git - merging a merge from a clone

still trying to figure git out.... i had a clone in which i had forked off a previous commit and made some changes, then did a merge to bring both branches together. now i need to bring that merged update (along with the intermediate forked-off commit, if possible) to the origin. 'git fetch file:///remote' didn't seem to do anything, and even after 'git merge' i didn't see those other commits in my original repo.

finally, the thing that seemed to do the trick was 'git merge FETCH_HEAD'. so i guess git fetch grabbed the info, but it just didn't make it visible. the clue was the return from 'git fetch':
* branch HEAD -> FETCH_HEAD

now my repos match.