Note: Ignores the Rhinestone Eyes storyboard, and is set in a world where Noodle and Russ make it to Plastic Beach while things are still pretty peaceful and she sneaks inside before anyone knows they're there.
Written for kink_bingo for the (g-rated) kink mirrors and doubles.
The elevator moved in fits and starts, one moment making her heart leap into her throat by plummeting several feet, the next stopping dead and refusing to movie until she'd removed its control panel and fiddled around with its workings. She'd have thought that even Murdoc would have enough sense to keep the thing which kept him from splattering like a pancake at the bottom of its shaft whenever he needed to move to another level in working order, but apparently that was giving him to much credit. At least he'd kept up their old habit of having their whole studio wired with webcams, so with what research she'd been able to do back on the ship before it was destroyed she knew right where she wanted to go and didn't need to spend extra time in the elevator searching.
The maintenance man she saw when she stepped off ignored her completely, so she did the same to him. He wasn't what she was there for. She darted down a small flight of stairs and there it was, the closet, just where she'd seen it online. And within... herself, as she'd been four years before. If she'd ever had dozens of wires jamming into her body.
For a moment she could only stare, revolted. Seeing it on a screen was one thing, but it wasn't until she was standing in front of it in its flesh and circuitry that it really hit her what a perversion of her own form it was. She had never looked that empty, she was sure, not even when all her memories had been left behind in a hidden military base.
She wanted to storm away, to hunt down Murdoc and break his nose for the ninth, and tenth, and eleventh times just for making it before she even decided what else he had coming to him for everything he'd done, but she couldn't yet. Not when she wasn't sure of the full extent of his crimes. Not when she couldn't trust that he'd only made it to play guitar and give fans something shaped like her to look at.
It didn't respond at all to her presence as she came closer, not until she grabbed the hem of its shirt. The moment she touched it its eyes sprang open and its mouth gaped wide, revealing the muzzle of a gun poking out from between its lips. From between her lips, and suddenly it became even more disturbing that Murdoc would decide to make her face capable of that.
"Stop that," she told it, and pushed her mask off her face so it could get a good look at her. "Don't you know who I am? That's my body too, I have a right to look at it."
Though she'd said the words firmly, like she'd had no doubt they'd be accepted, she was truly surprised when they actually seemed to work and the muzzle withdrew down her throat. It peered at her closely then grabbed her face with one hand, its mechanical grip strong enough that she wouldn't be surprised if she bruised, and twisted her face to the side to look at the marred skin around her eye. It opened its mouth again, but all that come out this time was a series of high pitched beeps.
Noodle didn't expect the pity that stirred under the disgust at the sound. "Poor thing," she told it, "did he not even give you your own voice? No, we're not as much the same now as his memory would have told him. But I need to see how different we are."
When her hands went to its shirt again it didn't react, allowing her to unbutton it and push it off its shoulders as much as the wires sticking out of her allowed. She kept her eyes fixed low at first, almost dreading to look up. "Why do you have a belly button?" she wondered out loud even though she knew it couldn't answer her and likely didn't know in any case. She pressed her finger against it and shook at how much if felt just like real flesh, her own flesh. Their skin, she saw, was exactly the same color.
She slowly pulled her eyes upwards, cataloguing differences as she went. There weren't many, not if she pushed her mental image of herself back a few years; there was a scar or two missing that she'd gotten while training to be a soldier and an access port for her power lines added here and there, but otherwise she might as well have been examining herself. Not until she reached her chest, and then a small amount of tension left her body.
There was nothing there but flat skin stretched out over the ribs underneath, no budding breasts for grimy hands to play with, not even nipples standing out against it.
But that was the least of her concerns. There were still worse possibilities, and she couldn't stop without seeing if they were true or not. She kneeled down in front of the cyborg and it allowed her to pull down its skirt just as easily as it had let her strip off its shirt after that first tense moment, revealing plain cotton panties beneath. They were the type she would have worn herself, nothing at all provocative about them. They even could have been hers, left behind when she left Kong; why would Murdoc waste money on new clothing when anything of hers that he could find would fit perfectly?
She hooked her fingers over the elastic waistband, not really wanting to explore further but knowing that she had to be sure, she had to. She yanked them down as quickly as she could, not looking away from the flesh they'd been covering, fearing the worst and finding...
The area at the cusp of its thighs was as flat and featureless as a Barbie doll's privates. She pushed its legs apart and looked between them just to be sure, but there really was nothing there, not even, when she turned it around, a crack to its arse. She pressed her hand against the skin between its legs, looking up at its face to see if it caused any reaction at all, anything he could use against it, but its only reaction was to look down at her curiously.
She let her whole body sag, her head dropping forward until it landed somewhere that would have been quite rude on anyone else but meant nothing at all to her duplicate. It was exactly like her younger self in almost every detail, except for the one that would have suggested an unforgivable use that Murdoc may have had for it beyond its skills as a bodyguard and guitarist. Even the only real orifice that she had was taken up with a gun.
Perhaps that meant that when she confronted him it wouldn't need to end in violence after all.