibling. We're not related," Paul tried.

Fraser looked at Paul sharply over his shoulder, still holding the arm he'd caught him by. He said nothing for a moment as Callum noticed frantic noises emanating from the bathroom, including an underbreath litany of cursing, followed by a flush and Kowalski exploding back into the room. "Frase, it's okay! Well, it's not okay, but it's not...hell. It's weird. Keep it together anyway, okay?"

"Ray--" Fraser whispered--and only then did he notice Callum.

"I have this scene from a Bill and Ted movie going through my head," Callum sighed, as Paul reached out and caught the swaying but thank God not fainting Fraser, and eased him down to the couch. "The one where there's a knock at the door and Bill gets it and says 'Oh, hi. Hey Ted, it's us!'"

"If you sigh one more time, I'm going to smother you with a pillow."

"Bite me, Paul."

Paul sat up. He was wearing shorts and a T shirt; Callum was in a similar outfit. Unsurprisingly, Fraser and Kowalski's clothes fit them passably well, though Cal was having to tug the occasional tug to keep everything down there copacetic, which was responsible for at least part of the sighs, not that he'd admit that to Paul, who was now wondering "What's up with you, anyway? The thrashing stops, the sighing starts--"

"That's a really brilliant question, Paul."

"Okay, besides the obvious."

"Besides the obvious, I am nicking out bad."

"So am I, and your sighing every two seconds isn't helping." Paul rubbed his forehead. "I know how you feel. But if we can't keep our heads together, we're going to end up, where'd you say, in an inner circle of Hell next time we try to make a jump. We need sleep."

"So lie down. I can't sleep with you looming."

Paul grumped something under his breath, but lay back down.

"Wonder how they're doing out there on the bedroll," Callum muttered.

"I'd imagine Fraser's fine," Paul muttered back. "Ray's probably going to bitch about his back all day tomorrow, though."

There was quiet for a moment.

Callum murmured "I just don't get it."

"Don't get what? I mean, out of the plethora of things that are not exactly easy to get with which we find ourselves currently surr--"

"The real-person thing. Here the fans have got these cool characters to write about, the to-die-for Super Mountie and his partner, Loose Cannon Kowalski. Why the hell would they bother writing about us? We're just guys. We're staring down the barrel of forty, and we've got crow's feet and we smoke too much and you're starting to get a gut--"

"This is the same gut I've always had."

"Yeah, right. You were about half as big around when you did 'Tales of the City'."

"Oh, I was not. Besides, I was just a kid then."

"Anyway, we're real, with all the annoying shit that real people have, morning mouth and bitchy bad days and everything. Kowalski and Fraser are going to be young and beautiful and perfect forever, unlike us, who are going to end up old and saggy and smelly. And that's if we're lucky. Why would anybody want to fantasize about us, compared to them? Well, okay, except for Martha."

Paul gave him a look.

"Oh, for--about you, I mean!"

Paul subsided, shaking his head. "It beats the hell out of me, Cal."

There was quiet a moment longer.

Callum wondered "You sure we shouldn't just break for it? Isn't it dangerous to stay in one place this long?"

"Yeah, it probably is, but it's also probably, as we realized earlier, surefire death to try to navigate the planes of reality when we can't concentrate long enough to get our shoes tied, much less try to maintain about half a dozen different POVs in our heads. Plus the nicking-out factor."

"Good point. Fraser looked at you like you'd just said you'd kill to eat a booger when you finally cracked and said you'd kill for a smoke."

Silence again.

"We're going to get out of here," Paul muttered. "You believe that, don't you?"

"I believe we'll get out or die in the attempt," Callum said.

"No. You've got to believe it. I get the feeling doubts could cause people in our situation even more problems than doubt always does."

Callum sighed. Again. "I'll try, Paul."

Quiet for a few breaths.

"I can't take it," Paul muttered, sitting up again and turning on the table lamp by Ray's bed. "You're still sighing and I'm getting the sweats and I cannot take it, I have got to have a cigarette."

"Planning on pulling one out of the air?"

"No," Paul said, flipping to a clean page on the ever-present notebook and scribbling. "I'm planning on pulling them out of my..." he set the pad down and reached for his coat. "...jacket pocket." He did so. "Well?"

"Are you nuts? I'd kiss your ass and even let you draw a crowd first, but Fraser will smell it and have a shitfit. 'This is a nonsmoking enviro--'"

"Damn, you're Kowalskied."

"I think it's because I'm lying in his bed."

"Uh, that would do it, I guess. Anyway, just open the window. Didn't you smoke pot in college?"

"I was busy working on my dry-fly cast."

"Oh. Yeah. I forgot about that."

Callum got up and opened the window while Paul threw his pants against the crack under the door.

"You really think that'll keep eagle-nose--"

"Eagle-nose?!"

"--from smelling anything?"

"No. But I doubt he'll bother us if we take precautions not to stink up the apartment. If he does, fuck it, we'll go outside. I can't take this anymore."

"Then sheesh, why didn't you get ballsy a couple of hours ago when the walls started closing in to begin with?"

"I'm not sure this writing-things thing is an ability I should overuse. The more I screw around with the fabric of this reality, the more likely it is that we'll get noticed, and someone's going to figure out just where we've got to."

"Kowalski's gotta have matches or something around...here." Callum found a lighter in the top dresser drawer. "You may give up the smokes, but you can't lose the habit of keeping something around to light 'em with." Paul joined him at the window, after turning the lamp back off. Callum lit two from the pack Paul handed him and gave him one.

Exhaling smoke in a long sigh, Paul muttered "Ambrosial."

"Why do people start smoking? It's a fucking life sentence. And it's not even a decent high."

"It's a fucking death sentence and it's not even a decent high," Paul corrected him, to a small snort of agreement from Cal. Paul took another drag and wondered "But then, why have either of us ever done the kind of stupid-ass shit we've done? How did I manage to get arrested for drunk driving--well, drunk parking, at least--in a church parking lot? How did you wind up with a piece of glass through your eye?"

"You were drunk and I was, shall we say, overconfident, once I had a window between me and that asshole construction worker. But I get your point."

"One night--around last Christmas--I actually managed to get enough eggnog down to get wasted. How, I'll never know; the stuff consisted of cream, half-and-half, more cream, a little cinnamon, vanilla, nutmeg, rum, and more cream. And presumably eggs, though you couldn't have told it by me. It could've stood there all by itself, no punchbowl necessary. If anyone bumped it, it would have transformed instantly into butter. There should have been a defibrillator sitting next to it on the buffet table."

Callum chuckled. "Sounds like some nasty shit."

"Anyway, I had this giant weepy guilt attack about it. Smoking, I mean, not the eggnog. Like, I have a family, how can I keep pounding the nails into my coffin with these things?" He took another drag. "Needless to say, the first thing I did when I woke up the next morning was chain smoke for two hours."

Callum smirked, his gaze focused somewhere out the window. They were both quiet a moment, then Callum murmured "I wonder just how...detailed all this is. I wonder...if we got on a plane to Washington State, would we find a city called Cascade? Or one called Seacouver? If we went to Washington D.C., would we be able to look up a couple of neurotic FBI agents named Mulder and Scully? Or..." he shook his head, staring at the skyline. "Is all of this so much light and shadow? Is there anything in those skyscrapers, any back side, any people? Or are even Kowalski and Fraser nothing but...some kind of mockup, not really in there at all...or is this place, like Ray said, just as real to him as our world is to us?"

Paul's mouth quirked in a vague half-smile. "Maybe lake Michigan is pouring off the edge of the world, and we're floating on somebody's brainchild--a world in limbo, rising out of the overmind ether like foam on the water, vanishing again as soon as there's no one there to observe it..." He laughed softly at himself and added "'But oh, beamish nephew, beware of the day, if your Snark be a Boojum! For then--you will softly and suddenly vanish away, and never be met with again...'"

Callum was quiet for so long that Paul apparently finally noticed it, and turned his gaze from the skyline back to Cal, who was watching him intently. Cal said "Thanks for completing my creep-out, Paul. That was some very fancy imagery. And out of that poetic mind came 'Santa Drives a Pickup'. Who'd've thunk."

Paul smiled again, looking back out the window, and said "Blame Dean for that one. It's plagiarized. The imagery, I mean. And the line from Carroll."

"I know that, brainiac."

Paul just smiled even wider, and Callum managed to smile as well. Then Paul looked back at him and added "And I hope you're not going to suggest hanging around to find out just what kind of world this is. If it is one."

Callum shook his head. "No way. Get enough rest to see straight and we're outta here."

Paul nodded and pitched his depleted cigarette remains through the window. He stared at the skyline another moment. "I actually think I can sleep now. Nicotine as a sleep aid. Look, Cal...I'm sorry I got you into this."

"Yeah, well." Callum tossed his own scorched filter out after Paul's. "Just as long as you get me out."

"I'm...I'll try."

"Hey." Callum reached up to touch Paul's shoulder. "You wanted faith? You wanted belief? You got it. Here it is, right in front of you, wrapped in a skinny guy with a silly name. You can't turn around and start having doubts now."

Paul reached to close the window. "Yeah, I'm doing one-eighties all over the place, aren't I? Have been since this started. Probably not a lot of fun for you to deal with."

"Paul, I'm freaking out, too; I think you're allowed to be acting a little screwy when you find yourself in...in whatever the hell it is we find ourselves in, exactly." He was getting back in bed by this time. "Now lie down and get some sleep."

Paul climbed back in bed, too.

Quiet for a few moments.

Paul murmured "Your name's not that silly. I'm the one Ray took the jab at."

"My parents fled England in mortification at how goofy their name was. At least in Canada, weird names are taken for granted."

"How'd you get stuck with a name like 'Callum' if they were so worried about that kind of thing?"

"They couldn't help it. They're Scottish. They had an attack of Celticness or something."

"You know, until I met you, I thought 'Rennie' was a French name. Maybe a variant of Renne."

"I don't think it's of this Earth, frankly. Why do you think I use 'Keith'? It's the only one that sounds halfway normal. Though I'm told that in England it's considered kind of a pencil-neck name, like Egbert or Poindexter. Wait, maybe that was 'Neil'...you got a middle name?"

"Michael."

"Paul Michael?"

"Uh, yeah, unless someone changed it while I wasn't looking."

"Mm. Pretty."

Paul was still a second, then actually got up on one elbow to stare at Callum, as well as he could in the dimness. "Did you say 'pretty'?"

"Though I admit it's a little offset by the 'Gross' part." Callum held his hands up in the air before his eyes, like a camera operator framing a shot.

"I do not have a 'pretty' name."

Callum glanced over at him, grinning. "What'd you rather I say? 'God, Paul, your name is the quintessence of masculinity, lemme roll over and show my underbelly?' Sorry, but it's pretty." He reached up and patted Paul's cheek, smirking. "Goes with your face."

Paul's mouth twisted in an expression somewhere between amusement and annoyance. "You're just jealous because your name is 'Callum'."

Callum whapped him in the breadbox with the back of his hand. "Low blow. Go to sleep."

Paul lay back down.

A moment later, Callum murmured "You and Fraser think you've got the bugs ironed out?"

Now Paul sighed, and turned over. "We can only hope."

"Yeah...yeah."

After another moment, Callum reached over and closed his hand around Paul's wrist.

Paul opened his eyes, blinked and turned his head to look at him.

Callum said "I don't want to wake up and find out that either this story involves slavers who kidnap blonds in their sleep--or brunets--and just nobody in this apartment knows that yet, or that somehow our subconscious minds managed to send us space-warping off to God-knows where. Or any combination of the two. But if, God forbid, any of that happens, I want us both to end up in the same place."

Paul was quiet. Then he turned to face Callum, holding his arm out. "C'mere."

Callum eyed him suspiciously. "Why?"

"You'll never be able to keep hold of my arm in your sleep. Scoot over."

"Shades of a slash setup."

"Oh for God's sake, I'm not gonna screw you, I'm just gonna sleep on you. I could wish you weren't so goddamn wiry. Now get over here."

Callum slid over. There was a brief but painful knee war, accompanied by appropriate monosyllabic commentary, before Callum turned over and spooned up, eliminating the problem. Paul wrapped an arm over him, sliding the other under the incurve of Cal's waist, where it wouldn't get the circulation cut off. Callum wrapped his own arms through Paul's and sighed again.

"Stop sighing. And don't fart on me, okay?"

Callum stifled a snicker. "Can't promise anything. Kowalski's Polish however-you-pronounce-it seemed largely based on cabbage..."

"Hell. I forgot about that. Stuff's not really for the uninitiated to approach without caution, is it? Well...at least fart quietly, then."

"And you can try not to shove your morning boner against my ass."

"What ass?"

"Shut up, Paul."

Quiet for a few moments.

Callum said "I've been trying to remember something."

Paul let loose a resigned sigh that blew warm across Cal's neck. "Will you decide once and for all if you want to sleep or--"

Callum just talked over him. "It's something Ray said while you were still going over the paper. I was losing my grip a little, and he thought he was just giving me a rationale to hang onto--but whether he knew it or not, it's some kind of set-out principle or other, I can't remember where I read it. Or even if I read it, maybe I saw it on--"

"What is it?" Paul cut him off.

"It's got a specific wording, but I can't remember what that is. It was something to the effect...say you build a robot. The robot can think, but still, it was built by humans--it's fully understood by humans, it can be programmed by humans, activated, deactivated, whatever. Right?"

"If you say so."

"But the robot can't reprogram itself, activate itself, et cetera. A human has to do that. And then, there's us. We can't ever fully comprehend our own reality, or even our own minds, because we're inside them, if you see what I mean. We're, I mean, we're in and of it, and it's in and of us. We can't get separate enough from it to see it."

Paul nodded. "Yeah."

Cal continued, in the same quiet murmur, "The upshot was that a level of reality cannot be fully understood, nor fundamentally manipulated, by a being at that level of reality. That has to come from at least the next level higher, a level we're incapable of perceiving."

"You do realize this concept has been used about a million times in arguing the case for the existence of God."

"Ray was using it to argue the existence of you. Or maybe of us. Of why you can do what you can do here. Because--you're from a higher level. Here, you--for all practical purposes--well--"

"Say it and I break your neck."

Callum was astonished to feel Paul's forehead pressing against his shoulder. "You okay?"

"I just need some sleep...fuck. And I thought being a father sounded like a hell of a lot of responsibility."

"Well, you do have that reputation for being perfect..."

"Cal. It's not funny." Paul's forehead pressed a little more firmly against Cal's shoulder.

There was a pause.

"Yeah," Cal answered, "I'm beginning to figure that out." He turned over on his back, readjusting Paul, so that they were still wrapped up enough not to come apart in the night, barring excessive thrashing on at least one of their parts. "Here."

Obviously self-conscious, but apparently appreciating the gesture, Paul lowered his head to Cal's shoulder. Actually, Cal thought it was rather decent of him to just do it and not make a big embarrassing deal about how it er um wasn't necessary, especially considering the fact that Paul's ear would likely have a major crease in it in the morning from the prominent endpoint of Cal's clavicle.

"Thanks," Paul muttered. He tried to move his head a little lower.

"No problem." Callum closed his eyes and shut up.

Paul and Callum stepped out of the doorway into a small, blind alley; the faint illumination of a streetlight spilled into the open end.

"Not bad," Callum said, glancing around at the windowless brick walls to either side. "Nobody saw us show up here, for sure. But I still don't get it."

"That's probably because you're thinking in three dimensions."

"Paul, there's not anybody alive that doesn't. Except possibly Fraser. If you can call him alive."

"I'm not saying I don't, just that I know what the pitfalls are. If I start thinking that we can't wind up right back where we started in just one jump, we probably will wind up right back where we started. The associational paths are not straight-line, point a to point b. You have to remember how huge the world of fanfic is. And every slightest happening is relevant--that's why our attitude and our ability to focus is at least as important as me getting the writing part of it correct. Which is one reason I need you."

"What, like, you're the announcer, I'm the color commentator?"

"Kind of. Perspective, exactly how you perceive a given situation, is as important as what I write--as the situation itself--in determining exactly where we end up and where we go from there. You...provide the perspective."

"Paul, if there's one thing a guy in your position has to have, it's perspective. You don't need me for that."

"Then maybe what I mean is...your perspective is louder than mine, even if mine might be more precise."

"Why do you think that is?"

"I don't know. Maybe because somebody put all the plugs in your switchboard wrong and you're a fucking psycho."

"Ah. So, like, you're still the announcer and I'm still the color commentator."

"Something like that. Not that either of us couldn't do either thing, but..."

"I think I get you. What do you mean that it's a problem that I think in three dimensions?"

"Did you ever study topology? N-space? Superstrings? Anything having to do with space existing in something other than three dimensions? Usually time is brought up as a viable dimension, too--"

"You telling me you have? Studied that stuff?"

"I've read about it. I understand the idea that we're not simply stepping through a doorway when we do the reality-shift thing."

"Sounds like a dance craze. That crazy reality-shift thing..." Callum sang to the tune of "Time Warp", doing a brief hip-shaking dance. "And by the way, what is it with doorways? You didn't need one for the paper or the cigarettes."

"Uh...actually that's just kind of a device on my part. A metaphor for going out of one place and into a separate place."

"So it...helps you visualize."

"Also, it seems like it might be safer to write something like 'Paul and Callum stepped through a door and found themselves blah blah et cetera' than to write some kind of fade-out or describe an effect. I'm thinking about what might have happened to us if I hadn't written anything on the other side of the stairwell door, you know?"

"Namely, that there's no telling what might have happened to us, right. Not to mention it's probably a lot easier on our heads to have at least that much to prepare us for a transition."

"Yeah, that occurred to me, too. You know, it's a good thing the show's so bent, or I probably wouldn't be able to do anything at all like this."

"The transporter that didn't work. Yeah. Too bent, or not bent in the right way. So keep trying, I'll get this. Tell me some more."

"Okay, see, there could be...an infinite number of steps between where we are and where we want to be. The number might be limited only by human imagination--and I'm not talking about a single human, despite your comments about us being in my head. Everyone has a different perspective on every story. It might not be that there's only 'room' for so many. Even more importantly, the connections most likely don't run one-way, and they don't always run through jumps we've made before. The number of associations could well be infinite. Which is why it's a good thing that door vanished when we landed at the consulate the first time--if we'd just turned around and walked back through, God alone knows where we might have wound up. That's why we have to have such a clear idea of where we want to end up to ensure that we get there, no matter how well I've phrased it or not."

"So, once again, why don't we shoot right for home?"

"Because--okay, this is going to directly contradict what I just said, but to explain concepts like this coherently you have to speak math, and I don't. Though Fraser does, that Fraser, at least. Christ. I felt like I was talking to a Univac half the time--"

"'Univac'?! We're not that old, Paul."

"--because trying to say this stuff in English is like trying to describe the way a computer works in Etruscan. The vocabulary just isn't there; all that comes out is gibberish."

"I got you that far."

"So, the reason we don't shoot straight for home is that even though you shouldn't be able to multiply infinity--it's already infinity, there's no increasing it--for our current purposes, speaking purely practically, you can increase infinity. Or decrease it. We can improve our chances of hitting what we want to hit by taking it in shorter jumps."

"Um...you're saying that even though our heads can't really handle the concepts anyway..."

"...we've still got a better chance if we keep things as uncomplex as possible. The possibilities increase exponentially for each additional assumption, each stage we try to skip. It's a...it's not a time*line* with a linear progression of possibility we're dealing with here, it's a time*space*. Nothing linear about it."

"Except from our viewpoint."

"Right."

"So we're trying to simplify infinity. Even though that's not possible."

"Uh...yeah."

"You know, I don't think I'm confused because I'm thinking in three dimensions and linear timelines. I think I'm confused because you have no clue what you're talking about."

Paul hung his head with a rueful smirk. "Guilty. I told you, I don't speak math. Why do you think it took Fraser and me hours to hash out what came up being an almost obscenely simple plan? He had to stop and try to translate for me about every five minutes. Okay, for the next jump, think..." Paul was frowning at the notebook. "Think Kowalski long about 'Ladies Man', but try to throw in that he's got the hots for Fraser."

"I thought we weren't trying for anything that canon yet, episode-related and like that."

"We're not. We just came from plot-driven slash, with canon-like characterization..." Paul flipped pages in the notebook, scanning, then flipped them back. He made a note in a margin, muttering "...remember to keep characterization points up..." finished writing and continued "Fraser and I decided that the next step we could easily break it down into would be episode-related slash, and 'Ladies Man', 'Mountie on the Bounty', shows like that, with a lot of intensity in Fraser and Kowalski's interactions--or at least some suspicious comments--are discussed in slash, and fanfic in general, more often than the eps with less of that. And you really had a couple of moments in 'Ladies Man', so I picked that one. Let a little horny-for-Fraser loose in your head when you put together your Kowalski."

"Ah, okay, I got you."

"We could break it down even more," Paul continued, evidently on a roll now that he'd gotten warmed up, "by trying for even tighter specifics, but that would involve near--or actual--jumps to and from specific stories, rather than subdivided categories; while theoretically that would be safer, considering the fewer steps we skip the more likely we are to hit what we want to hit, we run the risk of trying to jump to a specific story that doesn't exist. After all, you can find damn near anything in the world of fanfic--but only damn near. That number isn't infinite, though interpretations may be."

"I take your point." Callum readjusted his grip on the pack and wondered "What all did Fraser put in here, for God's sake? I'm about to hoist you over my shoulder and let this thing walk. Feels like there's a body in it."

"Yeah, he went a little crazy when I told him I think the writing-stuff-out-of-the-air trick, if I overuse it, might shake the ficworld shingles even more than our just being there in a story in the first place--enough to be an even bigger danger of pointing up where we are to those with whom we do not wish to become reacquainted. The changes aren't going to go unnoticed forever. In fact, if we land in a more popular story, they might get noticed immediately, and if it gets back to the RPSers, they'll know just where to find us, and if we haven't made it back to reality yet when that happens..."

"Did you put it like that?" Callum asked with a half-smile.

"Pretty much, though I suppose I must have sounded more desperate than I do now, because Fraser had a real proper-preparation panic. I'm not even sure what all's in there. A medical kit, for one thing, which is likely one reason it's so heavy."

"Bottles of water likely being the next reason." Callum tugged at a strap to resettle the pack.

"You want me to take it for a while?"

"No, I want you to keep your hands on that pen and notebook in case we trip over someone's mental tangent and need to make a quick getaway. There are too many stories out there that aren't what you could call typical for their category for us to get too comfortable with these jumps. So what else? In the pack."

"Food I will have to be very, very hungry before I eat any of--"

"Pemmican?"

"Yeah. And dried fish, stuff like that. There's a list in the outside pocket of everything he put in there, and how much, and how long it should last..."

"Figures."

The Goat was parked around the corner they were currently turning, and Paul reached over to touch Callum's arm. "It's them. Fade back."

They both did so. "It does look like we've struck episode-related fic of some kind, that's the setup--uh, only I guess it's not a setup, for that scene in 'Ladies' Man'. How'd you manage to land us this close?"

"It was more a matter of not landing us too close, if we don't want to be taking the next jump in a big damn hurry when they see us."

"Good point. We haven't got time to make friends with every Ray and Fraser in the fanficverse. Ow..." Callum rubbed at his chest. "This is the place, all right. Damn..."

Paul eyed him in concern. "Vibes getting to you?"

"Yeah, I must've done a hell of a job on this scene. That guy is miserable."

"Yeah, and Fraser's worried as hell about him, I'm not feeling so great, either...and...yep, he's crawling into Fraser's lap...and Houston, we have contact. Slash city."

"Okay, so we know where we are, let's get moving before I need therapy over how torn up Kowalski is."

"Looks like Fraser's handling putting him back together pretty well. C'mon, this way..."

"Cal," Paul said faintly, "in future, I will place greater reliance on your judgement about these things."

"Told you not to look." Callum hopped down from the tree branch he'd climbed onto to get a line-of-sight through a second-floor window of the consulate, helped Paul down off the branch that was threatening to become kindling under his weight, and picked up the pack. "Okay, so we've obviously made it to het, or at least slash/het."

"I am never ever ever going to be able to look Camilla in the face again," Paul groaned, still slightly bilious-looking. "What the hell were those things? Ostrich feathers?"

"I have no idea, and I'm good with that. You know, this was kind of to be expected. No I don't mean the ostrich feathers--I mean the pairing. Fraser/Thatcher is one of the most common het pairings in the fandom. The good part about this is--Paul?"

"I'm okay." Paul sighed and managed to take his face out of his hands. "I feel like I ought to apologize to Camilla."

"That wasn't Camilla. It was Thatcher."

"Who looks exactly like Camilla!"

"Actually, you don't know that for sure, especially since the difference between you and Fraser, and me and Kowalski, is distinguishable. Plus, you've never seen Camilla naked...have you?"

"Cal!" Paul's green-around-the-gills complexion transformed into a flush of irritation.

"Right. And my guess would be that no het writers have, either, so..."

Paul blinked. "Good point. I'll just keep telling myself that."

"You do that. Anyway, as I was saying, it means we're definitely moving in the right direction--there's a canon basis for Fraser/Thatcher. The characters showed interest in each other more than once."

"Yeah," Paul said. "Come on, we shouldn't be hanging around the consulate..." They began moving away from the building.

"It could be worse, you know, Paul," Callum said, with a slightly devilish twist to his smile.

"How? Fraser could have been doing...that, with Dief?"

Callum stifled a snort. "Yeah, that'd have been worse all right, but what I meant was it could've been Fraser and Maggie. There's a canon basis for an attraction between them, too."

"Oh, God," Paul groaned.

Callum figured that stuff he'd heard lately about the Theory of Relativity possibly not being as accurate as was once thought must be true, because he was pretty sure he and Paul had just broken the light barrier. He collapsed as he stumbled through the door, losing his grip on both the pack and Paul as the latter practically fell through behind him; Paul's God-given ability to squirm creatively was the only thing that saved Callum from being squished flat. "Who were they?!" he gasped, trying to get his breath back. He looked around; they seemed to be in some kind of storage shed.

"I don't know exactly," Paul panted, pushing himself back upright. "But I know who they thought we were. Obviously, Fraser and Ray managed to piss off an entire gang in that one."

"But you know something?"

"What?"

"That was the cleanest-mouthed bunch of gangbangers I've ever run like hell from."

Paul blinked, then started to smile. "Hey, yeah...we didn't get a chance to check our location, but if they weren't swearing--"

"We might've made it to gen. But we can't be sure--for one thing, we need to figure out where we are now, if we took another step homeward, or got kicked sideways. For another, there may be quite a number of dirty-minded fic writers with exceptionally clean vocabularies."

"Yeah. We better triangulate."

"Paul!" Callum almost squealed with merriment, holding his sides and staggering sideways a little. "Man, you're evil!"

A smirking Paul was sitting on his heels, holding the notebook on top of the pack, writing intently. "Just thought I'd help out our alter-egos a little..."

They were on top of a building in the warehouse district, at what appeared to have been a bust gone bad. Chicago PD members were crouched behind the barricade of their vehicles, exchanging fire with a number of individuals that fairly screamed "bad guy" from their pores. Somebody out there in fandom was either very good at character description, or badly needed an originality infusion.

Paul and Callum were in a good position to observe the bad guys, who were crouched behind their improvised fortifications. So far, their shoelaces had tied themselves together, all their guns had jammed at least once, and now...

...all their pants fell to their ankles, precipitating shrieks of alarm and a frantic scrambling to pull them back up--or to get up again and then pull them back up, on the part of those who'd been in foot transit at the time. However, before they could get their bearings, the pants vanished entirely, being replaced by pink tutus.

Callum squealed again. "Come on, Paul, show some originality! Everybody does the damn tutus."

"I would, but we're pressed for time," a calmly smiling Paul reminded him, pen hand still moving.

Callum didn't know if he'd ever draw another breath. "Note to self," he thought. "Never ever piss Paul off when he's holding writing materials."

An extremely localized thunderstorm formed over the bad guys' improvised bunker and rained on them ferociously. Then a gigantic flock of low-flying pigeons swooped over, providing editorial comment via defecation. A small herd of moose thundered through, knocking over crates and carts, and seriously compromising the structural integrity of one four-door sedan. Interestingly, it didn't look like anyone was getting hurt. Being sent into conniptions of abject fear for their sanity, yes, but not hurt.

"Okay, here comes the piece de resistance," Paul said.

"What's that mean, anyway? Piece of resistance?" Callum figured he could at least contribute the occasional hoary joke.

Paul grinned at that, still writing, and said "It means the good part. Quiet, I'm creating, here."

Cal could only stare in dropjawed amazement as the mother ship from "Close Encounters" descended slowly overhead, big across as several city blocks. It proceeded to blast out the five-note message-tune, in the giant tuba effect that blew the glass out of the control tower in the movie. The sound wave nearly knocked Callum over. It felt like somebody was using his breadbasket as a timpani.

"Paul, shit!"

"I already did that with the pigeons."

Below them, the bad guys had flung down their weapons. Abandoning their merchandise with unison girly screams and running like bugfuck, stiff chiffon skirts bouncing with each step, they flung themselves directly into the arms of the also-somewhat-disquieted representatives of the Chicago Police Department.

The mother ship vanished. Smugly, Paul stood, assumed a version of his studly-Mountie stance, and proclaimed "Looks like my work here is done." Then he relaxed and grinned sheepishly at Callum. "I've always wanted to say that. Come on, we'd better move quick. I really shouldn't have done that, I just couldn't resist. Let's get out of here before all the carrying on alerts someone to where we are."

But Callum still couldn't get up--and he was betting his face was going to hurt like a motherfucker when he finally managed to stop laughing--so Paul hoisted the pack over one shoulder and put the other arm around Callum's waist, giving him enough support to walk--if in a semi-doubled-over fashion--and they went through the roof-access door.

"PAUL!"

The shot had slammed into the front of Paul's shoulder, low toward the chest, throwing him back against the building they'd just stepped out of. By the time Callum got him out of the continuing firefight, into the alley behind a stack of crates, Paul was barely conscious, blood pumping out of him in powerful arterial bursts.

"Goddamn it, tank commander, don't you do this," Callum whispered. Paul remained motionless, an unnatural pallor stealing over his features. Callum heard shouts and retreating footsteps as both sides of the dispute realized that a bystander had been hit, and that they'd be wise to take up their difference of opinion at a later date and another location.

He tried to stop hyperventilating, which he couldn't, and managed to get the notebook and pen out of Paul's pocket, fortunately just before a flood of red poured over the edge of his thoroughly ensopped jacket to start soaking his jeans. Oh God. If the shot didn't kill him--like it wouldn't--Callum was likely going to finish the job himself if he didn't get this just right, but no time to go over it, to make sure it was just right--and what the hell did he know about physiology?

But Paul didn't stand a chance otherwise.

He forced himself to calm for a second, and thought: Keep it simple. Didn't seem to matter if there were some fantastic elements in what was written, so long as it didn't go too far outside the parameters of the show's usual level of weirdness...think of what you need, just what you need, no more, no less...

Now. Write.

He did.

"Please work," he then whispered over and over, sitting on his heels next to Paul with his eyes closed, concentrating for all he was worth, rocking back and forth. "Goddamn it, you fucking notebook, I invoke thee or whatever. Please work, please work, please AAAK--"

He launched himself sideways in shock at the touch on his shoulder, heart hammering. Paul was still down, still covered with blood--schist, how much had he lost, it was all over the place, Callum realized he'd been kneeling in it, and he found himself gulping spastically as his whole digestive tract suddenly tried to vacate his body. But Paul's eyes were open, wide and stunned-looking, their normal slatey color unnaturally vivid in his chalky face. The hand he'd touched Callum with fell limply to the pavement.

Callum started to grab him, but pulled up at the last minute, staring at the crimson ruin of Paul's sweater somewhere near to where the bullet had gone in. "Is it...are you..."

Paul sort of whisper-gagged "It's gone, Cal...did it."

Callum immediately resumed his aborted lunge.

"Can't breathe--"

Cal loosened up a little; Paul seemed to be trying to sit up, so Callum tried to assist. "How do you...are you, I mean, shit..."

Paul took a wet, nasty-sounding breath, cleared his throat and abruptly turned his head, which at least partly answered that question. Cal, holding him steady as the blood, and a few other unidentifiable substances, came up, blurted in sudden fear "Oh, God--are you still hurt in there?"

"No." Paul shook his head a little, nearly went over on his face as a result and Callum hauled him back upright, as carefully as possible under the circumstances. Paul cleared his throat again and managed "Weak. Sick. No pain, except where I hit the bricks." He rubbed the back of his head with a shaking hand.

"Breathing okay?"

"Some crud in the airway, but..." a few coughs, "...yeah. Can't...sit for long, dizzy..."

"I know fuck-all about this stuff but I think it's weird you're even conscious at all. I mean, you were out and you're still a couple of quarts low and, and your blood pressure's gotta be in the basement from the--hell, blood loss, you need water--" Callum lunged again, this time for the pack. "Try to avoid walking us right into the middle of any more shootouts, for fuck's sake--I nearly fucking died, you--" He shut up. He knew that had sounded a bit strange, since he hadn't been the one to soak up a bullet; but either Paul understood what he meant or he was just in no condition to comment. Callum came back and held Paul half in his lap, holding the water bottle for him, while he rinsed and spat effortfully into a nearby drain.

After a few go-rounds, Paul choked "Makes two of us." He managed to get some water down, though the swallow looked iffy there for a minute. There was relative silence while Callum mopped at Paul's face and throat with a bandage he'd dampened with the bottled water.

In a minute, Paul graveled "Good job, by the way."

"I'm sorry I couldn't do anything about the blood loss, or your clothes, but--"

"You didn't have time. Besides, I don't..." he paused while Cal poured more water into him, "...feel that comfortable with the idea of...uh...messing that extensively with our, you know...body functions or whatever. Fooling with blood production rates and stuff. Now I'm really sorry I couldn't handle the math for medical school...anyway, we could screw ourselves up bad if we're not careful."

"Yeah, that was my thought."

"Ick...we've got to get me some more clothes."

"Me, too."

"Oh...yeah, you're...Jesus. We're going to stink to the moon."

"We're already pretty bad, but we're not moving until you're a little more steady. You're white as a sheet and you're shaking. And you feel cold. Shit, shock, why didn't I think of shock--?"

"I could argue that out of makeup I'm always white as a sheet, but fortunately I'm not completely stupid." He let himself lean heavily against Callum.

"I think I am, too. In shock, I mean."

"Probably. Maybe not the same kind."

"Here." Cal detached the rolled blanket from the pack, digging out some of the emergency food to go with the water. So what if it tasted like shit. He then pulled Paul close again and spread the blanket over the two of them. "I need to keep you warm. I know that much about treating shock."

"You're getting the blanket disgusting," Paul muttered dazedly.

"So we'll deal with it. You passing out again or having some kind of serious medical crisis or whatever would be even more disgusting. Finish the water and eat something."

"You're asking a lot of a guy in shock to eat when he's soaked in blood, and likely just swallowed a fair amount of it. I'm not that much of an irongut, I'm afraid. Pardon the expression."

"Then at least drink the water. Your body needs something to make blood with. I have no idea why you're conscious. There can be no blood left in your body. Why are you conscious?" Paul ignored that completely, as, Callum thought weakly, well he probably should, and began concentrating on getting the water down in such manner as to not throw it back up all over them both.

A couple of bottles of water later, Callum was leaning against one of the crates, still occasionally cursing softly under his breath, holding Paul steady. "Never get shot again, Paul, okay? At least not in front of me. I'm getting too old to easily afford the time that kind of thing takes off my life."

"Believe me, I've--" Paul had to roll over and spit out another mouthful, wait for the spasm to pass, then finished speaking before trying another swallow, "--just assigned 'Not Getting Shot' a very high priority on my list of things to do."

"Where...uh, where?" Callum wondered, waving a hand in a listless, roughly circular gesture. They had just come from the nighttime streets of Chicago; by this time, Callum was ready to be happy with any setting as long as it was fairly low-traffic and contained a chair. A bed would be better. And after the last couple of jumps, which had been heavily affected by their mutual exhaustion, the only leather or latex he wanted anything to do with involved things like upholstery and rug no-skids. He let go of Paul's wrist and dropped the pack, then himself, onto the floor; carpeted, he noticed, that being the only thing he could notice with his head hanging and his eyes crossing.

Some jumps back, Callum wasn't certain by now exactly how many, Paul had risked composing a slightly more complex scenario for the transition from the alley where he'd left way too much of his DNA; the gamble paid off, getting them both adequately cleaned up and dressed. He'd done it that way, rather than doing a separate paragraph for it, in order to keep the noise level to a minimum; but later he'd second-guessed himself about it, deciding it was too dangerous a move to perform regularly. After all, they'd already established that the more they tried to do at once--the more complicated they made the transitions--the greater the chance of screwing something up and landing God-knew-where.

"Hotel. Near the consulate." Paul managed a few more steps and fell over backward on the bed.

Callum noticed this with a sympathetic smirk. Paul might, on occasion, be capable of carousing 'til all hours and then working a fourteen-hour day none the worse for wear, but this kind of thing would make even the bushiest tail droop. Callum wondered "Just how long have we been at this, since the last time we...uh, breathed, anyway?"

Paul glanced at his watch. "You want that in dog years or human?"

"Shit." Callum rubbed his forehead wearily and added "And those last two jumps we made were about maximally tangential. I mean, you thought the Fraser/Thatcher was bad."

"I have to admit that ostrich feathers aren't as disquieting as rubber corsets. Though after that last Fraser/Kowalski we did--"

"At least Dief wasn't involved in the last Fraser/Kowalski we did."

"Fuck all, anyway, I don't know how we got turned around--but we need to take a break. Before we end up in a damn death story or something."

"Shit. Good point. What do you think would happen to us?"

"I don't know, but considering the way we've been reacting to the stories we find ourselves in so far--actual gunshot wounds aside, even--I can't imagine that it would be much of a party. You were nauseated for nearly an hour by that slash redo of 'Ladies' Man'."

"Yeah. Schist..." Callum rubbed at the back of his neck. "Um, does your head hurt as much as mine does?"

"Probably. Fraser put aspirin in the pack."

Callum managed to bestir himself a bit and started rummaging. With difficulty, he pulled a plastic bottle out. "How the hell did he get so much stuff crammed into this thing? We're talking collapsed matter here."

"He's efficient."

"Too efficient." Rather than expend the energy to haul himself up and get water from the bathroom, Callum cracked open one of the water bottles; after swallowing aspirin, he recapped both bottles and tossed them up on the bed, aiming for Paul's general vicinity and hoping said bottles didn't hit any soft and personal parts. Not hearing any curses from bedspread height, he assumed they hadn't. "I just scraped my knuckles on something I'm pretty sure is supposed to be soft. Bandages, I think."

"I wonder what bandages turn into when you subject them to intense pressure," Paul slurred, sounding, less than shockingly, like a person whose mind was starting to go from sheer exhaustion. He made a choking noise as he tried to wash the aspirin down without sitting up all the way.

"Asphalt, felt like. You okay?"

Paul made a damp "mmph" sound and recapped the water, let the bottle roll out of his fingers to thump softly on the carpet, and then let his elbow slide out from under him as he collapsed backward once more.

Quiet for a few moments.

"Um..." Callum realized that Paul was probably nearing unconsciousness, lifted his head to blink in the other man's direction, and asked "We going to play spoons again?"

Pause, then: "Oh. Uh..." Paul lifted a hand to rub at his eyes, and muttered "Well, you were right about not wanting to end up at opposite ends of the fanfic continuum because of a vivid dream. Or not realizing we're in a story which destines anyone in the room we're in to get attacked by Hottentots or something."

"Didn't happen last time. Which is a good thing. If it had, we'd be navigating the ficverse in our underwear."

"No shit. Your shoulder holding up?"

Callum lifted a wrist, demonstrating that he was still joined to the pack by what he was beginning to think of as a hemp umbilical. "Okay so far." He'd fashioned the safety line when he realized that as often as he had to set the pack down, they might end up without it if they were forced into/suddenly taken by an unexpected jump. Speaking of which... "We could do the same with each other when we sleep, by the way. Wonder why we haven't. If I didn't know better, I'd say some slash writer is lurking around, finding excuses to dump us on top of each other..."

Paul only chuckled and said "Don't get paranoid, Cal."

Callum crawled over to the bed and clambered up next to Paul. "Get...up on the..." he shoved weakly at Paul's shoulder until the latter grouchily dragged himself over and up to rest his head on the far pillow. Callum piled himself against Paul, hauling a sweater-clad arm across himself, turning to rest his back against Paul's front. "Did you set your watch?"

"Uh..." Whoops. Fade out.

"Paul. Did you set. Your. Watch."

"Mmno."

Callum pulled Paul's wrist up to where, after a couple of minutes of playing trombone with it, since he wasn't wearing his glasses--Paul never moved, at least not under his own power--he could get to the tiny buttons and fool with them; he cursed softly a couple of times, before getting it right and muttering "I gave us four hours. Think that'll do it? Paul...?"

Soft snore.

"I'll take that as a yes." Callum let his own eyes close.

Callum, wearing a towel, was shaving while Paul took his own turn in the shower. Every fifteen or twenty seconds, Cal had to stop and mop the damn mirror so he wouldn't end up having to apply a tourniquet to his face; shaving without his glasses was already putting him to considerable trouble, but they steamed up in about a picosecond every time he wiped them off, since he wasn't enough of an asshole to open the bathroom door to admit a cold, humidity-dispersing draft and freeze the cockles of Paul's heart, ahem. Or his own, for that matter. And he and Paul couldn't afford to be out of earshot and/or quick grabbing range of each other.

As he picked up the razor again, a thought occurred to him. "Hey, Paul?"

"(Glub)Yeah?"

"What about smarm?"

Paul made a noise that was probably supposed to be some member of the "derogatory snort" family, but had technical difficulties involving the water that was apparently spraying him right in the face at the time, and so sounded more like he was blowing his nose on the shower curtain. "What about it?"

"Wouldn't that be a natural bridge between slash and gen?"

"Uh...well, as you'll recall, last time we made it to gen, it was through het."

"Yeah, but somehow we still got turned around and hit that twisted out-there slash thing."

"That's because we were too tired to think clearly. What I write can't cover everything, on its own it can only go for the most literal manifestation of--"

"I know, but smarm might be a more stable link. It's true that we've established that we can get to gen via het, but generally speaking, there's no sex in smarm, and it frequently still has all the attributes of slash, in terms of the relationship between you and me--"

"Fraser and Ray."

"Yeah, right, sorry. Anyway, it's got everything slash has except the actual sex or gay relationship or whatever, and it's widely rumoured that the biggest writers and proponents of smarm are actually repressed slashers."

"Which always makes smarm writers froth at the mouth."

"Yeah, and I could give about as much of a damn about the whole question as you do. But if there's enough truth in it, we might be able to make it back to gen in a lot fewer jumps than it took when we went through het. I know skipping steps is dangerous, but every jump has its own element of danger, too, in case you hadn't noticed."

Paul didn't answer, likely out of deference to the fact that he knew Callum was still freaking out just as bad as he was himself at the brush-with-death jump. Callum continued shaving while Paul thought, splashings and soap-spitting noises emanating from behind the shower curtain.

Finally Paul said "Well, do you think you can help me write us to a smarm story?"

"Um...depends. You'll have to show me where you are--where we are, in Slashland--and how you got us here. But speaking as the color commentator, I can tell you that my role would probably be mostly concentrating on loving you more than life, death or God--"

"Kowalski loving Fraser. And vice versa."

"Yeah, right, but then after we get that down we'd have to...um...well...I'm not sure how to put this..."

"Are you trying to think of a way to say that we'll have to mentally render ourselves nadless?"

"I wasn't going to use that exact phrase, but yeah." Callum swished his razor in the sink and took another mop at the mirror.

"Uh..."

Paul's lack of erudition in this instance spoke volumes, and Callum replied "Yeah, I guess it would be a hell of an acting job at that. We could...well, how young a character do you think you can play? Could you play a kid? That'd give us some kind of handle on the I-love-you-more-than-I-love-anything-else-alive-or-dead-including-my-wife-but-I-feel-no-trace-of-sexual-desire-for-you problem."

"It's been a while since I did. I think the last time I played a kid was the public service spot I did when I was a kid...so not since Romeo, at least, and he doesn't count. He was a teenager."

"What about Hamlet? Nah, he was..."

"Right, another teenager. Besides, Hamlet was a big downer-freak queernelly with an Oedipal complex bigger than Rush Limbaugh's gut, and the whole world knows it. Okay, I guess the important thing here is that I know it. Even if he screwed Ophelia. He pretty much just did that to be an asshole, fuck the whole 'I did love you once' bit. I didn't believe that line while I was doing it."

"Well, yeah, and I guess Romeo screwed Juliet. Or they screwed each other, if there is any politically correct way to describe two thirteen-year-olds doing it. I guess what matters is that they had sex at all. What about that Ray Bradbury thing you did? Didn't you play a kid in that?"

"No, another teenager." There was a rustle and Paul stuck his head around the curtain, dripping on the tiles. "Is there any reason we couldn't use something from an acting exercise? You know, all that 'be a tree' and 'be a dustmote' shit?"

"I suppose." Callum pondered. "But I'm not sure just what I'd do, without speech, to convey the concept of being, for all practical purposes, rapturously in love with someone and having absolutely no desire whatsoever, in any part of my mind or body, to pork this person."

Paul snorted. "Uh, how about imagining you have no functioning genitalia?"

"I'm not sure just what I'd do, without speech, to convey that concept, either. Or with it, for that matter, short of standing around yelling 'I have no functioning genitalia'. And I think there's a law about that."

Paul put on an accent that might have been Hungarian, and might not, and said "You must beeee the part, my boy."

They looked at each other for a second, and both of them broke out laughing as Callum, bending over at the waist with his hands crossed over his bathtowel-swathed privates, hopped around squeaking "Ouchie ouchie ouchie ouchie--"

"Don't get lost in the role, Cal."

"I don't think that's possible short of a trip to Sweden."

"Women have sex drives, too."

"I know, but they're at least able to think about something besides sex occasionally, and, generally speaking, we aren't. On some level, guys are always thinking about it. Dead guys are thinking about it."

"Dead guys have no functioning genitalia." Paul vanished behind the curtain again. "Smarm, eh?" There were the sounds of contemplative rinsing.

Callum was finishing up shaving. "We should consider it. Anatomical correctness aside, we might be able to get to gen in one jump that way, without the danger that comes with skipping a bunch of steps, if I understand what you've been doing up 'til now, which I don't, but you know what I mean."

"Uh...yeah. I'll show you where we are and you can tell me how viable you think the idea is." The water shut off. "Throw me a towel."

Callum threw a towel over the curtain rod. "I hope I don't have to wrestle my shorts to the ground before I can get dressed. Your jump fix got rid of the blood, but they've been in those pants long enough to claim squatter's rights."

"Check the bureau. I think I remembered to write us a change, too." Paul stepped out of the shower wearing the towel around his waist, and abruptly sat down on the toilet lid. "Whoa." He clutched at the counter with one hand.

"Shit." Callum rested a hand on Paul's shoulder until he was sure the latter's face wasn't about to make the intimate acquaintance of the linoleum, then picked up a glass from the countertop tray and turned on the cold water tap.

Paul watched, a bit hazy, but still there. "It's okay, Cal, I just had the water too hot."

"You don't usually faint from a hot shower, do you? Besides, your eyes were doing that disgusting rolling-up-into-your-head-crossed thing there for a second." Callum tested the water temperature and began filling the glass.

"If you pour that over my head I'll kill you," Paul warned him calmly, eyeing the filling tumbler.

"I want you to drink it, idiot."

"Oh. Uh, I can do that."

Callum didn't go so far as to hold the glass for him, but he did keep his hand on it until he was sure Paul's two-handed grip was secure. Then he turned and opened the bathroom door, admitting a shock of comparatively chilly air.

"Callum! Christ."

"Just trying to cool you down a little. You're like an Ivory Snow commercial."

"As I've said before, how the hell can you tell?"

"Right at the moment, by the fact that you ought to be a lot pinker than you are, having just stepped out of a hot shower."

"I'm okay, Cal, really," Paul sighed. "You're like a spinster aunt."

"Shut up, Paul."

They walked, once again under the semi-cover of night, toward the consulate; Paul, apparently navigating by keeping Callum in the same general place in his peripheral vision, was poring over the notebook in the intermittent blue-white light puddles of the streetlamps.

Callum stopped, then seized Paul by the shoulder and shoved him into the dense foliage bordering the sidewalk.

"What the--!"

"Quiet!"

Paul's voice dropped at once. "What's wrong?"

"I think someone's staking out the consulate."

"Oh, that's just perfect. Fuck."

"You stay down; if it is the consulate he's watching, he might not recognize me, but you're pretty much a shoo-in." Cal dropped the pack, tugged his arm out of the tie and began climbing the tree they were under. Paul got behind him and boosted.

"Fraser, do not touch my inner--shit."

"Do not touch your inner shit? I wasn't planning on it."

"Nobody loves a wiseass, and be careful when you grab that."

"Grab what?"

Callum muttered and struggled upward again, then grew still.

"See anything?" Paul near-whispered.

"Uh...yeah. I think I was right. And I think we have another problem."

Paul deliberately banged his forehead against the tree trunk and swore, quietly. "What now?"

"Come on up. I don't know if this guy could see us if he looked right at us, but in any case he seems to be concentrating on the consulate."

With a little bit more difficulty than Callum, Paul did so. Callum reached down to grab his hand, got them arranged so Paul could sight down the line of his arm when he pointed, and said "Big blue car. Blonde guy, curly hair."

"Um...yeah, I see him. Barely. You recognize him from somewhere?"

"I think so, but it's hard to say for sure from here. Still, we don't dare get closer to make sure, if he's who I think he is."

"Who?"

"His name's Geraint--no, sorry, this guy's name--if he's who I think he is--is Nicholas Knight."

Paul blinked. "'Forever Knight'? The vampire cop show? Didn't they have about as much trouble with casting and semi-cancellations as we've had?"

"Yeah, that one. Geraint Wyn Davies?"

Paul glanced at him. "Yeah, I know the guy. I always thought his name sounded like he's from your neck of the woods."

"Close. He's Welsh. He never could get rid of all the accent; if you run into him, ask him to say the word 'clue'. But do it out of arm's reach."

Paul smirked. "His version of the Kit-Kat problem?"

"Yeah. Anyway, the show was set in Toronto."

"So? Due South isn't."

"But it's filmed there."

Paul frowned, piecing it together, then looked even more grim as realization dawned.

Not wishing to let anything go assumed, Callum finished "If that is Nick Knight, we are in a crossover, and that is a Very Bad Thing."

"I know. It looks like your maundering in Kowalski's bedroom was prophetic. If we can wander into other fandoms--"

"Strictly speaking, we haven't. Crossovers supposedly belong to as many fandoms as are represented in them. So we're still in due South--"

"--but we're also in Forever Knight, if that is Knight. And when we leave, we do not want to end up jumping fandoms."

"The rough thing--one among others--is that there's no cheap way to find out who he is. Knight has super vamp powers, and I don't remember what all of them are, if I ever even knew. So we can't get any closer to him without risking his sensing us, one way or another, if that is him. I think he's got his vamp senses focused on the consulate, or he probably would have noticed us already. Are we even still in gen, I wonder?"

"There's plenty of gen crossovers," Paul considered. "We might be."

"Okay, so we won't panic about that just yet. What we do have to worry about is whether that's really him, whether this is really a crossover. We can't walk up and ask him; he doesn't kill anymore, but he and his undead compatriots can do a version of the Jedi Mind Trick. Even if he decides we're harmless, he'll talk us out of remembering why we were here...and in our case, that might include talking us out of knowing who we really are. I don't know exactly what he'd reprogram us with, but..."

"...but if he does, we're in the same boat as if we let the Fraser and Kowalski vibes take our brains over. We'd be stuck here. Not knowing what was going on."

"Exactly."

"Christ. Of all the crossovers to land in. Why do you suppose we did, anyway? That's sure as hell not what we were aiming for."

"Um, I can think of a couple of reasons off the top of my head, but let me see..." Callum held out his hand for the notebook. Paul gave it to him, and Callum tried to read in the dimness. "Damn. Too dark."

Paul jumped out of the tree, alighting fairly easily. "I'll get the flash--"

"No. Vamp eyes."

"Shit. We absolutely cannot get a break."

"Has it taken you this long to figure that out?" Callum dropped down next to him. "Light's a little better here...okay..." Callum was flipping pages, trying to take note of anything that might cause a connection between their own fandom and Forever Knight's. Paul was resting against the trunk of the tree, looking pensive.

"Night," Callum murmured. "For one thing, at least."

"Hm?" Paul looked up.

"In what Kowalski called...what was it...the fan overmind--Geraint's a Canadian born in the British Isles, like me, and there's the Toronto thing--and, uh, other stuff--but I think it was our bright idea to make all the jumps from one nighttime set--sorry, I mean nighttime, period--to another, to cut down on our chances of being observed."

Paul groaned. "And on a vampire show, nearly all the action would take place at night. We've probably been fading toward a Forever Knight crossover for the last half-dozen jumps or so, but there was no way to see it until we got here. God, I've got brainsprain. I may never recover from having to learn to think like an entire folk culture phenomenon."

"I know. Also, probably a lot of the people who're fans of Due South are Canadian, or just fans of Canadian TV in general, and ditto for Knight. And...um...the crowning touch is that I did a 'Forever Knight' in '92, remember?"

Paul sighed. "No, I didn't remember, obviously," he snapped. "You could have just said so."

"I didn't think it mattered. We haven't been showing up in everything one of us has done before, have we? And we've both done things that have their own fairly sizeable fanfic following. If it were that, we'd have at least hit Highlander by now--or, even more likely, X-Files. I did two of those, and Carter offered me the Krycek part before he offered it to Lea. So that can't be the only reason we're here."

Paul exhaled. "True. Then I guess it's just...another piece of the puzzle, along with the other factors you mentioned. Which kind of has to be a good thing in terms of figuring out--"

"More like another brick in the wall. How are we going to keep this up not even knowing what we don't know? We're still flying blind, for all practical purposes--I mean, I'm right that we couldn't predict hitting other stuff we've done first off, but you're right that we've likely been fading toward 'Forever Knight' for God knows how many jumps, there wasn't any way to see it until we got here, and if we can't--"

"Cal, calm down. There's no need to panic every damn time we have a setback." Paul sounded tired again, still leaning against the tree, now bending over to rest his hands against his knees, letting his head hang, rolling his shoulders a little.

Callum felt himself frost over. "I am not panicking," he said quietly, subjecting Paul to one of his smoldering looks; this one, however, was not smoldering in a good way. "But one of these little 'setbacks' nearly killed you, in case you've forgotten, and it really kind of bothered me, though at this moment I'm having trouble remembering why, and--"

Paul sighed again and muttered "I'm sorry, Cal, I didn't mean it like--" but Callum ignored him, continuing "--and I hardly think it's irrelevant that we don't have any kind of clear map for what we might be walking into next, and no way to create one short of spending the rest of our lives at this. Which I don't wanna do, and which, since infinity keeps coming up in this irrational equation, probably still wouldn't do it anyway."

Paul glared up at him, those perfect brows drawn in irritation. "Well, what do you want to do, then, if you think it's too dangerous to keep going? Maybe we should just call it a night--no pun intended--go introduce ourselves to your toothy friend, and let him help us forget all about getting home?"

Callum steamed a bit, then said "You know, you're starting to sound like one of Janeway's 'Get the Crew Home' speeches on Voy--"

Paul lunged for him, covering his mouth. "Don't say it!" he hissed.

For a moment, Callum's eyes widened, then they narrowed again and he firmly removed Paul's hand from his mouth. "Now who's paranoid? Don't you start panicking over one crossover, Paul. Remember the transporter that didn't work? There are limits, quote unquote? I hardly think a stray comment is going to eventually land us anywhere in Star Trek."

"I don't know, Cal, it's a gigantic fandom...and, uh, the limits thing--I'm a little less sure of that since the mother ship."

Callum groaned. "Terrific."

They were both quiet a moment.

Then Callum looked around rapidly, as though for something that might be sneaking up; he calmed himself and leaned against the tree with one arm, rubbing his face.

"What?" Paul wondered, glancing around himself.

"It occurred to me that I've worked in...um...a few things with what you might call high slash potential, and if we do start jumping fandoms..."

Paul blinked. "Besides...? Oh, Jesus, you and Don?"

"Craig and Patrick, you mean."

"No," Paul said with dawning horror, "I fucking mean you and Don, we could end up back in RPS--just a different fandom--and oh, no, Christ--!"

Callum's hand flew out in a restraining gesture as he realized what Paul was thinking, and his Kowalski accent got thick. "Don't even say it! Don't think about him!"

"Yeah, well, we'll both do our best there, but we better pray that any guitars we see before we get home belong to Fraser."

"Believe me, I am."

Cal must have looked as miserably exhausted as he suddenly felt, because Paul reached over again to touch his arm. "Relax, okay? Don't think about any of that now, just think about what we're dealing with right here."

"Right."

Paul continued "You're right that it can't be that easy for us to be wandering into crossovers, or we would have before now. So maybe...the limits I was talking about expand for every additional fandom we're technically in, to include it--that would explain the mother ship, I wrote it in--"

Callum continued "...and if we can go from category to category within fanfic, what's to prevent us from being able to make the same kind of jumps from fandom to fandom? By way, naturally, of crossovers? Yeah, Paul, that was my point." He took a calming breath, removing himself from Paul's grip with as little detectable prejudice as possible--they sure as hell weren't going to get out of this if they started exploding at each other under the tension. Doing his best to seem conciliatory, if not exactly contrite, he continued "But we have to assume our own reality is out there, no matter what show, or book or movie or whatever, that we're stuck in; and as far as the Voyager thing--Forever Knight's pretty close to Due South in terms of fantastic elements...okay, it's a lot less subtle. But still, we're too far away from something like Star Trek for that to be much of a danger, or why would it have taken this long to hit a crossover in the first place? Unless you actually change the story to include it."

"Yeah, I got you. I think we've beaten the question into submission, Cal." Paul leaned against the tree again.

"You still don't look all that hot." Worry tinged Callum's tone.

"I don't feel all that hot, either. So, we've got about as good an idea of how we wound up here as we're going to get, if we're where we think we are. The only thing left to do..."

"...is make sure we are where we think we are. Shit. Did we...what'd I say before, get kicked sideways? Are we no farther but no closer--just at a different angle?"

"Before we worry about that, we need to be sure we're in a crossover, and unless I do some more notebook magic, I can't see any way to accomplish that other than to get a better look at your friend in the car. You were right before--if he's staking out the consulate, for whatever reason, he probably knows what Fraser looks like, even if that's not who he's watching for--though odds are he is, of course. Anyway, Kowalski he might or might not recognize."

"He's going to have found out what Fraser's partner looks like, too, isn't he?"

"Maybe. But he's a Toronto cop, right? He's a long way out of his jurisdiction here. He might not have had the time or the resources to get thoroughly familiar with the appearance of everybody who might have regular business at the consulate; if he had Chicago PD's full cooperation, he'd have a liaison partner in the car with him right now."

"Don't count on it. He's not that thrilled with having partners, I seem to recall. Probably has trouble keeping his fangs out of them. So what did you want me to do?"

"Walk past on the other side of the street and take an unobtrusive look at him. Even if it's past midnight here, the pack'll make it look like you're just between flops. But don't skulk."

"I'm an actor, Paul, I think I can do a non-skulk walk."

"I'm going to circle around and meet you--"

Callum held up a hand at that and admonished Paul "Don't you try anything furtive, either, because his vamp feelies are probably all primed to detect stuff like that--I mean, who are you going to pay attention to, the guy walking along without a care in the world or the guy sneaking around like an escaped convict?"

"Cal, I know that!"

"Okay, okay," Callum said, making settle-down motions with his free hand. "So just fly casual, and make sure you stay out of his direct sight, and he'll probably ignore you, too, even if he does know you're there."

"Right...but Callum...there's one thing..."

Callum muttered "Yeah, I already thought of it. What if, against all odds, it is Kowalski he's after?"

Uncomfortable silence. Paul muttered "I can still write something to--"

"You've been doing way too much of that lately. I think I felt the hot breath of slavering RPSers on the back of my neck during the last couple of jumps." Callum sighed, then said "I guess if he nabs me, I'll throw myself on his vampy mercy. He's supposed to be a nice vampire, after all. Unless this is a Bad!Nick story or something. But anyway, if he messes with my head, you'll just have to hang back and keep me in your sights until you can get me out of there. Do whatever voodoo it takes, and hope it doesn't point up our location, or send me...somewhere you don't want to send me."

"Yeah. Um, I'll meet you two blocks up, behind the far building."

"Right."

They both stood there, still uncomfortable.

"You know how in horror movies people start dropping like flies as soon as the group separates?" Callum muttered.

Paul shook his head ruefully. "Yeah, first rule. Both for horror movies, and for being lost--never separate. Even more crucial than usual in our case."

"We haven't been apart for more than a few seconds even to use the can, for God's sake, since we figured out there's no particular reason we should both end up in the same place, since our heads have so much to do with it, unless we're in contact with each other."

"Yeah, we got a disturbed look from Kowalski for that. The, uh, can, I mean, not the figuring part."

"I noticed."

Another silent moment, and finally Callum reached out and clasped Paul's wrist, squeezed once, and let go, turning around to start for the sidewalk they'd been on when Callum noticed Knight. Paul followed, but turned the opposite direction, heading the other way down the block. Callum, in setting up his casual demeanor, nearly went into his Kowalski walk, then tripped and staggered once in his haste to cut it out.

Five minutes later, he narrowly avoided committing a Skorr commercial when he sighted Paul in a doorway of the designated building. Paul was a little more restrained, just reaching out a steadying hand as Callum ran up the cement steps to where he waited, out of direct sight of the street.

"Well?"

"That's him, all right. And remind me never again to volunteer to walk past an actual blood-sucking vampire in the middle of the night alone. I've got eyetracks burned onto me. Next time I bump into Ger, I'll probably scream and bolt." He gave an illustrative shudder.

Paul's mouth twisted, partly in sympathy and partly in displeasure at the news. "Okay, we haven't wandered out of gen since that bit with Dief and the rubber corset, when we were too tired to think straight. I'm going to assume this is a gen crossover."

"I should probably argue for a more thorough check, but at this point I could give a shit; I just want out of this story."

"I know how you feel, but let's put a little more distance between us and the consulate, in case the sun's about to come up. We don't want to bump into Vamp Cop when he heads out to hide from the light." They scuttled around the corner to the side of the building facing away from Knight's car, then across the street. "Wonder where he plans to go, anyway, this not being his home turf."

"I'd think scouting out boltholes for just such emergencies would be priority one whenever a vampire finds himself on alien ground--that, and finding out where the herb shops and Italian restaurants are. Or maybe he plans to spend the day in the trunk."

"Wouldn't he suffocate if it's sealed enough to block all sunlight?"

"I think he can take indirect sunlight."

"I guess he must, if the moon doesn't get to him."

"Paul. I don't think anybody writing anything to do with vampires is terribly concerned with things like the fact that moonlight is reflected sunlight. Next you'll be wondering if full-spectrum lamps like those people with Seasonal Affective Disorder use would burn him up."

"Actually, I was wondering if he even needs air anyway, if he's undead and everything." Paul was flipping pages to the most recent transition paragraph. "It took me nearly forty-five minutes to write the last one," he muttered, waving the book in illustration of the word "one", "and I'm at the stage that I can't just pull the line about it being night--it's too integrated, every jump with the last one. Like using what we learn to avoid gunfights and such, for example, but I can't just write 'no flying bullets', because the number of things that could screw with us or send us to the wrong place is..."

"...infinite," Callum finished. "No way to guard against infinite possibilities one by one."

"I've got to be more general, more encompassing, without leaving enough room for us to walk into something totally unexpected." He was concentrating, making little margin notes as he walked.

"Where are you aiming for?"

"I'm going to try to get us back where we were; like I said, trying to head straight backward probably wouldn't work, but I might be able to do it if I deliberately plot a different route--a different description of the same situation. We were getting closer to canon. It'd probably be simplest to treat this like a...dimensional cul-de-sac, rather than like its own jumping-off point. We don't want to fool with anything as dangerous as a crossover, even a tame gen."

Cal sighed. Paul had done, well, not bad for this last jump, actually. At least, in the sense that they seemed to be in gen, still; and, if they'd made no progress, neither had they lost ground in any area but one. And neither of them were precisely hurt...

But the characterization points had taken something of a dive.

"Ooookay," Callum sighed, rolling over once, still holding the notebook in one hand and not breaking his gaze on it, pen in his other hand. "Paul..." he was forced to look up when he got no response. "Paul."

Paul, lying on his back in the grass, kind of head-to-head with Callum, who was now lying prone on the restored blanket--the pack, for the moment, was tied to Paul--stopped gazing at the two gigantic grey squirrels making inroads into the remains of his hot dog and fries. He tilted his head to look at Callum upside-down, grinned, and said "Hah?" Then he giggled.

Callum still wondered how many people, on seeing him helping Paul get the food down without severe incident, wondered whether this was Field Trip Day at the local mental health facility and if Callum was some kind of case worker. He scratched Paul's head soothingly, rather like scratching a dog behind the ears, while positioning the notebook so they could both see it. "Is this an 'n', or an 'r' with an 'i' right after it?"

"Where?" Paul wondered dazedly, his gaze wandering all over the page.

Callum put the pen down and took Paul's hand, sorted his forefinger out of the general jumble of relaxed digits, wiped it in the grass to get rid of some mustard, and placed its slightly guitar-string-callused tip against the page. "Right there."

"Oh. S'an 'r'."

"It can't be."

"Why not?"

"There's no such word as 'rihannsu'...of course, there's no such word as 'nhannsu', either."

Paul yawned and went back to contemplating the squirrels and the shifting green foliage overhead. He began singing under his breath.

The first time Paul had stumbled, when they had stepped out of the alleyway near the consulate in this particular version of Chicago, Callum had thought that the lack of sleep and the blood loss were still making themselves felt in Paul's strained metabolism. Then, however, Paul had started to giggle. Of course, Paul was an inveterate giggler, everyone knew that; but, Lord spare him, not like this. Callum remembered the sensation--rather like someone had removed his diaphragm and digestive tract and his thoracic organs were descending into the vacancy--when he'd realized that somewhere in this world, Constable Benton Fraser was bombed off his ass.

Paul had tried to keep it together, he really had; but he simply couldn't concentrate for long, no matter what Callum did to keep him alert--pep talks, following along with his trains of thought so he wouldn't lose his place, dumping a bottle of water over his head--for which Paul had been too woozy to kill him--but none of it had gotten them anything, aside from a confused and uncomfortably wet Paul. Fraser, he'd realized, must be wasted, if this was the best Paul could do to keep the Fraser vibes out. Thank God that Kowalski didn't seem to be bombed, too. All Callum felt was the same tiredness he had on their last jump.

He pondered the columns of words, and ballooned and arrowed interconnecting notations. Paul might not be that great at math, but the guy could make verbally expressed concepts interlock with the complexity of a three-axis Euclidean figure. Unfortunately, since it wasn't a mathematical construction, Paul was likely the only one who could follow that complexity in anything like a useful fashion. You had to be inside Paul's head to know just what some of these freaking connections meant for the jump in question, and, probably a lot more importantly, just why in the name of all things holy there even was a connection between some of these ideas. Early on, the paragraphs and short notations had resembled something Paul might write in a script, and Callum was fairly sure he could have deciphered it all well enough as little as five or six jumps ago; lately, though, as Paul began integrating more and more complex trains of thought, like a conceptual logarithm, the things he'd been writing for each jump had started to resemble a computer program more than a script or a story. Mostly it was complete sentences, but the words "non sequitur" were purely inadequate to describe some of what appeared to be intuitive leaps, or maybe just some kind of personal joke. That'd be like Paul.

"Rihannsu," Callum muttered. No matter how he tried, he couldn't make a real word out of Paul's scribble. Hell, with his luck it probably was a word and he just didn't know it. There were a few of those, though this was the only one in the most recent jump that he couldn't figure out. The ones that made him really nervous were things that were decipherable but incomprehensible. For example, the words "amethyst blow dart" with about half a dozen exclamation points after it. And what the hell did "Trois personnes ont ete tuees a Chicago dans la nuit de mercredi a jeudi" mean? Well, he knew what it meant--"Three people were killed in Chicago early Thursday morning"--but what did it mean? Was it the prime motivator of their last jump, into an episode-like gen story? It was written like an afterthought, but Callum had seen a manuscript, thanks very much, and he knew that some little note off in the margin could easily be more important than the main paragraph. And why the hell had Paul written it in French? A nameless personal association? Damn...

A sunset-colored plastic beach ball bounced lightly past him in the grass. He automatically reached for it and glanced around; a small, overall-clad child of indeterminate gender was trotting toward him. He put the ball back down and sent it toward the child with a gentle tap.

"What do you say, Eric?" called one of two women seated on a bench, just off the cobbled walk that wound past them.

"T'ank-yoo," said Eric, while picking up the ball, falling over--the ball was as tall as he was--and getting back up. He eyed Callum speculatively, glanced briefly at Paul, apparently classified him as a neutral quantity, and returned his attention to Callum. "Wanna play?"

Callum smiled a little, distractedly. "Love to, but at the moment I've got to figure out what the heck a rihannsu is."

The child was aiming a kick at the ball, apparently having given over picking it up as a bad job, but at this he paused, looked back at Callum and said "A romilan."

Callum's gaze flashed back up. "A what? Romilan?"

"A romulan. Like Spock."

"Like..." Callum sat up and held his hands out. "Roll it over here, c'mon..." smiling, he gestured come-hither with both hands.

Eric vanished temporarily via getting behind the ball, relative to Callum, and kicked, savagely and substantially off-center. Most of the force was expended by the resultant spin, such that the ball wandered slowly around the area for a bit before it meandered close enough that Callum could grab it. "You like Spock, eh?"

"Yeah. He's smart."

"Yeah, that's what I've heard. He's a romulan?"

Eric gave him a vaguely disgusted look, but positioned himself to give the ball another kick when Callum sent it back toward him. "He's not a romulan. He's a Vulgar."

Callum carefully did not laugh. "Right. But romulans are like him?"

"They look like him."

"Oh...they're a Star Trek alien?" Well, at least he'd heard of that. God help him if he found any references to Pokemon in the damn notebook; Paul did have kids, after all. Callum'd have to kidnap a kindergartner to translate for him.

"Yeah."

"So...why are they sometimes called 'rihannsu'?"

"That's Romulan for Romulans."

'And this is "Star Trek for Dummies",' Callum thought, smirking, before saying "Romulan for Romulans. Romulans call themselves 'Rihannsu'."

"Yeah," Eric said, receiving the ball with both hands, eyeing Callum speculatively, with some concern, as though he might be worried that such a pleasant but slow individual had been allowed out alone.

"Eric! Time to go!" The women on the bench were getting up. Callum wondered how much he personally had to do with that. Then again, it could easily be the stoned party on the grass next to him. Maybe more easily.

"Bye, Eric," Callum said, waving bye-bye. "Thanks for the tip."

"Bye," Eric replied, beginning to herd the ball in the direction of the bench.

"Well," Callum muttered, "that was convenient."

"Of course it was."

Callum looked around. Paul had rolled over on his front, and was lying with his chin propped in one hand. He smirked a dizzy smirk and said "It's a story. Even more important, it's fanfic. Lotta damn convenient things do happen."

"So do a lot of inconvenient ones. Like you starting to write in Serbo-Croatian or something long about day before yesterday." Callum waved the notebook accusingly under Paul's nose.

Paul just smiled and batted at it, rolling over on his back again. "Hey, this in't my story."

"For which I should probably thank God," Callum muttered, flipping pages. "I know your stories. They tend to be nearly as twisted as your song lyrics. Okay, Paul, I realize that you're not entirely yourself right now--for one thing, I happen to know you aren't a giggly drunk--"

As if to give the lie direct, Paul broke into another spate of giggles.

"Christ," Callum muttered. "I'm gonna drown him, I swear." He was pretty sure that somewhere out there, Stanley Raymond Kowalski had just said the same thing, but for once that thought didn't bother him.

"I heard that."

"Whoopee shit. C'mere a minute." Callum flopped down again with the notebook; Paul glanced up, then moved unsteadily, on all fours, around to where he could see it, too.

"Is this what you were doin' wit da--shit. Is this what you were doing with the Rihannsu bit?" Callum had made notes in blue ink, as opposed to the black Paul was using. Picking things out of the jumble was still a pain in the ass. "Here, and, um...oh, back to here." He flipped the occasional page as he spoke. "Then here, and...last jump, and...the crossover? You got worried about the Trek thing?"

"Uh..." Paul blinked and his arm slid out from under him, landing him on his face in the grass. Callum winced, but didn't comment.

"Yeah," Paul said into the grass. "Wanted to...big, BIG fandom, y'know. Really big fucker. Part of world culture, by now. Head it off at the...uh..."

"Pass?"

"Yeah." Paul struggled back up onto his elbows, nearly overbalancing once (which is not easy to manage when you're on your elbows). "But we were, you said that, well, and we were thinking about it, and..."

Callum tried to help. "And so...you think Trek fandom in particular was big enough to...get us in trouble if you didn't guard against it in specific?"

"Big fucking fandom."

Callum took this as assent and said "Right. Okay, so when you wrote in the...the whatever, the keep-away factor, you chose an obscure reference instead of one of the more well-known ones."

"Big motherfucking fandom." Paul fell again.

"Um, I think we've established that."

"Specific...got the okay."

"I know I'm going to regret asking this, but...what?"

"It..." Paul heaved himself up, getting his face out of the grass and sidling over on his elbows to lie right next to Callum and make a beckoning gesture with one finger, looking around for observers, as though preparing to impart a great secret.

Callum's lips pursed in a wry expression. "Paul, you've been in show business too long."

"Got the okay. From Paramount."

"What did?"

"Rihannsu thing. Not too many of...of the fans know about it...I mean, compared..."

"Compared to something like 'Beam me up, Scotty, there's no intelligent life down here'?"

"Yeah. Like that." Paul appeared delighted.

"Paul, I am trying like hell here, but I think you've lost me. Can we go back to the okay from the producers?"

Paul fell on his face again, this time in what looked like aggravation, and bounced his head in the grass a few times. Callum reached up and comfortingly scratched around in his wildly disordered hair some more. "Whooooa, there, big fella," he soothed. "Take it easy. One thing at a time."

"The producers," Paul said, into the grass. "They...adopted it."

"What? Oh--you mean it was originally some fanfic thing?"

"No, pro. But most of the novels..." he trailed off, then picked his head up again. "Help." He stared imploringly up at Callum.

"I'm doing my best to, Paul. So...you're saying this thing, this Romulan thing, was something in a Trek book. I mean, a pro book."

"Yeah."

"And that's not considered canon, usually."

"Yeah."

"But if the producers...what'd you say, adopt it--then it is considered canon, but it still manages to be a relatively unknown canon point."

"Yeah," Paul said, threw an arm around Callum's neck and squeezed. Rather hard.

"Gglk!" Callum pried the arm loose. "Yeah, yeah, love you too. So you're saying this was a way to keep the whole shmear, the whole damn fandom, out of our path, without calling attention to ourselves. I mean especially since I didn't know...uh, oh. No, Paul, wait, I'm sure it's okay." Callum was patting Paul's back hastily, trying to diminish the almost comic look of alarm that had overtaken the other man. "Okay? Okay." Callum returned to the notebook. "It's all right that we both know about it now. It won't automatically endanger us. I don't think. Anyway, it's not like we have much choice. So let's take another look...damn. I wonder what the odds are of some toddler existing here who happens to know what a 'Rihannsu' is and walking right up to...what?" Paul was eyeing him strangely.

"Of course the kid...of course he knew."

"Why 'of course'?"

"'Cause whoever wrote this story knows it."

"And we got here...via your equation or whatever--which it was in...so--no, not everyone--I mean, every character--could know all the things the writer knows, because that would--wait, Paul, I still don't get it."

Paul had been trying to get up; he managed to get himself vertical by hand-climbing a tree with some conveniently low branches. He gazed down at Callum pityingly, as though perhaps echoing Eric's thought about why was Callum out alone. "Y'know, issa good thing you're cute or you'd never get laid," Paul opined, shaking his head slowly--then swayed a little too far, the pack's safety tether tugged him off balance and he fell over the line of soft evergreen bushes he was next to, vanishing entirely with a muffled yelp.

Callum sighed. "Okay. I understand now. I'm dead, and hell is Paul giggling drunk and generally making like an idiot-savante in a public park. And having the nerve to insult my intelligence, for pete's sake. Paul! Hold still, you're just making it worse." He got up, stashing the notebook in his pocket with the blue-ink pen, shaking his head at the weak stirring of the bush branches. "One way or another, I have got to get you out of here..."

"Well, you got me out of there. One way or another."

"This is not my fault."

"Well I'd like to know whose, then."

"You wanna talk about fault, let's--unf--talk about your little dead cat bounce with the characterization points and the binge-drinking--unf--Fraser which forced me to handle the whole thing myself in the first place!"

"At least all I did was lie around and giggle. You're the one who kept wandering off with that stoned smile on your face in the schmoop series we landed in."

Callum glowered. "I--mph--still only have your word for that."

"You see? You don't even remember it!"

"Well what was I supposed to do about it? Kowalski was--"

"--feeling pretty damned contented, obviously, but so was Fraser, and I kept my shit together--"

"And landed us in that AU--erf--"

"It was only barely an AU!"

"--that it took us three jumps to get back to mainstream gen from, and what do you mean 'barely' an AU? 'Klondike Gold Rush Kowalski and Canadian Rockies Mountie Fraser in 1897'? Paul DUCK!"

Paul dropped like a stone and Callum swung the heavy shaft of wide-gauge rebar that had once been part of a support, in the building where they were trapped, into the space vacated by Paul's upper body.

Actually, they could get to one of the windows in the burned-out hulk, but by the time they'd taken shelter here, the denizens of the radioactive wasteland that was this story's Chicago had become too numerous for that to be of any help; it was like a mob scene at a corndog stand. Apparently said denizens knew a non-irradiated food supply when they saw one, and unfortunately they were not looking at the pack Paul was still tied to.

"Paul, damn it--"

"Judging by what I've already got here, there's one way I can get us out of here quick and know where we're going, but you're not gonna like it."

Callum swung again and a meaty thud resounded as their latest assailant bounced down the huge pile of building debris Callum was defending while Paul worked. "Then do it! They're starting to climb the walls, and I can't keep 'em off from below and above!"

"Okay--" Paul wrote, stood up, unceremoniously hoisted Callum to the window above them and joined him--there was a lot to be said for sheer terror in some circumstances, Callum thought vaguely--then overbalanced them both toward the outside.

"Paul!" Callum dropped the rebar and grabbed Paul's wrist--

---and landed with a thud on Fraser's desk at the consulate. Paul landed, also with a thud, on Callum. The pack landed on Paul.

"Glfgk!" Callum complained.

The pack rolled off, and Paul followed it. Callum tried to move, groping around to see if he'd been impaled on anything and just hadn't realized it yet.

Uh, oh. Something...definitely not a desk set through the abdomen, though. He shuddered. "Uh, Paul..."

"Just hang on, Cal, I'll be right there." Paul was throwing everything off the cot and pulling Callum off the desk, supporting him around the waist, and helping him over, sitting down and lifting him a little to hold him against his side with his left arm as he flipped pages frantically with his right. "Shit..."

Callum shuddered again. "Paul...?" He noticed that the second voicing of Paul's name had come out about an octave higher than the first, and he could feel his body trying to draw itself into a fetal position. When he realized that Paul was holding him as if he'd expected Callum to curl up like that, Callum drew breath to demand just what the living hell they'd landed in this time, but what came out was a loud gasp as he felt a sharp wrench of anguish that practically bugged his eyes out, and he burst into tears. The part of his mind that wasn't doing this sackcloth-and-ashes routine kept enough poise to press his face into Paul's midriff to stifle the noise. This caused his glasses to hurt the bridge of his nose and probably Paul's ribs, but that was kind of low on the problem priority list right now.

He dragged in a wet breath and tried again. "Paul--"

"Shh, it's gonna be all right, Cal. I've just got to get this--"

"I'm so sorry, I didn't even know there were post-apocalyptic due South fanfics!"

"I know, Cal. It's okay. It's all right, I know. Just hang on. Breathe."

Callum found himself sort of crawling into Paul's lap, if that had been possible, which it wasn't, since Paul had his right heel on the edge of the cot, holding the pack steady with the side of his leg as he scribbled in the notebook that was open on the tough green canvas, but Callum gave it a damn good try.

"Paul..."

"Shhh, Cal, I know. I've just got to...figure this out..."

"What...where are we? I feel like...I didn't mean--"

"I know. But it'll be all right soon. Shhh..." Paul was not a father twice to no good purpose. He did an excellent job of soothing Callum, concentrating on what he was writing, and keeping them stable on the cot all at the same time. Of course, he pulled off that kind of multitasking every day at work anyway. Sometimes in his sleep. When the top of Cal's head banged Paul in the chin, Paul just levered him carefully around sideways with the arm devoted to Callum-care and kept writing. When Callum got his arm around Paul's neck, sort of, hanging on around his waist with the other, Paul's eyes bugged a little and he paused to move Callum's arm off his throat, then returned pen to paper.

Callum managed "What the hell kind of story is this?"

"A death fic."

"What? You deliberately wrote us into a--who dies?"

"Me."

"WHAT?" The word was half-disbelief, half howl of anguish.

"Well, Fraser, I mean. Kowalski thinks it was his fault."

"Is that why...why you...why I..."

"It's why you're contemplating suicide, yeah. Kowalski's probably pretty torn up. Worse than even the Botrelle thing. That's why I said you weren't gonna like this."

Kowalski? What about Fraser? What about you?"

"I'm fine, Cal. I'm right here, see? Right here."

"But Fraser's--"

"--in there." Paul jerked his head toward the closet without looking up from the notebook.

"In...oh."

"Yeah, hanging with his dad."

"So that's why you're not..."

"Feeling pretty darn crappy, right. It's only Fraser's body that died. His POV actually doesn't leave the story."

"What about your body? Won't you--"

"Uh, apparently not," Paul muttered.

"You didn't know you'd be okay? How could you take that kind of--"

"It was better than taking the chance with you, you were a lot less likely to continue hanging around as a ghost! Uh, Kowalski, I mean. Beyond that, my choices were about as limited as it gets."

Callum buried his face in ribs again and just sniffed and whimpered for a minute, still clinging to Paul like he was the last helicopter out of Saigon; Paul kept absently stroking his back with one hand.

"You're okay?" Callum finally tried, mentally rolling his eyes at his own tone. Fuck. This was pathetic. But as embarrassing as it was, some part of him couldn't shake the conviction that something godawful had happened, or was going to happen, to Paul. Nor could he shake the further conviction that if Paul died, he personally couldn't see a lot of reason to go on living himself. Which was ludicrous. Of course he'd be sad if Paul died, probably cry and the whole works, but this was...then the sheer, crushing grief won out and he gave up, sobbing softly.

Paul held him tighter. "I'm okay, right here, breathing in and out, see? It's okay. Everything's going to be fine."

Callum huddled miserably for another few moments, and then Paul got up to stick the notebook back in his pocket. To Callum's eternal humiliation, he made a plaintive sound and clutched at Paul, trying to pull him back down.

Paul took his hands, murmuring "Jesus, Cal, I'm sorry about this." Then, with the comforting singsong in his voice again, he said "Come on with me, now, come here..." Callum tried closing his eyes to see if that made the awful immediacy of Kowalski's problem any more distant, but that was no good because he couldn't see Paul that way and something in his head was screaming that if he turned his back for even a second, Paul was doomed, so he reluctantly let Paul guide him to his feet. "We're going through the door," Paul said, "and I need you to concentrate for me, okay?" He spoke as though to a small child. Callum, unfortunately, couldn't bring himself to get pissed off about that, which scared him worse than anything else had so far.

"Okay," Callum quavered uncertainly, sniffling.

"Put together your Kowalski..."

Callum was not entirely sure just what the two of them did, though he supposed it had to have involved walking through the office door, and a reasonable contribution to their navigation of the fictional continuum from his end, because the next thing he knew, when he opened his eyes and the world had settled again, Paul was calmly holding a couple of tissues up to his face. "Blow," he said quietly.

Mortified, Callum didn't even think of protesting. Paul changed wads of tissue, and, with obviously practiced technique, finished wiping his face up.

"Uh...thanks," Callum muttered at his lap, throat still thick and aching, but the sheer gut-busting angst had subsided, at least. He wondered if Paul could conceivably be so major an asshole as to EVER mention this again. Nah, nobody could be that low. So he decided to quash the childish urge he was feeling to point out that the only reason he'd completely imploded at the thought of Paul's demise was the Kowalski phenomenon, as had knocked Paul on his can (in its Fraser version) when Fraser was wasted; but that sounded, to put it mildly, a bit less than gracious. He cleared his throat and sniffed, then asked in an unfeignedly nasal voice, "Where are we?"

"We're in a very obscure drabble, if I've done my job right. We should be okay here for a while, at least."

"Uh...Paul..."

"Cal, you don't need to say anything. That was Kowalski flipping out, not you. It's okay. Take a few deep breaths. It's just like coming down from a rough scene."

"I do love you, you know?"

"I know."

"Good, because I've gotta tell you that there are times when I want to put on some stiletto heels and do the Watusi on your alabaster-skinned face. What the fuck were you thinking?"

"I was thinking that we didn't have a lot of options," Paul said, with a dry smirk at Callum's choice of imagery. "And that somebody really beat the shit out of that bunch with the radioactive ugly stick, and I couldn't stand it if your face--" he started to reach for Callum's cheek.

Callum wasn't pacified by the attempted silliness. Swatting Paul's hand down, he snapped "Don't you ever take a risk like that again with your life, you hear me? Not as long as I'm the only one around who could possibly bail you out--because frankly, I don't need that kind of responsibility, not in a place that'll turn around and bite your ass worse than the mushroom when Alice fell down the hole, okay?" Hell, he sounded petulant even to himself, not to mention semicoherent. 'Nice try with the tough guy act, Rennie,' he thought, almost too wrung out to care anyway.

Fortunately Paul was decent enough not to remark on it; he only said "I won't, if it's humanly possible to avoid it. Besides, staying where we were was an even worse risk."

"Which is the only reason I haven't killed you myself." Callum sighed and fell backward on the bed they were sitting on. "I could sleep for a week."

"Yeah, I know what you mean."

This time nobody bitched about the necessity of having to spoon up to sleep.

Callum didn't know at first what woke him, because he felt dead, still--oh, smooth choice of words (thoughts?) there. He winced a little as his various sore muscles, cramped from Kowalski's bout with Fraser's death, announced themselves. He managed to pull his eyes open.

Oh. That was what had woken him, the "Hey! Wherethefuck is he?!" feeling of not feeling Paul. If they didn't get out of this soon, Paul was gonna have a really fun time explaining to his family why Callum now couldn't go through a door or sleep without him. "Kids, this is uncle Callum. He and I find ourselves with a little problem involving classical conditioning, and so he may be something of a fixture around here for a while..." But no problem for now; there was a warm, square hand resting on his ankle. He looked down toward it.

Paul noticed the movement; he was lying across the foot of the bed, propped on an elbow, staring contemplatively at the notebook. He glanced up at Callum, then looked back at the book. "Hi. Did I wake you?" He absently squeezed the ankle he was holding. "Thought it might help if I held on to something."

"No, not when you moved. I didn't wake up until my back got cold. Does Martha snore?"

Paul smiled a little and didn't bother to answer, evidently grasping and dismissing the joke at the same time.

"What are you working on?"

"Well, I just thought of something while I was asleep..."

Callum smiled, his eyes closing again. "Like when you sleep at work standing up?"

"Probably." The sound of a small chuckle. "I'm wondering if I've found a way to make it to canon in one more jump. I hit the death fic, and then this thing, right on, using a pretty simple twist--when it worked for the death fic, I knew I could use it, and it worked again for the drabble--and I think I just realized what we did right. Not that I could explain it to save my life..."

Callum rubbed his eyes. "Then don't try, you'll probably jinx the whole thing. But is, uh, is that safe?" Or something. God, he needed more sleep.

"I'm not sure yet. I'd need you."

"I think we've established that when it comes to making jumps, we need each other. It doesn't seem to work very well when only one of us handles it, at least since the equation's gotten so complex."

"Good point," Paul said, making a face. "I guess together we make at least half an idiot. You should go back to sleep. It's only been an hour or so."

"You should go back to sleep, too. We've also established that exhaustion is as bad as there only being one of us in the driver's seat, when it comes to queering a jump."

"Yeah," Paul murmured, still staring at the notebook.

"Write down what you need to remember and come back here. You're beat, and I sure as hell don't want to have to go through that weird tabloidesque slave-market scenario again, or something even worse. Such as smarm, God forbid." Callum shook his head. "I'm still trying to coax my nuts back down out of my abdominal cavity. That was not one of the better ideas of my life."

Paul looked at him, smiling again. "At least it worked. Though now I know why you've been so snippy."

"Your nuts aren't any better off than mine, I'm willing to bet. Come back to sleep, eh?"

"Uh...yeah, okay." Paul, barely managing to train his eyes on what he was doing, stuffed the notebook back in his pocket and crawled back up the bed.

They were quiet for a few.

Then Callum muttered "We're gonna need couples' therapy after this."

Paul was silent a foggy moment, then puzzled "Huh?"

"I think we're gonna be the western medical community's test case on how to counsel two mature, intelligent people--"

Paul snorted.

"Okay, intelligent people, at least, both of them willing to work and sacrifice and do whatever it takes...to find a way to break up."

"You know what, Cal? I love you, too."

"Of course you do. You're a smart guy. Great taste."

"Cal?"

"Yes, Paul?"

"Shut up."

"Yes, Paul."

"Wait--didn't we end up in schmoop that time?"

"Uh, no, low-grade smarm. Just after buddy-sex was schmoop."

"Oh, right, right..." Paul was making a note in the margin.

One thing about being holed up in a drabble was that the damn things were so short, even the slightest changes were readily apparent; just the actions they'd taken since they woke up the second time had likely put pages on the thing. Usually they rested in the longest story they could make it to before they passed out. Fortunately drabbles tended to be throwaway stories that vanished into the fandom ether, though they might still technically exist in an archive somewhere. In any case, they could reasonably hope the RPS contingent wouldn't have any connection to this drabble in particular.

They'd woken when Paul's watch went off and got cleaned up, both of them with a grim feeling of inevitability, sort of a home-or-bust determination. They had then torn through a gigantic bag of barbecue take-out that Paul informed Cal could be found on the other side of the door. Being confused and battle-fatigued and so jumpy they were sometimes afraid to let go of each other even when they were awake, and eating the kind of crap Benton Fraser thought was fine dining, was just too damn much, drabble or no drabble, especially when they were about to make the big leap to canon, and, hopefully, the even bigger leap to reality right after. Then they got cleaned up again, barbecue being what it is, and now they were plotting. Literally.

"You know, in canon...Fraser and Ray are us."

"No, we're them. No, wait--"

"Okay, whatever, what I mean is, will we metamorphose into being Fraser and Ray? Then we'll just be stuck in canon forever instead of fanfic."

Paul shook his head. "I don't think so. Canon is still fiction. Fraser and Ray will exist separately from us there, just like in fanfic."

"If you're sure."

"Uh...yeah."

"Oh, that's real comforting."

"Shut up, Cal."

(wind!)BANGsunfliesover(ow!)VIBRATION(grabsomethinggrabsomethinggrabsometh)BANG!--GlassescatchouchTHUD, OW, PAUL!

Right in his face, yet. Paul was lying smack on top of him; the both of them were on top of something hard that was making a hell of a lot of noise. Not that Cal could hear it; all he could hear was the air blasting by them at what felt like mach three, and his back was doing something human backs were not meant to do. It felt like he was trying to stretch out across a large stack of unequally-sized wooden crates.

But he could feel the rumbling, for sure, even if he couldn't hear it; he had a couple of old fillings that he didn't think were going to survive this, any more than his back was going to if Paul didn't get off of him somewhere in the neighborhood of right now. "Where are we?!" Callum screamed.

Paul was trying to put his glasses back on his face for him. "Turn your head--"

"Thanks, now what the FUCK happened?! This is not the final scene of "Odds!"

"No shit. I, uh, I hate to say this--"

"Paul, you're breaking my back--"

"Sorry, that's the pack, it's trying to pull you over the side, that's why I'm--um--here--" Paul started moving, apparently prepatory to letting Callum up, but suddenly Callum felt a sensation of hideous cold and stabbing pain in his left wrist and hand.

"OW! Paul--I think the rope, uh, I think it--Paul--?"

"Oh, God," Paul whimpered, his eyes riveted on, apparently, the arm Callum was flailing in reaction to the loss of the pack.

"Paul, what--"

"We're in canon," Paul said quickly, "but--"

"The train show," Callum realized. "You wrote for that one. It's probably easier for you to whatever, to resonate with, than the ones you didn't work on the scripts for."

"Uh, also I nearly got killed--during a fight scene on the roof up here. We unhooked the safety cables because we couldn't get a shot without them showing up--"

"I know, and you fell and nearly slid off while you were going over a bridge. Okay, we got bumped to a different ep, we've never tried the canon jump before, it's not too surprising we ended up in one that would kind of grab you like that; the important thing is we're in canon. Now we've just...gotta get to...somewhere we can rewrite the last...I mean, we wrote the reality jump for...from 'Odds', so we'll have to redo the next jump or it might not...Paul, I'm..." Callum felt a strange breaking-up sensation behind his eyes, as though the signals of the outside world, being picked up on his personal receivers, were starting to stutter.

"Cal? Oh, my God--"

"What...?" Callum's voice faded alarmingly before he could get the rest of his intended sentence out. He tried to shake his head, resulting in a fuzzy roar in both ears.

"Cal, the pack rope didn't slide off! It went right through your wrist."

"It--oh shit--"

"Kowalski didn't exist yet in this ep. There's--I don't know, nothing to anchor you or something!"

"But how did we...if it--"

"I don't know, whatever, it doesn't matter now--oh, Jesus, Cal, stay with me here--"

Through the increasing haze, Callum realized that the abruptly greenish cast to Paul's features probably had something to do with what was causing his own gut to twist--Paul, in apparent sudden concern, had tried to touch his face, and all Callum had felt was a vaguely invasive sensation of pressure, amorphous and slight. He didn't even want to think about what it must've looked like to Paul, to put that expression on the guy.

"We don't have time to rewrite, we've gotta go while you're still here," Paul was shouting over the wind.

"But we might end up--"

"You might end up nowhere!"

"Can't you just go? Maybe I can--"

"I can't go without you, you know that, now if you can still move hang on tight and remember what we talked about for the reality jump!"

Callum wasn't in any shape to argue. Callum was not altogether sure he was in any kind of "shape" whatsoever. His back didn't hurt any more, but this largely had to do with the fact that he couldn't feel much of anything but a miasmic sensation that he supposed must be the pressure of Paul on top of him, wrapping himself around whatever parts of Callum seemed solid enough. "Whatever you can hang on with, do it, and concentrate!"

"Yeah," Callum managed, but judging by what he could see of the look on Paul's face it had sounded more like it had felt coming out than like the word he'd intended. Something like "hhhaaa(mufflemuffle)".

"We're going to roll off the side. I'll handle it, you just hang on and focus. On three. One--two--"

"--three," Callum joined in, or hoped he had, and the next moment, in addition to trying to hold the necessary coordinate reinforcement in his mind, he flashed on what it might be like to be soaked in a vat of Lidocaine and then tossed over Niagara falls in a closed barrel. The last fragment of thought that he could isolate had something to do with wondering if he was still wearing his glasses, and hoping they made the jump with him. Assuming there was enough left of him to make it. Hell, they might make it without him. He felt an all-encompassing blow like the hand of God slapping him into the afterlife, and then everything went dark.

The next thing he was aware of was something unpleasantly cold and wet along his back and the backs of his legs. Then he noticed that his ass hurt like an absolute bitch. After that, he realized that one, he was naked; two, the weight holding him down was Paul, who was also naked (and why the hell did Callum always end up on the bottom when the two of them had to take a mutual dive?); and three, the reason he felt something cold and wet along his back was that he was lying on a white cloth on top of something he could only tentatively identify, but it smelled like Jell-O salad. Part of the cloth was lying over them, too; they were wrapped in it kind of like a human burrito.

"Oh God no," he whimpered. Lying naked in Jell-O with an achy butt and Paul on top of him did not serve to reassure him that they hadn't simply completed some kind of full circumnavigation of the fic continuum and ended up right back in RPS. "Paul? Can you move?"

Paul could, evidently. The next thing Callum knew, he was being hauled upright, still under the cloth, various comestibles in different degrees of disrepair were falling off of him in all directions, and there was a concrete floor under his feet. "What the--"

"Come on!" Paul was behind him, shoving. He didn't sound like he was in much of a mood for answering questions. "Move it already!"

"I can't see anything. Where the hell do you want me to--"

"Just go! That way, up, down, I don't care, but I'm not getting caught with you like this, this place is chock full of cameras, now go!"

Then they were moving, huddled under the cloth, doubtless leaving a trail of food and containers splopping and rolling around in their wake. "I think I broke my butt, ouch, ouch ouch OW, damn it, not so fast!"

"I wouldn't be surprised. We fell about a story before we hit the catering table. It collapsed under us. God, I only hope nobody happened to be looking right where we materialized...ow!" This last was uttered in connection with the distinctive crash of a light stand being knocked over, apparently by Paul's face. Then they both ran into something, who knew what, maybe a wall, and the general sounds of mayhem and of people in various states of consternation were increasing dramatically.

Paul seemed to know where he was going, at least. "Where are we?!" Callum wondered desperately, trying not to slip and kill himself on what felt like the ketchup or something that was dripping down his side and on down to his feet, to create little bare Callum-footprints on the floor.

"On the set. Keep moving, my trailer's this way--"

"We're back? I mean home? I mean, not in RPS? We're naked, if you hadn't noticed."

"There's no way to tell yet, we won't know until we OW--" he had just hit something unyielding, bouncing back against Callum.

"We won't make it to your trailer alive unless at least one of us sticks his head out of this thing for a look around."

"No, I refuse to be stuck explaining this! We're almost there....here we are, fuck it, fuck it fuck it fuck it, just fuck it--" he was groping frantically at a vertical surface. "Ha, here's the door, come on, come on--"

The door slammed behind Callum, as loudly as a trailer door can slam, at least, and he risked a peek out of the tablecloth. "It's okay. There's nobody in here but us."

There was, however, an immediate pounding on the door, accompanied by confused demands for a freaking explanation. "Fuck off, we're busy!" Paul bellowed as the tablecloth slid off them both.

"'Fuck off we're busy'? Is that the best you can do?" Callum asked, rolling his eyes.

"Do you want to explain what the hell just happened to everybody and his fucking dog?"

"Uh, right now I'd be happy just to wash this food off myself and rub some sports cream on my ass."

Paul sighed. "You know where the bathroom is." He collapsed on the couch.

"Uh, you might wanna put some pants on before you get too comfortable, Paul. I hear it's generally not considered salutary to the level of professionalism in a workplace to have the boss running around naked. Though I guess if the boss in question looks like you, it might actually be kind of a morale booster, unless it made all the guys feel inadequate or something--"

"Asshole!" Paul grinned at him and flung a cushion at his head. "The really scary thing is that I no longer feel even slightly strange about being naked in front of you. Or seeing you that way. I mean, after what we've been through, mere nudity doesn't seem all that titillating."

"That is scary," Callum agreed, mopping halfheartedly at himself with one hand. "Christ. Is this...what is this? Banana yogurt or something?"

Paul reached over and ran a finger down Callum's arm, then tasted the finger. "No. It's pineapple."

"How come you're not covered with food?"

"I landed on the napkins and stuff, and you, not the food."

"Christ," Callum muttered again. "After you get dressed, could you send somebody to my trailer to get me some clothes?"

"No problem. Why do you suppose we're naked anyway?"

"Well, considering my glasses made it, I'm going to assume it's because we were wearing fictional clothes. You wrote them for us, remember? When I was wondering if I was gonna have to subdue my shorts with a hammer?"

"Then..." Paul grinned. "We are back in reality. If we'd hit RPS again, we'd still be dressed."

Callum grinned back. "Yeah. I guess that's true."

They just looked at each other for a moment. Then Paul started to giggle, and they both broke up laughing at the sheer relief and exhileration.

"We made it. We fucking made it."

"Yeah. Go shower. I'll see about getting you something to wear. God."

The pounding on the door started up again. "Paul! What the living hell is going on in there?"

Paul smirked. "Hi, George. Callum and I are screwing like bunnies. You'll understand if I don't open the door."

"Paul, Jesus. What if Martha happened to be standing next to me?"

"Then I'd be hearing her laugh herself sick right now. Look, do me a favor and tell Larry we'll both be available in about half an hour, okay?"

"Your set call's been blown already and you want me to tell him you'll be another half hour? We can't really get started at this point without either one of you, you know."

"George, we're ahead of schedule, or we were this morning, anyway. Tell him he wants me and Callum to take a half hour, and he absolutely does not want to know why."

"Any reason you can't call him and tell him yourself?"

"I never use the phone when I'm screwing my co-star. I read something about it being poor etiquette."

Callum, listening in the bathroom, started laughing so hard he fell down. "Ow!"

"Cal, try not to kill yourself in there, okay? I doubt we could pull off the introduction of yet another Ray."

"I'm fine, I just hit the bruise again."

"I really don't need this information," George sighed. "All right, I'll tell him. Are you planning on explaining this any time soon?"

"Ummmm...no."

Callum snorted. "GOD it's good to be the executive producer, isn't it?"

"Shut up," Paul hissed at the bathroom door.

George kept muttering to himself as he moved off: "It's a lucky thing you're so stinking lovable or somebody'd have drowned you by now."

Paul cackled. "Cal, there's liniment under the sink. Do you want any help?"

"No, thanks, I can reach my own ass."

"No, I was just gonna help you find it. The liniment, too."

"Shut up, Paul."

Later, Callum had wondered why they hadn't fallen over dead from dehydration as soon as they reappeared in reality. If the fictional clothes couldn't make it into reality with them, why could the fictional food and water they'd had? Or the oxygen, for that matter? The only conclusion they could come to, leaving Callum vaguely freaked by the idea, was that they must've assimilated it or something, as they'd had to be kind of assimilated themselves to exist in fiction. Frankly it didn't make a lot of sense, but not much about the whole experience had. For example, they'd apparently returned to the same moment in time they'd vanished from. If either of them had thought of that, Paul would have put it in the last jump paragraph, but neither of them had. Paul's watch notwithstanding, they couldn't really begin to figure how long they were gone subjectively--no matter how they hashed it out together, they couldn't make it any less than a few weeks or any more than two months. Whatever the subjective truth was, objectively they apparently hadn't been gone any time at all.

"What are you thinking under there?" Paul wondered.

Callum, his voice making the paper of the script currently lying over his face buzz, said "I was thinking about...uh, the one where the writer wrote the sequence with Ray and Fraser being called into the station in the middle of fooling around, and forgot to have them put their clothes back on or give them a segue break, and when we tracked them down for a trajectory check they were both standing around Ray's desk stark naked, chatting over an open folder, and nobody was paying any attention." He snorted.

"The look on your face was priceless," Paul said. "I guess there's no continuity checker in fanfic."

"I was a little less amused when you burst out laughing at that priceless look on my face. Everybody looked right where we were lurking around behind the shelves and we had to break for it before we got grabbed. God, I could just see the two of us sitting in an interview room with this naked Fraser and Ray trying to find out who the hell we are. My lungs felt like fire by the time we lost the pursuit just long enough to make the jump. I was afraid to look backward for fear there'd be Fraser, sailing out of a window in his birthday suit, about to land on top of us. My head just wasn't up for that."

"I wasn't laughing at you. I was laughing at--well, aside from the blatant fact of them bare-assed over there--Fraser's hairy chest. Some people apparently don't check anything."

"Yeah, he could probably grow a beard, too." Callum felt something small bounce off the script on his face; the object plopped gently onto the floor.

"Low blow," Paul was muttering. "Anyway, maybe Fraser can grow a beard, no reason he couldn't."

Callum peeked out from under the script; the little object was a half-dead pad of yellow sticky notes. He picked it up and threw it back in Paul's general direction without looking. "Suck it up, I'm on a break."

Paul giggled. "Of course, I think my favorite was the one where EVERYBODY TALKED LIKE THIS BECAUSE THE WRITER DID IT IN ALL CAPS!!!"

That got Callum laughing enough that the script fell off his face; he rolled a little on the couch to pick it back up off the floor. "Yeah, that was almost worth the headache it gave me, once we figured out what the hell was wrong. It was the Convention of the Shouters."

"The one where everybody pronounced everything, including the punctuation, as it was actually rendered in the story was a pretty big headache, though."

"Thank God you could still write okay. The first time I got Kowalskied and actually heard myself saying 'they're' instead of 'their' I stopped talking. That was just weird."

"At least you never had to say 'prostrate' instead of 'prostate'."

"Damn right I didn't."

"How about Hero Turnbull?"

"One of Dean's fans wrote that puppy, obviously."

Paul sighed and there was the sound of a pen hitting the desk. "How the hell am I supposed to concentrate on this? We're supposed to what, just pick up where we left off, move along on our merry way? Hey, I'm traumatized," Paul grumped. "There's got to be a way to cut myself some slack."

"You? Not hardly, my friend, costar-soundtrack consultant-head writer-executive producer. That's why they pay you the big bucks, eh?" Callum said, with a grin he knew was audible in his voice, which was good because his face was covered up by the script again. "Me, I'm just some nobody actor. I get to lie here and wait for you to work out all the details."

"That's the big bucks' office couch you're lying on, there, nobody actor."

Callum was not about to come out and say that he still felt a little skittish without Paul at least in earshot. "You gonna throw me off it?"

Paul sighed, and Callum could hear him slumping against the desk. "No. I'm too tired."

"S'what I thought," Callum snickered.

There was a pause.

Then, "You know," Paul said, "if we were still in fanfic, we might have to start worrying...both of us all tired and relaxed...in my office...with the door locked...instructions not to be disturbed for anything less than a full-scale emergency..."

"Paul, that's not even remotely funny."

"I didn't mean it to be." Callum heard motion, and pulled the script off his face. Paul had come around the desk and was leaning back on it, gazing speculatively at Callum.

"What is that? What is that look?" Callum said. He glanced around as though for whatever party Paul might be staring at. Unfortunately there was nothing there but the wall. "What?" he wondered again, looking back around.

"Cal, really. Calm down. I'm just...thinking."

"About what?"

"Tell me--when we were still in slash, did you ever...notice...you know, the way it hit you when Kowalski knew Fraser was dead. Ever notice anything that strong up 'til then? Oh, I don't mean anything...anything bad, you know..."

"Well, of course I...uh, no. I don't know." Callum sat up, eyeing Paul warily. "What do you mean?"

"Oh...it was just...I could sort of tell...when we were in a story that, um...Fraser was feeling exceptionally amorous in."

"The overflow hit you? That overflow?" Callum's alarm began to take serious root. "Are you telling me you could, uh, you, uh, could tell by what it made you wanna...um, do with me?"

"Not always. But part of the time, yeah."

"Paul, eek!" He pronounced it as a word, not a shriek. "Why the hell didn't you tell me?"

Paul looked puzzled. "You mean you couldn't tell when Kowalski was getting desperate for it?"

"No I could not, and if I could have I still wouldn't have. Geez, Paul."

Paul tksed. "Some people have so little artistic sensitivity."

"I've got plenty of artistic sensitivity. I just don't get hot over married male people whom I work with who have kids and who just as an aside happen to be my boss, for God's sake."

"C'mon, Cal, don't limit your options like that." Paul smirked mysteriously. Or maybe not so mysteriously.

"Paul, if this is a joke--"

"Because it...made me wonder, just a little, you know. You already knew that I think you're sexy..."

"You think I'm sexy like you were shopping for a co-star, not like that! You think I'm sexy like 'Oh, hey, that's sexy, let's get it on the show.' Or at least that's how I thought you thought it."

"Oh, Cal--you don't expect me to believe you've never thought about it."

"Well I have now, but not before we got shanghaied into fanfic."

"Cal. This is me. Come on, we're alone here. You can tell me the truth." Paul moved away from the desk and began to slink in Callum's direction.

"Oh geez. We are not, through some machination of Satan--or RPSers--back in RPS. We can't be. I mean, nobody'd write an intro that long before the smut..." Paul's expression didn't change; Callum began to feel his own expression changing like gangbusters, alarm making his eyes about three times as big as usual. "Paul, you've gotta tell me you're not really--"

"I'd rather talk about you...well, about you and me. Us, as it were." He giggled softly and leaned down, resting his hands against the couch back on either side of Callum and starting to set one knee on the cushion just outside Callum's--

Callum squirted out from under him like a bar of soap being stepped on in the shower and somehow ended up across the room, behind Paul's desk. Paul switched directions and kept advancing; Callum's peregrinations maintained an inverse relationship with Paul's, direction- and speed-wise. "Paul. Come on. Don't mess with me like this. This is not funny, we can't be back in--" he froze for a second. "Oh, shit. Oh, shit--what if we're not back in RPS, what if being trapped in fanfic that long screwed up your head--?!"

"My head, as you put it, is consummately unscrewed just at the moment, if you'll pardon the expression, but I'd like to fix that if you'll just hold still--" on the last word, Paul darted in for the kill.

Callum damn near ruptured himself leaping up on the three-drawer file cabinet behind him and crashing headfirst into the ceiling. He dropped on his ass on top of the cabinet, feet hanging off to either side. He had to do a two-handed save to keep his glasses from taking a dive. "Ow! Fuck! Okay, listen, Paul, just stay where you are and think for a..."

He trailed off as he realized Paul was suddenly no longer there. But from the area of the room he'd been in--other side of the desk, around which their pas de deux had been a fairly classic chase--now emanated the sound of truly maniacal giggling.

Callum felt a twinge--the beginning of the sinking realization that maybe, just maybe...he got to his feet on the cabinet, crouching, high enough that he could see over the desk to the floor on the other side.

Yep, there he was, holding his stomach with one hand, pounding the floor with the other, reeling and rocking like a Weeble in an earthquake, porcelain complexion now as red as the costume he wasn't currently wearing. "The look on your face..."

He couldn't get any more out, he was laughing too hard, but that was quite enough for Callum to come off of the file cabinet and land on the desk blotter in the space of maybe half a heartbeat, roaring like an exceptionally foul-mouthed avalanche. Paul, for his part, bolted for the door, banged his hip against the sofa on the way and staggered once in his lunge for the doorknob, cast a slightly panicked glance over his shoulder--Callum took a minor bruiser leaping off the desk and landing, or trying to, with both feet right where Paul had just been--got the door unlocked, and shot through, barely a hair ahead of Callum.

Callum thought grimly, as they charged across the warehouse, that seeing as how he and Paul were about the same in the leg-length department, there was going to be one more overused and less-than-literary aphorism investigated as a result of their journey through the world of fiction; namely, whether Scared as Shit really does run faster than Mad as Hell.

"Ramona!" Dean rolled his eyes, dropping his script on the table they were next to. "You've got to stop breaking up when I say that line or we'll never get out of here."

"I can't help it," she spluttered, trying to keep her heavy makeup from running. "You're funny, okay?"

"I thought you said I was cute."

"No, Turnbull is cute. You, sir, are funny. I--"

The sound of pounding feet on a concrete floor made her look around. She pursed her lips and shook her head at what she saw. Dean gave a low whistle of disbelief.

As the two men shot by, Dean and Ramona both jumped back a bit, startled about as much by the sheer volume of Paul's Renfieldish (not the Turnbull kind) cackling, and Callum's nonstop stream of imaginative profanity, as by their sudden appearance and subsequent disappearance.

"I wonder what the hell could possibly be up with them now," Dean muttered.

Ramona looked up over her shoulder at him. "With those two? Who can tell?" She looked back around, gazing after the sound of retreating footsteps with a half-smile. "Everybody knows they're both crazy."

Notes

So, I decided to piss off the entire slash universe at the same time (well, okay, I started the story and then realized that I was going to end up pissing off the entire slash universe at the same time) by doing a sendup of RPS. Yeah, Paul and Callum are in the story--where POV can be discerned at all, we see things from behind Callum's eyes--so people who object to Real Person Fic will be pissed that I wrote a Real Person Fic. Though it's not slash. Also, I did the story as a way of expressing my (not what you could call glowing) opinion on web RPS, so the people who like RPS, and probably RPF in general, are going to be pissed at me, too. What the hell. Like Hodgepodge said, "Let's alienate EVERYBODY! Jesse Jackson and Jesse Helms in (election year)!" However, this story was not written to criticise specific stories or authors. The "gradations of reality" concept is not intended as criticism of any particular character-fanfic category or subcategory. Besides, I needed a blueprint for the two of them to follow, or I couldn't have written this; it's a big metaphor made of many smaller metaphors. (It's a fractal metaphor, or something.)

Some of the anecdotes in this story are true, some are made up, but most of them are from interviews in which Paul and/or Callum told them personally. For instance--yeah, Paul did do a fight scene on top of a moving train in "All the Queen's Horses" without a safety cable, fall, slide, and nearly go over the edge while the train was moving over a bridge (though he didn't exhibit any particular residual trauma about it while he was telling the story). However, I have no idea how Paul felt about Hamlet as a person, either while he was playing the character or at any other time. But I hated that sorry pre-Goth whiner when I played him in school (I mean HAMLET, not Paul), though I admit this might have had at least something to do with the extreme measures required to get my C cups into the damn doublet--I'm afraid I was forced to do a very Rod-Up-His-Ass Hamlet in terms of physical interpretation. (Also, I was five-two, and the lifts in my boots didn't help a damn thing in that department, either.) Anyway, Paul makes a few comments in this story about the ol' Melancholy Dick that are, actually, all me.

None of the made-up stuff is particularly raunchy, or titillating, or potentially defamation-of-character-lawsuit-inspiring, or anything like that. Or even all that interesting. After all, either of those guys is more than interesting enough without my meager help. I have also largely kept their friends and families the hell out of it (Martha Burns, Paul's wife, who is an actor, too, gets a couple of brief and innocuous mentions, as does the fact that Paul is a father. And Callum makes a small [very small] joke about why his parents left England).

One other thing I'll specify as being Not Made Up are the stories "Visit to a Weird Planet", an early Trek fanfic concerning Spock, Kirk and McCoy ending up on the soundstage in LA (on the transporter platform, of course. The story's title is an homage to Leonard Nimoy's appearance as the alien in "Visit to a Small Planet"). The subsequent story, "Visit to a Weird Planet Revisited" is the companion piece, detailing Shatner's, Nimoy's and Kelley's experience on the Enterprise at that time. The second story was published in a Paramount-produced anthology of fan fiction. No details were given, but I'm going to assume that in order to sell it in an official anthology (or any other way, probably), they had to get the actors' permission. I do not know this for a fact. It may be that the book was seen as a promotional item, and I'm sure that the studio using the actors' names in promotional items was included in whatever papers they signed.

I will also say that while the story included some personal information--some biographical, such as Leonard Nimoy's having grown up on the coast and done a lot of boating with his family, such that he would be familiar with tidal patterns; and some situational and invented for the story, such as when Shatner answers an intercom page from the bridge, snaps out a brisk, Kirklike "On my way," switches the 'com off, and stands there a minute before he realizes that what he's waiting for is to hear a director say "Cut"--there was certainly nothing in the dialogue or narrative that could be seen as an invasion of the actor's privacy, or as libelous. To put it mildly, RPS does NOT fall into the same category.

Callum and Paul swear a bit--maybe more than a bit--in this story, but I don't consider that to be particularly slanderous, since in the situation they're in they'd both have to be particularly devout nuns not to swear, and besides, they're both on record using some pretty darned colorful language in interviews--and we ain't just talking print, we're talking TV and such--so apparently they aren't all that worried about such niceties if they aren't in mixed company. And sometimes even if they are. (Though I'm sure they'd be quite verbally circumspect on such occasions as meeting the Queen for tea or whatever.)

To Paul and Callum, in the highly unlikely event that either of you ever stumble across this bizarre little tale: Yeah, I realize you guys don't sound like this; since I've never even met either of you, much less know you anywhere near well enough to write your voices accurately, you both, in this story, basically sound like me. You don't even sound Canadian, because I'm an American. I probably wrote you both with midwestern US accents. In other words, I could have picked any two real people who've been RPSed, done a little research, and written essentially the same story; only the details would have been different. You two just happened to get tapped...

...okay, there were three main reasons I picked you two: One, you seem to be the targets of an abnormally large amount of RPS, for actors (a great deal of RPS is devoted to various different boybands, and as a musician I Could Not Handle That Thought) and frankly the way some of it depicts you made me see red. Two, Paul's a writer, which gave me a plot gimmick to run with (yeah, Paul, I know you largely write scripts for various media, and song lyrics, not prose; but I'm willing to bet you wouldn't suck at that, either); and Three, you seemed to be the most likely candidates--with whose show I was familiar at all, at least--to find the idea of this story amusing rather than upsetting. Frankly, I don't care whether RPS story subjects are ever aware of the story or not; I don't like the idea of writing anything about a person--rather, making up stuff about a real person--that might upset them if they knew about it. I may not be a Christian, but I want nothing to do with bearing false witness against my neighbor.

To be perfectly frank, you guys per se aren't even the point of the story (of which fact I suppose you're just as glad). I did consider inventing a couple of actors for it, but it's much easier to visualize a character who had an actor playing him, and besides, it was you two's honor I had vowed to defend. So, even though you haven't given me permission for it, thanks for the use of your names anyway. I've treated them as respectfully as possible (barring a little physical humor, involving things like Paul and a line of evergreen bushes, etc.) After all, it wouldn't make a lot of sense to write a story like this in protest of stories which invade your privacy and defame your characters, and then speculate on your private lives or make you look like a couple of bozos. In any case, via my approach, you're essentially still playing characters. Callum, you get to be our POV man. <g> (Sorry to put you on the spot, but the idea of trying to get inside Paul's genius/wackjob head just scared the crap out of me. And no, before you get insulted, I don't mean to imply that you're not a wackjob, too. Case in point: That TV interview where you offered to ahem show your tattoo? Sheer beauty, man. <g>)

Of course, before the both of you relax, you may want to see the number I did on myself when I answered a story challenge and put myself on the canon Deep Space Nine, although you two came off a hell of a lot better than I did. (You actually get up off your butts and start figuring out how to get OUT of this bizarre fictional milieu and back home. I had sequential nervous breakdowns and threw myself tearfully on the mercy of Miles O'Brien.) I'm also being sent up (yes, as myself, we're constantly doing that on the TSU campus) in a TSU story, written by one of my fanfic readers, in which I somehow manage a transporter misfire and end up stumbling into the Dutch Ministry of Agriculture (where she works). I can hardly wait to see how bad I fuck up in the sequel. <g>

I also managed not to remember that you two might be more likely to use metric measurements, not English ones (I believe the US is the only remaining country in the civilized world that hasn't changed to metric). Well, the hell with that. The damn story was nearly done by the time I realized my mistake, and I'm NOT doing any corrections that extensive if they involve math. (Paul? I'm no good with math, either. Not even wussy math, in my case, math that's basically just arithmetic.) I mean, it's not like I'm getting paid for this, you know?

But let me close the story notes with two specific advance apologies:

Paul--I have been told that you are, at least on occasion, capable of giggling in a fashion that could make a typical thirteen-year-old-girl roll her eyes in exasperation. If it's a vicious lie, I apologize profusely and beg your forgiveness. (Not that I'm laboring under the impression you actually give a shit who thinks you giggle or don't. I'm just disclaiming, because--by golly--that's what we do in the world of fanfic.)

Callum--your ass is beautiful. I swear. I worship your ass, man, I mean it. I have an altar in my bedroom. The plaster reproduction's not finished yet, though. I'm having trouble finding a still three-quarter view. And no, I am not sufficiently out of touch with reality as to ask you to send me one, for God's sake (though I am weird enough in general to make up a line about having an altar to somebody's ass).

End The Voyage Home by Blue Champagne: bluecham@mindspring.com

Author and story notes above.