Checking the time on the clock on the wall in the hospital lobby as he walks in and greets the receptionist on night watch, Uesugi Fuutarou takes long, quick strides to cover ground as efficiently as he can to reach his destination. It's now two hours past the intended time of his meeting with the quintuplets' father, and while he's been texting the doctor updates consistently for the past two hours on his situation, Fuutarou knows better than to hope that Dr. Nakano will give him any such leniency, even if his own daughters are the reasons why Fuutarou is late.
Eh, not that he gives a damn; Maruo practically lives in the hospital with all the workloads he gives himself, and whatever time he doesn't spend in the hospital itself, he spends at a nearby hotel to rest properly or meeting other important figures of the city. If Maruo actually acted like a dad once in a while and went home to see his kids, Fuutarou would in fact feel bad for wasting the man's time. At the quintuplets' expense, however, it appears that he doesn't need to.
Half-past eight in the evening; ordinary visitor hours are concluded for the day, and the night shifts are starting, so the number of staff members, visitors, and regular patients have dwindled substantially. While the lights are on for now, Fuutarou knows that by the time his meeting with Dr. Nakano is done, they'll be off. He readjusts his messenger bag as he walks down the corridor to the flight of stairs leading up to the third floor where Nakano's office is located, his headphones over his ears and filling them with some lofi so that he doesn't have to listen to the lonely, flat clicks of his own footsteps reverberating somewhat off the walls of the hospital corridor.
That, and due to his extreme lateness for his meeting, Fuutarou didn't have the time today to enjoy his walk to the hospital listening to some city lofi like he'd been looking forward to. Normally he wouldn't have his headphones on inside the hospital itself out of respect for the staff and patients, but given the late hours, Fuutarou figures he can afford to be a bit rude tonight. Having to talk to Dr. Nakano will do that to him no matter what happens, so why not get off to an even better start?
The young mage reaches the third floor and heads straight for the head physician's office, which is landmarked only by a nondescript door with a small black metal plate sign hanging on the front that says "The Doctor is In". If you were to flip it over, the back of the metal sign would say "The Doctor is Out". Fuutarou has always wondered if this is meant to be some kind of cruel joke on Maruo's part, because, not surprisingly, for the vast majority of the time, the sign would be flipped the other way.
Regardless, Fuutarou knocks on the front door.
"Come in."
And so he does, closing the door securely behind him and going through the small trouble of applying a small blue rune that bleeds into the door itself, embedding itself within and fading out of sight as Fuutarou greets Dr. Nakano and takes a seat next to him in his somewhat diminutive office. For being the head physician of the best hospital in the city, Dr. Nakano sure seems to not care about flaunting the title much.
"It would appear my daughters kept you; Miku texted me a few moments ago about your work today and what happened afterwards," Maruo says dryly, glancing at Fuutarou as he takes a tired seat at the doctor's desk.
"I mean, I did text you as well on the situation."
"That you did. But you'll excuse me for using these texts that one of my own daughters sent me for validation of your alibi."
Fuutarou groans shortly. "So you're calling that an alibi too, huh. I just got out of one court case, and now I have to deal with another? Besides, we've been working together for how long now and you still act like you can't trust a single thing I tell you?"
"Is it so unreasonable for a father to trust the words of his own children as opposed to a stranger? Particularly one who is a self-proclaimed mage?"
"It is when said father is allowing said self-proclaimed mage to actively interact with said children, in this case via a tutoring contract. It seems after all these years, you still underestimate the amount of damage mages can do," Fuutarou grins darkly. "But never mind that, it's already late at night and I'm sure neither of us want to deal with each other at this hour, so I'll make it quick."
Pulling up his messenger bag as he speaks, Fuutarou unclasps it and fishes out a USB 3.0 thumb drive, placing it on the doctor's desk.
"There's the footage, and here's...the samples."
Setting his bag aside once he's also stowed his headphones into them, which can barely fit into his bag and quite awkwardly at that, Fuutarou activates his small storage rune and pulls out the ziplock baggie of the two remaining liquidized Heisei samples he's taken from the gangsters the previous night. This time, he hands the samples directly to Dr. Nakano, who inspects them quickly.
"The research team I'm in contact with in London sent me back their test results this morning; I've forwarded their findings to your email, and now I'm giving you a copy of the footage of my own testing that I did last night. You should have everything that you need to conduct your own tests."
"Excellent," Dr. Nakano says simply. "Then explain to me the situation as you see it now. Spare no details."
Fuutarou nods, taking a bit of a deep breath.
"The samples that I've brought you here contain the same type of Heisei that the syringes I took from Nino's dealer's gang and sent to London for testing. It's a liquid form of Heisei - reports of it first cropped up around the beginning of the year, and I believe it first began circulating throughout the city about two months ago, so it's a very recent addition to the underground market here and just a new drug in general. But these particular needles - rather, the Heisei that these needles carry and the syringes from a month ago had - it's not your average Heisei you can buy off the black market."
"How did you know to analyze the samples you recovered from the gangsters who attacked my daughters?" Dr. Nakano asks with chilling calmness.
"I first got the hunch back when I used the centrifuge to analyze the Heisei samples, because your daughters were the first case that I came across that involved a gang using drugs not for themselves, but to use on other people."
Fuutarou folds his arms slowly, inhaling and exhaling slowly to reorganize his thoughts.
"Gangsters aren't the brightest of people a lot of the time, at least not in this city, so if there's a new drug out, I'll eventually come across an idiot or two who's overdosed on a new drug and killed themselves doing it because they had no idea what kinds of effects the drug would have. Of course, it doesn't have to be a thug, but most of the time it is, since they're the likeliest people to have access to the newest shit. But to see a gang like that specifically try to go after other people, for the purpose of trying out a drug on them - now that's strange, especially when it's Heisei we're talking about, because by this point people should know what it does. Throw in the recent kidnapping cases that the city's been seeing lately, and my own run-in with those gangsters from last night, and it starts to add up: whoever's manufacturing liquid Heisei wants to test it out on people and is hiring gangbangers to run around snatchin' people off the streets to do it for them. Your daughters were very close to being the first ones."
"...and this...'Shirazumi Rio' fellow...may be responsible?"
Fuutarou raises a hand to have the doctor pause.
"Not so fast, Doc, I need to explain the magical side to the story first...which brings us to this."
The young mage taps the baggie of needles on the doctor's desk.
"Ordinary Heisei, in either powder or liquid form, essentially do the same thing - it knocks people out quick, depending on the dosage, but liquid Heisei is a lot more dangerous because you're injecting what's basically a magical substance straight into your body. At least by ingesting it, the stomach acid can mitigate a lot of the potential damage by weakening the magical effect of the blackout - but you don't have that kind of protection with injecting. So it's a near-instant knockout with an even smaller dose - meaning that all these needles, all the syringes you saw in that box that I took off the motherfuckers going after your daughters - they're all lethal doses. You're not waking back up if even only half a needle gets into your bloodstream."
Now, Fuutarou moves his hand over to tap the USB drive that's sitting with the baggie of liquid Heisei needles.
"But as I've been hinting at a few times already, these needles have a different kind of liquid Heisei, even though they look exactly the same as your normal liquid Heisei samples at first. I've already mentioned that Heisei is a magically engineered drug - these ones have had their magical compositions strengthened approximately sixfold. Tampering with the original Heisei's magical structure is already bad enough, but with its effects multiplied six times over, it doesn't knock people out - it kills them."
"What are the symptoms?"
Fuutarou snorts sarcastically. "If you can even call them 'symptoms'...upon injection directly into the bloodstream, it appears to cause the blood to coagulate within the vessels themselves; it also either causes the coagulated blood to rot immediately or corrupts them somehow, because the blood vessels on the test subjects turned noticeably black. It doesn't kill you immediately, which is the worst part, because you will feel your blood thicken, clog up your arteries or veins, wherever it started first, before slowly spreading throughout the rest of your body. And as far as I'm concerned, once it's in your system, you can't purge it unless you cut off a limb if it happened to begin spreading there. If it starts in a vital organ, you're basically already dead - and by that point, it's better for you to end yourself to save yourself the pain."
Looking back at the Doctor, who meets his gaze as well, the young mage raises his right knuckles thoughtfully to his chin.
"New drugs show up all the time. And Heisei isn't the first drug we've seen that has a magical manufacturing method or a magical origin. But this is the first time that I've personally seen where people are trying to test a new form of a magically engineered drug on other people, for the expressed purpose of testing. And this is where that Shirazumi Rio guy comes in, and my hypothesis for the time being: I think that Shirazumi is behind the circulation of Heisei in this city, and he's trying to conduct tests to perfect a new form of Heisei for his own personal use."
"For his own personal use? When this new form of Heisei is so dangerous?" Doctor Nakano points out, but Fuutarou shakes his head.
"First the quintuplets, then the kidnappings of random people throughout the city, along with the girl I found yesterday...they're all ordinary people, Doc. The gangster I tested one of these Heisei samples out on last night, too, was a normal person, and the effects that his body showed upon direct exposure to this new Heisei matched the results of the group in London. For now, all signs point to these symptoms only being derived from a sample pool consisting of non-magical subjects."
"I see. Then Shirazumi-kun may be intending to concoct a version of liquid Heisei that is beneficial for mages or those with magical backgrounds but lethal to normal human beings."
"Or he just wants to make a lethal version of Heisei just because he hates anyone who isn't a mage," Fuutarou counters swiftly. "Remember, not everyone is a rational human being who works towards their own gains, and we're talking about a small demographic of people in the world who unfortunately consist of people who very well may be anything but rational. Surely you've heard of the incidents that other cities, both in Japan and around the world, have seen that have been caused by mages who acted not out of personal gain but merely for the sake of destruction?"
"And I hope you are not speaking out of experience."
"The only experience I speak of is six years of practicing magecraft for the sake of looking after myself, my dad, and my sister so that we don't fucking starve to death or get our heads caved in by debt collectors, thank you very much. But that's besides the point."
The young mage runs a hand through his black hair again one last time for the night.
"What we know is this, Dr. Nakano: this city's drug problem is worsening at an alarming rate. A new form of liquid Heisei that we know will kill people who get injected with it is out there on the streets, and people are getting kidnapped just for the sake of testing this new Heisei. The police might be able to delay the progress of the drug's circulation with their raids and search warrants, but they don't know the full extent of the situation that they're dealing with, and there's no way for them to understand it on their own."
Perhaps somewhat inappropriately for the topic at hand, Dr. Nakano offers nothing but a dry smile back at his hired mage.
"That sounds like a problem you must handle, if you are truly the Resident Guardian of this city that you proclaim yourself to be. I am not a mage like you; I already have my own hands full running this hospital."
"I'm well aware of that. But the good news is that I was able to extract intel from one of the gangsters I captured from last night. I now know what he looks like and can identify him using the surveillance network I've got set up throughout the city. I'll be conducting a citywide manhunt for this mage named Shirazumi Rio - because a part of me suspects that he's also the one who's responsible for the murder of Ebata more than a month ago, even if I don't have any direct evidence as of now."
At this, Dr. Nakano finally shows a different reaction, in the form of a raised eyebrow.
"In the meantime, while I do that, I'll need you to use your influence in the city to get me into contact with the mayor."
"Having me go straight for the mayor, are we? Not the fire marshal or the police commissioner?"
"The fire marshal can't do jack shit, and you know what I think of the damn police commissioner. And I know you feel the same."
"Indeed. But surely you know the situation with the mayor."
"I know. But in spite of that, I'm gonna have to ask you to do what you can to get in touch with him. It's something only he, as mayor of this city, can do for me."
"Hm. Very well, I shall oblige. But in exchange, I believe midterms for the first semester are fast approaching, so I will have you ensure that they all pass - how prepared are my daughters?"
"Woefully unprepared," Fuutarou mutters darkly, with his bangs casting a shadow over his face as he lowers it somewhat. "Miku's the only one who's consistently attending my lessons, and thankfully she's been showing at least a little bit of improvement - she now has a good chance of passing most of her subjects. Everyone else, on the other hand..."
"I understand that some of my girls refuse to attend your lessons. I can at least talk to them for you - "
"Don't bother, Doc. That would be really out of character for you - and I'd like to handle this end of the contract by myself."
"Even though the terms of our contract specifically state that I will step in and intervene if my daughters are giving you trouble whenever and wherever I see fit?"
"Yes, even knowing that. It's something I have to do, after all."
"Hmph. Do as you see fit, then, Uesugi-kun. Is there anything else for us to discuss tonight?"
Fuutarou shakes his head, gathering his bag and getting up from his seat.
"That'll be all. Did you eat dinner yet tonight, though?"
"No, I have not, though I am used to such nights, of course. Why the concern out of the blue like this, though?"
As the head physician is voicing his slight confusion at Fuutarou's own little out-of-character moment expressing concern for his own dinner situation, Fuutarou rummages through his bag briefly and pulls out the third pack of dango that he bought from the Izumi supermarket to offer to him.
"Nino and Miku were kind enough to cook me a big lunch today, despite the fact that Nino and I aren't on very good terms at the moment. I happened to buy a third pack of dango here to eat myself earlier this morning, but I figured you could use it more. I don't think Nino would accept any forms of thanks from me any time soon, so maybe I can show her dad some appreciation instead."
But the physician shakes his head to decline.
"I will be alright, Uesugi-kun. That, and I believe your little sister is particularly fond of Mitarashi dango, correct? If my memory serves me correctly from the time I treated her for a fever a few years ago."
Smirking a little, Fuutarou packs the dango back away. "You sure? You never know when I'll offer you free food like this again."
"I shall take my chances, then."
"Fair enough; have a - "
"Oh, one more thing, Uesugi-kun. About those midterms..."
Having started to head for the door to see himself out, Fuutarou stops on a dime and turns around to face his employer again.
"This is admittedly a bit sudden, but after some consideration, I would like you to show me adequate results from the tutoring you have done for the girls. So in the midterms in two weeks, if even one of the quintuplets fails, I will be terminating your contract as their private tutor."
Fuutarou shows no reaction on his face in response to this sudden demand by his employer.
"Is that a threat, Nakano?" he asks slowly, a slight shadow now cast over his eyes.
"Not at all. I merely want to see results, Uesugi-kun. You are a man of results - so I would like to see them in this area of yours as well."
"Even knowing that two of your own girls refuse to cooperate with me, and given how busy my schedule usually is?"
"Of course. I am well aware of how much of a busy person you are. However, as their father, I am not willing to sacrifice their academic standings by giving one of my employees leeway. I would have preferred to hire a full-time tutor who can focus all of their efforts in teaching my girls and not be distracted by other responsibilities."
"Even when you're partly responsible for such responsibilities that I've got?"
"Yes, even with that in consideration as well."
"Then why the fuck did you even bother hiring me for this in the first place?"
"Because your father pitched the idea to me, and as his former classmate, I decided to oblige him. If this will make you feel better, our years of working together have established to me that you are indeed a hard worker and a reliable contractor. But none of this will matter if you do not produce the results that I desire for my children. I hope you will understand."
Fuutarou tilts his head slightly.
"I do, but whether or not I understand is irrelevant. Because for my part, I would've preferred if you could just tell me straight up if you want me to stop teaching your daughters so I wouldn't have to worry about that kind of added responsibility just to keep my job as their tutor, on top of all the other bullshit I have to take care of. You're not even paying me for the girls whom I can't teach because they refuse to work with me despite my own efforts of trying to get them to join, and on top of that, you haven't even fucking paid me yet for first month."
Raising a hand to point harshly at the quintuplets' father, Fuutarou narrows his eyes disdainfully at the doctor.
"I deal with all this shit and then some because you're a long-term client of mine, Nakano, when I would normally terminate the contract with anyone else the moment I feel they're stepping one foot out of line. But don't think for a second that I won't do the same to you too eventually, motherfucker."
Turning swiftly to once again head for the door, Fuutarou pauses one last time as he opens the door and holds it open.
"And stop talking like you actually care about those girls," he hisses, his back facing the head physician. "It's fucking disgusting."
Once the door is closed and Fuutarou's footsteps outside in the third floor hallway echo into silence, Dr. Nakano grabs his phone that's sitting on the side of his desk and begins to dial a number.
"Ow! Ow, ow, owwwww! What the...?!"
Inhaling sharply and swearing under her breath, Nakano Nino, rudely awakened by a searing pain pulsing in her eyes, immediately rolls over to her left side on her bed, with no covers to duck under because she's tossed it aside in her sleep.
As she clutches at her eyes with both hands, the pain worsens dramatically, and it hits Nino in that moment that something is very wrong with her eyes right now. This is the first time something like this is happening, and she has no clue what even is happening as she lies on her side, inhaling sharply through clenched teeth with her eyes covered by her hands.
"...what the fuck...? What's going on...ow, ow, ow...!"
But the pain continues to pulsate in her eyes, which also begin to throb in their sockets, closely matching her own heartbeat in her chest. The longer it lasts, the worse it gets - it's not the pain itself that gets to Nino, but the escalating and increasingly unbearable heat that accompanies it. It's as if her eyes are being set on fire, and there is no way to put out the fires in her eyes. The combination of pain and heat make it so that Nino cannot bear to tear her hands away from her eyes, even though at the same time she desperately wants to give her eyes some air to at least try to have them cool off.
Nino opts to lay in bed where she's awoken, hoping that maybe, just maybe, the pain will subside on its own, whatever it is that's happening. But trying to endure the scorching pain in her eyes is like pressing her hand against the bottom of a frying pan over an open gas valve on the stove - Nino is reaching her breaking point. Her mind races as fast as her heartbeat as adrenaline begins to pump into her bloodstream, fear polluting her thoughts that she'll lose the rest of her already terrible eyesight to this mysterious infernal pain.
And with the fear comes the rest as the floodgates to her emotions are smashed open in the wake of the pain's rampage through her already turbulent mind.
"...why...why is this..." Nino can't hold back the tears welling up in her eyes, which are also blazing hot and probably make her eye situation even worse, though she can't feel them until they've squeezed out of their sockets. "...why is this all happening to me..."
The run-ins she's had with Uesugi Fuutarou, her and her sisters' classmate who is also their tutor, or supposed to be, the frustration that they've ended up producing for her, the anger and indignation she's felt towards him for being an unwanted presence in their household and posing a threat to the cohesive bond that she wants to keep pure and unsullied among her fellow quintuplet siblings, the helplessness she feels towards herself as she watches her sisters slowly open up to him, leaving her behind...
As though it were inevitable, the fear and other such rocky emotions going through Nino's head amalgamate into a murky, messy pool that quickly decomposes into raw hatred. Her teeth, still clenched initially from the pain, now tighten against each other even harder than before, reinvigorated by the jolt of deep-rooted anger that now seizes control of her heart.
"...it's all your fault..." Nino hears herself whisper murderously in the dark, so maliciously so that the quintuplet for a moment isn't sure if she's the one speaking those words or not. "...it's all your fucking fault...Uesugi...!"
So preoccupied is she now with her sudden fit of silent but simmering rage that she slowly forgets about the pain that's sent her into such a fury to begin with, and it's only after a good five or so minutes lying on her side on her bed that she then slowly realizes that the burning pain in her eyes are gone...or at least that's what it seems like, because the aftershocks of the sudden scorching pain in her eyes still linger, making her eyeballs feel like they are still burning in their own sockets when the pain is now largely absent. It's as though she were staring directly into the sun in the sky and is now having to deal with the light scars that linger in her vision even after she turns away from the sun.
Now that the pain seems to have gone away on its own, luckily for her, Nino turns onto her back slowly to gaze up at the ceiling of her room, managing to finally pull her hands off her eyes so that they can open again, which they do, slowly and cautiously, amidst the crowd of plush dolls and stuffed animals that also share the bed with her, along the bedframe next to her head and against the edges.
Though there are no lights in her room, a pair of dim purple lights are projected onto the ceiling above her. Ordinarily these dim lights are so weak that they cannot be noticed if there is any other light source around, but as Nino is in pitch black darkness, the purple lights from her eyes are somewhat more discernible now, despite their relative weakness.
Or at least they would be if there were anyone else in the room with her.
Slowly blinking up at the ceiling above her, her anger having slowly bled off in favor of relief that seeps back into her mind that the pain has gone away on its own, Nino slowly wipes the hot tears that have escaped her eyes as her thoughts, rattled by the pain and left disturbed by the jarring contrast of the replacing relief and the absence of such intense pain, begin to wander a little.
Nino has always known that she was a little different. She and Itsuki are the two among the quintuplets whose eyesights deteriorated quickly once they entered junior high - she will never forget the day that she looked up in class at the chalkboard upon being called to answer a question, only to stand up and realize that the chalkboard was a lot blurrier than it had been before.
Even stranger was the fact that there was now a weird purple filter over the blurriness that she saw all around her.
She didn't dare tell anyone about it, mainly because she didn't know what to do in order to address it, even when her junior high homeroom teacher at the time called her father to inform him of the situation, and he promptly got her eyes checked and procured for her a pair of glasses to use. It was bad enough already that something so embarrassing like that happened to her in the middle of class, in the middle of the school day, in front of all her other classmates - and it was only made worse by the fact that she realized her eyes had changed color, too.
No longer did she have the same beautiful blue sapphires that the rest of her sisters had. Even when Itsuki also experienced a similar case, though in her case it was farsightedness as opposed to Nino's nearsightedness, Itsuki retained her blue eyes, and her status quo was not changed. Even the prescription glasses that her father got for her initially stopped working because Nino's myopia worsened even more, to the point where now, she is virtually blind without her contacts; the fact that she couldn't even recognize Fuutarou earlier of all people and mistook him for her own sister demonstrates just how bad her vision really is.
So Dr. Nakano, after investigating his own daughter's case of extreme myopia, replaced her first set of glasses with contact lenses, upon Nino's own request since she didn't like how glasses made her look like a nerd or a bookworm. Not only were they colored contacts that restored her eye color back to their original blue to match the rest of her sisters, but ever since then, her eyesight stopped worsening.
To this day, Nino still isn't quite sure if such timing was mere coincidence or an unstated effect that her contacts have on her eyesight; her father certainly didn't specify that himself, and she's never quite had the guts to go up to him as ask, despite being the one quintuplet among them who would most likely be able to charge into problems like this head-on. Normal problems like dealing with school bullies ganging up on Miku, chasing away guys in the city trying to hit on her and her sisters, and other such social roadblocks have nothing on Nino; with her direct and blunt mannerisms and interactions, she isn't afraid of anything like that, not even back at the warehouse when she was kept hostage by her drug dealer's cronies.
But her eyes and her eyesight are a completely different story, for too many reasons. Her purple eyes set her apart from her classmates, friends, and peers - the peachy-red hair that she and her quintuplet siblings all possess already set her and her sisters apart from everybody else in a country where natural hair colors barely deviate from the narrow spectrum of black to brown. But she can deal with having a unique natural hair color and all the questions she's gotten bombarded with by everyone she meets asking her if her hair is dyed or not because she loves the red and blue contrast that her hair and eyes present, and because as part of a quintuplet family, she doesn't have to be the only one to be badgered like this.
Perhaps along this logic, she should also be able to take having a set of different eye colors in stride, but such is not the case. She was born with red hair and blue eyes, and that's what she grew up with; that's what she's used to. So having her eye colors switch artificially like this is too unusual, too unique - and the way that it happened too, suddenly looking up in class one day to find her eyesight having deteriorated to the point of necessitating glasses and the color of her eyes itself having morphed as if overnight, is something Nino cannot accept.
And it's not as though something like this has ever happened to anyone else; maybe people losing their eyesight quickly in a short period of time can happen, but people changing eye colors like that out of the blue? Nino remembers having to deal with the fallout of that incident during junior high, the gossip that circulated for a time about her that she needed to get glasses in the middle of class, so she had to go around and confront the people spreading such rumors and gossip and put her foot down. Incidentally those girls she confronted were the same girls at Black Rose Junior High who were infamous for bullying underclassmen, spreading rumors and gossip about other girls, and generally being assholes that no one liked but couldn't be challenged, at least not until Nino became their target of ridicule and got provoked into going after them, so ironically her lost eyesight was replaced by the supportive and amiable eyes of many others who became enamored with her, her aggressive but kindhearted charisma, and her willingness to stand up to unsavory people giving her or classmates she knows a hard time.
Still, her elevation in school status as the hot new socialite on the block, the charismatic and extroverted quintuplet with red hair and blue eyes, wasn't enough to help her overcome her fear of her own new purple eyes that would rear their ugly heads any time she removed the contact lenses holding them back. Maybe...if she wasn't part of a quintuplet family, maybe if she were just her own person and didn't need to worry about another sibling who was born at the same time as her, she could bring herself to accept her new eyes - after all, as often as she gets angry herself, getting angry just because she's losing the red-blue contrast between her hair and eyes is a bit much, even for herself.
But what she cannot bear to lose is the connection that she shares with her sisters. Having red hair and blue eyes is great and all, but anyone can do that if they so chose by dyeing their hair and getting blue-colored contact lenses, just like herself for her contacts. It's the fact that she has four other sisters who also have natural red hair and blue eyes that she takes pride in, what gives her the uniqueness that she truly desires. But perhaps more importantly, it's part of the bond that she shares with them that transcends words and physical manifestation, a bond that she has so fiercely defended and will continue to do so should she feel it being threatened.
And threatened it is again now, by the biggest threat Nino has ever seen.
The biggest fear that she harbors about all this, however, isn't the social aspect or even the safety of the connection she has with her quintuplet siblings. They can't be, because she knows how to deal with those types of problems, or at least knows she can try...the warehouse incident is a bit of an outlier, though, so let's not mention that. Her biggest fear is the knowledge that she's kept secret to herself, locked away in the deep recesses of both mind and heart, that she is not a normal person. She already isn't, of course, being a quintuplet born with red hair and blue eyes, but physical appearance isn't what she's concerned about here. The purple filter in her eyesight that, even now as she gazes up at the ceiling in her room, infects her vision...and following the initial loss of her eyesight, her vision has since developed another unusual quirk, so now, in addition to the purple filter, her eyesight wavers and vacillates slowly, almost as if there's a fire that's perpetually underneath her eyes that she will never be able to see because the distortions of the fire's heat trails rising up into the air are all that she will ever see.
Nino uncomfortably remembers the first time her eyesight started doing that, shortly after she received her contacts...so nauseating was the experience that she spent a week being sleep-deprived because she was too queasy to fall asleep, the week that the bathroom was her room because she was so afraid of puking at any given moment, which, twice, really did happen. She may be more used to it now, but she likes it no more than she did when it first began.
All these are signs that there is something different about her, and Nino has convinced herself as such, even if she can't produce any factual evidence to prove her conjectures. How could she, though? These aren't problems that she can confide in anyone else, problems that she can share with anyone else and expect them to understand. None of her sisters seem to show any of these symptoms, either. She's tried doing everything she can to rid herself of this tick, of this incessant feeling lurking in the depths of her mind by capitalizing on her status as one of the most popular girls at school, at least back at Black Rose - surrounding herself with friends, working on her social networking, and throwing small parties at the penthouse from time to time, though she doesn't do that much anymore because such parties would always leave the house in a terrible mess the next day.
But no matter what she tries, she can't exterminate that annoying bug, that terrifying bug of feeling alone. And it only feels all the more terrifying because she's perhaps the one person among her sisters who has no right to say that she's lonely.
Maybe that's why she holds onto the bond she has with her sisters so relentlessly, so adamantly, because her sisters are truly all she has. She can lose all the friends she's made, she can lose all the contacts and connections she's made at school and around the city. But her sisters is the line that she will never compromise - even if she can never explain herself to them, explain these feelings that she has that's been troubling her for all these years, just being with her sisters is enough for Nino. Just knowing that they will be together as a family through thick and thin is enough for Nino, and she'll do whatever it takes to keep her family intact. Her sisters are hers, and hers alone.
Because you don't actually hate them - you love them.
"Get out of my head, Uesugi..." Nino grumbles, mainly to herself.
And to top it all off...the burning sensation she's felt in her eyes tonight, which only serves to add another question to her already daunting mountain of questions that she's got about herself. She's never felt this sensation before, and what made it feel even more painful than it probably needed to was the fact that she'd never been one to mind heat much. Ever since she taught herself how to cook after their mother passed away, Nino can't recall even a single time when she was afraid of open flame or high heat. Sure, in her novice stages of cooking, she's felt the bite of flames or intense heat on her hands and the stings of flying oil from the frying pan, but she hardly gave the pain a second thought. Every time she and her sisters went on vacation to the beach, she's been able to tolerate high temperatures very well, even when under the same conditions as some of her other sisters who are more prone to getting heat fatigue.
Strange, because having a high tolerance for heat would probably complement someone like Yotsuba with her extensively practiced athletic ability better. And Yotsuba doesn't like super hot stuff and has a rather pronounced cat's tongue.
While she probably shouldn't be surprised with the fact that it's happened, given the other strange things about her eyesight already, it's the fact that it's occurred without prior notice, without warning. What caused it to happen? Was it something that she did? Was it something that was going to happen eventually, something inevitable that she could have done nothing about? Maybe it could even be the exposure to the drugs that she's bought as a means to protect herself and her sisters? Nino doesn't know. There's no way that she can know. Maybe like everything else about herself that she's got questions to ask about, perhaps there's no way she can find out.
Setting the back of her right hand over her forehead, Nino closes her eyes that still throb a little here and there in the aftermath of the searing pain. And to think that she'd finally started getting to used to the quirks about her vision...only to have to take yet another quirk about it into account.
The weight of her new, painful quirk, having been sinking in ever since the pain ceased, is now too much for Nino to accept, at least for now. Reaching over to her blanket that she's tossed aside in her sleep that's hanging off the side of her bed, Nino pulls it back up and drapes it over herself again. Because her bed is against the wall, she wiggles a little to close the distance between herself and the wall and rests on her left side again, facing the wall with her back to the rest of her room as she hides beneath the covers. It'll be difficult having to go back to sleep with clenched teeth and more tears dripping out of her pained eyes...
Like everything else, Nino will have to force herself to live with it, but that time is not now. Instead, tonight, like several others before it, is the time to let loose her soundless thoughts, her muted frustrations, her helpless confusion, and her diluted anger into a room that is dark and empty, at a wall with neither ears nor lips, to an audience of marionettes that neither listens nor comforts.
"...san! Uesugi-san!"
Once more, asleep at his desk on a Monday noon. And once more, woken by one of the quintuplets. How did the lyrics go again? I've been in this place before, or something...
Pulling his face off his arms at his desk in the middle of the classroom, Uesugi Fuutarou shakes his head a little and rubs his right eye before getting a quick stretch and a yawn in.
"Lunch just started, huh," Fuutarou croaks, glancing up at the clock above the chalkboard. "You could've just gone ahead with your sisters, you know."
Having stayed behind to wake him up for lunch this time, Yotsuba gives him her signature toothy, bubbly grin.
"I could have, yeah. But today, I wanted to eat lunch with you!"
"Eat lunch with me...?" Repeating after the fourth quintuplet, as he's unable to hide his surprise at this statement, the exhausted mage looks up at Yotsuba with a look of cautious disbelief as he reaches down to pick up his unopened messenger bag. "Can't say I saw that one coming."
"Neither did my sisters, to be honest," Yotsuba giggles a little with her trademarked "shi, shi, shi, shi!" "But I did promise you last Saturday that I'd make up for running out on your lesson."
"I mean, that's fine, but you said you'd attend all the lessons this week. You didn't say anything about eating lunch with me."
Pouting at Fuutarou's usual stubbornness, Yotsuba takes a step forward at her tutor. "I'm just trying to make it up to you a bit more! It's the least I can do, with how much effort you put into teaching us!"
"Well, the least you can do is promise me you won't run out on a lesson like that again."
"I'm really sorry about that, so just please let me treat you to lunch for today!"
Yotsuba even performs a full-length bow at her tutor, who's getting up out of his seat in the meantime.
"No need to bow, I'm the last person you want to do that to," Fuutarou declares quietly, grabbing firm hold of Yotsuba's green hair ribbon and gently lifting it up so that Yotsuba's face also rises with it. "You're in luck; I didn't eat anything yet today, so please do treat me."
"But you never eat anything at all in the morning!" Yotsuba continues to pout, causing Fuutarou to quickly set a finger on her lips, which catches her off-guard and causes her cheeks to bloom.
"Ssshh, before Miku hears you. She's gonna force-feed me burned omurice until my fucking intestines commit digestive suicide."
"Oh, was that why the kitchen kinda smelled like something burned over the weekend?"
"Yeah. Did you not hear from Nino or Miku?"
Yotsuba shakes her head as the two of them make their way out of the classroom.
"After you left, Nino reminded Ichika that she'd had work scheduled for that day, and she convinced Itsuki to leave to go study at the library instead, so it was just me, her, and Miku left in the house. She also tried making Miku leave by telling her to go get her a drink somewhere, but she didn't because she'd already bought one for her at the supermarket. So Nino tried another way to get rid of me by challenging Miku to a cooking contest to see who could make better food."
"Aha...I guess I can imagine what happened from that point on," Yotsuba remarks with an uneasy laugh.
"Yep. Should explain why your kitchen smelled like that."
The fourth quintuplet lets her eyes fall down to the ground just ahead of their shuffling feet.
"So...Nino is still giving you a hard time, huh?"
"Would it really be Nino if she weren't?"
"Well...I guess...you're not wrong, but..."
"But?"
Yotsuba glances up quickly at her tutor beside her. "Nino's...Nino's actually a super nice person, Uesugi-san. It's just that...if she doesn't think very highly of you, she'll behave like that towards you."
Yotsuba pauses as she averts her gaze before adding,
"And...she...this is just a guess on my part, but...I think she acts like that towards you because you're the only person who's visited us at our house so frequently like you have. Unless she's, like, planning to throw a party at our house or something like that, she really doesn't like having people she doesn't know in the house. She doesn't even like it when we have maid service come in or plumbers come in to fix some of the pipes in the kitchen or something."
Fuutarou listens carefully to Yotsuba's input, for it lines up with what Nino herself had to say about him two nights ago. It wasn't likely that Nino was lying about what she had to say about him, since she'd spoken those things thinking she was talking to one of her own sisters, but it's still nonetheless reassuring that another one of her sisters is inadvertently supporting Nino's sentiments.
"So please don't give up. Nino will eventually see that you're not a bad person, and that all you want is to do your job," Yotsuba says, a little bit pleadingly. "I believe in you that you can do it, Uesugi-san!"
Smiling a little, though a bit vaguely in terms of the sentiments behind it, Fuutarou gives off a heavy sigh. "Thanks for the support. But the problem is that midterms are comin' up fast...I didn't exactly have the luxury of time to work with going into this tutoring gig, but now with midterms only a few weeks away, now I'm absolutely crunched for time. And it's not like my usual workload outside of tutoring's getting any better either. I had a bit of a standoff with Nino two days ago too - remember when she ran out on us after our little trial when all you came back home?"
"Yeah, what happened after that, actually?"
"Well, when I headed out, I found Nino outside the doors down on street level, so I stayed behind a little to chat with her, since I had my own key into the high-rise and into your place that your dad gave me. I think I was able to at least make her feel a little bit better afterwards, but I can't be sure."
Shaking her head, Yotsuba also begins to look somewhat discouraged. "She...she's been a bit moody lately. I think something's bothering her, since she doesn't normally act cranky like that just by herself."
"Ugh, great. Then I'll assume that's my fault..."
"I-It's not your fault, though..."
"Well, it's like you said, right? Something's bothering her if she's acting bitchy all on her own. Unless she's talked to anyone else over the weekend, I'm the only person who could make her act like that." Fuutarou shakes his own head too. "As long as I can monitor Ichika's schedule with her work, I don't have to worry as much about you three. But Nino fucking hates my guts, and I don't know what Itsuki's doing or what her stance is like towards me since we haven't talked much ever since our Golden Week vacation. I need to get the two of them to start showing up...but admittedly, I'm kind of at a loss for what to do."
The two of them head down to the school cafeteria to buy their lunches, with Yotsuba graciously paying for his lunch too. The school cafeteria has recently added its own schoolmade lunchboxes in an effort to keep students on campus for lunch rather than having the students head out to convenience stores nearby off-campus and buying lunchboxes there, and to everyone's surprise, the school lunchboxes are actually very well made and delicious, so the lunchboxes are the hot new commodity among the students. Naturally, though, with their popularity come long lines and long wait times, so by the time Fuutarou and Yotsuba finally manage to get their own lunchboxes and settle on heading up to the roof to sit down and eat, there are only about fifteen minutes left in the lunch period.
"Sorry that it took so long...I forgot just how popular these new lunchboxes are..." Yotsuba mumbles dejectedly, noticing her tutor check the time on the smartwatch that she's bought for him.
"You underestimate my power of waiting," Fuutarou smirks a little, in an effort to raise the quintuplet's spirits as the two of them sit down on a bench behind the fenced edge of the roof that overlooks the central school plaza below. "I've waited much longer than this for worse food, and less of it. And especially when someone else is buying it for me."
"Ehhhh...you don't have to go that far...it's only just lunch, right...?"
Opening his own lunchbox and snapping apart his wooden chopsticks, Fuutarou raises the box up to begin eating.
"To you, it might just be lunch. To me, it's another day that I don't have to worry about going to sleep hungry."
Yotsuba's hands freeze where they are, about to pull apart her own pair of chopsticks.
"Even though it's only lunch...?" she asks. A bit of a misplaced question, but the sentiments are the same nonetheless.
"A day with food is better than a day without."
"Then how come you're so much taller than us?"
"Don't ask me. Or rather, maybe you should imagine how much taller I'd be if I actually ate properly."
"Y-You'd be a giant!"
"Thankfully I'm not. So I guess it's a handicap I don't mind having."
"But I mind! I don't like the sound of you having to worry about food every day."
"It's fine, things are better now than what they used to be. I have a sister who always makes good food for me and my dad back at their place that I can rely on whenever I get hungry."
"You can always stop by our house for dinner if you want, though. You've eaten dinner with us a few times before by this point."
"Eh, I'd rather not trigger Nino more than I already have. The dinners with you girls are gonna have to go on hold for now."
Because they don't have a lot of time left for lunch, Fuutarou eats rapidly, already a fourth through his lunchbox when Yotsuba's barely even started. Yotsuba puts her thoughts on hold for now, wanting to at least give her tutor some time to himself so that he can eat. After all, what would be the point of buying him lunch if all she does afterwards is talk his ear off...or make him talk his own ears off...
Still, as she munches softly on a piece of karaage, there's one question that remains that she must ask, like an itch that refuses to die down until it's taken care of.
"Uesugi-san...I know this might be a little bit of a more personal question...but I would still like to know. Are you...afraid of letting other people help you?"
The fact that her tutor does not give her a swift and immediate answer like he normally would is all the proof she needs to know that yes, this is in fact a very personal question she's just asked him. Her first instinct, then, is to apologize for asking such a personal question, but for once, she manages to resist her impulse to apologize, as is her second nature other than helping other people, so that Fuutarou has time to formulate his response.
"Yes," Fuutarou finally answers, lowering his now almost fully eaten lunchbox. "I've never been comfortable with the idea of relying on others for help of any kind. That's why I've always been hesitant or always tried to turn down anything that you and your sisters offer me."
Her suspicions now confirmed directly at the source, Yotsuba also lowers her chopsticks to pause her own eating.
"And...is it alright if I ask why?" she continues.
"Well, since we've already started talking about it, sure. Without going into too much detail, the world of magecraft is, uh...it's rough, to say the least. It's a cutthroat world out there, and in this current situation that the world's facing where magecraft and magic in general is on the decline, the problems that helped contribute to its downfall are only getting worse. It's a true dog-eat-dog world, the survival of the fittest, whatever you wanna call it. Bottom line is, generally speaking, you can't trust anybody except yourself. And even then, there'll be times when you don't even have yourself to trust..."
The young mage takes a break from talking to finish the rest of his lunch so that he doesn't have to worry about having to eat on his way back to the classroom once lunch ends.
"All that, plus my own experience as a mage who's managed to live through a good bit of it myself...it's taught me to always be wary of people offering aid. Too often have I seen people try to disguise malicious intentions with seemingly harmless things, and so now I can't help but think about all the bad things that could happen whenever someone offers to help me in some way. Right now, for instance, you could have arranged for this lunchbox to be poisoned, and I wouldn't have known any better because you're someone whom I wouldn't expect to do such a thing."
Yotsuba opens her mouth to protest, but she barely manages to keep her protest suppressed, since she has a good idea what Fuutarou will say back to her.
"The smartwatch you gave me here - it could have a small bomb installed inside that could blow my left hand off and maim me. The food that Nino and Miku gave me on Saturday, that could've been poisoned too. Hell, Nino tried drugging my ass during my first week over, so that doesn't exactly help matters. Even if you girls aren't the ones trying to do these things, someone else might know about our relationship and take advantage of that to attack me while making it seem like it was you girls who did it. Deceit is everywhere, and given its nature, you never quite know where it'll come from and when. So to minimize my own risks of getting hurt, but more importantly to do my best to make sure that no one else gets involved in case something goes wrong, typically I handle things on my own, I solve my own problems. I'll have to make exceptions every now and then, obviously, depending on the nature of whatever contract I have active, since I can't exactly go around choosing what kinds of jobs I want to have, since, well...money is money, and I don't care what my job is so long as I see the check at the end after I've done my part."
Fuutarou looks straight up again, towards the rest of the city.
"I get the feeling I've said that line a whole bunch of times for some reason..." he wonders aloud.
"You have been hanging out with us a lot lately. Maybe you've been telling them the same thing?" Yotsuba suggests.
"Probably."
Setting aside his now empty lunchbox to dispose of properly later once they need to get going, the young tutor opens his messenger bag and pulls out a plain thermos bottle that has ordinary drinking water inside to take a swig.
"To add to that...everything has a cost. This is similar to the whole 'opportunity cost' thing I talked to you about a while back, if you remember that. But for example, when you buy something, it has a monetary value attached to it that tells you how much money it's worth, and you give the cashier that amount of money to purchase it. In this case, it's very simple - you see the cost in a way that you understand and pay it with the appropriate currency, in this case with yen."
Yotsuba has stopped eating to pay attention to her tutor, as if they're in the middle of a lesson. Except this would be one of the rare times that Yotsuba is deeply invested in what her tutor has to say.
"But not everything is so cut and dry like that. Because let's say, using the two of us as an example now, I've been hired to tutor you so that you can pass your exams and get through graduation safely. But you're not the one paying for my tutelage, your dad is. Same thing with lunch today: you bought my lunch for me, so you had to pay lunch twice, once for the two of us. And that's still involving a clear, intuitive medium like money - how do you know what the price of something is when money isn't involved?"
"Uesugi-san...this is starting to sound like an economics class," Yotsuba says blankly.
At this, Fuutarou breaks into actual laughter. Having never seen her tutor behave like this, Yotsuba can do nothing but stare.
"An economics class...this would be the most basic economics class in the world if that were the case," he snickers. "I can add an actual economics course to our schedule if you really want, but I don't think you can - "
"Forget I said anything! Forget it, forget it pleaeeeeeeaaaaase!"
"Yeah, I figured...but I guess I can't blame you for thinking that. Honestly, I think I started talking about money because I'm a broke ass bitch most of the time and money's all I ever think about..."
Uesugi clears his throat briefly.
"Basically, what I'm trying to say is - when you offer help to someone, or when you ask someone for help, no matter what form that help comes in, it needs to be paid for. Most of the time, it's money - but there are things that don't involve money at all. Favors, connections, deals, negotiations...as long as both or all parties agree to it, compensation can take literally any form, even no form at all if that's what everyone really wants. My unwillingness to let other people help me is also due to that, because the price I'd have to pay for receiving aid from someone else may be in a form that I'm not willing to pay. So if I can help it, I do everything on my own, because the prices I pay to operate alone are prices I'm fine with paying, if that makes sense."
"...so...you mean something like...you weren't planning to eat lunch today because you're okay with going hungry?"
"Wow, you're smarter than you give off, Yotsuba. Why can't you be this smart during our normal lessons, I wonder?" Fuutarou reaches over and pinches Yotsuba's left cheek gently.
"Uaaaaaahhh...U-Uesugi-san's bullying meeee..."
Giggling a little as Fuutarou lets go of her cheek, the fourth quintuplet falls back into pensive silence, looking down at her half-eaten lunch on her lap.
"So that means...all this time...even with all the, the...bad stuff that could happen...you accepted our help in the end. Be it food, or...gifts, or..." Yotsuba trails off briefly before picking her thought back up again. "You let us help you...knowing that something bad could happen...?"
Fuutarou lowers his water bottle.
"Well, obviously I'm not going to take risks like that without setting some kind of countermeasure to mitigate any damage that I could be taking," Fuutarou shrugs a little. "Like back when Nino tried slipping me drugs. I drank the water that she gave me, but I have runes on my taste buds that scan for foreign substances in the food and drinks I consume that let me know if I'm about to get poisoned or drugged so I can spit out whatever it is that I'm about to eat or drink."
"But...you still drank the water she gave you back then, and...it turned out you were only pretending to be unconscious."
"Heisei is a drug that's manufactured with magical means - that means it can be deconstructed magically too, and if that's done, Heisei's basically harmless. I work at the hospital with your dad, and with the drug problem that the city's been experiencing lately, we've had to deal with contraband drugs of all kinds a lot, so I know a thing or two about them - especially when it comes to the magical ones and how to counter those, if they happen to have any."
Uesugi stashes his water bottle away.
"But that doesn't mean the next time I ingest Heisei or another drug, I should expect the same result. While I don't think it's fair to say that every time you girls help me out with something, be it buying me food or getting me something like this smartwatch, I have to assess every single possible bad scenario that can come of it, it wouldn't surprise me if something were to happen to me one of these days."
Yotsuba's gaze is fixed on the cement by her feet as she somberly listens to her tutor. The smartwatch that she bought for him...the lunch that she bought for him today...all the other little trinkets that she's given him over the weeks that she's known him...and that's nothing to say of whatever else her sisters have done for him too...all of that, every single one of them could have carried a risk of hurting Fuutarou instead...? As unbelievable as it might seem, the memories of Fuutarou fighting against the gangsters at the warehouse are there to remind Yotsuba that Fuutarou isn't saying all this just to scare her, that he's got a very good reason to say all the things that he's saying. After all, she was the one who got him to talk about this - he wouldn't bother her with this stuff if she hadn't, since he keeps to himself mainly.
Like clockwork, a hand rests on top of her head, over her hair ribbon that gets flattened for a moment underneath the hand's weight.
"You let me worry about that," Uesugi Fuutarou mutters solemnly, and Yotsuba thinks she can sense a bit more weight to his words as well than usual. "Keep being you; you wouldn't be Yotsuba otherwise. And if nothing else, know that out of all five of you, you're the one who's helped me the most so far."
Unable to find her breath, Yotsuba remains frozen where she sits on the bench, with her tutor's hand on her mid-length peachy red hair. The one who's helped Fuutarou the most? Her? But how? The most she's ever done was buy him an expensive smartwatch that Fuutarou never asked for...most of the time, all she's ever done is be a dumb idiot during his lessons...
The bell begins to ring, as if Fuutarou intentionally timed his last words to her so that she won't have a chance to ask him why he felt that way.
"Ugh...time to go sleep in class again, I guess..." Chuckling morbidly to himself, Fuutarou gets up, picking up his bag and his trash with him. "I can take yours too, if you want. Wait, you didn't finish it all..."
But Yotsuba slowly shakes her head, not looking back up at her tutor.
"It's okay...um...I'll...I'll finish this up quick right now," she says lightly.
"You sure? Then I'll see you back in the classroom."
The sound of the metal door leading up to the roof of their building scrapes shut behind her as she lifts up the last piece of karaage to her mouth.
"...I haven't even done anything yet..." is all she can mumble to herself as she finishes the rest of her lunch.