The Doppelganger

Note to the Story: I woke up one night after a weirder than weirder dream and decided to write this story and somehow it fits. Everyone enjoy. :]

My Challenge to all Readers: I never do these things, but I would like to pose this challenge to all of you fine fanfiction writers out there. Come up with a camping story, one that scares even you, written for any pairing or any fandom, and see how far you can take it. Now, on to the story! :]

Disclaimer: I do not own Sailor Moon of any of its characters, though for my own purposes, I am borrowing them here for a little while.

Part 1: The Story

"You laugh at me like I'm joking, but I'm telling all of you the truth!"

Makoto kept her face stern as she brought the flashlight beneath her chin so that its beam of yellow light would illuminate her face from beneath, casting creepy shadows below her eyes and mouth as she maintained an expression of absolute seriousness, the laughter of her friends dying down around her as she continued with her story.

"Every night the lone samurai wanders the forests and valleys, searching for the man who took his head in battle. Sometimes, if you listen really carefully, you can hear him moving, his boots scraping against the ground as he hobbles on his one bad leg, deadheading towards Tokyo: ker-plop, ker-plop, ker-plop…"

Chibi-Usa and Usagi gasped in unison as both of them clung tighter to an arm of Mamoru's each one of them had claimed while Hotaru scooted unconsciously closer towards her parents until her back brushed up against Michiru's legs and startled her. They were all gathered around a campfire, in a circle, Minako cuddled up to Rei and Ami drinking from a thermos of hot chocolate and giving her significant other the room she needed for her overdramatic story telling.

The burning wood crackled, the sound louder than a gunshot as it disrupted the silence that had settled between all of them.

Then Makoto turned off the flashlight and set it face down in the dirt, stretching her arms above her head with a huge grin at the obvious affect that her story had had over the group.

Yeah, she was just that good.

"Well, that's my scary story of the evening. Who's next?" Makoto asked, slinging an arm around Ami's shoulders and drawing her closer.

"I know! What about you, Rei?" Usagi volunteered.

"What? No!" Rei growled, crossing her arms in front of her chest.

"Oh, come on, Rei!" Minako purred, hanging onto Rei's sweater clad arm and smiling up at her in that sickeningly sweet, do-this-for-your-girlfriend-and-I-will-repay-you-later-in-private, sort of way. "You're a miko, I'm sure you have plenty of stories of restless spirits trying to come back from the beyond and stuff."

Rei was immediately glad for the gloom of the night because she was sure had it been daylight, the blush that rose up in her face would have been visible to the whole world.

"I—uh—"

"One with ghosts!" Chibi-Usa piped up.

"I—"

"And monsters!" Minako added, grinning mischievously up at Rei as she began to sweat drop.

"Well—"

"I hope you tell a ghost story better than you build a campfire though." Usagi interrupted, "Who would have thought you'd be so bad at setting something on fire, Mars."

"Hey! You should talk! You're the one who knocked the original one over and caused it to die out in the first place!" Rei shouted back.

Usagi's eyes immediately began to tear up and she clung to Mamoru's arm tighter as Minako felt Rei stiffen at her side. Everyone knew what was coming.

"Why do you have to be so mean all of the time, Rei?" Their princess sniffed, pouting pitifully.

"Awww, she didn't mean it, Usagi." Minako came to the rescue with a smile Rei would have described as sly, "It's just a little past her bed time and you know how cranky she gets when she doesn't get her beauty sleep."

"Mina!" Rei hissed. "Speak for yourself!"

Makoto started laughing, but just managed to stifle it into a coughing fit before Haruka started in. The blond haired racer, however, didn't even try to hide her mirth and was only silenced when her lover's elbow made contact with her ribcage.

"Ow!" Haruka groaned, rubbing at her side like she really had been wounded and looking dejectedly to her lover for compensation. "Why do you always have to be so mean to me, Michiru?"

"Because some children need a little more disciplining than others." She replied, smirking up at the blond.

Then Michiru belittled her actions by leaning up and laying a lingering kiss on Haruka's lips as Usagi giggled at their antics.

Eventually, Mamoru was connived by the two excited blondes of the group and his future daughter, into being the next storyteller. His story was about a man who had been paralyzed as a youngster and had lived his entire life alone. Then one day he was shopping at a marketplace and to his horror, he saw a man who looked exactly like him and was dressed like he was, walking parallel to his wheelchair on the other side of the street like any other stranger.

Chibi-Usa gasped. "Was he really his double, Mamoru-chan?"

Mamoru nodded gravely.

Makoto turned to Ami. "There's a name for that. It's a German something…what do they call it?"

"A doppelganger." Ami whispered back, twining their fingers together as she leaned her forehead against Makoto's cheek.

"Oh, yeah, I remember now." Makoto replied, relishing in the contact.

"Then his double turned around and looked right at him!" Mamoru said, wheeling around dramatically, causing Chibi-Usa and Usagi to cling to one another unsteadily and almost fall off the log the three of them were occupying.

Hotaru felt a hand on her shoulder and startled, staring up into warm garnet eyes. Before she could say anything, her Setsuna-mama had settled a jacket around her shoulders. Apparently, she'd been shivering and she hadn't even noticed it.

The air around them was deathly still as Mamoru continued his story.

"The man thought he was losing his mind, of course, he had to be. How was it that he could be seeing himself walking beside him when he himself couldn't even walk anymore? It didn't make any sense. The man got more paranoid, not trusting his senses or even those closest to him and eventually he shut himself up inside of his house, refusing to come out ever again. No one saw him for years, until one day when his doctor made a house call only to find that the old man had died.

"He was buried and his house was boarded up and nothing was ever mentioned about the crazy old man again, until one night, a blacksmith was on his way home when he noticed a figure moving through the garden of the dead man's house. He shouted at the figure, but whoever it was didn't pay any attention to him and just kept walking. The blacksmith shouted again and again he was ignored so he went over to the garden gate to let himself in and found it padlocked…from the inside."

Mamoru paused for dramatic effect, everyone's attention now focused solely on him.

"Whispers went through the small town, about the person who was still living in the boarded up house on the edge of the village. A team of policemen were sent to investigate, but when they unboarded the door and went inside, they couldn't find anyone in the whole place. They even inspected the attic and the garden fence for signs of tampering, but the ten foot high iron enclosure was as sturdy as it had been when it had been built years before and the spikes on the top of every post would have made it impossible for someone to climb over it so the police were dumbfounded. In the end, though, they couldn't find the man the blacksmith had described to them so they reboarded up the door and left the place alone for good.

"Months went by and during that short amount of time, the blacksmith had become the laughingstock of the village. People laughed at him and called him crazy and mocked him for the apparition he'd seen, but he knew what he had seen. He knew it was real and so one night he went back to the house and again the same man was walking in the garden. The blacksmith went back several more nights and each time he went back to the house, he again saw the same man who seemed to have no knowledge that he was being watched or even cared strolling through the garden. Finally, encouraged by the many sightings, the blacksmith waited until after dark and got his wife out of bed and took her to the house, but there was no man. The wife began to think that her husband was losing his mind and one day he came home from work to find that she had taken their son and left him. The blacksmith was heartbroken.

"Determined to prove to the town and his wife that he wasn't crazy after all, he decided that he was going to kill the man. That way he would have a body to show to people and he could say he found it in the garden that way, so mad was it already that he didn't think they would pin the killing on him even if he was caught. So, the blacksmith waited until evening again and then took a sword his father had made and went to the dead man's house to wait. After midnight, the apparition appeared again, walking through the garden. Having come prepared, the blacksmith used a flat ended chisel and a rubber mallet to break off the padlock to the gate. Then he tossed down his tools and drew the sword.

"He shouted, but the figure ignored him so he ran at it."

Here Mamoru stopped and folded his hands in front of him, gauging the looks of anticipation on everyone's faces. After less than five seconds of silence, Usagi broke down and smacked him on the shoulder.

"Ouch, Usako!" Earth's future prince raised his hands to defend himself.

Chibi-usa stood up, "Mamoru-chan, you have to tell us what happened!"

Mamoru shrugged, lowering his hands, "That's just it, nothing happened. No one ever heard from or saw the blacksmith again. End of story."

"That's a horrible story!" Usagi criticized, gapping at him.

Mamoru shrugged again, "You wanted a story, I gave you a story."

"A good story, Mamoru, a story with a dramatic, bleeding heart ending, not no ending at all."

"But that story doesn't have an ending…"

"Well, make one up!" Chibi-usa and Usagi chanted at the same time.

"Fine!"

Mamoru took a deep breath and gave himself a few moments to think. Then finally he settled back comfortably again, ready to finish the story under the scrutiny of the entire group and his future queen and daughter.

"Um, well…"

The poor man twiddled his thumbs together as he tried desperately to come up with something in his head, anything that would be creative enough to please the crowd before he was thrown to the lions for bad story telling.

"Aha!" He shouted on the verge of an epiphany. "The blacksmith cut off the head of the dead man's double, showed it to the people of the town and became internationally famous for being the first man in history to prove, without a doubt, the existence of doppelgangers. From then on, the people of the village loved him so much, in fact, that he wasn't put in jail for the killing and his wife and son came back to him and he lived off of the publicity money for the rest of his life. The end. Better?"

"Better." Usagi said, leaning up and rewarding her flustered boyfriend with a kiss.

Chibi-usa made a gagging sound and the rest of the senshi laughed. Maybe this trip had been a good idea after all.

Soon though, all of the senshi were ghost storied out and everyone headed back to their respective tents for the night.

As the Outers were walking back to their own tents, Haruka stretched her hands behind her head and looked up at the stars glowing brilliantly against the black sky.

"You're awfully quiet tonight, Firefly." The blond commented, looking down at her daughter out of the corner of her eye.

Through the whole story telling session, the black haired girl hadn't said a word or made a sound save a gasp of surprise when she had backed up into Michiru.

"Not one for scary stories?" Setsuna asked, with a knowing smile.

Hotaru shook her head no and maintained her silence as they walked.

"That's all they are, just stories." Michiru soothed, rubbing the girl's back sympathetically as they stopped outside of Hotaru and Setsuna's tent. "Don't give them too much thought, alright?"

"She'll be fine, won't you, Firefly?" Haruka reassured standing beside them and ruffling the girl's hair affectionately.

Hotaru shook the hair out of her eyes and nodded bravely. Haruka seemed satisfied with that and leaned down to give her daughter a kiss on the cheek before starting off towards the tent she shared with Michiru, "Sweet dreams, Firefly."

"Goodnight, Papa."

Michiru remained behind a little longer, looking down into the quiet girl's deep amethyst eyes as Setsuna went into her tent and began rolling out their sleeping bags and getting her toothbrush and pajamas ready so she could start getting ready for sleep.

The whole point of this trip had been to give them all a place to go and relax for a little while.

After their last battle with Galaxia, they had all been more than just a little on edge and ready for a break from saving the Earth from evil neurotic women who came from outside and inside of their galaxy to conquer it. That was why when summer had finally rolled around again, they had all collaborated to take a trip somewhere and get away from Tokyo for a few days or so. Hence the camping trip. But everything wasn't back to normal yet.

Since the final battle and they had all been brought back to life…Hotaru hadn't been the same.

She still did everything her parents asked her to. She still seemed to love them and the rest of her extended family like she always had, but she talked less now and when she did it was usually either in a whisper or to Setsuna or Chibi-usa. The girl never argued either—not that she had been a difficult child before the fighting had taken place—but she used to have more of an opinion than she allowed herself these days.

Whatever the reasons, Hotaru had changed somewhat and it was worrying her parents.

Setsuna, Haruka, and Michiru had sat up late a couple of nights talking about it. Setsuna thought that it was the shock of dying that had caused the change in her. Even when she had died and been reborn as an infant, she had retained no memories of those times. Whereas now, she was completely aware of the before and the after without having to be told about it secondhand…as well as being completely aware of who it was who had killed her.

The senshi of Neptune took a deep breath and released it as she thought about it.

They had attacked their own daughter, their child.

Michiru had tried not to think about it as much as possible in the succeeding months after the battle. It had all been done in the name of sacrifice. Because they had had to do it, but in the end the means ceased to really matter as the bottom line remained the same: they had attacked their own daughter and killed her. She and Setsuna had understood in the end. They had understood what was going on and why it had needed to happen, they'd said they did, but it couldn't erase the sense of guilt that hung over what she and Haruka had done to them, their family.

Michiru grimaced inside as those eyes stared back up at her, confusion and a lack of real fear swimming in their depths. The soul that she could feel mirrored in those eyes was kind and dear and loving, but the coldness of one who could wield the power of death hung like a frost over it.

Michiru sighed, bending down to plant a kiss on Hotaru's forehead. Then straightening back up, she pushed the girl's hair back behind her ears and held her chin.

"If you need anything, you're Haruka-papa and Setsuna-mama and I are right here."

The little girl nodded. "Goodnight, Michiru-mama."

"Goodnight, sweetheart." Michiru said.

She paused a moment, staring with concern one more time into the child's eyes before stepping back from her and heading for her own tent.

Hotaru watched her mother go, eyes following her intently until the tent flap closed behind her. Once Michiru had disappeared, Hotaru set off in search of Setsuna and her pajamas.

End of Part 1