"...sir. Good sir, I hate to interrupt your sleep, but we've arrived."
Opening his eyes, Fuutarou sits upright from the rear seats and rubs his forehead with the back of his index knuckle to clear his senses. He can see that he's been thrown in the back of a taxi, and instinctively, he checks himself for any bruises, cuts, or other injuries and pats himself down to make sure that he still has his phone and wallet in their appropriate pockets, which he does. His messenger bag is also stowed on the empty seat to his left. At least the girls were courteous enough to make sure nothing of his was left behind, though that's obviously not meant to be a complement.
"I was informed that this is your home. Is this correct, sir?" the taxi driver sitting in front of him, a gently-mannered and neatly dressed middle-aged man with a very round face and a clean and slick haircut, asks his passenger, who glances outside and realizes that he is in fact staring straight at the Daikazoku Business Park grounds.
"Yes, this would be my stop, thank you. How much is the fare?" Swallowing his simmering anger towards Nino for drugging him for the time being, Uesugi remains calm and politely asks the taxi cab driver for the cost. It's not as if the taxi driver's done anything and is therefore innocent in this situation, so might as well pay the fare and have him go on his way.
"4800 yen; we accept cash or credit."
Forty-eight hundred yen...Fuutarou is grimly reminded of why he never takes private transportation. With how expensive it is, he can't fathom ever taking a taxi like this normally to get anywhere, especially not with his family's current financial situation, and even less so with him being a mage and all. Giving a quick sigh and accepting his fate, the boy reaches for his wallet to produce the bills - it's money that he'd obviously much rather not spend, but what can he do? The driver isn't doing this for free, either.
But before he can pull the wallet out, a girl's voice speaks out first.
"By card, please."
The taxi driver smiles over at the passenger sitting shotgun to his left and takes her card, thanking her for her business.
"You didn't need to do that, Itsuki," Fuutarou sighs. "I can pay for myself."
"Although I personally owe you nothing, the fact of the matter is that Nino did go too far today," Itsuki admits as the driver hands her card back. "So I will apologize in her stead, just for tonight."
"Thanks...I guess."
Exiting the taxi, Fuutarou double-checks to make sure he's got everything and rounds the vehicle to bid Itsuki farewell for the rest of the evening.
"I'm betting that if you didn't need to go somewhere, you yourself wouldn't have bothered doing this for me either?" Fuutarou asks, his curiosity getting the better of him, despite knowing Itsuki might take offense to this question too.
"Hmph. All I have to say that is that I needed to go out shopping tonight, and dropping you off at home while on the way seemed the best course of action," Itsuki clarifies. While she isn't glaring daggers back at him, Fuutarou can tell that she doesn't feel inclined to keep conversing with him for much longer.
"By chance, you didn't go through my stuff, did you? You or your sisters?" the fledgling tutor continues.
"And what sort of reason would my sisters and I have to do something like that? I admit I am rather confused by what you're asking me..."
"Hey, don't blame me for wondering - if one of your sisters has the guts to drug a guest of hers and kick him out of her house, I don't think it's too much of a stretch to think that she'd be willing to do far worse, no?"
Fuutarou's bluntly piercing logic renders Itsuki unable to respond to this statement for a few seconds.
"A-Anyway! Do you get it now, Uesugi-kun?" the youngest quintuplet finally turns her head in Fuutarou's direction to speak properly to him. "This is what you can expect trying to come back to our house. Therefore, I suggest that you give up being our tutor."
"Oh, I'm sorry, I didn't know I was talking to your dad! That's right - because I'm not," Fuutarou feigns surprise at first but quickly switches to irritation as he gripes back at Itsuki sarcastically. "Tell me, Itsuki, on whose authority do you think that telling me to stop tutoring you will actually do anything?"
Very visibly miffed at the fact that Fuutarou is using her own words against her from earlier in the afternoon during their previous confrontation, Itsuki presses her teeth together before growling back,
"On MY authority!"
"Uh-huh. And I'm supposed to be impressed? Or scared? Which is it?" Fuutarou gives Itsuki a particularly nasty look because of how much of a spoiled brat Itsuki is coming off as right now to him. "And speaking of authority, actually, you're the youngest out of your sisters, right? So do you even know what authority feels like?"
This is the last straw for Itsuki. She doesn't even bother wasting her time trying to show her anger on her face; instead, she jams her fingers against the seat belt release, tosses aside her seat belt, practically shoves the door open, and swings her legs out to exit the taxi to stomp a few times towards her would-be tutor, with all the motivation she can muster to slap him as hard as she physically is able.
"I knew it, it was Onii-chan!"
Hearing light footsteps pattering towards them across the cracked parking lot, Fuutarou turns around just in time to see Raiha run up to him to greet him.
"You should've just stayed inside, Raiha, I was gonna be over soon," Fuutarou sighs, not wanting to get his sister involved in his quarrel with Itsuki. Speaking of Itsuki, hearing Raiha's voice made her freeze mid-slap, and she's swiftly retreated her striking arm before Raiha can realize what's actually going on.
"Well, this car was sitting outside for a while now, so Dad and I were wondering if these were debt col - "
Fuutarou immediately cups his hand around Raiha's mouth.
"Mmmmkay, that's enough out of you, let's head back inside." He turns back to Itsuki. "I'll be coming back tomorrow, same as the past two days. We've got a lot of work to do."
Itsuki opens her mouth to protest, but once again Raiha stops her in her tracks, this time managing to pull her mouth away from her older brother's hand to say,
"Ah, you're one of Onii-chan's students, right? Dad told me about how he was tutoring five people at the same time!" she says cheerfully. "Since you're already here, and we're just about to have dinner, is it okay if you join us? We're having curry tonight!"
"Raiha, as nice as that offer is, she's got her own plans for tonight, so just let her be," Fuutarou tries to convince his younger sister otherwise while Itsuki quickly wipes off the drool that's leaking from the corners of her mouth at the mention of curry.
But Raiha isn't done. Deploying her secret tactic, Raiha scrunches up her cheeks, gazes over at Itsuki, and whimpers in the best tear-inducing voice she can manage while making sure she herself looks like she's about to burst into tears,
"You...don't wanna...?"
Clicking his tongue, Fuutarou resigns himself. Once Raiha deploys this tactic, it's game over; there is nary a soul in the world who can resist such weaponized cuteness and go against its childish, innocent desires. He turns around to face Itsuki, who can't stop herself from blushing.
"I guess you're eating dinner with us. Sorry about this, Itsuki."
"GAHAHAHAHAHA!"
The hearty laughter that Fuutarou knows too well fills the interior of the Uesugi office-house, almost knocking over some of the picture frames on the drawers nearby from its sheer decibel level alone.
"To think that the day would come when the kid would finally pull it off and bring a girl back home!" Isanari can't seem to stop laughing at the top of his lungs with heartiness.
"For the record, it's not for marriage like you're hoping it is," Fuutarou sighs, once again facepalming as he, his father, and Itsuki all sit at the tiny folding dinner table that they've set out. The table was already quite small for three people; now Fuutarou wonders if the laws of physics would even allow the table to hold four people's worth of dishes.
"Oh? Then what's she doing here, then? Gotta have a reason, right?" Isanari challenges, poking a straw into the milkbox he's had sitting on his desk for the last seven hours because he'd forgotten to drink it earlier.
"She's my damn student, old man. Remember? From the tutoring gig you passed by me?"
"Damn, that's right, that's right!" Isanari nods greatly. "Totally forgot about that, my bad. No but for real though, when're you gonna marry this chick?"
Fuutarou just stares at his father. "Dad, don't ever call her a chick ever again, that's fucking weird."
"Hahaha! See, you're being defensive over her! That's too precious, too precious! Hey, what was your name again? Nakano...?"
"Itsuki; my name is Itsuki," the fifth quint repeats awkwardly, managing the best smile that she can when she has no idea how to deal with such an overbearingly outgoing father such as Fuutarou's.
"That's right, that's right. My bad, I'm much better with faces than I am with names..."
"Then I really hope you don't run into the others," Fuutarou remarks to the side. "God forbid you try learning them all just by their faces."
"It's fine, I'll manage," Isanari waves his hand to dismiss his son's doubts as he begins to drink from his milkbox. But when he realizes that something tastes off about the milk, he checks over the milkbox again. "Ah crap, it's already been a week since this thing's expiration date..."
"Just toss it, then, I can go grab more milk tomorrow on my way b - "
"Toss it?! I can't just waste valuable milk like this! All I gotta do is drink it before it's too late!"
And with that, Isanari virtually inhales the rest of the milk right in front of the two high school freshmen. Itsuki merely blinks, unable to comprehend Isanari's actions, while Fuutarou just groans loudly.
"I swear, Dad, if I get a call from you tomorrow while I'm at school that you've clogged the pipes again..."
"Hahaha, that won't happen! I'll just go clog up someone else's pipes instead!"
"THAT'S EVEN WORSE, YOU FUCKING IDIOT!"
"Bahahahahaha!"
After the two boys go at each other like this for a few more minutes, Raiha, who's minding the cooking in the kitchen from which the delicious curry smell that's making Itsuki's mouth water faster than Yotsuba can fail a test, calls over to them.
"Food's just about done, just another minute or so," she says. "How's the tutoring going so far?"
Naturally, this grabs the attention of the two high school students sitting at the table.
"Well, Raiha-chan, about that - "
Itsuki begins to talk, but Fuutarou speaks right over her with,
"It's going well so far. We still have a lot to work on but it's still the beginning of the year, we can take our time for now."
Again annoyed at Fuutarou's deceptive actions, Itsuki scowls once more back at her would-be tutor. "What are you saying right now - ?"
"Go with it, you're gonna make her feel sad if you tell her how things aren't working out..."
"Thank goodness! That's a relief to hear," Raiha nods with a huge smile, returning to minding the food now that it's just about done. "That means that we can finally start paying off our debts, right?"
Itsuki freezes at the word "debts". She didn't anticipate learning so soon why Fuutarou interrupted her just now.
"Hey, Raiha, don't bring that up when we've got a guest over," Fuutarou warns Raiha sternly.
"Ah, you're right, I'm sorry..." Raiha taste-checks the curry one last time, now determining that the food is perfect. "Okay, food's done! Onii-chan, Dad, come help me with the food ~ "
"Finally! I gotta have something to help wash this expired milk down." Isanari springs up to his feet and strides over to the kitchen as his daughter begins to ladle out servings of curry onto four big plates. "Oi, kid, c'mere and give us a hand. Just 'cause you got your girlfriend over doesn't mean you can slack outta kitchen duty!"
"I know, I know."
But as Fuutarou gets up from the table, he leans in towards Itsuki briefly.
"Don't worry about our situation, just enjoy tonight's dinner."
Itsuki gazes after Fuutarou as he joins his family in the kitchen to bring the food and water over, wondering aloud to his sister and father if the table's even big enough to fit all the plates and cups. While she waits for them, the youngest quintuplet finds herself lowering her gaze down to the tiny table.
The tiny meal that Fuutarou was eating at school on the first day that they met...the pathetic state of not only the business park but also the Uesugi household itself...Fuutaruo's homely appearance in general...before she departed the penthouse with Yotsuba, who volunteered to carry the drugged Fuutarou to the taxi that was waiting for them at ground level, Nino was commenting on just how many cookies Fuutarou had eaten earlier that day by himself...and now the debt that Raiha mentioned, even if Fuutarou specifically told her not to worry about it...
"Here you go. The house favorite: Uesugi Special Curry and Tamagoyaki! I hope you like it!"
Raiha is beaming when she and the rest of her family return with plates and cups of water, and Fuutarou quickly determines that the dinner table is in fact too small for four people's worth of dishes, so he sets everyone else's dishes on the table first and simply sits down at the table with his own plate in one hand, opting to eat off it while simply holding it.
"Y-Yes! Then if you will excuse me - itadakimasu!" Itsuki nods hurriedly, clasping her hands together in thanks for the food and picks up her spoon to dig in.
"Hmph. As if a high-class patrician would even bother liking the common foodstuff of us mere plebeians," Fuutarou cackles shortly, but it's short because Raiha immediately dashes over and karate-chops the top of Fuutarou's head.
"You shaddap, Onii-chan. She's your student, isn't she?" she points out with a dull smile that indicates anything but happiness.
"Yes, but lemme tell ya, she won't be satisfied with just this."
"And you need to fix that sarcastic attitude of yours."
"Don't wanna."
So Raiha karate-chops her brother on the head again.
"That's not gonna change anything, you know."
And again.
"Raiha, enough of that, just eat already."
And again.
Itsuki somberly watches the small antics between Fuutarou and Raiha, while Isanari looks on with amusement while gobbling down his own dinner in true Isanari fashion. Slowly raising a spoonful of curry to her mouth, she carefully guides it in, making sure to savor every part of the food made by the small and delicate hands of a girl who should never have to say the word "debt" like that in her childhood.
For as much as she may love eating, Itsuki hates it if she must eat with a heavy heart or when she's feeling down, because then this means she can't concentrate on how good the food is itself. But for the sake of this family whom she's just met today, the patrician girl conceals her sentiments as best she can so as not to make a scene.
As she gulps down this initial spoonful of curry, Itsuki gazes back down at her plate. This setting, this camaraderie - it's all so painfully familiar. And just when she thought she'd managed to leave it all behind...
"...delicious..." she mutters to herself.
"A'ight then, kiddo, walk Itsuki-chan out. This isn't exactly the best part of town, after all."
Fuutarou pulls his shoes back on, and so does Itsuki. Raiha and Isanari watch them prepare to leave, and in doing so, Raiha speaks up again,
"Um, Nakano - er, I mean, Itsuki-san?"
"Yes?" Itsuki turns to Raiha one last time for the night.
"Since Onii-chan is tutoring you and your sisters now...I just wanted to let you know that Onii-chan is a great person, and he's a great tutor," Fuutarou's younger sister testifies slowly. "Even if he's got a lot of bad things about him, like...being mean to people, being an overly sarcastic jerk sometimes, and being an insensitive idiot..."
"Raiha, if there's anything that I did to make you angry recently, you can just let me know," Fuutarou sighs rather impatiently.
"But, but! He's still a genuinely nice person. Even if it doesn't seem that way at first."
Forcing an awkward smile for the sake of keeping Raiha's, Itsuki nods in confirmation.
"So...that's why..." Raiha pumps both of her arms up at their guest, "...will you come eat with us again sometime? Please?"
This time, without missing a beat herself, Itsuki relaxes and widens her smile.
"Of course! I get quite hungry after studying for a long time, so please allow me to return for dinner with everyone again!" she says gracefully and cheerfully.
Bidding her goodbyes to Fuutarou's family, Itsuki exits the office and, led by her would-be tutor, walks out of the business park to the street to wait for another taxi that she's called for. The two of them stand out in the dark, with the only lights coming from a few dim streetlights around the degraded business park.
Unable to stand the silence, Itsuki breaks it first.
"Please do not get the wrong idea here," she says quietly; the fact that tonight is a calm night with no winds to muffle her voice enables this quiet tone from her. "As much as I empath - no, sympathize with your situation, I still will not accept you as our tutor."
"I didn't intend to use my own family as a way to guilt-trip you into doing so, either, if that's what you're implying."
"I was not! Besides, how could you have planned for something like this if you were out cold for most of this afternoon..."
"Exactly. And for my part, I still won't accept your denial, either. I will return tomorrow as your tutor."
Itsuki glares back at Fuutarou, but this time with much less anger and abhorrence as before.
"And I am telling you, that will be unnecessary. I will continue to study on my own, without having to rely on your tutelage."
"And I'm telling you, you're not going to get anywhere. Yotsuba should've already told you that your dad gave me everyone's test scores from back when you were all still at your old school. I've gone through it all - and based on what I've seen, nothing that you say to me's going to convince me that you'll be able to pull yourself out of this all by your lonesome."
"This time will be different. This time..." Itsuki faces her classmate in full. "...this time, I will pass my exams with my own power. I will prove you wrong, Uesugi-kun, and show you that I can do well even without your help or anyone else's, for that matter."
The second taxi of the night veers into view, its bright headlights giving away its arrival.
"Then...how about this, Itsuki," Fuutarou says calmly and quietly. "I'm still coming over tomorrow at four in the afternoon, but it's going to be slightly different. Since you've gotten free food from us plebeians, I need you to do me a favor."
"Tch...even though Raiha-chan was the one who cooked and not you..."
"Still ate our food at the end of the day, didn't you? Listen, get everyone together tomorrow, same time; you'll see what I mean."
Unsure of what to make of Fuutarou's words and quite frankly having had enough of talking to him, Itsuki elects to simply get into the taxi without another word, other than bidding him good night when Fuutarou himself gives her such a farewell on his end. The young tutor lingers at the sidewalk, watching the taxi drive off into the distance, and once it's sufficiently far away, he heads back inside.
But he doesn't head back inside immediately.
Instead, he walks around the rear of the building, where there is an old service ladder that leads straight up to the roof. Climbing up and getting onto the roof, Fuutarou heads over to the far edge, where he then sits down with his legs dangling over the side right over the Uesugi office.
A small blue rune appears beside him, and out of it and into his outstretched hand drops a crinkled pack of cigarettes and a lighter with only about a quarter of its fuel left. He'll need to grab another lighter at some point, Fuutarou makes a mental note to himself as he pulls out a cancer stick, lights up, and puts the lit cigarette in between his lips while putting the pack and lighter back into the rune out of which they've fallen. He takes a long puff, making sure to savor the toxic smoke for all that it's worth.
The heaviness of the air that he's filling his lungs with...the noxious smoke and the burning chemicals that engulfs him slowly as if sinking into invisible quicksand...ah yes, it's been a long while since he's decided to have another smoke.
Ordinarily he'd reserve a smoke for a much more stressful day - while the quintuplets have certainly been a bit frustrating to work with, they are by no means the worst he's had to deal with. But with the windless night and the cloud-draped full moon in the starless night sky before him, tonight just feels like the perfect night to light one up, that's all.
Since he's here now, it's a good time for Fuutarou to review the events of today...especially what happened after Nino "drugged" him.
"That'll teach him to never come back here again."
Poking the "unconscious" Fuutarou on his nose and unable to elicit a response from him, Ichika frowns slightly. "He's out for good, huh. Hey, Nino, are you sure this was a good idea?"
"You don't wanna bother taking his stupid tutoring lessons either, do you?" Nino snaps at her older sister from the kitchen, making sure to clean the drugged glass thoroughly.
"Well...not really, but...I do think that pulling a fast one on him was a bit overboard."
After hesitating for a few moments, Yotsuba takes matters into her own hands and heads over to Fuutarou's side, pulling him up with great exertion as he's surprisingly much heavier than she thought.
"What on earth are you two doing?" Calling out from the stairs as she descends, Itsuki is scowling at Yotsuba and Fuutarou as the former simply decides to drag him over to the couch behind her.
"Nino did it again, Itsuki!" Yotsuba calls out, turning her head in Itsuki's direction in an effort to win her sympathy.
"Did it again? Oh, I see..." Itsuki immediately understands once she sees the unconscious Fuutarou while Yotsuba tries to heave him onto the couch with much struggle until Ichika sighs and gives her a hand. Now with the two of them, Fuutarou is pulled up to the couch so that he can sleep sitting on it for the time being and not on the floor.
"Hey, what kind of reaction is that? You're normally the first one who gets angry whenever Nino goes off and does something like this!" Yotsuba exclaims once their drugged tutor is now safely secured on the sofa.
"Hm, let us just say, I do not mind as much if the one Nino drugged is him." Itsuki gives Yotsuba a quick tussle of her hair before joining Miku at the table, pointing at the platter of Nino's cookies. "Do you mind if I have some?"
"It's for everyone, so...help yourself..."
"Thank you."
Yotsuba helplessly looks on at her sisters, none of whom seem to give a damn about the fact that they've drugged the person that's supposed to be their tutor. With one exception: Ichika walks over to her and puts her hand on her shoulder.
"Don't dwell too much on it. And Nino never hurts anyone she drugs, so he'll be fine," Ichika says reassuringly.
"...that's not the point, though," Yotsuba purses her lips, letting her eyes fall to the carpet and feeling her chest tighten up slowly.
"Then what is? Tell your sis what's on your mind."
The fourth daughter of Nakano looks back up at the quietly dozing Fuutarou. If there is one silver lining about this situation, it's that, at the very least, he is getting some badly needed sleep for how terrible he looked coming into the house almost an hour ago.
"He's been...working so hard for us already," Yotsuba's strained voice lets out. Perhaps it's this welling feeling in her chest that she can't quite identify that's giving her the drive to say what's on her mind, for she usually doesn't act like this. "Even if it's only been two days, even if maybe it's understandable that there wouldn't be much progress...I don't want to take it away from him, the fact that he's already been doing everything he can for us."
"Has he? Um...well, I guess you would know better than anyone else, since yesterday..." Ichika grins painfully, realizing that she'd completely skipped out on Fuutarou's first official day of tutoring.
"While that may be, just how do you know whether or not he truly has been putting in the effort?" Itsuki points out after washing down her cookies with a swig of Miku's C.C. Lemon, since Miku dislikes sweet stuff. "It is as you say, Yotsuba, it has only been a mere two days. Not to mention, he has barely taken the time to meet with the rest of us!"
"But that's only because the rest of you haven't given him a chance to do that!" Yotsuba argues back, taking a step towards Itsuki and Miku who are sitting together at the low table. "He's had to work with all of us acting this way towards him, you know! I told everyone this morning what he was doing before we got home yesterday, right? He was looking through our tests!"
"So? Any fucking idiot can do that, so what gives?" Nino grumbles, returning from the kitchen once she's done cleaning the drugged glass.
Yotsuba then walks around the long couch before her to the table and picks up her quiz sheet to show her sisters.
"He didn't just skim through our test scores," she declares resolutely as her sisters just stare aimlessly at the quiz sheet she's holding up. "Look at the questions themselves."
So her sisters do. Naturally, Miku, the sharpest one among them, understands first after Yotsuba.
"...the questions are taken straight from our most recent tests from our old school," she mutters, somewhat in annoyance.
"And not just that," Yotsuba continues, pointing down her own sheet. "A lot of the questions are from our most recent tests, yeah, but that's only around half of them. The rest are questions taken from tests from all throughout our middle school years!"
Lowering her quiz sheet, the fourth quint surveys her sisters quickly, who begin to have various degrees of discomfort creeping up on their faces.
"He didn't just skim through our test scores just to see how badly we did," Yotsuba repeats herself emphatically. "He looked through them all. He looked through all of our tests and hand-picked questions out of them to see if we can answer them right this time around. That's why he wanted to give us this evaluation quiz, because he said he wanted to know where we currently are in terms of test-taking!"
"Even...even if that may be, that is simply laziness on his part, no?" Itsuki talks back, getting back up to her feet to speak to Yotsuba on the same level. "Going through our old tests, picking out old questions, and then putting them together to make a quiz...how unmotivated and lazy must you be that that is how you come up with a test for your students? And he calls himself a tutor! Preposterous!"
"But Yotsuba did say this morning that Fuutarou-kun was really busy guy outside of school," Ichika reminds her youngest sibling. "And we all remember what happened this morning, right? We all walked in on him sleeping at his desk when we were so early we should've been the first ones to arrive."
"...he looked like crap, too," Miku adds quietly from the table. "And...when I confronted him about where my jersey was earlier outside our rooms, I could tell that he didn't take a shower recently. Smelled pretty sweaty, I think...he's been moving around a lot."
While her sisters are pointing out just how exhausted Fuutarou seemed to be, Nino looks away to hide the growing look of discomfort on her own face, discomfort that is now slowly mutating into guilt. As she was cleaning, she realized that she accidentally didn't slip the glass of water that she gave to Fuutarou to drink enough of a dose for a guaranteed knock-out, and just to make sure, she checked the drug bottle in the cabinet above the sink, which indeed did not have enough of its contents removed for a full dose. Normally with an insufficient dose, a normal boy like Fuutarou would merely start feeling woozy and lethargic, so the fact that Uesugi knocked out that fast from a suboptimal dosage...
"I won't pretend to know what Uesugi-san's up to that makes him so busy outside of school, and I don't want to pry into his personal business either," Nino hears Yotsuba continue to speak once she's done doing her part feeling sorry. "But for us to do all this and act like this...not wanting to cooperate with him, not even wanting to talk to him, ignoring him when he's trying to help us, and then now drugging him asleep just because we don't want him here...don't you guys think we've gone too far?"
Itsuki pulls over Miku's quiz sheet to look it over for herself. As she scans it, something about the test catches her eye - but she decides not to mention it for now, for if she does, it will be the equivalent of losing the moral battle against Fuutarou.
"You didn't do anything wrong, Yotsuba...you don't need to group yourself with the rest of us," Ichika pats Yotsuba on the shoulder reassuringly. "You're the only one who's actually been spending time with him, after all. The rest of us...well, not so much."
But Yotsuba shakes her head. "No...I don't think that's good enough. I'm the dumbest one out of everyone here - it's only natural that I should be the one who should be going to Uesugi-san for help the most. Even if I'm not behaving exactly like everyone else, the fact that Uesugi-san needs to deal with a stupid idiot like me who gets single-digit test scores more often than double-digits...no, I can't exempt myself or give myself any excuses, Ichika. This is...this is how it should be. I'm just as guilty as everyone else..."
Yotsuba lowers her head even more, to the point where her bangs now cover most of her eyes as though her name is Miku.
"...especially since...I'm the reason why we had to transfer..."
It is at this point that Miku also gets up from the table to walk over to Yotsuba and take her hand.
"Being the dumbest out of us doesn't mean a whole lot when we're all dumb," she says quietly, trying her best to lift Yotsuba's dampened spirits. "I don't think myself as the 'smartest' of us quints, since it doesn't amount to anything other than 'I'm still failing'. So you shouldn't think of yourself as the dumbest. And...if anything, you did me a favor...getting us out of Black Rose..."
"And besides, we talked about this before, didn't we?" Ichika takes Yotsuba's other hand. "If one of us falls behind, we won't just leave her there. Mom always said to stick together no matter what happened, didn't she?"
"Yeah, and it would still be the same if it were somebody else," Nino adds, putting her right hand against her hip. "More than anything else, we have to stay together...even if our lives have changed to this point, at the end of the day, we can't ever forget that we're all we have."
After pausing, Nino shoots a nasty look over in the unconscious Fuutarou's direction.
"And we can't let people like him get in the way," she adds hatefully.
"Don't worry about it, Yotsuba. We'll figure something out," Ichika warmly takes Yotsuba into her arms and embraces her, patting her on the back comfortingly.
"But first, we ought'a figure out what we're gonna do with his ass," Nino points to their dozing tutor.
"I have some shopping to do later tonight, so I will take my share of responsibility and make sure that he returns home safely," Itsuki announces, looking up at the rest of her sisters. "Does anyone have any objections?"
"None here. How're you gonna get him home, though? Ebata still hasn't come around..."
"By taxi. It is the next best option, after all."
"Then that's settled. What do you all want for dinner?"
"Anything's fine," Miku answers for the group.
"It's always 'anything's fine', huh," Nino sighs. "It wouldn't kill you all to give me some more specific requests, would it?"
"But...anything you make is good..."
"That's right, that's right ~ " Ichika nods fervently, smiling over at Nino too while still hugging the downhearted Yotsuba. "You always make great food that we don't know what to choose, they're all so good ~ "
Pouting somewhat at the complements she's receiving, Nino gives a quick flick of her own hair before turning around and heading to the kitchen to make dinner preparations.
"Then I'll just make some curry tonight, I guess..."
Itsuki's ears perks up at the mention of curry.
Itsuki really loves curry, Fuutarou thinks to himself as he watches the full moon. Not only did the quintuplets have curry for their own dinner, but Itsuki ended up coming over to his house and clearing the plate that Raiha gave her, too. Just what kind of bottomless stomach does she have to be able to eat that much? Fuutarou doubts even he would be able to down that much food, even at his hungriest.
But that's a tangential matter; what matters more are two things: Yotsuba's insecurity, and the fact that Nino is in possession of some alarmingly potent drugs.
First, Yotsuba. Fuutarou had already gotten the sense that she has some sort of hidden motive that drives her to be the most willing out of the quintuplets to accept him as her tutor. Although he'd need to spend more time with her to make certain of this hunch, just with what little time they have spent together has led Fuutarou to believe this, at least before Nino tried drugging his ass. It's perhaps not an ulterior motive, that sounds far too malicious for the likes of someone like Yotsuba, but for someone as ditzy and bubbly as her, he finds it hard to believe that bad grades would be the sole factor in pushing her towards him in a figurative sense.
And now, he knows why - or is starting to see why, at least. Yotsuba admitted that she is the reason for the quints' transfer to Fuutarou's school out of Kurobara, so guilt is a major factor. Or, perhaps even worse, Yotsuba harbors a degree of inferiority complex in comparison to her sisters, despite the fact that they are all potential dropouts.
Fuutarou finds himself scratching the back of his head. In hindsight, maybe the whole spiel that he gave her about how being the dumbest out of a group of dumb people doesn't mean a ton was in fact incredibly inappropriate; if this is the case, then it makes sense why Yotsuba reacted the way she did when Fuutarou revealed to her that he'd been looking through everyone's test scores.
"...Even if he's got a lot of bad things about him, like...being mean to people, being an overly sarcastic jerk sometimes, and being an insensitive idiot..."
Raiha's words about him float into his head. Fuutarou lets out a soft sigh - while his sister is indeed spitting facts, he certainly doesn't act this way to maliciously put anyone down, and even less so towards someone like Yotsuba.
For now, Fuutarou resolves to put more emphasis on tutoring Yotsuba. He might not know how exactly tutoring the girls will go, especially with all this initial resistance that he's getting, but he should have expected girls like them to react this way - with the clear exception of the fourth quint, they're all just rich spoiled brats, after all. Going in with any such high expectations out of them would just be asking for a bad time; Fuutarou didn't even have high expectations of them to begin with and look how that turned out already.
Tapping the burning ashes of his half-smoked cigarette to the side, where they drip into another small blue rune that catches the ashes for him, Fuutarou switches the subject in his mind.
Now this is something that worries Fuutarou more urgently than Yotsuba's case, and that is the fact that Nino somehow has access to drugs. Of course, there are normal date rape drugs and the like that are in circulation within the normal population, though thankfully it's somewhat less so here in Japan than in other countries, if that really counts for anything.
For context, most normal club drugs have symptoms that appear after ingestion first, symptoms like dizziness, disorientation, loss of muscle control, slurred speech, nausea, altered heart rate, sleepiness, sudden confusion, or even a sense of suffocation. Depending on their doses, eventually these drugs can lead to unconsciousness.
If standard date rape drugs were all that Nino had, then Fuutarou wouldn't be as concerned as he is now, since he can buy the possibility that she has access to them through her friends; since Yotsuba described her as a social butterfly of sorts, it's not unreasonable to assume that she's in contact with some less-than-savory friends who could hook her up with some less-than-legal items. But what Nino does have is on another level.
This drug that Nino possesses skips all the symptoms and just puts you straight to sleep within mere seconds. Fuutarou has encountered this before, in the form of a prototype strain during a previous contract. If he recalls correctly, the drug's name is "Heisei" (平静) due to its ability to knock a full-grown adult out in mere seconds after ingestion; it's a magically-engineered drug produced from an unspecified concoction of well-known club drugs like flunitrazepam, gamma hydroxybutyric acid, and ketamine and various magical ingredients that was originally intended for medical procedures in the magical world so that patients could enter immediate deep sleep for a set period of time while mage surgeons could operate immediately without hassle.
In fact, Heisei is so strong that mage surgeons have been known to skip out on magical anesthetics altogether because they would be redundant. Its other advantage is that due to its magically engineered nature, past a certain amount, various doses of Heisei would be able to reliably put patients to sleep for varying amounts of time, making it quite the convenient drug in the magical medical field. However, past another threshold, too big a dose of Heisei would put patients into a comatose state out of which they may not be able to wake...and even more than that, and the drug would simply halt all brain activity.
Naturally, it would only be a matter of time before a drug of this potency and strength leaked out to the criminal side of the magical world, and sure enough it did, as that previous contract of Fuutarou's showed. While he's aware that there are magical investigations under way to try to determine the extent to which Heisei has spread into the normal world, Fuutarou has done his own share of investigation, at least in this region, as a way to protect his family from ever coming into contact with it or other drugs like it. He did find that Heisei is still an extremely rare drug on the underground black market, as its sheer reliability and potency have give it quite the hefty price tag that dissuades most potential buyers from purchasing it, and that's before taking into account supply and demand laws and middleman markups.
That is certainly not a problem for Nino, though.
At the very least, it seems like the quintuplets are aware of about Nino's drugging habits, judging by their reactions from earlier, so for now he'll have to assume that the girls know better than to mess around with it, though he highly doubts that any of them know just how truly dangerous Nino's drug is.
The most alarming aspect of this issue is the fact that because Nino has somehow gotten her hands on Heisei, this means that she has a contact to the magical world, which is a direct violation of the terms of his contract with the quints' father. And even if it weren't a term on the contract, Fuutarou doesn't want Nino to have a gateway into the magical world anyway; this side of the world is no place for ordinary girls like her or her sisters to wander into unknowingly. It's bad enough what can happen to you in the normal world, especially when date rape drugs are involved, but have that happen to you in the magical world, that's hell you've just entered, whether you believe in it or not.
As Fuutarou takes one last puff from his spent cigarette and flicks the butt into the ash tray rune, he gazes up at the full moon one more time to finish the night. He'll need to take a shower to get rid of the cigarette smell, otherwise Raiha'll find out that he's been smoking again, and he knows how angry she can get just from seeing how she's reacted to finding out about her father smoking the other day.
But above that, he'll need to keep a close eye on Nino and find out how the hell she's acquiring Heisei. To that end, he'll need to search the girls' house for it and see how much of it she has to predict when she needs a refill, at which point he'll track her down to eliminate the source. This, on top of trying to tutor them for once. He smirks to himself lightly, knowing that it'll probably be another long night ahead.
"Heh...this fucking sucks."
And with that, he hops off the edge of the roof.