The Dreaming 2.36

By Asynca

Sorry, C-Kunks, for all the bad feels.

"No…" It was like a nightmare.

I was staring at myself – every detail was exact, 'I' was even wearing my own clothes from back home – but it wasn't me. It was something else, and it was sentient.

I pulled my hand away from where I thought the surface of the mirror would be, taking a step back. She copied me with the same knowing smile. That was when I saw what was in her other hand: a satellite phone. I'd just though it was a reflection of mine in the dark, but now the light was on I could see it wasn't even the same brand of phone. I recognised it, though, and my stomach dropped.

It was Macca's.

She was wearing my holsters, too, and they had Sean's pistols in them. And, God, Macca's car was outside… "What have you done with them?" I asked her, still lost.

"That's your question?" She looked mildly amused. "Not, 'who are you?', 'what are you doing here?'" She extended a hand towards me with a falsely cheerful expression. "Hi, I'm Lara Croft," she said. "I'm so pleased to meet you."

Sam had been behind one of the wrecked boats. "Are you talking to yourself again?" She was laughing, and I could hear her footsteps rounding the edge of one of the wrecked boats in front of me. When she appeared on the other side of it, she had her camera up and she was panning across the whole scene, looking at her LCD. "Because if you are I'm totally going to get some footage of—what the hell?" Her camera reached the 'mirror'.

I felt like my feet were cased in cement.

"In a manner of speaking, yes," the reflection said, "she is talking to herself." She turned around and in one sharp movement drew a gun and fired a shot at Sam.

"No!" I shrieked, not caring how sore or how tired I was, I just launched myself at her. She easily threw me off and I landed heavily on my side on the concrete floor. Something clattered across the ground toward me and I twisted frantically toward the boat. Sam wasn't hurt, she'd just backed up, terrified, against the hull of the wrecked boat. On the ground near me was a severed LCD panel. It was Sam's camera that had been shot, not Sam.

A boot stepped on the back of my neck, pressing my face against the cold concrete. I would have struggled, but I was acutely aware that she had loaded guns and one of them was probably pointing at my head.

"What are you?" Sam was breathing, looking horrified. "Are you an evil doppelganger spirit or something and I'm not allowed to film you?"

The 'Doppelganger' laughed once, but ignored Sam's question as she focused her attention on me. "You have something that doesn't belong to you," she said in my voice, treading some of her weight against my jugular so my ears rang and I felt like I was going to pass out again. "I suggest you avoid a whole load of ugliness and just let me take it from you right now."

If she was after the artefacts, she was working for Amanda and Natla, as if that wasn't obvious enough. Only Natla would send a clone of myself after me. I hadn't done what she'd said, either. Good, I thought. Go to hell where you belong, Natla.

"She has something that doesn't belong to her?" Sam was saying, I think rather upset about her camera. "She does? Why don't you give her face back first and then we'll talk about the Scion and the Slave Stone!"

"Sam…" I said. I couldn't get much air through my throat because of how heavy the boot was. I wasn't sure if Sam could hear me. "Sam, don't say anything…!"

When the Doppelganger spoke again, she'd obviously bent down a little because her voice came from closer to my ear. "Are you worried I'll shoot her if she annoys me, Lara?" she said. "I'm you, and you're still worried I'll do it?" She laughed again. "That's very interesting. Put your arms out so I can take off your backpack."

I coughed. "You're nothing like me," I said, pinning my arms against my side. "If you were, you'd be helping me defeat Natla and Amanda, not working for them."

When she spoke again, there was a smile in her voice. "Very well," she said, and I felt the cold steel of a the barrel of a pistol on the back of my neck. "We'll do this the hard way."

For a moment I could only hear the sound of my laboured breath. If the pistol was against my skin, she was bending down. Now was my opportunity.

I twisted my head to the side so when she fired, it just connected with the concrete floor and sent chunks of it into my shoulder. Then, I bucked against her and toppled her backwards.

I stood over her while she recovered and managed to land one solid kick in her ribs before I spotted the second pistol some distance away from her on the floor. When I'd thrown her off, it had fallen out of her holster.

She saw me look at it and then at her. Instead of looking at all surprised or concerned, and instead of going for it, she just raised her gun and fired a couple of shots at me. I dropped out of the way of them, but God I was still stiff and my wrist collapsed when I landed on it. The blood seeping through the bandage Sam had put on my arm reminded me of her.

"Go, Sam!" I yelled to her. "Go find out what happened to the others!"

I managed to reach the gun and crawl under one of the wrecks. The Doppelganger was out of my line of sight so she couldn't shoot me, but that made me worry about the others. I stepped out from behind the other side of the boat, gun ready, to find her before she could get to them.

I needn't have bothered though, because as I was edging along the boxes of broken rubbish, I felt the gun against my temple again. "If you're looking for the boys," she said, "then you're about two thousand miles off. Have you heard of the Boab Prison Tree...? Oh— silly me," she said, pretending to dramatically wince. "That's right. You don't know anything about Aboriginal history."

God, I hoped those two were okay. I stepped out of another shot, using my shoulder to ram her up again the tin wall of the shed. Terrifyingly, it didn't even appear to wind her. She did have some blood on the t-shirt of mine she was wearing, though. I was excited about it until I realised it was mine, and that it was my shoulder that had been bleeding. I made a split-second assessment that I wasn't going to be disabled by that amount of blood loss, and then raised my gun and shot at her.

It went straight through the tin of the shed and then her pistol was against my temple again and she was beside me. That wasn't… that wasn't possible, was it? Maybe she was a spirit, and like the Pigeon she could appear and disappear at will. Or maybe I was just so slow from being tired that her moving as I usually did just seemed supernaturally fast.

I had a really bad feeling about this. Still, she had felt like flesh and blood when my fingertips had been touching hers before. If she was alive, then I could kill her.

There were voices from the roof, and I heard Bree screaming something to Sam, but I couldn't make out what she was saying. Min was frantically trying to quieten her down.

"How do you think this is going to end, Lara?" the Doppelganger asked me. She cocked the pistol and I heard the sound of it through my skull.

I could hear footsteps coming down the internal stairs, and Min yelled, "Lara!"

The Doppelganger ignored them. "Come on, stop for a moment and be honest with yourself. You're exhausted. You can't think properly and you certainly can't move properly. On the other hand, I am you, and I've never been in better condition."

I didn't want to listen to her. "Go!" I yelled at the others. "Get out of here!"

There were voices and footsteps and the sound of the big double-doors rattling. "It's locked!" That was Sam's voice.

"Find something to pry it open, then!" I called to her. "Anything, there must be something in this place!"

While I was distracted, a fist drove deep into my solar plexus and I doubled over, seeing stars. While I was writhing on the floor in a ball, trying desperately to draw a breath, I could feel the Doppelganger step over me. I heard more than felt the straps on my backpack being cut, and then the weight of it was gone.

I tried to recover as fast as I could, but the adrenaline had made my muscles shake and that, coupled with my difficulty in breathing and how weak I was, meant that I wasn't fast enough to grab it back from her. She lifted it easily out of my reach, and when I tried to trip her up she just stepped over my ankle.

I still had my gun though, and so I lined it up to shoot her. She kicked my wrist away. "You should have stayed home and slept," she said as she tied the two cut straps together and fit the backpack over her shoulders. When the others spoke, she did glance up to where they were standing, though.

"Here, you're stronger," Sam was saying. "Take it like this, and— yeah, try that."

"You'd think people would have learnt not to hang around you by now," the Doppelganger commented loudly enough for the others to hear and she tested the straps. Then, she started to walk towards where they were. "Shall I go warn them?"

That made me roll upward on my sore legs, struggling to rush after her.

She turned around sharply and I stopped in my tracks. I just had no idea what she was going to do or what she was capable of. "You're not going to follow me," she said calmly. "I know everything about you. I know how you think, how you work, and I know how to stop you. You can't win."

"If you're me," I said, raising my gun at her, "then there's a chance I can win."

She had a creepily neutral expression. "I am you," she said, "but with one major difference. I don't have any of your mortal flaws."

I frowned at her. Her voice sounded like mine, but that sounded like something that would come out of Natla's mouth. Why did she sound like Natla?

"Oh, come on," she said when it was clear I didn't understand. She tucked her hair behind her ears in a movement I often made, and then jutted out one of her hips. She very abruptly dropped the dispassionate demeanour and gave me a coy little smile. "Sam says I'm really photogenic," she said, pretending to be shy. "But what do you think…?" She lifted the t-shirt to the middle of her stomach, showing some of her skin. Her expression asked me if I wanted to see more.

My jaw dropped. "It wasn't me who filmed that!"

She didn't stop there, though, she grabbed her breasts and started breathing heavily, biting the corner of her lip. That was it. I had fucking had it with this whole game. I didn't care what Natla or Amanda were doing or what for, but this was not okay. "Fuck you," I said through a very tight throat as I walked straight towards her with the gun raised. "Just fuck you!"

I squeezed the trigger, but even before I had completed the motion, she had already stepped aside with that knowing smile.

It was a few seconds before I really realised what had happened; Min and Bree were screaming and all I could feel the Doppelganger smiling at me as she ran off somewhere. I didn't know why I wasn't following her, though, until I was finally able to process – almost in slow motion – what I was looking at.

"Lara…?" Sam had been behind The Doppelganger when I'd shot at her, and there was a mixture of shock and confusion on Sam's beautiful face that would haunt my dreams for the rest of my life.

She was clutching her stomach, and when she took her hands away for a moment to look at them, they were covered in blood.