Storeroom
By LoveAnimeForever
Surprisingly, it was Suigintou who found Shinku sobbing in the old workroom, now store-room for broken dolls.
In a moment of despair, she had probably condemned herself to join their ranks, but now, she must be regretting it – not one of the Rozen Maiden could hold their own against the taunting smiles and empty eyes of the broken marionettes that occupied that room.
Opening the door, Suigintou was greeted by a jester, with beady eyes and a malicious grin painted onto its powder-white face, crumpled at her feet. She stepped over him gingerly, tentatively stepped over the corpses of what could have been members of her family. Corpses still suspended by remnants of strings long cut, hanging in rows of limp, rejected bodies. Some were incomplete – there were eyes missing, arms missing, even whole torsos missing (Suigintou knew about the agony of that). And there were those that you could tell were once magnificent dolls, perhaps Alice candidates, but a slip of the hand or another malignant doll had ripped a limb away, or torn hair away. Somehow there had been no salvation for those dolls, no chance of restoration, as if allowing themselves to break had been an unforgivable sin.
Shinku must have been feeling that way.
And Suigintou had caused it.
But there was no more hate in her, only fear that another precious sister would be lost to the oblivion of endless dreams. Suigintou had once been abandoned to that fate, and she knew how traumatizing a doll's death was. No, she wouldn't let her little sister suffer.
Suigintou scooped Shinku up gently and carried her trembling body from the shadows, and took her to her own N-Field. In truth, Suigintou's N-Field wasn't much better, considering the dark tones that made it up, but at least it was colour and life, not just the monochrome of death in the store-room.
Shinku thanked Suigintou unsteadily, and returned to her own N-Field after recovering slightly. Death was a frightening concept. And it had been her most hated sister who saved her. Shinku supposed she should have learnt something from the episode.
She was just coming to a conclusion, emerging from the mirror to Jun's room, when Barasuishou appeared with Laplace in tow and –
Barasuishou ripped her elder sister's Alice from her chest, and disappeared into her N-Field with a cold smile, leaving a broken doll slumped on the floor like so many others before her, clothed in the red of the blood she could not bleed.