The morning after the Anohana finale, Riley Evans woke up to forty-seven missed calls.
She stared at her phone for a long moment, then put it face-down on the nightstand and stared at the ceiling instead. She had expected the notifications, she'd watched the finale with the rest of the cast at Chloe Summers' place, and she knew what the last twenty minutes had done to people. She just hadn't expected the scale.
By 9 AM, her follower count had jumped by nearly three million overnight. The Anaru fanbase had been growing steadily through the run, but something about the finale had cracked it open. The comment that kept getting reshared, a user with four hundred followers saying they'd called their father after Episode 11 had been viewed eleven million times and counting. And somehow, for reasons that made complete sense once you thought about it, a significant portion of those eleven million people had ended up on Riley Evans' page.
She finally picked the phone back up and opened her messages. Near the top was one from Leo.
Nice work, Evans. Enjoy it. You earned it.
At the Celestial Peak offices in Burbank, the day had started considerably less quietly.
By 6 AM, the first fans had appeared at the gates. By 7 AM there were several hundred. By 8:30, Sydney was standing at the window of the second-floor conference room watching the crowd below with the focused calm of someone running contingency calculations.
"We're at approximately three thousand," she said, to no one in particular.
"Mmhm," Leo said from the couch, not looking up from the script in his lap.
The fans had come with signs, hand-drawn, printed, one that appeared to have been embroidered overnight. The most common message was some variation of JJK Season 2 - When? A few had brought full Gojo cosplays. One person near the front was holding a banner that read, with considerable conviction: WE KNOW YOU'RE IN THERE, DIRECTOR VANCE.
Sydney turned from the window. "The announcement this week puts us right in the middle of the Pacific Rim Film Festival's press cycle."
"Good," Leo said.
"That wasn't a compliment."
"I know." He turned a page. "Let them fight for column inches. We'll get more coverage that way."
Sydney looked at him for a moment with the expression she reserved for when he was both completely right and completely exhausting. She went back to the window.
By 9 AM, it was clear that Leo would not be walking through the front door. Sydney made two calls. Fifteen minutes later, a secondary car had been arranged, two members of the production team had been dispatched to the main entrance as a decoy, and Leo was in the back seat of a blacked-out SUV exiting through the service road with the quiet satisfaction of someone who had anticipated this exact outcome.
[We've been waiting since 5 AM and Leo just — he DECOY CAR-ed us?]
[The man said "I see three thousand people who love me and I will be escaping through the back." Absolute Gojo behavior.]
[He's already inside the building writing the thing we're all out here for. He doesn't need to acknowledge us. He's already helping us.]
Leo spent the first part of the morning with the script.
Not the final version, the working draft, the one with his handwritten revisions in the margins. He'd been going back to this particular sequence for three weeks and he still hadn't committed to a direction.
The sequence in question was Gojo Satoru's sealing.
Internally: The Shibuya Arc had ended with Gojo sealed. That was the story as Akutami had written it, and Leo knew — had known since before he'd shot a single frame of Season 1, that the sealing was the structural keystone of everything that followed. The arc's entire emotional architecture depended on the strongest being made absent. Remove it and the tragedy loses its foundation.
But knowing the right call didn't make the script page any easier to look at.
He sat with it for a while. The word "SEALED" in capital letters in his own handwriting, underlined once. Below it, in smaller letters: keep? modify? this decides everything.
He closed the script.
Harrison Reed arrived at eleven.
He came in through the service entrance, Sydney had suggested it after the morning's situation at the gates and found Leo in the second-floor conference room with two copies of the JJK S2 production bible and a half-finished coffee going cold on the table beside him.
"You'd think," Harrison said, settling into the chair across from Leo, "after Hidden Inventory and the Meridian sweep and all of that, people would expect you to follow up."
"They did expect it," Leo said. "That's why they're outside."
Harrison looked out the window at the dissipating crowd, most had left once the decoy car footage had made the rounds and it became clear Leo was clearly already inside working. A few diehards remained with their signs. Harrison watched one of them for a moment.
"Three thousand people showed up at dawn," he said, "for an announcement that hasn't happened yet."
"Closer to thirty-two hundred by Sydney's count." Leo pushed one of the production bibles across the table. "Choso. Read page forty-seven first."
Harrison opened it. He read. His expression moved through several stages, professional assessment, surprise, something that might have been the early stages of genuine emotional investment.
"He doesn't know he exists," Harrison said.
"Not at first."
"And then the Non-Existent Memory." Harrison looked up. "That's the scene."
"That's the scene," Leo confirmed.
Harrison was quiet for a moment, still looking at page forty-seven. When he spoke again, his voice had the careful quality of someone choosing words deliberately. "Lucas and I, the way you've written the Choso/Itadori dynamic, that's not just a fight. That's the Iron Coast dynamic inverted."
Harrison Reed set the bible down and looked at Leo across the table with an expression that had nothing performative in it. "When do we start?"
"Two weeks," Leo said. "Pinnacle Studios. Sydney has the full schedule." He picked up his coffee, found it cold, set it back down. "Welcome to the Sorcerer Universe."
Outside, the last few fans at the gate were posting videos to X. By noon, the hashtag #JJK SEASON2 had climbed to the top of the global trending list and stayed there for six hours.
The internet, as it turned out, had been waiting for exactly this.
Plz Drop Some Power Stones.
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