If Only I Died Inside

Elise's Sorrow

After a very small conversation with Q, Elise ran back upstairs. She'd told Rintarou that she'd needed to use the bathroom, but she'd actually snuck into the basement to see Q.

Elise really did care about Q. They were her best friend, after all. After Kyouka left it had just been the two of them in the mafia to be kids, and so they had gotten closer and stuck together ever since.

The only thing was that Rintarou wanted Elise all to himself. He loved her very much, and therefore was very clingy to her. And she hated it.

He had told her a while back that she had a list of rules she couldn't break for any reason, and she was still mad about it.

Elise finished scribbling in her dragon with her crayons. She held it up that way Rintarou could see it. He smiled and told her that it was amazing.

She nodded happily and stood up, picking her picture up off the floor.

"Where are you going, Elise-Chan?" Rintarou asked her.

"I'm going to go show Q my drawing!" She exclaimed before running out of the room.

She ran out of the office and into the cafeteria area. Showing people her drawing as she passed them, they smiled at her and told her it was good.

Even though she knew Rintarou had ordered the entire mafia to treat her like a princess, it still made her feel good to get so many compliments on her drawing skills.

They'd probably be better if she didn't have a one hundred yen box of crayons from the store, though.

Eventually, she reached the stairs to the basement. She hopped down them two at a time, excited to show Q what she'd drawn this time.

At the bottom of the stairs she took a left into a long hallway to different rooms. They were all pretty small and had one bed hanging by a chain off the wall. These were prisoner cells.

They hadn't been used in a while, but they still had the remains of people who were once in there inside.

Elise shuddered and continued on quickly, asking herself how Kyouka had lived in one of those.

At the end of the hallway was a room split into two sections by a prison cell door that could be opened and closed from the inside.

However, the button could be locked and only a key that Rintarou had would open it, making the button become unusable.

Right now, the door was lifted. This meant she could actually sit by Q.

Inside of Q's half of the room was a bed like the ones in the prisoner cells, a very small desk, a pile of unwanted books in the corner, an old rug with many holes in it on the floor, a small curtain hung in another corner that Q could change clothes behind, a pile of maybe three outfits at most underneath of Q's desk, a coffee cup, and a small coffee maker sitting on Q's desk.

Q was currently sitting on their bed with their doll, humming a TV song from around five or six years ago to themselves as they bounced their doll around. They looked up when Elise walked in.

"Hey bestie~" Elise greeted in a sing-song voice.

"Hola," Q replied.

"Guess who brought her latest masterpiece~"

"The princess herself?" Q teased.

"You know it!"

Elise sat beside Q and noticed a bug crawling on the floor. She squished it with her shoe and declared that she'd eventually get Mori to have someone clean the basement.