A/N

Slightly revised & expanded the post-meal conversation between Fuutarou and Nino chapter 23.

After washing the dishes and conducting his group lesson-turned private lesson, Uesugi Fuutarou finally emerges from the ground floor lobby of the Pentagon high-rise. It was a long but productive lesson today, a whole five hours of it, in fact, just as the sun is on its descent beneath the horizon over the city.

This is one of the few times that Fuutarou has had a chance to tutor one of the quintuplets solo. There were a few other instances, like Miku asking for lessons from him at the school library during lunch, but naturally lunchtime can only last so long, so not a whole lot has been done during those such solo study sessions. So today is the first solo lesson that Fuutarou feels was actually productive - and it also somewhat painfully reminds him of how much easier his job would be if the quintuplets were all just a single person. Teaching just the three of the usual suspects Ichika, Miku, and Yotsuba together was going to be tough, but Fuutarou took it in stride since that's what the job called for, but after having taught Miku for the last five hours and being able to focus all his attention on just her the entire time and not have to worry about Yotsuba's antics or Ichika's chronic narcolepsy, Fuutarou now fully understands just how difficult his job has been. A midway epiphany five weeks too late, perhaps, but what can he do about it by this point...

At the very least, teaching Miku has been a pleasant experience so far, and she is without a doubt the best student among her sisters. Like her siblings, she was hesitant towards him at first, and Fuutarou was concerned in the aftermath of that particular weekend incident that she would distance herself even further away from him once the quintuplets found out who he really was, but that turned out not to be the case. And to add to that, the night they spent together on that outdoor patio back in Honolulu overlooking the night beach certainly helped warm up their relationship even further, to the point where now, for the past week ever since they came back from their Golden Week vacation, Miku has been actively studying on her own, both at school and at home; several days this week Fuutarou even found her studying already in their living room when he'd show up for their tutoring sessions. With his own painful lack of social skills, Fuutarou didn't think he'd hit a home run with the third quintuplet, but perhaps he has no need to worry about it now.

And today has only served to exemplify Miku's metamorphosis, both socially and academically - five hours of all five school subjects of English, Japanese history, Japanese language, science, and mathematics, one hour of each, and Miku is finally beginning to show slight improvements to her scores. While normally such tiny improvements shouldn't be able to incite such strong feelings of encouragement, any amount of improvement is good news for a girl whose test scores either border on or fall short of the passing line, especially when it means that she can at least pass her tests without being in immediate risk of failing.

Fuutarou can only hope that the others are doing the same or will eventually do the same, as he stops beside a utility pole midway through the asphalt path leading to the street from the base of the tower to reach for his phone. But upon reaching into his pocket, he realizes that it is not there, and jogging his memory, he quickly remembers that he left it back in the quintuplets' penthouse - he took both his phone and wallet out to make sitting on the floor a bit more comfortable and set it down on the carpet next to one of the table corners.

How uncharacteristic of himself, the young tutor can't help but think to himself as he feels a bit embarrassed at his own forgetfulness. Normally he always makes sure to leave prepared, no matter what the situation - perhaps the rare experience of being able to do his job properly as a tutor came as such a pleasant surprise that it's thrown him off his usual game. Then again, that would beg the question of what exactly he considers "doing his job properly" if this is really the case...

Now that he's left his wallet behind, Fuutarou has no way of allowing himself back into the high-rise, so he's forced to use the intercom sitting outside the automated glass doors to call the quintuplets' house number.

"Hello?" Miku picks up the phone, to the boy's quiet relief, since it would be rather awkward if Nino were the one to pick up. It wouldn't have been likely to happen, seeing that Nino had gone to the bathroom to take a bath towards the end of his lesson with Miku, but obviously he doesn't know how fast or slowly Nino bathes.

"Hey Miku, it's me Fuutarou. I left my phone and wallet in your living room on accident, I need to get them back," he explains himself.

"Okay, I'll let you in. I'm about to take a bath right now too, so just come in and get them."

The thick glass doors pull open, allowing Fuutarou back inside to take the elevator back up to the thirtieth floor of the Nakano penthouse. As the elevator takes him higher, it dawns on Fuutarou that if Miku said that she's about to take a bath as well, that means Nino is done with hers or is about to be. Plus, while he's not worried about his phone, his wallet is extremely vulnerable to prying eyes - especially if they're from someone like Nino. Then again, the girls probably did take a look through his wallet that one time when Nino "drugged" him and Itsuki had to chaperone him back home, and nothing really came of that, so maybe there's nothing to worry about.

Even still...now that the animosity between him and Nino has once again intensified, who knows - maybe Nino will find his wallet first before he can get to it himself and peruse its contents more carefully. It really shouldn't matter if she does, but...it still doesn't really sit well with him that she would.

Reaching the girls' penthouse, Fuutarou tries the door, which he finds already unlocked for him courtesy of the third quintuplet, and he calls out his arrival so as not to give anyone inside a shock, a valuable lesson he's learned from his disastrous first appearance to the quintuplets over a month ago. He takes off his shoes and makes his way into the living room, where, sitting on the shorter couch on the side of the glass table, is a peachy red-haired quintuplet, fresh out of the bath, moist, and wearing nothing but a bath towel.

Clearly there's no way that Miku could have taken a bath like that in the four minutes that it's taken Fuutarou to ride the elevator up to the thirtieth floor to retrieve his belongings. There weren't any of the pairs of shoes that belong to the other quintuplets either, meaning that the others aren't back home yet. So by process of elimination, the only quintuplet this could be, as if he couldn't recognize her by the staunchly irritated air that she's got about her most of the time, is Nino.

Nino is blow-drying her very long hair right on the couch. At first, Fuutarou can't help but wonder why she'd dry her hair here in the living room when she should do that in the bathroom itself, but then he remembers that Miku must be taking a bath right now, and things are probably still a bit tense between them too, after their little cook-off during lunch. And she seems like the type who'd complain about having to blow-dry her hair in her own room because she doesn't want her own room to get wet from doing so, so the living room certainly seems like the most logical place for her to blow-dry her hair.

But because of all that, Nino clearly hasn't heard him enter the house again with the blow dryer right next to her ears, and only now when he is stepping by to pick up his phone and wallet does she turn it off to dry her hair manually with a smaller towel. She does notice someone walk by as she is doing so, however, and as Fuutarou stoops down to collect his pocket dwellers, she calls out,

"Miku, is that you? Didn't you say you were gonna take a bath after I was done?"

Fuutarou freezes where he stoops, his right hand having barely clutched his phone and wallet from the carpet next to the glass table. He opens his mouth to immediately reveal his identity - but then stops himself for two reasons: Nino will more than likely freak the hell out as soon as she realizes he's back and sees her dressed in nothing but a bath towel, but more importantly, her voice isn't as antagonistic as he last heard it, and because she currently thinks that he's Miku due to her terribly bad eyesight, she may have something to say to "Miku" that Fuutarou would like to know about.

So he keeps his mouth shut to play the riskier long game, standing up after grabbing his phone and wallet, and he also steals a quick glance over his shoulder at Nino, who peeks out at him from beneath the towel that she's using to squeeze the last of the bathwater out of her long locks of peachy red hair.

Two mesmerizing purple jewels, draped with fabric and hair, meet Fuutarou's black pebbles. Though they are but pebbles, Fuutarou can still feel his own eyes grow warm momentarily.

"Well, I guess since you're here, while I'm finishing drying my hair, can you get me my contacts? I haven't changed where I put them, so they should still be in the same spot," Nino gestures over to the shelves to her right, closing her eyes so that she can dry her bangs. Fuutarou's eyes immediately cool off once eye contact is disconnected between them.

Complying with Nino for the time being, Fuutarou wordlessly shuffles over to the shelves that sit over the aquarium to locate Nino's contacts. While he isn't proud of this, Fuutarou has gone through the Nakano penthouse several times during the middle of the night on multiple occasions following the incident with Nino and her drug dealer to make sure that there aren't any other drugs that Nino might be hiding that Fuutarou would want to know about, and in doing so, he's found where the girls keep a lot of their things, Nino's contact lenses and kit being two of them.

"...are you still mad at me for what happened during lunch?" Nino asks as the young mage identifies the correct shelf and recovers her contacts. "Now that I've had some time to cool off, I, uh...I do feel a bit bad about it myself. I just wanted to use that as a way to make Uesugi leave, so all I cared about was winning. I didn't mean to rub it in that I was better at cooking than you, especially when I was the one who's been teaching you how to cook."

Returning to Nino, Fuutarou keeps his peace still as he hands the contacts to their owner, who takes them from him, still unaware of who this "Miku" really is and interpreting "her" silence in a different way.

"So you still are angry..." the second quintuplet frowns a little, giving Fuutarou a glancing look as she sets the contacts down on the edge of the glass table in front of her, still working on drying out her long hair that, understandably, takes a long time to dry. "Honestly, it's...it's all his fault."

Heaving a heavy sigh, Nino grumpily tosses her smaller towel down on the couch beside her as she begins to tie her butterfly hair ribbons back on.

"Just because Papa hired him to be our tutor...he feels like he can just casually walk into our house every weekday like it's no big fucking deal? And that's not even including the fact that he tried scaring us on that first day of his, and that he even has a fucking spare keycard into our house! Like, even if I don't want him to be, I get that he's supposed to be our tutor and all, and we don't know just how well he knows Papa, but still, don't you think that doing all that's just too much? It's like he's known us all his life or something, like he knows this place as much as we do!"

As much as Fuutarou would like to point out that there have already been times when Nino has given him and her sisters snacks and drinks during their lessons, and that even today she's fed him lunch, he decides against it in favor of listening to what the second quintuplet has to say.

"I'm telling you, he's getting too involved with us; we have to cut him off like the absolute cancer that he is before it's too late," she hisses venomously, and Fuutarou feels such venom resonate within himself. "This house belongs to the five of us. He's got no place here."

As she's talking, the young mage notices some slight movements near Nino's bosom; the fact that it's a nice sight for sore eyes is serendipity, for it would appear that the bath towel that clothes Nino's glamorous figure is losing its structural integrity with the pressure from Nino's own voluptuous chest.

"Alright, you know what? From now on, Uesugi's banned from our house!" the second quintuplet declares vehemently, suddenly jumping up to her feet off the couch. "If you want him to keep tutoring you, he can do that from now on at school or at the library! That's what he should've been doing in the first place!"

And just as Fuutarou figured, the bath towel finally slips and begins to fall, the sudden movement on Nino's part being the last straw to break the towel's back. And with Nino being this close to him, and now that she's standing, she'll soon realize that the person standing next to her, no matter how bad her eyesight may be, is simply far too tall to be her own sister.

With practiced reflexes, Uesugi darts out a hand to press his left palm against the bath towel where it is becoming undone before disaster can strike, and he pins the towel against Nino's chest successfully with just enough force to hold it in place while refraining from pushing Nino back down onto the couch. The fact that his left hand now grabs hold of a sizeable portion of Nino's left breast in order to do so, too, is mere serendipity.

"H-Huh...? Miku, what are you - " Nino begins to ask in confusion, but the roughness of the skin on the hand that now presses against her breast, a natural side effect of someone like Fuutarou who does not wear gloves and is too busy to give much attention to the condition of his skin, is the dead giveaway that finally gives her the rude awakening that she completely did not expect. The contortion of the look on her face, shifting coarsely from confused to horrified, is all Fuutarou needs to see to reveal his identity.

"Your towel was falling off," he says calmly, his black eyes locked onto Nino's blue ones for a moment before dropping down to his hand and then returning. "Sorry for catching a bit extra."

Nino opens her mouth to scream at the top of her lungs, so Fuutarou mentally prepares himself to sacrifice part of his hearing for tonight.

But what follows isn't a scream - it's a click of a phone camera. Both Nino and Fuutarou turn towards the direction of the digital click, Nino much faster in her reactions due to her heightened senses, while Fuutarou merely glances over like he usually would.

Standing from the short hall into the living room from the front door, having freshly returned from studying in the library and taken off her high heels, Nakano Itsuki lowers her phone somewhat as she gives the two of them, but more so the young tutor, a heavily disappointed scowl.

"...you absolute degenerate," she denounces assertively.

About half an hour later -

"Your honor, please take a look at this photo taken at the scene and time of the crime..."

The entire quintuplet gang is all here and back home, gathered around the glass table with an extra man sitting at the other end of it. Ichika and Yotsuba, having returned home at roughly the same time from their respective duties, now join Fuutarou, Nino, Miku, and Itsuki in the living room in a pseudo-court case environment, with Nino as the plaintiff, Uesugi Fuutarou as the defendant, Ichika as the judge, Itsuki as the prosecutor, and Miku and Yotsuba as the jury.

Itsuki is now parading slowly around the table, the only one who's not seated, showing both the judge and everyone else the photo that she snapped of Nino and Fuutarou, and once she's confident that everyone's gotten a good look at it, she continues her prosecution.

"The defendant, though he was allowed into our home as a trusted private tutor by our father, could not contain his lust in the presence of such a healthy young high school girl and began to touch her inappropriately," she delivers sternly. "This photo in fact depicts Uesugi Fuutarou-kun, the defendant, does it not?"

Itsuki turns sharply down at Fuutarou, who gives her a bored look back as if he's waiting for her to be done with her prosecution. Ichika, the de facto judge, is smiling as always, Nino is slumped against the base of the long couch, still somewhat shell-shocked that the boy she hates got a handful of her own chest, Miku is looking on dully as usual, and Yotsuba is glancing around at everyone else around her nervously, excited to see how the situation will unfold.

"Th-This is just like those Korean dramas that we watch together sometimes...!" she can't help but remark in bubbly anticipation.

"Except unlike the ones we watch, this one is pointless," Miku murmurs dryly. While she's giving her dry comment, Nino raises her hand in the meantime, and Ichika answers her.

"Your honor!"

"Yes, Nino-kun, the plaintiff?"

Having the floor now, Nino jabs a thumb over to the side in the silent Fuutarou's direction.

"This man only pretended to leave the premises following his private lesson for the bystander Miku, but was merely waiting for me to come out of the bath to attack," she testifies. Hearing herself be addressed as a "bystander" somewhat irks Miku, probably because Nino's the one saying it, but she doesn't let that show. "Because of the absolutely heinous nature of the crime that he has committed, I hereby motion to ban him from the grounds of the entire Pentagon complex."

Giggling at the extremity of Nino's proposal, Ichika nods sagely, enjoying her temporary title and prestige as the judge presiding over this makeshift court case. "Your motion is well noted, Miss Plaintiff. And yes, oh yes, this crime is very naughty indeed ~ in the meantime, does the defendant wish to speak on his own behalf?"

"I just came back to come grab my phone and wallet, which I left by this table here and forgot about when I left earlier," Fuutarou says simply, laying out the truth and nothing but the truth. But finding that Ichika has turned her face away with a small pout, Fuutarou groans a little and adds, "...your Honor," which returns Ichika's smile back to its rightful place.

"Objection."

The floor moves to the third quintuplet Miku, who, like her older sister before her, raises her hand to speak.

"It was I who let him into the high-rise when he asked to come back in to get his stuff," she announces in Fuutarou's defense. "And so I let him in over the intercom. The intercom also records everything that goes through it both ways as per the Pentagon's security measures, so you'll be able to find our conversation from an hour ago there. All of this is just an unfortunate accident."

"How's this 'just an unfortunate accident?' You saw the picture yourself, Miku! He intentionally and deliberately reached out and grabbed one of my tits!" Lurching forward from her seat at the base of the couch, Nino gets up on her knees so that she can press her hands down on the glass table for emphasis towards Miku. "No matter how you try to twist it, there's no way this can just be 'an unfortunate accident'!"

"But it is, Nino. Just get over it already, you're just still salty over what happened at lunch earlier today."

Recoiling a little and clenching her teeth, Nino feels angry words clump up in her throat, but begrudgingly she knows that Miku doesn't know about what she said to Fuutarou just earlier, so she's forced to let those words rot.

"I'm NOT salty, okay? Besides, this fucking pervert saw me naked! Wouldn't you freak out too?!"

"Not really, no."

"I mean, Miku's the one who cares the least about walking around the house in nothing but a towel after a bath," Yotsuba points out, nodding her own head like she's some sort of female Sherlock Holmes.

"You do that too, might I add," Nino retorts quickly at Yotsuba before refocusing her attention back on Miku. "Your honor! Miku is protecting the defendant for what must be personal reasons!"

This accusation lands a critical hit on Miku, whose eyes widen suddenly as her face's usual icy demeanor swiftly breaks to reveal a warmer, more flustered expression as Nino's words ring through her ears.

"N...No, that's...that's not...tr..." the third quintuplet stammers while her cheeks betray her words with their luminscent blushes. She steals a glance quickly at Fuutarou, who also gives her another bored look of his own, before dropping her eyes down at her lap.

Seeing this kind of reaction come from her sister, the kind of reaction that she's always imagined her having, Nino pounces on her long-awaited chance to press the issue.

"Hmmmmm...? What do we have here, Miku? Looks like you're acting more cautious around him now all of a sudden," she wonders aloud to incite suspicion among her other sisters as well.

Miku quickly rebounds from her embarrassment, sensing that Nino will relentlessly attack her in this weak point of hers if she does not stand up for herself right now.

"You're just imagining things, Nino. That, and you're just looking for any excuse to kick Fuutarou out of our house," Miku rebuts swiftly. "That's why you got everyone but me to leave the house, that's why you baited me into that cook-off earlier for lunch, and that's why you're making a big deal out of this when it really shouldn't be."

"Oh, you don't think having my chest groped and being seen naked against my will isn't a big deal?"

"Why should it be? There's nothing to see there."

"Maybe not for someone like you who doesn't care about how she looks, but it does for me since I'm different!"

"That makes no sense, we all have the exact same body, pretty much."

The fierce, rapid-fire back-and-forth between Nino and Miku begins to intimidate Itsuki, while Yotsuba continues to look on with Ichika with a heightened mixture of nervousness and anticipation for the climax of this drama-like scene.

Itsuki, not wanting to see her own sisters fight between themselves, tries to step in verbally, saying quickly once she finds a break in Nino's and Miku's arguments, "Y-You two, please, this is not the time to be fighting each other! The one at fault is - "

But neither of her older sisters are having any of it, not even from their own sister, and both of them snap over to her on a dime, glaring with such intensity that even Yotsuba yelps a little and ducks behind Ichika's seat on the shorter couch, despite not even being in the crossfire.

"Be quiet, Itsuki," Miku snarls.

"And delete that damn photo already!" Nino demands.

Now bearing the full brunt of Nino's and Miku's combined killing intent, Itsuki is sent off with her figurative tail between her legs and quickly turns to dive into her oldest sister's arms, whimpering, "Waaaaaaaaah, your Honooooorrrrr!"

"There, there, you did your best, don't worry," Ichika chuckles soothingly, accepting her youngest sister and patting her between her shoulderblades. Reaching over to the glass table where Itsuki's set down her phone, the eldest quint picks it back up to take another look at the photo of Uesugi with his hand on Nino's chest. "But even if you are right that Fuutarou-kun's innocent here, that naturally begs the question of how exactly they ended up in this position in the first place."

Jumping at her chance to seal her would-be tutor's fate, Nino pulls away from her argument with Miku to face the judge. "That's right, Ichika, I knew I could count on you!" She then turns and stomps behind the seated Fuutarou, who still has a somewhat bored, somewhat amused look on his face as he is busy texting someone on his own phone. "This bastard absolutely had his hands all over me!"

"Slight correction: I only had one hand on you," Fuutarou raises a finger matter-of-factly while still staring down at his phone screen.

"That's besides the freaking point, Uesugi! Don't make light of this, you were about to jump all over me if Itsuki hadn't walked in on us at that exact moment!"

"Fuutarou...is that true...?"

Uesugi and Nino both look up at the third quint, who has a crestfallen, almost betrayed look in her eyes.

"What's true? What Nino said?" Fuutarou asks for clarification, pointing his thumb over his shoulder back at the quint standing behind him. But Miku doesn't even give him a chance to respond and turns her chin away with the biggest pout Uesugi's seen to date.

"You're guilty," she declares quietly. "Seppuku."

Rolling his eyes and turning off his phone screen to pocket it, Fuutarou gets up to his feet to wrap up his case.

"If I may, your Honor, I'd like to turn your attention back to the photo," he asks, adopting a more polite form of speech in contrast to his usual casual style of talking. "I laid my hand on the defendant because her bath towel was about to fall; in the heat of the moment, I decided that risking a punch to the face from the defendant in order to preserve her pride was the correct judgment call, because the alternative would have been much worse. I believe the angle of the photo that Itsuki took of us should depict my intention adequately."

The combination of Fuutarou's calm, rationalized thought process and his unusual polite speech are enough to compel both Ichika and Itsuki, and Yotsuba as well who pops up like a groundhog from behind the couch, to take another look at Itsuki's photo.

"Y...You could certainly...interpret it that way..." Itsuki mumbles hesitantly, realizing the truth behind her would-be tutor's words upon a more careful examination of her own evidence.

"Yeah, now that I look at it again, you can see where she tied her towel, which happened to be right over her chest," Ichika nods understandingly. "And it looks like it was about to fall off, too...look how loose it is in some parts..."

"Just how did this happen, Uesugi-san?" Yotsuba asks curiously. "You said you only came back to grab your wallet and phone, so how the heck did you end up like this with Nino?"

"Let me start from the beginning. After I finished tutoring Miku for the day, I left your house, but I realized I'd accidentally left my stuff back here because I'd taken them out of my pockets. Miku let me back in right before she went to go take a bath, but Nino had gone to take a bath right before we were done tutoring. So by the time I got back to the house, Nino was done and was drying her hair in the living room. I don't know just how bad her eyesight is, but it's bad enough to the point where she didn't recognize me walking around in the living room with her, and so - "

"Y-You don't need to make fun of me for my bad eyesight, thank you very much!" Nino gripes at Uesugi from behind.

"I wasn't trying to roast you for it, I'm just saying what happened. Anyways, she mistook me for Miku and asked me to go get her contacts. So I got them for her, and while I'm doing that, she was going on about how she doesn't want me in the house and wants to ban me from ever setting foot in the high-rise again. So she jumped up from the couch that you're sitting on right now, your Honor, and that was when her towel got undone."

Miku nods at Fuutarou's full explanation, satisfied with what she's heard. "Yeah, that makes sense."

"It certainly does. Besides, Fuutarou-kun's such a busy person that he wouldn't even have the time to do something like this in the first place, would he?" Ichika giggles.

"Implying I would even want to do something like that to someone like Nino," Fuutarou clicks his tongue in irritation, folding his own arms in the process. "She's more hassle than it's worth; just look at what's happened tonight."

"Aw, don't be like that, Fuutarou-kun. Besides, surely you can't deny that you felt something real nice at the time of the crime?" Ichika offers a sultry smile up at her tutor and throws in an eyebrow wiggle just for good measure.

"My phone feels nicer, thank you very much."

"Ouch! Imagine getting to touch a cute girl's boob and then saying your phone's better - Fuutarou-kun, don't go down that dark path known as being an otaku, you don't want to go there!"

"I think you need to worry about Nino's pride a little more," Miku says bluntly, glancing over at Nino who's beet red with a volatile mixture of embarrassment and boiling anger.

Surveying the quintuplets one last time, Fuutarou checks the smartwatch on his left wrist for the time, which Yotsuba notices and can't help but smile at, internally overjoyed to know that Fuutarou is indeed putting her gift for him to full use.

"Well, it's been fun playing around with you all for this extra bit, but I really have to get going - " Fuutarou says finally with a sigh, picking his messenger bag back up and making sure he's got his phone and wallet this time so he doesn't forget it a second time, but of course Nino won't let him go so easily.

"Hey, hold it right there! Don't just act like all this's settled already or something!" she shouts with a sharp-nailed finger.

"Unfortunately, for tonight, it has to be." Withdrawing his phone and clicking it on, Fuutarou, with his back turned to Nino, lifts the Google Pixel 3 up above his right shoulder to show her what's on screen, which is a text conversation with Dr. Nakano. "Doctor's orders. Maybe bother me sometime next week, Nino."

Reeling a little at the sight of her father's name and number written at the top of the screen, Nino nonetheless doesn't let up. "Y-You're just trying to use Papa as an excuse to leave, but you can't trick m - "

"Nino, just give it a rest already. Did we really even need to make this a big deal in the first place?" Miku talks over her sister to check her.

"You back off, Miku, this is betw - "

"Now, now...both of you, I think that's enough arguing for today, okay?" Setting her own foot down calmly, Ichika, armed with the prestige of being the eldest, interrupts both of them to help resolve the matter. "I let this one slide today because it seemed fun, and it was, but we've got to know when to stop. The five of us used to be so close, remember? We can't let things get too out of hand."

Nino's eye twitches at this.

Scratching the back of his head briefly, Fuutarou also adds, "I guess if I didn't forget my stuff in the first place, none of this would've happened. I will at least assume responsibility for this incident in that sense."

"Used to be...?"

The hair on the back of the young mage's neck sticks up suddenly, and correspondingly, Fuutarou sharply turns his neck to glance at the source behind him just in time to see a blur - Nakano Nino bolts off for the front door faster than he's ever seen her move before, with the kind of speed normally only Yotsuba is capable of demonstrating.

"You sure are quintuplets, all right - thought that was Yotsuba running herself out just now," Fuutarou remarks dryly as the house is momentarily rattled with the loud SLAM of the front door in Nino's wake.

"I keep telling that to everyone, but no one listens to me!" Yotsuba also pouts back at her tutor. "Uesugi-san, will you help convince my sisters to go running with me every weekend?"

"Heck no!" Ichika, Miku, and Itsuki all cry out in unison, though Ichika more lightheartedly so.

"She wants us to run 5K's with her every Saturday morning! My body cannot handle that kind of strenuous exercise! I am a student, not a triathlete in training!" Itsuki exclaims in self-defense.

"Now imagine me doing a 5K with Yotsuba..." Miku mumbles darkly, the small amount of light in her blue eyes fading away like dust in the wind at the thought of running any distance longer than a fifty-meter dash.

"I mean, I go jogging every weekend, but...that's not quite the same as five kilometers every Saturday..." Ichika also adds with a bit of a defeated chuckle.

"Not to mention, I don't think it's reasonable for you to expect me to give you a hand in that when you just ran out on my ass today to go help out the basketball team." Fuutarou glares sternly over at Yotsuba, who once more lowers herself behind the short couch to avoid most of her tutor's wrathful gaze.

"I-I'm sorry, I'm sorry! I just...I just couldn't leave them hanging like that!" Yotsuba whimpers loudly back like a dog being scolded. "You can teach me longer next week, Uesugi-san, I promise!"

"I'll be the decider of that, but later." The young tutor glances back at the front door, to which he will make his own exit very soon. "It probably doesn't make sense for me to ask this, but was that okay? Letting Nino just run off like that."

"Just leave her be, Fuutarou."

The boy turns to the third quint beside him, who's also gazing in the direction of the front door.

"She does that sometimes when she doesn't get her way. It's best to just leave her alone to cool off - at the very least, she knows how to let go of stuff if you give her enough time."

Pressing his hand on the back of his neck, Fuutarou inhales and exhales deeply.

"I sure hope so."

Having bid the Nakano quintuplets, the four of them who remain, anyway, good night and a good rest of their weekend, Fuutarou rides the elevator back down for the second time today to the elevator lobby on the ground floor. He's received another text from his sister Raiha, informing him that she's made his favorite food for dinner tonight, curry udon, and that he should stop by to eat with them if he can. The sound of curry udon is especially appetizing, given that he hasn't eaten since the double lunch earlier that afternoon, so he texts back to his sister that he plans to stop by the office after his meeting with Dr. Nakano, and that if his meeting ends up going later than expected even more than it already is, to leave him a portion for him to eat when he does arrive.

Putting his phone away, Fuutarou bows his head tiredly and closes his eyes to rest them, if only for a few minutes as the elevator descends. But try as he might to relax his mind, Nino's words still grip it, along with the sight of her running out of the house like she did. As much as he doesn't like to interfere with the business of others and refrains from doing so as much as possible, he still can't help but dwell on everything that's happened between him and Nino so far today. The sabotage of his lesson, the cook-off, the accidental groping, the subsequent trial, and now this...

Shaking his head a little and squeezing the bridge of his nose to de-stress, even if it's only a tiny bit, the young mage reaches the bottom floor and makes his way out, the glass doors of the entrance parting for his approach, but he stops a few paces beyond the closing automated doors, for directly to his right, sitting slumped against the glass walls by the sliding doors, is Nino.

Their eyes meet once more tonight at the same time, with Fuutarou looking down at her to his right and Nino gazing back up at him to her left. Since their run-in after her bath, Nino has donned their high school's tracksuit and has nothing on her feet but a pair of bathroom sandals with cutesy rabbit prints on the bridges. Her eyes are their normal blue, now that she's put her contacts back in, but not even her contacts can hide the tears that she's been quietly shedding out here, all alone, in the middle of the fresh night and darkened sky.

Realizing far too late that Fuutarou presents her the opportunity that she needs, Nino tries to quickly get back to her feet to dart back into the elevator lobby, but the doors close shut far before she even has a chance to do so. Fuutarou watches on silently, noting that Nino may match Yotsuba's burst speed, but her reflexes may need a bit of work.

"Tsk...you're so fucking useless," she snarls miserably at her would-be tutor, her voice sounding more depressed than angry as she begrudgingly accepts her fate, sealed outside of her own home.

"Forgot your key, huh," Fuutarou says simply, watching one of his would-be students resume her seat against the glass wall.

"You don't need to rub it in. Just get out of my sight, I don't wanna deal with you anymore..."

"Making you angrier isn't my intention right now, but I just want to say, now you know how I feel."

"And yet you're pissing me off even more anyway."

"Yeah, figured..."

But Uesugi refuses to move for the time being, standing where he's found Nino and looking up at the darkened but not totally blackened evening sky while the second quintuplet keeps her face buried into her knees that are tucked in against her chest. She raises her eyes, however, at the sound of someone taking a seat at the glass wall on the other side of the automated doors, only to find Fuutarou mimicking her, pulling out his phone to help pass the time a little.

Unimpressed, Nino glares hatefully at her classmate. "What the hell do you think you're doing? Are you making fun of me?"

Fuutarou shakes his head, quietly and calmly as usual. "Let's just say...there's one more problem that I need to solve before I leave. One of those problems that bothers you if you don't solve it...though I'm not sure if you can relate to that..."

Nino's eye twitches again.

"All you do is work. Work, work, work..." She discretely begins to bite the inside of her lip with her front teeth. "No wonder I hate you so much - you're the exact same as Papa. The two of you only ever think about work...I guess it should've come as no surprise that you two would be working together..."

Fuutarou pauses his texting to Dr. Nakano.

"I can understand you hating me. But why your dad?"

"What's that got anything to do with you? Fuck off, stop nosing in my business."

"As much as I would love to, the fact of the matter is that you're directly denouncing the man who's my boss, and the one who's paying me for teaching you. So I do feel at least a little compelled to stick my nose in." Fuutarou pauses, then adds, "All the more concerning if that man is also your dad."

"That sounds awfully fucking ironic - I specifically remember you having a run-in with him last week at the resort's restaurant."

"So you remember that? Then you should maybe see why I'm being an idiot, meddling into your family's business."

"Then stop. Is it so hard?"

"It is. What's harder is convincing you to come take my lessons, though, so I kinda need to worry about that more."

"Shut up, Uesugi! Just - just fucking shut up already!" Nino cries out exasperatedly, pressing her hands against her temples. "God, everyone's - everyone's so fucking stupid...! I hate you all...!"

Fuutarou wonders what species of poisonous butterfly is Nino's favorite, because the venom's returned in her words.

"'All'?" he asks quietly. "Sorry for butting into your family business even more, but does that by chance include your sisters, too?"

Annoyed by the way Uesugi is asking his questions, Nino angrily overlooks it in favor of answering him. "Yeah. I fucking hate them. So what?"

Fuutarou simply grins lightly.

"That's a big fat lie, isn't it?"

"It's not!" Nino vents back. "Look, they must all be out of their goddamn minds letting someone like you come into our house to tutor them!"

She finally turns to the boy whose face she is sick and tired of today.

"I don't get it - Papa hires you to be our tutor, and then a month later everyone's acting like it's all fine and dandy now? What part of that makes any fucking sense to you?"

"Here's a better question: what part of that doesn't make any sense?" Fuutarou deflects Nino's question right back. "A father is concerned about his daughters' failing grades, so he hires a tutor in an effort to help his daughters rectify their grades. After some time, the girls learn to work with their tutor so that they can raise their grades. What part of that doesn't make sense to you? I can understand the initial bit of resistance that you girls showed in the beginning; it was to be expected, since it was admittedly on very short notice, and this is gonna have to be a bit of a long-term investment on everybody's part. But did you really expect all your sisters to reject me the same way that you are? That you still are?"

Once again, Nino is silenced so badly by Fuutarou's overwhelming rationality that hits as bluntly as the bottom of a frying pan to the face that she struggles to find something to say through her simmering anger.

"D...Don't...don't make yourself sound like you're in the right here," she finally manages to hiss back.

"It's not about being right or wrong. I'm a mage - it's rare you come across one in the first place, and it's even rarer that you meet one who actually bothers caring about what's 'right' and 'wrong'. Morality has no place in a line of work like mine - all that matters is how well I can do my work, and how much I get paid for it."

"I don't buy that for a damn second, Uesugi. You clearly care for your own family, with how you treat your little sister. Taking her out for a crepe, giving her your airplane ticket and hotel room spot. Stop spewing bullshit just to make yourself sound cool."

"That wasn't not my intention, but I'm flattered to hear you say that anyway."

"I wasn't trying to praise you!"

Chuckling a little, Fuutarou lowers his phone. "But yeah, maybe in that sense you're right, I do at least care a little bit about stuff like what's 'right' and 'wrong'. I have a family, after all; I'd hope you'd excuse me for wanting to take care of my family, since that's what anyone would normally do." He glances back over at Nino. "And that's a feeling you know very well, don't you?"

Stumped at first, Nino glares back at her classmate. "Bullshit. Stop talking like you know me - "

"'This house belongs to the five of us. He's got no place here.'"

Nino's own words, spoken with the voice of somebody else, slap her in the face harder than Uesugi's ever could.

"For as much shit you've given me and put me through, I can deal with you hating me," Fuutarou says softly. "But saying you hate your sisters - that doesn't sit well even with me, because you don't actually hate them - you love them. That's why you can't stand me - because to you, I'm an outsider who appeared out of nowhere for you all and is now a part of your life when you had little to no say in the matter."

Even without having to look over at her, Fuutarou can sense the waves of flaming anger emanating from the quintuplet cool down little by little as the two of them sit together on opposite sides of the glass wall underneath the evening sky.

"...you're so full of shit..."

Finally able to croak out her feelings, Nino also raises her eyes to match her tone, gazing off instead down the pathway towards the street, but she can't keep up this facade for very long before tucking her knees back into her chest and resting her arms over them for her head to rest on.

"Talking all that big talk...just to make yourself sound cool to yourself...and acting like you know me...as fucking if, you braindead creep."

Having said his piece, Fuutarou offers no response, merely blinking off into the distance.

Nino then adds somewhat bitterly, "...and so? Anything wrong with that...?"

"With the one exception that it's preventing me from actually doing part of my job...no, there's nothing wrong with that. I did say that it's only natural for someone to want to care for their family. This is your way of looking after your sisters, and I, of all people, cannot judge you for that." Fuutarou glances over at the quintuplet next to him again and gives her a wry grin. "Besides, I've got a little sis of my own. And I know exactly how you feel."

Giving him one last scornful glare, Nino buries her face back into her arms, feeling her own heartbeat begin to race and the heat return to her face. For all the hateful things that she's flung his way, for all the burning wishes in her head that have demanded nothing less than never seeing Uesugi ever again...she cannot bear to let him see her face now.

But the same quiet embarrassment that forces her to hide her face from the boy next to her also fuels her to act in spite of itself, and so she raises her face one more time for the night.

"That's right. I'm not wrong about this - no, not at all, I can't be," she says, mainly to herself. "This is so stupid, I don't have any reason to be sitting here acting all depressed."

She gets back up to her feet and points dramatically down at her classmate still seated against the glass wall.

"Then I've decided, Uesugi - I still won't accept you. Even if all the others hate me for it instead. For their sake, I'll be the one who hates you."

Tussling her hair matter-of-factly, she returns the wry smile that Fuutarou gave her first.

"You didn't really expect all five of us to just be good girls and do everything you say, did you?" she asks, masking a bit of a snort somewhere in that sentence. "That's just too bad."

Fuutarou grins back up at her. "Big talk coming from a girl who's still locked outside of her own house."

"I-I'm totally fine, thank you very much!" Nino blurts out, her freshly-established charisma getting smashed into oblivion as easily as her pride. "I can just call my sisters to let me back in any time I want!"

"Then by all means, go right on ahead. The intercom's right over here." Fuutarou beckons to the intercom standing a short distance from him.

"Yeah, of course! Just watch! It's so easy, all I have to do is - just - call them - "

But once she reaches the intercom itself, Nino can't quite seem to scrape up the courage to press the number of their room to call the rest of the quintuplets due to the sheer awkwardness of having to ask them to let her back into the high-rise. Watching her struggle with the intercom, Uesugi decides that he's spent enough time here with Nino and gets up, pulling out his wallet in the process so that when Nino turns to him after realizing that he, too, has stood up, Fuutarou has the keycard that the quintuplets' father gave him at the start of his contract, which grants access both into the high-rise through the front doors and into their house proper. He puts it on the intercom dashboard, right in front of the second quintuplet.

"I believe this belongs to you. Have a good night, Nino, and enjoy the rest of your weekend. And thanks for lunch today - it was still really good."

Departing so swiftly that Nino doesn't have a chance to stop him, Fuutarou removes himself from Nino's sight, stepping out of sight onto the sidewalk as he rounds the corner. Nino can only stare after him until he is gone before slowly turning to face the intercom, down at the keycard that Fuutarou has left in her possession. She remains for a few long moments where she stands, in front of the intercom and the keycard.

As she reaches out slowly to pick up her ticket back home, Nino doesn't know what to feel. Too many thoughts, too many emotions, too many things that she wishes she could say but can't for one reason or another. And to top it all off, the burning warmth that she feels in her chest, her cheeks...

...her eyes.

As she takes the keycard and waves it in front of the sensors at the automated doors that now slide open for her, Nino can't stop herself from dwelling on her nighttime conversation with Uesugi Fuutarou while she waits for the elevator to arrive.

The doors part open once the elevator reaches the first floor, and behind it is none other than Miku, who is about to step out and almost walks straight into her older sister, who was about to head inside too.

"N-Nino, you should come back. Are you done sulking now?" Miku asks, a bit taken back, admittedly, to find Nino somehow inside the elevator lobby.

"Yes, yes I am, don't even fucking ask me about it," Nino growls, though with much less intensity behind her voice. "C'mon, let's go back home already."

"How did you even get back inside? I came down here since we figured you locked yourself outside..."

"Don't worry about it, okay! Let's just go home, home!"

But as the elevator doors snap shut after them, Nino hears her own words play back in her ears.

I still won't accept you.

Even if all the others hate me for it instead.

But just how much of those words are true...?