Hello. I hope you forgive me that I joined the group only to ask this question, but I hope you can find me this fanfic.

I can't even say for sure who was the central figure in this fanfic - Octavia or Vinyl. Whoever that was, she was depressed/shut-in and had a collection of dolls (or figurines) including some made to represent her friends/acquaintances. I know this is horribly vague, but I doubt there a lot of fanfics with either Octavia or Vinyl where they have doll collection which have a prominent place in the narration.

The best I can offer is a localized google search

I found my story. It'sFragile Secrets, and I want to say one of the best Sad OctaScratch things on this site.

Localized google search was nigh useless, because it searches everything on the page (including comments) and somehow comments grant more relevance to the result than main text.

I ended up downloading Fimfarchive and then trying half a dozen different programs to search through archive before finally finding DocFetcher. It builds database for a few hours, but after that it searches instantly. At least I was able to found two more stories that I barely remembered (and they not about Vinyl and/or Octavia, so I was not asking about them here).