Five Equal Angels

by Hieda no Akyuu

Alternate retelling of the original manga. With more than just tutoring skills at his disposal, Uesugi Fuutarou is hired to guide the Quintuplets to graduation, but this time there is more to it than just tutoring and more at stake than simply avoiding academic failure.

50. Tuner

With heavy breath and a brisk step, Nakano Yotsuba jogs quickly down one of the narrower streets in the city's southern suburbs. Due to her obligation with the track team, she's keeping herself in shape for an upcoming track meet that is important to the team, as their results and placings in it will determine the team's ability to enter regionals in a few months during their second trimester in the fall.

Today is Saturday, the first such one of the new month of July. Final exams are almost upon them, and as such, their tutor and classmate Fuutarou has been correspondingly ramping up their studies to ensure that they will be on track, no pun intended, to pass their first trimester's finals with better grades than their midterms. However, much to his annoyance and disappointment, the responsibilities and obligations that several of the Nakano sisters have besides their studying under him have taken priority, with the usual suspects in Ichika with her mysterious part-time job and Yotsuba constantly helping others at school out but predominantly the track team making up the most number of missed tutoring sessions.

So to make up for these missed lessons, Fuutarou has been issuing and delivering auxiliary lessons during the weekends as well, and practically every weekend since the incident they had with Nino has been occupied with auxiliary lessons, at least for Ichika and Yotsuba who have been frequently ditching their intended tutoring lessons. Miku and Itsuki have consistently been joining them for these weekend lessons anyway, however, even though Fuutarou did not require them to join since their attendance has been perfect thus far. Nino has chosen not to join them yet, instead preferring to use the weekends to relax and hang out with friends, though she did mention that she would consider joining them the last weekend before their finals as an opportunity for a final review.

But strangely, Fuutarou called off today's lesson. He did not give a specific reason why; after school yesterday, he even had a much shorter than usual review session with the girls, only for a mere hour when he'd usually be there for three times that amount of time. When questioned, he merely answered that he had some obligations of his own to keep, and that today's weekend makeup lessons for Saturday and Sunday for the usual pair of frequently AWOL quintuplets would also be cancelled, so they were free to use this weekend however they wished. Considering that finals are fast approaching, he advised them to take advantage of their free weekend, since afterwards until the end of finals and the start of summer vacation, there wouldn't be another opportunity for the girls to take a breather.

The girls simply assumed that Fuutarou probably needed to take care of whatever magework that's come up and so didn't ask him much more about it. But over the course of the past few weeks, again ever since their incident with Nino, Yotsuba couldn't help but notice that Fuutarou is once again slipping back into his unhealthy cycle of almost starving himself and depriving himself of proper sleep. Of course, it can be said that Fuutarou never really demonstrated what "proper sleep" entails since he's always used class time, apart from several lessons that he'd use to gather information about their tests to use as review material for his students, to catch up on sleep during the day.

But these days, ever since a week ago, Fuutarou has been sleeping so deeply that he's slept through entire lunch periods and even all the way to the end of school. On one of the days when Fuutarou didn't even budge at the sound of the school bell signaling lunchtime, Yotsuba decided to go over to him herself to try to wake him up, with Miku and Itsuki in tow, since they, too, shared Yotsuba's concern for his health, but Fuutarou simply waved them off and told them to leave him alone, so ever since then, whenever he sleeps past the lunch bell, the quintuplets just leave him be, however reluctantly they must do it. In addition, there have been a handful of days when Yotsuba woke him up to remind him that he has students to tutor that afternoon, and when they would walk home together, she would always hear his stomach growling to varying degrees, a clear sign of his irregular eating habits. It even got to the point where Yotsuba legitimately tried dragging her own tutor into a Wendy's to force a Baconator USA Double down his throat because she heard about some virtual white-tailed fox talking about it in a video online and had to threaten Fuutarou to let her buy him food after school one day because of how much his stomach was rumbling, lest she call Miku and tell her that she needed to whip up dinner for their tutor so that they could ensure that he'd eat something before heading into the night to do his magework, even if that something had to be Miku's barely-qualifies-as-mediocre cooking that hasn't improved much due to the recent lack of teaching on either Nino's or Fuutarou's part.

Yotsuba, having used the morning and afternoon to study with Miku and Itsuki while Ichika and Nino are out following their own agendas, is taking a break from her studies and keeping herself in shape for the upcoming track meet by heading out for an early evening jog while she's still got an hour or two of sunlight left. The truth is, though, that she's been barely able to concentrate on her studies because of how worried she's quietly been in regards to their tutor's condition, and not even heading out for a little night jog like this seems to help take her mind off Fuutarou.

Slowing to a walk, the fourth quintuplet takes the time to catch her breath and stretch her arms; she'll stop by a small park in the area that's mainly meant for kids and do some stretches for her legs there. In the meantime, though, Yotsuba can't help but feel annoyingly frustrated at herself for being unable to discard her feelings for her tutor like she told herself that she would. Just because she's known him ever since they were kids, just because they're technically childhood friends doesn't mean that she should treat him with any kind of favoritism that she didn't give everyone else whom she's drawn and discarded. There have been people who have done much more for her than Uesugi-san has done, people she's known for longer periods of time, so -

- no, wait. Now that she thinks about it, Uesugi-san is practically the only person left with whom she interacts on a regular basis outside of her own sisters from back in her elementary school days. And he's spent countless, oftentimes grueling hours for the past three months with her and all of her sisters, working his butt off helping them with their homework and improve their test scores, and that's without going into his magework that may or may not also involve the quintuplets as well. So no, no one's done more for the Nakano quintuplets than Uesugi-san, for her, with the one exception being their own dad.

She knew this already. She's always known this. She didn't need to repeat this to herself as a reminder of sorts. She went over this like how she reviewed her study sheet for the finals because she caught herself subconsciously trying to remove Uesugi-san from her conscience.

Yotsuba must forget about Uesugi-san.

Yotsuba must not forget about Uesugi-san.

The mental vacillation continues beneath the quintuplet's wrinkled brow. She knows that she has to stop being so on-the-fence about this and confront her own feelings to discover which side of them are what she truly believes in. But that's a tall order for her, because she already knows what she believes in and recognizes the thing that she has to do, and that just makes her even more unwilling to confront these feelings because she'll always come to a conclusion that she doesn't want to accept.

At the very least, she needs to stop being so worried about him. Uesugi-san is infinitely more times the adult she can ever dream of being; he, more than her or any of her sisters, knows how to take care of himself, and she doesn't need to baby him like this, being concerned about his problems and all that. He can manage himself. He doesn't need her help.

In fact, he's the one person that she can't help no matter what because no matter how hard she tries, she'll never be able to put herself in a situation where she'll understand him well enough to help him to the best of her ability. She's been able to help out tons of different people in her life throughout school because she's able to put herself in the shoes of others to understand their problems and feelings and do what she can to assist them, and part of the motivation for that is because she doesn't want people to experience those feelings of pain and/or helplessness. She and her sisters themselves were once in that position, scared and vulnerable, following the death of their mother, because with that, the quintuplets didn't know what would happen to them at the time; since potential foster families wouldn't want to adopt all five of them at once, there was a serious threat to their future of growing up together because they could be split up and sent to different foster families if their current father had not stepped in at the time that he did. And while it's not like the people she's helped in her life are going through that exact same experience, Yotsuba still manages to relate to other people in need with their feelings of uncertainty in order to motivate herself to do the best she can to give those people a hand, just as she herself was given one.

Is that it, then? Is the reason why she just can't seem to let go of Uesugi-san because of the fact that she doesn't think that she can help him, that anything she does won't be of any help to him? That would seem to be the one difference that sets him apart from the countless number of others she's helped in the past. Everyone she's helped so far has had problems and predicaments where Yotsuba was confident she could help resolve them - as long as it didn't involve studying, of course, but so far she hasn't needed to worry about that since there hasn't been anyone else at school who's as dumb as she is. But things like helping the teachers in distributing papers and materials? No problem. Assisting several sports teams and clubs at the same time because they needed a ringer or a fill-in for a missing teammate or club member? Absolutely. Taking care of a sick schoolmate? Can do. Paying for a friend's ticket to the amusement park when they forgot to bring their wallet or purse? But of course.

None of Uesugi-san's problems are things that Yotsuba can help with. On top of that, Yotsuba is accustomed to dealing with people who are not hesitant - sometimes a little too eager - to ask for help with their problems - and Uesugi-san, for better or worse, is the exact opposite and simply refuses to ask for help. It's perhaps because Uesugi-san himself doesn't see things like his irregular eating habits and his poor sleep schedule as problems in the first place because he simply doesn't have the time to waste even pondering things like this. But if that's the case, that only serves to deepen the slowly enlarging chasm of pain a little more that Yotsuba feels in her heart every time she thinks of Uesugi-san lately.

Yotsuba slowly arches her neck backwards to gaze up at the darkening blue Saturday sky. Now that it's well into the summer, the days have gotten quite long, permitting daylight during hours that, over the past several months, would normally induce darkness.

Perhaps that's why she can forget everyone else so easily. Once she's helped them, she doesn't need to worry about them anymore - and thus whatever memories or feelings she had going into them and kept coming out of them have so little weight. Yes, some of them may be her friends, people she meets on a regular basis at school, for example, but for the most part, outside of what problems they want her to help them deal with or fix, Yotsuba doesn't really care for them. She can't, not if she wants to keep throwing away whatever feelings and memories she makes out of them.

Perhaps that's part of the reason why she can't seem to let go of Uesugi-san.

Then what if she somehow found a way to be of use to Uesugi-san? To help him in some way? Would she be able to discard him just as easily as the rest, then? For the sake of her sisters who also value his companionship and presence just as much, if not more, than she does? Yeah, maybe that's worth a shot. Maybe if she can feel like she's made a difference in Uesugi-san's life, no matter how she must do it, she can begin to see him the same way that she sees everyone else. And then...

Yotsuba reaches the park in question faster than she expects, mainly because she's been so engrossed in her own thoughts that she's lost track of her progress up the narrow suburb street that leads to her stop. It indeed is a small park, and its usual admittance of young children playing on its even smaller playground and the limited number of swing sets is absent at this time of the day.

But there is someone already there.

"...seventy-two...seventy-three...seventy-four..."

The strained, hoarse grunts of someone clearly exercising somewhere in the park rolls throughout, and with the small size of the park in general and the absence of other occupants, these grunts are easy to hear, even for Yotsuba who was about to walk into the park herself but swiftly ducks behind a curbside bush for cover when she suddenly recognizes who that voice belongs to.

To the fourth quintuplet's silent amazement, Uesugi Fuutarou is doing pull-ups on the swing set, in between the two swings. Speak of the devil - this was something Yotsuba was not expecting whatsoever; the route that she's taken for her jog is well and out of the way of her and her sisters' usual routes that they take to get around the city; in fact, Yotsuba doubts that her sisters even venture much out to the surbubs around the city. Perhaps on second thought she shouldn't be too surprised that she'd run into Uesugi-san in a place like this, since he sounds like he runs around the entire city sometimes for his magework, but recognizing this doesn't make Yotsuba feel any less surprised for the moment.

The consistent grunting coming from the pull-upping Fuutarou regains her attention eventually, though, causing her to notice that he's taken off his shirt for his exercise. For how lanky and "normal" he appears to be at school and in regular daily life, Fuutarou quietly has well-built muscles hidden underneath his shirt. They're not as well-defined as they could be like bodybuilders or those who specifically work out to build muscle, but their form is there; no doubt with some proper gym training and cutting, Fuutarou could be just as ripped as your stereotypical protein shake-swigging gym nut.

But his hidden muscles aren't what keep her staring; it's the frightening, almost disorienting number of scars that are plastered all over his body from the waist up. Scars, scars, and more scars - sometimes even scars on top of scars. Most of them look quite old; some of them look weirdly stretched out, too, for reasons Yotsuba can't quite understand. At first the sheer mass of his scars gave Yotsuba the impression that they were just a really weird layer of tattoos, but she can still see them as scars, given that she's got quite a few herself from all the sports she's done.

Fuutarou is doing pull-ups on the swing set with his back facing Yotsuba, so she can't see if there are any newer-looking scars on his front where he'd sustained his injuries from before. Why she feels the urge to see them, not even she's sure.

When he reaches a hundred pull-ups, her tutor slowly eases himself back down onto the sand, putting his hands on his knees for a moment to catch his breath and to give his arms a much-needed rest. Realizing that there's a good chance that it's going to be time for Uesugi-san to leave soon, Yotsuba begins to turn around and slowly creep away, but when she's turned around and starts to sneak out of the area, she hears Fuutarou's voice call out calmly,

"...what're you doing here, Yotsuba?"

Yotsuba's never frozen in her tracks so fast, and she's never felt her heart jump so hard before that she feels like she might choke on it in her own throat.

But unlike how he'd address her often at home during their tutoring lessons, Uesugi-san doesn't repeat himself. Yotsuba senses that it's because he knows that she's there, and he doesn't feel the need to repeat himself to make himself known to her. Or is it because he's giving her a choice to run away and not have to acknowledge that they met today?

The smart thing to do would be to avoid him. He's already been a preoccupying presence in her mind; she doesn't need the real deal to add any more to that.

But Yotsuba isn't smart, so why would she bother doing the smart thing?

Getting up from behind the rather tall curbside shrubbery, the fourth quintuplet, wearing the Asahiyama Track Team's official jersey in lieu of the heavier tracksuit, slowly makes her way into the park to greet her tutor in person, though she can't get rid of the awkwardness she feels meeting her tutor in a place like this in time. Not that it seems to matter, since Uesugi-san is still catching his breath and doing some arm stretches of his own.

"H-Hey, Uesugi-san. Fancy...fancy seeing you here, aha," Yotsuba says a bit awkwardly.

Fuutarou narrows his eyes a little down at her with a bit of suspicion, his heavy breathing providing some ambient noise for the two of them whenever they have breaks in their conversation.

"Something on your mind?" he asks without hesitation. Yotsuba once more feels her heart jump a little, though thankfully not as much as the first time.

"Oh, um, n-no! I'm - I'm fine, I'm okay ~ "

Fuutarou eyes his student carefully, searching for whatever visible clues of a possible sickness that he can find, but he can't seem to locate any.

"...doesn't seem like you're sick, but something feels off with you today," he thinks aloud.

"Feels off? How so?"

"Well, for one, when you showed up to this park, if you were in your normal mood, you'd've hopped on in and told me good evening or something like you normally would. But today, you're acting all hesitant and stuff; you even hid behind that bush the moment you saw me, I think. The Yotsuba I know wouldn't do something like that normally."

The words "The Yotsuba I know" strikes a deep chord with the quintuplet in question, and Yotsuba is finally able to crack a smile, though it's just a tiny one for now.

"So you think of me as that noisy, annoying classmate who always gives you a hard time with all the bad test scores and questions about her homework, right?" she giggles lightly.

"You got it. Noisy, annoying, stupid, bad at tests..." Fuutarou lists off Yotsuba's less-than-ideal qualities with the fingers on his left hand. "Only knows how to make riceballs well as food..."

"Oh come on, where did that come from?!"

"Nowhere, I just remembered it for some reason from the last time you, Miku, and I made riceballs for dinner that one night when Nino was still holed up in her room." Fuutarou, noticing that he's still shirtless in front of one of his own students, quickly pulls on the shirt that he's taken off and left sitting on the swing behind him. "But that's what makes you, you. You're not that tonight. So that's why I asked if there's anything wrong."

Yotsuba shakes her head.

"Nothing's wrong. I just have a few things that I have preoccupying me at the moment, that's all. They're nothing serious."

"Nothing serious? If that's the case, then why don't you attend our lessons instead of helping the track team out all the time like you are today?"

Glancing quickly down at her own chest, Yotsuba only now realizes that she's wearing the track team's jersey, which immediately gives away what she's been doing this evening.

"A-Aaaah! This - this is - " Yotsuba stammers, feeling warmth rush up to her face in embarrassment as she turns sideways so that her tutor can't see her jersey as well, but he just sighs and waves his hand dismissively.

"Whatever, I don't care. I've already told you off enough times this week, and I haven't forgotten that there wasn't going to be a lesson this weekend, so you can do whatever you want today, including practicing for the track meet."

Smiling up at her tutor, Yotsuba nods. "Thanks for letting me off the hook, Uesugi-sensei ~ "

"You know I don't like being called 'Sensei'..."

Fuutarou looks around the park, surveying their surroundings briefly.

"So what brings you here? Your run just happened to cross through this area or something or what?" he asks.

"Um, yeah, something like that. I usually have my normal routes through the city, but sometimes, especially if I'm out running before dinner or something or at this time in the evening, I like going this route that takes me through the suburbs here," Yotsuba explains. "Plus, I get to visit this little park!"

Yotsuba spreads her arms out wide at the park in which she and her tutor stand.

"I actually come to this park all the time," she says, "especially when I'm feeling a bit down. When I am, I'll play a little on the swing sets here, because it helps me deal with whatever's bothering me, I guess. I know, I'm weird..."

"I find it weirder that you bother mentioning that when you just said that nothing's bothering you."

"Geeez, you just read into things way too deeply, that's why!" Yotsuba sighs heavily. "But anyways, that was the reason why I was hiding from you just now, because I was honestly pretty surprised that you knew about this place too. What about you, though? How do you know about this place?"

"I happened upon it a long time ago. I think this park's been here as long as I can remember," Fuutarou remarks, also taking another look around the park. "It's pretty nicely tucked away in this corner of the city; nothing really happens here, since these are just the suburbs that we're in. On days when there's not much going on, sometimes I'll come down here to get a quick workout in, since I don't want to bother with a gym membership or anything. So I just do the usual workout of a hundred push-ups, a hundred sit-ups, a hundred squats, and ten kilometers."

"That sounds like some kinda superhero workout! But you can always just ask us to pay for a gym membership for you," Yotsuba suggests. "This park is pretty out of the way from most of the places we go to around the city, so coming down here's a bit of a pain, isn't it?"

"Yeah, but I'm a mage, so distance doesn't mean as much to me as it does to others, which means I shut up and deal with it. Besides, I like it here too. It's quiet, it's highly unlikely that I'll be bothered here, and there's a vending machine right around the corner that I can grab a drink from once I'm done with my workout."

"But why a park like this to work out in? You're not trying to show off in front of the kids that play here, are you?"

"And look, Ellis, it's Kiddieland!" Pointing off into a random direction in the sky, Fuutarou swiftly pivots on his foot and stares incredulously down at Yotsuba. "Do I look like some sort of queer to you?"

"I'll...take that as a no."

"Obviously not. I only come by here during the mornings when kids at are school, or during the evening like this when the kids've already gone home. That, and I use a spell to make sure that people don't notice me here while I am working out here, so I'm not even trying to show off to anybody."

"A spell that makes people not notice you...then wait, why was I able to notice you here, then?"

"Well, the spell doesn't work quite as well on people who know me well or have been around me for long enough. You happen to be one of them, with how much time we've spent together."

"Ah..."

The way Fuutarou words this makes Yotsuba look away again with shyness.

"It's not something to be proud of, just so you know," her tutor says in a disapproving, low voice to her.

"I-I wasn't trying to be p-proud of it!" Yotsuba quickly pouts hard back up at Fuutarou. "Geez! You meanie, Uesugi-san! Ruining the mood like that..."

"Mood? What mood?"

"Oh no...for all the questions we get wrong on our practice tests, the one thing we're never wrong about is your sheer denseness..." Yotsuba begins shaking her head in her own disappointment too. "Tsk, tsk, tsk...that's going to bite you in the butt one day, Uesugi-san."

"You're telling me now? It already has, hasn't it? What, with what happened with Nino and all."

"Ah, that's right." Yotsuba's look of disappointment swiftly fades at the mention of this. "But...that wasn't because of your denseness. You couldn't be blamed for anything that happened back then."

"Well, that's what I'd like to think. It would make my life easier if I could just settle on that and move on."

While talking, Fuutarou strolls slowly back over to the swings and takes a seat on the one where he hung his shirt that he's since put back on, and Yotsuba joins him, sitting on the other swing next to him.

"But it's become apparent to me that that's not a good way of handling situations like that; just applying my own usual ways of handling business doesn't work here when my clients are the five of you, since it's not like I can approach you girls the same way that I can approach other clients or problems. My run-in with Itsuki in the beginning, back when I turned down her offer of joining our study group during our Golden Week vacation, taught me as much. So even if I think I haven't done anything wrong, even if you think I haven't done anything wrong, even if we agree that I haven't done anything wrong, the fact that Nino got angry primarily at me means that there must have been something that I did that made her act that way, even if it's something I just don't grasp."

"Thankfully she's calmed down since then. In fact, you two've been getting along way better nowadays than you ever have," Yotsuba says encouragingly.

"Yeah, I guess that's the silver lining we got out of that. But it's Nino we're talking about; I don't really expect her to stay that way forever. Like, we know that she still sees me as an outsider to you girls. I feel like as long as she sees me that way, there's always a chance that she can explode like she did last time. And every time that happens, it'll only get worse and worse."

"Er, I don't know...Nino's been back to her usual self since then...it's not like what she acted like during those two weeks after midterms when she was getting quieter and legit acting a bit out of character..."

"Then I'll just have to take your word for it, huh?"

"Mmuuu, you sound like you don't want to."

"I just don't like taking other people's words for something in general. I'd rather make sure that something doesn't happen myself...but this seems like it's something that I can't completely handle on my own."

Those words weigh heavily on Yotsuba's conscience.

"Uesugi-san, how do you - "

But Fuutarou stands up just as Yotsuba begins to talk again.

"Sorry, I know we just sat down, but I'm gonna go grab a drink from that vending machine real quick; I'm kinda thirsty after working out," Fuutarou apologizes quickly, pointing over to the vending machine by the adjacent road nearby.

"Ah, then I'll come with you," Yotsuba offers, and the two of them head to the vending machine together. "I'll pay. What would you like?"

"You're paying? Do you even have your purse on you?" Fuutarou wisely points out, and to Yotsuba's dismay, she realizes that she doesn't have her purse since she came out of the house with the sole intention of jogging.

"Ah, ahaha...guess I left it back at home since I figured I wouldn't need it just for jogging..."

"Looks like I'll be paying, then."

"Oh, um, no no, you don't...you don't have to worry about me," Yotsuba tries to say quickly, but Fuutarou just ignores her and points at the choices of beverages offered by this particular drink vending machine.

"What would you like? I usually go with regular water. There's an orange drink here that I think you'd like; you like oranges and tangerines and such, right?"

Unable to bring herself to try to convince her tutor to stop, Yotsuba simply nods a little and watches Fuutarou slip in some coins from his wallet into the vending machine coin slot and punch the corresponding buttons to have their two drinks plop out at the bottom chute. He hands Yotsuba her orange drink, and they return to the swing sets together to sit back down on them and enjoy their drinks. Fuutarou unscrews the cap of his freshly purchased water bottle and takes slow but big gulps out of it to quench his thirst while Yotsuba takes small sips, still unsure of whether or not she's deserving of Fuutarou's generosity when he's already been so providing for them all this time.

When Yotsuba looks back over at her tutor, though, she does a small double-take, because Fuutarou has chugged all of the water in one go. Letting out a big sigh of relief, Fuutarou screws the cap back on, looking over at Yotsuba with a hearty grin on his face.

"Been a hot minute since I last chugged an entire water bottle like that, ha ha ha!" he laughs moderately. "Every once in a while isn't so bad, huh?"

Yotsuba has seen that face before. That same laughing face. She never expected to see it again, in this day and age, even after all these years.

"So...what was it that you were asking me before we went to the vending machine?" Fuutarou asks, now that he's gotten water back into his system to replace what he's lost by sweating, but Yotsuba simply shakes her head and takes another bigger drink out of her orange beverage.

"It's fine," she says, smiling warmly back at her friend. "I already got the answer to it anyways."

"That so? Then better for me. If only all the questions you asked could be something like this where I don't even need to answer them directly for you to get it."

"Oh, geez, there you go again, Uesugi-san."

"Heh..."

As Yotsuba enjoys the orange drink that Fuutarou has bought for her, Fuutarou takes out his phone and unlocks his home screen. Yotsuba figures he's probably looking through his texts and email again like he usually does for his work, but a curious glance over at him shows that he's not looking at either of them this time. Instead, there's a lot of English words on screen that he's reading for some reason.

"...what are you reading?" she asks, letting her curiosity get the better of her.

"These are...lyrics. Song lyrics," Fuutarou answers. He tilts his phone to show her, even though the two of them both know that Yotsuba can't read a damn thing in English.

"Song lyrics? Oh right, you did sing that one song for us that one night...are you going to do that again?"

"Regretfully for my pride, yes."

Yotsuba's blue eyes immediately brighten in excited anticipation. "You will!? Oh boy, oh boy, I can't wait, ehehe ~ "

"It's for educational purposes first and foremost, a'ight? I'm not doing this just to hold a damn concert in your house or anything like that."

"Educational...oh, so you're going to sing us a song in English to help us with English?"

"Something like that. You notice how my lessons lately've been much more interactive and such, I hope. My plan for English was to do this, since maybe you girls might be interested enough in my singing that it'll help you with English. It probably won't work, but it's worth a shot, since any amount of improvement to most of your English scores is a welcome one."

"If you just wanna tell us that we're absolutely hopeless at English, just say it. It's not like you're lying or anything."

"Okay, you all blow at English."

"N-Not THAT harshly!"

Snorting with amusement, Fuutarou grins in response and continues reading the lyrics written on his phone while Yotsuba continues sipping on her orange drink, making sure not to drink it too quickly lest her body process the fluid rapidly and make her go to the bathroom faster than she plans. Then again, there is a public bathroom here at the park, but it's now getting quite dark, and she's not fond of the idea of using the bathroom here.

She continues to watch Fuutarou diligently read the lyrics on his phone. By this point, she can hear him muttering the lyrics, practicing singing them presumably for a future English lesson.

"...Uesugi-san, if you don't want to sing in front of me, I can head home first," Yotsuba offers, trying to be considerate, though as soon as she says this, she becomes afraid that he might take this the wrong way and think that she's making fun of his singing or something along those lines.

"Oh, don't worry, it's not because of that. In fact, if you want, I can sing another song for you. The one I have here is the one I'll be performing later for all of you, so it'd kinda be spoilers if I were to do that one here..."

Hesitant to accept Fuutarou's generosity yet again, Yotsuba tries to find it in her to refuse his offer, but she just can't. Not when it comes to Uesugi-san.

"Y...Yes, of course! I'd love to listen," Yotsuba forces herself to smile. Or maybe she's trying to stop herself from smiling so hard?

So the young tutor gets up from his swing set, turns off his phone, and slips it into his pocket as he clears his throat. Quickly replacing his Presence Concealment rune in the area with a simple repellant Boundary Field instead to both contain the sound levels he'll make and to keep potential passersby away from the area, Fuutarou also crafts a small music rune like before to give him a steady beat before beginning to sing in English.

"Woke up this morning holding my head
Thinking last night is one I'll regret
Washing off the bad decisions, the blurry vision,
The clues that I'm still a mess
Spitting out the taste I have in my mouth
Knowing what this all is really about
Knowing there's an explanation, an expiration,
I gotta figure shit out

And they're asking me if I can see the darkness down below
And I know it's true, I say I do, when half the time I don't
Maybe I can't make what it may take to leave this thing behind
But I shut my eyes and cross each line and every time

I keep on running backwards, I keep on losing faith
I thought I had the answers, I thought I knew the way
My brother said be patient, my mother held my hand
I don't know what I'm chasing, I don't know who I am

Waking in the dead of night, I can't sleep
Sleeping in the light of day for like weeks
Reality was out of focus, I could be hopeless,
Instead I gritted my teeth
I didn't have the patience left to explain
Didn't wanna wait while nobody came
I know the path ahead's uneven, but while I'm breathing,
I have to make my own lane

And they're asking me if I can see the darkness down below
And I know it's true, I say I do, when half the time I don't
Maybe I can't make what it may take to leave this thing behind
But I shut my eyes and cross each line and every time

I keep on running backwards, I keep on losing faith
I thought I had the answers, I thought I knew the way
My brother said be patient, my mother held my hand
I don't know what I'm chasing, I don't know who I am

So, I make it up as I go,
O-oh, o-oh
I make it up as I go,
O-oh, o-oh
So I make it up as I go,
O-oh, o-oh
I make it up as I go,
As I go

I keep on running backwards, I keep on losing faith
I thought I had the answers, I thought I knew the way
My brother said be patient, my mother held my hand
I don't know what I'm chasing, I don't know who I am

So, I make it up as I go,
O-oh, o-oh
I make it up as I go,
O-oh, o-oh
So I make it up as I go,
O-oh, o-oh
I make it up as I go,
As I go."

Once the song is finished, Fuutarou reaches over to deactivate the music rune and clears his throat again.

"Another bottle of water sounds pretty good right now...damn, I'm out of practice..." Fuutarou mutters, shaking his head at himself at his subpar performance. "Sorry you had to listen to that, that didn't come out sounding anywhere near as good as it sounded in my head..."

"I'm more surprised that you have the guts to say something like that, that a song you're singing sounds better in your head," Yotsuba says flatly.

"Shit, then I guess I shouldn't have even bothered." Fuutarou shrugs helplessly, but Yotsuba also shakes her head at this.

"I...I really enjoyed it, even if you did sound out of practice, and even if that kind of music isn't really...my kind of music, I guess. But I could still feel the effort you put into singing that song."

"Is that, like, a participation medal or something? Like one of those medals they give you because they don't want you to leave feeling all sad 'n stuff because you didn't win anything?"

Yotsuba starts to pout back at her tutor halfway through his train of thought. "Geez, there you go again. How are you always so consistent on inferring the worst stuff possible whenever someone says something?"

"Sorry, force of habit. I tend to think of the worst stuff first whenever I'm faced with a problem or situation, as you've noticed. You'll just have to deal with that, unfortunately, since that's a habit that I can't drop just because it sounds bad."

Again, Yotsuba shakes her head at her tutor, but with a small smile this time. "It's fine, we're all used to it already. Without that, you wouldn't be Uesugi-san, after all."

"...then why bring it up?"

"For revenge for all the times you get mad at me for getting things wrong! Like the difference between 'rice' and 'lice'!"

"But you always get that wrong! Even after three months!"

Yotsuba starts cracking up at her tutor's visible disturbance at her inability to differentiate those two particular English words. Fuutarou glances down at his phone in the meantime, even though he doesn't need to to know that it's gotten very dark and very late.

"We should get going, not safe for us to be out and about at a time like this, so let me take you back home," Fuutarou says as Yotsuba gets up from her own swing. "I should apologize for interrupting your jog, though."

"Are you sure this wasn't planned, though? Maybe you're sabotaging me and the track team because I'm not showing up to lessons to help them out instead?" Yotsuba suggests teasingly, leaning in towards her tutor.

"Look, I get that I might strike you as the super-smart, 500-IQ Super-Tutor who can kick ass and chew bubblegum, but I'm all out of gum, mainly because I don't chew gum to begin with. So today was purely coincidental."

"Suuuuuure, hehehe ~ !"

Giggling, Yotsuba heads out of the small park with her tutor, and hopping forward a few strides ahead of him, she spins around and gives him a big smile that's bright enough to light up the park on its own if it were capable of generating light.

"I really enjoyed just sitting here and hanging out," she proclaims sweetly. "Next time, let's bring everyone along and hang out like this, too!"

"Sure. Maybe sometime during summer vacation, I guess, when we've got the time."

"Is that a promise?"

"I don't like making promises, though. And we aren't kids anymore, Yotsuba."

"Awwww, you're one of those people who say they don't like making promises because they always break them, aren't you!"

"Shhhh, you're gonna expose my secret, Yotsuba, shhhhhh..."

"Aw heck, I knew it, I knew it!"

As the two of them hit the street to head back home, Fuutarou turns to Yotsuba.

"Then how about a promise that I can keep - how about I stop by tomorrow sometime after lunch? I've got some free time then too; I know I haven't been able to hang out much after our lessons these days."

"It's not going to be another lesson, is it? Not that I mind, of course!"

"No, nothing like that. I'm sure Miku would like to have me teach her some more cooking."

"And we can play Minecraft together too! Miku has a second computer that you can use!"

"Minecraft? What is that, a computer game?"

"Geez, you're really out of the loop these days, aren't you?"

"...what am I supposed to say to that, 'I'm sorry for not playing video games'?"

"Yes."

"Give me a break..."

---

"...Miku, what are these?"

The next day, two hours after noon, Yotsuba stands in front of the kitchen counter next to the sink, staring down with blank eyes at a long rectangular plate that holds three black rocks that are steaming and charred, with black crumbs flaking off them every so often. The fourth quintuplet has headed downstairs from her room after doing a bit of morning study to see what's for lunch, only to find Miku manning the kitchen instead of the usual Nino. According to Miku, the replacement cook for today's lunch, Nino and Itsuki have headed out to eat lunch, watch a movie, and to do some weekend grocery shopping together.

"Croquettes," the third quintuplet answers, filling the frying pan that she's used to cook them with water and setting it down on the counter next to the stove so that the water can moisturize the gunk and make it easier to wipe off after a little bit of time.

Yotsuba turns to Miku, still with the same pair of blank eyes. Even her usual green hair ribbon sits still on her head, as if it, too, is unsure of what to make of these unique creations made by Miku's not-very-good cooking hand.

"Oh, so you're saying they're not just rocks you picked up on your way back home from school the other day."

"I wasn't aware that Ichika was awake, isn't she still sleeping in her room?"

"Well, she is, but more to the point, if these are supposed to be croquettes..." Yotsuba glances back down at the three black rocks sitting amicably on their plate on the kitchen counter. "...then I'll be acing our next practice test that Uesugi-san gives us."

This last remark finally chips the ice that's encased Miku's face, which breaks into a mean pout.

"I tried my best on these, okay? So I'm sure they taste fine. Try one."

"Uhhh...suuuree, I guess..."

Yotsuba knows that Miku's been practicing cooking whenever she has the chance, especially when Fuutarou has the rare bit of time to spare to hang out with them after their lessons, so Miku isn't lying about doing her best. So in order not to be rude to her sister, she obliges, picking up one of these charred croquettes, taking a cautious bite of it, and chewing carefully. Once she swallows her bite, Yotsuba turns swiftly to her sister and declares,

"It sucks!"

And with that, Miku goes straight back to pouting.

"I mean, the most I can say about it is, at least it's not bad enough where I spit it back out immediately? That's what happened a while back when you tried making homemade soba, remember?"

"I-I've gotten better since then!"

"I know you did, that's why these croquettes are at least edible and not literal poison. But c'mon, Miku, like, you can't look at these and think to yourself that they taste fine." Setting down the croquette that she's taken a bite out of, Yotsuba picks up another and offers it to her sister. "Here, try one for yourself."

So Miku does take a bite out of her own croquette. But the instant her teeth crunches into it and cause her tongue to make contact with the charred, rough surface of her ungodly creation, Miku immediately rushes over to the large kitchen wastebasket that slides into a nearby cupboard, throws it open, and spits it out with the force of a fire hose.

"...I can't cook anymore," the third quintuplet moans, her voice filled to the brim with defeated despair as she slides the wastebasket back in and wipes her mouth. Her more visible eye that isn't half-draped with part of her bangs is twitching uncomfortably, a clear sign that the foul taste of the burnt croquette will remain fresh on her mind for some time to come.

"Well, it's not that, it's just that you need to practice more with Nino or Uesugi-san," Yotsuba says.

"I've been trying to get them to teach me more, but no one really has time anymore, now that finals is in two weeks. Fuutarou said himself that this is probably our last weekend where we'll have free time to ourselves to do whatever. So I've just been scraping by with trying to practice myself and cook on my own."

"Well, he is coming over today, though we don't know exactly when. Why did you make croquettes today, anyway?"

"Fuutarou sent me a recipe for a cheese and potato croquette," Miku says. She produces her phone and unlocks it to show Yotsuba the recipe that Fuutarou texted her. "I asked him for a suggestion on what I should try to cook, so he sent me this."

"Aaaaah, so Uesugi-san's the culprit behind this. I should have known..." Yotsuba nods sagely, and so does her hair ribbon.

"Don't make it sound like this was his fault."

"But...he is still partly responsible..."

Just then, the two quintuplets in the kitchen hear the front door open, and the following voices of their sisters plus one.

"The hell's that burnt smell? Who the hell burned shit in the kitchen?!" Nino voice comes rushing through the short hall and disperses throughout the first floor of the Nakano penthouse. "Oi, Miku! I know it was you! Turn yourself in peacefully and no one gets hurt! And by that, I mean no one's gonna get denied dinner tonight!"

Following the voice is the real deal, and Nino, the second quintuplet, plants herself in front of the open kitchen entrance and takes one look at the plate of burnt croquettes to locate the source of the smell.

"What in blazes did you just make? Are those rocks?" Nino gawks scornfully down at the sad-looking croquettes that have taken multiple rounds of insults to their persons; it's almost as if they literally seem more and more dejected every time someone regards them condescendingly like this.

"N-Not you too, Nino!" Miku cries a little with yet another pout as Yotsuba can't help but crack up at the coincidence that both she and Nino would describe Miku's failed croquettes as rocks. Itsuki and Fuutarou join them promptly, having taken off their shoes and closed the front door behind them. Their tutor is carrying all of the girls' shopping bags and wears a rather large and oddly-shaped black backpack.

"We're making rocks? With what, clay? We studying geology today or something?" Fuutarou asks, slipping through the quintuplets who step aside for him to come through so that he can set down the bags of groceries that he's carried in for the girls.

"Did you run into Nino and Itsuki on your way here?" Miku asks, nodding down at the bags.

"Sure did."

"He makes a good pack mule, at least," Nino smirks as she stoops down to sort the groceries alongside her tutor. "So maybe I'll drag him around some more if I can't get Yotsuba to tag along."

"As if you haven't been doing that already."

"What, today's the first time I had you do this!"

"Excuse me, did you forget the morning back in Hawaii when you dragged me around that shopping mall so that I could carry all the shit you bought for you?"

"Oh, so was that why you went to the shopping mall first before everyone else that day?" Yotsuba asks, recalling their Golden Week vacation.

"Th-That was because you needed to buy some proper vacation clothes while you were there! Remember? You literally went down there with us with no other clothes except the usual ones you just wear to school!" Starting to yowl loudly, Nino points her sharp fingernailed index finger up at her tutor, approaching him threateningly to give her advance more pressure.

"I didn't need to buy them. I never asked for them, either."

"But it's still pathetic having someone like that just walk around sticking out like a sore thumb! And so since I was paying, I had you carry my shit for me! That's only natural!"

"Then food for thought for next time, don't bother buying stuff for me."

"Hmph! Fine by me, but that's not going to get you out of carrying around stuff for me in the future."

"Yeah, yeah, whatever, let's just get this stuff sorted out."

"I'll help too," Miku offers, and so Yotsuba and Itsuki make themselves scarce and relegate themselves to the living room to chat and let those three sort out and properly stock their newly bought groceries into their proper places in the kitchen.

Once they're done putting the groceries away and the plastic bags are tied up to use as wastebasket bags later and stored in a cupboard filled with other tied plastic bags, Fuutarou dusts his hands off. "A'ight, done with that. Were you cooking before we got here?"

Miku nods. "I tried making the croquettes that you sent me the recipe for."

"That would explain the potatoes and cheese..." Nino eyes the ingredients that still remain on their counter that Miku's brought out to practice with. "But you've still got a hell of a long way to go before you can make these properly, you know that, right?"

"Y-You don't know that," Miku says quickly in self-defense.

"...uh, no, yes I do. And besides, it doesn't take someone like me who's actually good at cooking to know just from one look at that shit that your croquettes are bad." Nino jabs her index finger again, this time over at the somewhat deflated, blackened croquettes.

"Then how about this - " The third quintuplet turns to her tutor in an attempt to appeal to a source of authority that even Nino would respect. "Fuutarou, please try one and tell us what you think of it."

"Me? Sure, though even I wasn't sure what this was when I first saw it coming in here..."

So the young tutor obliges his student and takes a bite out of the third and last untouched burnt croquette. Both Nino and Miku watch with two different looks of expectation, one of brooding certainty on Nino's face and one of hopeful anticipation on Miku's.

Once Fuutaoru swallows his big bite out of Miku's burnt croquette, he turns to Miku.

"It's edible, at least," he shrugs.

Nino just rolls her eyes at this. "No one gives a shit if it's edible, is it good?"

"No, it's not."

Miku immediately slumps where she stands, her bangs drooping over completely to hide her face in humiliated defeat.

"What made you even think they'd be anything remotely good? Like, you literally burned everything; last I checked, people don't like eating ash, grease, and oil," Nino points out to her younger sister while their tutor continues to eat the rest of the croquette he's holding and turns to eat the rest. "And stop eating those, you're gonna get a stomachache! Just toss those out already."

"Nah, it'd be a waste of food," Fuutarou shrugs before popping the half of the croquette that Miku ate into his mouth. Miku happens to lift her head up as Fuutarou talks, just in time to see him munch on the one of the croquettes that she and Yotsuba took bites out of, and she ducks her head again to hide the blush that swiftly hits her in the face. But Miku realizes that she doesn't know which croquette it was that she took a bite out of, so maybe Fuutarou didn't actually give her another indirect kiss, only to raise her head a second time just in time to catch him eat the third and final croquette to seal the deal, which then causes her to duck her head down a second time as well.

"Waste of food? Seriously, that stuff's burnt!" Nino gripes back at her tutor, watching him in disapproval as he eats all the burned croquettes that Miku made and heaving a big sigh. "You're a total idiot, you know that?"

"I don't want to be called an idiot by the likes of you, by the way," he fires back smoothly, as if he'd been waiting for Nino to call him an idiot this whole time while eating. "Besides, like I said, they're at least edible. It's better than drinking water spiked with Heisei, that's for sure."

"Oh, shut the hell up! You're still salty about that?!"

"You wouldn't be? If I wasn't contractually obligated to prevent this from happening, I'd like to see you have someone spike your drink and get knocked the hell out, see how you like it."

"But you didn't even get knocked out anyway somehow! You just pretended to be, if I recall correctly! So what does it matter? No harm, no foul!"

"Yeah, if only it were that easy..."

"Oh, just shut up already." Reaching back, Nino ties her hair up into a high ponytail with a plain purple hairband that she keeps on one of the shelves in the kitchen for use while cooking so that her very long hair doesn't get in the way. "You said you didn't eat lunch yet, right? I'll make something quick for you. Miku, go join the others in the living room while I cook something up for Uesugi-kun."

"Huh? But - but I can he - "

But Nino throws out her finger at Miku, stopping her hand right in front of her face.

"No buts! You've made enough of a mess here trying to cook these croquettes, so you're banned from this kitchen for the rest of the day!"

Pouting again, with real emotion starting to bubble behind it, Miku pivots quickly in Fuutarou's direction. "Fuutarou, convince Nino to let me stay!"

But to her shocked dismay, even Fuutarou shrugs helplessly. "That's not my jurisdiction. Nino's the master of this kitchen, after all; it's not my place to say what she wants to have done here. We just gotta listen to what she wants."

Miku doesn't give up so easily, though. "Mmmuuu! Why're you siding with Nino today, of all days!" she frets while beginning to throw a small little tantrum.

"Well, I'm pretty bossy and strict whenever I'm tutoring you girls, right? So it's only fair that I respect what Nino wants. Cooking is her domain, after all, and we're both worse at it than she is. So she sets the rules."

"That's right, at least someone gets it in this household," Nino chuckles victoriously; it feels good having their tutor, whom Miku holds in high regard, backing Nino up like this. "Even Uesugi-kun acknowledges my superior ability, oh~hohohohohohoho ~ !"

Lifting her right hand up to the side of her mouth, Nino lets rip a glorious, stereotypical Japanese noblewoman's laugh that fills both the kitchen and the rest of the first floor so that even Itsuki and Yotsuba on the couch are not free from being subjected to it.

"We don't have a lesson today, so we can practice cooking together later on once Nino's done making lunch for me," Fuutarou quickly whispers into the dejected Miku's left ear while Nino is still laughing haughtily in her victory. Drawn in by this strange laugh that they've scarcely heard Nino make, Yotsuba shows up at the kitchen entrance to see what the commotion's about.

"Something happen to make Nino laugh like that?" she asks loudly to make herself heard over Nino's laugh, which is admittedly getting stretched out a bit too long.

"No, not really," Fuutarou shakes his head as the third quintuplet, her dashed spirits raised back up considerably thanks to her tutor's promise of more group cooking, goes to join Yotsuba to exit the kitchen as per Nino's order.

"Then why's Nino laughing like she's a princess or someone from a rich family?"

"Beats me. Maybe because she is from a rich family?"

"Ah, that's right! We are from a rich family, ehehe ~ "

As Yotsuba chuckles at her own lapse in judgment, she notices the plate on which the croquettes were sitting, which is now sitting empty on the counter.

"Wait, Uesugi-san, did you eat those...croquettes...?" Yotsuba asks, her words decelerating as she speaks.

"Hm? Oh, yeah, I did. Miku asked me to try them, so I did."

"Er...weren't they...they were burnt, you know?"

"I know."

Yotsuba watches silently as Fuutarou clears the plate and brings it over to the sink to wash it, her face warming up too at the realization of her second indirect kiss with her tutor. By this point, Nino is over laughing like this and waves her hand at her two younger sisters to shoo them away.

"Alright, kitchen's off-limits until I'm done making some lunch for this dumbass, so go hang out in the living room or something," Nino calls to them amidst the sound of running water next to her.

"Who the hell's the real dumbass, though, that's the real question."

"Just shut up for a damn second when I tell you to, will you!?"

"One...okay, it's been one second."

"Do you want me to make lunch for you or not!?"

The growing argument between the two compel Miku and Yotsuba to remove themselves from the scene, lest Nino turn to them as an outlet for her recurring anger, but once she hears them walk away, she leans in next to her tutor and says under her breath,

"They're gone now. Do it."

Setting the newly washed plate on the dish rack next to the sink, Fuutarou silently casts a rune that covers the kitchen, establishing another small Bounded Field that alters their presences in such a way that the rest of the quintuplets in the living room will not notice what Fuutarou and Nino talk about unless they physically enter the Field themselves. When Fuutarou casts it, Nino can clearly sense a small spike of magical energy emitting from Fuutarou's direction.

"So what's this about?" the young mage asks Nino, who consolidates the ingredients that Miku brought out to make croquettes and makes a round of the kitchen to bring over more.

"Nothing much. I just wanted to ask you something that I've been meaning to ask you for some time now, and I figured this'd be the best time."

"When the rest of your sisters are literally right here?" Fuutarou points his thumb in the others' direction.

"That's fine; I figured you'd have spells that would let you do something like this."

"And how would you know?"

"How the hell else are you sleeping all the time through class without our teachers telling you off all the time? Even if Papa's made sure that the school board can't do anything about your so-called delinquent behavior. You're not the type to put up with teachers yelling at you for sleeping in class all the time, so you must be doing something to keep them off your back."

Folding his arms in surprise, Fuutarou lets a wry grin form on his face. "I'm surprised you figured out as much."

"Look, we might be hopeless at taking tests and academics and stuff, but I can assure you that we're much better at real life stuff like this. Even Yotsuba."

The young mage watches his student work her own magic in the kitchen, swiftly preparing Miku's ingredients for another batch of croquettes that won't be completely burned this time.

"You're making croquettes too?" he asks curiously.

"Why not? Miku already brought out the ingredients. And it's been a while since I last made croquettes, so it'll be a good refresher for me." Nino hesitates for a moment. "...you don't mind croquettes, do you? I guess I should've asked you that first..."

"Any food is good food for me. So long as it doesn't outright poison me or kill me."

"Oh, so you're saying that I can burn everything like Miku did and you'll be okay with it?"

"Add 'intentionally bad food' to that list of food I don't think is good."

"Tch."

"Are you really going to make me lunch or not? Because I can just go down to Family Mart nearby and grab lunch there if you're gonna threaten me like that, sheesh."

"I'm working on it right now, are you fucking blind, you brainless idiot?! Also, check the rice cooker for me and see if there's any rice left in there."

So Fuutarou slaps open the rice cooker lid and peers inside.

"None."

"Shit, then I guess I forgot to cook more rice before leaving today. Do me a favor and cook more rice for me while I'm working on this. You can at least do that, right?"

"My name isn't Yotsuba, so yes, I can..."

The tutor fetches a bowl full of rice, rinses it thoroughly at the sink, pours out the sink water, repeats this process a few times, then draws fresh filtered water from a special faucet on the corner of the sink to pour both the water and the rinsed rice into the rice cooker before closing the lid and punching in the correct settings to get the rice cooker to begin doing its job.

"I set it to speed-cook, if that's alright with you," he informs Nino, who begins frying her own batch of croquettes.

"Obviously. You want rice to go with these croquettes, don't you?"

"I don't mind, no. Mind if I use some of the furikake you bought on the rice, too?"

"No, go ahead."

So Fuutarou grabs the new, unopened salmon furikake jar in one of the cupboards above Nino.

"You don't want me to help you at all with this?" he offers, but Nino shakes her head.

"It's fine. I did force you to carry all those bags in for us when we ran into each other outside, after all."

"Even though we met like ten minutes before we got here? My, my, how generous of you."

"Just shut up already, God you're so annoying sometimes..."

Nino gazes down at the sizzling croquettes sitting in the frying pan, cooking.

"...just out of curiosity," she speaks up again as Fuutarou checks his phone for emails and texts, standing next to his upright black guitar case that he's set down back when he helped sort out the groceries. "Remember when you made onigiri that weekend? When I was...y'know, all holed up in my room and whatnot?"

"Onigiri...yeah, what about them? Were they bad?"

"No, no, they were good..."

"Oh. Good to know, then."

"But that's not what I wanted to ask."

"Then what did you want to ask?"

After a moment's hesitation, Nino turns her head a little, her right blue eye barely managing to peek out past her side bangs over at Fuutarou.

"...you didn't make onigiri on purpose that day, did you?"

Narrowing his eyes uncertainly, Fuutarou raises his head up from his phone to gaze back at his student.

"On purpose? I'm not quite sure what you mean by that."

"As in...remember what you said to me when you were outside my door? About how...you'd bring me lunch."

Fuutarou blinks back at her.

"Aren't you looking too deep into that? Besides, you told me to forget about bringing you lunch, so I didn't," he simply shrugs, returning to his phone.

"Oh. Yeah...I guess."

Gripping the tongs she's using to flip the croquettes over to make sure that they're evenly cooked, Nino finds herself biting the inside of her lower lip again. The small but sharp pain does little to make her forget, as she hoped it would, the familiar boiling frustration that she feels at herself again. It would appear that there was no point in wasting her time dwelling on something as stupid as this. Yeah, someone like him wouldn't care to think that many steps ahead, even if he's smart enough to do so. Especially not with how she acted towards him that previous night.

"But I'm relieved to know you thought they were good. That's a pretty big weight off my shoulders, not gonna lie."

About to pick up a finished croquette, Nino freezes.

"Honestly, I thought you wouldn't touch them at all, so the fact that you ate them at all is a pretty big relief," Fuutarou admits, looking up to see Nino turn around with a finished croquette held in her pair of chopsticks that have replaced her tongs. Having let the oil drip off as much as possible before pulling it away from the frying pan, Nino, holding out the croquette in her pair of chopsticks while holding her left hand underneath it so that the breadcrumbs don't fall down to the floor, offers it to her tutor with a smile - half cheeky, half teasing, and completely warm.

"Alright, Uesugi-kun, say it," Nino continues grinning up at him as she steps in closer. "Say the thing. You know what it is."

"Goddamn it, Nino, you too? I already have Ichika teasing the shit out of me enough with this..."

"You wanna eat? Do as I say. You were the one who said that I set the rules around here, so you dug your own grave with that."

"Khh...I did say that. Ugh, fine...Aaaaaah."

Relenting, Fuutarou bites off half of the croquette at once.

"Good boy. Wasn't so hard, now, was it?" Nino watches her tutor munch on the food she's made for him. "So? How is it?"

The tutor nods strongly. "It's really good. Didn't you say you hadn't made croquettes in a while?"

"What can I say, I'm just that good." Nino puts her left hand on her hip smugly. "Now you know what it feels like dealing with you tutor us all day."

"...do I really come off like that to you? I thought I was just tutoring..."

"Oh, you have no idea. You're still as annoying as you were three months ago, I'll have you know."

"Uh-huh. So what changed between then and now?"

The second quintuplet once again smiles brightly back up at her tutor.

"You're supposed to be the smart one, aren't you? You figure it out. Say it again."

Another "Aaaaahh" and more crunching noises follow in the kitchen as Nino feeds Fuutarou the rest of the croquette in her chopsticks.

---

"Mmmmmm ~ that was a good lunch!" Ichika stretches mightily, having just woken up before Nino sent her sisters to go wake their eldest quintuplet sister up to eat with their visiting tutor. Miku and Yotsuba already ate, so they did not partake in the croquettes that Nino cooked for Fuutarou, but they did still sit with him at the dinner table just to hang out as he ate his belated lunch with the still-groggy Ichika.

"That's all you'll eat?" Fuutarou asks with a little concern, pointing his chopsticks over at Ichika's small plate. She's only eaten three or four croquettes when Fuutarou is already working on his sixth or seventh, with plenty more on the platter that Nino's piled them on. "You should eat more; I'd feel bad for eating more than someone who actually lives here."

"Ahaha, I'm perfectly fine. I don't really like eating too much right after I've woken up, after all," the eldest quint explains shortly. "I'll eat more for dinner, I promise. You're the one who should eat up as much as you can."

"Working on it."

Miku, Yotsuba, and Itsuki, all seated at the dinner table, continue watching Fuutarou rip off half a cheesy potato croquette at once with his front teeth and chew swiftly, being the faster eater that he is.

"Don't you feel weirded out by everyone just watching you eat like that?" Nino asks, joining them as well once she's done washing her hands and cleaning up after herself in the kitchen.

"Not really. But now that you point it out..." The young tutor looks around at his small audience. "...I guess it's one of those things where it only feels a bit weird after someone points it out to you."

"Hey, we're just making sure that you're getting enough to eat," Yotsuba points out, and Miku nods in support.

"It's also rare to see you eat so much at once. You usually only eat only as much as we do whenever you stay over for dinner on weekdays," the third quintuplet notes observantly.

Fuutarou nods curtly while reaching for his ninth croquette. "I'll admit that I've been very busy lately, a lot more than usual, so I haven't been able to eat regularly. I've had to get by on one meal a day, pretty much."

"Well, then it was good that you stopped by for free food, you hobo," Nino smirks down at him, having stopped behind Ichika's chair at the table to watch him eat as well.

"Isn't it also because you're liking Nino's cooking more and more, though? Nino's cooking is sooooo good, isn't it?" Chuckling lightly, the eldest quintuplet resumes her teasing act that she likes doing towards her tutor.

"I mean, it was always good. I was just especially hungry today."

"Well spoken like the freeloader that you are," Nino interjects.

"Freeloader? Me? That's rich, coming from someone like you." Fuutarou simply stuffs his mouth with another whole croquette to make that ten while staring right back into Nino's blue eyes before diverting his gaze to his left, where next to him sits the youngest quintuplet, who's eyeing the croquettes that her tutor is practically inhaling with how fast he's eating them just like a cat eyeing a fish swimming around in its tank. Following his gaze, Nino also notices Itsuki's hungry look and the telltale trails of saliva that are starting to ooze out of the corners of her mouth and barks lightly at her.

"Itsuki, we just ate lunch not that long ago, and you even got the large portion! How the hell are you still hungry?!"

"Well, it is Itsuki, after all..." Miku shrugs nonchalantly.

"Yep, that's our Itsuki, alright," Ichika agrees.

"Itsuki's cute today as well!" Yotsuba grins widely.

So Fuutarou diverts his eleventh croquette from the big platter and offers it silently to Itsuki, whose face was getting frustrated with the teasing she's receiving from her sisters but does a complete one-eighty and illuminates itself majestically, absolutely thrilled to be offered one of Nino's amazing croquettes. It feels as though smaller versions of the star-shaped hair ornaments that she wears on her sidelocks will begin flying straight out of her wide, happy blue eyes. Fuutarou barely has the time to react to the sheer speed with which the quintuplet with the seemingly bottomless stomach darts her face in to snatch the croquette whole off his chopsticks.

"Ugh...you're spoiling her, Uesugi-kun. Seriously," Nino groans, putting her hands on her hips while frowning at the two of them disapprovingly.

"Ah, don't worry about it." The quintuplets' tutor waves Nino down a little.

Yotsuba suddenly gasps a little, like she's just experienced an epiphany. "Wait, I know! I just thought of this! What if - what if Uesugi-san's trying to feed Itsuki like this so that he can be even harsher on us during our lessons later this week?!"

"As in, he's trying to buy us off, starting with Itsuki? Oh my, oh my, how devious, Fuutarou-kun," Ichika laughs shortly again. "How do you suppose you'll buy the rest of us off, though?"

"Buy the rest of you off? Uh, let's see..." Fuutarou pauses to shovel some fluffy white rice seasoned with sprinkled salmon furikake into his mouth, which he consumes even faster than the croquettes. "Going top down, for you Ichika, that's easy, I'd let you sleep through my lessons for a day."

At this, Ichika gasps.

"Deal!" she says firmly, throwing forward her hand in a handshake.

"You're way too cheap, Ichika! You sleep so goddamn much as it is already!" Nino yowls at her older sister, but Fuutarou turns to her now.

"Nino...what would I do for you..."

Fuutarou leans slightly forward in his seat, narrowing his own eyes to gaze up at the second quintuplet intently. Nino returns it without a blink of her own eyes, and for almost a full minute, the two of them stare at each other like this, as if they're having an impromptu staring contest, with Itsuki munching on some more croquettes in the background. However, Fuutarou concedes this staring contest, sighing lightly.

"...alright, moving on - "

"Hey, what the shit! You couldn't even think of ONE thing that I'd like?!" Nino grumpily hisses back at her tutor.

"That's because I don't know what you'd like. Like, you and Ichika are the two I spend the least amount of time with so I don't know you two all that well compared to everyone else, and you usually like going off and doing your own thing at school and such."

"Plus, it doesn't help that you always act like this towards him, too," Miku also adds. "It wouldn't kill you to be a bit nicer to him, right?"

"I'm being plenty nice to him as is, making him all this food for him! Honestly, I should've just made a third of this..."

"Actually, that's a good point you bring up. Why did you make so much food? You knew you were basically only cooking for Ichika and Uesugi-san, yet you made enough to feed all of us if Uesugi-san wasn't totally demolishing everything on his own anyway," Yotsuba wonders aloud to her older sister.

"Don't forget Itsuki," Fuutarou nods sideways to Itsuki to his left, who's about to take a big bite out of her fifth croquette, freezes when her name is mentioned by her tutor, and shyly turns away to nibble on her croquette discretely like a hamster nibbling on leaf of lettuce.

"Well, Nino's a pretty materialistic girl, so you could just take her shopping or something at some point. I'm sure she'll let you know what she'd like - you love shopping for phone accessories, don't you? You did that last time with Miku when you lost your phone," Ichika reminds her.

"You think I'd let Uesugi-kun buy me out with just a few phone stickers or something? Might I remind you that Yotsuba bought him a whole damn smartwatch, so what're the chances that he's even going to be able to afford something that's more than just a phone case for me?"

"I'm sure there's something," Ichika shrugs again.

"Doesn't Nino really like those fairy tales of handsome princes coming to save the princesses or something like that? What if Uesugi-san gets Nino a white horse?" Yotsuba laughs, causing her sisters except Nino to giggle along with her.

"A white horse, huh? That's pretty specific, but I'm sure I could make something work..." Fuutarou mutters, sounding like he's seriously considering such a ridiculous option.

"Don't you dare, Uesugi-kun. I know we're rich, but where the hell are we even gonna keep a whole damn horse!?"

"But your sisters aren't lying when you said you liked white horses?"

"No! They're just trolling; don't believe them so easily, what the crap!"

"Well, okay, okay, she might not like white horses specifically, but she used to go on to us about how she absolutely adores fairy tales like that. She even told us about how she dreamed that she'd meet her Prince Charming who'd come by and save her from a terrible enemy by whisking her away on a white horse!" Ichika laughs harder than before, so amused is she just recalling one of Nino's more private moments.

Surprisingly, Nino doesn't seem to react strongly to Ichika revealing one of her more such sensitive moments, instead simply turning away from the table a little with a grumpy blush on her cheeks.

"S-So what? I do like stories like that, what's so wrong with them?" She stubbornly defends herself, but her voice is markedly lower than before.

"So something related to fairy tales...? I'm not sure what I should do about that, so I'll think it over..." Fuutarou turns to Miku. "Miku...I could get you a game about Se - "

"Ah! Ah, aaaaah!" In a panic at realizing what he's about to reveal, Miku immediately begins flailing her hands rather cutely in front of her tutor's face to get him to shut up.

"A game about Se...? What does he mean, Miku?" Yotsuba asks innocently, but Itsuki and Ichika incorrectly finish the word in their minds and begin to display vastly differing responses: Ichika starts grinning from ear to ear like a mischievous cat, while Itsuki begins to blush furiously, the hardest Fuutarou has seen her go nuclear in the three months he's known her.

"H-H-H-H-HOW INDECEEEEEEEEEENT! ! ! ! !" Itsuki cries, furiously chomping down yet another croquette to get it out of her hands as quickly as possible.

"Heh heh heh...Fuutarou-kun, so that's how it is, huh? I figured it'd only be a matter of time before you started making moves on my sisters..." Ichika shakes her head with yet another amused grin.

Nino, Miku, and Yotsuba are all rather confused at why their two sisters are reacting this way in response to what Fuutarou said, but soon Nino gets it, and she, too, begins to go ballistic, starting to fume out of her ears as she silently glares daggers out of her blue eyes back at the boy sitting across the table from her.

"You put one finger on any of us and I swear to God, Uesugi, I'm going to give you a one-way ticket straight to hell, and I'll follow you there to make damn sure you stay there...!"

Yotsuba and Miku continue to look rather troubled at everyone's weird reactions. "Uhhh...mind filling us in on this? Are we just dummies for not getting it?" Yotsuba wonders aloud with a mentally tired sigh.

"I think they confused me saying that I'm going to give Miku a game about sex," Fuutarou says flatly, and the sound of his teeth crunching into his fourteen and final croquette to clear the platter for good is just about the loudest thing in the house for a few moments.

That brief silence is merely the calm before the storm, because just as expected, the dinner table positively erupts like a dormant volcano suddenly becoming active without warning. Ichika shrieks, beside herself with highly amused disbelief that Fuutarou would be so blunt; Nino starts shrieking like a banshee at the top of her lungs, dashing around the table to charge at her own tutor to seize his neck with both hands to get him to shut up; Miku almost falls out of her chair like she's been knocked over by a sudden tidal wave; Yotsuba can't help but to begin making short and high-pitched little squeals of embarrassment as she hides her face behind her hands; and Itsuki is already shouting "INDECENT! INDECENT! INDECEEEEEEEEEEEEENT! ! ! ! !" in Fuutarou's general direction.

"Y-You son of a bitch! Shithead! Harasser! Lowlife! Loser! Creep! Bastard! Horny little dipshit!"

Hurling all the insults that she can think of with the adrenaline of embarrassment fueling her, the second quintuplet, having successfully wrapped her surprisingly strong hands around her own tutor's neck, shakes him rather violently back and forth. Fuutarou's glad that he managed to swallow his last croquette before Nino grabbed him by the neck like this.

"Alright, alright, Nino, stop, stop, you're actually gonna hurt him if you keep doing that," Ichika calls out to her violent sister once she herself has managed to calm herself down enough from the unbelievable bluntness of their tutor. As much as she'd love to continue, Nino very reluctantly heeds her sister's words and lets go of him, but the fierce look she has in her eyes still remains as she takes a step back, tussling her hair angrily.

"Honestly, guys like you with no delicacy are the fucking worst! The worst, you hear me?!" she seethes down at Fuutarou, who rubs his neck thoroughly. It would appear that the hidden, monstrous strength she's got and can apply to her punches also translates just as well to choking, too.

"I'd just like to set the record straight and let everyone know that I wasn't the one who thought of that first. If anything, it was you three who thought of it first," Fuutarou declares, pointing at Ichika, Nino, and Itsuki. "And since Miku and Yotsuba didn't understand why the three of you were reacting like that, I did my job as a tutor and clarified it for them."

"That's something you DIDN'T need to tutor us about, you little shit!"

"Honestly! How could our own tutor say such d-d-dirty things like that!" Itsuki cries, shaking her head in acute disapproval as well.

"Oh, c'mon, calm down, guys. It's not like Fuutarou-kun's wrong either, y'know? We did think of that on our own; Miku interrupted what he was going to say, and he's not the type of person to just say something like that all on his own without being provoked," the first quintuplet points out to bring reason to the dinner table.

"Okay, fine, that might be true, but - but he didn't need to just go off and say something like that in front of all of us!" Nino argues furiously back. "He could at least have a sense of decency!"

"A sense of decency, coming from a guy like me who sleeps in class and goes around beating people up at night. Out of all the services I offer, being a decent person is probably something I can't provide."

"Oh, shut the hell up with all that business talk already!"

By now, Miku's managed to pull herself back up onto her seat, but she's flattened her face against her arms down on the table, hiding her furiously blushing face from view of her tutor's eyes. Yotsuba isn't faring much better, her own hair ribbon drooping down as if to hide her eyes too, since she doesn't have her own long bangs that can do that for her like her sister next to her does.

"Um - well, m-more to the point, wh-what were you going to say, before Miku interrupted you...?" the fourth quintuplet finally manages to spit out.

Fuutarou glances down at the facedesking Miku. "...well, I'd like to say what I was originally going to say so that I can at least clear up this little misunderstand that we've got on our hands, but...I guess it's safe to say that she'd rather have me not say."

Narrowing her eyes down at Miku as well this time, Nino begins to mutter the last word that was about to come out of Fuutarou's mouth.

"Se...se...wait a minute," Nino frowns even more deeply at her headphoned younger sister, "was he...was he about to say 'Sengoku', Miku?"

Miku immediately sits up in alarm quickly, so fast, in fact, that she has to slump a little as her vision goes blurry for a second because of the physiological shock of the blood in her head being subjected to a change of gravity with such quickness. Sensing this, Fuutarou is about to obey his first instinct which is to reach out with his hand to provide a small medical spell that will help Miku's head adjust more quickly so that her temporary loss of vision won't be as uncomfortable, but he stops himself, remembering Nino's words about not putting a finger on her or else. And he'd rather not deal with another one of Nino's outbursts, since that's going to bother everyone anyway.

"Uh oh, are you okay, Miku?" Yotsuba asks, gently propping her upright on her seat as Miku nods.

"Yeah, don't worry. I just...sat up too quickly there." Miku then eyes her older sister with diluted alarm. "And...Nino, h-how did you know...?"

"Oh, I was actually right about that one. Well, you have that Takeda emblem or whatever it is as your phone wallpaper ever since, like, middle school, right?"

The mention of her phone wallpaper causes Miku to jolt in her seat before she once more hides her face behind her hands, whimpering like a sad puppy.

"Miku sounds like we just found out about her dirty little secret or something," Ichika remarks. "I don't really get what's so embarrassing about that, Miku, to be honest. You always did well on your history exams, right? So that would just make sense."

"And remember? Back when Uesugi-san went over our midterms together with us? He mentioned that Miku scored really well on the questions in the Social Studies exam that involved Sengoku warlords and stuff like that," Yotsuba also notes, but this only serves to intensify Miku's embarrassed whimpers, and Yotsuba pats her on the back reassuringly. "Oh, it's okay, Miku, there, there. It's nothing to get embarrassed over."

"Yeah. At least it's better than Yotsuba still wearing underwear that she's worn since elementary school," Ichika giggles.

"I-ICHIKAAAAAA! ! ! !" Yotsuba suddenly explodes herself, fretting at her oldest sister who once more cracks up into another round of laughter. "N-Not in front of Uesugi-san, at least, come ooooon!"

Fuutarou takes a sip from his glass of water that Nino's provided for him at the beginning of his meal. "What is this, real Candid Camera hours?"

"That's it! That's exactly it! You're under a secret contract with a television agency or whatever and you're filming us in secret to get us to expose our darkest secrets!" Nino yet again jabs her index finger accusingly at Fuutarou. "Ha! Caught'cha now, Uesugi-kun! You can't get away with this!"

"The only dark secret of yours that I bother caring about is your horrible test scores from the beginning of the trimester," Fuutarou says extremely dryly, even though he's just taken a drink of water. "Seriously, without your dad pulling some strings, how the hell were the five of you even supposed to get accepted into any high school?"

Sighing along with him, Itsuki, who's gone to the kitchen and returned with a glass of water of her own to calm herself down, sits back down in her seat, sipping her water.

"I ask myself that every day," she mutters emptily.

Meanwhile, the topic of her elementary school underwear still fresh on her mind, Yotsuba desperately searches for a diversionary topic to distract everyone with and manages to remember the guitar case that she saw their tutor walk into their house with earlier.

"Th-That's right! Uesugi-san, you - you came here with a guitar case, right? What's that all about?" she asks quickly, stumbling over several of her words in the process.

But even as she says this, Yotsuba recalls her chance meeting with her tutor yesterday evening at the park.

"Yeah, I meant to ask you about that too, actually. What's with that guitar case? You didn't come here to play a stupid song for us like you did last time, did you?" Nino smirks condescendingly down at her classmate, who looks back up at her with the straightest face she's ever seen him wear and nod matter-of-factly.

"Actually, yes, I've come to make an absolute embarrassment out of myself again like last time. I can do that right now if you'd like just so that I can get it over with sooner rather than later."

"Oooh, another performance? Will it be a Western song like last time? I love listening to English songs, even though I usually don't understand a word they say, aha ~ " Ichika giggles.

"You're in luck; it is another English song. Though it might be a bit different to what you girls are probably used to hearing, or like hearing."

"That just gets me even more interested, you know!" Ichika calls after her tutor as he and Nino clear their plates away, now that he and Itsuki have devoured the entire batch of croquettes that Nino has made for him.

Uesugi returns from the kitchen with the black guitar case that he's borrowed from his friend, having left it there and forgotten to bring it back earlier.

"Can I bring this chair over? I like sitting while I play," Fuutarou asks Nino.

"I guess...make sure to lift the chair, though, don't be like Yotsuba and just drag the chairs all across the floor 'cause doing that'll damage the floors."

"Yeah, yeah."

So the quintuplets follow their tutor into the nearby living room, where Fuutarou sets his chair down in front of the large flatscreen TV as the girls pile onto the long couch directly facing him. Miku is trying to do her best to hide the growing giddiness that she feels in her stomach, having some insider knowledge about what Fuutarou is about to do.

"It feels like we're about to attend a concert or something," Ichika remarks to her sisters as she packs in with Nino.

"Except this concert's gonna suck," the second quintuplet groans with an obvious roll of her eyes.

"Oh c'mon, don't say that."

"At the very least, you should all treat this as an English exercise," Itsuki reminds her sisters.

"Ah, there goes Itsuki again and sounding like Uesugi-san..." Yotsuba calls out.

"I-I am not trying to sound like him! I am simply suggesting that you should all take this opportunity to try to pay attention to what he is saying since he will be singing in English!"

"Itsuki's right, actually. The reason why I'm even going along with this whole singing thing is 'cause I feel like maybe it'll help you with your English studies just a little bit, since I know Ichika likes listening to Western songs like this, and maybe Nino does too since she's the best at English out of all of you. Of course, we'll see just how much of a help these are, but...in any case, I'm doing whatever I can to make our lessons more interactive and interesting so that you girls have an easier time retaining everything that you're learning..."

While delivering his rationale, Fuutarou takes the time to tune his guitar, plucking the strings to make sure that they are tuned properly. Itsuki then realizes suddenly that he's doing this purely by ear, without needing another instrument to give him some reference.

"Are you...tuning that guitar by ear?" she asks, letting her lower jaw go a little slack.

"Hm? Oh, yeah. It's not that difficult, if that's what you were getting at. And now that I think about it, didn't Ichika say that you used to sing before?"

"She sure did. We all actually took singing lessons, but Itsuki took them for a longer period of time, when the rest of us stopped."

"I take it that she isn't taking those singing lessons anymore, though, right?"

Itsuki shakes her head. "Not anymore, you are correct. My studies eventually took priority..."

"Doesn't seem like that was the smartest move, given how little that's helped."

"I am well aware of how things have turned out, thank you very much!"

With a bemused grin, Fuutarou finishes his guitar tuning swiftly, having already done much of it prior to arriving at the Nakano penthouse, and he casts his usual music runes beside him that magically synthesize other instruments that Fuutarou cannot provide on his own. Clearing his throat and taking one more drink of water from the glass that he's brought with him from the dinner table, he seats himself again before the waiting quintuplets, most eager and one indifferent at most, and counts himself down silently this time before beginning to strum the strings of his borrowed guitar.

"With a piece in my hand and bloodshot eyes
I walked to the water for a last goodbye
He begged so much, it clouded my mind
One thing's clear, the man's gotta die

Might makes right, so he said
When he held all the keys over our head
I lived through that grip but now he'll learn
At the end with the tables turned

Lord forgive me...

Take me on -
Down the river where the guilt can't find a red-handed sinner
On -
Where the grave can't cry - out
'Cause I done wrong -
Down the river with a hand on a Colt and a finger on the trigger and
Long -
Before dawn, they'll try to find - me
So take me on down
Take me on down

Well, I sank that body by the riverbank
Caught a boat south, took off a hurricane
With spotlights, dogs, yeah, the whole nine yards
And breathin' down my neck and breathin' hard

Two weeks in a wild chase
Across the highways, mountains, over seven states
Found a man at the harbor, said that he could take me
Across the ocean somewhere far away

Lord forgive me...

Take me on -
Down the river where the guilt can't find a red-handed sinner
On -
Where the grave can't cry - out
'Cause I done wrong -
Down the river with a hand on a Colt and a finger on the trigger and
Long -
Before dawn, they'll try to find - me
So take me on down
Take me on down

I never saw 'em comin' on the boarding plank
Now I'm starin' down the barrel at point-blank range
I make for the water, jumpin' off the ledge
But not before I catch two to the chest

Now there's blood and water fillin' up my lungs
Blood and water fillin' up my lungs
My heart is beatin' like a fading drum
Lord, forgive me, here I come...

Take me on -
Down the river where the guilt can't find a red-handed sinner
On -
Where the grave can't cry - out
'Cause I done wrong -
Down the river with a hand on a Colt and a finger on the trigger and
Long -
Before dawn, they'll try to find - me
So take me on down

Lord, take me on down

Lord, take me,
Just take me on down

Take me on down, yeah..."

---

Snapping the latches of the guitar case closed after packing the instrument away, Fuutarou sets the guitar case down on the floor in front of the TV and puts the chair that he's used to perform before the girls back where it belongs at the dinner table. Yotsuba is climbing down the stairs as he's doing this.

"I've tucked Miku away in bed," she informs her tutor. She looks a bit pensive saying this.

"Thanks. Nino would kill me if she finds out if I ended up doing that."

Yotsuba quietly trots after Fuutarou as he shuffles back to the living room and eases himself down on the floor in front of the large glass windows that lead out to the veranda. It's mid-afternoon, and by this point the sun's rays are perfectly shining down on Fuutarou's spot on the floor, providing a natural heat source for him to indulge in for a little bit as he lays down on the hard floor, and Yotsuba sits down cross-legged beside him.

While Fuutarou was performing, Miku strangely fell fast asleep in the middle of it. And once he was done, after thanking him for his performance, Ichika said that she'd forgotten about an obligation for her part-time job and headed out quickly after changing. Nino, too, said that she needed to head out for a bit to meet with one of her friends and followed suit after Ichika, and Itsuki's since returned to her room to continue studying, leaving only Yotsuba to be Fuutarou's handler for the rest of the day until he needs to leave.

"...why was everyone acting so strangely today? Did they not like your singing?" Yotsuba murmurs aloud.

Fuutarou shrugs a little. "I guess not. I was unsure of how they'd react to it - I did say before that the song would be a type that you girls wouldn't be used to. I guess it was too much of a different style of music for them to really like."

Yotsuba lets herself gaze down at Fuutarou's face, whose eyes are closed as he silently enjoys the warmth of the sun's rays. Since he's got some more time to kill before he needs to leave to assume his mage's responsibilities for the night, Fuutarou is taking advantage of this spot in the house to soak up some much-needed sun.

"...but I liked this song a lot better than the one you sang for me yesterday," she says quietly, in an attempt to cheer her tutor up. "Because this one...this one, it felt like you really put a lot more effort into it. Even if I couldn't understand anything you were saying, that's...that's what I think."

"So you're admitting that you can't even use that as a way to help you with English, huh. There goes the rest of my reason to do anything like this anymore," Fuutarou grimly smirks, mainly at himself.

"Oh c'mon, that's not what I mean..."

Opening his eyes to gaze back up at his student, Fuutarou calmly blinks and paces his breathing, lying on the floor with his hands behind his head to help cushion them against the floor. Yotsuba notices his hands adjusting themselves so that his knuckles don't start getting too sore, and she swiftly pulls over one of the smaller pillows from the long couch and wedges it in underneath his head. She receives a word of thanks from her tutor for this deed.

"But I just don't understand why everyone acted like that. It's like...they didn't recognize how much effort you put into this," Yotsuba finds herself muttering.

"Meh, don't worry about it. You leave that to me to worry about."

Yotsuba starts to nod, but her nod dies even before it really begins.

"...I know that I should just let you worry about it. But..." The fourth quintuplet looks even more uncertain and pensive than before as genuine feelings of dark, brooding indignation are simmering lightly in her chest somewhere. "...it's a bit frustrating, seeing my sisters act like that towards you. I just...want them to see how amazing of a person you are."

"Like I said, it's not worth it. I tried something that may or may not work, and it ended up not working. It's fine, I'll find another way to teach English more efficiently and interactively to everyone." Fuutarou closes his eyes again.

Yotsuba continues to gaze down at him. "...I know my sisters probably asked you this in different ways before, but...why do you go so far to help us like this?"

"...yeah, I've definitely answered that one before. Same reason that I've given everyone else; I make sure to do my absolute best on every and any contract that I get. It doesn't matter what it is; magework, teaching quintuplets, whatever. So long as my clientele isn't too hard to work with or anything unreasonable."

"But we're way different compared to your usual clients, right? It seems like we're the first ones you've had to tutor like this."

"...perceptive as always. Where are you going with this, though?"

"Well...I just..."

Yotsuba has words she wants to say, but she can't find the strength to speak them.

"...never mind. Forget I said anything."

The young mage continues to stare at his student like this for a few more moments with his open right eye before closing it again.

"If there's anything bothering you, Yotsuba, feel free to talk to me about it. Text me if you have to, now that we have each other's numbers," he says softly.

"Ah, it - it's fine! It's not a big deal, I'll get over it! I always do. So don't worry about it, Uesugi-san."

"...if you insist." Fuutarou sighs deeply through his nose. "Feels like back at the very beginning again. Remember our very first day? When you made me that Shirley Temple?"

Yotsuba smiles gently, able to bury her simmering feelings again. "Yes, of course."

"Yeah...feels like that all over again. With no one else around, and it was only you who was willing to work with me."

"Uh-huh, I remember that. Not like I've really made that much progress since then, despite being the first one to be willing to work with you, though. My test scores still suck, and I'm still the dumbest out of everybody, just like usual! Ehehe..."

"Mmm, maybe so. But still, it's worth mentioning for me that you were the very first one who changed out of the five of you. Because, let me tell ya, it was a big help and confidence booster for me that there was at least one of you who was willing to work with me in a type of job I'd never had before...at least one person among you five who was honest and straightforward, someone who would give me a chance to do my job from the get-go."

Yotsuba says nothing.

"And that still holds true even now, three months later, when I'm still trying to figure out the most effective way to be that tutor who's responsible for the five of you graduating school safely. Today, when I tried performing seriously to see if this could be a good way to teach English, everyone basically reacted as if they wanted to straight-up walk out on my ass; at least they were decent enough to let me finish before they did walk out. Miku just flat-out fell asleep, so that's real nice to know, I guess. And yet, again, you were the one who gave me a chance like this, encourage me like this. Of course, you could just be lying just to make me feel better about myself, but..."

"I-I'm not lying...! My sisters always tell you that I'm a terrible liar, don't they...?"

"They do, yeah, so I'll take your word for it. Either way, the fact that you're not like the rest of them and you've supported me while I've been struggling, honestly, to figure out how best to do this job of tutoring you and your sisters is something I deeply appreciate. I'm not sure how else to put that into words, since I'm not the best with them, but...I tried my best."

Rubbing his eyes a little, Fuutarou takes another deep breath through his nose, letting silence fall between the two of them again.

With his eyes closed, the young tutor hears Yotsuba quietly get up and take a few steps around him, near his head, so that she seats herself behind his head.

"Do you know why I'm always supporting you, Uesugi-san?"

"To improve your grades, I'd hope."

"Well, that is one reason, but...there's another reason."

Feeling Yotsuba draw her face near his, Fuutarou opens his black eyes to peer directly into Yotsuba's blue pearls floating directly over him, her peachy-red locks of hair flowing all around her head with the rays of sunlight drifting through the window next to them into the living room to give the young mage a truly one-of-a-kind perspective on the fourth quintuplet.

Reaching forward a little to gently press her palms against his cheeks upside-down, Yotsuba gives Fuutarou the gentlest smile he's had the pleasure of seeing on another human being.

"It's because...I like you."

The two classmates remain like this for a few moments, a few still moments shared only by them and will be remembered only by them. Sunlight dances in the air about them, and the two freshmen can hear nothing but their own soft breathing.

"...juuuuust kidding." Yotsuba's gentle smile swiftly morphs into that of mischief and trickery. "See? I'm lying to you. I can lie when I want to ~ !"

Just before she's about to pull her face away from being so close to her tutor's, however, Yotsuba watches Fuutarou's eyes close slowly.

"...would be nice if you weren't."

---

"...hello? Yeah, it's me. Took your sweet time fuckin' callin' me after all these weeks of radio silence, huh? Fucking shitter."

A tall man in a red leather jacket, roughened jeans, and blonde hair stands on the corner of a relatively empty indoor parking garage. Tossing and catching a knife up and down in the air with his right hand, his other hand is occupied with holding a phone up to his ear that's broadcasting another man's gruff voice into it.

"Yes, yes, you'll excuse me for that. Busy schedule and all that."

"Busy schedule my fuckin' ass, you don't do shit for that job over there, and it ain't even a secret among us drug runners either."

"Hahaha! So I see my reputation precedes me. But I do have to at least keep up appearances, so let's make this snappy. What's your progress looking like so far?"

The man in the red leather jacket spits suddenly onto the garage floor in front of him, not caring for politeness or decency.

"That other mage...Uesugi's his name, I got a guy named Maeda who attends the same school as him to gather some intel on him wherever he can...he's a real fuckin' pain in the ass. Kills my boys, jacks my drugs, keeps those quints safe..."

"You can't just track him down and kill him? What's stopping the likes of you?"

"He and I fought before. I hate to admit it, but that kid's fuckin' good. The first time we met, I figured I could just go apeshit on him but I found out the hard way that that ain't the case with him, he ain't no pushover. He's not like most mages who fight just to feel like they're swinging a big dick that they don't got around; he actually uses his fuckin' brain too. Fuckin' hate people like him, but that's how it is. In any case, the first time we met in person, he cut me up good, and I had to stay back for a bit to recover."

"But you ARE better now, right?"

"That I am."

"Then go find him again and kill him this time, now that you have a better idea of what he's like."

"That's the fuckin' plan, bitch."

"When I say kill, I mean kill. Don't be like the other fucking idiots who just stab the people I want dead a couple times and call it a day. Make absolute goddamn sure that that kid isn't breathing when you're done with him."

"Yeah, thanks for the refresher course in Homicide 101." The man in the leather jacket turns around to survey the mess he's made: an alarmingly big pool of blood gathered near one of the turns in the middle of the indoor parking garage, and inside the pool are torn human limbs like arms and legs; there's even a decapitated head of a human female staring with missing eyeballs resting on its right side in the middle of it. Licking his chops to clean some of the blood that's smeared against his lower face off, the man with the bloody knife begins to smile insanely. "I'm lookin' forward to eatin' those quints, lemme tell ya. I know for a fact they're gonna be delicious."

"This more of your fucking cannibalism talk? Spare me of it, I'm not as batshit insane as you are."

"Not yet you aren't, but given what you're tryin'a do, you can't sit there and tell me that you're not gonna be even worse when the time comes."

"Ha! I'll be the judge of that at the end of the day. By the way, if in case you can't seem to defeat Uesugi, how do you suppose you'll go about going after the quints?"

"Don't worry, I got an ace in the hole that I got a while back. One of my boys found someone who was selling phones that he picked up off the streets because they were dropped or because he pickpockets them, and luckily enough, that phone ended up being one of the quints', so now I have every quint's contact number. All I need to do is send them a group text posing as Nino and plan around that. Those girls'll be my direct ticket to Uesugi to kill him once and for all."

The man in the red leather jacket produces another phone from his back pocket, a phone with an old, scratchy-looking rabbit ear phone case, holding it together with his sharp knife.

"Took a while to get it hacked so we could access its info, but we got it now."

"Oh, and just in case you somehow forgot because you're a lunatic, remember that you can't eat the quints until AFTER they're sent to me and I'm done with them. Understood? Otherwise I'll see to it that you don't leave this city alive."

"Uh huh, is that a fucking threat I hear? What's the likes of some pencil-pusher like you gonna do to stop a goddamn mage like me?"

"You best not be challengin' me, Shirazumi. I don't care what your rep is, I don't care how batshit crazy you are. You break our contract, and I'm going to make you suffer. So cut it with the big words and get to fucking work already."

The call cuts, and the man in the red leather jacket lowers the phone with his left hand. He's quite tempted to chuck it at the nearest support pillar on this floor of the parking garage, but he refrains from doing so - he still needs to keep in contact with his own employeer for the time being.

Even if he has the Nakano quintuplets' contact information thanks to the phone that once belonged to the one named Nino, the quintuplets should know that something is afoot if they receive a text from a phone that their sister named Nino no longer has, especially if Nino ended up getting a new SIM card when she got her new phone. Especially risky is sending that group text that he mentioned earlier, because if the sisters are together at the time that he sends it, they'll also know that something is wrong.

He'll need to rely on his Maeda contact at Asahiyama High, the quintuplets' and Uesugi's school, to direct him on a proper timing to send that text that will draw them out. Working all sneaky-beaky-like like this is not his thing at all; he'd much rather start rampaging through their school in order to get to the quints, if only to get this job over with and continue with his own obligations. But his own boss would terminate their contract, so no point in doing that.

Pulling out a small orange kit from his back pocket that contain a small number of small syringes, all of which contains a familiar white liquid, the man in the red leather jacket pulls one out and swiftly injects himself with it.

---

A/N

I'll be taking that break that I mentioned in an earlier chapter, my other responsibilities are starting to ramp up so I'll need to handle them now. Expect a longer break, anywhere from two weeks to a month, even.

However, during this time I will be going through the whole story over for real this time to do that editing that I also mentioned I'd do earlier but didn't because writing new chapters was more fun, lol.

5 months, 50 Chapters, 500k words; funny how things work out sometimes. Here's to another 50 to hit a million words - thanks for being with me for this, and I sincerely hope you've been enjoying the story so far.