TITLE: 'All Mimsy were the Borogoves.' 4/12
AUTHOR: Pythia
FEEDBACK: Always appreciated
DISCLAIMER: The Slayer and her Watcher are the property of Joss Whedon, Mutant Enemy, Sandollar Productions, Kuzui Enterprises, 20th Century Fox Television and the UPN Television Network. 'Jabberwocky' and 'Alice' were written by Lewis Carroll. Geoffrey wandered by and took up residence when the story demanded it, and Ari has been delightfully mine for the past two and a bit years. The story is written for the pleasure of the author and readers, and has no lucrative purpose whatsoever. Please do not reproduce this story anywhere without the author's consent.

Posting Notes: *-* indicates emphasis. {-} indicates thought. [_] identifies thought-speech

It wasn't, Giles realised once he'd got over his initial shock, really a voice as such. It was more like a transmission of mental concepts, a sharing of thought and impression that his mind wrestled into a perception of words. That first exchange, for instance - the simple explanation of the cat's presence behind the mirrors - had actually been an extremely complex message, filled with echoes of challenge and pleasure and prey. It had also held quieter echoes of Buffy and her Slayer's destiny, which might explain why it had been quite so startling - and suggested that the sleek feline was almost certainly a lot more than he seemed.

The animal was quite definitely male, a fact suggested by its anatomy and confirmed by its unspoken voice. Giles couldn't recall ever having much to do with cats in his half remembered life, although there were vague memories that had something to do with stables and horses. Old, distanced memories - recollections of childhood he suspected, since they came with a sense of comfort and uncomplicated pleasures. There was one thing he was sure of though - and that was that, while he might have occasionally conversed with a cat in the dim and distant past, he'd never had one talk back before.

If he'd come across the animal earlier in his travels he might well have started questioning his sanity, but he'd been in this world long enough, seen enough to convince him that it was entirely and bewilderingly real. It had an internal consistency that belied the deceptions of insanity. It had textures, it had hard and harsh edges, and it followed rules.

It was just that the rules here were *different.*

Here, it seemed, there were two types of reality - the one the mirrors imposed and the one that lurked, unseen and undetermined beyond the edges of the reflected world. It was a world that held its shape only when seen, leaving the rest to be defined by emotion and imagination. The landscapes and the dimensions of the first were somehow imposed on the second, creating further reflections; distorted echoes and dark, twisted replicas of things half glimpsed, half suggested by the play of light and shadow.

The cat led him deeper into the labyrinth, its chosen route twisting and turning through a bewildering series of rooms and passageways. They crossed wide, expansive areas - navigating the intricacies of shopping malls and business complexes - were swallowed up by sequences of homely, intimate rooms, emerged into stark utilitarian spaces - one of them a waiting room in a hospital, another the echoing emptiness of communal showers and shared locker rooms - and then moved on through a confusion of offices, galleries, and more personal spaces. They could have been going round in circles for all Giles knew - and in places he could have sworn they'd doubled back, except that they clearly hadn't since every room they entered turned out to be somewhere different yet again. His confidence in the systems of transition that he thought he'd managed to figure out collapsed into perplexity and confusion - and he began to suspect that - where he'd thought he'd been following a carefully mapped and measured route - he'd actually achieved little more than aimless, undirected wandering.

"Where are we going?" he ventured to ask, as the cat led him out of what looked like a school-room and down a disconcertingly angled stairway. It wasn't an easy guide to follow; it wasn't leading him as a dog might, an eager step ahead and running back at every turn to make sure he was still on its tail. It was just making its own way through the world, walking where it wanted to walk, slinking through the furniture or leaping onto it, pausing to investigate nooks and crannies, running at speed or simply strolling aimlessly as the mood took it. For all that, it was leading him - sometimes waiting for him to catch up, sometimes appearing at his feet just as he thought he'd lost sight of it and occasionally glancing back to make sure he was still there. It had run down the stairs and then leapt onto the low banister at the end of it, sitting there and taking the opportunity to wash a non-existent spot from a pristinely white rear paw. The question - or possibly just the sound of his voice, since they had been travelling in silence for some time - lifted its head; deep green and amber eyes stared at him with a mixture of impatience and amusement.

[Somewhere that isn't here,] the cat said matter-of-factly, leaping down and away before Giles could formulate a sensible response. He sighed, shouldered the sword blade and headed after it.

The route they were following seemed interminable, but at least it was going *somewhere* - and after so many long silent hours on his own it was a relief to be travelling in company again, no matter how strange that company might seem. They both helped themselves to food as they found it, the cat leaping on something in a shadowed corner while his human company picked up some fairly tasteless sandwiches from a buffet that they wandered past. They had the texture of cotton wool and about as much appeal as something that had been sitting in the fridge for several weeks - but it was still better than going hungry. The apples - which he'd snatched from somebody's fruit bowl earlier that morning - were slightly better, although not by much; they offered only a reflection of the real taste, and he found himself questioning just how much sustenance the mirrored food actually held.

{If I can't find a way out,} he pondered anxiously, {will I just slowly fade away?}

{Or will I starve to death trying to live on illusions and facsimiles?}

His guide reappeared from under the table, licking its lips and looking smug; whatever it was that he'd caught, he'd clearly enjoyed eating it afterwards.

"Is it much further?" Giles asked, feeling slightly resentful that *someone* had managed to find a square meal even if he couldn't. The cat gave him another of those amused looks.

[As far as it needs to be.]

It wasn't very a helpful answer but it was remarkably informative. The concepts behind it were extremely complicated; they contained hints of how the animal was managing to navigate the mirrored labyrinth, matters of desire and memory tangled up with patterns and correlations. He *had* been right about how the rooms linked one to the other - but he'd been unaware of the subtler elements that shifted random connections into directed navigation.

To actually get anywhere in this place, it seemed that you had to know where you needed to go.

It wasn't that easy of course; if it was, he'd have found his way to somewhere he recognised days ago. The library, probably, since his memories of that seemed to be stronger than anywhere else. But memory alone was clearly not enough. There had to be a trick to it, a skill he had yet to acquire.

[You think too much,] the cat told him, hints of laughter lurking behind the remark. [Feel it. *Want* it.]

[Become the Way …]

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They travelled a considerable distance without incident but, as the afternoon drew on both of them began to move with much greater caution, the cat pausing in doorways to assess what lay beyond them while Giles cast anxious glances over his shoulder, half convinced that *something* was about to happen. A few rooms further, and just as the glow from mirrors began to become visible again, his suspicions were finally proved correct; the sound of hissing and yowling suddenly shattered the oppressive silences, echoing and reechoing around them with fervent distress. His guide jerked to a halt and arched his back, puffing out his fur so that he looked at least twice his normal size. Giles frowned, glancing round what seemed to be a fairly innocuous living room before he realised that the sound was coming from behind a half open door at the end of it. It was a desperate, angry kind of sound and it was underpinned by a soft, bone throbbing buzz - the kind of noise that crawls into your body and can't be shaken free again. He was instantly on edge, his fingers tightening reflexively around the hilt of his borrowed sword and his heart racing with alarm.

{What the bloody hell is that? }

Thoughts of the menacing, creeping presence that stalked the night sent a cold chill up his spine and his initial reaction was to take step back, to get away from whatever it was that was making such a furious noise. This wasn't his world; it almost certainly wouldn't be his fight.

Would it?

Two things put a halt to his retreat. One was the actions of the black and white cat, which had begun a slow and cautious stalk towards the source of the sound. The other was something much stronger than a merely selfish survival instinct - something in him that reacted to the sound of battle and desperate distress. Sensible men avoid things like vampires, demons and the unseen menaces of the dark, of course - and on his own, Rupert Giles was undoubtedly a very sensible man. But when someone else was in trouble? Then it appeared that a lifetime of training, an ingrained sense of duty and some inner *deeper* instinct kicked in.

Watchers, it seemed, ran *towards* danger.

He didn't have that far to go. On the other side of the half open door lay what looked like an ornately glass roofed conservatory. One that was made up of pleasant reflected areas where sunlight danced on white painted woven furniture, interspersed with shadowed, threatening spaces which could not be seen in the narrow decorative mirrors that defined the room. The darkness of the true dimension had encroached into the gothic recesses between the glass panes; lush pot plants were matched with writhing grotesque parodies of themselves, their blossoms filled with sucking mouths and their vine like leaves groping eagerly for prey. The hanging baskets were the worst. Swathe of decorative flowers had become draping tendrils covered with a myriad of lidless eyes. They dripped slime - and they filled the air with a musty, sickly sweet scent.

In the middle of the room - standing ground on a hand woven rag rug that was part jewel-like colours and part washed out approximations - was a slender tortoiseshell cat, its back arched, its hackles raised and all its claws out. Crouched at the end of the rug, quivering up against the base of a terracotta pot, were a pair of kittens, mewling plaintively.

Giles saw all of this, and more, as soon as he arrived in the doorway. But it was the creatures that dipped and flitted around the besieged animal that drew his eye and sent a shiver of horror down his spine. They weren't the creatures that hunted the reflected corridors in the dark; these things were too small, and they lacked the soul chilling sense of presence that haunted his nights - but they were something almost as bad.

House flies the size of Labradors would have been cute and fluffy compared to these hideous nightmares; they had a mass of squirming tentacles where they should have had legs - and too many eyes along with their blur of multiple, buzzing wings. They filled the air with a mind numbing thrum of sound, the notes of their flight rising and falling in discordant pitch as they darted between the pillars and the pot plants trying to get past the yowling, hissing wildcat that was keeping them at bay.

It took less than a moment to assess the situation; the tortoiseshell appeared to be evenly matched against one or maybe two of the creatures, but she was trying to track at least four, and couldn't leave the confines of the rug without exposing the kittens to attack. They, in turn, were trapped in their sunlit refuge, since any attempt to bolt for the door would instantly bring them within reach of their attackers. There was a mixture of hunger and fear painting the air - and outside, night was fast approaching.

Once it grew dark none of them would stand a chance.

The knife was in his hand almost before he knew it. He couldn't match his Slayer's strength - or her reflexes either - but that didn't stop him from flipping the weapon with unconscious skill, or launching it with all the force he could muster at the nearest of the flying nightmares. His aim was both accurate and deadly; it struck the thing just as it turned in his direction. The blade sank deep and the force of the impact knocked the creature backwards, straight into the reach of one of those distorted hanging baskets. There was a sudden writhing of vines and tendrils - and the thing was gone, literally ripped apart within seconds.

Giles didn't have time to absorb the horror of that; his actions, his flurry of movement had attracted the attention of the rest of the swarm, and he swung the sword up in haste as they dived in his direction. They'd clearly never encountered sword play before; the leading creature simply impaled itself on the blade, forcing him to use its flailing body as a bludgeon to drive back the rest. He cursed soundly, fighting to shake the half dead creature free while trying to dodge away from the rest of them. Writhing tentacles painted pain across his cheek, slashed at his shoulder and raked down his right arm. Numbness followed almost immediately, creeping out from the edges of torn skin like frost crawling across window glass.

"*Bloody hell,*" he swore, swinging his weapon round with desperation. The blade cut through shimmering wings, bit down on an armoured body - and sliced away an entire cluster of eyes as the creature tried to move away from this sudden source of pain. The thing fell to the floor in a squirm of limbs and damaged wings, where it was immediately pounced on by a furious, spitting bundle of tortoiseshell fur and claws. Giles took half a step back, grimacing at the discomfort of his wounds, then hurriedly ducked as the last of the flying things made a swooping dive in his direction. A sudden sense of weight and force scrabbled at the small of his back - and then a black and white furred missile was launching itself off his shoulder with a yowl fit to wake the dead. Claws and teeth sank into a whirr of wings, forcing the creature to the ground.

The cat leapt free as it landed, giving Giles room to drive the point of his sword through the monster's head; the thing writhed and struggled for a moment, before finally falling still. Man and cat looked at each other for a moment, one panting a little for breath, the other letting its hackles fall and its fur return to its usual sleekness.

[You fight well,] came the observation, surrounded by pride at the victory, pleasure at the kill - and a whole bundle of admiration and surprise. The wounded Watcher had to smile at the reaction. He was a little surprised himself.

"Thank you," he acknowledged, relieved to find he'd survived the encounter relatively intact. "You too."

The cat merely flicked his tail at that, moving away to bump noses with the tortoiseshell and leaving Giles to gingerly examine the damage to his arm. His jacket sleeve had absorbed most of the attack, although there was rip in it that ran from shoulder to elbow and a matching shallow scratch in the muscle beneath. The wound still felt numb, but the rest of his arm was beginning to tingle - as was his cheek. There was also, he realised with a sudden shiver, a crack in the right lens of his glasses. If he hadn't been wearing them, he could well have lost an eye.

"What are these things?" he wondered aloud, turning his attention to the recovery of his sword, which was still quivering in the corpse.

[Bandersnatch.]

Once again the answer was more concept than comment - but his mind bundled it up and labelled it, giving it a name that was disturbingly familiar. With it, the echoes of a bizarre rhyme, a simple piece of childhood nonsense, suddenly took on sinister overtones.

{Beware the Jabberwock, my son! The jaws that bite, the claws that catch! Beware the Jujub bird, and shun The frumious Bandersnatch …}

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