Doppelganger [2016] [P/UP]

1

There was a time, many years ago, when I was happy.

The disease I had been afflicted with had not spread far enough to cause me that same old gut-wrenching pain that I now feel every day.

I had a mother, a father, and even an older brother at the time.

My brother, four years my senior, had decided to follow in our father's footsteps by becoming a doctor. I wanted to be like mother, a nurse and assistant to my brother.

Then the effects of the disease worsened.

It got to the point where I only had enough energy to get out of bed once every week or so.

And the pain, the crippling pain that raged throughout my body like wildfire. It has only gotten worse since.

My brother looked after me during that time. Our parents were frantically searching for a cure and day after day I could see the disease slowly spreading across my brother's body.

He would call my name and brush back the beautiful brown hair I got from our mother.

Even now I can still feel his touch...

My precious older brother...

It was during that time of weakness that the countries around ours decided that they didn't want to risk the disease spreading to them, so they burned our beautiful home to the ground.

The place where I grew up in had been turned to ashes in less than a day and the Marines were called in to kill us all off.

Didn't they know it was a hereditary disease?

I remember wanting and praying for my brother as the hospital I had been in was burnt. The only day he wasn't there was the day I died.

I might as well have, at least.

My memory grows fuzzy at that point, but I remember waking up in a wagon of bodies.

My beautiful brown hair had been singed black and burnt to the length of a boy's.

It was at that point I knew that nothing would ever be the same.

I prepared myself for a death that never came.

It was a higher ranking Marine, I remember that clearly, who had descovered that I was still alive.

They all mistook me for a boy. I remember the voice, the words that brought my salvation.

"Let's give this one to that fucker Vegapunk. He wanted a live guinea pig."

Not the best string of words for a little girl of only five years, but they were my salvation none the less.

I was taken and my home destroyed.

It was about a week later when I met the man I would grow up with.

My family was dead, my home was dead, the old me was dead. The new me had to live on.

Doctor Vegapunk could hardly be called a doctor. Doctors were supposed to help and heal people, like mother and father did.

This man was mad.

The scientist cut out parts of my skin where the disease showed most prominently and tested them for months, always harvesting more samples.

It sounds like an unhealthy way of living, but in truth it was not entirely bad.

He knew almost instantly that I was a girl, and yet he didn't throw me away. He replaced the organs that were infected with the disease (everything save my heart and brain)- which gave me a little more time to live- and taught me medicine like mother and father used to.

Unfortunately the government could not know that I was a girl- couldn't have me growing up and having a diseased child now could they?- so my hair remained short and black.

My brother- the person I loved most in the world- was dead, so I took his name and grew up as a boy.

Lamie... The girl that I had been, was dead.

Yet even with my new organs I hardly had a year added on to my lifespan.

Vegapunk never did find a cure for me, but he created a medicine- a serum that needed to be injected into the bloodstream once every six hours that would stop the effects of my disease for just long enough.

I lived like that for nearly sixteen years until it happened.

The day I descovered that my most precious person was alive.

His name- the name I had used for so long- and his face stared up at me from a wanted poster and I nearly cried. He looked just like father.

Trafalgar Law... My precious big brother...

Was alive.