A/N

Changelog:

-Expanded the end of Fuutarou's and Dr. Nakano's conversation in chapter 25 (reintroduces manga plot point at the end of chapter 15)
-Added short segment towards the end of Nino's narrative in chapter 25
-Slightly expanded the conversation between Fuutarou and Yotsuba in chapter 25

ricardotolava450: "Who is your favorite quintuplet?" The one who didn't win. But it be like that sometimes. FeelsStrongMan

"...I think I can feel a bit of depression comin' on."

Fuutarou's little sister Raiha walks around her big brother to peer over his shoulder to take a look at the piece of paper that he's opened up after their dinner is done, and she finds that it's a midterm announcement letter from Asahiyama High School, having been sent out a little over a week prior to the date of the actual midterms themselves.

"Wow, Onii-chan. You're usually really confident about your test scores...not really like you to be scared of a test. Won't you just ace it like you do every other test you take?"

"Is that supposed to be, like, some sort of jab at me or something?"

"No, not when it happens all the time..."

Fuutarou lets out a little heave, which comes out sounding like a mix between a groan and a sigh.

"I'm not worried about myself, obviously I'll be fine. It's the girls I'm worried for...there's even a chance that they aren't even aware midterms are coming up."

"Even though you said you've been over at their place tutoring them every weekday? You didn't make sure to tell them?"

"That's the thing - I did, but Ichika's busy with her part-time, so she's probably got that on her mind more. Yotsuba's got the brain of a goldfish and forgets everything I teach her three seconds after the lesson's done, and she constantly runs around the school helping everyone and their mother with every and anything. Nino and Itsuki still refuse to show up...I guess really only Miku would even be aware that midterms are coming up."

"Then at least one of them knows!"

"Yeah...still four short from my target goal, though..."

Isanari, who's sitting across from his son at their folding dinner table on the floor with an open can of Kirin, takes a big chug that immediately deletes half of the can's contents before belching out,

"Fuutarou, don't bring back all this talk of studying home with you, alright?!"

"Motherfucker, whose idea was it to have me teach those girls in the first place?!" Fuutarou bellows back while Raiha dully puts her hands over her ears, expecting the two male members of the household to begin going at each other. "And that shit doesn't sound like the kind of thing a responsible parent should say. Is that why we're all still poor as fuck?"

Letting out a bit of a chortle, Fuutarou's and Raiha's father gives a half-exasperated, half-amused sigh of his own.

"Look, it's not like you were always such a perfectionist and a workaholic, right?" Isanari points out, speaking more reasonably this time around.

"Maybe not, but I don't see how that's related to my worry about the quints possibly not passing their midterms."

"My point is that those girls will change, just like how you did. Everyone does - it's a natural part of growing up, no matter who you are. You've gone through it already yourself, obviously - I don't need to tell you that for you to know."

"Then why did you?"

"Just to remind you. There are days when it kinda feels like you're so engrossed in your work that as your dad, I want to pull you back out into reality."

"Hmph. Usually it's the other way around."

"Well, there's no reason to pull you back down to reality. Your problem's the exact opposite - you're too much of a realist."

"Kinda have to be, though, unfortunately."

"Right, but it wouldn't kill you to learn to know when to act that way and when not to. I hope you're not the same kind of person whenever you go tutor those girls, are you?"

"I try not to be..."

Isanari snorts loudly. "Then I might be hearing that from Maruo at some point. Don't blame me if I can't do much to help you keep this contract."

"Not like I would anyway. And you don't even need to go that far - I've already got my neck down on the chopping block."

"Chopping block? How so?"

"I met with him the other night, last Monday. Right before I left, he asked me to 'show the results of my work' or whatever and said that if even one of the girls fails, he'll be terminating the contract."

"Goddamn it, Fuutarou, after all the trouble I went through just to convince Maruo to give you that opportunity!"

"Shut your damn trap, old man, I've been juggling my usual work with tutoring them, and it ain't helpin' that two of them would rather go eat dinner with their dad than let me teach them!"

"Onii-chan, Onii-chan, you're starting to sound like a Yakuza again," Raiha reminds her brother with a flat voice.

"Am I? Let me go cut off my pinky finger real quick..."

"Please don't, you'll cause even more misunderstandings with the police."

"I won't. And how the heck do you know about that?"

"Because I made Otou-san tell me what happened that night."

Fuutarou throws a murderous glare over at his dad, who raises his hands in self-defense.

"Hey, it was either that or the ladle. And you already know what I feel about the ladle!" Isanari says quickly.

"You're an idiot, Isanari."

Wanting to change the topic, Raiha looks up at her dad as well.

"So...Onii-chan wasn't always such a workaholic? What was he like when he was younger?" she asks.

"Hahaha, well, let's see...er..." Hesitating a little, Isanari manages to keep up a facade of family-friendly camaraderie. "He, uh...he used to be a wild boy, just like his old man! Yep!"

"Did that also include smoking cigarettes and drinking beer?"

"Obviously not, Raiha," Fuutarou calls over disapprovingly.

"Well, ignoring those, there was no denying that he was a kid of free reign, before he got tied down with all the work that he's got on his plate now," Isanari continues after another hearty swig of Kirin.

"Then I wanna see pictures! Well, actually, Onii-chan doesn't like having his picture taken normally because of his work, so never mind that. Can you tell me more about Onii-chan's past?" Raiha presses on.

"Hmmm...I suppose he won't mind if I say that he changed after he met her," Isanari mentions thoughtfully before pointing across the table at his son. "Don't lie to me, kid, I know you've still got a picture of that girl you met six years ago."

At this, Raiha gasps excitedly like a fangirl meeting her idol in person for the first time.

"Onii-chan, you had a childhood girlfriend?!" she cries out, unable to contain her excitement and dashing around the small table to confront her older brother about this, who now looks mildly annoyed that his dad brought the topic up.

"She wasn't my girlfriend, Raiha. I think she was just a girl I met around the city at one point and we just hung out for the day or something. It was a long time ago, I don't remember everything about it."

"But Otou-san said you still have a picture of her! Can you show me? Please? Pretty please?"

"No."

"I'll make you curry udon again tomorrow! I just need to swindle money out of Otou-san first..."

"Raiha, don't do that. And Isanari, raise your daughter better, damn it."

"Couldn't I say that about her older brother too?" Isanari snickers back.

"Who's with her more at home, the man who sits at his office playing Minesweeper three hours a day or the guy who spends every night running around the city making sure it isn't about to blow up at any given moment?"

Isanari chugs down the rest of his beer while his son is talking back at him so that he can pretend like he hasn't listened to Fuutarou's counterpoint.

"Anyways, Onii-chan, please, lemme see! You never talk about what you were like in the past!" Resorting to her ultimate weapon, Raiha assumes her face of ultimate destruction and whimpers up at her big brother, "...please?"

But to Raiha's shocked dismay, her brother shakes his head adamantly still, rendering her psychic attack completely null and void.

"I don't even have the picture on me, even if I wanted to show it to you. What makes you think I'd even keep a picture like that on me in the first place, anyway?"

"Well...I figured I'd ask, just on the off-chance that you might have it on you...I mean, she, uh, that girl Otou-san said you met six years ago, she sounds like someone important to you, right? Since he said you changed after you met her. So that picture of you and her probably means a lot to you."

"It does, but remember, Raiha, I'm running around the city a lot and doing all kinds of stuff. So it's not the smartest thing for me to keep something valuable to me like that on my person while I'm working, you know?"

"Mmmm...I guess you're right...but still, I wanna see!"

Sighing and running a hand through his black hair that he lets his sister cut every so often, Fuutarou deliberates for a short moment.

"Maybe one day, once we're older and I still remember, I'll let you see it."

Raiha pouts a little, but she decides it's better to just let it go for now.

"Fine, fine, you win for now, Onii-chan. In exchange, though, take me out to a hamburger place next week sometime! Today's, what, Friday night? You said you'd be busy over the weekend with work and cram studying with everyone, so...whenever you're not busy, of course."

"Hamburgers, huh. Sure, actually, why not - we haven't been to one in a while, right?" Deliberating shortly again, this time on his sister's request, Fuutarou nods in agreement and gives her a quick smile back. "Where do you wanna go?"

"Anywhere! Family cafe, restaurant chain, I like them all!"

"Alright, I'll see if I can scrounge up some coupons for a place or something. Isanari, if you're not busy, we should all go together."

"WHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAT?! Fuutarou inviting his dear old man out for a family dinner?!" Literally flipping out and tumbling onto the floor backwards as though pushed, Isanari quickly crawls over to a nearby nightstand against the wall across from his office and assumes a respectful kneeling position, hands pressed together in reverence at a small, slightly cracked picture frame. "Haruna...I did it. I finally did it...I got our son to invite me out to a family dinner..."

Grabbing the now-empty can of Kirin that Isanari's left on the table, Fuutarou yeets it at his father, and the can tinks off the back of his head.

"It's not as if I haven't taken us out to dinner before, what gives?" he calls over as Raiha bops his head quickly as punishment for throwing something in the household, especially at their dad, while conveniently ignoring the fact that she beats her own father regularly with a kitchen ladle. "Sorry, I'll go pick that up, Raiha. But I'll have to get going after this - thanks for dinner tonight as always."

"Mhm! Let us know when you'll take us out to dinner for hamburgers!"

"Yeah, I will."

After properly disposing of Isanari's empty beer can and gathering his usual belongings of a messenger bag and headphones, Uesugi Fuutarou bids his family good night as he closes the secure office door behind him and scales down the rickety metal stairs to set off once more into the night.

As he walks away from Daikazoku Square, he gazes up at the dark, empty sky.

"...wonder how that picture's doing...the color might be fading a little bit by now..."

Suddenly, he stops on the curb of the square, furthest from the office. Without another word, Fuutarou changes direction and begins walking in a different direction.

"Ah, good morning, Uesugi-san ~ !"

"Good morning, Fuutarou."

Greeting the two usual girls who answer the door every time he arrives at their house, Uesugi Fuutarou pulls off his shoes and follows Miku and Yotsuba into the living room that is their usual study room, the glass table is already cleared for his arrival and lesson. Miku looks like she's been up for a while now, even though it has only just struck nine in the morning, and Yotsuba is still in her bear jammies which, oddly enough, suit her very well. She's quite fond of them, as she's shown up dressed like that to some of Fuutarou's lessons as of late, now that he's been over enough times and the quintuplets are feeling more comfortable with him in the house.

"You girls didn't eat breakfast yet, did you?" Fuutarou asks, sniffing the air once and noting the absence of any indication of morning cooking.

"I can make some for you if you'd like," Miku offers, raising her hand, but Yotsuba, alarmed at this offer, leaps forward to shake her own hands at her older sister.

"Wait wait wait wait, Miku, you can't give him an upset stomach first thing in the morning, and he's about to teach us, too!"

"He ate my cooking before. He can handle it," Miku says confidently while rolling up her sleeves and beginning to walk towards the kitchen, but Fuutarou stops her with a firm hand on her shoulder.

"As much as I appreciate the sentiment, Miku, I agree with Yotsuba, I think it's best if we just let Nino handle it today."

Indignant that her tutor's stopped her, the third quintuplet pouts back up at him. "What do you mean? You said before that you could taste the effort that I put into making food."

"Yes, but recall that I said that in part to get back at Nino for the shit she pulled on us last weekend. That, and 'being able to taste your effort' can only last for so long as an excuse to eat burnt food that's legitimately bad for you."

Miku simply pouts a little harder. "I've been practicing...! Just like studying, Fuutarou!"

"Eh...maybe you can show me another time."

Knowing that she won't be able to convince her tutor by herself, Miku turns to her younger sister in an effort to recruit her to her cause of being able to feed Fuutarou breakfast. "Yotsuba, help me out here."

"Even though I just told you not to?!"

Pouting at her sister as well, Miku turns to put her back to the two, folding her arms in the process.

"I see how it is...nobody wants me to cook. Fine...no one wants me to get better at cooking..." she grumbles.

"It's not that, Miku, it's just - it's just - " Yotsuba begins to panic a little, afraid that maybe Miku really is getting a little angry at her and Fuutarou's oppositions to Miku's good intentions, but Fuutarou bails her out for her by saying,

"Right, it's not that we don't want you to get better at cooking, it's just that right now isn't the time for that. Besides, Nino said she's the one who's been teaching you how to cook, right? Where is she, anyway?"

"Still in her room," Miku replies, pointing up at their rooms, Nino's in particular.

"Still sleeping? I thought you guys said she's usually the first one up."

"She'll have days when she likes to sleep in every once in a while," Yotsuba explains. "They're usually on weekends too, since obviously we don't have to wake up for school."

"Makes sense...good that she gives herself a break every now and then."

"Yeah, breaks that you should also take more often, Uesugi-san!" Yotsuba points out to her tutor with a pout of her own. "See, look, Uesugi-san, look at your eyes, they're still so red!"

Miku joins Yotsuba in the pouting combo, having found another excuse to pout up at Fuutarou in a last-ditch attempt to convince him to let her make breakfast for him. Having the two of them both do so at him, Fuutarou can truly see the family resemblance between them, just like what he had Yotsuba do to mimic Itsuki back during his first official day over.

"You all really are quintuplets, I guess," Fuutarou remarks quietly, averting his eyes.

"Aha ~ ! Uesugi-san, maybe, maybe you're starting to understand our charm as quintuplets?" Yotsuba giggles, leaning in towards her tutor a little closer. Miku stops pouting immediately when she sees Yotsuba do this, because her sister is getting quite close to Fuutarou. It's not like her sisters haven't gotten physically close to their tutor before during their lessons whenever Ichika or Yotsuba screw around with him, so...why is it that, all of a sudden, this particular instance of Yotsuba leaning in towards Fuutarou dwells on her mind?

Fuutarou grimaces, inching away from Yotsuba as the latter maintains her close proximity to him. "The only charm I'm getting from you five is your collective inability to score anything above a passing grade on your mock exams that I've been giving you," he answers swiftly and bluntly like usual, which Yotsuba has become acclimated to quite well by now.

"I've been passing my exams, Fuutarou!" Miku cries out indignantly.

"Okay, yeah, you're the one exception. But Yotsuba and Ichika still aren't passing, and that's a problem when midterms are basically in a week!"

"Well, we won't pass our exams trying to study for them on empty stomachs," Yotsuba points out considerately, rubbing her own tummy. "And I bet you haven't eaten anything today yet either, Uesugi-san."

"So you're gonna let Miku win? You're gonna let her cook us breakfast?!" Fuutarou seizes Yotsuba lightly by her shoulders and shakes her a little in jest. "How could you, Yotsuba! And I thought we were part of the Anti-Miku Cooking Coalition!"

"Aha, but when was I part of this coalition?" Yotsuba laughs.

"Right now! Membership is free!"

"Ooooh, so I'm a club member! What kinds of benefits do I get?"

"Free tutoring lessons for your midterms in a week!"

"Wow, what a steal! But only if you let us feed you breakfast first!"

Renewed with another round of laughter, Yotsuba pounces like a lioness, trying to tackle Fuutarou to physically convince him to eat breakfast first before their planned lesson today, but Fuutarou has the reactions to stay on par with the most athletic quintuplet and dives out of the way, performing a flawless forward roll to break his dive and smoothly transition back up to his feet.

"So this is it then, Yotsuba? We're finally having our long-fated showdown right here, right now?" he calls out to the fourth quint, who pulls down the eared hoodie of her bear pajamas.

"That's right, Uesugi-san! Our destinied meeting, our epic battle that'll span eons and be spoken of throughout the generations!" Yotsuba announces grandly, drawing from all the animes she's watched in order to put up the best act she can, even though she's the worst among her sisters at actual acting.

Smirking and lowering his profile to assume an action stance, Fuutarou pounds his right fist into his left palm several times in anticipation.

"Very well, Yotsuba! I've been looking forward to this quite a bit myself - you are truly the most worthy opponent, and thus, our battle here will be legendary!"

"Then have at you, Uesugi-san!"

"Hell yeah, bring it on!"

As soon as Yotsuba charges at Fuutarou, the young tutor simply pivots on his heels and books it, running away from Yotsuba as quickly but safely as he can, so as not to crash headfirst into the fragile aquarium underneath the bookshelves. Miku simply stares with a blank look on her face, watching her younger sister and her tutor simply run laps around her, the dinner table, and the couches in the living room for few minutes straight.

"...but what happened to the epic showdown?" she asks aloud as the two troublemakers pass her for a fourth lap.

"What're you talking about? The midterms are the final showdown!" Fuutarou calls over while he's still running. "I'm not her true opponent! The true opponent is the one who lies in the heart of battle!"

"But you're not even having a battle right now, you're just running away," Miku points out.

"Yeah, I'm doing my best Yotsuba impression right now, whenever Nino calls her to tell her there's someone at school who needs her help with something!"

"Ah, that was mean, Uesugi-saaaaaaan!" Yotsuba cries out, her turn now to be indignant at Fuutarou's low blow. "Now I really won't let you get away!"

"Oh shit - !"

Somehow, even after several straight minutes of constant laps around the living room, Yotsuba cranks her speed up a noticeable notch and almost overtakes Fuutarou, who also speeds up to maintain his lead, but Yotsuba's surprise speed throws the young tutor off-guard, and he accidentally trips over his own foot while accelerating himself. This happens right as he turns the corner around the long couch to run alongside the glass table, past Miku, but because Miku is standing right in the path of his tumble and with the speed at which he's tripped, Fuutarou can't redirect his forward momentum to dive out of Miku's way, and Miku certainly isn't expecting Fuutarou to trip at that moment either.

So Fuutarou crashes straight into Miku, but realizing the crash is unavoidable as soon as he feels himself trip, Fuutarou grabs Miku tightly as he runs into her and twists his body over with his last step before crashing into the wooden floor beyond the living room carpet so that he can cushion Miku's fall for her, her head tucked safely against his collar so that when the two of them do crash-land, her head merely bumps the bottom of his chin.

"Ugh...really sorry about that, are you okay?" Fuutarou asks immediately, grimacing and rubbing the back of his own head where it's hit the floor. Yotsuba hurries over, since the collision between Fuutarou and Miku seemed pretty bad from her angle, while Miku reopens her pressed eyes, tightly holding onto the boy who tackled her like an NFL linebacker. "Shouldn't have done that...got carried away a little bit there."

Upon reaching them, Yotsuba stops as soon as she sees how they've ended up: Fuutarou has his right hand still around Miku's side, and Miku is lying with half her body on him, her ample chest pressed down on his own with her head tucked in a rather affectionate manner right underneath the young mage's chin.

"W-Waaah! Miku, y-you're so...so bold...!" Yotsuba cries out on impulse.

In the split moments before Yotsuba interrupts, while she still lays on the boy who crashed into her, Miku didn't even feel angry at all at Fuutarou's blunder, merely surprised and, of course, a bit sore from the collision itself. But lying there, on Fuutarou, with her head tucked in for her by her tutor who still has his arm around her, Miku didn't feel like getting up so soon.

Hearing him pant close to her ears...feeling his chest rise up and down strongly against her own to give his lungs the air they need...the big and strong, yet gentle and precise hands that pressed against the back of her head and waist...

It's only when Yotsuba voices her sentiments that Miku then realizes just exactly what she must look like, lying on the floor on top of her own tutor, so she quickly but silently tears herself away from him and sits up frantically.

"It was my fault, not hers, Yotsuba," Fuutarou groans as he, too, gets back up to his feet, rubbing his back where he's fallen. "Also, lesson learned, don't run in the house. Thank God Nino isn't awake yet, she'd really have me kicked outta the house if she gets wind of this..."

"Ah, well, it - it was also partly my fault too! I ran around in the house with you!" Yotsuba says quickly. She doesn't want Fuutarou to take all the blame for something that she also had a part in. "Here, Uesugi-san, where did you fall? I can rub it for you."

"On my back, right in the middle...ow, ow, yeah, right there..."

As Yotsuba massages the part of his back where he fell, Miku, still sitting on the floor, still has her blue eyes glued to the floor. Her heartbeat has quickened, even though she isn't the one who's been doing laps around the living room, and she's just trying to do whatever she can to calm herself down.

"Hey, Miku, you alright? Anywhere that hurts for you? I can take a look if there's a place that hurts," Fuutarou calls down to the third quintuplet as Yotsuba pats his back to indicate that she's finished her job. Miku just barely manages to scrape up the will to look up at her tutor who sits down next to her on the floor before averting her own eyes.

"Um...you hit me right here...so it's a bit sore..." she mumbles, putting a hand over the front of her left shoulder.

"Yeah, I must've hit it with my face, not even joking..." her tutor grunts uncomfortably. He rubs his nose, remembering that he nosedived into Miku before going down with her, so he uses the base of his left palm to firmly but gently rub Miku's shoulder where he hit her.

"Ugh, bit of a rocky start to today's lesson, huh..." Fuutarou groans to himself lightly. "Why're our weekend lessons always gotta be so, uh...eventful like this? Sheesh."

"I'll accept full responsibility for today, Uesugi-san!" Yotsuba snaps off a surprisingly crisp salute to her tutor.

"No need, you've already accepted responsibility for scoring a zero on that last mock exam I gave you three earlier this week, so you can't accept any more responsibilities."

"Awwwww!"

While Yotsuba and Fuutarou are bantering about her miserable mock test scores, Miku finds herself closing her eyes naturally as Fuutarou massages her left shoulder. With her eyes closed, she can better concentrate on his big and strong hand pressing against her shoulder...

...and she finds herself enjoying the sensation noticeably more than she probably should.

But like all good things, her quiet enjoyment ends all too soon when Fuutarou gets back up, having figured he'd done a good enough job and wanting to actually start his lesson.

"I'll go get Ichika so that we can actually start, and we're already like ten minutes past our start time," he determines. "You two, get ready for our lesson today."

"But we still haven't eaten breakfast yet!" Yotsuba pouts once more.

"Then I'll go get Nino and tell her to make you girls breakfast, how's that?"

Also giving off a sigh of her own, Miku joins her sister and tutor by getting up to her own feet, having suppressed the excited emotions she's gotten.

"Go wake Nino up then. You can just go straight into her room - she never bothers locking her door."

"Really? I feel like she'd be the one girl among you who'd always have her bedroom door locked whenever she's inside..."

Wondering this to himself, Fuutarou shuffles up the stairs, his legs still recovering from all that burst running with Yotsuba around the living room, and enters Nino's bedroom.

As soon as he opens the door, the young mage freezes where he stands, his eyes narrowed from post-sprint exhaustion snapping open. It's due to his own self-afflicted exhaustion that he wasn't able to sense this even before entering Nino's room, but now even in his current state, there is no mistaking it. Something is wrong in the air of this room.

Closing the door softly behind him, Fuutarou, now on full alert, approaches the sleeping Nino who, again, lies in bed with her covers tossed aside yet again, as is her nighttime habit, amidst her crowd of plush dolls and stuffed animals - even an alarm clock sits among them, well within arm's reach of the sleeping beauty.

This aura in the room...could it really be? The young mage is having a difficult time believing it himself, with how unexpected this development is. But the longer he is in Nino's room, which feels filled to the brim with such an aura, the more convinced he becomes of what he suspects.

On his guard now, Fuutarou approaches the second quint in her bed carefully. Two Saturdays ago, he spied Nino's strange purple eyes compared to her usual blue, and now today, all of a sudden, there is a small but lingering sense of latent magical energy in the room. It can't be just a coincidence...Nino is sleeping peacefully in her room, and with the security runes he's set up all around the Pentagon and on the Nakano penthouse itself, this couldn't have been the work of a possible attacker, otherwise he'd know about it.

The young mage, in pursuit of the truth, finally reaches Nino at her bedside. Snoring lightly, in a somewhat oversized long-sleeved shirt, and with drool trickling out of the right corner of her mouth, the leader of the two-member Anti-Uesugi Fuutarou Coalition dozes with the kind of lethargy any healthy high school girl is capable of on a Sunday morning.

Until she opens her eyes, that is.

And the first thing she sees is a tall, short-haired boy by her side, with the face of a street thug and a hand reaching down for her face like she's about to get her vibe checked.

Nino's blue eyes and Fuutarou's black ones lock together for the first time of the day, and Uesugi's hand freezes in place as soon as they do.

"...good morning, Nino. Your sisters need you to make breakfast for them, otherwise Miku's gonna blow up the kitchen," Fuutarou smiles pleasantly.

Even as he's talking, though, Fuutarou can see Nino's eyes tear up quickly as she stares back up at him in horror that he's the first thing she sees in the morning, in her own room at this hour. Pulling his hand back, the young tutor closes his eyes and raises his hands up to his ears to brace against the inevitable -

"YAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHH! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! !"

"I don't fucking believe this!"

Five minutes later, after dragging Uesugi downstairs with her, Nakano Nino is seated with one leg over the other on the long couch with Fuutarou sitting on the floor before her, Indian-style.

"How could you enter a girl's room first thing in the morning like that?! And without my permission, too!" Nino gripes down at Fuutarou, who's not even paying attention to her and instead is gazing out the side glass door out to the veranda. "I don't care who you are, you don't just do that to a girl like me! Do you have any sense of shame whatsoever?!"

"Well, given my usual line of work, I think I'm obligated tell you...no, I don't really," Fuutarou replies casually.

"And if you're asking about permission, I gave him permission to go into your room to wake you up," Miku also says, standing behind her older sister and the couch that she sits on.

"And what kind of right do you have to let him do that?!" Hollering at her sister, Nino swings around at her on the couch.

"I knew he'd be sure to wake you up, one way or another. Either he'd wake you up, or you'd wake up on your own from him being in your room."

"That's still not an excuse to let him just waltz into my room like that!"

"Ugh...he's back again...?" Itsuki, having woken up from all the commotion that Nino has stirred up, yawns as she steps off the stairs to reach the first floor. "And Nino, is breakfast ready yet...?"

"I'm gonna make it, but first I need to teach Uesugi a lesson for walking into my room like nothing was gonna happen afterwards!" Nino declares aggressively. "What do you have to say for yourself? Spill it!"

"Nothing much; all I need to say is that Miku told me to go wake you up so I did. That's all I got," Fuutarou testifies, raising both hands up.

"I don't believe you for a damn second! A boy like you doesn't just waltz right into a girl's room like that unless they have reasons! Reasons!"

"Reasons, you say, huh? Care to elaborate just what kinds of reasons they might be? Because I sure as hell don't know."

Having the reversal card played on her, Nino stops herself short as her cheeks begin to glow red. "I-I don't need to explain them to you, you already know! Stop acting like you don't!"

"But I really don't. Before I started tutoring your sisters, I'd never even been to the house of a girl I knew, much less been into her own room. I hardly ever go out of my way to talk to people if I don't have to, and it's not as if I have a lot of friends, right? Besides, the only girl I talk to more than you five is my own sister, and we have to share a tiny house together, if you can even call it a house. So I'm not kidding when I sit here telling you that I don't know what to expect, other than having you scream in my face the moment you woke up with me right next to you."

"Wait, wait! Then that means - that means you knew why I would scream at you though, right!? Checkmate, Uesugi, you just played yourself!"

"Nino, cool off on that already. I was the one who asked him to go up to your room; he would've never gone up there if I didn't tell him to," Miku repeats herself. "It started when I tried offering to make breakfast for him and Yotsuba, but both of them didn't want me to, so I relented and told Fuutarou to go grab you so that you could make breakfast for us."

Now that Miku is taking the time to lay out the whole story for her, which is something she does only when she's being serious, Nino finds herself losing steam in her prosecution of her would-be tutor, who is now looking down at his phone, checking his morning texts and emails.

"Sheesh, why's it always gotta be me that ends up in these kinds of situations?" Nino complains rather helplessly, tightening her folded arms around her chest a bit more. "First you walk in on me right after I got out of the bath, and now you walk into my room while I'm still sleeping. Surely this can't just be a coincidence! You don't do this to my sisters!"

"Would you prefer it if I did?" Fuutarou asks suddenly while still fixed on his phone.

"NO! What kind of a question is that?! You fucking creep! Leave me and my sisters alone!"

"Sorry, already too late. Yotsuba and I were screwing around a little when I first showed up and we did laps around the living room here, but I tripped at the end and ran straight into Miku and pushed her down. You'll have to yell at me for that, too, I'm afraid."

Nino once more snaps to her younger sister. "Miku, did he really do that?" she demands, her voice equipping a dangerous edge to it.

Miku doesn't respond. Instead, where she stands behind the couch nearby her sister, she begins to fidget a little, her blue eyes averted and narrowed, clearly recalling a recent memory.

Reacting swiftly, without a word, Nino practically throws herself off the couch to get up and start kicking at Uesugi for his own admission. Because Nino is still in her oversized long-sleeved shirt that barely covers her undergarments, Fuutarou looks up to see both Nino's right foot being thrust at him, and plus a little something extra behind them - the purple stripes on the strip of cloth separating his eyes from the forbidden land.

Normally he wouldn't care to have seen Nino's panties, but the fact that they have purple stripes - why did they have to be purple? As the bottom of Nino's foot smashes against his face, none of which he feels because he parries Nino's kick with his own face, Fuutarou can't help but feel like he just got baited, which hurts way more than Nino's kick ever will.

"U-Uesugi-kun!?" Itsuki cries out, since she was about to walk behind Fuutarou to head into the kitchen just to see if there isn't a snack she can eat first before breakfast when Nino bounces out of her seat to plant the bottom of her foot into their would-be tutor's face. "Nino! Just what on Earth was that for?!"

"He just said that he assaulted Miku, Itsuki! Weren't you listening just now?!" Nino roars back. "I knew it, we really can't have a stalker and a molester like you in the house! I'm calling Papa right now to get him to terminate his contract and - "

"Now, now, Nino, let's calm down a little, shall we? He was clearly only saying that to mess with you."

The four quintuplets already down on the first floor, having started to converge upon seeing Nino kick Fuutarou in the face to help contain the situation, look up at the stairs on which Ichika, the eldest among them, is now descending, holding something in her hand.

"Listen, Ichika, this asshole - " Nino begins to yell, but all Ichika has to do is raise a hand to silence her and the second rowdy quintuplet complies, albeit unwillingly.

"I heard everything, Nino. And like what happened last time, Fuutarou-kun isn't the type to do these kinds of things on purpose."

"Then how do you know if he's just saying that stuff to screw with me?"

"Because I do that myself a lot. You should know, right? I mess around with you girls all the time."

"But Uesugi doesn't sound like you at all!"

"I mean, naturally he doesn't, people have their own ways of messing around, you know. And you're all used to me screwing around that if someone else like Fuutarou-kun shows up and starts doing that too, you won't recognize it as easily."

"But that's still not like him to mess around! He's a damn workaholic! All he ever thinks about is work! Tutoring! And more work on top of that!"

"What, a work-addicted guy like me can't crack a joke every once in a while?" Fuutarou calls from the floor of the living room, rubbing his face where Nino's foot connected harmlessly.

"By the way, Uesugi-kun, is your face okay? That looked like a pretty bad hit Nino gave you..." Itsuki asks hesitantly.

"I'm fine, thank you very much. If you've got the time to show me some concern, you should join us, Itsuki," Fuutarou suggests, and Itsuki quickly turns around again to put her back to him to decline his offer.

"In any case, Nino, he's here to teach us to make up for the lessons Yotsuba and I skipped out on earlier last week. We even told you that he'd been here on Sunday morning, so no need to make a big deal out of this." Ichika then hands Nino the object she's holding in her hand. "And here - the thing we talked about yesterday night."

Realizing what her older sister's giving her, Nino quickly grabs the object, but not before Fuutarou's keen black eyes, despite their perpetual bloodshot appearances, catch a good glimpse of it. It's a handheld ear piercing kit - and Fuutarou only knows what it is because he's used one on himself a long time ago.

"You sure you can do it alone?" Ichika drops her voice, as if to prevent Fuutarou from overhearing, but Fuutarou's heightened and practiced senses pick up everything they're saying anyway. "You don't like sharp things like this, do you?"

"I-I already told you that I'll be fine! Don't make fun of me here..."

Now that Ichika has done him a favor and defused the tricky situation that Nino posed to his Sunday lesson for his students, Fuutarou gets back up to his feet to join the quintuplets.

"Alright, while Nino makes you all breakfast, I'd like to start right away. We got a lot of things to cover today and - "

"Hey, wait just a damn minute!" Nino interrupts Fuutarou again abruptly, but now the young tutor, becoming visibly irritated at Nino trying to cut him off again, especially in light of what she did last weekend, talks back.

"Not today, Nino, our midterms're coming up next week, and I can't afford to let you crash this lesson this time. If you're trying to start some shit - "

"I'm not! It's just - " Nino hesitates, and Fuutarou catches her eyes glancing a bit nervously down at the thing she's holding in her own hand now. " - follow me to my room. I need you to do something for me."

"Do something for you?" Fuutarou repeats incredulously while Ichika develops a wry smile, much to Nino's silent chagrin. "You just spent the last ten minutes here yelling my ass off about how I shouldn't come into your room, and you want me to come back in?"

"Nino's really indecisive sometimes," Miku remarks dryly at Fuutarou's side.

"Shut it, Miku, you're part of the reason for all this! Anyways, yes, I'm asking you to come back into my room, got a problem with it?"

"Uh, YES? God, where should I even start - "

"Well I don't care! You'll follow me up to my room or I won't make breakfast for everyone!"

"N-No breakfast!? Uesugi-kun, whatever Nino is demanding, you must comply! We can't have her holding our breakfast hostage like this!" Itsuki cries out, horrified at the idea of not being able to eat on a Sunday morning.

"And this is why you don't have only one of you five know how to cook! What do you girls even do if Nino's not around?"

"Ichika usually just orders take-out for us," Yotsuba shrugs.

"Yeah, that doesn't sound very healthy. Forget it, I'm not that great myself either, but at least I know how to make some basic stuff and I won't burn it all like Miku does," Fuutarou determines, turning to the kitchen to head there while Miku begins to pout again at his back, but Nino quickly reaches over the couch and manages to seize hold of his shoulder.

"Oh no you're not! I don't know what kind of food you'll be making my sisters - you might put something weird in there for all I know!" she accuses, but this only serves to draw a quietly scathing look from her would-be tutor.

"Ah, yes, of course, Nino, you would know everything about slipping something weird into someone else's food or water, huh?" he hisses back, causing Nino to wither somewhat with the uncomfortable truth, but she rebounds one more time to stand her ground.

"Forget about that! This is our house you're in, so you have to do what we say! And I'm telling you to follow me to my room to help me with something, got that? It won't take long, and I'll fucking leave you all alone after this's done!"

"Fuutarou-kun, just go with her for now. I promise we won't run off like the other times," Ichika says calmly, always being the voice of reason among her quintuplet sisters, which is something Fuutarou can appreciate, despite all of her own absentee showings to his lessons, so he obliges her with a heavy sigh.

"Fine, I'll go up with Nino to do whatever she wants me to do. The rest of you, except for Itsuki I guess, get your notes and stuff ready for when I get back."

Following the second quintuplet back up to her room while the others gather their study materials from the bookshelves above the aquarium, Fuutarou closes the door that Nino leaves open for him behind him after he enters and faces her. The look on his face currently is one that Nino has only ever seen him wear in one other instance in the short month or so that she's known him, and that was when he was beating up those thugs who tried kidnapping her and her sisters at the warehouse that one weekend.

"N-Normally I'd rather die than let you into my room like this," Nino stammers shortly, feeling the pressure that Fuutarou is putting on her silently just with the deeply annoyed look on his face as he walks slowly into the middle of the room to let Nino explain why she's brought him here. "But if you pierce my ears for me here, I'll let you go!"

She raises the ear piercing kit that Ichika handed her downstairs, but Fuutarou, having already seen it during the exchange itself, merely glances down at it as Nino holds it up to show him.

"...that's it?" he snarls in a low voice, like he's in disbelief at what Nino's asking him to do.

"Y-Yeah! That's it!"

"There's no fine print that you're purposely leaving out here to screw with me, is there?"

"Bitch, you're the one who's screwing with me today!"

"I didn't see you take a kick to the fucking face, but sure, if that's all you want me to do, leave it to me, I guess..."

Taking exactly two steps forward, Fuutarou snatches the ear piercer with surgical precision out of Nino's hand and tests it a few times to make sure it's working properly, running his fingertip down the blade to disinfect it magically, just in case Ichika forgot to do so already.

"Sit up and stay still - this'll be over quick," he murmurs. Setting the ear piercing kit down on the side of the quintuplet's bed on the covers, he reaches his hands at Nino, putting his left hand on her stomach and the other on her back to firmly force her to sit up properly, as though he's acting with the superlative authority of a doctor. He then parts Nino's extremely long peachy-red hair to expose her left ear, which he will pierce first, and picks the piercing kit back up.

Taken back by how experienced Fuutarou seems to be in this, Nino suddenly grows a little meek, at first letting Fuutarou do as he needs to, but when he takes firm control of her ear and brings the kit in close to do the deed, she impulsively bails out at the last minute and forces her head away.

"H-Hey, wait a second, wait! You can't just - just act like you know everything! And besides, I - I need some time to prepare myself!"

"Then fucking do them your damn self," Fuutarou hisses, offering the piercing kit back. "You didn't even need me to do this for you, just use that mirror over there and get it over with!"

"No way!"

"Why the hell not?"

"Because I'm - I'm scared! I don't like needles, okay? I'm one of those people!" Pouting just like her sisters, Nino folds her arms angrily and turns away again. "I hate the sight of needles - weird, I know, fucking laugh at me all you want. I don't get it either, since I use knives to cook all the time. But I don't like needles for whatever reason, even when I know what they do and what I'm supposed to use them for."

Fuutarou glances down at the needle of the ear piercing kit. Even though the needle of the kit itself is quite short, the fact of the matter is that this needle will still be poking a hole straight through her ear, so as admittedly annoyed he is at Nino at the moment, Fuutarou feels that it would be unfair for him to get mad at her for something she can't help, in this case her trypanophobia.

"You can't just get one of your sisters to help you out with this? Why the hell did you think having me to do this was gonna be a good idea?" Fuutarou points out exasperatedly.

"Because it'd be hella weird! And it's embarrassing to have to ask them to do that for me! Ichika's gonna make fun of me for that, and Itsuki doesn't handle the sight of blood very well, so I definitely can't ask her..."

"Wouldn't Ichika make fun of you anyway, now that she knows you're having me help you?"

"Shut up!"

Fuutarou quietly takes note of Nino's remark at the end there. Itsuki doesn't like seeing blood...that might explain how she was acting when he was fixing and cleaning her broken nose after that warehouse incident...

Running a hand over his head again, Fuutarou inhales and exhales deeply, attempting to mentally reset himself. "Why do you even want to pierce your ears, anyway? You're scared of needles, and you don't wanna ask your sisters for help with this - on top of that, I hope you're aware of how much it's gonna hurt."

"How would you know? You're probably only saying that to try to scare me," Nino retorts quickly.

"Please, I don't need to bother trying to scare you when a needle like this one here does that job for me."

"Sh-Shut up, asshole!" Glaring at her would-be tutor for a moment, Nino drops her gaze again to look at the floor, unable to handle the piercing gaze of the boy she's forced to come into her room with her. "...but there isn't...really a reason in particular that I'm trying to get my ears pierced. I just...wanna do it because, well, y'know...everyone else's doing it at school."

Narrowing his eyes, Fuutarou briefly jogs his memory of his classmates and the recent trends at school, what little of it he can bother himself to recall. He doesn't really know of any kind of piercing trend at school, even though Asahiyama's dress code did not expressly forbid piercings so long as they were limited to the ears only. He doesn't remember seeing that many girls walk around with ear piercings on campus either, so Nino is probably just giving him a bullshit excuse. But even if that were the case, Fuutarou doesn't feel like accusing her of that since that'll take even more time away from him. And who knows, maybe the friends she hangs out with really do have a piercing trend going on among them, so Nino might be getting peer pressured into doing the same.

"And why don't you hesitate a little, huh? It wouldn't kill you to take your time with this kind of thing, since you're opening up a hole in someone else's body!"

"Oh ho? Hesitate?"

Taking another step over to close the distance once more, Fuutarou squeezes the piercing kit, making it emit an ominous clacking noise, and once more pulls it up to Nino's left ear.

"This is absolutely the perfect opportunity I have to truly get back at you for all the shit you've pulled against me this past month," Fuutarou vents quietly, talking like a movie villain who's finally captured the protagonist and is about to do unspeakably horrible things to them. "And you think I'd hesitate? Don't make me laugh - prepare yourself, Nino. This will sting. On the count of three - one...two...two and a half...two and three quar - "

"Just do it already and stop screwing around!" Nino bellows, just as swiftly jamming her toes into Fuutarou's left shin.

"Sorry, that time I'll admit to messing with you again," Fuutarou apologizes, rubbing his left shin painfully since he didn't think ahead to parry Nino's kick that time. "But seriously, if you want me to pierce your ear for you, I'd rather take the time to do it properly so that the process is safe and there won't be any risk of infection."

"Infection? But how am I gonna get an infection from just getting my ear pierced?"

"You're using a needle, for one. I know Ichika's got one of her ears pierced, and seeing that she's the one who gave you this - " Fuutarou raises the piercing kit once he's done rubbing his shin. "It's safe to assume that she's used it before. I don't know what she's done to clean the needle, or if she's even bothered to disinfect it at all. Plus, I need to wash and disinfect my own hands so that I don't accidentally cause your ear to have an infection either, since like you said, I'll be opening up a hole in your ear."

"Man, do we really need to bother with that kind of stuff? It's only ear piercings!"

"Then like I said, do it yourself, if you don't want me to do it for you."

"Urk..." Nino has nothing to say to this.

"That kind of attitude is what'll get you in trouble, Nino. Remember that part of my contract's responsibilities is to make sure you and your sisters are safe at all times. Even if I can't be held responsible for something like this, I'd rather that you pierce your ears safely and responsibly in a way that'll minimize risks of infection or other complications that could happen from piercing your ears like this on your own at home."

"Tch. You really are like Papa..."

"Did you forget that I work at the same hospital that he does? It's only natural for me to want to follow proper procedure like this. That, and if you end up doing this on your own and you botch it, or if your ear ends up getting infected because you didn't disinfect properly, then I have to be the one to explain everything to your dad when we take you to the hospital."

Nino sits on her bed, with her arms still folded, her eyes turned away, and her lips pursed into a dissatisfied pout. Sighing one more time, Fuutarou reaches into his back pocket to pull out his student handbook after setting the piercing kit down on the corner of Nino's desk and opens it to show Nino a picture behind a laminate pocket.

"If it'll make you feel any better...here, take a look at this," he says as Nino glances back to see what he's showing her.

The photo Nino sees before her depicts a young boy in late primary school or so, wearing a dark zip-up hoodie and a messenger bag with a thick carrying strap. His hair is gelled back in true delinquent fashion, exposing the entirety of his forehead, his left ear sports a single small earring, and his face shows a nonchalant, juvenile scowl as his muddy-golden eyes are angled away from the camera shot.

"Whoa...wait..." the second quint, slowly forgetting about all the frustration and antagonism she's been harboring against her would-be tutor, leans in more closely to get a better look at his photo. "...this little thug...he might just be my type...!"

Lowering the photo so that Nino's compelled to look back up at him, Fuutarou scowls down at her, not unlike the kid in the photo.

"He's your type? You're telling me delinquent dimwits like him are your type?" he asks disdainfully.

"Y-Yeah! So what!" Nino gripes defensively, clenching her teeth again back up at him. "He's a lot better looking than you, with how dreadfully plain you are! Who is he, anyway? And why do you even have that picture on you?"

"This is me."

"Oh, that's you? You were a lot better looking when you were youn - "

Nino freezes. Having dropped her gaze to take another look at the photo, the second quintuplet only now registers Fuutarou's three words after she deliberates on it aloud for him, and she inches her wide and shaking blue eyes back up at the boy standing in her room in front of her.

"...say sike right now," she whispers. "Say it, Uesugi. Say it right fucking now."

Fuutarou instead pulls up the photo next to his own face so that Nino can easily see the juxtaposition, and he even keeps the same scowl on his face as the kid in the photo. Sure enough, the resemblance is uncanny - too much so to deny that both the kid in the picture and the boy who is holding it are in fact the same person.

"I wasn't lying when I warned you that getting your ears pierced will hurt for a while, since I'm speaking from experience," Fuutarou answers to a sweating, trembling, and already internally screaming Nino. "If you look at my left earlobe, you'll see the little scar that's left behind after I stopped wearing that earring in the photo. This photo was of me six years ago."

Fuutarou calmly closes his student handbook and returns it to its rightful place in his back pocket, and he smiles pleasantly down at a horrified Nino who seems to have lost her voice, because her mouth is open like she's trying to say something but no words are coming out.

"So it turns out that I'm your type, huh? What a plot twist we've got here, don't'cha think? Who knew the one girl in the Nakano household who hated me the most would turn out to like me the most. Now if only you'd act on that and come study with us, huh?"

Nino's voice was going to return to her sooner or later, and as her body retches and she tilts her head back a little bit, raising her hands up to her ears in a futile effort to dig out Fuutarou's words that she's just heard, Fuutarou does the same to protect his own ears. The smirking smile still isn't gone from his own face, and he suspects it'll stay awhile as Nino finally screams,

"AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA - "