"Eh...? He wasn't even planning on giving us any sort of lesson yesterday...?"
The Nakano family is enjoying breakfast together fixed by none other than Nino, who's cooked mini-omelettes filled with bite-sized ham pieces, leafy greens, and thin apple slices, to start their day off for school. Yotsuba has just finished explaining what Fuutarou did the previous afternoon after everyone else had gone to their rooms.
"He just wanted to talk with us, and, um...get to know us," Yotsuba nods slowly, cutting a piece of her omelette and gazing at it for a second. "And...while he was waiting here for us to arrive, he was looking through our tests from Black Rose so that he could get a grasp of exactly what we needed, and what he needed to do as our tutor..."
"Psh, that's just a load and a half," Nino scoffs as she, too, joins her four other sisters at their six-person dinner table with her own plate of mini-omelettes. Miku is nibbling at the side of one of her omelettes, Itsuki is already on her second, and Ichika is...fast asleep, completely ignoring her food. "Also, Ichika, wake up, at least get some food in you before you doze off."
"Okaaayyy..." Sleepily, Ichika pulls her face out of her folded arms and picks up her utensils to begin eating her cooling food. The way Ichika moves after just waking up reminds Miku of a sloth in the wild. "By the way, why did we have to wake up so early...? It's not even seven yet..."
"Since today is our first real day of school, we ought to arrive a bit earlier than usual to class so that we can give ourselves a good start for the rest of the school year," Itsuki reasons, washing her food down with a swig of water.
"I...don't think that's how it works, necessarily, but...whatever..." Ichika goes back to her food with meager interest.
"Anyways - if he didn't even intend to tutor us, then that's even worse!" Nino snaps. "That just proves that he's a freaking creep, doesn't it?"
"But - but - Dad hired him for a reason, right? And it seems like they know each other, too - we can't deny that, can we?" Yotsuba tries to argue.
"Bah. It's just some nepotistic bullshit...Papa offering someone he knows a job and all that. In fact, that just makes him even more disgusting, you know?"
"Nepotistic..." Miku mumbles, finally saying something at the dinner table while still staring down at her half-eaten omelettes. "That sure sounds familiar."
Feeling her right eye twitch, Nino glares in Miku's direction as the latter returns to eating her breakfast at the slowest pace out of the quintuplets.
"Okay, I didn't mean to take it in that direction, but you know what I mean, Miku!" Nino snarls.
"A-Anyways! He said he would be back tomorrow, and that he'll have us take an evaluation test to see where we're at right now," Yotsuba continues, sensing another potential argument boiling up between Nino and Miku, as is often the case in the household. "And Dad texted us earlier this morning before we woke up that Uesugi-san would be coming in today at five instead of four like yesterday."
"Oh, so now he's being late to his own tutoring sessions? Some tutor he is...not only is he a creep, but he also sucks at his job, wow, I'm soooooo surprised..."
"We haven't even given him a chance yet," Miku speaks up again quietly. "We should...at least give him a chance to do his job if we're going to judge him on it."
"That's funny...I don't recall you being supportive of having a tutor over from two days ago, Miku. Care to explain your change of heart to us?" Nino questions menacingly.
"It's not a change of heart...I'm just trying to be reasonable, which you should make more of an effort to be yourself."
"Oh, and what part of my behavior so far isn't reasonable? Do tell me, Miku, what part about freaking out that a random classmate from our new school was waiting for us to arrive home in our own house just to 'surprise' us that he was the tutor that Papa hired is unreasonable to you? Tell me!"
"You said it yourself, didn't you? The fact that it was Papa who hired him, which is further cemented by the fact that he has a passcard to our house. Do you think Papa would just give anyone a key to our house?"
"Tch. Even Papa can have his lapses in judgment, okay? I'm convinced this is one of those times. And besides, he should've at least let us know that he was going to give a house key to the tutor if that ended up being the case!"
"Haha...even though Dad's such a perfectionist at work..." Ichika chuckles softly.
"N-No one's a hundred percent perfect, Ichika! Not even Papa! Even he can make mistakes! He made one not telling us about giving Uesugi a key to our place!"
"You're not wrong, but even with that in mind, let's not forget that Dad always hand-picks his own staff at work and makes sure that everyone he works with is capable and hardworking. We know this since we've visited him at work a few times before and met his coworkers there and talked with them and all. Just because Uesugi-kun isn't exactly part of his conventional staff doesn't mean Dad shouldn't have to apply the same standards to him too, right?"
Once again, Ichika's calm and big-sisterly demeanor puts the brakes on Nino's emotionally driven train of thought, and Nino, unable to come up with a counterargument, returns to eating her breakfast in silence, though she does notice Miku wearing a small smirk on her lips.
"Wipe that fucking smirk off your face, Miku," Nino snaps again.
"Please, you two, do not fight first thing in the morning," Itsuki says firmly, standing up from her seat to go put away her empty dish and glass. "Thank you for the meal, Nino, it is delicious as always."
"Hmph. You're welcome..."
As Itsuki turns on the sink faucet to wash her dish and glass, Yotsuba also finishes her food and wipes her mouth with a napkin, silently wondering to herself how the rest of the day will unfold for her and her sisters.
"...ahem!"
Sensing someone glaring down at him nearby, Fuutarou calmly opens his eyes, finding himself with his head in his arms against the top of his desk. Without so much as looking at his homeroom teacher, a short and bald middle-aged man who has a comically oversized front tooth that makes him look like a bald rat, Uesugi sits up properly, clasping the top of the bridge of his nose to wake himself up fully.
"Sleeping in class again now, I see! Which must mean my lessons must really be that boring for you?" the teacher snaps down at Uesugi as several students in the classroom start snickering, Nakano Nino included among them as one of the louder ones.
"I wouldn't say boring, per se, but being the only person in class who managed to get a perfect score on that mock quiz you gave us last week doesn't really help your case out, Sensei," Uesugi nonchalantly says, now finally glancing up at his teacher. "That, and it doesn't exactly help that you sound like someone's holding your nose constantly as you talk."
The snickering immediately spikes as quite a few more students join in at Fuutarou's comeback, and the bald teacher puts on an almost comical face of anger in retaliation.
"S-S-Such disrespect! In all of my nine years of teaching, I have yet to see a student of such - such - brazenness and insolence until today!" he yells, immediately silencing the snickering going on in the room, but realizing that he himself may be taking things too far raising his voice like this, the bald teacher clears his throat quickly and smiles deviously back down at Uesugi. "But that is very well, then. Rejoice, Uesugi - if you seem to have no use for my lessons while I am here, then I suggest you make yourself useful and volunteer yourself to be the class representative! At least that way, you'll have some way to redeem yourself!"
"But didn't you say last week that someone like me who constantly sleeps in class would never become enough of a model student to become class representative, not even in a thousand years?"
Once again the class bursts into a round of chuckles and snickers as Uesugi exposes their homeroom teacher's hypocrisy. Now growing red in the face, and not the good kind, the class's bald teacher starts gnashing his teeth as he takes on the look of an overheating tea kettle that's been left on an active stove for too long.
"This has gone too far, Uesugi! Pack your bag and get out of my classroom!" The homeroom teacher roars, unable to bottle his temper and throwing his finger in the direction of the door. "Report to the disciplinary committee immediately! I will let Takeda know that you are on your way! This is merely our second week into the school year and I refuse to deal with the likes of you!"
While the teacher fumes and rages, Uesugi pulls out his phone, unlocks the screen, and starts thumbing through it.
"And you're even looking at your phone while I'm yelling at you! I can't believe what I'm seeing! Is this what this generation's youth boils down to?!" the teacher hollers hysterically once he realizes that Uesugi's doing.
By this point, most of the rest of the class can no longer contain their laughter. At first, their homeroom teacher's anger was frightening, but now he has gone so far off the deep end in his rants that the scene is more hilarious than scary; the fact that Uesugi seems so nonchalant and uncaring about it all certainly doesn't help the imagery be any more serious.
"U-Uesugi-san, just - just put your phone away, please!" Yotsuba, who's sitting in the same column of seats as him in the rear of the class, tries to call out to him, but she's not sure if her hushed voice can reach him or not.
Worried, she looks around at her sisters, but to her dismay, none of them seem particularly interested in the scene, no thanks to the fact that the five of them were not present during the first week of school to fully understand the context of the situation and why many people in their class are laughing at the situation.
With one exception - Nino is looking on intently, clearly mentally invested in the outcome of this classroom conflict.
"Nino! Hey, Nino...!" Yotsuba tries calling out to her, but to no avail.
Just before the bald homeroom teacher snaps again and decides to try to yank his student's phone away from him, Uesugi turns his phone around in his hand and raises it up to his confrontational teacher to show him what's on screen.
"Oh ho, obedient now, are we, giving me your phone like th - "
Just as he begins to gloat, the bald homeroom teacher stops in his vocal tracks when he realizes what he's seeing on Uesugi's phone. Quickly, once the students realize what their teacher's face looks like now, the chuckling and snickering in the room evaporates once again. Nino, too, snickering with the two girls in front of her with whom she's already made friends on her first day of school since transferring, stops to pay attention to what's going on.
"You're an excellent teacher, Sensei. As disrespectful as I've been to you so far by sleeping in class and sometimes showing up late to homeroom, I won't take away the fact that you're a phenomenal teacher," Fuutarou says, still speaking in his nonchalant voice, but this time with his eyes closed again like he's planning to go to sleep as soon as he's done talking his own part.
Now, with their homeroom teacher's look of comical anger flipped one-eighty and replaced by a look of pure fear and confusion, Fuutarou's calm voice has somehow gained a subtle but chilling edge - and the patronizing words he's giving the teacher as if cushioning him for the death blow he'll deal immediately after don't exactly help matters, either.
"So phenomenal, in fact, that I thought to myself, that's strange, why would a teacher of your caliber choose to teach here when there are other schools in the city or even elsewhere that are more prestigious and wealthier and would be more than happy to accept a teacher of your credentials into their faculty? And you said you've been teaching for nine years, which is funny, because when I checked our school's faculty history records, you've only been teaching here for three. That's a little...strange, don't you think, Sensei?"
Uesugi lowers his phone, making sure to lock it so that whatever he showed to his homeroom teacher remains an open secret between just the two of them.
"I don't want to make it sound like I'm trying to accuse you of anything at all, oh no, I wouldn't want to do that," Fuutarou continues. "But what if...what if, just hypothetically speaking, you were teaching elsewhere at first...but had to change schools yourself due to some, let's say, unforeseen circumstances?"
The more Fuutarou talks, the more he enunciates his words so that there is absolutely no way anyone in the room can mistake his words for anything else.
Ichika, realizing that this is the perfect diversion to sneak in a few z's, lowers her head quickly on her desk, not unlike how Fuutarou was napping himself until a few moments ago. Yotsuba looks utterly confused as to what's going on; Miku just gazes out of the classroom windows, since she's sitting next to them; and Itsuki looks on tensely, wondering what could be making her new teacher freeze up like this when he should be laying down the law on Uesugi.
Nino, on the other hand, has the most unique reaction out of her sisters - she's glowing with subtle admiration, her vivid blue quintuplet eyes wide and attentive, quite obviously intent on wanting to see how the situation will unfold from here.
"H-H-How - did - you - " The bald homeroom teacher slowly takes steps away from Uesugi, unable to tear his eyes off his student whom he once thought was nothing more than a smart but utterly disrespectful juvenile delinquent, as if in a fear-induced trance.
Sighing and opening his eyes again, Fuutarou lethargically grabs his messenger bag underneath his desk-chair, which he didn't even bother opening for class anyway.
"Don't worry about it, Sensei, no one's gonna find out. Besides, I was only voicing some thoughts that I should've kept to myself out loud," Uesugi gives his teacher a small, lifeless grin. "I was just curious, you know? And you seem to be convinced that I think your lessons are utterly boring, and so I did my best to convince you otherwise...but I guess I failed again. I apologize for being such a disappointment; I'll be removing myself from class for my behavior towards you for today."
Pocketing his phone for the time being, Uesugi pulls his messenger bag's carrying arm up and over his left shoulder as he gets up out of his seat and walks up to the chalkboard, the left side of it where the "Class Representative" section is, and he chalks his name under the line to accept his new position.
"I'll also accept the Class Rep position, hopefully that'll motivate me to stop being the failure that I am," Fuutarou nods courteously to his homeroom teacher, whose back is flattened against the middle of the chalkboard behind the teacher's podium as he passes by. Incidentally, he's still unable to tear his eyes off Uesugi. "Though, for the teacher to resort to asking someone like me to become Class Rep, I think that says more about the class as a whole and how much of a spine everyone else needs to grow after no one volunteered for it last week."
Fuutarou walks calmly the rest of the way towards the front door in complete and total silence - if Fuutarou still had his eyes closed and didn't know there was class in session, he probably wouldn't know there were other people in the room. Opening the door and putting his left foot halfway out the doorframe, he pauses one last time.
"...well, maybe except for the transfer girls in the back, since they weren't here last week, obviously," he notes without so much as a glance towards the quintuplets whom he's referring to. And with that, he quietly closes the door behind him with a loud click, leaving the classroom still in a stunned stupor.
In the back of the class, Nino gazes discretely at the front door for a few more moments as the homeroom teacher does his best to recollect himself and at least make an attempt to resume class as normally as he can. Having covered her mouth with her hands so that no one can see that she's smiling and blushing like an idiot, she lowers her profile so that she can try to fix her expression.
"...what the fuck is his problem, seriously..." she thinks quietly to herself, unable to force the blush in her cheeks to abate. "Trying to act all cool like that...just who does he think he is..."
Unable to make heads or tails of the situation, Yotsuba, looking quite troubled, lowers her gaze down at the top of her desk. Itsuki simply snorts quietly, expressing her extreme disapproval at her would-be tutor's unbearably delinquent actions, Ichika is now fast asleep just like Uesugi before her, and Miku is still gazing out the window next to her.
After removing himself from his own class, the newly self-appointed Class Representative walks out of his classroom building, checking his phone for the exact time. Still twenty minutes left in the current class period - not that it matters, since Fuutarou's attendance is basically invalidated for the rest of the day for his obscenely disrespectful behavior towards his own homeroom teacher. Because he was told to go see the disciplinary committee, that means that the rest of Fuutarou's classes are to be considered absences, even though he's technically at school, so since it's come to that, there is now no reason to attend the rest of his classes like a proper student for today.
Which works out for him, actually - this means he has the whole school day now to work on the next step of his preparations.
Opening his phone up again, Fuutarou pulls up a map of the school campus. Due to the size of the school and due to its extremely high relevance to the situation, Fuutarou will need to be thorough about setting up his runes so that he can cover the campus as well as he can. He determines his first area of interest and begins heading in its direction.
Fuutarou wonders to himself whether or not being that harsh towards his own homeroom teacher was necessary. On second thought, it probably wasn't - that teacher isn't a bad person, and the blackmail he threatened him with wasn't even that bad, just an embarrassing photo of the teacher back when he was working at another school and was forced to dress up as a rat for one Halloween, quite the embarrassing memory that teacher has sworn never to reveal to anyone at this school. And while he's a strict and difficult teacher, Fuutarou wasn't lying when he said he was a good one, too. He just wonders if the quintuplets can handle his classes...
Rather, he pulled that stunt off mainly to get the class to finally get off his case. While he's comfortable with admitting as many times as he needs to that his social skills and awareness are quite subpar, what he has more confidence in is his understanding of schoolyard psychology: ideally, with his secret identity as a mage, Fuutarou wants to be a complete and total wallflower in the public eye, both in and out of school. So the fact that he's already somehow earned a lunchtime nickname for himself is quite vexing; even if it more than likely won't amount to much, Fuutarou would rather not take the risk of leaving his school-time reputation alone, on the off-chance that it could develop into something more annoying in the future, at a time when he really would rather not deal with any such external factors while handling things that actually matter to him.
So as unfortunate as it is, Fuutarou took advantage of the developing situation in his homeroom and used his homeroom teacher to make an example out of him. That way, he can put the rest of his classmates in their place without directly offending any of them; retaliation by proxy, essentially. And since his behavior is so unusual compared to how he's usually acted so far in school, no doubt his classmates will gossip about it to the rest of their friends, who'd then tell their own friends, and such news will spread through the school like an invisible wildfire. Then, most everyone will know to avoid him because his social identity will change from Lunch Table Hermit to that scary delinquent first-year who was easily able to seemingly blackmail his own homeroom teacher, and the infamously strict Bald Rat, out of all the teachers he could've gone after.
Of course, this plan is riddled with risks, since gossip can so easily mutate while running its course, and Fuutarou could end up with a twisted reputation that ends up earning him even more attention than before, but he's got contingency plans for that in case that happens. Besides, his relatively unpopular status at school will lean the ensuing gossip later today in the direction of Scary Delinquent than anything else, so at least he has that going for him.
But back to the matter at hand: Fuutarou arrives at his first designated spot, the front atrium in front of the cafeteria. He's spent every night since he accepted the tutoring contract traveling to different parts of the city, establishing magical sensor and surveillance stations diligently in strategic locations across the city - as a matter of fact, beginning with the surveillance station he set up on the rooftop of the Nakano girls' high-rise, their tutor has pulled an all-nighter traveling around the local vicinity completing the surveillance network, and by the time he finished, it was basically time to go to school, so he came straight here without bothering to go home. Fuutarou knows that Ebata's killer will try his hand again at some point, and this time with no butler to target to lure the girls out, he'll likely cut out the middleman, no pun intended, and go after the girls themselves directly.
The problem is that as he explained to the Nakanos' father, there's simply way too little evidence to work with for Fuutarou to track down the culprit. While there are magical registries that he could look at that can maybe help him narrow down the identities, just out of experience he knows not to bother wasting his time with them, simply because of the fact that any ordinary person, with enough training, guidance, and motivation, can learn to use magic...or even become a full-blown mage.
And Fuutarou should know that better than most.
Therefore, while still quite rare, mages can walk the normal world freely under the freedom of anonymity. The magic world is much like the Internet in the sense that so long as you make sure to keep your trail as clean as possible, keep your profile low, and keep yourself from saying or doing shit that's too obviously dumb or dangerous, you can basically do whatever you like, so long as you know what you're doing. Such is the unwritten creed of mages in the modern world of today: two mages can walk straight past each other and not even know that the person they just passed was a mage, though the really good ones might be able to sense it.
So it's imperative for Fuutarou to prepare adequately, and by adequately, he's going to cover the entire city with surveillance runes. With how exceedingly elusive the murderer is for now, the best option the mage-for-hire has at the moment is to put the entire city under his watch and look for signs this way, signs of unusual behavior or movement. And in case the killer does get moving, hopefully Fuutarou will be able to detect him with the absurd number of surveillance runes he's planning to build throughout the city.
But Uesugi knows he needs to act fast - the fact that the Nakano girls are already likely under threat already puts him at a severe disadvantage. Ideally he ought to be informed of a client's situation before they get targeted, so that way he can first investigate the potential attackers and stop them before they can even make a single move to cause the least amount of trouble for the client. But in this case, he doesn't have the time to search for the attacker's identity before the fact since Ebata, the quintuplets' butler, has already been offed; simply finding his murderer as Fuutarou progresses is the best course of action presently.
For now, after he covers the school, he should have covered most of the areas that the girls will likely occupy in the city, so the fact that the killer hasn't made another move so far is quite fortuitous. But until the culprit is caught, he must stay vigilant...
"Hello, Uesugi-san ~ ! Come on in!"
Yotsuba and her warm welcome greet her new tutor as she opens the door for him. Setting the runes down on the school campus proved more tedious and more difficult than Fuutarou had anticipated, both because of other students getting in the way and his own exhaustion from the all-nighter he just pulled. Yotsuba notices the acute fatigue etched into his face as he nods back at her with a strained smile and takes off his shoes before entering the house proper.
"Y-You look really tired, did something happen?" she asks worriedly, noting the visible tiredness plastered on Fuutarou's face. "You had that run-in with our homeroom teacher earlier today, too..."
"Had to pull an all-nighter," Fuutarou answers honestly, sighing heavily and feeling the exhaustion course through his veins as he sets down his messenger bag on the couch. Once again, only Yotsuba has greeted him at all on the first floor, with the rest of the quintuplet crew missing like yesterday.
"You really must be super busy, Uesugi-san. It's barely the second week of school and you're already pulling all-nighters? You were already in the classroom sleeping at your desk when we arrived, and we even arrived half an hour before school started. We were all, like, really surprised!"
"It's not school-related, in case that's what you're curious about, but that's for another time." The tutor glances back at his only student for the time being. "I'm assuming everyone's already in their rooms?"
"Er, yeah...I tried to convince them to come out to meet you at five, but..." Yotsuba's hair ribbon is drooping down again.
Fuutarou glances up at the large clock that's built into the wall over the still-unused fireplace in the living room, across from the couches, and the hands on the big wall clock read a few minutes after 5 in the afternoon. Because of the extra time he needed to finish setting the runes back at school, Fuutarou had to call the girls' father to let the girls know that he would be an hour late for today. But even with that extra hour buffer, it seems it's still not enough.
"Well, I wanted to actually talk to everyone today, so I'd like to ask you to help me bring everyone out," Uesugi nods at Yotsuba, who immediately brightens up again.
"Roger that! Just follow meeeeee ~ !"
Yotsuba simply flies up the stairs and turns around to wait for Fuutarou to catch up to her at the top.
"Okay, let's get started! First, from left to right - Ichika, me, Miku, Nino, and Itsuki. You can tell because of the white lines on the doors, ehehe ~ "
Fuutarou notes Yotsuba's observation - certainly it's a simple yet clever way to denote whose rooms are whose, since the quintuplets' names are numerologically structured, and thus it removes the need for name plates or anything of the sort. Though, to be fair, some of the girls certainly seem like the type to still hang their names on a sign outside their doors or the like.
"Let's start with Itsuki first," Yotsuba suggests, leading Fuutarou over to the youngest sibling's room on the far right. "She's super diligent when it comes to actually studying, so she should wanna join us!"
So Fuutarou knocks politely on Itsuki's door, which opens a moment later.
Before either Fuutarou or Yotsuba can ask her anything, Itsuki, having already dressed out of her school uniform into her weekday afternoon casuals, glares darkly back up at her would-be tutor.
"I still refuse," she says curtly.
"I didn't even get the chance to ask you anything yet," Fuutarou scowls down at her while Yotsuba's jaw drops in shock at Itsuki's stubborn rejection.
"No need, I could hear you right through the door," Itsuki explains, scowling back at Fuutarou in response. "And now that I think about it, why does our tutor have to someone from our grade - heck, from the same class, while we are at it? Are there no other decent tutors in this city or something?"
"Not when compared to me, no."
"And on whose authority do you think that you are better than the rest?"
Fuutarou simply narrows his eyes down at Itsuki, like he's unsure of what he's hearing out of Itsuki's mouth.
"Your dad's," he stresses slowly. "Or are you trying to tell me right now that you don't think much of your dad's judgment?"
Taking a small step back, the youngest quint feels her face distort slightly with discomfort at the sudden harshness of her would-be tutor's words.
"P-Perhaps he has put a bit more faith in your tutoring ability than me, but still, as far as I am concerned, you have nothing to prove yourself beforehand. What are your credentials? What kinds of tutoring have you done before this, if any at all?"
"My credentials? The only credential I need is the fact that I'll probably get better grades than you with only ten percent of the studying you do."
Baring her teeth in response and letting her left hand clench the side of her open door, Itsuki gives Fuutarou the nastiest scowl she can offer while Yotsuba, frozen in place behind Fuutarou at the standoff between her sister and her tutor, looks on helplessly, unsure of what to do herself.
"Ugh, that...that insufferable arrogance you have...I absolutely detest it. Just because you got a perfect score on a mock quiz of all things, you think it is appropriate to come to class late, sleep in class, and act like that towards our homeroom teacher earlier this morning? And now, you think you can just waltz up to my room and tell me these things? I just cannot believe you right now, you know that?" Itsuki growls defensively back up at Uesugi.
"Okay, I don't want to be told those things by a girl who barely transferred in yesterday and didn't even show up to class until today," Fuutarou returns fire. "Besides, ignoring the shit that happened yesterday, I'd like to remind you that you were the one who asked me to tutor you at lunch yesterday, and I accepted it. Doesn't that count for something, at least?"
Narrowing her sharp blue eyes back at her male classmate, Itsuki pulls her nose up to shun Fuutarou and begins to close her bedroom door.
"That was simply your imagination; please forget about all of our interactions so far, because as far as I am concerned, they never happened."
And Fuutarou watches Itsuki's door slam shut right in his face. Rolling his eyes, Fuutarou turns aside to face Yotsuba, who tries to give him an encouraging smile.
"Ah...ahaha, well...you know, since, like, there's five of us, there's always bound to be one of us who won't wanna cooperate, you know?" the fourth sibling pats Uesugi's back reassuringly. "Let's just move on for now."
She points over at Miku's room, skipping past her own room for obvious reasons.
"Miku's actually the smartest out of us all; you probably could tell looking at our test scores from yesterday. She's consistently always the highest scorer among us," Yotsuba explains as the two of them shift over to Miku's door.
"But like I said yesterday too, being the smartest out of a group filled with failing students doesn't exactly amount to much," Fuutarou says quite dryly, making Yotsuba awkwardly chuckle again.
"E-Even still, I'm confident you two will get along ~ " Yotsuba pauses, dimming her own strained enthusiasm as Fuutarou knocks on Miku's door. "...well, maybe...I'm not really sure. Miku's usually super quiet and keeps to herself most of the time..."
The door opens, and out peeks the quintuplet with the usual blue headphones around her neck. With one problem - her long peachy-red bangs cover her right eye, and her door hinges are on her left, meaning that she ends up not being able to see at all with the one eye that's peeking out from her room.
"...Yamamura Sadako?" Fuutarou remarks absentmindedly, raising an eyebrow down at Miku, who quickly realizes her mistake and hastily opens the door, parting her bangs open so that both of her eyes are visible. She also tries to suppress an embarrassed blush that she can't quite get rid of.
"D-Don't treat me like a ghost...!" Miku pouts, pursing her lips in the same fashion as her sisters. "And what do you want?"
"I'm here to ask you something that Itsuki didn't give me a chance to say, which is to ask you to join us downstairs so that I can start doing my job properly as your new tutor," Fuutarou answers with blunt honesty.
"No."
"Fast answer, I like it. But are you sure?"
"Why does our tutor have to someone from the same class as us? Are there no other decent tu - "
"Okay, you can stop with the deja vu now, I get it."
Giving up on Miku immediately, Fuutarou turns to proceed to Nino's room next door, but Yotsuba quickly hops in front of him to block his path and get him to stop.
"But what about what you said earlier this morning, Miku?" she calls her older sister out. "You said at breakfast today that we ought to at least give him a chance to do his job right before we can judge him on it. Why are you going against what you said this morning now?"
"I changed my mind. Acting like that to a teacher...he's a meanie," Miku answers simply.
"But - but you did the same to one of our teachers back at Black Rose!" Yotsuba accidentally blurts out.
With the fastest of reactions, Miku slams the door shut even more loudly than Itsuki did earlier, forcibly cutting the conversation short. Yotsuba, realizing her lapse in tongue far too late, gasps shortly, subconsciously covering her mouth with her left hand.
"Oh my God - I'm, I'm sorry, Miku! I didn't - I didn't mean to bring that up! Miku? Miku!" Springing forward, the fourth quint cries out to her sister, almost crashing into the door in the process, but her pleas invoke no more responses on the other side. "Miku, I'm sorry! I didn't mean to say that! Miku? Miku, please! Mi - "
The same firm hand that caressed her head yesterday grasps Yotsuba's left shoulder, and she is instantly silenced as she turns her head slowly to look back at Fuutarou behind her.
"Just leave her be. It's my fault for forcing a situation like this in the first place," Fuutarou shakes his head, a statement that leaves even Yotsuba bewildered.
"...but you didn't even do anything wrong! You're just trying to do your job!" she hoarsely asserts back at her tutor. "It's my - "
"No, it's my fault, Yotsuba." Fuutarou pulls his hand off Yotsuba's shoulder. "As far as your sisters are concerned at this moment in time, it's going to be my fault whether it really is or not, anyway. So let's just move on."
At first, Yotsuba doesn't move. She stands where she is, in front of Miku's bedroom door, having let her head hang weakly on her neck and letting her hair ribbon droop down dejectedly as well.
"Before you say anything, don't apologize for them, your sisters haven't done anything wrong either," Fuutarou says quickly, which startles Yotsuba enough to make her raise her eyes back up at Fuutarou. "The responsibility of getting everyone together is mine alone, you're just doing your best to help. I'll figure something out eventually."
"...okay," she nods slowly, trying her best to move past this jarring moment. "But...how did you know what I was going to say? Not even we quintuplets have any sort of twin telepathy...or I guess in our case it'd be called Quintuplet Telepathy? Ahaha..."
"You seem like the sort of person to apologize a lot. You gave me a few of those yesterday while I was over, right?"
"Aha, yeah, I guess I did..."
"Then there you go. Anyways, let's move on to Nino..."
Fuutarou knocks on Nino's door, but nobody answers. Tilting her head in confusion, Yotsuba reaches for the door handle.
"That's weird...she's always one to answer her door when someone knocks..." she mutters to herself, and to her surprise, the door is unlocked, so she opens it up.
"...aaaaand she isn't even in her damn room," Uesugi rolls his eyes again, once he peeks into her room after Yotsuba and confirms the absence of the second quintuplet sister.
Saying this, however, Uesugi notes that this is the first of the quints' rooms that he's able to freely step inside, if only for the fact that Nino isn't here for the time being. It's a surprisingly very well-kept room, with clean and brightly colored furniture, miscellaneous picture frames, custom flowery pink window blinds that hide a sliding door that leads to a personal veranda outside, and a whole crowd of cute plushies and stuffed animals that sit on the properly made bed and on the shelves on the wall nearby.
"Nino was the one who kept punching me in the back yesterday, right? I don't think this would've ended well with her either way," Fuutarou shrugs, taking one more look around Nino's room before turning to head out.
"Ah...yeah, you're...you're right..." Yotsuba agrees half-heartedly with a sympathetic sigh. "Then...then last on our list is Ichika. She's the most levelheaded out of all of us, so actually you've probably got the best chance to get something going with her!"
At first building her confidence and enthusiasm back up, Yotsuba exits Nino's room, only to freeze again in front of Ichika's door this time.
"...and what's that pause supposed to mean?" Fuutarou asks hesitantly, wondering if such a question is even appropriate in the first place.
"Er...well...it's just..." Yotsuba's strained smile degrades further into a full-blown cringe while she puts her hand on the handle of the door to Ichika's room. "Try not to be too shocked..."
Yotsuba's words of warning materialize into a room covered and strewn with the most concentrated amount of random bourgeoisie trash that Fuutarou has ever had the displeasure of beholding. Mainly it's just girl's clothes practically flung all over the place as if the concept of tidiness or, heck, even that of "laundry basket" simply doesn't exist in this realm that is Ichika's room. Funnily enough, as Fuutarou thinks this to himself, he does spy a poor laundry basket barely managing to peek out from the far corner, holding about three times the amount of clothes that it was originally built to hold. If it counts for much, Fuutarou can actually see that this once was a proper girl's room, with posters of famous actresses hanging on the walls and necklaces and pendants hanging from a designated frame on the wall among the posters...too bad it's become the Eighth Wonder of the Modern World with how much shit's lying around.
"Someone actually lives here, huh..." Fuutarou can't help but express his somewhat diluted disappointment as he and Yotsuba walk inside - or, at least, try to. There's hardly any space to walk, so it's just a challenge figuring out where to go to avoid stepping on anything.
"Unnngh...it'd be nice if you didn't...treat a girl's room like it's uncharted territory..."
A familiar voice crawls out from underneath the lump-shaped blanket on what appears to be a bed against the far wall, and out peeks Ichika, who yawns mightily from her afternoon nap.
"Good morning there ~ " Ichika smacks her lips uncomfortably, able to taste her breath and immediately regretting her decision. "You're still around, huh...? Yotsuba told us that you stayed for a bit longer yesterday even though no one showed up..."
Fuutarou rolls his eyes for a third time, and this time he figures he might as well keep count while Yotsuba makes an attempt to clear a path in the room, muttering about how she just cleaned up Ichika's room the other day.
"Where the hell do I start...for one, there's so much shit in here that it's hard to even know where to walk; for two, it's the afternoon; and for three, thankfully Yotsuba was kind enough to stick around to talk to me and actually let me do my damn job. If it weren't for her, I probably really would have left early, which, as I understand, was your girls' intention for me to begin with."
"Well, if it's any consolation, I wasn't involved in that myself. Itsuki and Yotsuba were supposed to be the ones to tell you that...and you know how Nino is from earlier..." Ichika slowly sits up and starts to stretch her arms up.
But in doing so, forgetting one crucial detail, Ichika accidentally lets the blanket that she's been sleeping with start to fall off her shoulders.
"Whoa - "
Thankfully (or not), she does react quickly enough to catch the blanket before she can turn this fanfiction M-rated, and Fuutarou can see why: Ichika is clearly not wearing anything underneath that blanket.
"Ehehe, sorry about that. I usually don't bother wearing much when I go to sleep," Ichika bashfully admits, holding up her blanket so it doesn't fall off to expose her chest again. "Yotsuba, since you're here, can you grab some clothes for me? I can't really move like this..."
As Yotsuba moves to assist, Fuutarou sighs lightly and glances over at Ichika's desk, which is just as littered with stuff like the rest of the room.
"I won't judge you on how you keep your own room, since that's none of my business, but I can't imagine you study in here..." he comments, pushing aside random fashion magazines, notebooks, writing utensils, and papers to clear a space on her desk.
"Oh, c'mon...while I get that you're supposed to be our tutor and studying is your M.O..."
Fuutarou glances back at Ichika, sensing irritation in her voice initially, only to find the eldest quint lying back down on her bed, still with her blanket covering her, but she's lying in such a way that her butt is finely highlighted by the thin blanket and pointed in Fuutarou's direction.
"You've finally achieved what every teenage boy dreams of, which is to make it into the room of a girl in the same grade, and that's the first thing that comes to your mind?" she coos teasingly, even closing one eye at Fuutarou to wink at him alluringly.
To her quiet disappointment, however, Fuutarou doesn't react the way she wants him to by rolling his eyes for a fourth time and letting out another fatigued sigh.
"If only that's what my dreams were made of," he remarks offhandedly.
"Uwaaaa! I-I-I-Ichika, wh-what the heck's this?!" Yotsuba cries out, grabbing attention again and lifting up a piece of lingerie, a black babydoll with rose patterns woven into the breast cups. "Where did you get th-this?! So...so adult-like, and...m-mature...!"
"Oh, that...I forgot I even had that, to be honest...and besides, we're quintuplets, so I bet they'd look good on you, too ~ "
"Y-You think so...?"
"I mean, better that than the panties you've kept wearing since elementary."
"Eeeeeeeek! Ichika, stop, stop, stop! Not another word out of you, Uesugi-san's still here, you know!" Yotsuba practically smacks her hand against Ichika's mouth to get her to shut up right away while Fuutarou can't stop himself from cringing off to the side.
"O-Okay, okay, calm down, I was just teasing..."
"But...well...since you mentioned it..." Yotsuba shyly turns around to face their new tutor, holding up the babydoll so that it roughly takes the shape of her own body. "H-How is it, Uesugi-san? Do you think...I could...um, look good in this...?"
"Sure," Fuutarou answers without missing a beat.
"Eh - !?" Yotsuba tenses up, feeling a blush heating up her cheeks.
"Wow ~ Uesugi-kun making moves already, how bold ~ " Ichika giggles, leaning in towards Yotsuba. "How about it, Yotsuba? Wanna try it on for real?"
"Just to be clear, I have very little imagination when it comes to female fashion sense, so when I say you look good in it, I'm only saying that to complement you. I actually have no clue if you look good in something like that or not because, like I said, my dreams aren't made of teenage girls dressing up in lingerie or lying in bed wearing nothing like a sloth," Fuutarou declares with a very exacting clarification.
"O-Ouch, that hurts a bit, don't you think...?" Ichika smiles awkwardly as Yotsuba hangs her head again, disheartened by Fuutarou's indirect rejection.
"Anyways, the reason why we came in was to ask you if you'd like to join us downstairs so I can actually start doing my job right," Uesugi informs the eldest quintuplet. "If there are no problems, meet me downstairs; I'll be waiting in the meantime."
Fuutarou turns and exits Ichika's room to do just that, but he only manages a couple steps before he himself is stopped in his tracks by a certain Miku who's standing in the way.
"...did you decide to join us, Miku?" he asks tentatively.
"No, it's not about that," Miku shakes her head, her steeled blue eyes poking out from behind her bangs up at Fuutarou. "I'm missing my gym uniform from our new school; we picked them up earlier today...specifically the jersey, and I had it up until a moment ago...before you arrived."
Fuutarou continues staring back at her with furrowed eyebrows of confusion. His lack of an answer prompts Miku to take a step away from him.
"Stealing girls' gym uniforms - I wonder if Nino was right about you after all, being a creep - "
"I'm sorry, what exactly do you want me to say to that?" Fuutarou interrupts Miku before she can finish. "I just got here and I went straight up to your rooms to talk to you; Yotsuba can testify to that. I didn't steal shit, okay? Did you check around properly or are you just accusing me out of the blue because you want me to get out too?"
"I already did check everywhere that it could've been. Well, maybe except..." Miku points into Ichika's room.
"...that makes no sense. If you had it up until a moment ago, why would it just randomly wind up in Ichika's room? It seemed like we were the first ones to go in there after Ichika went in to take a nap, so I don't think it'd be in there."
"Hmph." Miku pouts a little and folds her arms, unwilling to listen to Fuutarou.
"If you lost it, then you can just ask for another one, right? No big deal," Ichika calls out from her room as she's in the middle of getting properly dressed. "Just wear your old gym clothes from Black Rose."
"Ugh, that? I just tossed it...don't want it anymore," Miku grumbles with a small amount of venom in her words.
Sensing those trace amounts of venom, Fuutarou glances back down at Miku.
"Something against your old school for you to toss their uniform?" he asks.
Silence, not unlike the same that befell their class earlier in the morning, grips the air among the quintuplets and Fuutarou on the second floor. Quickly realizing that he's just stepped on a landmine, Fuutarou bites his lower lip briefly in recognition of his insensitive mistake. Maybe it's because of the angle of the sunlight coming into the penthouse from the side, but Miku's blue eyes appear lightless and empty as they peer with a vengeance into Fuutarou's.
"None of your fucking business," Miku glares angrily back up at Uesugi, who notices that her fists are also clenched tightly like Itsuki's from yesterday, but the key difference here is that Miku, for whatever reason, wraps her fingers around her thumbs when she tightens her fists.
"Now, now, Miku, calm down, he didn't mean to bring that up," Ichika says quickly, also sensing murderous intent from the middle quint. "Forgive him, okay? He didn't know."
"And you can't blame me for mentioning this because of how you acted when Yotsuba talked to you earlier," Fuutarou points out, causing Miku to look aside begrudgingly.
"Whatever the case, it's better off that you don't know. Just don't bring it up again..." Miku mutters.
But before she can retreat back into her own room, a voice that Fuutarou hasn't heard yet calls up to them from below on the first floor.
"Oiiiii ~ what're you all up to up there?"
Miku and Fuutarou glance over the railing down at whatever's calling out to them, joined shortly by Yotsuba, and the second quintuplet who hasn't been accounted for yet, Nino, is standing beside the dinner table, returning their gaze with a baking pan full of small, finely crafted cookies.
"I made too many cookies just now, anyone want some?" Nino calls back up.
"Nino, now's not the time for - " Miku starts, but Yotsuba interjects, pointing down at Nino.
"Look, look! That's your name on that jersey, isn't it?"
Sure enough, on the left breast of the jersey are stenciled the kanji 中野 三玖.
"Well, that's four of you, which is more than good enough of a start for today, I guess," Fuutarou sighs, scratching the back of his head as is his tic. "We'll worry about Itsuki later. As I believe Yotsuba's informed you all already, I'd like for you four to take this quick quiz that I'll use to evaluate your current academic capab - "
"Itadakimaaaaasu ~ !"
The four quintuplets present at Fuutarou's "lesson" drown out the sound of him placing the evaluation quizzes on his end of the table in between the long couches in the living room as they help themselves to the wide assortment of snacks that they've piled onto the table: pouches of Pocky, bags of Calbee potato chips, assorted pastries from a local bakery near the school, a big plate filled with all the small homemade cookies that Nino has baked just now, and a tall plastic bottle of C.C. Lemon that's just poured out four glasses' worth of its contents for everyone at the table, with the notable exception being Miku, who's opted for a small can of matcha soda instead.
"Mmmm, these cookies are so good ~ ! What flavors did you use for these?" Ichika murmurs lovingly, savoring the exquisite baking skills of her younger sister.
"Strawberry creme, green apple gelato, and cinnamon extract. I wanted to make something a bit different than usual," Nino explains, snapping a picture of all the snacks with her phone to post to her friends.
"And why exactly are you wearing my gym jersey?" Miku asks suspiciously.
"What do you mean 'why', obviously I don't wanna my own clothes dirty while baking. Aaaand...send."
Annoyed by Nino's negligent response, Miku reaches over and grabs hold of her jersey that her sister is wearing.
"Take it off and give it back. Now."
"Wha - hey, knock it off, stop it! You're gonna knock over my drink like last time, I'll give it back later!"
Clicking her tongue irritably, Miku lets go.
"It's okay, Uesugi-san! I've already gotten started ahead of everyone else!" Yotsuba beams at Fuutarou, complete with pencil in hand, and he glances over at his only truly willing student, who's taken one of his quiz sheets and has indeed gotten started - by simply writing her name.
"Ah, good work, keep it up," he says dryly, so dryly that he takes a sip from his glass of C.C. Lemon.
Ichika gives another big yawn, stretching out her arms, which causes her shirt to press up against her generous chest and accentuate them, though this time she probably isn't doing this on purpose. "Eating made me sleepy again ~ "
"Just for the record, Fuutarou, I didn't agree to taking your quiz yet," Miku mutters, helping herself to a green tea-flavored pastry.
"By the way, I wanna pick up something at the mall, who wants to go with me?" Nino suggests.
"Oh, oh, I'll help!" Yotsuba eagerly volunteers, abandoning her quiz altogether before she can even really start.
Watching the sisters chat and snack, completely ignoring the quizzes he's prepared for them, Fuutarou slowly facepalms. Little wonder why they're in the position that they are - his own faults aside, not only do they actively not want a tutor like him around, but now that he's finally somehow been able to get them all together, they're just outright ignoring that he's even here. He knew that having to teach five girls at once would be tough, but he assumed that going into it, his students would at least be willing to work with him in recognition of their terrible academic states.
Clearly, they don't give a single flying fuck. With maybe Yotsuba as the sole exception.
As Fuutarou silently ponders what his next course of action should be, as hopeless as the situation seems at hand, Nino notices Fuutarou brooding to himself and decides to crawl over to his side while he isn't looking.
"Are you not a fan of cookies or something?" she asks once she's next to him, grabbing his attention and causing him to raise his face out of his hand.
"It's not exactly that, I just wasn't sure if I'm allowed to eat anything here with you guys," Fuutarou explains quickly. "Not to mention, you clearly don't want me here as your tutor, so wouldn't it be awkward if I decided to help myself to the cookies you made?"
"Oh, you have a point. So I guess you do have a tad bit of tact to you," Nino smiles quaintly at him, gesturing to the platter of cookies. "Well, don't worry, I'll allow it for today. I haven't laced them with anything either, in case that's what you're worried about."
"I have even bigger worries now that you've even bothered mentioning that possibility."
"I'm serious! See, look, my sisters are eating them too, and nothing's happening to them."
"...you make it sound like you use your sisters as guinea pigs..."
"What the heck, I don't, sheesh. Unless her name is Itsuki."
Both Yotsuba and Ichika burst into loud snorts that they can't control, and they both duck their faces underneath their hands in an attempt to hide their laughter.
"...surprisingly, that's a reference I actually understand..." Fuutarou notes, though he doesn't laugh like the others do while popping one of Nino's cookies into his mouth. "Mmm, these are really good. You're a good baker."
"Thankies ~ I'm the only one who knows how to cook and bake properly, so it's only natural that they're good, huh?" Nino smiles pleasantly again, clasping her hands together next to her cheek.
Wary of Nino's abrupt shift in attitude towards him, Fuutarou helps himself to a few more cookies. She's probably up to something.
"Oh, and by the way, I'm just curious, but..." Nino tilts her head at her would-be tutor, "...just what kind of arrangement exactly did you have with Papa?"
"And why do you need to know, is what I'd like to ask," Fuutarou replies crisply, in between cookies. "As your tutor, that kind of information is confidential; I don't need to divulge that if I don't want to or need to."
"Ah c'mon, it's obvious that you're just not the type of person who'd do this kind of thing, right? I mean, just look at how you behaved to our homeroom teacher this morning!" Nino points out. "You're a big and scary delinquent type, I can tell. People like you have no reason to take on a tutoring job like this, do you?"
"And you know so much about delinquents to think you know all of their situations?" Fuutarou talks back. "Though I won't dispute the whole delinquency thing."
"Aha, so you admit it at least."
Nino puts an elbow on the corner of the table and leans her cheek against her open hand, gazing back at Uesugi.
"Quite frankly, we don't need something like a shitty tutor," she says with a polite smile that is anything but. "Especially not someone like you."
Fuutarou's expression doesn't change one bit at Nino's threat; he just pops another cookie into his mouth instead.
"Wow, look at you, you really did like 'em," Nino marvels, noting the noticeable crater that Fuutarou's made into the cookie platter. She gets up, grabs the sole glass of water on the table from the other end, and returns to give it to her would-be tutor. "Here, have some water. You must thirsty after all those."
"Thanks."
Accepting Nino's token, he immediately drains the entire glass of ice water to help wash down the cookies he's just eaten and sets it down. While it tastes a bit different from water he usually drinks, it's helped him clear his mind; while still a failure for today, the fact that four out of the quints are here now is progress by itself. Either he can consolidate his progress or attempt to convince Itsuki to join them so that she won't be left out, but that could come at the cost of another or more quints drifting away.
As Fuutarou is pondering his options, Nino suddenly gets up to her feet. He glances up at her to see what the matter is, and there's a dark look on her face.
Raising her hand and starting to wave down at him, Nino smiles and says,
"Bye bye ~ "
Narrowing his eyes up at the second quint, Fuutarou is unsure of what to make of Nino's strange behavior now.
But before he can ask what she's up to, he slowly tilts to his right and slumps on the carpet. His eyes are closed, and he is breathing deeply, fast asleep.
"Too easy," Nino snickers, her smile growing markedly more wicked as she relishes in her victory. "I guess it doesn't matter how tough you are if this's all it takes, huh? Stupid fucking idiot."
"Ah - ! Nino, did you really just - " Yotsuba cries out, only now just realizing what has happened.
"It's done, Yotsuba. Call a taxi or something and get this creep out of my fucking sight already," Nino venomously hisses, grabbing Fuutarou's drugged glass and taking it to the kitchen to clean. "That'll teach him to never come back here again."