100 Yellow Doors

june 6th, 2020, 8:27 p.m.

"Jules?"

Julien heard Fritz's voice, felt Fritz's nails as they caught in the fibers of his suit jacket, but Julien did not respond. He could not respond; he was focused, ever focused, on Rosario. She sat watching him now from her perch upon the couch, the very tilt of her head suggesting that some sort of crown belonged there.

"Set you...free?" repeated Rosario.

Julien sighed, the breath trembling upon his lips, and dipped his head.

"Jules," Fritz was saying. "Julien, wait. Think about this, okay? Think—"

"Oh, quit it, Haneul," said Rosario, drawing Fritz to an abrupt silence. Fritz's hands slid, hesitant, from around Julien. He stood on quivering legs, as if the very sound of his real name from Rosario's mouth had shaken him to his core. "Like you didn't know it would come to this? Tell him, then. Tell him, Haneul, how you and Seraphine both lied to him. He should know before he dies."
"No," said Fritz. As he did, there was a low tap against the glass of the windows, followed by another, and another. Soon the night silence was replaced by the fervent patter of rain, a sound that vexed Julien the more he heard it. Everything was annoying; everything was exhausting. The awful vintage wallpaper, the ratty carpeting, the anklet twinkling upon Rosario's brown skin.

"That's unnecessary," said Fritz, shooting a worried glance toward Sera, who still slumped unconscious against the far wall, "because nobody's doing any dying."

"Fritz," said Julien, his voice scraped raw. "That isn't up to you."

"It is if I fucking say so!" roared Fritz, kneeling before Julien again, so quickly that Julien rolled backwards, startled. Fritz's face was red, blotchy; until then, Julien had never seen the man as anything but a fittingly vampiric pale. "Your family's dead. I know that's painful, Jules, but all of our families are gone now. Mine is. Sera's is. Even Rosario's—long gone. That's just the life we live now; you know that. You're just going to give up? You're just going to—"

"Tell me, Fritz."

A sputter. "What?"

"She said you lied. Tell me what you lied about."

Fritz just blinked at him, his mouth half-open in an awed frown.

That was all the answer Julien needed.

"You knew," Julien said, and though he hadn't thought there was much left in the first place, something inside his chest emptied, leaving behind a painfully dark nothing. He'd thought gaining his memories back would be a massive wave of self-discovery, but he had never felt less like himself. "You knew, this whole time, and you didn't tell me."

"I was just protecting you, Jules," Fritz stammered. He reached out for Julien, clawing at his shirt collar, willing him to look him in the face. "I just wanted to make sure you were happy—"

"Like I fucking said," Julien seethed, swatting Fritz's hand away. "That isn't up to you."

From behind them, there was a theatrical sigh. "What a mess this all is," said Rosario, raking her hair behind one ear. "After I wiped your memory, Juliano, I gave Haneul and Seraphine the lovely task of looking over you. But it seems they both grew a bit too attached. Started disagreeing about how to properly care for you, and such. Seraphine even going so far as to poison the park animals to bring you to her side again."

Thunder cracked somewhere high above their heads. Sera groaned, blinking her eyes open.

When Julien got to his feet, turning around, Rosario was already there. She tipped his chin forwards, smiling at him, two clean lines of white teeth. "I'm thinking now that we both would have been better off if I'd looked after you myself, however painful that might have been."

"I need to know some things," said Julien, his hair falling lank into his face, "before I die."

Fritz started, "Julien—"

"The Patels," said Julien. "Manu. Iman. I know you're the one who cursed them—er, at least, I suspect."

Rosario's face flashed with recognition. "Oh, Manu? But it wasn't a curse. It was a gift I gave him. You see, long ago he saved my life. I was simply paying back a debt—"

"I don't care why you did it," Julien interrupted. Rosario dropped her hand. "I just want to make sure you can undo it after I'm gone."
There was another audible groan from Sera's direction. Julien glimpsed her over Rosario's shoulder; she was staggering to her feet, one hand balanced against the wall, blue eyes bloodshot.

She stared at him, and for a moment he was himself again, dancing with Sera in his arms, the soft melody of her voice the only rhythm to guide him. He missed her. Even looking at her, he missed her.

Yet there was someone else he missed more. Someone whose name struck him like a bullet every time he heard it, someone whose laugh—although slightly too loud, sometimes—never failed to elicit the same reaction from him, someone who pored over history books and obscure documentaries rather than going out each night. Someone who he thought of each time he looked into Rosario's eerily similar face. Someone, he thought, who looked beautiful in white.

"Please take it away from her," Julien begged. "If you can give me my memories back, I know you can do this. Take that burden away from her, Rosario, please."

"Rosario," she repeated with a demure sigh. She touched his cheek, and Julien remembered, remembered her hand upon his face when she woke him up in the morning, the scents of grass and coffee around them and the leftover taste of her in his mouth. "How I loved it when you called me Rosarita."

The next moments were more noise than anything else: pure sound, as if no other sense existed. The thunder thudded again, enough to shake the house. Seraphine's hoarse voice shouting, Julien. Fritz wailing, surging forward, Jules. The soft whoosh of air as Rosario lifted her hand. Gentle, then harsh. A loud thunk. Pain, or so he thought. Was this pain?

"I'll do what you asked," whispered a voice in his ear.

A flash of white in his vision. Maybe lightning. Maybe not.

"I'm sorry I never let you rest," they went on. "So rest now, mi amor."

A door opened, creaking slowly like the reel of a horror film.

And then—

Nothing.

Julien slumped to the floor.