The front door opens to let in a total of six young students back into their home, and Ichika and Miku, the first ones into the house, turn around to greet the two sisters behind them.
"I know it hasn't been that long since the two of you left home, but it still feels like forever," Miku smiles at the two of them. "So I think it's alright for us to say...welcome back."
Nakano Nino and Nakano Itsuki both glance at Miku, then at each other, then back at the two sisters before them and nod.
"We're back ~ !"
Stepping back inside their penthouse, the five quintuplets plus one let out a smattering of relieved groans as they pull off their shoes (or flip-flops in Nino's case) and shuffle slowly into the living room. It's now well into the middle of the afternoon, with the big clock on the wall reading a little over half-past three.
"Guh," Nino heaves out a heavy sigh, collapsing onto the long couch that she's sorely missed the past two days. "If I were older, I'd be having a smoke right about now..."
"I'd recommend against that, but that's just me," Fuutarou quips back as the quintuplets all settle into the couches, leaving their tutor the only one standing.
"Wait, how would you know?"
"I work at a hospital, remember?" The young tutor scowls lightly. "Let's just say that I've seen my fair share of smokers' lungs, but that's not the point right now. Good work today, everyone, I know the last few days've been pretty tiring with everything that's been going on."
"Oh, come on, there you go again," Miku pouts a little; the conversation's barely started and the third quint's already begun to pout. "We told you earlier on our way home: why are you telling us 'good work' when we didn't even do anything? You're the one who did all the hard work."
Fuutarou shakes his head quickly. "Not true. You and Itsuki handled Nino for me while Ichika gave me a hand in working to get Yotsuba to come back from the track team. Yes, if you're also including everything that happened before today, then I certainly had my work cut out for me, but I'm not going to hold that against anyone or expect any of you girls to assist me in any of that, since realistically that wasn't going to happen."
Beginning to fidget in her seat as she listens to her tutor talk, Itsuki at first looks down at her lap before raising her eyes back up at their tutor.
"Are you sure that you will not hold any of this against us?" she asks in her usual polite tone that is accented with reserved uncertainty. "Because, compared to everything else that has happened, these past two days have been...the most taxing on you in the last three months or so of your work, I would imagine..."
Fuutarou looks down at himself, patting himself down a little bit before answering, "Well, I don't see myself with any fresh wounds, so just off that I'm gonna have to say that these past two days weren't that bad, which is just a fancy way of saying that I've had worse. And again, I'm not here to hold anything against anyone. All this falls under my contr - "
"I don't think she's asking you about how you feel about all this from a professional point of view, Fuutarou-kun," Ichika raises her voice a little to make herself heard audibly over her own tutor to cut him off. "She's asking you as a friend. And I'm sure the rest of us all care more about what you feel about this whole situation as a friend rather than as our tutor and guardian."
The young mage lowers his arms, merely raising his eyebrows at Ichika.
"...I think you're the one confusing what I'm saying, Ichika," he rebukes her mildly. "When did I say that I was coming at this from a perspective like that?"
"Well, weren't you going to mention contracts and stuff like that just now?"
"I was going to, yeah, but you interrupted me and I didn't get to finish the rest of what I was going to say."
"Which was?"
"That while I consider all the work I've done as contractual, as a halfway logical human being and friend, there's no sensible reason for me to go around putting the blame on anyone. So it's best if we all just be glad that things didn't get worse than they did, since they easily could have been, and move on so that we can focus on what's at hand." Fuutarou hits the first quintuplet with a quick shrug. "Besides, you were the one who told me to work on being a friend, right? Or am I remembering that wrong?"
"I mean, technically you're off on that, but..." Ichika leans back on the couch to rest her head against the top of the pillow behind her. "...I'll let that one slide."
"But before we get back to studying..." Miku speaks up just in time for her stomach to rumble loudly to finish the rest of her sentence for her, "...it's been a while since we last ate, I think."
The quintuplet sisters all share a few awkward laughs as it only now dawns on them how long it's been today since any of them last had a meal.
"Now that I think about it, maybe we should've ordered takeout on our way back or something..." Ichika sighs with her hand over her tired eyes.
"So I guess that means that I'm back just to be thrown into kitchen duty, huh?" Nino grins back over to Miku and Itsuki.
"No need, I'll handle this one." Before any of the quintuplets can get up, Fuutarou begins to head in the direction of the kitchen, but the sudden thump of a pair of feet behind him grab his attention enough to turn him around to see who it is.
"Um, before that...!"
Seeing that she's successfully gotten her tutor's attention, the fourth quintuplet swiftly stands up from her seat on the couch next to Ichika and hops over the glass table to get down onto her knees and almost slam her forehead against the cold hard floor in her haste to perform the most sincere bow that she can make.
"I-I want to express my apology for causing all the trouble that happened today - !" she rapidly fires off as though she wants to apologize to everyone before she can be stopped. "If I hadn't been so selfish and, and, and went off to go train with the track team - "
Fuutarou doesn't let her finish her apology anyway; he merely takes the necessary number of steps to plant himself in front of her, stoops down, and gently but firmly lifts the fourth quint back up to her feet.
"Again, not true, you only caused part of the problem but not all of it," the tutor sighs a bit more heavily this time. "I know you all give me a hard time whenever I'm trying to tutor you, but you could at least not make stuff outside of our tutoring hard too."
"Hey, don't lump us with her, that's just Yotsuba's thing," Nino reminds him. Speaking of Yotsuba, she, too, starts to pout back up at her tutor while she hangs almost comically in the air with her toes just barely not touching the floor while Fuutarou continues to keep her elevated.
"Geez, Uesugi-san, I'm really apologizing seriously here!" she whines a little. "At least let me say sorry to everyone if I can't be out there helping the track team right now!"
Fuutarou does a bit of a double-take when he hears this. "...I'll admit I don't get to hear something quite like that every day," he snorts, "but we don't have a lot of time right now. So if you feel like you have the time to apologize, then come help me in the kitchen to make something to eat for everyone."
This counter-proposal brightens up Yotsuba's face immediately as she accepts this venture. "Okay, that sounds good, actually! What's on the menu, boss?" she asks eagerly once her tutor puts her back down on her feet.
"Onigiri. But that's only if we still have seaweed in the kitchen somewhere."
"There should be some still left over," Ichika hollers over at the two of them as they journey into the kitchen together. "I wonder if Fuutarou-kun knew if we had onigiri recently since we couldn't make anything better without Nino here?"
"Wouldn't surprise me if he did," Nino remarks. "Oh, speaking of which, how the hell did you all get by on food while I wasn't here?"
"Takeout and onigiri. Lots of onigiri," Miku smiles weakly. "I'm getting a little tired of onigiri, actually."
"Then why not tell Uesugi-kun to make something else?"
"Because it's his treat," Ichika answers simply, and Miku nods in total agreement.
"So? What's that got to do with anything?"
"Everything, right?"
Nino and Ichika gaze at each other for a few seconds.
"...yeah, you're right." Relenting first, Nino breaks eye contact and looks away.
"Why not help Yotsuba and Uesugi-kun with making food?" Itsuki suggests helpfully.
"Nah, I'm tired. Why don't you go help? Seeing that you might have feelings for him and all," Nino counters, causing Itsuki to blush up again and Ichika's eyes to snap open with sparkles.
"Ooh, ooh! Itsuki-chan's got a crush on Fuutarou-kun?" she asks excitedly while keeping her voice down so that their tutor doesn't pick up on what they're talking about from the kitchen. "I knew they've been getting along pretty well lately, but this I gotta hear more about!"
"I-Ichika, shhhh...!" Quickly relocating closer to her oldest sister, the youngest quintuplet flails her arms a little in front of Ichika in a cute attempt to silence her. "Not so loud, not so loud...!"
"I know, I know. Actually, come to think of it, wasn't one of the reasons why you and Nino had that big fight the other day that started this all because you got angry when Nino ripped one of the worksheets he made for us in half? I guess I should've known, eheheeee ~ "
"Ichika, don't egg her so much. And you should bother her after we're done studying for today, and who knows how long we'll be at it today to make up for all the time we've lost," Miku reminds the eldest quint.
"But, like, come on, this is - this is such a cute little love story that's brewing up here, don't you think?" Ichika squeals a little, swiftly reaching over and pulling Itsuki in, much to the latter's chagrin. "Who knew that our cute little sister who first started out hating her tutor would over time come to start liking him instead? This is, like, something straight out of a drama on TV or something! Don't you think so too, Nino?"
"Huh? Oh, uh...yeah, I...I guess? W-Why're you asking me..."
"What do you mean? You're the only other one who watches dramas with me sometimes, so of course I'd ask you." Ichika lets go of Itsuki to focus on her other younger sister. "Actually, on that note, what about you, Nino?"
"What? What about me?"
"Oh, you know what I'm talking about," the eldest quint murmurs suggestively, slowly scooting over to Nino's side of the couch to lean in towards her as Nino looks on suspiciously. "When Fuutarou-kun was defending you from our upperclassmen on the track team when they were talking a whole lotta smack about you, he basically called you his girlfriend, right? And when one of them started doubting him, you jumped in real quick to back him up. You seemed pretty enthusiastic about doing that for someone who ripped up a worksheet that he'd made for you just two days ago."
"Sh-Shut up..." The second quintuplet plants her palm against Ichika's face to slowly shove her away. "I don't know what he was thinking saying something like that, he's such an idiot. Trying to look cool or something in front of everyone like that..."
"Wait, but isn't that exactly what you like, Nino?" Ichika says quickly, and Nino sees a cheeky smirk on her older sister's face when she pulls her hand away.
"I said, shut up...!" Desperate to think of something to distract her older sister to get her off her case, Nino glances swiftly at Miku for a second. "B-Besides, you know that it's not just Itsuki who likes him now too, right? Aren't you forgetting about Miku too?"
Ichika gasps suddenly, still managing to keep her voice down as Nino's diversion succeeds. "Oh my God, you're right, I almost forgot! Miku, Miku, how do you feel about this development? Are you going to start seeing Itsuki-chan as a rival in love from now on?"
Swinging around to face Miku, the eldest quint practically shoves her own face right up to the third like a news reporter scrambling to capitalize on a brand-new scoop.
"Th-That's not important right now..." the third quintuplet hisses in a low voice back, but the blush creeping up on her own face betrays her true feelings.
"Oh? It's not? Then you're saying that you're fine with Itsuki-chan swooping in and stealing Fuutarou-kun away from you, huh?"
"I will not be doing any s-swooping of any kind, thank you very much...!" Itsuki pouts over at Ichika. "And please, we - we really should not talk about this right now, especially when Uesugi-kun is physically here with us! What if he overhears us?"
Ichika throws her hands up into the air. "Oh c'mon, you know how dense Fuutarou-kun is. I bet he could overhear everything we're talking about right now and still not have a clue!"
"B-But...he...he did say that Nino was his girlfriend..." Miku points out a little bashfully. "So...maybe he's not as, um...dense as we thought...?"
"That was just a ploy, couldn't you tell? He just said that to defend me, that's all," Nino scoffs a little.
"Oh, but are you sure it was just to defend you?" Ichika responds with a rather suggestive voice that's chock-full of implications.
"Th-That's just the kind of guy that he is, Ichika, you know this! Like, it's his job to, you know, defend us and keep us safe and all that, isn't it?"
"Yeah, but like, in terms of keeping us physically safe, obviously. What kind of motivation would he have to defend you like that, though? It's not like those girls were going to attack you or anything."
"He just - I bet he did that because - because - " But try as Nino might to think of an excuse for why their tutor behaved in such a way, the second quintuplet cannot, so she's forced to let the thought trail off on her end, but Ichika picks it up.
"Why don't you ask him, then? When we start eating," the oldest quint suggests. "I think I speak for all of us when I say that we're all pretty curious as to why he decided to defend you like that. Like, he didn't need to bluff about how you were his girlfriend, and he's certainly not one to talk about having girlfriends or whatever, right?"
Nino just rolls her eyes. "Do I have to?"
"Only if you want to. But knowing you, you're pretty curious yourself, aren't you?"
Ichika waits for a response from Nino, but when she receives none, the former simply moves on and turns to her other two younger sisters present at the living room couches.
"So when did you start falling for him, Itsuki?" Ichika asks with a big, amused smile.
"F-Falling for him...uuu..." Itsuki starts squirming with embarrassment now that her eldest sister has pitched the situation to her in this way.
"Ichika, I told this to Nino earlier, but please don't make her uncomfortable..." Miku quickly reminds the first quint with a scolding frown.
"I'm not trying to, I'm just curious! And you already know I love talking about things like this, Nino and I both do! But since Nino isn't quite in the talking mood right now, it's up to me to go around asking all the juicy questions. Of course, if you don't wanna talk about it right now, that's fine, but you can't keep your secrets away from me forever, Itsuki-chan ~ "
Her gaze pointed down at the carpet at her and her sisters' feet, the youngest quint has shrunk her profile and is looking like something in between miserable and bashful thanks to the pressure Ichika is applying on her to share her feelings about their tutor.
"Well, either way, looks like things might just get pretty spicy around here ~ " Ichika grins to herself. "High school's finally starting to look real fun now, and it's all thanks to Fuutarou-kun ~ "
"You can thank me after you've all graduated from high school first. Until then, no need to," Fuutarou calls over to the girls as he and Yotsuba march out of the kitchen with plates of freshly assembled homemade onigiri in each of their hands. "Now come eat, you're gonna need at least some food in you if we're gonna hunker down and study for the rest of today."
"We gotta study for the whole rest of the day...?" Nino complains lightly as she and her sisters get up from the couches to join Fuutarou and Yotsuba at the dinner table.
"Well, what else did you expect from us losing the first two days."
The girls thank their tutor for the food before digging in, with Fuutarou urging Yotsuba to join her sisters in eating while he brings over drinks from the kitchen for everyone.
"Hey, have you been, uh, practicing making onigiri or something?" Nino remarks after taking a bite out of her salted onigiri sprinkled with bacon bits.
"Huh? Uh, not particularly, no. I think I made some with Raiha the other day, but I don't know, I wouldn't really count that..." Fuutarou shrugs, joining the girls after distributing bottles of orange-flavored Craftea to everyone except for Miku, who receives the green tea flavor instead.
"...so you practiced."
"Sure, let's go with that, then. Why, how could you tell?"
"The salt's been better sprinkled; it doesn't taste like it's been clumped up in different spots like what you did last time."
Fuutarou gives another big shrug. "Try some of the ones that Yotsuba made. She's been improving, too."
"Why do I not believe you."
"Aw c'mon, Nino, I really have!" Yotsuba cries out, causing the rest of the quints to start cracking up. "Even Uesugi-san says so!"
"Yeah, I hope you realize that he's only saying that just to make you feel better," Nino smirks.
"She really has, I'll have you know. And at least she can make much better riceballs than Miku over here." Diverting the attention over to Miku, Fuutarou bails Yotsuba out of the spotlight as the quints, save for Miku, redouble their laughter.
"Just give me time. I'll make the best onigiri you've ever tasted, Fuutarou," Miku pouts back at her tutor strongly.
"Cool, looking forward to it. In the meantime, apply that same kind of motivation to your studies tonight, alright?"
"But I always have, though..."
"I meant that to everyone in general. I already know you're one of the ones who works hard."
Taken back by this sudden complement, Miku mutes herself with a soft blush.
"Oh, and the rest of us don't?" Ichika chuckles after a bite out of her own riceball.
"Well, let's just say that there's always room for improvement," the young tutor remarks before taking a swig of his sweetened tea.
The six high schoolers eat their impromptu meal in a brief silence - only now do they realize just how ravenously hungry they all are, especially after everything that has happened and all the things that they'd needed to do.
"Hey, Uesugi-kun, I'm just curious - why did you call me your girlfriend back there?" the second quintuplet asks suddenly, looking up at her tutor and classmate.
The sudden question grabs the interest of every single other quintuplet at the table with no exceptions. Ichika beams, her eyes lighting up again like it did before in excitement at this new development among her sisters; Miku snaps out of her shy hunch after getting complemented by the boy she likes to pay attention; Yotsuba looks rapt at attention too, but her complexion somehow looks a little more melancholy than the rest; Itsuki is the only one who does not put her eyes on their tutor and instead jolts a little in her seat when Nino asks her boyfriend-related question and quickly glances to the side in embarrassment, the memory of the gossip she and her sisters had while Fuutarou and Yotsuba were making riceballs still fresh on her mind.
Uesugi Fuutarou looks up from his own riceball to lock eyes with the second quintuplet for just a second before returning to his food, but he pauses lifting his plain onigiri seasoned with salmon furikake up to his mouth.
"I took those girls insulting you very poorly," he says finally, even though he didn't really pause for very long. "And when that one girl asked me what I was to you other than being your tutor, the first thing that came to mind was that I was your boyfriend. I figured that since girls our age care about relationships and all that, that was the most relevant and most compelling argument I could make to throw them off."
Nino sighs heavily. "I kinda figured that was the case, but I guess now I know that for sure."
"Yeah, it was meant to be a bluff. Imagine me actually having a girlfriend...I don't have the time for that, ha." Fuutarou takes a particularly big bite out of his riceball.
"Aw, c'mon, don't say that, Fuutarou-kun," Ichika sighs reassuringly, smiling brightly over to him across the table as the other girls at the table also frown a little, growing crestfallen at their tutor's last remark, and the first quint, keenly aware of her sisters' poor reactions, knows what she must do. "Everyone's got time for anything that they set their mind to, right? I mean, in your case, you're stuck with us for a long time, so, y'know...?"
"Your dad will have me hunted down like a dog and have my body dumped in a river somewhere if I decide to pursue any kind of relationship seriously with any of you while he remains your legal guardian. And I would much prefer not dying so soon, not when I've got my own family to take care of, so no thanks."
"Let's be honest here, between Papa and you, you're probably more like our 'legal guardian' now," Nino comments.
"I don't disagree, but a certain father would, and his word is more important than mine, so let's just leave it at that."
"But, but..." Ichika glances quickly over to Itsuki, who isn't paying attention with her gaze still pointed off to the side at the floor next to her feet, and blurts out, "...but what about Itsuki-chan? I heard from the others that you had something happen with her, no? You know she likes you, right?"
"I-Ichikaaaaaa - !" As expected, the youngest quintuplet bolts upright in her seat and bawls over at her oldest sister the moment she processes what Ichika is saying.
"Ichika!" Miku also joins in, sounding genuinely upset that Ichika has decided to reveal something as sensitive as this so bluntly to everyone, even if everyone at the table except Fuutarou and Yotsuba already knew. "Wh-Why did you say that? You could have let Itsuki handle that on her own!"
"W-Well, come on, Fuutarou-kun can be as dense as a rock sometimes, right? Sometimes people like him need to have these kinds of things straight up told to them!" Ichika hastily defends herself, wondering if her decision to reveal Itsuki's feelings for their tutor like this was a really bad idea after all. "Maybe if Fuutarou-kun was just a normal high schooler like the rest of us, sure, maybe one day he'd actually figure this out on his own or something. But not when he's a mage and he's got mage stuff to do, right? He's always so busy, and he's never going to not be busy, so I feel like he's never going to take the time to figure out when a girl likes him or wants to get into a relationship with him or whatever because he simply doesn't have that sort of time. That, and I just, y'know, wanted to give Itsuki a little push, since Itsuki probably has the least amount of actual dating knowledge out of all of us since she's always spent so much time just holed up in her own room studying or something."
Lowering his riceball towards the end of Ichika's miniature monologue, Fuutarou waits briefly for her to finish, then glances over to Itsuki.
"Is it alright if I tell them what happened, or did you do that already?" he asks.
"Er...I told...I told Miku and Nino, but...not the others," Itsuki says quickly, her voice falling off towards the end of her own sentence.
"Then is it alright for me to quickly recap what happened? Since if the others want to hear more, you girls can talk it out after we're done with our tutoring today."
After a pause of her own, Itsuki nods to give permission.
"The long and short of it is that apparently, earlier this morning, Itsuki had a pretty bad nightmare that made her wake up screaming, pretty much. Since she was staying at my house since she'd forgotten her purse when she left this place at the start of the week and had nowhere else to go, I went straight back to my place to calm her down." Fuutarou is about to take another bite, but he quickly slips in before he does, "I can see how Itsuki might have, uh...enjoyed that a bit more than what I intended."
"Ph-Phrasing, Uesugi-kun - !" Itsuki yelps again as her sisters give off varying degrees of awkward laughter.
"Sorry."
After chuckling awkwardly, though, Ichika lets off her heaviest sigh yet today. "And just why exactly do you sound like you had literally no interest in a situation like that beyond just getting Itsuki to calm down?"
"Because like I said, your dad's going to rip me a new one if he finds out at all that I'm overstepping my boundaries."
"Okay, I get that, but like, any guy your age would kill to be in a situation like that! You do know that Itsuki-chan is really cute, you know? Even if she's just a wannabe nerd most of the time."
"You're supposed to be helping her case, not insulting her," Nino snorts in amusement. "Also, nice way of complementing yourself."
"But you know for a fact that we're all drop-dead hot, Nino. At the very least, we're all heart-stoppingly cute!"
"Damn right we are."
Ichika and Nino swiftly raise their free hands and give each other a crisp, well-executed high-five, since they're sitting right next to each other at the dinner table.
"Mkay, that's enough ego-stroking for you two today," Fuutarou says loudly, causing Miku to snort into her own riceball from trying to suppress the sudden laughter that she must get out. "But believe it or not, I did that for Itsuki this morning because on the off-chance that we really were able to get everyone together like we just did by the end of today, I don't want Itsuki to still be in a state of shock that would render her unable to participate in some badly-needed tutoring. My contract states that I'm responsible for all of your educational successes during high school, and that I need to ensure them by any means necessary barring outright illegal methods or cheating."
Finishing his current riceball, the young mage reaches over for another and grabs one with a tonkatsu center this time.
"I've learned enough about both you girls and about tutoring itself that it's not just the teaching part that's important. If I only cared about teaching you all, then I'd do what most public education teachers would do and just focus on the teaching and not give a flying fuck about anything else, since they're not getting paid to handle their students' emotional or mental healths on top of their educations. But with how my contract's laid out, I have to. Therefore, making sure that everyone's in a good position emotionally and mentally to study is just as important as the teaching itself, because what good will my teaching do if y'all're distracted by other shit, you know? It's kind of the same reason why I didn't want to force Nino and Itsuki to come join us when I first started teaching, just with a different context."
The young mage scans the table at his students.
"Important shit like this deserves all the effort you can put into 'em. Every little detail, every aspect of whatever it is that you're doing should be paid attention to and worked on so that the final product is the best that it potentially can be. And by extension, if I'm not giving my 100%, how am I supposed to expect the girls I'm tutoring to commit fully to this themselves?"
Miku leans in a little, her elbows resting on the table on both sides of her small plate.
"So that's why...that's why you went out there and said that Nino was your girlfriend, even though that's not something you'd normally say?"
Fuutarou grins darkly. "I got taken out of my comfort zone, if nothing else. I'll admit that I didn't think that one through all the way, and that it was totally a kneejerk reaction. If Nino hadn't jumped in to save my ass, I would've looked like an idiot and me calling up your dad to threaten the track team with forced termination would've seemed lame as hell...not that I wouldn't have done it anyway."
"Yeah, you so owe me for that. And you're right about that being a dumb decision - in a few days, the whole school's gonna be buzzing with rumors that we're going out!" Nino groans. "I mean, it's nothing I haven't seen before, especially back when we were still at Black Rose, but I can't imagine someone like you liking something like that going around?"
"No, I don't, in fact, you're absolutely right. I'll have to track those girls down at some point and, uh, how should I say...politely ask them to refrain from spreading such rumors..."
"U-Uesugi-san, your face, um, it don't look so polite right now!" Yotsuba warns her tutor out of concern, with Fuutarou chuckling darkly to himself as a shadow encroaches over his forehead and eyes. "You're not going to threaten them with shutting down the track team again, will you? Because that's going to be a bit of a problem for me when I said I'd still help them out at regionals!"
"Well, I'll use it as a threat if they keep trying to be uncooperative, but I won't actually follow through with it. I know doing something like that's pretty messed up, don't worry." Fuutarou looks over at Itsuki again. "Sorry that things turned out this way, Itsuki. I don't know - "
"Aaah, y-you don't have to a-apologize...!" The youngest quint also blurts out, stumbling over quite a few of her words now that she's being directly addressed again. "I-I mean, this...a lot of what has happened the last two days is because of me, after all...I wish to properly apologize to my sisters after we are done studying for today..."
"S-So do I!" Yotsuba darts her hand up into the air like a teacher's pet practically leaping out of their seat to answer a question. "If Itsuki gets to apologize to everyone properly but not me, then that's no fair!"
"Well, then like Itsuki said, do your apologizing afterwards..."
Yotsuba starts pouting herself at her tutor. "I bet you're just saying that so that you won't have to listen to us apologize!"
"I mean, if I'm being honest here, I'm not the one you should be apologizing to, so from my perspective, there's no need for me to be around for that, but anyways..." Fuutarou clears his throat. "Like I was saying, this actually goes out to the rest of you, but in case you couldn't tell by now, I'm well aware of the fact that I don't know much of in the way of social interaction, particularly when it comes to other girls like the five of you, and I'm certainly not very good with romantic stuff and all that. So I just want to make it clear right now that everything that I do to help you girls with whatever's going on outside of our tutoring is strictly because I don't want you to have your minds elsewhere whenever I'm teaching. I imagine that for you, Itsuki, it might take some time to get used to whatever it is you're feeling now, but know that I'll still be the same as I was before all this went down."
After hesitating for a moment, Fuutarou also adds more quietly this time,
"...but I suppose if you want someone to talk to if no one else is around, you can give me a call, or send me a text, or...something. I don't know..."
It takes a moment for the quintuplets to react, and of course Ichika does so first.
"Awwwwwww ~ ! Oh my gosh, you two are sooooo cute, it's actually getting so annoying!" Ichika bolts out of her seat after dropping her riceball back down on to her plate to hurry around the table over to where Fuutarou and Itsuki are sitting to put her hands on both of their heads in an effort to put them together. "Now kiss! Kiss already, damn it!"
Itsuki relapses to her usual whining as she tries to evade Ichika's hand while Fuutarou does not budge, try as Ichika might to move him as he comically munches on his fourth riceball with a deadpan look on his face, a look that causes the other three quints to start cracking up too at this ridiculous sight.
"Oh, so now Itsuki gets special privileges with you then, huh? Showing favoritism here, now that you know that Itsuki might have a thing for you, huh?" Nino teases her tutor while Ichika finally capitulates her effort to get her tutor and youngest sister to make out and returns to her seat, jokingly mumbling something about Fuutarou being a spoilsport.
"Not just with Itsuki; I'm extending this service to everyone."
"A service, huh. Like it's something that you have to go out of your way to do when we're all gonna be stuck together for a hot minute anyway."
"Fuutarou isn't the type to normally do something like that, so...in a sense, it actually is a service, Nino," Miku firmly reminds her older sister while Fuutarou begins to gather the plates to put them away in the kitchen, now that everyone's just about done eating with, of course, Itsuki being the last one to still be munching on their riceballs. Nino also gets up to assist. "You always keep calling him dense, but he at least knows enough about us to consider our well-being even outside of tutoring. Why else would he have gone to the lengths that he did to get us all back together the past two days?"
"Hey, for your information, I wasn't the one who called him dense, that's Ichika. Get your facts straight, first of all," Nino rebuffs her sister lightly, and then adds, "...but I get it. Itsuki and I are the two people here who should know that the best by now."
As the quintuplets' tutor and Nino head to the kitchen to wash and put the plates away, Ichika leans across the table a little towards her youngest sibling. "Hey, Itsuki, I'm sorry for bringing that whole thing up to Fuutarou-kun. I just wanted to play matchmaker there since it isn't really like you to have feelings for a guy; if it had been Nino, for example, I wouldn't have gotten so excited and gotten ahead of myself since, y'know, that's just to be expected. This is your first time having a crush, right?"
Itsuki slowly nods. "...I would have...liked to reflect on this situation a little bit more...I feel that I need more time to think about all that has happened."
"Yeah, I agree. I shouldn't have jumped the gun so fast like I did; again, I'm really sorry. In exchange, if there's anything on your mind that's bothering you about any of this, just come talk to me. Onee-chan's got a lot to say about things like this, after all."
"What I'm more surprised is that you decided to do this for Itsuki but not for me," Miku points out to her sisters. "I know you've egged me about Fuutarou here and there, but you never did anything like you did just now with Itsuki."
"Again, because it's just so not like Itsuki to have feelings for a guy," Ichika repeats herself, starting to grow tired of having to reiterate this multiple times. "And now that I think about it a bit more, the fact that Itsuki didn't start off being nice to Fuutarou-kun like the three of us did also plays into this. I mean, to begin with, Itsuki never really showed any signs of liking him like you did, right? And we only just found out about this today when we came back home. Like, how did the rest of you find out about it?"
Miku hesitates. "...she told us earlier this morning, when she and I were talking Nino into returning home with us. And...yeah, it...we didn't know about it, either."
"See? That's exactly what I mean. So whatever feelings Itsuki has for Fuutarou-kun must've blossomed literally today or something. Maybe the foundations were laid over the course of the past few months with all the time that we've spent with him, sure, but her actually realizing that she likes him is a totally recent development, like, fresh-out-of-the-oven recent."
Patiently listening to her sisters discuss her recent development, Itsuki finds an opportunity to speak after Ichika's done.
"Um...well...more than myself, I am worried about...how Uesugi-kun himself feels about this matter," she says softly, occasionally tossing a shy glance over to the kitchen to check on her tutor to see whether or not he's eavesdropping, which he is not, as he and Nino are busy washing and drying the dishes by hand. "He even said it himself just now, that he, too, is...unfamiliar with this kind of social interaction. So...as much as I am nervous about how I must act and behave around him from now on, I...I cannot help but wonder how he must feel about this whole situation too. Especially when he most certainly remembers how I was like towards him in the beginning."
"Oh, that's nothing you need to worry about; it's Fuutarou-kun we're talking about here. He's just going to be the same as ever," Ichika reassures her youngest sister. "And I'm sure he'd agree to that, too. You heard what he said about how this all is his job, right? So it's not like he's going to be doing anything different now."
"Same as ever..." Itsuki repeats uncertainly.
"Why, what's so different about him now compared to how he was when we first met him?"
"He...well..."
Ichika's inquiry gets Itsuki to start digging through her memories in an attempt to refute it, but as she digs, she accidentally fishes out the memory of the night when Fuutarou protected her against that hostile mage when she had accidentally walked right into their combat zone without knowing.
More specifically, she recalls the moment when he put his hand on her head, once they had returned safely to the Pentagon rooftop.
Itsuki's neck sags a little, causing her bangs to droop straight down and act as a curtain for her eyes, as Miku's own does naturally. She doesn't know what hurts her more - the fact that Uesugi Fuutarou had shown her such kindness that long ago and that she's just now realizing this, or the fact that she didn't think anything of it at the time.
And the more she digs, the more she finds that Ichika might not be so wrong after all. Every step of the way during their tutor's relationships with the quints as a whole, Fuutarou has more or less stayed consistent to how he was since the beginning of his tenure. Itsuki was about to respond to Ichika's question that Fuutarou was changing as much as she was over the course of the past three or so months, but that's not technically correct the more she thinks about it; it's more so that the more time he has spent with them, the more circumstances and opportunities he has had to interact with them in scenarios that may lie outside of their standard tutoring environments, and that those fringe behaviors he's displayed merely give the sense of a change in behavior from him. That he openly admitted here at the dinner table while they were still eating their meal of onigiri that calling Nino his "girlfriend" was something that had explicitly taken him out of his comfort zone is proof that most everything else he'd done with the quints was all a natural extension of his usual behavior, because if any of it weren't, he would have been more than willing to say that it wasn't.
"...Itsuki?" Ichika asks quietly, unsure if she's said another thing that might have upset her sister, who quickly raises her head up, Ichika's voice having pulled her out of her own mental Pensieve.
"I-I'm sorry, uh...I...yes, I would...I must agree. Uesugi-kun has not...really changed, no. It was I who has changed..."
Ichika moves her chair over closer to Itsuki so that she can pat the latter on the back comfortingly.
"Just take all this one at a time. Fuutarou-kun won't be leaving us anytime soon - well, for the sake of our grades, hopefully not - so you've got plenty of time to think about this. If you need to talk to him directly, you should, especially now that he's told you that he's open for consultation whenever you want, haha."
"C-Consultation..." Miku mumbles a little bashfully.
Hearing Miku talk pulls Ichika away from Itsuki.
"Oh yeah, speaking of which...Miku, what do you think?" the eldest quint asks.
"Hm? Think about what...?"
Ichika tilts her head a little back at the third quint with a small, inquisitive smile on her face.
"What you think about Itsuki having feelings for Fuutarou-kun? I mean, you were the first one to have a thing for him, right?" Ichika glances back at Itsuki for a moment. "I guess with how much time we've spent with a boy in the same class as us acting as our private tutor, something like this was likely to happen, but to actually have it happen is another story entirely. So now that it has, what do you think about it?"
Miku also becomes hesitant and uncertain, though not to the same degree as Itsuki, but she does manage to come up with a reply.
"...I don't know. Maybe it's something that Itsuki and I have to talk about at some point too, just not right now. For now, though, I told you before, right? I want things to stay the way they are, since like you keep telling us, things won't stay like this forever. And not only that, but like the last two days showed, things can change instantly and without warning. So...for as long as possible, I want the five of us to keep things like they have."
"And I'm sure we will, but that's not really what I was asking you about."
"Then...what?"
"I'm asking you - what do you, as a girl who likes Fuutarou-kun, feel about another girl also liking the same boy you like?"
Miku looks away briefly. "...I don't know. I...I've never been in a relationship before. I suppose...what I can say is that it's probably better for me that it's Itsuki who also likes him, rather than another girl I don't know."
"Hm, now that you mention it, yeah, you're probably right. I only bring this up because I'm worried about what can potentially happen."
"I'm guessing you've seen this sort of thing before with your friends at school?"
"Yep. Most of the time, these kinds of three-way relationships don't go so well - not that I've seen all that many, but enough to know, at least. But here, if you two eventually become serious about pursuing relationships with Fuutarou-kun, at least you two are sisters, so hopefully you two won't become so confrontational about it. If it were Itsuki and Nino, on the other hand..."
The quints at the dinner table let out a small smattering of awkward giggles.
"Looks like they're finishing up in the kitchen," Ichika says, nodding shortly over at Fuutarou and Nino finishing their work and getting ready to return back to the dinner table. "Just remember that Onee-chan's always here to listen to your maidenly troubles, alright?"
As Fuutarou turns on the faucet in the kitchen sink to begin washing the plates, Nino taps him on the shoulder.
"Mute us again," she says, and the young mage obliges, casting another secret bounded field to cover the kitchen. He makes sure to cast his spell with much more discretion so that the other girls back at the dinner table will not be able to sense his spellcast, as most of the quints now should be capable of detecting Fuutarou's magic if he uses it haphazardly.
"What'd you wanna talk about?" he asks, handing a scrubbed plate to Nino to rinse and dry. The two of them have washed and dried the dishes like this together enough times where the two of them are now in sync, able to perform this chore almost purely by muscle memory and freeing most of their efforts to talking and conversing instead.
"Not much. I just, y'know, wanted to make sure that you weren't serious about the whole girlfriend thing," the second quintuplet simply shrugs, scrubbing at the rim of the plate she's drying to scrape off a speck that Fuutarou has accidentally neglected.
"Yeah, of course not. I don't imagine you'd be okay with that either."
Those words slap Nino in the face with a force that she didn't expect. So sudden are those words that Nino almost stops drying the plate in her hands - but she manages to recover to carry on her part of the chore to at least maintain her composure. She wants to tell him that that's not true, that she feels different about him now than before, that things have changed now, especially in light of the events of the past forty-eight hours. But she knows she can't try to correct him on this - most likely, Fuutarou is still under the impression about her that Nino will return to treating him like crap as she's traditionally done once this whole incident blows over, and with her track record, Nino can't exactly blame him. And it's not just her past behavior that's come to bite her in the butt but also the fact that Ichika dropped the bomb on their tutor that Itsuki likes him...at the time that she did, Nino was surprised and amused by the fact that Ichika pulled the trigger on that like she did, but now, it's adding yet another layer of complications between her and Fuutarou, as Nino can't possibly tell him now that she also has a thing going for him too.
So Nino stands next to her tutor in complete silence, quietly drying plates as Fuutarou passes them to her for a few minutes. Just as well, since her mood to talk at all was pretty much killed off anyway.
"...did I say something to upset you?"
Nino slowly glances up at Fuutarou, who's reached over to the faucet lever. The water is still running, but Fuutarou has turned it down so that he can more easily listen to what Nino might have to say.
The second quint quickly glances away, trying to focus on drying plates from the growing stack in her side of the sink that Fuutaoru is feeding.
"...not really, no," she says in a low voice.
"You sure?"
"How do you even know if I'm upset or not?"
"Because whenever we wash dishes together like this, you yap at me constantly or you talk about whatever gossip or rumors have been going around at school, things like that. You do that even with me when I'd imagine you love chatting with your friends or your sisters, so I assume that you just like chatting it up or talking about stuff in general," Fuutarou reasons. He stands up straight to fix his posture momentarily before going back to scrub dishes. "So if you aren't doing that, then I would assume that you're not in such a great mood. And seeing that you were okay when we got here, I can only deduce that I'm the one at fault here."
Nino sets down her next freshly dried plate onto the plate holder next to the sink.
"...when you said, 'I don't imagine you'd be okay with that either'," she begins slowly to give herself time to articulate her thoughts, "you said that because...you don't think I'll ever see you as a potential boyfriend, or...?"
"I mean, with our track record together, I don't know if you expect me to believe that something like that would happen, no? Even if right now we're pretty civil towards each other, what's to say that something else might happen that'll have us at each other's throats like before?"
Nino hates the fact that she ended up being totally right about Fuutarou's perspective...and that he's relapsing to being denser than a black hole. But she can't say anything to that, since he's not wrong about anything he's said. But even still, she still hangs on and doesn't give up.
"Things will be different from now on, I promise," Nino says firmly, managing to snap herself out of her brief period of sharp melancholy. "I won't, uh...be such a bitch towards you anymore. I thought...maybe you already got that, though."
"I did, but my concern is that maybe you'll go back to being how you were before. Maybe you'll get tired of me again and get fed up with me, and then you'll start yelling at me and punching me again and try to sabotage my tutoring like before again and - "
"Okay, okay, stop, stop, spare me the rest of those fucking details, will ya, I get it! And stop sounding like you're playing the victim card here."
"Heh."
Another minute of pause passes between them.
"...are you so jaded that you don't think people can change?" Nino asks quietly.
Fuutarou wrings his dishrag to rinse it of dish soap and picks up the last plate he's washed to help Nino in the drying process.
"It's not that, but normally people are too selfish to consider changing themselves for the better, so it's quite rare that something like that actually happens," he answers.
"What, so now you're calling me selfish, is that it?"
The young tutor merely gives his student a slow, damning glance that has no words to follow, and the message this look gets across is as clear as day.
"...forget that I asked," Nino mutters, unable to look at Fuutarou in the eye.
"Let me elaborate a bit more, then. From my experience, people don't want to change the way they are unless they have a good reason to or because the consequences are ones that they simply can't ignore, and those kinds of circumstances are pretty rare to come by for the average person. They don't want to change because it's convenient for them or because they're so used to how they've been like that changing it means changing their whole lives, or what would seem like that to them. So without some kind of tangible consequence to motivate them to do so, people will just stay the way they are if they have the choice. It takes a special kind of person to actually change themselves because they want to, not because someone else is telling them to or because they'll suffer some kind of consequence if they don't, and those kinds of people are...there aren't a lot of them out there in the world, that's for sure."
"You make it sound so dramatic when all I'm trying to say is that I'll be nicer to you from now on," Nino frowns back at her tutor. "You sure you don't, like, watch dramas or anime or something? You're not a closet otaku, now, are you?"
"Implying I even have time to watch TV or anime..." Fuutarou rolls his eyes quickly. "But I think my point still stands. I'd like to believe in you that we'll get along much better from now on, following everything that's happened this week, so that we can avoid repeating everything again in the future, and if you say that we will, then all the better. All I'm saying is that from my own experience, I don't have a lot of faith in that being the case. Or at least not for long."
"But I'm your student, you know. Have some more faith in me, will you? Besides, we see each other all the time anyway so you don't have a choice but to believe in me. There, checkmate!"
Fuutarou sighs. "If you put it that way, yeah, I guess I really don't have a choice."
"Aw, c'mon, I'm trying to tell you to treat us a little differently than you would random people off the street or other kids at school."
"...that's not what I've been doing all this time, then?"
Again, Nino is stopped abruptly in her tracks. The words "all this time" repeat on loop in her mind again and again -
"Also, I didn't get the chance to ask you this, so I will now - what's up with your short hair?" Fuutarou asks, nodding shortly down at Nino's cut peachy-red hair. "I'm assuming you cut it at some point after I left, but if it's alright with you, I'm just curious as to why."
"Oh, my hair?" Nino reaches back behind her head. "Yeah, like you said, I cut it. I actually cut it when Miku and Itsuki came to visit me at the hotel, after they convinced me to come back home with them and before we decided to go track down Ichika and the track team to help you out. And as for why..."
With Fuutarou's help, the two of them go through the last of the plates that need to be dried, but Fuutarou keeps the sink faucet running at low pressure to buy the two of them some extra time of conversation alone.
"...remember how I told you that you're the one who can keep the five of us together? Back at the amusement park?" Nino looks up at her tutor with pensive eyes, and he nods back in confirmation. "To me, I basically entrusted the promise I had to my sisters of keeping everyone together to you. So like...how should I say this...it's like I've taken off a weight for you to hold for me, if that makes any sense."
"Yes, how very kind of you, as if my responsibilities regarding you and your sisters weren't already heavy enough," Fuutarou chortles darkly.
"Oh c'mon, you can handle this too!" Nino folds her arms across her chest crossly. "...besides, compared to everything else that you're already doing, what's a silly little promise that I made to my sisters when I was just a kid going to do?"
"Well, for just a silly little promise, it sure sounds like it meant a lot to you."
"Because it did. But the problem with it was that I was being weighed down too much by it, since as I am now, there's almost nothing I can do to fulfill that promise with my own ability. It was stopping me from growing the fuck up and moving on...remember the stuff I told you about how I felt like everyone else was growing up faster than me? So...yeah, I felt like it was just appropriate for me to cut my hair before coming back home. Symbolic, isn't it?"
"Psh. And you're the one asking me if I'm a closet anime watcher? Are you even listening to yourself right now?"
"I-I'm trying to be serious here, stop ruining the mood, you fuck!" Nino cries softly, pouting rather indignantly at her classmate.
"I apologize. Continue if you had more to say."
"Hmph." Nino pulls her gaze away from the boy, but her expression softens rapidly. "...and now that I think about it, since you were doubting me about how I'd end up being once we're past this week, the fact that I cut my hair should be my proof that I'm serious about trying to be nicer to you. I really did love having long hair, after all - since none of my sisters had anywhere near as long hair as I did, it made me stand out."
"But I hear that hair that long is also a pretty big pain in the butt, right? In terms of maintaining it and such."
"Oh my God, yeah! You can't even begin to imagine how fucking annoying it is trying to wash it in the shower or the bath!" Getting triggered by this topic switch, Nino drawls obnoxiously loudly. "And especially nowadays when it's getting hotter since it's the beginning of summer, oh my fucking God, it gets soooo stuffy, I hate it, I hate it, I hate it!"
"So much for loving having long hair, then."
"No, I did, but still, aaaaaaagh!" Nino grabs a small lock of her hair next to her right ear. "...let's just say that I'm enjoying having short hair - uh, I mean, short-er hair a lot. It doesn't feel like I'm pulling around an entire carpet on my head anymore."
Nino glances back at Fuutarou.
"...now that I think about it, you wouldn't normally care about something like this, right? It's not like you of all people have any reason to ask why I cut my hair. So what's the catch?"
"While you would be right that normally I wouldn't care, I would notice something as drastic as this. I wouldn't know this myself, obviously, but I would imagine that a girl with as long hair as you would need to have some kind of special reason to just more than half of it off one day." Fuutarou pauses. "...so I appreciate you sharing with me that reason of yours, since you could've easily told me to fuck off since it's none of my business or whatever."
"I-I told you, I'm going to be nicer to you from now on, God, what didn't you get about that..." Nino purses her lips a little, but she raises a hand up to her left cheek with a distracted gaze in a feeble attempt to shroud the heat returning slowly to her face. When she realizes this, Nino, not wanting to let Fuutarou catch her blushing, quickly asks, "Actually, w-what did you prefer?"
"Prefer what?"
"Did you like me better with long hair or short hair? Then, or now? Do you even have a type?"
"Surprisingly, I actually do - I'm a long hair sort of guy."
"Eh - "
Nino feels her heart thud at the bottom of her gut a bit harder than she anticipated.
"You're right about your long hair, how it made you stand out from your sisters," Fuutarou nods sagely. "It gave you a kind of, how should I say, elegance? A type of elegance that set you apart from the others. At least, that was my initial impression of you..."
The second quintuplet is twirling a lock of her hair with an odd little smile that's slowly creeping up on her face as she listens to Fuutarou complement her former hairstyle, though this doesn't last long.
"...and then you destroyed it by punching me a whole bunch'a times in my back."
"W-Well, good, then! I was never trying to win you over or anything like that, especially not back then!" Nino hisses lightly, pulling her hand down from her hair. "Guess I'll enjoy my new hairstyle all I want now, and you'll never see me with long hair ever again! I guess you'll have to go to Itsuki for your long hair fetish from now on, don't'cha! Haw, haw, haw!"
"You say all that like it's a bad thing for me that you cut your hair or something," the young mage remarks with amusement, finally turning off the faucet water as he's starting to become uncomfortable with how much perfectly good water he's wasting.
"But it should be, right? You just said that you have a thing for long hair. In fact, didn't you tell us that at some point before? I think I remember you telling us that, now that I think about it..."
"Yeah, back when I told you and the others what I like in girls or whatever."
"Oh, so you weren't bullshitting us about that?"
"Never was."
"Well...okay, but still, why's me not having long hair not such a bad thing for you, then?"
"You look cuter that way. I think short hair fits you a lot better."
"W - Wha - "
This time, Nino is unable to hide her embarrassment before it appears on her face, and Fuutarou gets two glorious eyefuls of an entirely stumped Nino who stares back at him for a full two seconds, her face splashed with nothing but red.
"Hm? Something wrong there? Did I say something to piss you off again?" Fuutarou says flatly, wiping his hands with a nearby kitchen towel.
"Y-Yeah! Wh-Who do you think you're calling c-c-cute!?" Nino cries back.
"Your hairstyle," her tutor answers simply. "I said that you look cuter with short hair now. Or did you think I was trying to call you cute? Why would I do that when you're anything but?"
Nino doesn't think she's ever experienced such a severe whiplash in moods as she does now. Just as soon as it appeared, the full-face blush drains horrifically from her face as the second quint raises a quivering fist up before her to brandish it before her classmate. Her fist is literally sizzling, though only softly, as her knuckles emit small traces of visible steam as her fist reddens in her face's place with how hard she's clenching it.
"...you're...you're doing this...on purpose, aren't you...?" she mutters dangerously; a deadly smile whose corners are twitching viciously conveys anything but happiness.
Fuutarou nods strongly with his hands on his hips. "Yep! I did say that I don't believe in people to change for good, so I gotta prove my point somehow."
"I'm gonna hit you!"
So the young mage bends his knees a little and thumps his chest before spreading his arms out wide, making himself as presentable of a target as possible.
"Then gimme your best shot - you gotta practice for Round 2 against Itsuki somehow, right? C'mon, I can take it."
With his eyes shut, Fuutarou braces for the inevitable swing and the follow-up pain - he just hopes Nino isn't a complete asshole and goes for a sucker punch to the gut with all the food he's eaten still down there being digested, otherwise the toilet won't be ready for what's about to come back up, even if it is in a luxury high-rise condominium.
To his mute surprise, though, the punch never comes - he just feels the whole weight of Nino's body lean against him, with her arms wrapping around the back of his body. Thanks to Fuutarou bending his knees to drop his height down a little, Nino is able to dock her cheek next to her classmate's perfectly and conveniently when she dives in for her opportune embrace.
"...last I checked, this wasn't a punch to the face," Fuutarou gives a small and cheeky grin as he drops his own arms. "What's the occasion? I thought we already hugged it out once before."
"This time is different, okay?" Nino grumpily mutters, but she tightens her arms around her tutor regardless.
"How so?"
"The first time was because I was feeling shitty and I needed someone to be with me, that's all."
"And now?"
"To thank you for getting all of us back together." Nino takes a deep breath, which Fuutarou can hear to its fullest extent with her mouth being right next to his ear. "I don't know how this all would've panned out without you, but I knew that you could do it when I entrusted my promise to you, and the fact that you did is all the proof that I need. So...you better be grateful that I'm even bothering to thank you like this, okay?"
It's Nino's turn to be surprised, this time by Fuutarou actually letting out a genuine laugh.
"Hm, fair enough. So you're saying that I've finally proven myself worthy? Then that just means I can't disappoint now, three months into the game, can I?" He pauses again, though. "...that's great and all, but you do know that you missed a once-in-a-lifetime chance to pop me in the face, right? You don't know when that chance'll come by again, I'm just saying."
"If you wanna volunteer to be my personal punching bag, then I'll gladly accept ~ Oh, and also, yeah, I should fuckin' punch you for calling my hairstyle cute and not me! What the fuck, Fuutarou! You really suck with girls, huh?!"
"Hello, I'd like to introduce myself as Uesugi 'Denser-Than-A-Black-Hole' Fuutarou, as your sisters sometimes like to call me..."
"Yeah, and you deserve that! But anyways, we've stayed here way too long, c'mon, let's go back."
Nino lets go of Fuutarou and, with a big, wholesome grin on her face, hops over to the kitchen's exit before turning around at her tutor.
"You've got some quintuplets to tutor right now, don't you?" she smiles. Fuutarou gives her a big nod back.
"That I do, and not enough gosh-darn time to do it. Let's go."
The two of them return to the dinner table, promptly joining the rest of the quintuplets there.
"Well, look who took their sweet time washing dishes," Ichika smirks over at Nino in particular. "I didn't know it took this long to clean dishes that were only ever used to hold riceballs."
"Hey, washin' those dishes is hard work! It might not be much, but it's honest work," Fuutarou quips back. "Especially when Itsuki's involved."
"TRUUUUUE!" Ichika hoots out as everyone else but Itsuki and Fuutarou crack up at yet another Itsuki-themed joke that the young tutor busts out so suddenly like this.
"E-Even at a time like this, you make fun of my eating habits, Uesugi-kun?!" Itsuki cries out, pouting back at her tutor with all the strength that she can muster, which causes her face to turn even redder than it already was from being yet again the butt of Fuutarou's jokes. Fuutarou wonders to himself how many of the quints have pouted at him so far today.
"Sorry, as usual, I couldn't resist, y'know, low-hanging fruit and all that. I'll cook something for you if you want later tonight as an apology if you're willing to accept."
Folding her own arms and turning her face away, Itsuki frowns deeply, still unable to stop pouting. "...w-we shall see, then! It would...it would depend on what you are offering!"
"Uh, if I remember what your fridge has right now correctly, I think I can make..." Fuutarou taps his lower lip thoughtfully as he recalls the contents of the Nakanos' refrigerator, having taken a seat at the table by now. "...oh yeah, I think I can make some Mongolian beef, though it's been a while, so I can't guarantee its quality. I might need to draft Nino for it..."
"Oooh, Mongolian beef? I haven't made that in a while, we can have that for dinner," the second quint nods, the residual embers of her last bright smile still shining even now.
"Cool. Then for now, let's get back to the main issue at hand."
Sitting at one of the long ends of the table, Uesugi Fuutarou clears his throat again and assumes another Gendou pose to view his audience with, and the five quints sit up at attention, sensing that it is time to take things seriously.
"As you're all aware, we've lost more than half the time we had to prep for finals. I don't say this to remind you all of what's happened, but more to press home the point that we don't have much time left and that the clock is against us. I'm going to be brutally honest here: your chances of passing these finals was going to be a coinflip at best even if we had this whole week to prepare, but now I legitimately don't know if we can make it. So to raise your chances of passing, we need to commit everything we got to tutoring - it's going to be a whole boot camp for the next day and a half, as in we won't be going to school tomorrow either so that we can cram as much as we can. It's going to be difficult, and it's probably going to be the most amount of studying all of you have ever done up until now. But this is what we need to do if you're going to pass your first high school trimester."
This ominous speech instills nervousness into the girls as they listen a little apprehensively to their tutor.
"However, I do have a contingency plan; I wasn't going to reveal it unless things got really dire from an academic standpoint, but I'll deem this current moment in time as an appropriate enough emergency," Fuutarou says, and with that, he drops out of the small storage rune from his right hand into his left a set of five small sticks of tightly rolled paper, about the size of a cigarette. He distributes them to each of the quints.
"And these are...?" Yotsuba asks curiously, wondering if she should open it up right now.
"Wait, don't open them. Actually, you can't even open them right now, since I have to release the seals on them myself first, and I'll only do that during a time of emergency," Fuutarou warns them. "These are cheat sheets, plain and simple."
The girls all blink at him, then at each other, then back at him again.
"I...never thought you would stoop so low to resort to cheating...?" Itsuki asks uncertainly as she takes a nervous glance down at her own cheat sheet.
"Wait, wait,, didn't you tell us that contractually, you can't do this sort of thing?" Yotsuba quickly points out. "You said that you could do whatever you needed to as long as it wasn't anything illegal or cheating, right? So...why?"
"By this point, I've invested too much of my time and effort into getting you girls to raise your grades and test scores that I'd feel worse about you all failing your exams than I do losing my job," Fuutarou shrugs. "I've told Itsuki this before: money isn't the issue for me here, though admittedly it's gonna suck losing this job since your dad does pay me so well, because what's going to suck even more is seeing all of our hard work go to waste if you fail to pass your finals on Friday. So I prepared this cheat sheet for you all as my own little Doomsday plan - if you girls are still not confident that you can do well on your finals on Friday morning, then I'll lift the seals on those cheat sheets so that you can use them during your tests. How they'll work is that if you decide to use them, whatever I write onto my own cheat sheet that I'll have of my own will also appear on everyone else's, and since we're all in the same classroom, we'll all have the same tests, so all of our answers should be the same, very simple. However, to make sure that you girls won't be suspected of cheating, you need to make sure to get a lot of your questions wrong so that you're just barely passing, since the teachers'll get pretty suspicious as to why you're suddenly getting perfect marks when not even two months ago you were all basically failing still."
The quints look more and more uncomfortable the longer Fuutarou spends talking about his contingency plan.
"...if things are that bad for Fuutarou-kun to even consider having us cheat in order to pass our finals..." Ichika mumbles with difficulty.
"But there won't be any point in us getting good grades if we do cheat. Cheating is still wrong, no matter what the context," Miku declares firmly.
Fuutarou nods strongly in agreement. "And you're absolutely right. The thing is, though, is that the situation right now doesn't care for our morals or our academic integrity, it only cares for how we perform - and it most certainly won't care for whatever consequences follow after. So if you want to stay true to your integrity and pass these exams without having to rely on these things, then we just need to study harder, harder than we've ever studied before."
Fuutarou gets up out of his chair to stand up straight.
"As such, now that I've put things into perspective, I am once again asking for your cooperation. Only when I have that will we get started."
The quintuplets don't even need to look at each other for approval; they're already beaming back at him.
"You already know what we're gonna say," Ichika smiles back. "We'll do this, and we'll do this together this time. Right, girls?"
"Yeah!"
On cue, the quintuplets voice their agreements in unison.
"Nino, what about you? You're okay with this, right?" Fuutarou calls over to the second quint as they all start to get up from their own seats.
"Wait, why are you singling me out?!" Nino yowls back at him.
"Just to make sure, that's all."
Nino first sticks her tongue out at him, but she quickly retracts it to say,
"Yeah, of course I'll do it. We're all in your care, Uesugi-sensei."
"Good. Then let's head over and clear the table. We've got a lot of work to do..."