4:13 AM.
Such is the time displayed on Nino's alarm clock when Miku awakens groggily next to her older sister in her bedroom. Nature is calling - perhaps that was to be expected with how she and Nino stayed up longer than usual at night talking to their tutor about their newfound identities as mages and their recently discovered (but not acquired) Mystic Eyes.
Robotically, the third quintuplet grunts with a bit of discomfort at having to leave the warmth and comfort of her sister's bed. Nino, quite the deep sleeper herself, merely stirs a little and rolls over onto her left shoulder before continuing to snore quietly into the wall next to her bed when Miku gets out, so Miku unlocks and opens the door to head down to the bathroom.
While washing her hands after doing her business, Miku briefly lets them sit underneath the running faucet. She can't remember the last time she'd had to make a bathroom run in the middle of the night like this that didn't involve feeling like she'd just come out of watching a horror film. Maybe she's not meant to remember such a time to begin with.
Climbing back up the stairs, still half-delirious with sleepiness, Miku heads to the bedroom and lets herself in, closing the door softly behind her and locking it, as is her habit. Her night vision, briefly blinded by the bathroom lights, is slowly returning, so she can at least make out the layout of the room as she drags her feet through it to reach the side of the bed. She lifts up the covers and pulls herself in, draping herself with the covers again and cuddles up with the occupant of the bed who's already sleeping there at the time of her departure for her late-night sojourn.
Her spot on the bed doesn't feel very warm, even though she'd just been sleeping here...maybe Nino's just hogging up the middle of the bed. But then again, that can't be right...Miku has enough space on her side of the bed, and it's not like she's about to fall off the edge. That, and Nino seems a bit more muscular than Miku last remembers...has she been working out lately?
Too sleepy and tired to pursue the answers to this hazy nebula of questions that begins to cloud her mind, Miku closes her eyes for good in the darkness and slips back into her sleep.
"By the way, girls, do you know where Miku went off to?"
Morning in the Nakano household. Nino, the first one up, dutifully as always even on a weekend at seven o'clock sharp, has prepared breakfast consisting of mini-omelettes, fresh blueberries, fluffy white rice, seasoned greens, and toast and is bringing over the first few plates for her sisters while the rest set the table with utensils and dinner mats on which to put them and their plates.
"Miku? Come to think of it, she's usually pretty good on waking up on her own..." Ichika wonders aloud, looking up at the second floor where their bedrooms are.
"You told her to go sleep with you for last night, didn't you?" Yotsuba reminds Nino as the girls sit down together to eat breakfast.
"I did, but when I woke up, she wasn't there. If she were, I would've woken her up with me to help me out with breakfast, since I'm teaching her and all that," Nino explains, once the girls have given their cultural thanks for the food that they are about to partake in.
"Hmm, that is very strange indeed. Where could that girl have gone off to?" Itsuki wonders aloud as she is the first to take a big bite out of her first mini-omelette.
"Did you check her own room yet? Miku has a tendency to go to the bathroom during the middle of the night: I hear her walking up and down the stairs sometimes since my room's right at the top," Ichika suggests. "She might've gone to the bathroom and then gone straight back to her own room by mistake since she's half-asleep, but that's just my guess."
"I already checked; Uesugi locked the door to Miku's room before going to sleep," Nino shakes her head. "Honestly, having the nerve to lock the door of someone else's room that you're borrowing for the night...how much of a dick can he be?"
"Oh c'mon, don't be like that, Nino, it's Uesugi-san we're talking about here," Yotsuba chuckles a litttle to help Nino settle down. "I'm sure he's the kind of person who might have trouble sleeping with other people around him nearby or something. He is spending the night in a place that he's not used to sleeping in, after all."
"That's right, that's right," Ichika nods sagely in agreement. "Fuutarou-kun's quite the introvert, you know? So of course he'll have introverted tendencies. Miku does the same, after all, locking her door at night when she goes to sleep."
"I mean, we all should have, with Uesugi in the house and all. Actually, no, I call bullshit on that, he fucking sleeps in class every single day, doesn't he? So clearly he shouldn't have any problems sleeping around other people he doesn't know!"
"But this time's different."
"How so, Ichika?"
Ichika lets out quite a mature giggle. "How so? Well, don't you see the four of us? Of course any healthy high school boy would have trouble sleeping when he's got five jaw-droppingly beautiful and sexy classmates surrounding him in the other rooms, wouldn't he?"
"He's...really not the type of person to care about that, I don't think," Nino retorts.
"Oh, he isn't? Then why are you always so concerned about him being in the house? You didn't like the idea of him staying over a night either, right ~ ?"
"Shut up, Ichika! And that's still besides the point; Miku's gone off somewhere and she hasn't texted us or left us a note or anything telling us where she's gone," Nino sighs, trying to shift the conversation in another direction.
"Um...I don't mean to, uh, make everyone panic, but...could it be that something...something happened to her...?" Yotsuba asks sheepishly to her sisters, looking up from her food.
"If that were the case, then Fuutarou-kun would already be up and about searching for her since that's kind of his job, right?" Ichika points out for her sister.
"What about Uesugi-san himself?" Yotsuba asks.
"Still sleeping, remember? For someone like him, he sure is a heavy sleeper," Nino scoffs a little before munching on her slice of toast that she's buttered.
"Again, cut him some slack. He's been super busy the past few days - to the point where he couldn't even crash at school like he usually does," Ichika reminds them. "Don't be so harsh on him; I'm sure he's got a lot going on besides us to worry about."
Nino remembers the stitched wound that stretched across her tutor's chest that she saw after walking in on him intentionally in the bathroom, so she says nothing on the matter.
"Speaking of Fuutarou-kun, how was the tutoring session last night? Was it good?" the eldest quint asks curiously, smiling brightly over at the two former members of the Anti-Uesugi Fuutarou Coalition.
Both Nino and Itsuki glance at each other uncomfortably, as if silently seeing if the other wants to talk first, before parting their gazes just as quickly.
"Just be honest with yourselves; it's not like Fuutarou-kun's here to hear you talk about him," Ichika says gently.
"You never know...maybe he's doing another one of his magic tricks to listen in on us in our own house," Nino grumbles suspiciously.
"I mean, he certainly could, but I don't know if he'd be the type of person to go that far..."
"You never know, do you? I didn't know you were recording me through the wall when I was studying English on my own at night, so if you can do something like that - "
"Okay, now you're just being paranoid."
Clearing her throat, Itsuki decides to be the bigger woman between her and Nino and speaks up seriously. "I will admit that, after having studied with him for a day, I can see his skill as a tutor and why Father hired him for us. However, I do feel that his style of teaching is a bit...overbearing for my tastes."
"Well, he kind of has to be, right? If you think about it," Yotsuba shrugs. "We're all so dumb and bad at studying that we need to have stuff repeated to us over and over and over again like he's been doing to us. You see it whenever Uesugi-san yells at me for forgetting how to spell 'rice' and 'lice' every time it shows up on a test. If he's not drilling us like that, we won't remember anything."
"To add to that, we're all so used to studying by ourselves - well, I guess we can only really say that about you or Miku, and I guess a bit of Nino too," Ichika tacks on. "So that kind of reaction is understandable - you're going from being able to study at your own pace to now suddenly having someone dictate your pace for you."
"It's not the pace that bothers me, it's just how he makes himself sound like he's always right that pisses me off..." Nino remarks.
"Well, isn't that, like, supposed to be the case? He's our tutor, after all. You can say the same about all the teachers we've ever had."
"Yeah, but at least some of them make sure to not sound like stuck-up jackasses in the process."
"Does Fuutarou-kun really sound like a stuck-up jackass to you...?"
"Yes."
Ichika sighs defeatedly as the sisters continue their breakfast with a few more minutes of peace.
"I'm sure...I'm sure we'll all get used to Uesugi-san teaching us," Yotsuba murmurs hopefully, surveying the dinner table at her sisters quickly. "I'm not saying that...you know, it'll happen in just a few days. It took me and Ichika a while to get used to it too. But once you are, it's really fun!"
"Perhaps so...but even still, I have my doubts," Itsuki also gives a bit of a sigh after finishing her omelettes and is now working on her toast that she's saved for last.
"If it's only about him being overbearing and you really don't like it that much, you can always just talk to him about it. I'm sure he'll listen to what you've got to say," Ichika encourages her youngest sister.
"Listen to what I have to say?" Itsuki gives her oldest sister quite the incredulous smile. "What a joke. Do you not remember when I told you about what happened between me and Uesugi-kun during our Golden Week vacation?"
"Yes, I still do. But I'm sure he'll behave differently now, now that he's finally able to teach you."
"I am not as sure. Uesugi-kun comes off as the kind of person who uses his experience as a sort of...podium of authority on which he stands to look down on other people around him, just because he is a...a mage, or whatever he is. And letting him teach us yesterday, I got that exact same sense from him."
"He's not like that, Itsuki. He just...comes off that way to you, probably, because, um...I don't know how to describe it..." Yotsuba fumbles for words as she struggles to vocalize her argument, and thankfully Ichika comes to her rescue.
"He only seems that way because of what he's normally like, right? Pretty cold, curt, doesn't have much to say most of the time, always acts and behaves super efficiently."
"Yeah, uh huh, it's exactly that! But if you spend more time with him, you can tell that that's not what he intends to sound like at all. He just wants to help out as much as possible. He only sounds overbearing and...and strict because he wants to make sure we get everything that he's teaching us."
"That sounds really contradictory..." Nino remarks again, still staying on the sidelines to let Itsuki battle this one out on her own.
"But it's true!" Yotsuba insists, but to her dismay, Itsuki still shakes her head, unconvinced.
"I am...still unsure. While I am not against you or Ichika or Miku if you have gotten used to his tutoring by this point, I am not sure if I can be like any of you in this instance."
Then, a little idea pops into Ichika's head.
"Sure you can, Itsuki. And I know just how to do it..." she says with a smile, and she reaches over to Itsuki sitting next to her at the dinner table to begin managing her hair.
"E-Eh? Ichika, what are you...?" Confused at her eldest sister's actions, Itsuki sits still for Ichika so that she can finish her amateur hairstyling.
"I'm saying you can be one of us too if you want to be. Look, all I have to do is just change your hair around a little bit and...ta-da ~ ! Now you're Miku!"
When Ichika steps back out of her chair to stand behind Itsuki, the youngest quintuplet sports a similar style of hair to Nakano Miku, mainly imitating Miku's bangs-covering-the-eyes aspect.
"Whoaaa! Itsuki really is Miku now!" Yotsuba gawks widely with amazement.
"Ichikaaaaa! I was being serious here, you know!" Itsuki cries out in indignation again, and Ichika apologizes quickly, giggling all the while.
"Sorry, sorry, sorry! It was just an innocent quintuplet joke and I had to make it since it was the perfect opportunity!"
"Ichika!"
Nino's sudden controlled shout grabs the rest of the quints' attentions as they look over at her, realizing that she's looking pretty serious about the matter as well. Now that she's gotten everyone's attention, the second quintuplet swiftly stands up from her seat at the table, rounds the corner to walk behind Itsuki herself, and then reaches for her hair like Ichika before her.
"You parted her hair the wrong way; Miku has it going the other way," Nino explains, correcting Ichika's mistake and draping Itsuki's bangs the opposite direction so that they properly cover her right eye just like Miku's. "And look drowsier, Itsuki, you have to look like you don't give a shit about anything."
"Oh, and this ahoge is getting in the way too - it's gonna be a dead giveaway," Ichika adds, trying to flatten out Itsuki's cowlick before resorting to simply tucking it underneath a lock of her hair behind Itsuki's head.
"Please do not play dress-up with me right now!" the youngest quint cries, perhaps understandably, but her older sisters finish just as soon as she demands them to stop, and Yotsuba, who sits across from her at the table, claps her hands excitedly.
"Wow, you really look like Miku now. If you just match how she talks, Uesugi-san wouldn't know the difference!" she laughs.
And once again, Ichika gets an idea from her sister's remarks and leans in mischievously towards Nino.
"Miku isn't here right now as far as we know, so wanna see if Fuutarou-kun can tell them apart?" she asks her younger sister, who balks at her silently.
"Are you serious...? I don't think he'll fall for a trick like this...he's a mage and all..."
"Yeah, I know, but still, we're identical quintuplets, and we've gone around masquerading as each other before just to mess with people, especially before we entered middle school. Just for old time's sake, let's see if Fuutarou-kun falls for it and mistakes Itsuki for Miku. Maybe he'll treat Itsuki as nicely as he does to Miku."
"I-I do not like the sound of that one bit!" Itsuki blurts out from below.
"But like, he already knows that we're identical quints...there's no way he won't see through this right away," Nino still doubts.
"Oh c'mon, let's just have a little bit of fun. You should be all for this, given how you usually act towards him, right?"
"Ugh...fine. At least it's not me going in there."
"Are you selling me out again, Nino?!"
"I don't know what you're talking about, lalala ~ "
"Ninooooooo!"
Like a car turning on its lights, Uesugi Fuutarou's black eyes open mechanically to signal his awakening.
Blinking a few times to help his returning vision adjust properly, the young mage can immediately sense that he's slept much longer than usual simply by the fact that his head isn't pounding his brain into oblivion the moment he wakes up, or at least not as much as he's used to. But then again, it's not very difficult to get more sleep than his usual average - especially when he's got the luxury of sleeping in a proper bed and not any other bed that usually goes by other names, like a chair, a desk, the floor, or against a wall somewhere.
Well, it is the weekend...and he's made sure to clear his schedule to leave Friday and Saturday open so that he can tutor the girls all day on both days, so sleeping in at least has no immediate repercussions, other than maybe Nino yelling at him for oversleeping. It's not like she doesn't already yell at him for every other little thing that she finds fault with that he does anyway, so by that point it's more of a drop in the ocean for him to deal with. Ninety-nine problems, indeed - Fuutarou wonders if Jay-Z ever had to deal with quintuplets.
Sighing softly through his nose, Fuutarou decides to indulge in this very rare luxury of sleeping in and lets his head tuck in a little more on the pillow...
...before his forehead bumps against someone else's.
Pulling back his head so that he can properly assess his situation, the young mage beholds the pajama'd body of Nakano Miku sleeping calmly in front of him, lying on her side. So that's who he sensed entered his - or rather Miku's - room in the middle of the night...Fuutarou's subconsciousness was able to detect her presence, but because it didn't sense any disturbing aura from it or any other kind of threat from it that would tip him off to awake immediately, Fuutarou took the risk of assuming it was just one of the quints and kept sleeping, as he hasn't had good sleep in a long while. Turns out it was Miku - which would probably make sense, given that it's her room he's borrowing for the night.
Fuutarou's accidental bump against Miku's forehead also happens to wake the girl, and Miku, too, groggily reopens her eyes, merging from her second stretch of sleep of the day.
Not sure of what to do, since he's never been in a situation where he's woken up to find a girl in the same bed as his, Fuutarou watches Miku carefully, beginning to anticipate several outcomes that this touchy situation can lead to. He does notice as Miku opens her eyes that they are their normal blue, so he doesn't need to worry about them messing with her sleep, at least not when he's around.
Miku's eyes lock gazes with her tutor's for a solid three seconds. She blinks three times as well, as if ascertaining that what she's seeing is not just the vestiges of a pleasant dream but actual reality.
"...is that you, Fuutarou...?" she mutters sleepily, her voice cracking a little along the way.
"Yeah. I thought you were spending the night with Nino?" he replies, also keeping his voice down. He magically checks for presences outside; the rooms around him and the second floor immediately outside Miku's room seem empty, so it's safe to assume that the girls are probably all downstairs eating breakfast or something.
"...I was...I had to...use the bathroom...I guess I...ended up...back here..." Miku continues to murmur sleepily, in such a way that Fuutarou can tell that she hasn't quite regained all her senses yet.
But that swiftly changes when she stops talking. Fuutarou watches her blue eyes snap open in extreme alarm, and as he suspects, her cheeks begin to bubble with red embarrassment as she just now begins to grasp the exact kind of situation she's in.
"...Fu...Fuu...tarou...?" she whispers hoarsely. Her voice is now breaking even harder than it was before.
"はい、ふうたろうです," the boy in question replies curtly.
Upon hearing her tutor speaking to her from mere inches away from her own face, Miku bolts from her bed. Or, at least she tries to - she attempts to push away from Fuutarou to sit up on her side of the bed, but her bed, unlike Nino's, isn't big enough to properly accommodate two people, so she barely has the space to work with to do so - and she ends up tumbling over the edge onto the floor.
Well, she would have fallen to the floor behind her, if it isn't for Fuutarou reacting swiftly and grabbing hold of her left arm and tugging her back up to the bed. But in so doing, Miku thus soars back into the bed - and is stopped by bumping lightly against Fuutarou, ending up even closer to him than when she was when she woke up.
"...I get that it's a bit surprising to find yourself in the same bed as your classmate, but try to not jump out like that, you're gonna hurt yourself and your dad's gonna kill me," the young mage whispers, practically right into Miku's reddening ear. "Or even worse, dock my pay."
Fuutarou's usual dark humor, ironically enough, helps break her emotional gridlock, though naturally she's still feeling another type of way being so close to her own tutor, and in her very own bed of all places.
"...getting a cut paycheck is worse than dying to you?" she asks quietly back.
"By a large margin. Docked pay is the stuff of nightmares." Fuutarou shudders a little, though how much of it is actually serious, Miku is still unsure.
The way she's ended up back on her bed has placed her in hugging range of her classmate, with the top of her head right underneath Fuutarou's nose. All Miku can see herself is the upper half of Fuutarou's thorax, covered by the plain white shirt that he's worn to bed. Now that they've exchanged a few words and she's wide awake by this point, Miku can't help but notice how much warmth she feels Fuutarou's body giving off. It's not just her own embarrassment or the body heat that the two of them have been building up together underneath the covers throughout the night; his body feels like a small electric heater that's been put on its lowest heating setting.
"...Fuutarou, are you...sick? Do you have a fever...?" she finds herself asking softly before she can stop herself and think about what she ought to say.
"No, I'm not sick. You must be feeling all the body heat from me, right?"
Miku nods.
"Mm. Here's another little magic lesson from me, then, as much as I said I'd rather not get into that kind of stuff, but a mage has what are called 'Magic Circuits', which I mentioned briefly earlier this morning before going to sleep to you and Nino; they're a sort of...pseudo-nervous system that exists in a mage's body that allows them to use, well, magic. Specifically, it works by converting your own Life Force, or Od is the specific terminology, into magical energy. You need to have Magic Circuits in order to be a mage, and if you don't, you can't use magic, and thus you can't be a mage. At least, generally speaking...in reality it's a lot more complicated than that, but that's the simplest I can make it for now."
While Fuutarou is explaining Magic Circuits to her, Miku slowly realizes that she's been thoroughly captivated by every time that Fuutarou has taken the time to explain something magic-related to her or her sisters.
"But long story short, since magical energy is produced by a mage's body via Magic Circuits for that mage to use and make runes, spells, or whatever with, the process of running Od through those Circuits produces heat as a byproduct, pretty similar to how a computer's power supply generates heat as it's working to keep the computer on."
"...so...all your body heat right now..." Miku looks up slowly at her tutor before shyly ducking her chin back down after realizing again just how close their faces are to each other. "...it's...because of all the...magic that you're using...?"
"Right. I maintain a lot of spells and runes and such at the same time for all sorts of reasons...security and surveillance, mainly, and I've explained before what I use those for. Normally, mages don't use magic all the time; they only produce and use whatever they need during the times they actually need it, and in those normal usage cases, the heat that their bodies produce is pretty negligible and not even worth thinking about. To go with the computer analogy I made already, it's like turning on your computer, using it for a few hours, and then turning it off properly; nothing should really happen to the health of the computer if you use it like that, right. But just like how you can leave a computer on all the time, a mage can also constantly be using magic. It gets pretty tiring after a while, even dangerous depending on how much magic you're constantly producing and using and how physically fit you are, but it is doable."
"Then is that why you're always so tired whenever you're at school with us?" Miku asks quietly but sharply; even with her voice in a whisper, Fuutarou can feel her words cut through the air between them, even though there's not even that much to begin with.
"Not really, that's more because I'm running around all over the place and I'm getting worn out from actual physical activity. I've optimized my magic so that it doesn't really bother me, and the only real side effect I have to deal with is this excess body heat I produce, which you can only feel if you're right up next to me like you are."
Miku doesn't answer him for a few moments, causing Fuutarou to silently wonder if he's made Miku angry again, so he lets her be...until he feels her arms slowly drape around his own and pull her towards him to close what little distance between them remains.
"...I don't want to doubt you, Fuutarou," she mumbles quietly. "But...in the case that maybe...you're saying these things so that I won't have to worry, please don't...hurt yourself like this. Please don't work so hard just because of us."
Fuutarou's perpetually tired eyes gaze past the top of Miku's peachy-red hair as it draws closer and out of his cone of vision, save for the very top of her head.
"I can't do that, Miku. I don't believe in half-assing a job, no matter how small or insignificant it might seem, even if it's just something like tutoring. That was the whole thing that Itsuki and I fought over, remember?"
"But you don't have to go so far for us...you don't have to be doing everything that you're doing just for us..."
"Why not? If I feel like putting in a certain amount of work that I feel is appropriate for a job, I'll do it. I feel that going to these lengths is, in fact, what I need to do. I know this might sound a bit cold on my part, but frankly, your own inadequacy, or feelings thereof, are not relevant in how I want to do my job."
"Okay, well - maybe I shouldn't say anything about how you should do your job, but still - having to come to school every day so tired and exhausted like that, having to run around the city or whatever it is that you said you do - and then still doing all your class president work, your schoolwork, and tutoring the five of us on top of all that...?"
Fuutarou feels Miku's arms squeeze him a bit more tightly.
"Is that all...really worth it...?"
"...you give me too much credit, Miku. Homework and all that class president stuff is a non-factor; that doesn't bother me at all."
"That still doesn't take away from the fact that you have to sleep in class every day because that's normally the only time you even get to sleep."
"Maybe so, but for your part, you don't even know the extents to which I'm working. Maybe I could just be bullshitting you about how much I'm exactly working; maybe I'm not actually working that hard at all and I'm only making it seem like it. I did tell you in the beginning that mages aren't trustworthy, right?"
"Then if I asked you to tell me everything that you're doing for us so that I'd have a better understanding of it all, would you?"
"No, because again, frankly, that's none of your business."
Silence is Miku's next response. Fuutarou feels Miku's arms begin to relax on their pressure against his own.
Then, he hears a small sniffle - a bit of a runny sniffle, in fact. That can mean only one thing, but just to make sure, Fuutarou glances down at Miku's face.
Sure enough, she's crying silently. The first few tears have already glided down the side of her face onto the sheets beneath them.
"...do you hate us, Fuutarou?" Miku asks, her head remaining still so that she talks into Fuutarou's collarbone. "Was Nino right about you...?"
"I don't hate you," Fuutarou swiftly replies so that there can be no doubt to be wedged between their words.
"Then why won't you let us worry about you?" Miku slowly wipes the tears from her eyes. "You stayed the night with us when Ichika texted you to, so why...?"
"Stuff's been happening in the city...dangerous stuff. I fucked up during one of my investigations, and so I decided to take Ichika up on her offer so that I could make sure nothing would happen to you girls over the weekend."
"...so wait, the tutoring...the tutoring you did yesterday...?"
"That was only half the reason. I mean, it's always been only half the reason, but yesterday it was a lot more apparent than usual."
"That's what I mean!"
Without warning, Miku digs her face into Fuutarou's chest - right onto the gauzed injury that afflicts Fuutarou on his chest. The sudden application of pressure on the magical stitches he's put on himself there drives nails of pain through the area, causing the young mage to inhale sharply on reflex. The boy tries to stifle his reflexive reaction, but there's little he can hide about that when Miku is right in front of him, and she quickly pulls her face away to look up at her tutor.
"D-Did I hurt you...? Are you hurt somewhere?" she whispers urgently, her eyes wide in alarm that flicker back and forth from Fuutarou's face to his chest and back again; the tears that they have been quietly shedding have immediately dried up in her alarm.
"Yeah, but...it's fine, don't worry about it - "
But Miku isn't having any of it this time. Sitting up in bed over her tutor, who rolls over on his side of his bed to follow her gaze, the third quintuplet, with a stubborn frown firmly etched on her face, stares down her roommate.
"Fuutarou, show it to me," she says softly, but her voice has lost its usual meekness and aloofness. Rather, it sounds more in line with the kind of voice she used to lash out at Nino the previous evening when the latter joked about intentionally failing midterms next week.
"And what if I refuse?" the tutor talks back.
"I'm not letting you leave this bed until you show me," she answers in kind. "Please don't make me say it again, Fuutarou. Show me where you're hurt."
Her last sentence is accentuated, again without warning, with a blink of her eyes, and Fuutarou finds himself staring straight up into a pair of small, icy black and blue snowballs of death. It would appear to the high school mage that Miku's mastery over her Mystic Eyes is far more developed than those of Nino's, for her to activate them at will like this, while Nino's handling of them was noticeably clumsier and more awkward - understandable, since Miku's probably known about her eyes for a good few years.
Even still, even when facing the mysterious Mystic Eyes of one of his students, Fuutarou finds the gall to chuckle a little.
"You realize what you're saying to me right now?" he mentions up to Miku. "Telling me to show you something on me, when we're both in your bed, in your bedroom on a Saturday morning?"
Fuutarou is merely halfway through his words when Miku's face once more pops red, as red as the hair on her head. The mage watches the sight of Miku's Mystic Eyes physically tremble and quake, and when she blinks, they've instantly reverted back to their normal selves, her Mystic Eyes retreating into their magical depths.
"...why...why did you have to...put it...that...way..." she stammers, her voice full of soft-spoken embarrassment as her usual meekness returns with a vengeance.
"I mean, I don't mind showing you, of course. All I'm doing is asking you if that's what you really want," Fuutarou chortles, also sitting up with Miku, who inches away from him, now made hyper-self-conscious about the things she's been demanding from him for the past few minutes.
"Aaaaaa, aaaaaaaa...!" Miku whimpers, quickly turning her back to him as if Fuutarou were about to show her something nice, but she still makes sure to keep her voice down. "Fu-Fuutarou's a pervert, a perveeerrrt!"
"Oh, I'm the pervert? And who exactly was it that said all that stuff like, 'Show it to me', 'I'm not letting you leave this bed until you - '"
"Eeeeek! Fuutarou, sh-shut up! Shut uuuuuuuuuppp...! ! !"
Clasping her hands over her ears as tightly as she can, Miku feels her face burn like a glowing charcoal as she's subjected to Fuutarou's amused chuckles behind her that she can still hear despite her best efforts. She quietly resolves to herself that she'll start wearing her headphones even when she goes to sleep so that she'll always have them on hand.
"Sorry, I couldn't resist teasing you. You know I always do that to Itsuki and Yotsuba whenever I can," the boy apologizes quickly. "But it's good to know that you've got a cute side to you too."
Slowly turning back around to re-face her tutor, though with another one of her solid pouts, Miku grumpily gazes back at him.
"...telling me I'm cute isn't going to work," she informs him, continuing to pout and be grumpy. "You big meanie."
"Well, it's more because I enjoy watching people show a side of themselves that they don't normally show, but...that's a story for another time. I believe you wanted to see this, though...excuse me for doing this, by the way..."
In one fluid motion, Fuutarou reaches down and silently pulls off his plain white shirt, revealing the light layer of bandages around his chest. Miku's eyes once again contort slightly with horror as she realizes that besides the white bandage, there is an alarming plethora of scars muddying his chest and abdomen, the same ones that Nino saw in the bathroom the night before. Fuutarou doesn't stop there, though - he reaches back to disable the sealing rune that's holding the bandages tightly in place, and he catches the gauze as it's falling down.
"Three days ago, I was investigating a pretty big police raid on a drug cache. It was the same night when Ichika texted me to come over and stay for Friday night with you guys," Fuutarou explains as Miku's eyes scan the long wound across his chest. "I snuck in to check out what was going on for myself, and it turned out that someone had planted a magic-based bomb there, probably to kill the police officers and anyone else in the area. So I tried taking it away from the police scene, but I got caught on the way and had to run somewhere safe to hide and then try to defuse the bomb. But I couldn't defuse it easily, so I ended up having to detonate it safely so that we wouldn't have to deal with an even worse explosion, and I got caught by a bit of it, and this is what I got out of it."
Fuutarou watches Miku stare intently at his wound for a few moments.
"...in case you're wondering, I'm fine now. I just need to wait for it to heal, and when you pressed up against it, it hurt a bit." The young mage waits for a response from Miku, but she doesn't give one right away. "...are you that interested in a dude's body or something?"
"I'm...I'm not," Miku says quickly, resuming her pout back at him. "It's just...I'm...well..."
Fuutarou looks back down at himself. "Oh, you were looking at the scars."
Miku gives him a tiny nod, and she watches Fuutarou put the bandages back on and then pull his shirt back on.
"Well...I did say that being a mage is hell. Not literally, but...it's a rough career choice. Would totally not recommend...they don't even offer classes for it in university, that's how bad of a career it is."
"Your jokes aren't funny, Fuutarou."
"Damn. I thought you out of all the quints would appreciate my realist humor the most."
"What's that supposed to mean..."
"Nothing in particular. But I am serious when I tell you that being a mage is not what you want. You've seen the damage it's done to me here." Fuutarou leans against the wall up against which Miku's bed is placed.
"Then why did you become a mage, Fuutarou?"
"I didn't have a choice back then. My family was in deep shit...debt, mainly. My dad at the time was also involved in some, uh, let's say...less than savory business, and so when he quit that to reform himself, they sent people after him to harass him and such to try to pressure him into coming back."
"Like Yakuza stuff?"
"Something similar, I suppose, I don't have the details since that was before my time. I discovered that I had some magic potential when I was young, luckily enough, so I capitalized on that and became a mage to help pay the bills and to keep the guys who kept bothering us away." Fuutarou looks straight back at Miku. "I didn't become a mage because I thought it'd be cool, Miku, before you get the wrong idea. I did it so that I could protect my family. My dad, my sister...my mom too, before she passed away, at least."
"Eh?" Miku blinks at her tutor. "Your mom...passed away too?"
"Yeah. It was actually when she died that I decided to commit to becoming a mage," Fuutarou explains quietly. "Because back then, back when my mom was still around, she could support the family by selling bread that she baked for us to local bakeries and markets in our area that would buy them for resale. But when she died in a traffic accident, I knew that, since we were already poor back then, I needed to step up and start doing something. Magic was the only thing I had, and magic was the only thing that could let a kid like me back then earn any money."
He takes a moderate sigh, letting the back of his head rest against the wall behind him.
"Working as a mage is pretty tough, I'm not gonna lie. Not trying to sound like an old dude here, but I've worked a lot of odd jobs in my time...nothing that I've done's as tough as being a mage is. It's very cutthroat and tragic - not many people become mages and live for very long, and it's probably not wrong to say that they're not meant to. I've seen a lot of kids like myself try to become mages for whatever reason they got, and most of them don't really get anywhere. Half of them would die, the other half would quit after realizing just what it means to get involved in the magic world..."
Miku slowly blinks back at her tutor, who then matches her gaze, as if inviting her to talk as well.
"Is part of the reason why you're so nice to us because you empathize with us?" she asks. "Because you also know what it's like to have lost your Mama?"
"Hm? Oh, no, not...not really, no," Fuutarou denies casually with a shake of his head. "I do my best to keep family matters and work stuff separate wherever I can. Yeah, I guess I can empathize with your girls' situation, but that's not what's motivating me to tutor you all."
"It's cold, hard cash, isn't it."
"Bingo." Fuutarou gives her a short series of golf claps. "Very well done, a hole in one for Nakano Miku."
"Ichika suggested that I should be part of the golf club at school. She said golf seems like my kind of sport..."
"It could be, golf's more about concentration, performance, and execution rather than physical endurance. But yes, I'm motivated by those juicy yen bills, those big ol' numbers on my checking account. The more the better so that I can buy Raiha whatever she wants."
The two schoolmates once more settle down into a downy silence as their next round of thoughts is being prepared warmly.
"...you're an amazing person, Fuutarou," Miku says softly, looking down at the sheets on her bed between herself and her tutor. "Doing all that...I couldn't possibly imagine myself being in your shoes."
"Didn't I tell you not to take everything I say at face value? You don't know if I'm spoonfeeding you lies, or how much of it's just bogus lies."
"But you're not that kind of person. You don't work this much just so that you can get your little sister what she wants; you don't tutor idiots like me and my sisters as much as you have just for the money."
Miku's eyes lift up to meet Fuutarou's again.
"You sure about that?" he asks her directly, and she nods with her own form of reserved but self-confident assurance.
"Yep. You care about us, Fuutarou, whether you tell me it directly or not. All I ask is that you let us do the same for you, like how you've stayed with us for tonight so that you can get some proper rest."
The young mage smiles a little with a curt little nod of his head.
"We'll see about that, I suppose. But for now, we've got a bigger problem on our hands..."
"What problem...?"
Fuutarou points to the door. "I think one of your sisters is coming up to check on me. I don't think they know where you are right now."
Gasping lightly at the situation, having totally forgotten about what her sisters are doing, Miku tenses up and turns towards the door as well; outside, they can hear one of the quintuplets clearly climbing the stairs due to the lack of soundproofing in the walls.
"What...what should we do, Fuutarou? I completely forgot..." the third quintuplet asks hastily.
"Well, it's more like, what should I do...Nino's gonna fuckin' rip my damn head off if she finds out we spent the night together," Fuutarou groans as he leaps a little off the bed while scratching his head.
"I know, I'm more concerned about you right now."
"Eh, they'll find out one way or another. I'd rather just come clean and get my head-ripping over with."
"But then Nino might end up quitting your tutoring..."
"Ah shit, you're right...this might actually send her over the edge...hm...well, we don't have time, so let me do this...and..."
Fuutarou casts a quick Presence Concealment spell over Miku, a weak one that should remove her presence so long as she doesn't say anything or make any drastic movements.
"Just stay where you are, I'll try to figure something out," Fuutarou whispers over to her as he goes to the door and opens it first before whoever's coming up the stairs has a chance to reach him.
Stepping out onto the second floor, pretending to yawn to convey an air of just having woken up, the young tutor finds Nakano Miku facing him at the top of the stairs. Mentally, the sight of Miku's face in a second place other than her own bedroom makes Fuutarou do a double-take, but he quickly realizes that this is another one of the quintuplets, and that the others are playing a trick on him by sending one of them to go wake him up while looking like Miku, at least with how her hair is done. Her different set of pajamas is already a dead enough giveaway, too. The question is, though, do they know already that Miku spent the night with him? No, that can't be it, otherwise Nino would've woken them up by kicking Miku's locked door down...
"Erm..." the fake Miku blurts out, also surprised to find Fuutarou walk out to her like this. Just by her tone of voice alone, Fuutarou can immediately tell that it's Itsuki, but he decides to play along.
"Oh, hey, Miku. Sorry...I overslept, haven't had a good night's sleep in a while," Fuutarou grunts a little, still feigning some tiredness and stretching to get some of it out. "Did you eat breakfast already? Smells like it downstairs..."
"Uh, um...well...y-yeah..." Itsuki, posing as Miku at the moment, mentally scrambles to remember how Miku usually behaves and tries her best to impersonate her, but to her own deep embarrassment, she's forced to realize how bad she is at impersonating her own sisters, as she probably does it the least among them. "I was sent - er, no, I came up to see if...you were awake yet or not..."
Fuutarou can plainly see how much Itsuki is struggling to pose as Miku, and as such he's unable to resist getting a good laugh out of this. So he squints down at the fake Miku, taking a few steps over, and Itsuki instinctively steps backwards, unsure of what Fuutarou is up to now.
"You sound different, Miku. Are you sick? Need me to take a look at you?" Fuutarou offers, drawing close to Itsuki, who starts shaking her head frantically.
"N-N-N-N-No, I am - I'm completely okay! I don't need a ch-checkup...!"
Downstairs, at the dinner table where the rest of the quints are clearly watching the shenanigans unfold, Fuutarou can hear a pair of suppressed snorts and giggles which spur him on to tease Itsuki a bit more.
"You sure about that? At least let me take your temperature, it'll only be a second," he says casually, reaching up with a quick hand before Itsuki can dodge out of its way to gently brush the fake Miku's bangs to the side and put his hand on her forehead.
Inhaling quickly at the sensation of Fuutarou's rough hand pressing lightly against her forehead, Itsuki, also suppressing her first reaction to yelp at her own tutor touching her like this, which she believes is absolutely improper behavior between tutor and student, forces herself to bear with it with squeezed eyes, as she's posing as one of her sisters at the moment and doesn't want to ruin her image to their tutor.
After a few moments, Itsuki reopens her eyes slowly, wondering what's taking her classmate so long to check her temperature, and she finds Fuutarou gazing directly into her own eyes. The sight startles her, but for some reason she can't pull her eyes away - Fuutarou's deep black eyes, like the dark nighttime sky, are somehow mesmerizing and captivating, even though there shouldn't be anything particularly interesting about them.
Fuutarou makes a little grin with an upwards twist of the corner of his mouth. It doesn't appear that Itsuki has any such Mystic Eyes of her own.
"Your eyes are exquisite today as always too, Miku," he whispers under his breath, but there's no mistaking what he's just said, at least from Itsuki's perspective.
As soon as those words slip into her ears, Itsuki feels her heart skip a beat.
Then the situation that she's in just now dawns on her. Uesugi Fuutarou has his hand on her forehead, with his face inches away from her own, gazing deeply into her blue eyes, after telling her that her eyes are beautiful as always.
Itsuki's cheeks also begin to pop as her tongue and vocal strength begins to disintegrate on the spot. "...w...wha...Ue...sugi-kun...what are you saying...?!"
"AH!" Fuutarou recoils backwards quickly, letting go of the youngest quint's forehead as he points dramatically back at her like a spiky-haired attorney in the courtroom. "That isn't Miku, Miku doesn't call me 'Uesugi-kun'! The only one who does is Itsuki! Did you try to trick me just now by posing as Miku, Itsuki!?"
At this point, the quints watching the situation unfold from downstairs can contain their amusement no longer, and Ichika, Nino, and Yotsuba all burst out in hilarity-ridden laughter when Fuutarou quickly figures out that he's being duped. The combination of Fuutarou's swift deduction and the laughter from her sisters at the dinner table yank Itsuki back down to earth as her face fully transforms into a bright, undeniable shade of red.
"N-No, no, U-Uesugi-kun, wait, please, please wait, I can explain - !" Itsuki tries to explain herself, but Fuutarou continues his dramatic act and turns ninety degrees away from her with his arms crossed and his chin turned upwards.
"I don't wanna hear it! You tried pulling a fast one on me by pretending to be Miku so that you could get all close and personal with me like Miku sometimes does, huh? Bet! But I ain't havin' none of it, you can't trick me! Congratulations, Itsuki, ya played yourself!"
Unable to handle both the continued laughter from her sisters downstairs and Fuutarou's damning accusation, even if none of it is by any means true, Itsuki can do nothing other than purse her lips together and let her pure, unadulterated embarrassment gush from her cheeks and her eyes in the form of tears that begin to line her lower eyelids.
But before she can start crying outright -
"Fuutarou, you're having too much fun with this."
To his horror, and to the shock and surprise of the rest of the quintuplets, Miku, who dispels the weak Presence Concealment rune that he's cast on her to hide her presence from her sisters by talking, raises her hand as soon as Fuutarou turns around to see her behind him and whacks him lightly on the middle of his forehead with the side of her hand in a karate-chop motion.
"Bad Fuutarou," she adds with a wry little smile.
Sighing because of what's about to happen, now that Miku's betrayed him, Fuutarou stares back at the culprit, who smiles cheerfully back up at him. While it's quite the beautiful smile coming from her, now is not the time that he wants to see it.
"No teasing my sisters, okay? Bullying is bad," Miku says back at him, still maintaining her wide smile.
"Goddamn it, Miku," Fuutarou groans, just as he turns around to find Nino, who's somehow teleported up to the second floor in the span of two and a half seconds, standing in front of him with her right fist in a blur right in front of his face.