"I've been meaning to ask, but...just what were you two doing last night...?"
Now arriving at school the next day, the quintuplets, still yawning and stretching their arms as they head onto campus almost exactly half an hour before their first class of the day starts, greet their schoolmates who tell him good morning as they pass. Even almost two months into the school year, the quintuplets find that their schoolmates still find the sight of the five of them walking around school all together like this fascinating and can't help but remark about them as they pass.
"People still look at us like we're some kinda walking zoo exhibit, huh?" Nino scowls after a pair of boys who are the last to pass them, walking in a different direction towards their own homerooms while debating which one of the quintuplets is the best among them.
"Just ignore them, Nino...it is not as if we have not been through this before at our old school," Itsuki sighs, putting a hand on Nino's shoulder just in case the latter decides to stomp off after the boys to give them a thorough berating. "And sorry about last night, Miku, I wanted to talk to Nino for a moment, and...well..."
"It went on for longer than it should have, that's for sure. So much for it being just a short talk, huh?" Nino puts her knuckles on top of Itsuki's head, squishing her ahoge in the process while giving her a good knuckle rub and causing her to yelp a little.
"Yeah...maybe it keep it shorter next time...or at least keep it down," Miku mumbles. Given the brooding and almost detesting look in her eyes, it's clear that she isn't pleased with the commotion that her sisters were causing in the next room over.
"Nino and Itsuki hanging out together, huh. That sure sounds nostalgic, doesn't it?" Ichika smiles over at the two of them. "I remember when we were younger, you two would always stick together whenever the rest of us weren't around for some reason..."
"What were you two talking about? It has been a while since we saw the two of you together at all, now that I think about it," Yotsuba asks curiously.
"N-Nothing! Nothing much..." Itsuki begins to say quickly, hesitant to explicitly reveal the contents of what she and Nino were talking about the previous night, but Nino has different ideas.
"We were talking about what we thought about Uesugi teaching us. After all - "
"Wait wait wait, Nino, must - must you tell everything about...?" Itsuki interrupts her sister quickly.
Nino scowls back at Itsuki this time. "Aren't you supposed to be the smart one after Miku? Think about it - now that Ichika's made us promise to study with Uesugi, naturally he's gonna ask us what got us to change our minds. He's not just gonna take Ichika's word for it since he knows how she acts a lot of the time; he's gonna wanna hear it straight from us. It's something everyone's gonna hear about anyway at some point. So we might as well get it out of the way now and embarrass ourselves here rather than embarrass ourselves both in front of everyone here and Uesugi on top of that."
"Wowie ~ Nino sure knows a lot about how Fuutarou-kun behaves, huh ~ " Ichika coos with a hand over her lips. "All that time you've spent with us downstairs listening to us study with him sure is paying off, isn't it ~ "
"Sh-Shut it, Ichika! I can't help that when I'm always downstairs with you guys!"
"But you could be like Itsuki-chan and just stay in your room if you don't like it ~ "
"I have to be down there to make sure that Uesugi doesn't try anything funny when I'm not looking!"
"Still with that excuse, Nino...?" Miku sighs off to the side.
"Don't you start with me too, Miku! All of you, just let me answer Yotsuba properly first!" Nino frowns at the rest of her sisters excluding Itsuki. "Like I was saying, we were discussing what we thought about Uesugi teaching us for the reason I mentioned: we need to have something to say to him to explain ourselves so that it doesn't seem like we're letting him tutor us because we want him to."
"So what did you come up with, then?" Ichika asks, still with that teasing smile on her face that Nino is completely conscious of.
"Well, obviously you forced me into this," Nino snaps back while tussling her hair indignantly. "Itsuki has a better reason than me, though, admittedly."
"U-Um, well..." Again finding that Nino is shoving her against her will into the spotlight, Itsuki nonetheless gathers her thoughts to convey them properly. "It turns out that...my own self-studying has proven inadequate. I have been keeping track of the test scores that the three of you have been getting from taking the occasional mock tests that Uesugi-kun has been administering every so often and comparing them to my own progress...only to find that the three of you have indeed been making noticeable improvements in your scores, while I have been...stagnant, to say the least."
"Oooh, so that's why you wanted to see the mock tests that Uesugi-san was giving us!" Yotsuba nods sagely like a lightbulb's just gone off above her head as she connects the dots on her own.
"She asked you for those tests? Since when?" Miku asks, completely oblivious to Itsuki's string-pulling with Yotsuba behind her back.
"Uh, I think it was about a week and a half ago? It was right after Golden Week, I know that for sure," Yotsuba answers while counting her fingers to try to pinpoint exactly when.
"So you asked Yotsuba for Uesugi-kun's tests because she's the one who wouldn't tell anyone else that you were doing that, huh? Crafty, Itsuki, I like it," Ichika giggles.
"I-I did not mean to try to deceive anyone! I just knew that asking you or Miku would have been a bad idea because both of you would have known what I was up to!" Itsuki defends herself pleadingly.
"Well, if you're at the point where you felt the need to take the same tests that Fuutarou was making for us just to see how you stack up against the scores we get, you might as well start studying with us from now on..." Miku sighs.
"And...well...that leads me to what I was going to say, what I told Nino last night: I have been forced to accept that maybe...maybe I really do need a tutor after all. And Uesugi-kun happens to be tutoring the three of you already, so..."
"Awww, don't make it seem like you didn't wanna join because of Uesugi-san!" Yotsuba laughs, throwing her arms around an embarrassed Itsuki.
"I-I still do not! I am still the same as Nino, I am merely joining you all because after some self-reflection, I have decided that for the sake of my midterm grades, it is to my, advantage to study with everyone!"
"Then we'll do everything we can to make sure everyone stays studying together! Right, Miku? Ichika?" Yotsuba turns to her fellow sisters who are part of the Uesugi Study Club.
"That's right! Once you're part of the sisterhood, there's no escaping it! Not without consequence, that is ~ " Ichika murmurs scarily, a dark shadow being cast over her eyes as she tilts her head menacingly towards Nino and Itsuki, the latter of whom uses this opportunity to break free of Yotsuba's grasp to cower on the other side of Nino.
"N-Ninooooo, Ichika has a really scary look on her faaaaace!" she cries, peeking out from around Nino only to find Ichika still leering at her and ducking back behind Nino again.
The five Nakano girls finally arrive at their homeroom, stepping inside to take their seats. Miku and Yotsuba, in particular, are conservatively eager to find their tutor dozing as usual at his seat in the middle of the classroom -
Uesugi Fuutarou's seat is empty.
Being the first one among her sisters to enter the classroom, Yotsuba stares at the empty desk, blinking at it and scanning it over and over with her confused blue eyes to make sure she's not seeing wrong. No bag, no Uesugi Fuutarou. Her classmate and tutor is very assuredly not present.
"...huh...? Wait, Uesugi-san's not here..." she says aloud quietly as the rest of her sisters file in past her. Miku, realizing that Yotsuba is telling the truth, also develops a worried look in her eyes, but Ichika pats both of them on their shoulders reassuringly.
"He's probably just taking a break. Think about it, he doesn't really have much invested in school, right? So he's probably catching up on some much-needed rest right about now," she says calmly. "It's better for him to rest at home rather than at school."
Leaving her sisters with that, Ichika joins Nino and Itsuki at their seats at the back of the classroom - but both Miku and Yotsuba remain at the door of the classroom, still with their blue eyes fixated on Fuutarou's hauntingly empty seat.
"...Yotsuba, call me weird, but..." Miku swallows a bit of her saliva back, "...after seeing Fuutarou in his seat every morning like before...him not being here is...weird, isn't it...?"
"Miku, you just said 'weird' twice. I just thought I'd...let you know that," Yotsuba mutters back.
"I know. It was...on purpose."
"Liar."
"I'm not lying about that."
Miku sighs a little. "Maybe Ichika's right, then...we're probably just dwelling on it too much - "
"Are we, though?"
Yotsuba's doubt stops Miku in her tracks as the latter is just about to begin walking over to her own seat.
"You can call me weird for thinking about this too hard, Miku. But...if you really think about it, right..." Yotsuba's eyes are still fixed on Fuutarou's lonely desk. "...Uesugi-san...doesn't seem like the kind of person who would take a break just because he should...does he?"
Staring at her younger sister for a second, Miku then creaks her neck back over in the direction of their tutor's seat in their homeroom. The sight of it, coupled with her knowledge of the text that Ichika sent Fuutarou the night before once Nino and Itsuki both agreed to come study with them the next time Fuutarou came by to tutor, once again reseeds worrying doubt into her mind.
"...no, you're not weird for thinking that," Miku whispers shortly. "Because...that's exactly the kind of person he is."
As if right on cue, the door behind them opens abruptly, causing both Miku and Yotsuba to jump, and then spin around, both hoping that the door opened because of -
"Um, are the Nakano quintuplets here yet - ah, of course, here you all are," their homeroom teacher whom Fuutarou has called a bald rat before steps into the room carrying a short stack of Japanese History study guides for their midterms next week. "Or, two of you, anyway. Uesugi's father called the school earlier this morning and informed us that he will not be attending school today...as if him being here made any difference whatsoever..."
Miku's cold blue eyes fix themselves onto her homeroom teacher's smirking face as he clears his throat, realizing that he's speaking ill of a student who isn't even here.
"His father informed me that you girls seem to have close ties with him, so I will have to ask one of you girls to hand these study guides to him so that he may distribute them to the class properly at some point before the week is out."
"Oh, if it's just handing them out to the class, I can handle that!" Yotsuba says cheerily, offering to take the study guides from their teacher. "I think I know just about everyone in class by this point, so it'll be no biggie!"
"I see. But must you handle this responsibility yourself? Why not let the class representative carry out what should be his duties?" the teacher scoffs.
It is by now that Yotsuba, as if sensing the murderous intent leaking from the quintuplet sister next to her, quickly glances to her left to find Miku's hands already balled into fists down by her sides and her frozen blue eyes staring lifelessly back up at their bald homeroom teacher.
Yotsuba isn't one to normally notice fine details, but her sisters are a different story. She's never seen Miku's eyes, specifically her pupils, dilated so much before. It's to the point where her blue eyes are thin rings circling empty black disks.
Why is there a pair of faint blue rings inside her dilated pupils?
Why does it feel like Miku is about to -
Before Yotsuba can stop Miku herself, someone else does that job for her. Seizing Miku's left shoulder firmly, Nino, having reached Miku faster than Yotsuba despite being all the way across the classroom, glares with narrowed eyes into Miku's icy ones as the latter turns to see who's stopped her.
"I don't know what you were about to do, but knock it off," Nino whispers quickly.
To reinforce her command, Nino forcibly turns Miku around and pulls her along back to their desks as their classmates who are also in the classroom waiting for homeroom to begin and their homeroom teacher stare after them.
"Mmm...some family trouble, perhaps? I suggest you girls handle that outside of class, otherwise I will have Takeda help you sort it out if you cannot," the homeroom teacher warns Yotsuba, since she's still left behind. "Everyone else, please get ready for homeroom, I will be right back..."
So Yotsuba takes the stack of study guides and begins distributing them silently to her classmates who are present, and once she's done with that, she rejoins the rest of her sisters at the back of the class. Miku is sitting at her desk with her face buried in her arms on the desktop, while Itsuki looks on with a mix of confusion and concern at what Nino just did. Ichika seems to be acting aloof as she normally would during class.
"Nino...what just...?" Yotsuba begins to ask as she walks by Nino's desk, but the second quintuplet responds quickly to talk over her.
"Nothing. Miku's just tired because of me and Itsuki being up late chatting, that's all."
Yotsuba looks around at her sisters one more time, gauging their behaviors before sighing heavily to herself. It appears that Uesugi will be absent entirely from class today, and now her sisters are acting quite strange...she hopes that all this is just one big unfortunate coincidence.
"Miku! Miku, hold up! I need to talk to you!"
The third quintuplet in question stops and turns around to find her immediate older sister, Nino, hurrying after her just as the former is about to step out of the shoe locker room and onto the rest of campus.
"...didn't you say that you were going to go hang out with your friends after school today?" Miku questions Nino back as the latter approaches her and changes her shoes for her outdoor ones at her own locker.
"I was going to, yeah," Nino says quickly. "By the way, what about everyone else?"
"Ichika's gone straight to her part-time; apparently she's got a ride over there today. Yotsuba's doing the usual, going around helping out some of the clubs she knows. And Itsuki's in the library right now, studying on her own." Miku narrows her eyes at Nino once she puts on her outdoor shoes and stands back up straight. "But don't dodge the question."
"What do you mean? I didn't dodge it, I answered you, didn't I? I said I was going to."
"But?"
"But I told them that I had something come up."
"So that you could do what, exactly?"
Nino suddenly snarls at her younger sister. "Bitch, I don't need your attitude right now. C'mon, we'll talk as we go."
Taking her sister by her shoulder, Nino almost drags Miku along with her as the two of them exit the lockers and begin heading home.
"...if this is about what happened this morning..." Miku starts, but not for long.
"This is exactly about what happened this morning. What the hell else would I want to talk to you about?" Nino hisses.
"Is it really that important where you'd even ditch your friends just to talk to me about it?"
Stopping on a dime at the top of the stairs that leads down to the street in the direction of their home, the second quintuplet glares straight into Miku's cold blue eyes. Miku is used to Nino confronting her face-to-face like this - but this time, something feels different...just like how something felt different about herself that same morning.
"Yes, Miku, it is," Nino answers directly. "I think it's very important."
Letting go of her sister, Nino rapidly descends the stairs, leading the way to the streetlight where she can hit the pedestrian crossing button to cross the street, and Miku follows shortly thereafter to rejoin her sister waiting at the crosswalk.
"So? Care to explain yourself, then?" Miku snaps at her older sister, whose gaze is fixed dead ahead.
"This morning, before homeroom...you wanted to do something to our homeroom teacher, didn't you?" Nino mutters darkly.
At first, Miku does not answer. She doesn't answer, in fact, until they've crossed the street and continue their way on the sidewalk.
"...always talking shit about Fuutarou..." Miku begins to whisper under her breath, so that only Nino can hear. "Insulting him all the time, talking like he knows what Fuutarou's going through...he's got it coming to him eventually..."
"First off, you should knock that off. I don't know what you want to do, but whatever it is, snap out of that shit right now," Nino growls firmly. "This isn't you. I don't know what's made you this way - "
Glancing to her right to notice a narrow alleyway that they're passing, Miku, with unprecedented strength that Nino has never seen her use before, seizes Nino by the scruff of her white dress shirt and pulls her deep into the alley, where they are unlikely to be seen by passersby out on the sidewalk. Nino's school bag that has her phone riding the sides of the notebooks and folders inside is knocked out because of the force that Miku uses to seize Nino and pull her aside, and the bunny-sleeved phone clatters noisily onto the ground.
"M-My phone! Miku, wait, what are you - " Nino tries to say, but Miku isn't having any of it.
Slamming her older sister against the wall, Miku keeps her pinned there. Nino, already taken back by Miku's hidden, vicious strength, gasps with pain as she's shoved against the wall, grasping at the back of her head where it's made contact with the wall behind her.
"This isn't me? Nino, look into my eyes right now, and tell me what you see," Miku whispers lifelessly. "And once you do, try to tell me that this isn't me. I dare you."
Without much else of a choice, Nino peers back into Miku's eyes with squinted eyes of her own.
Curtained partially behind Miku's long bangs, the dilated eyes are back with a vengeance - and once again, the faint blue rings in her wickedly expanded black pupils are in play, drilling straight through Nino's contact lenses and into her own eyes.
Before Nino has time to process what she sees in Miku's eyes, however, the moment that their two pairs of eyes meet - the heat returns, with an even fiercer vengeance.
Inhaling sharply, the second quintuplet slaps her free left hand against her eyes and buckles as the searing pain in her eyes rebounds, as though melting her eyeballs from the inside out. As soon as Nino's heat pain resurges, Miku's own eyes begin to throb, though without pain, and on reflex, she, too, covers her own eyes in confusion as to what's going on. Nino leans against the wall and begins to slump slowly downwards, finally resting her behind on the ground as her own school bag bumps against the ground next to her.
Realizing that she isn't feeling the same pain as her sister is, Miku, immediately snapping out of her own murderous state and subconsciously having her eyes revert to normal, drops to her knees to try to figure out what's going on, though of course she has no idea where to start.
"N-Nino, what's...going on...!? Is this happening because of - "
But Nino, in her pain-driven frustration and anger that's also rebounded with the burning sensation in both of her eyes, suddenly throws out her right hand, whose palm connects with Miku's face and pushes her violently away. Not expecting Nino to lash out like this, Miku yelps as she, too, is pushed over and lands on her butt on the ground in this narrow alley.
"Not - right - now - !" Nino gasps in a soft but horribly strained voice, a voice that Miku has never heard Nino make before. It serves to heighten Miku's gradually accruing sense of fear that first began when she realized that Nino's pain right now could only be because of her, whatever it was that she did to her own sister, and as much as Miku wants to do something to help her sister, she has no idea how. So she is forced to sit on the ground, watching Nino clutch at her eyes painfully, unable to do anything but wait out the pain until it can subside to at least tolerable levels.
After about two minutes, which feel more like two centuries, Nino finally is able to pull her hand off her eyes. Her erratic, panicked breathing has also returned to normal, though she is left covered in sweat that she's worked up during the relapse. However, she keeps her eyes closed as she pulls out a handkerchief from her skirt pocket and begins to wipe away the sweat on her brow first.
Watching her sister begin to clean her own sweat, Miku remains sitting in front of Nino, her mouth slightly agape still from the nerve-racking uncertainty of the situation that the two of them were suddenly thrust into, admittedly probably by her initiation.
"...are you...okay...?" Miku gulps nervously, "...Nino?"
Gnashing her teeth quietly back at her younger sister, Nino covers her right eye with her left hand while her right hand rises up to her eye, blocking the eye from Miku's view for the moment.
"Am I okay? Am I fucking okay?" she repeats in furious disbelief after Miku, who cowers a little, both in fear and guilt at what she's done in her own simmering anger. When Nino lowers her hand, Miku looks back up, but what she sees compels her to gasp a little before she clasps her own hands over her mouth. "Does it look like I'm fucking okay to you, Miku?"
In sharp contrast to Nino's regular blue eye, the one that the quintuplets all share and love, Nino's right eye is a deep, cosmic purple. Unlike Miku's eye whose pupils were dilated jarringly, Nino's iris has simply been recolored to its majestic, vibrant purple, with the black pupil it houses remaining its normal size - but it does radiate with a small blue ring around its outline which now acts as the border between the black and purple - not unlike the blue ring that appeared in Miku's eyes. And on Nino's right index finger is the contact lens she's pulled out from her right eye to show Miku what has happened.
With her sister's eye exposed like this, Miku's eyes that gaze directly into it begin to throb noticeably again, though again, the throbbing does not come with pain of their own. But it is uncomfortable enough to the point where Miku still does have to avert her own eyes to get her eyes to stop pulsing like this. While Miku is nervously waiting for the throbbing in her eyes to subside, Nino takes the liberty of removing the other contact lens from her left eye too, and reaching into her bag, she finds and pulls out her contact lenses' kit so that she can put the lenses safely away. She doesn't know if she should take off her contacts or leave them in in an event like this, as this is only the second time ever that she's had an incident with her eyes like this, but just in case, she figures she should remove her lenses in case something might happen to them, though she has to operate off pure gut instinct here. Regardless, it's a good thing she decided to start packing the kit with her ever since that first incident...
"...Nino...what's...what's going on with us...? What's happening to us...?" Miku whispers. Nino can hear her younger sister's voice begin to crack, like the first crack made in a mirror that will soon bring it all down. Hearing this drains much of the anger she was harboring towards her, though it doesn't quite drain all of the sharp irritation that she still feels towards her.
"Your guess's as good as mine. Probably better, in fact," Nino sighs shortly, still slumped against the alley wall with her sister while continuing to wipe sweat from her forehead and scalp. "You were the one who acted like that first this morning towards our homeroom teacher, didn't you?"
Miku raises her eyes again, and once again the sisters' eyes meet. Stimulated in return by Nino's strange eye, Miku's eyes have relapsed, the pupils dilated and the blue rings floating within their black voids. The throbbing begins anew, but Miku forces herself to deal with it so that they can try to restart their botched conversation.
"...so...you have them too," Miku croaks weakly. "These...weird eyes..."
"I only just found out about them recently. Two Saturday nights ago...or Sunday mornings, whichever you wanna call it," Nino mutters darkly, trying to get used to her blurry vision that renders her effectively blind - except for two objects floating before her that she can see with utmost clarity, like two clean spots on an otherwise dirty and smeared car windshield. "Same thing happened in the middle of the night. It woke me up, and...all of a sudden, before I knew it, my eyes felt like they were on fire...like someone was roasting them from the inside out...God, it fucking hurt..."
Nino grimaces, remembering the aching pain both from the first incident and mere moments ago. Though, to Nino's surprise, the aftershock pain that she felt the first time around is pleasantly absent this time around, and it didn't feel like the pain this time felt anywhere near as long as the first time...though Nino keeps her guard up lest she be lulled into a false sense of security about the strange nature of her eyes.
Listening to Nino's testimony, Miku feels her eyes widen. "...so...that also happens to you?"
"What part?"
"Your eyes, um, waking you up in the middle of the night..."
"I don't know, I'm saying that's what happened the first time, but this time, I guess whatever your eyes are, they triggered that same reaction out of mine, and so all this happened..." Nino squints back at Miku, in part due to her terrible eyesight at the moment where all she can really see is a strange purple haze and two crystal-clear circles of white, black, and blue before her. It's an eerie sight, a hellish sight, even, but Nino can deal with it surprisingly well, much to her relief. Then again, maybe the pain just now was so bad that her senses have been dulled to most everything else for the time being. "You sound like this's happened to you before."
Miku blinks slowly back at Nino for a few moments...and then raises her chin to look up at the sliver of the sky peeking down at them from above, in between the buildings on either side of their current alleyway.
"It started two and a half years ago."
"T-Two and a half years..." Nino inhales sharply through her teeth the moment she hears this amount of time. "Holy fucking shit, Miku...you've been dealing with those for all this time...?"
Miku nods slowly still. "Do you remember...the time when I had to go to the hospital during middle school?"
Recalling this, Nino presses down even harder on her already clenched teeth. "Yeah...how could I forget? That day when those assholes did that to you...they're still out there, too, one of these days I'll find 'em and fucking beat their heads in..."
"Don't bother; we've transferred schools, so I doubt we'll run into them ever again. You know them..." Miku exhales carefully, trying her best to deal with the throbbing in her own eyes. "But that's when it started, once I got out of the hospital. I've kept it secret from everyone for all this time..."
Nino wants so badly to ask Miku why she's kept her eyes a secret, but she knows she cannot, lest she put herself at risk of being exposed as a bit of a hypocrite herself with how she was planning on keeping her own eyes a secret from her sisters.
"I guess...something like this would've happened eventually," Miku continues quietly. "I had a feeling I wouldn't be able to keep this a secret from the rest of you forever. I just...could've never guessed that...it would've gone down like this..."
"Yeah, you're telling me. All this time, the two of us've been running around with these weird eyes that, well, at least I had no idea about until literally two weekends ago."
Nino pulls her head off the wall behind her to lean forward a little.
"But still, why's something like this gotta happen to me? I'm not the one who reads manga and plays games like you or Yotsuba," Nino snorts under her breath at the irony of her situation. "Isn't this kind of thing what otakus like you always dream of having happen or something like that?"
"But how would you know?" Miku challenges.
"I don't, that's why I'm asking you."
"...I'll be honest, that never really crossed my mind..."
"I guess it wouldn't, huh." Nino cups her hand over her eyes, shaking her head a little in the process.
"Do your eyes still hurt?" Miku asks, somewhat in alarm.
"No, I'm fine, they're fine. For now, at least. Do you have shit that happens to you in the middle of the night, kinda like what I described earlier, where mine woke me up in the middle of the night and bothered the hell out of me?"
Miku nods slightly, and while Nino can't see her head nod, the eyes that she can see do, and so she can infer the head nod that way.
"Mine wake me up in the middle of the night. At 3 in the morning, every time it happens."
"Ah...so that's why...on some days when we go to school, you'd randomly be all sleepy and tired..."
"Right, because...I wake up in the middle of the night, and...it can take me a while to go back to sleep...though I've gotten a bit better at getting used to it. My eyes too, they...don't feel like they're burning. In fact, it's not my eyes that hurt - it's my head that hurts, and I get something like sleep paralysis whenever it happens; I can't move at all. And...the worst part is..."
Nino stays silent, listening carefully to her sister talk. Now that her vision is mostly blocked, she's forced to rely much more on her other senses.
"...after my head hurts, my eyes force me to see some kind of...weird ocean. And...try not to freak out about this..."
"Freak out? What could freak me out more than what's already - "
"That ocean...is made of blood."
Nino is instantly silenced.
"...please say that you were just joking about that last part," she smiles with a cold sweat running down her scalp.
"I'm not. I find myself looking at a sea full of blood, underneath a black sky. And there's...nothing else in sight."
"...wait, so...it's...it's like a vision you see?"
"Yeah. My eyes force me to see it for a little bit...I've never had a choice about it. I stay stuck there for a little bit, and then - and then I return back to my room."
Shuddering a little, Nino feels quietly grateful that she didn't end up with Miku's fate. While she isn't scared of open blood like she is of sharp needles, or at least not to the same extent that Itsuki is, she still wouldn't be exactly comfortable if there's enough blood spilled before her. She could probably pass that off as a normal reaction, though, since it's not as if normal people see large quantities of open blood on a daily basis unless you work at a hospital or blood bank or something, but either way, she would rather not have to see what Miku sees, whatever it is that's going on with her.
"What exactly do you mean, by, uh...'return back to your room'?"
Miku pulls up her knees into her chest, as she is prone do to whenever she begins talking about a serious topic or something that she isn't entirely comfortable with discussing.
"Every time that happens, I get this...weird feeling that I'm...I'm...separated from reality. I don't know how else to put it...and I don't expect you to get what I'm trying to say..."
"Okay, I get that you think of me as too much of a real lifer and that maybe abstract stuff like that isn't exactly my strong point, but c'mon, things are weird enough already that stuff like that's bound to come up, right?"
"Mm...I guess you're right. But that's how it is...until that, that...vision goes away...it's like I'm in another world. Even my room doesn't feel like my own room until it's over."
"So, it's an out-of-body experience. Or maybe more like a lucid dream?"
"I didn't know you were a psychiatrist, Nino."
"Oh, c'mon, don't give me that. I know a lot of people, y'know? And people all have their own problems and such; I used to know a few people back at Black Rose who had sleep issues, and we used to talk about stuff like that."
Listening to Nino, Miku debates silently to herself if she should go into further detail about her situation, but she decides against it and asks her sister instead,
"What about you? What's happened so far with...your eyes?"
"I mean, I've already said everything that's been going on on my end. It started two Saturdays ago, after I tried kicking Uesugi out of the house for walking in on me after I got out of the bath...my eyes start burning like hell, and it hurts like a fucking bitch, and I can't do anything about it until it goes away on its own, kinda like you, I suppose..." Nino rubs her eyes a bit, on the off-chance that maybe doing so will correct her vision as she feels terribly defenseless and vulnerable not being able to see anything while outside the house, but the only things she can see clearly are still the eyes of her sister. Yeah, she'll probably be having nightmares about this tonight...
"Speaking of Fuutarou...he's a mage, right? Do you think maybe he can...help us with this? At least be able to explain to us what's going on?" Miku suggests.
"Hell if I know! You can ask him if you want, but I don't want to."
"Well, why not...? This is obviously a huge problem, isn't it?"
"It only is if we make it out to be one. Uesugi's already involved enough as it is with our family; we don't need him butting in on this now."
"But this is something he should be involved in, out of everything! I can understand you not wanting him to be around for his tutoring stuff, but - "
Using her ability to see Miku's approximate location with the clarity of her eyes, Nino lurches forward and grabs control of her shoulders to pull her towards herself so that their faces stop inches from one another.
"Miku, listen to me. We aren't normal - the fact that there's something wrong with our eyes says as much. Neither of us know anything about magic, or magecraft, or - or whatever, but we very well may be the same thing that Uesugi is and we never even knew. Mama never told us when she was still around, Grandpa didn't tell us, and Papa certainly never told us either."
Miku narrows her eyes back at Nino's; the throbbing has luckily subsided for now, but who knows when it'll come back. Why is it that when Nino draws close to her like this that the throbbing goes away?
"Nino...what are you saying?"
At first opening her mouth to speak, Nino hesitates and pulls away, also taking her right hand off her sister's shoulder to gesticulate with it.
"I don't know yet myself, I'll admit," she finally says, "but my hunch tells me that...we've been left in the dark for all this time on purpose. Somebody in our family, or at least someone close to us, at some point, deliberately made it so that none of us knew the truth about ourselves. And it's not just the two of us we need to worry about, because if this can happen to us, this shit can happen to the rest of us, and we just don't know it yet. Hell, maybe it could've already happened to the others, and they're trying to hide it from us like both of us were!"
"But you don't know that."
"Don't know what, exactly? Which part?"
"The part where someone's been trying to hide this from us. The reason why my eyes started acting up was because of what happened to me back in middle school two and half years ago."
"Okay, so yours happened because of a traumatic event, I guess. But what about me, then? I didn't need to get hospitalized to have this happen to me, and it just happened on its own! How do you explain that?" Nino waits for Miku to answer her this question, which she naturally cannot, so she continues. "Think about it, Miku, just hear me out here. A month and a half ago, we didn't even know Uesugi; he wasn't a part of our lives at all. All of a sudden, we transfer into his school, Papa hires him to be our tutor, we get attacked by those thugs of that one guy I knew for years and he comes in to bail us out of it, and now this. On top of all that, we know Uesugi's keeping an eye on us everywhere we go because he's said it himself. Don't you think all this is just...just way too convenient?"
Miku's mutated eyes widen at first, now that Nino is putting things into perspective, but they narrow quickly again in staunch resistance.
"You're saying that Fuutarou's the one at fault here?" she challenges darkly.
"It has to be! Who else could it be? And it all makes sense, too!" Nino pulls away from her sister to spread her arms out wide in emphasis. "The way I'm seeing it, Uesugi got all cozy with Papa and convinced him to hire him as our tutor so that he can get close to us, and he's using the tutoring gig as his alibi while he waits and bides his time for something to happen to us so that he can take advantage of us at the right moment. He even tried doing that two weeks ago, you know! When he walked back into the house when I just got out of the bath! He must've known somehow that I can't see without my contacts, and he probably used the excuse of leaving his wallet and phone back at the house so he could come back in!"
"But why would he go after you? You and Itsuki don't get along with him at all. If he came after me or Yotsuba or Ichika - "
"Because he must've known somehow that my eyes would start acting up! Remember what I said, about how my eyes first started hurting the same night? And not only that, he came into my room the next weekend, last Sunday morning! Thank God I woke up just in time before he could do anything, and you know what he was doing? He had his hand reaching out to me! At my face, no less!"
"You're probably just exaggerating - "
"I'm not exaggerating, though! He really did that! You can doubt me all you want, but I swear that's what he did! Why else do you think I screamed that loudly when it happened?!"
"You'd scream that loudly regardless of what he was doing, so long as he was in your room."
Nino cringes a little at the truth of Miku's words.
"A-Anyways, that aside, he's trying to do something to us, I'm sure of it, now that I know you've been having this...issue with your eyes, and for all this time, too. And he's starting with me because I'm the one who gives him the most shit, so he'll take his anger out on me first."
But Miku still isn't convinced by her sister's bravado. "I still don't buy it. If Fuutarou really is up to no good like you think he is, he's had plenty of time and plenty of opportunities to carry out his agenda. Papa even gave him a copy of our house card so that he can let himself in anytime he wants, at least until he gave it to you that one Saturday night when you accidentally locked yourself out."
"And I'm saying, he's biding his time! He's waiting for the right moment!"
"And when's that going to come, exactly?"
"You're asking me? How the hell should I know? I'm just saying that's what he's doing! Surely!" Nino raises a matter-of-fact finger next to her own face. "Remember what he told us at home, when he brought us back from that warehouse? When he was telling us who he really was and a bit about himself as a mage? Mages are selfish and self-serving, and Uesugi even said the same about himself because he said he's basically a mercenary, a mage-for-hire. What if he's after our eyes? Or maybe some kind of power that we have that we don't know we have yet but he does?"
"But Fuutarou isn't that type of guy! Why would he - "
Nino stabs a finger in Miku's direction, and her fingertip ends mere centimeters away from the latter's nose.
"You're too naive - you don't know how shitty people can get yet. While I get that you wouldn't get it, seeing how you've always secluded yourself away from other people, trust me on this, Miku - being around lots of people, even if it's just at school or around the city, I know how people can be sometimes," Nino declares. "You might feel a certain type of way for Uesugi; it's obvious to all of us, with how much you've opened up to him over the weeks that we've known him, so you want to trust him. But I don't - what's to say that he isn't also being paid off to do something to us later on down the road? How do we know for sure that he isn't using his tutoring as an excuse to get close to us for some ulterior motive?"
Unwilling to buy Nino's arguments but unable to refute them either, Miku stays silent, processing everything that has been said thus far.
"Then...what should we do? Is there something...we can do?" she asks slowly.
Nino hesitates too, for all the accusations she's made. "I don't know yet either, I'll be honest," she admits with a frustrated sigh, "but you can't blame me for not knowing what to do either because...how the hell were we supposed to expect something like this happening."
"For starters, then, we should decide on whether or not we want to keep this between the two of us, or if this is something we should tell everyone else," Miku suggests. "What do you think? You're the one who usually makes the most sensible decisions when it comes to things like this."
Remembering her own eye pain, Nino purses her lips briefly again. "Let's keep this on the down-low for now. While the others very well could have experienced something like what we've done through on their own, the fact of the matter is that this is the first time, at least to us, that we've known about someone else among us having the same issue. I can see Ichika keeping something like this to herself, but Yotsuba and Itsuki, no way - both of them would come crying to one of us if something were to ever happen to them. But on the chance that this problem is just limited to the two of us, I want this to stay contained to the both of us. We don't need to bother them with something like this."
Miku smirks suddenly. "Don't take this the wrong way, Nino, but...it's kind of weird hearing you wanting to keep a problem to yourself when you'll speak your mind whenever you want with us."
"Oh c'mon, don't give me that. Do you seriously think this's something I can just yap about to everyone else?"
"That's...that's true...but what if the others have gone through something like this on their own?"
"Then just like what happened between the two of us, we're probably bound to find out one day. And when we do, we can talk about it then with them. Until we know for sure that they've gone through the same thing, we shouldn't openly discuss this kind of thing with them because either they're going to get preoccupied with what's happening to us, or they'll just think we're going crazy or something. That's the gut feeling that I get about this whole matter."
"Fine. Then what about Fuutarou? How's this going to affect things? You and Itsuki already promised to study with us and Fuutarou, are you going to bail from this too?"
Nino frowns difficultly. "I'd fucking love to, but that'd be too suspicious; I always do whatever I say I'll do, so if I were to refuse to show up, Ichika'll know that something's up. So for now I don't have a choice but to play nice. By the way, we can't let Uesugi know that we've found out about these eyes that we have; if he's really up to something, then once we show him these eyes, we'll blow our cover. No way he doesn't react to these, that's for damn sure, and I refuse to believe otherwise. Like I said, we have to keep this between just the two of us until more stuff happens, and then we'll decide what to do from there."
Pausing and gazing back at her sister's eyes, Nino then suggests,
"Miku, I don't think you'll agree to this, but what do you think of failing your midterms intentionally?"
"And why the hell did you think I'd ever agree to that?" Miku spits back viciously.
"Yeah, figured. Because if we all fail our midterms, then Papa will lose faith in him as being a good tutor and will cut him from the job; that way we don't ever have to deal with him again, and we get rid of the chance that he's going to do something to us."
"Do you really think that just getting him to lose his job tutoring us alone's going to keep him away from us? Like you said before, he knows where we are at any time. And you were calling me the naive one?"
"W-Well, it'll expose him! If he's up to something and he loses his tutoring gig, he'll lose easy access to us and he'll start panicking!"
"And what about Fuutarou makes you think he's the type of person to panic if things don't go his way? You and Itsuki have been giving him a hard time all this time not letting him tutor you, and he hasn't panicked about that even once. You think that if he really was up to no good, stopping him from getting his way here and there's going to stop him completely or get him to start slipping up?"
Nino stubbornly shakes her head in denial. "I still don't buy it. I think he's got something to hide, and that he's playing you all. You, Ichika, and Yotsuba. And with what Itsuki talked to me about last night, she'll get the slip too."
"But why's it gotta be just Fuutarou? Open your mind, Nino, Fuutarou can't be the only one we should suspect."
"Who the hell else is there, though?"
"What about Papa? He's never spent any meaningful amount of time with us after Mama died."
At the mention of their father, Nino's eyes snap open, even though that won't help them see any more clearly.
"And as a matter of fact, he was noticeably younger than Mama was at the time they married, and it was obvious that Mama did that so that she could get us out of being poor before she died. And once she did, he went straight back to working all the time. How do we know he's not planning something either?" Miku's eyes once again begin to widen more and more as she rambles on. "What about Grandpa? He might be really old and frail, but we always knew he was a sharp man, a lot sharper than what his age gives off. He's also way stronger than he looks too, whenever he wants to be. We haven't known him for very long, obviously, but what's to say he's not doing something behind the scenes either?"
"But they're our family!" Nino finally bursts out, unable to keep silent in disbelief any longer. "Yeah, Papa's never really around and it's always awkward around him whenever he is, but he's still our Papa, and he's always provided for us all these years! And don't you involve Grandpa in this, there's no way he's involved in all this! And besides, why the shit are you suspecting our own family!? This is your Papa you're talking about, our Papa, our Grandpa! How dare you think that they're the reasons we're the way we are right now!"
Seizing Miku again while she's yelling, Nino sticks her face right up to Miku, who bares her clenched teeth back at her in retaliation.
"I'm just saying," Miku spits defiantly, "you were the one who called me naive over wanting to give Fuutarou the benefit of the doubt. But the way I see it, you're not acting much different about Papa, just because he's our 'family'. But I won't involve Grandpa - it didn't feel right to talk about him here, I'll admit..."
Seeing Miku retract her suspicion of their grandfather prompts Nino to begin restraining herself as well, as she pulls away from her sister again to get out of her personal space.
"Okay, but even still, Papa's been taking care of us for the past six years, so we have some history there with him, even if he's only our stepfather technically. Uesugi barely has two months! You can't just compare the two of them and be like, 'oh, we'll have to treat them equally' or anything like that, that's just absurd! At the end of the day, it's Uesugi who's the problem. I know you're not going to believe me, but if you look at this from what we have to work with, he's the biggest question mark," Nino argues, though this time she makes sure to control her voice so that she doesn't sound like she's about to fly off her rails again like she sounded a few moments ago.
Miku grimaces back at her older sister. "Nino, I get it already, I shouldn't have brought Papa or Grandpa into this. I just...mentioned them because...you know..."
Letting the touchy conversation topic die off like this, the two quintuplet sisters finally settle into an uneasy silence, now that they've said just about everything they've had to say on this matter.
"I guess we should end it on what I said to you that started all this," Nino sighs slightly, "but earlier this morning, when you were looking at our homeroom teacher - was that really you? Or was it someone else?"
Miku shakes her head. "No...it wasn't someone else. That was me, Nino. For that moment, when our homeroom teacher was talking bad about Fuutarou...I wanted to kill him."
"And do you think you really could have done something bad if I hadn't stopped you then?"
"Probably. I...I felt like I would have done something, yeah. But...I don't know what would've happened."
"And you shouldn't try to figure that out either. Why did you even behave like that anyway? It's not as if our homeroom teacher hasn't talked shit about Uesugi while he was in class, so why today?"
"I don't get annoyed if he does that when Fuutarou is in class, since I know that Fuutarou doesn't care about it."
"Then why get angry at the teacher today if you already knew that?"
"Because...Fuutarou wasn't here. I don't...I didn't like it. I didn't like how the teacher was still talking badly about him, even when he wasn't here. There was no need for him to make comments like that. So it felt like...it felt like a low blow. I didn't like it at all."
Nino scratches her cheek a little. "...yeah, I guess I get that. I don't like it whenever people talk about me behind my back...but still, whatever it is that you would've done, don't ever do that. We just transferred schools, I'm not in the mood to transfer to another one within two months."
Saying nothing in reply, the third quintuplet sinks her face back down into her knees. It's all too much to process...she just wanted this problem to be contained to herself, but then she almost did something to her own homeroom teacher, and in her lingering fury after school, she's now accidentally exposed Nino's own situation and dragged her into something she should've dealt with alone, even if it were inevitable that the quintuplets would have to face this problem together. And now, Nino is framing Fuutarou as the main culprit or driving factor behind everything that has happened.
Miku could very well be a mage. This never registered properly with her, but now that Nino very well may be one too, she's forced to accept this possibility. Maybe if she were still in junior high, when she was younger, somewhat more idealistic, and definitely a bigger closet otaku than she is now, she would have been absolutely thrilled to learn this secret side of her that she'd never known about before. But right now, when her life has been going smoothly recently, albeit with a few bumps at first, and her biggest joy is to study with her classmate and tutor named Uesugi Fuutarou, Miku can feel this revelation of identity threatening to tear her life apart. She almost did it to herself, too, by almost letting herself loose at her own homeroom teacher. If Nino weren't there...
Taking matters into her own hands, Nino rests her forehead against Miku's, to the latter's quiet surprise. Nino's skin is still a bit icky from the sweat that's dried off by now.
"We'll get through this together, like we always have. I know I haven't always been the best sister to you over the years; I'm fully aware of how much we've argued and fought. But we've always made up and kept going, and I don't want this problem to end any differently for us. In fact, this is the one problem we can't let do that to us. And all the stuff I've said about Uesugi so far - I'm just worried about what could end up happening to you or to everyone else. I only said those things because I'm scared of what could happen, because this isn't like anything we've ever dealt with before. I don't actually hate him as a person, and he very well could be innocent in all this, but we just don't know enough. That's why I said all those things, because I want us to be safe, first and foremost."
The throbbing is gone from Miku's eyes now.
"I didn't mean to cause all this either. I...planned on keeping this to myself so that...something like wouldn't need to happen. But I lost my temper, and if you weren't there to stop me, I don't know what might've happened this morning. Even then, I...I dragged you in here and...and got angry with you, too, and...made your eyes hurt you again, and now we have all this extra stuff to worry about, on top of midterms next week...I didn't mean to do any of this, Nino. I'm sorry..."
"Hmph. Now you know a bit more about what I feel every time I see what you've done to the kitchen whenever you try cooking."
"D-Did you really have to bring that up now!" Miku squeals indignantly as Nino busts out giggling at her own diversion. "I've been trying my best not to leave behind such a big mess! Gosh!"
"Relax, relax, I'm just giving you shit. Consider that payback for shoving me against the wall here."
Finally getting back up to her feet, and with Miku following suit, Nino shakes her head a little, squinting out in the direction of the sidewalk that they were taking to head home.
"Also, you're gonna have to lead the way...I can't see shit right now without my contacts," the purple-eyed quintuplet sighs heavily. "Ugh, walking home like this's gonna be such a pain..."
"You can't put them back in right now?"
"I could, but I want to take a shower and clean my contacts first. I don't want to take any chances in a dingy alley like this, y'know?"
Nino glances back at Miku, whose eyes she can no longer see clearly.
"What, got anything else to say to me before we leave? Might as well get it out now, while we're still in the talking mood," Nino advises.
Now that her eyes are able to look at Nino's purple ones without the throbbing, Miku gets a good look at her sister's strange eyes. The faint blue rings have disappeared, but the irises remain. Miku, who has lived all her life seeing the same blue eyes in herself and all of her sisters, finds herself slowly mesmerized by the sight of her older sister standing before her with a differently colored set of eyes.
"It's...it's nothing. I was just thinking to myself...how pretty your eyes are like that," Miku smiles a little.
"P-Pretty...?"
Nino can't stop herself from blushing suddenly at this unexpected remark, and she has to raise her hand over her face to hide it from her sister, who isn't fooled at all.
"I don't...I don't believe you. You're just saying that to tease me, aren't you?" she tries to scowl at Miku, who shakes her head.
"Have you even seen yourself with your eyes right now?"
"Well, no, since...since I can't see at all without my contacts..."
"Oh, so those contacts you wear make your eyes seem blue?"
"Did I not mention that already?"
"No, I don't think so..."
"Oh...I thought I did. But even then, I thought that was obvious, because you saw me take out my contacts..."
"Oh yeah, you did...I didn't make the connection there, I guess. But here, I'll take a picture and show it to you after we get home and we've taken showers. Wanna take a shower together for today?"
"W-What's with you all of a sudden! You're acting weird right now, you know! First you say my eyes look p-pretty, and now you're - "
"But you always complain to us about how much of a pain in the ass it is for you to wash your hair because it's so long."
"Shut it! Shut it, you! Oh, by the way, you made me drop my phone out here earlier, see if it's still around."
As the two sisters emerge from the alleyway, with Miku leading Nino as requested, Miku looks around the sidewalk for Nino's bunny-sleeved phone, but she cannot see it anywhere. Even after a brief search of the immediate area and some questions to passersby as Nino waits produce nothing, and Miku returns to her sister, defeated.
"I couldn't find it...someone must've taken it," she groans a little, feeling even worse about the whole situation that is entirely her fault. "I'm...really sorry about all this, Nino."
"Eh, whatever. It didn't have much on it anyway, I recently backed up all the photos and stuff I had on it to my computer, and there's nothing on there that people could use to blackmail me or whatever. I'll just call to cancel that number and get it replaced, it's not a big deal. Though I do need to find another one of those bunny phone jackets, does the phone store we went to a while back still have those?"
"Maybe, but I can search for one online and buy it for you."
"Eh, I like going in person more. You're coming with me, though, and you don't have a say in this."
"Fine, fine."
"And do my eyes really look that pretty? Or are you just messing with me? Be honest with me right now."
"They fit you. You've always said purple is your favorite color, right?"
"Y-Yeah, but...I just want all of us to match..."
"Pfff...you're still such a kid, Nino..."
"Sh-Shut up! Listen to me, Miku! Mikuuuuuuuu!"
"Earlier yesterday evening, at roughly 9:10, police were investigating what is possibly the largest drug cache found in the city. During the investigation, a suspect managed to enter the investigation scene unnoticed and proceeded to extract one of the packages inside and managed to escape. Senior Officer Yamaguchi is here with us to elaborate..."
Doctor Nakano Maruo, calmly sipping from a cup of afternoon black coffee, is watching the news in his office on the laptop on his desk when a curt knock raps on his door.
"Come in," he says, and the door, as instructed, opens with a slight creak.
"It's done. Everything's...packed in, and...sorted. Had to get rid of...some of the samples I recovered because...they broke, but...most of it should still be good."
The head physician turns in his swivel chair to take a good look at his visitor, who is breathing heavily.
"Good work. Do you need me to take a look at that?" He gestures with his cup of coffee at the young mage's chest.
"No, no need. I can...handle this on my own."
"And what about your tutoring for tomorrow?"
"And what do you fucking think...?"
And so the door closes immediately after, rendering the doctor free to resume his break.
"Reckless as ever, I see..." he murmurs, taking another short sip of his bitter coffee before turning back to watch the news.