epilogue: a woman named hummingbird
August 2016, Los Angeles, California.
Josie Yoo is LA K-town born and bred. She's third-and-a-half-generation American but sometimes dreams in Korean, maybe even a little Japanese. Her great-grandparents had first emigrated from Korea to Japan in the early 1910s, and then fled to the U.S. after the Great Kantou Earthquake had destroyed their community and a mob of humans and their curses had annihilated the remaining survivors. Josie's great-grandmother came from a family of rare and powerful Korean sorcerers and had been recruited to Yokohama by a powerful Japanese sorcerer family with the promise of good business and even better pay. The Zen'in family—and everything that had happened to Josie's family in Japan—was the reason Josie grew up grandparents who loathed the Japanese and their approach to sorcery, with families who'd rather profit off the existence of curses rather than seek how to exorcise them once and for all.
For a city as crowded as Los Angeles and as proportionately rife with troubles, curse burden is not that significant. The Yoos are a moderately respected clan, financially independently through non-sorcerer activities including owning apartment buildings and a chain of Korean fried chicken restaurants, with a reputable side business of curse exorcism. They take only Grade Two through Fours, very rarely a lower-level Grade One if things are tight; anything higher is generally routed to the California Society of Sorcerers, LA Branch, which consists of independent contractors, members of a prominent Japanese-American sorcerer family based out in Santa Monica, or a Latino-American clan that splits territory with the Yoos and is happy to take jurisdiction of high-Grade curses. Rumors have it that several smaller Black-American clans have spread out over southern LA and are quite powerful, but the families are not inclined to register with the Society, citing distrust of an establishment that has long ignored curse volume in historically Black neighborhoods in favor of exorcising minor curses in Hollywood Hills.
Josie grew up fairly normally, all things considered. She has non-sorcerer friends, went to a non-sorcerer high school and then to UCLA for college before returning home under the guise of taking over the family businesses but more to step into the role of designated exorciser for the occasional curse sighting. Her mom and dad are getting older and are busy with the actual non-sorcerer businesses (who would've thought Korean fried chicken would become such a hot topic), and her grandparents are riddled with ailments that make jumping off roofs chasing Flyheads less than ideal.
Josie doesn't mind. She's not a loner but has never minded being alone; she's accustomed to holding friends at arm's length, because you can't quite get close to someone who can't see the things that you see. She doesn't mind exorcising either: some part of her even enjoys it when she thinks she's rid the world of something foul, doing the world some good. The Yoo family believes in imparting the good on their sphere of influence—nothing more, nothing less, just net good, and Josie thinks that's more than most people can claim.
It's a horribly hot day in late August. Josie works the front desk at the apartment building she lives in, chewing idly on a stick of stale gum as she scrolls through Instagram and aimlessly likes posts at random. The doorbell jangles as the front door opens, exchanging expensive airconditioned air with a waft of humidity. Josie doesn't even look up from her phone, thinking it's one of the tenants coming back home, until a shadow falls over her.
Only then does Josie realize that whoever is in front of her has a massive amount of Cursed Energy, and it's a signature she doesn't recognize. Her head snaps up, and reflexively, she activates a string of seals pressed underneath her desk, invisible to the naked eye but that shoot up a light gold Barrier all around her. Curse Users are rare; the sorcerer clans all have a mutual pact to leave each other alone, but one could never be sure.
"Yoohoo!" the visitor chirps, waving. Josie has never met him before, because there's no way she would forget someone like this. He's stupidly tall and has a shock of silver-white hair held up by white bandages pressed over his eyes that double somehow as a headband. He sips at a pink Frappuccino and looks around, clearly able to see the Barrie Josie activated, and says in Japanese,
"Well, I guess that answers my question."
Josie's Japanese would be rusty, if it weren't for a new Japanese tenant who had moved in earlier this year. "What? Who are you?"
"I'm looking for a Morimoto Yuna," the stranger says brightly. "I believe she gave you those?" He points to the seals underneath Josie's desk. "Not that these would keep me out, but it would be a bit of a pain."
Josie frowns. "There isn't a Morimoto Yuna here."
"Oh, really?" the man hums. "Japanese lady, about ye-high," he makes a gesture with his hands at the level of his elbow, surely he's exaggerating, "tats up both arms, big eyes, looks like she's about to cry all the time?"
At the last descriptor, Josie realizes he's talking about her new tenant. "Oh. Yeah. We call her Hummingbird."
"Huh? Why?"
Josie squints at him. "Feel like that should be obvious."
He opens his mouth to argue, but Josie feels like she'd like this conversation to end sooner than later.
"Anyway, you sure she knows you're coming? She doesn't ever have visitors."
He looks delighted to hear that. "Really?"
"Well," Josie corrects herself, "no, there's a blonde lady who comes by a lot, but she has the keys to her apartment."
He scowls. "The fuck! She wouldn't even tell me where she lived, and she gave that bitch her house keys?"
Josie frowns harder. "Who the fuck are you? We don't use that kind of language around here."
"Oh, God," he says, and Josie is sure he's rolling his eyes underneath all those bandages. She wonders if he just got bilateral cataract surgery. Or his eyes dilated. "You sound just like her. Look, can you just let her know I'm here?"
"You didn't even give me a name," grumbles Josie, but she calls presses, "4B" on the call system and waits. Three rings later, she picks up.
"Josie-san. Everything okay?"
The man positively vibrates on the balls of his feet as he leans forward eagerly. Josie judges him with a flat stare and answers,
"Yeah, there's a guy here to see you. Uh, tall, weird guy, bandages on his face, white hair—"
"Hi, Yuna!" the guy bursts out.
The voice on the other line gives a long sigh. "Hello, Gojou-kun."
Josie stares harder. She knows that name. Her grandparents tell her this all the time, if she meets a sorcerer from the three big Japanese clans, she should run: Zen'in, Kamo, and especially the heir of no fucking way—
"Are you impressed I found you?" Gojou Satoru slurps his strawberry Frappuccino loudly and rudely.
"Not really, I gave Shouko-san and Nanami-kun my address when I moved here. I've met up with them twice since being here."
"Are you serious—"
"You may send him up, Josie-san," says the woman named Yuna. "I apologize for any headache you accrued in this interaction."
"Yuna!" Gojou Satoru whines, while Josie laughs and hangs up. She presses the button to open the glass inner doors, which slide open automatically
"She's not gonna fuck you," Josie says absentmindedly as she returns her attention to her phone, ignoring everything her grandparents ever told her about not pissing off a member of the Japanese Three Great Families.
"Eh?"
"You got that look." She types in "Gojou Satoru" into her search bar to see if he has social media. She heard from a Japanese sorcerer pen pal that Gojou Satoru is supposed to be really pretty. Maybe without the bandages. "I don't even know if she swings that way, honestly, but a whole lotta guys have tried and she's got some kind of criteria they can't ever meet. So don't try too hard. You'll only embarrass yourself."
"I am never embarrassed of myself," Satoru announces. "What's the criteria?"
There's no social media for Gojou Satoru, but there are fan pages, of which the most popular is run by a Kasumi Miwa in Kyoto.
"Dunno," Josie answers, tired of thirsty men. "Something about a binding vow."
Gojou Satoru has a smile that stretches from ear-to-ear, could light up LA in a blackout, and maybe Josie doesn't find him pretty but certainly cute in a puppy dog kind of way.
"Got it." He strides through the door, hands in his pockets, whistling. "Thanks, Jo-Jo-chan!"
Josie flicks him off and ignores how her ears burn. She waits until the doors close behind him and the elevator dings up to the fourth floor. She scrolls through the Gojou Satoru fan page for several minutes, debating.
She heaves a sigh and, resigned to the early onset of a migraine, switches to her Finsta and hits, "Follow."
thank each and every one of you for reading this fic. truly, truly. i started watching/reading jjk last year and haven't loved a story as much in a long time. as you FF fans know, i have written OC fics for an embarrassing decade-plus and have dipped in and out of the scene for the last couple years, but it isn't as popular as a genre anymore and so i didn't think many people would read this.
which is all to say that i am truly grateful to each of you for reading and especially to those of you who are such close readers/commenters. it brings me a lot of happiness to know people look forward to this story. if you're an OG fan (it is just mind-boggling to me how many people have read AGOCS, thank you for reading my shit for over a decade. for those who are new, thanks so much for still reading on this site.
there obviously will be a sequel, likely to come out in the new year as i'm going to take a bit of a break. happiest of winter holidays to all of you and may 2022 be full of joy and hope. please get your vaccines/boosters, stay masked, stay safe.
in the meantime, here's a sneak peak of the sequel's summary:
"Yaga said she was Gojou-sensei's teacher," Yuuta offers.
Maki makes a face. "I guess, but…hey, Megumi, you know her better than I do. How would you describe her and Satoru's relationship?"
Megumi doesn't even deign to look up from his textbook.
"Embarrassing."
To most, Gojou Satoru is the strongest sorcerer in the world, owner of the Six Eyes and Limitless, and esteemed teacher at Tokyo Jujutsu High. To the ones that matter, he's the Honored One who lost his one and only and tried to make out with his high school teacher to make up for it.
xoxo,
m.n/yuzudrops