A/N
Dan the Bloody: after reading your review, I want you need to be more specific with which parts of Nino's and Miku's dialogue you did not like so that I can more accurately follow along with your critique, as their dialogue is 60 to 70% of the whole chapter.
I reread the chapter a few times, but I'm not seeing what about Nino's reasoning you think is invalidating what the story's built up so far, so you'll have to specifically point those parts out to me so that I can either explain why I think they're still appropriate or see what I can change. Unless, of course, they're the parts that I'm about to respond to below.
I'm not too sure what you mean by "not strong enough of a reason" when you brought up Maruo; not strong enough of a reason for what, exactly? If I'm understanding you correctly, you don't like how I had Miku bring up their dad in the argument because it feels like it came out of nowhere. If such is the case, Miku brings up their dad there because she's trying to fight back against Nino in their argument; she doesn't want Nino to always dictate the pace and she obviously doesn't like how Nino is putting such a big target on Fuutarou, but she doesn't have any solid proof of her own that would exonerate him, so instead she tries to divert Nino's blame away from him.
So to me, it makes sense that Miku tries to bring up someone else who could be responsible for their situation. To add, I don't think in the manga Miku is ever seen interacting directly with Maruo, let alone have any dialogue to him/about him. We've only ever seen Maruo talk to Nino, Yotsuba, and Itsuki at all, highlighted in chapter 54; there is one scene during the Hot Springs vacation arc when Maruo is seen in the same frame as four of the girls who are all disguised as Itsuki at the time and another time in chapter 115 where Maruo is depicted eating dinner with his daughters all together "for the first time in ages", but if I'm not mistaken these are two of the only parts in the manga where Maruo is seen with all his daughters like that. And now that the manga's done, we'll never know the exact extent of the relationship between Maruo and Miku specifically, but what I infer from the lack of depiction/interaction of those two together in the source material is that Miku at most has a lukewarm relationship with Maruo, and therefore more likely to turn to him as a possible suspect in her argument with Nino, especially when she's under pressure like she was from Nino. This would likely change if there is in fact some kind of depiction of these two in particular in the manga, but it would need to be a significant enough scene for me to reevaluate my reasoning here.
However, after reading that section of their dialogue over, I do think that I didn't do a good enough job of having Nino scold Miku for even daring to suspect Maruo; Nino strongly identifies with her sense of family, and while it's traditionally associated with her sisters, it's only natural for her to extend that to Maruo as well. Plus, the manga does make a point to give Nino at least some dialogue that shows that she does care about him to a tangible extent, emphasized in chapter 104. Slightly expanded Nino's counter-response to Miku's accusation of Maruo to better fit her character.
Finally, even though I understand that you're only mentioning this to try to explain what you didn't like in the chapter, I heavily disagree with your notion that the quintuplets themselves are stupid; just because they're all book-dumb doesn't mean they can't act like sensible people outside of an academic setting, and I believe the manga strongly portrays them as such. Possibly it's my love for the quintuplets that's bleeding through here more than anything, and certainly the girls can say dumb things, make dumb decisions, and act like dummies outright at times, but I will not treat the girls as though they do these things just because they can't get good test scores; that kind of reasoning doesn't sit right with me, especially when I feel the source material never did either.
Which leads me to the last bit of your review that I want to discuss: Nino's opinion of Fuutarou. Chapter 6 of the manga, which is the basis for chapter 24 of this fic, establishes that Nino doesn't necessarily hate Fuutarou because of him in particular, but more so because of the threat he poses to the family life that she enjoys with her sisters and wants to preserve and protect from outside influence. In addition, in contrast to the manga, this fic has been building Nino's affection for Fuutarou from early on, ever since chapter 10 following the warehouse incident, to be exact. And when the argument between Nino and Miku begins to wind down towards the end of chapter 29, when it finally hits Miku that she might've been a mage all this time, Nino sees Miku's reaction and correctly guesses that she feels miserable about the whole situation, so she comforts her, because as much as the two of them may argue and fight, Nino always prioritizes her bond with her sisters above anything else and will strive to keep it intact, given enough time or reason.
All this, plus the fact that Nino isn't one to hide what she's thinking from her sisters if she feels she needs to speak her mind on something, is what makes her able to say those things about Fuutarou to Miku in chapter 29. It sounds odd, I don't doubt that, for Nino to say something like that this early on when you compare this fic's timeline to the original manga's, but given how this fic has been progressing and what's transpired here as opposed to how the original manga panned out, I feel Nino's opinion of Fuutarou here is justified.
Edit: Another 10 chapters, another short break. I'll be taking this time to go through the story as a whole to proofread and make edits wherever I see fit; if I decide to make any changes that I feel are important enough to be worth going back to read, they will be listed in another A/N in the next chapter like before. See you on the other side.
Can't tutor today because of work that came up, and I can't be at school tomorrow either, so enjoy your extra day off. I will still be there for the Friday overnight session, though, as promised.
Sorry for bailing out on you after you got Nino and Itsuki to come join us. Tell them sorry too for me in case they're angry at me for this too. I'll see you all on Friday.
Nakano Ichika gazes down at the text message she's received from her tutor and classmate yesterday afternoon.
It's lunchtime. The cafeteria is crowded as usual, with students flocking in from all around campus from their classes to come buy and eat lunch here. For today, she and her sisters have decided to eat lunch here as well, and Ichika herself has found a table to reserve it for her sisters while they buy their lunches and bring hers along with them.
"Aaaaa ~ " she sighs aloud, leaning back in her seat and angling her gaze up at the corner of the ceiling to her left.
Fuutarou really knows how to predict people's behaviors, Ichika thinks to herself. Nino and Itsuki both got quite upset when Ichika notified them of the text she received from him, just like he predicted. She'll have to have him make it up to her sometime for having to cover for him in this respect.
Miku and Yotsuba, on the other hand, naturally, were on the opposite side of the spectrum in terms of reactions. Miku, especially, got quite worried that something happened to him and tried to convince Ichika to text him back, asking him about his situation. It even got to the point where Miku asked Ichika to give her Fuutarou's phone number so that she could get in touch with their tutor herself, but Ichika was barely able to convince her that she shouldn't bother him, with how busy he must be if he took the time to tell the girls that he wouldn't have the time to make a tutoring session.
Ichika smiles to herself slightly. It's so like the five of them to be evenly split down the middle like this: Miku and Yotsuba on one side, and Nino and Itsuki on the other, with of course Ichika staying in the middle as the mediator between the two. Though, just by virtue of studying with Miku and Yotsuba under Fuutarou's tutelage, maybe she isn't exactly neutral as she pictures herself to be.
Leaning forward in her seat again, Ichika rests her forehead against her phone screen that still displays Uesugi's text.
Fuutarou-kun is okay.
He'll be fine.
He's just really busy.
That's all there is to it.
That's all.
What if he's not?
What do you mean, what if he's not?
Of course he'll be okay.
He always is.
He's just a little tired lately.
That's all.
You don't know that.
We've been studying together for weeks now.
He always shows up.
It's just that he had to miss today because of work.
There's nothing else to it.
That's all.
What if he doesn't show up today either?
He will.
He'd let me know if he needs to miss more days.
I'm the only one who has his number.
He'll come back to tutor us.
That's all.
What if something happened to him?
Nothing will happen to him.
He's strong.
He's hard-working.
He just needs a break.
That's all.
What if he doesn't want to teach you anymore?
That can't be.
If he didn't want to teach, he would've never started.
He would've never bothered to put up with them for so long.
He would've never taught them all this time.
Right?
What if he hates you?
Ichika sets her phone down loudly on the table.
"He doesn't hate us..." Ichika finds herself murmuring with closed eyes - though to whom, she has no idea. It doesn't feel like she's talking to herself, but it does at the same time.
When she opens her eyes, her phone sports a pair of divine golden eyes back at her.
When she blinks, they disappear. Of course a phone wouldn't have eyes, what is she thinking? She's been making sure she's getting plenty of sleep lately...
Resting her head back down on her arms as she turns off her phone screen and pockets it to put it away, the eldest quintuplet listens to her own breaths bouncing off the table. Fuutarou-kun is fine, she said to her sisters. His missing one day isn't a big deal, everyone's got days when they can't come to school because they're sick or something happened that they need to take care of.
What if he misses two?
Ichika gives her head a little micro-shake. Why should this be a big deal? It's Fuutarou-kun. He knows how to handle himself out there, whatever it is that he's doing. It's obvious that he comes off as someone who's been doing what he does for a long time; he carries himself with that kind of confidence and decisiveness that only a veteran at his or her craft would exude.
But everyone makes mistakes, right?
What if Miku's right? What if something did happen to him? Just like how everyone can miss a day or two of school, even the most experienced people can still slip up and make mistakes at their professions. Fuutarou-kun's profession is a mage. And...the night she and her sisters found out about his secret identity, he brutally knocked out or slayed bad guys in their defense, with no hesitation - with a kind of cold and merciless efficiency that only someone who is accustomed to a life of killing is capable of demonstrating.
If that's the kind of world Fuutarou-kun lives in, what's to say that there can't be a day that comes when he makes a mistake, or someone gets the upper hand on him, and something bad ends up happening to him?
Ordinarily, Ichika wouldn't get so worked up over this; if none of her sisters felt the need to freak out over his two-day absence, then she wouldn't find herself doubting her own confidence in Fuutarou-kun either. She's the eldest; she's the one who's supposed to keep cool, to keep calm and act on.
Besides, he's just their tutor, their classmate. She and the rest of the quintuplets have only known Fuutarou-kun for barely two months. Ichika herself has certainly known other people in her life for far longer and has gone living out her own life without a care in the world for them, and as rude as that might sound, it's the truth. You can't give the same amount of thought and care for everyone you know in life, and instead you have to reserve that kind of dedication and energy to the people you care for the most - and for Ichika, those people are her sisters, who are everything to her. And she's sure that the rest of them would say the same.
Yet Fuutarou-kun...or more accurately, the image of him...still persists, still stubbornly lingers, much like the boy himself, in her mind.
Before today, before she got this text message from him, the eldest quint would have never thought that a boy like Fuutarou-kun would be able to leave enough of an impression on her to get her to even think about him like this. She doesn't think this because she's arrogant and that she's too good for people; it's just that like Nino, Ichika can be a very social girl who can make friends easily and be able to hang out with practically whoever she wants, thanks to her good looks, charming personality, and impressionable sociability, and so she's met and known all kinds of people throughout her life. She's met far more handsome, far more courteous, and far more charming boys than the boy who was hired to be her and her sisters' tutor and known some for much longer than she's known him.
So why is it that someone like Fuutarou-kun, of all people, is someone who stands out to her, almost as much as her own sisters? How is it that someone as blunt as Fuutarou-kun, someone who's as rude, insensitive, bad-mouthed, spartan, work-obsessed, and money-driven as Fuutarou-kun, is able to leave more of an impression on her than all these other people? Sure, maybe it's worth mentioning that she's spent a lot of time in a short period of time with him, naturally, him being their tutor and all, but you could replace him with someone different, a regular tutor, for example, and things would be completely different. What about him makes him stand out, exactly?
What about him makes him worth the worry that she has for him that she's secretly hiding?
Is it the intrigue that he represents? He is a mage, after all, and the quintuplets have seen him perform magecraft before. Is it because she wants to know more about this secret life that he lives, outside of their tutoring and outside of school? It's definitely intrigued her at the time that they first found out about his true identity, but as the weeks went by, Ichika was able to get past the whole 'Fuutarou-kun is a mage' deal and focus on treating him simply as their classmate and tutor; it also helps that Fuutarou-kun himself has always frowned upon telling the girls about his other line of work since, understandably, it might distract the girls from what he was originally hired to help them with.
Is it his personality, somehow? But that doesn't seem right either; Fuutarou-kun's personality is just about as dry as a snipped toenail and as sharp as one too, and it's bordered on outright insulting at times, especially in the beginning when he first delved into analyzing their academics more carefully and discovering just how bad of students they all were. Sure, he can be funny at times, but most of the jokes he cracks are either dark or dry humor, which admittedly suit him quite well. Surprisingly, he goes along with Yotsuba's antics quite well for someone with such a dry personality like him, so the shenanigans they get up to together are quite entertaining to watch whenever they do happen. But Ichika senses that Fuutarou-kun is only acting that way because he feels that's the best way to deal with Yotsuba, since forcing a girl like her to study nonstop can't possibly be good for her, and so playing along with her helps her relieve some of the stress that comes with studying.
Is it because of his hardworking image, or his work ethic? Or the fact that he confronted their dad during Golden Week about his family's situation, how he ought to spend more time with them? That can't be it, either; with Ichika's popularity, plenty of people, both boys and girls, have white-knighted for her and defended her in situations where she was being talked badly about or in a sticky situation, and it's not as though Ichika ever felt anything major for people who did so. She's also known plenty of very hardworking people, especially at her part-time job, so it's not as if she really has a thing for people who work hard.
Is it because of his modesty? Not once can Ichika recall her tutor say anything good about himself, and for as much as he shits on the girls' alarming lack of academic prowess and the dumb mistakes they often make during their lessons, Fuutarou-kun always acknowledges the mistakes he himself can sometimes make while teaching and readily praises the girls for things they do right, or things that he can respect, such as learning a new material in a subject they've been traditionally weak in or getting a particularly difficult question correct, as rare as that is. But Ichika has never really found modest, humble boys to be her type, and she's met some boys before in the city who would put on overly self-effacing facades to try to win her favor, whose behavior she found to be absolutely cringeworthy, almost disgusting. Who knows, maybe a boy with just the right amount or the right type of modesty could interest her, but if that's the case, then the type or amount that Fuutarou-kun presents is not it.
Maybe she's just thinking too hard about this whole thing. Fuutarou-kun is, strictly speaking, their classmate who's been hired to be their tutor. There shouldn't be any more meaning to their relationship than that; that should be the end of story. After all, Fuutarou-kun himself is the type of guy who wouldn't want other people to think too much about him either, and he himself would agree that that's all their relationship should amount to, to just student and tutor, or simple classmates.
But even as she thinks this to herself, Ichika knows it's just not that simple. Sure, she can sit here and try to convince herself that all they are, all Fuutarou-kun is to her and her sisters is student and tutor, but ever since that incident at the warehouse, there's no denying that the boy is a bit more than just that. Maybe it's that extra layer of involvement that Fuutarou-kun has that makes the difference? Certainly she's never had to deal with this kind of a situation before, where someone whom she didn't know until very recently turned out to have a potentially huge impact on her life and those of her sisters. But even then, she doesn't think that's quite the case either. Sure, yeah, Fuutarou-kun probably saved their lives that night; that she's grateful towards him for. But just because he did so doesn't mean she ought to owe her whole life to him, and he's certainly never acted as though that should be the case either.
Then why is she so bothered by this? Why is she letting herself be bothered by a single text that he's sent her?
Why does it feel like somehow, it's her fault that Fuutarou-kun wasn't able to show up yesterday for tutoring, even though it couldn't possibly have been?
No, it's not her who's at fault. She's worrying about this because Miku is - maybe Yotsuba hasn't noticed it yet because she's too busy goofing off, but Ichika has, that Miku more than likely has feelings for their classmate and tutor. The weeks of tutoring that Fuutarou-kun has administered to the quintuplets has sparked a change in Miku that Ichika hasn't seen in her for a while, ever since middle school, because back then, when they first entered junior high, Miku still had much of the personality the five of them had when they were kids, back during the days when they truly were identical quintuplets who did everything together and dressed the exact same day in, day out.
Miku's middle school years were rough, a series of unfortunate events, if you will. Such events shoved her into the role of a quiet, meek wallflower who wanted to do nothing more than come home, shut herself in her room, and play games or watch documentaries or anime. The bright smile she had when they were kids was replaced by a perpetual, cold frown, and the bright blue eyes that were once so full of life and youth shed their energy as though it were only a mask, now shrouded half the time by the same long bangs that she's kept from back then. And despite the rest of their best efforts to protect Miku the best they could, there was only so much they could do on their own.
It's not as though Ichika feels guilty over Miku's transformation. They can't remain kids forever; people grow up and change, and she's always the one who tells her sisters to make sure to enjoy the moment, because middle school, and now high school, only lasts for three years of their lives. Miku's circumstances were unfortunate, yes, but she's done her part as her older sister and is continuing to do so wherever she deems appropriate. It would be a waste of her time to feel regret over what she couldn't do or to dwell on what's happened, because at the end of the day, Miku is alive and well to remain her sister today. And that's all she can really ask for, isn't it?
And thus, Ichika quietly accepted this new Miku as the status quo without question. This is how things turned out, so it's just how things are now. Expecting Miku to change back or to grow out of that cold, lonely shell that she hides in to distance herself from others nowadays does no favors for anybody involved.
And then Fuutarou-kun began tutoring them.
In the same vein that Ichika cannot understand how a guy like him would be able to make an impression on her, Ichika doesn't quite understand still how he's been able to make anything of a positive impression on Miku. But whatever it is that he's doing, Fuutarou-kun is drawing the old Miku back, or perhaps more appropriately the young Miku. Ever since he began his post as their tutor, Miku has slowly been peeling that shell that's formed around her since her junior high years and crawling out of her comfort zone: studying her weak subjects on her own, cooking more frequently with Nino and making a concerted effort to listen to her instructions more carefully and not get into as many arguments with her as before, spending more time with her sisters rather than spending it holed up in her own room by herself...
And when Fuutarou-kun is around, either tutoring them or hanging out with them at school, Miku's face seems much brighter than Ichika remembers it being in recent memory, at least compared to before they came to know their tutor. Her once sullen and shaded eyes are now wide and attentive, her somewhat slouched posture, both while sitting and walking, have slowly corrected themselves, her headphones haven't been clasped around her ears as much anymore, and perhaps the most striking difference - she is smiling all on her own.
Just how the five of them used to, six years ago.
Ichika never expected the past to come back. The past is called the past for a reason; wishing for things bygone to return to the present time is folly and a dumb waste of time, something even someone like Ichika who doesn't really care much for her own education by this point can say. But watching Miku slowly return to how she once was, when she was just a happier kid who visibly enjoyed life just as much as her four other sisters did, was the one thing Ichika could have never predicted happening upon Fuutarou-kun's arrival. Seeing Miku happy like that...made Ichika so happy too, both as her older sister and as a fellow quintuplet. Seeing Miku enjoy herself, be happier and hang out more with her sisters and their classmate was a surprise, to be sure - after all, it weren't as if Fuutarou-kun advertised such a thing when he first began his tutoring, but it was a welcome one.
So his sudden absence for two days in a row, which has upset Miku noticeably, upsets her in tandem. It turns out, being invested in one of her sister's happiness means that if her happiness is compromised, so is her own. So much has Ichika been enjoying this changed Miku that she wants to see her continue to be this way, and Fuutarou-kun not showing up for two tutoring days in a row has given Ichika a jarring vibe check that their newfound little joy, both her own and Miku's, hinges on a cornerstone that only Fuutarou-kun can provide - take the cornerstone away, and everything else threatens to simply fall apart.
Ichika's hand subconsciously squeezes its grip around her phone. So much for leaving the past for good - how much more of it will come back to haunt them, she wonders.
Why is she even worrying about all this, anyway? This isn't like her. She's never been one to overthink things...
"IIIIII - chikaaaaaa ~ !"
Grabbing her oldest sister's shoulders suddenly after setting down her lunch tray that has two bowls, one for each of the two quintuplets, Yotsuba leans over Ichika as the latter sits up properly in her chair at the former's return.
"Back already? Oooh, lunch today looks good," Ichika smiles pleasantly back up at Yotsuba, who dances around her to take the seat across from her.
"Today's oyakodon! And yeah, it looks so yummy ~ ! Itsuki's gonna love it!" Yotsuba exclaims happily, having arrived with both her own and Ichika's chicken and egg rice bowls that are quite large for their advertised portions and are brimming with hot, steaming white rice topped with egg-lathered chicken. Nino, Miku, and Itsuki arrive shortly thereafter, right when Yotsuba takes her seat at their table, and as Ichika notices, everyone seems to have gotten a large oyakodon lunch for today.
"Wow, it's been a while since we all got the same lunch. What's the occasion?" Ichika giggles, looking around their table.
"So? It can happen sometimes; we are quints, after all," Nino shrugs nonchalantly as she clasps her hands together briefly before pulling her wooden disposable chopsticks apart.
"Weren't you the one who said we don't have telepathy or whatever?" Miku questions her sister.
"Oh c'mon, do you really have to bring that up now?"
"Maybe we really do have some kind of telepathic link!" Yotsuba beams while striking a thinking man pose across from three of her sisters.
"Wasn't there one time we tried acting like we really did have that, back when we were kids?" Ichika mentions.
"P-Please do not remind me of such times," Itsuki groans terribly. "I feel like I could just die of embarrassment if people in this school were to find out about all the silly things we did when we were young..."
"Yeah, like how every time we'd play house, you'd always try to be the mom, remember that?" Nino laughs, prompting Itsuki to pout dangerously cutely back at her.
As Nino and Itsuki begin to banter back and forth about their times as kids, Ichika takes this opportunity to lean in towards Miku.
"...how have you been holding up today?" she asks quietly.
"Holding up? What do you mean?" Miku glances back at her quickly.
"You know...with Fuutarou-kun."
"Oh...well...I've..." Miku's eyes fall back down to her own steaming fresh oyakodon bowl. "...I'm fine. I thought about what you said yesterday, and...I really shouldn't let it bother me too much. It just...came as a surprise, and I didn't know how else to react to it at the time. Sorry for...bothering you with trying to get Fuutarou's number and all that."
"Eh, it's fine, don't worry about it. Everyone's got their days, after all." Ichika pats Miku on the back. "Besides, he'll be here later today, and he'll be with us for the whole day and then some."
Miku nods. "But seriously, you should give me his number at some point," she pouts back at her oldest sister.
"Maaaaaybeeeeee ~ or, I got a better idea, maybe you could ask him ~ "
"Ichika...!"
After school, the quintuplets head home all together for the first time in a few weeks, now passing the same Family Mart convenience store from which Yotsuba bought fried chicken at one point that's close by their high-rise home.
"I don't want to see the two of you run away from this, now that you've promised to study with us," Ichika smiles over at the two former members of the Anti-Uesugi Fuutarou Coalition, who both scowl back at her.
"We aren't, gosh! We keep telling you this," Nino insists.
"Yeah, but yesterday you two got pretty mad that he suddenly wasn't showing up because of his other work, so I just wanted to make sure ~ "
"He will be here today, yes?" Itsuki fidgets rather nervously.
"He should be. That's what his text said, that he'll see us all on Friday." Ichika raises her phone and shakes it a little over at her sisters. "Why, are you looking forward to it, Itsuki-chan?"
"I-I am not looking forward to it! I am merely concerned for us collectively because midterms are next week and we effectively only have this weekend to prepare!" Itsuki defends herself hastily.
"Oh, so what you're saying is that you would've liked it if you came to study with us earlier, right?"
"That is...well..." Itsuki doesn't even bother finishing that thought.
"You should've really just asked Fuutarou to let you come study with us anyway," Miku says sympathetically over to Itsuki, whose eyes are now cast down on the ground. "We know you had that run-in and all with him during Golden Week, but...was it really worth losing out on the last two weeks of studying for that, just to decide to come study with us in the end?"
"I am well aware of what I could have done, Miku, but hindsight is always twenty-twenty. Now, I cannot undo that decision; the only thing that matters now is what I am able to do with the amount of time that I have left." Itsuki sighs shortly. "I can only hope that this decision to study with everyone and Uesugi-kun will pay off. It will not be a good look for him or anyone else if he cannot produce the results that he so advertises."
"But that's pretty harsh, Itsuki! I mean, if you think about it, even if you study nonstop with us and Uesugi-san for this weekend, you'll only be going into midterms next week with just a single weekend of studying, right? Just one weekend of studying with him might not, you know, be enough, right?" Yotsuba points out.
All four of her sisters all stare back at Yotsuba, who takes a step back away from them, unsure of why they're looking at her this way.
"U-Ummmm, is - is there something on my face? Maybe some egg from lunch or something...?" Yotsuba wonders aloud with a nervous smile.
"I can't believe it...Yotsuba actually said something logical that she would've never said before..." Nino whispers in a hushed but obviously satirical tone.
"Could it be...? Perhaps Uesugi-kun's tutoring is actually paying off...?!" Itsuki also gasps.
"Oh c'mon, now you're all just being so mean to me!" Yotsuba pouts at everyone while Miku and Ichika both start cracking up at Nino's and Itsuki's dry jokes.
"But it's not as if her test scores've improved all that much," Ichika reminds her sisters, much to Yotsuba's chagrin as the latter begins to whine at the eldest quintuplet to get her to take back her words.
"Oh, that is right...perhaps Uesugi-kun is not adequate enough of a tutor then..." Itsuki rescinds her previous statement almost immediately.
"Mmmmuuuu! Itsuki, Nino, Uesugi-san is a really good tutor! Even if my test scores don't reflect that, he's still a great tutor! It's that I'm just too dumb to show that; his talent as a tutor's wasted on a dummy like me!" Yotsuba persists. "I'm sure the two of you will really benefit from his teaching! It's just that, like I said, you'll only have one weekend to study with him, so maybe it won't be enough for midterms next week!"
"I mean, we know it's definitely not enough for you," Miku slyly adds.
"Uuuu! Not you too, Miku! I thought we were friends!"
"Sorry, I didn't mean that."
"But still, Yotsuba does bring up a good point, all jokes aside," Ichika nods understandingly. "We're all slow learners and bad at studying and such, right? The three of us've barely shown a little improvement despite all the hours of studying with Fuutarou-kun that we've done, and so it's really unlikely that you two'll show any such improvement in your own grades with just this weekend's worth of studying under your belts. And after we get our midterm scores back, you two might use that as proof that Fuutarou-kun didn't do a good enough job of tutoring you, and you'll go back to how things were before."
"We were already planning on going back to how things were once midterms are done, did you forget what our conditions were already, Ichika?" Nino scowls a little over at her older sister.
"I know that, I haven't forgotten. But...I'm just saying, maybe it wouldn't hurt to stick around studying with us for a little bit longer even after midterms. Just throwing that out there..."
"Hmph, in your dreams. If I said I'm going to quit after midterms, I'm going to quit after midterms. Itsuki, you too, don't let Ichika sweet-talk you into staying with them after midterms, got that?"
To Nino's creeping horror, Itsuki doesn't answer her right away.
"...I will be the judge of that, after I assess Uesugi-kun as a tutor," she mumbles under her breath, before Nino takes her by the shoulders.
"Itsuki, you can't leave me, you hear? Itsuki! Itsuki!"
"N-Ninoooo, please stop thiiiis! Y-You must take care, too, not to let your own grades sliiiiip!" Itsuki cries as her sister starts shaking her slowly back and forth.
"But this isn't what we agreed to when we talked that other night!"
"We did not agree to anything! You are simply making things up!"
"Looks like the Anti-Uesugi Fuutarou Coalition is starting to break apart. Miku, Yotsuba, now's our chance to capitalize!" Ichika giggles, rounding up her other sisters as if rallying them to battle against their opposing two sisters.
"Okay, Captain Ichika! I'll get Nino - Miku, you get Itsuki! Ready, set, GO ~ !"
Yotsuba immediately tackles Nino lightly, hugging her from the side and putting her arms around Nino's so that Nino cannot wriggle free.
"Y-Yotsubaaaa! Geddoff me, Yotsubaaaa!" Nino hollers, trying to break free of her younger sister's sudden bear-hug, but even Nino knows that it is a futile effort to try to break free from the grasp of someone like Yotsuba. Miku, who merely walks over to Itsuki's side and readjusts the star-shaped hair clips on her sideburns, watches Nino resign herself to Yotsuba's unbreakable grasp as the fourth quintuplet in question thoroughly enjoys herself with her own antics yet again.
"Nino still cannot go against Yotsuba after all these years, can she?" Itsuki smiles, also watching along with Miku.
"Itsuki, you should stay with us to study with Fuutarou after midterms," Miku suggests quietly so that Nino can't hear with Yotsuba laughing practically right in her ears. "I don't know what you have planned afterwards, but...it's fun. We used to study together too, right? Back in middle school. Let's try it again."
"But that was just between the two of us back then. This time around..." Itsuki begins, but Miku also gives a small smile of her own, a kind of smile that she would normally never make on her own.
"Obviously I'm not asking for us to go back to the past. It's more...for old time's sake," Miku says quietly, but pleasantly. "I had fun...studying with you back then. It'd be nice if we could study together again."
"I have nothing against studying together again as we once did, but...we certainly do not need Uesugi-kun to be constantly involved like he is with you three?"
"Maybe not, if you don't care about your grades actually getting better at all."
"...that actually hurts, Miku..."
"Sorry." Miku puts her arms around Itsuki's left, in a more affectionate version of Yotsuba's bear-hug applied to Nino, and with Ichika enjoying the sight of her sisters all getting along so well together trailing behind them, the quintuplets begin to approach the Pentagon high-rise.
When they step foot onto the asphalt block path leading up to the entrance to the elevator lobby, there is someone standing and leaning against the automatic glass doors, off to the side. His head is bowed so that his black hair blocks his eyes, and his arms are crossed as his messenger bag hangs by his left hip, weighed down by his usual books, reference materials, and study guides.
Feeling a hand rest on her left shoulder, Miku turns in that direction to find Ichika winking at her.
"See? No need to worry," she whispers reassuringly.
As the quintuplets approach their waiting tutor, Uesugi Fuutarou slowly raises his head to behold his students walking up to him with mixed reactions ranging from relief to warm greetings to cold looks.
"Hey, what's up. Sorry I haven't been around for the past two days - been pretty busy on my end," Fuutarou apologizes swiftly as he stops leaning against the glass wall behind him to greet the quints properly.
"You haven't been taking care of yourself, have you, Fuutarou-kun?" Ichika immediately says, taking sharp note of his bloodshot eyes that look even redder than what she last remembers and the shadows cast underneath his eyes now.
"Didn't have the time to. Otherwise I wouldn't have bothered calling off yesterday, y'know?"
"Please take care of yourself, Fuutarou," Miku says worriedly, as much as she's relieved to see her tutor still doing well, despite his obvious exhaustion.
"I'll do that today. I'm staying over for tonight, remember? Ichika's not gonna let me leave, that's for damn sure."
Ichika laughs at Fuutarou's usual bluntness, having forgotten how much he and bluntness go hand in hand. "That's right! You're not leaving our place until you're fully rested!"
"Just do your job and don't try anything funny," Nino snaps lightly, though Fuutarou notes that there's much less animosity in her voice compared to earlier times in the week. "And I want to make it clear to you right now that I don't intend on studying with you all forever. In fact, I'm quitting as soon as midterms are done!"
"That's fine for now, I just want you to give me a chance to prove myself, at least. What about you, Itsuki? Do you feel the same as Nino here, or?"
"Um, I am...undecided. For right now, I wish to simply focus on our midterms, and to make sure that we can all pass it," the youngest quintuplet says resolutely. "I will decide on what to do afterwards once midterms are done."
"Fair enough."
"By the way, Uesugi-san, don't you have a keycard to our place? Why were you just waiting for us outside when you could just wait for us inside?" Yotsuba asks suddenly.
"Oh, that's because I don't have that keycard anymore, and I didn't bother asking your dad for another one."
"Don't have it?" Ichika tilts her head, somewhat confused at this sudden development. "Did you lose it, or...?"
"Gave it to Nino. She locked herself out after our little trial two Saturdays ago, so I gave her mine instead."
Miku then remembers meeting Nino in the elevator lobby and asking her how it was that she was able to get inside when she forgot her own key in the house proper. So Fuutarou gave her his own keycard so that she could go back home properly? That would explain why he's been constantly paging them over the building intercom whenever he's shown up for tutoring after the weekend rather than just letting himself in as he used to...
"Oh, and, uh..." Yotsuba points down to Fuutarou's left hand, which is missing something valuable. "...did something happen to your smartwatch?"
"The watch? I left it back at home, since I'm staying the night. I've managed to clear tonight, so I don't think I'll need to carry it around for today, just my phone should be enough. And I certainly don't wanna have another incident like last time where I walk in on Nino again trying to get my watch back because I left it behind on accident."
"You're still a dick for doing that, by the way!" Nino cries out, her face reddening in remembrance of that one instance.
"So you still aren't over it, huh?"
"Of course not!"
"Well, in any case, let's head inside," Ichika suggests. "Are you hungry, Fuutarou-kun? You probably are, don't lie. We can have Nino fix you something real quick."
"What am I all of a sudden, Uesugi's personal cook or something?! I didn't sign up for that!"
"Oh c'mon, Nino, you're not really going to have Fuutarou-kun try to tutor us on an empty stomach, will you? Just make him something simple, he'll gobble anything up."
"Uh, I never said I was hungry, either..." Fuutarou also protests quietly as the six of them enter the elevator lobby after Itsuki swipes her card and wait for an elevator to come down and take them up to the thirtieth floor, but Ichika swiftly reaches over and presses a hand firmly against his belly.
"I don't believe you for a second; if you haven't been taking care of yourself lately, how are you supposed to expect me to think that you've been eating at all?" Ichika points out. "Are you as bad at lying as Yotsuba is or something?"
"He's probably just intentionally starving himself just so that he can cop free food off us," Nino scoffs disapprovingly as the elevator arrives and opens up for them to take them up to the thirtieth floor. "That's all we are to him, just a food bank!"
"But, Nino, weren't you the one who always brought us snacks and drinks while we study?" Yotsuba counters innocently.
"Th-Those are just snacks! Snacks! Just light refreshments! You don't call that an actual meal, do you?"
"I mean, it is Yotsuba we're talking about, she could eat a whole bunch of snacks and call that a meal somehow..." Ichika sighs.
"Are you sure we're not actually talking about Itsuki?" Fuutarou dryly comments, and the entire elevator, save for the dry joker and one very conspicuously displeased quintuplet, explodes with laughter.
"Are you even TRYING to keep me as your student, Uesugi-kun!?" Itsuki shrieks indignantly over the reverberating laughter of her sisters. "After I finally gave in and decided to give you a chance, and THIS is how you treat me?! Absolutely unbelievable, utterly unforgivable!"
Fuutarou raises his hand in apology. "My bad, that was admittedly a bit of a low-hanging fruit, so I couldn't resist."
Hearing this, Ichika feels her naughty side creep up as she leans in towards the distraught Itsuki who is still pouting hard back at her newly instated tutor while Yotsuba is busy thinking of something like lemons or oranges.
"So...something like a lemon, then? Or an orange, maybe?" she suggests to her tutor, who shrugs at the possibility. "Do they even grow on trees?"
"Yes, both lemons and oranges grow on trees," Itsuki replies crisply.
"So you like the low-hanging ones, huh, Fuutarou-kun? I got you some low-hanging ones right here ~ " Ichika, still undetected by Itsuki, slowly puts her hands right underneath Itsuki's breasts and pushes them up, flattening her youngest sister's shirt around her chest to more sharply define the shape of her mammaries and reveal their exact sizes.
"I-Ichikaaaaa! ! ! ! !" the youngest sister understandably yells out suddenly, throwing her arms over her punctuated breasts.
"A-Aaaaah!" Yotsuba, just now realizing Ichika's joke, dances over in front of her tutor and holds her hands up in front of his eyes so that she can protect Itsuki's chastity. "You can't do that, Uesugi-san! That's - that's n-naughty!"
"I didn't even do anything, though. Other than make a joke about how Itsuki's a food vacuum," Fuutarou replies, and when Yotsuba drops her hands, they reveal a small smirk on Fuutarou's face.
"It's not a joke if it's true," Miku remarks as well, causing her sisters to burst out in another round of giggles again, again to Itsuki's sharp chagrin.
"But the joke's funny because it's true," Fuutarou corrects Miku.
"I-I superbly hope that our tutoring session today will not devolve into an Itsuki bullying session instead!" Sulking angrily, Itsuki turns her back to everyone and plants herself by the corner of the elevator to artificially isolate herself.
"We won't, we won't, we were just having a little bit of fun ~ " Ichika tries to comfort Itsuki, the same sister she teased just a moment ago as the elevator arrives at its destination. "C'mon, we're here, let's go, let's go ~ "
As the six high school kids pour out of the elevator and head for their front door, Nino eyes her new tutor suspiciously.
"You do that for real, and I'm kicking you out for good, understand?" Nino gripes at him quietly so that the others won't hear, but Miku, who's always attentive towards what Fuutarou is doing and what is going on around him, does end up eavesdropping on them, but she pretends not to hear.
"Do what, exactly?"
"Peeking at us, leering at us like you did to Itsuki in the elevator. Don't play dumb with me, you of all people can't do that."
"And what fucking choice did I have when Ichika did that right in front of me?"
"You could've closed your eyes or something!" Nino hisses quickly. "Instead you let yourself get a sweet eyeful, you disgusting piece of shit!"
With that, Nino tosses out a quick sucker punch at Fuutarou, the back of her knuckles connecting swiftly with the center of his chest.
Fuutarou recoils silently, with the only noise he makes coming from the sharp inhale that he takes through his nose. He flinches much harder than Nino expects him to, as if her light slap actually caused him any amount of pain. Watching him raise a hand up to his mouth, Nino eyes him hesitantly as she watches his mouth fidget for a moment. Lowering his hand, Fuutarou sharply inhales again, this time through his mouth, sucking his saliva back in, and Nino spies a small streak of blood on the tip of his tongue before he closes his lips.
"Let's just say..." Fuutarou's voice now grabs Nino's attention, and it sounds audibly strained in some parts as the quintuplets let themselves into their penthouse. "...it was a sight for my goddamn sore eyes. Nothing more than that..."
Not knowing what to do, Nino keeps her questions to herself as she pulls off her shoes.
"...alright, we'll stop here for now."
Letting out a bit of a tired cheer, Ichika and Yotsuba close their notebooks and slump in different directions, Ichika over the glass table and Yotsuba back against the long couch once their tutor signals the end of this first part of their overnight studying session.
"Good work, Fuutarou," Miku says considerately to her tutor, who also closes the reference book he's been using to tutor the girls and sets it down on the table. Fuutarou gives her a small nod back, raising his hand to rub his forehead with a few fingers in an effort to de-stress after having taught the five girls for the past four hours.
"How was it so far, Nino? Itsuki?" Tilting her head on her arms to take a look at their two new arrivals, Ichika smiles weakly over to them. "Not bad, right?"
Itsuki, having taken off her glasses, remains silent at first, while Nino simply scowls back at her older sister.
"Don't make it sound like that!" Nino snaps back.
"You don't seem that tired, Nino," Yotsuba points out, seeing that she isn't sharing the same mental exhaustion as herself or Ichika.
"That's because Nino's been listening in on our lessons a lot of the time, remember?" Ichika reminds Yotsuba, pulling her head up off her arms now so that she can support it instead with her left arm, with her elbow on the tabletop. "She already knows how Fuutarou-kun teaches; she was always just one step removed from actually coming over and studying with us."
"Well, we were studying English tonight, primarily," Fuutarou also points out as he eyes the small stack of lined paper that's filled with the quintuplets' handwriting from all the English spelling exercises that he's made them do to get the hang of the vocabulary that they'll likely be tested on during their midterms next week. "Nino's best subject is English, after all. So it's only natural that she's the one who has the easiest time here out of you five."
"When did you even get a good grasp of English anyway, Ninooooo ~ ?" Yotsuba yawns mightily in the middle of her sentence. "I don't think we've really seen you speak English much, and it's not like we get many foreign exchange students as classmates, either. Maybe you've just been hanging out with foreigners or people who just speak English well in the city or something?"
"And your favorite show's that one Korean drama we sometimes all watch together, and as far as I've been able to tell, it didn't really have English in that, obviously," Ichika adds.
"W-Why're you asking me? I don't know why, either! I just picked up English faster than the rest of you, there's nothing more to it than that!" Nino hastily defends herself.
"People can be good at subjects that you wouldn't think they'd be good at; it can happen," Fuutarou shrugs.
"Hey, what'cha trying to say about me there?" Nino glares back at her tutor with narrowed blue eyes.
"I wasn't trying to insult you, for fuck's sake. Have I ever questioned where and when in the hell you exactly managed to get a leg up on the rest of your sisters in the English learning department?"
"...I bet you were thinking it, though."
"Goddamn it, Nino."
As Fuutarou and Nino devolve into their usual bantering discourse, Ichika ponders Fuutarou's statement about the subjects that the quintuplets excel in. It's certainly strange that, given her own part-time job, her best subject isn't English, but rather, mathematics. And she isn't sure exactly when she developed an affinity for math over her other subjects; it's not like she ever went out of her way to study math in particular or anything...
Meanwhile, Miku keeps her eyes glued to her tutor. As Ichika noted when they first met him earlier in the afternoon, it's quite obvious that Fuutarou hasn't exactly used the two-day break to rest himself, but it's also clear, at least to her, that Fuutarou's condition has gotten...worse, somehow. He's certainly done a good job hiding it, though, as none of the other quintuplets seem to have noticed, though Miku gets the feeling that Ichika might already have an idea because it's Ichika, she's the best among the quintuplets at being able to read the situation about a person.
But his behavior today has been filled with constant quick throat clearings, brief forehead rubs, short chest presses with the base of his palms, and small expressions of acute pain that accompany the aforementioned symptoms. His throat clearings are understandable, as he's the one who talks the most due to his position as tutor, and naturally he can be stressed out by the quintuplets' overall academic stupidity, especially when Yotsuba's involved. But the chest presses? Unless tutoring the girls has brought him so much stress that he's starting to have respiratory problems, which would be a bit odd to say the least, those chest presses are markedly out of place in his usual tutoring behavior routine.
"Fuutarou," she calls out finally, unable to keep her urgent question bottled up any longer, and Fuutarou turns to her with drained, bloodshot eyes. "You're more...stressed out than usual. Is everything okay...?"
The nature of Miku's concerned question gets everyone's attention, and suddenly Uesugi finds himself once more the center of attention, though for a different reason than the past four hours. Even the formerly opposed Nino and Itsuki gaze back at him, now that Miku has pitched this kind of a question to him.
Taking a few seconds to contemplate, Fuutarou closes his eyes briefly to take a deep breath.
"I'm not sure if your dad'll appreciate me telling you this..." he says slowly, his black eyes still unsure of the consequences of what he's about to say, but they steel themselves suddenly as they rise up to look back at the quintuplets as a group. "...but...whatever, fuck that guy. I met up with him a few days ago, and he told me that he's adding another condition to my tutoring position."
"Condition? What kind of condition?" Ichika asks.
"If any one of you fails, I'm gone as your tutor."
At first, only silence responds to Fuutarou. And then -
"Oh, what the hell, then! All I need to do is fail my midterms if that's the case!" Nino snorts loudly, throwing up her hands to the air above her. "And we all know how good we are at doing that!"
"Don't you fucking dare, Nino."
A voice that only Nino has heard before crawls out of Miku's throat and pollutes the living room. The voice is husky and coarse, but more alarmingly, it's absolutely murderous - so much so that every quintuplet except for Nino and Miku can feel the hair on the back of her neck rise up in subconscious fright.
Hearing this kind of voice rear its ugly head again, Nino immediately locks eyes with her younger sister - only to find that those eyes of hers, the ones with blue rings and horribly dilated and empty black pupils, are back, in full view for everyone to see. Nino has to stop her, before everyone else sees them, especially not Uesugi, though it's probably too late.
But before she can scramble to calm Miku down -
"Relax, Miku, let's not blow up the house again."
Blinking at the sound of Fuutarou's firm voice, Miku turns to him again, her strange eyes gone as soon as they appeared. Clenching her fists, Nino, now realizing that Fuutarou may very well have gotten a glimpse of Miku's mutated eyes, tensely watches the two of them, but especially Fuutarou, to gauge what his reactions are. So far, though, their tutor doesn't seem to have noticed...
"Y-Yeah, let's not, um...let's not get into any big arguments here, with our midterms right around the corner..." Ichika raises her hands at Miku to also get her to calm down, but she still silently wonders to herself if Miku has ever sounded like that before. "And that's just how Nino talks, right? She's told us what she plans to do afterwards anyway..."
Miku lowers her face, causing her bangs to drape over her eyes completely, as she also realizes herself that Fuutarou may have gotten a look at those weird eyes of hers.
"...sorry...I just..." she mumbles so incoherently that the only word that Fuutarou can pick up is her first.
"It's fine. It's my fault, honestly, I shouldn't have told you girls that," he shakes his head slowly while scowling down at the carpet near the base of the glass table in front of him. "It only serves to add more pressure on you all when you already have enough as it is with me around all the time. I just figured I'd tell you since...I haven't been around lately and I feel like you all should at least know a bit of what's been going on..."
"But it is not as though you have been gone for a long period of time; it has only been two days," Itsuki points out too.
"I can't even use that as an excuse either, huh? Then yeah, I really shouldn't have told you."
"No, you're fine, Uesugi-san. You were honest with us, and...I really appreciate that," Yotsuba says reassuringly, offering another one of her signature warm smiles to her tutor, who looks back up at her just in time to catch the tail end of it, and just like the sight of Itsuki's pronounced breasts from earlier in the elevator, Yotsuba's comforting smile is yet another welcome sight for Fuutarou's sore and bloodshot eyes. "I'm sure we all do."
"Yeah, especially Nino. Now she knows exactly what to do on her midterms," Fuutarou grins darkly, jamming his thumb in Nino's direction.
"I-I was just kidding! I'm not going to intentionally fail them, alright!" Nino blurts out, feeling miffed by her new tutor's grin that she views as sarcastic. "Did you honestly think I was serious about that?"
Fuutarou nods. And it's not just him, either; all four of her sisters also nod along with him.
"E-Even you too, Itsuki!?" Nino cries out in shock.
"I mean, you're the one who's always opposed to Fuutarou-kun, no matter what he says or does," Ichika reminds her. "So of course when you make a threat like that, everyone's going to believe you."
"Okay, I'm not going to just bomb my midterms! There! That should be clear enough!" Nino hotly declares. "Papa would know anyway if we all just got straight zeroes on literally all of our tests, because for as dumb as we are, we at least can get some questions right!"
"Not enough, though," Fuutarou dryly remarks again, soliciting a round of uneasy giggles from the girls around him. Miku, having recovered enough emotionally to speak to her tutor again, faces him properly again.
"So...what do you think, Fuutarou? Are we really in that much trouble for Papa to set that kind of condition on you?" she asks.
"Even without that condition on me, you're all in some deep shit," Fuutarou retorts, still keeping his dark, sarcastic grin. "For all the studying that you all did for the past month and a half, your scores all barely got up past the passing threshold. I wouldn't exactly say that you're all going to pass your tests with comfortable margins, to say the least. And I haven't even gotten to these two yet with their scores."
"Excuse me, we've been studying on our own!" Nino again gripes back at him.
"'We'?"
"Yes! Both Itsuki and me!"
"I can believe Itsuki, but you? Since when have you ever learned to study on your own? Don't you usually just goof off with your friends at school or something?"
"What, just because I have more friends than you, you think literally all I do is hang out with friends all day? I study sometimes too!"
"Color me surprised then, did all that time sitting at the dinner table for the last month and a half get you into the mood for that finally?"
"I would've studied on my own regardless, thanks very much!"
"Okay, okay, let's break it up, break it up," Ichika claps her hands together a few times. "Nino, why don't you get started on dinner? And Fuutarou-kun, you should take a bath, since you'll be staying the night. If you need us to wash your clothes, we can do that for you real quick."
"I'll take the bath, but I'll pass on the laundry, I handle that on my own anyway," Fuutarou says, getting up to his feet slowly with a bit of a groan.
"Shouldn't he wait off on the bath until after dinner?" Yotsuba wonders aloud to Ichika.
"Well, we all need to take baths, and depending on who's in there, we'll all be taking different amounts of time to finish," the eldest quint mentions thoughtfully, though she smiles in Nino's direction as she's speaking.
"...and just why are you looking my way?" Nino frowns, pulling up a lock of her very long peach-red hair.
"Nothing in particular ~ "
"I'll be quick with my bath, then, if something like this's gonna concern you all that much," the young tutor reassures the girls.
"No, it doesn't, you should really take your time in there," Ichika turns quickly to the departing Fuutarou, who leaves the sisters to their own devices while Miku watches him head off to the large bathroom behind the kitchen. Noticing Miku gazing after him, Ichika leans in towards Miku this time. "Doesn't this seem like the perfect opportunity, Miku?"
Miku turns to her oldest sister, with Nino passing by to go to the kitchen and prepare a rather late dinner. "Perfect opportunity...? For what...?"
"Oh, you know..." Ichika points in the direction of the bath, and that's when it clicks in Miku's head, which turns red and shakes from side to side aggressively, causing her Audio Technicas to rattle around her neck.
"I-I can't do that...! What would Fuutarou think..." she mumbles quickly.
"Oh c'mon, you've got him right here, don't you? You have be more aggressive with how you approach him if you want to see anything come out of this."
"I don't know what you're talking about."
"Fufu ~ maybe I don't, but you sure do ~ "
"...uuu..."
Uesugi sits inside the spacious bathtub that looks like it could hold up to five people. As such, the rest of the bathroom is proportionally large - as one would expect of a bathroom of a luxury high-rise, specially one that houses a set of quintuplet sisters.
"Bathroom's fuckin' huge..." Fuutarou sighs aloud, leaning back against one end of the huge bathtub.
I just said that, motherfucker, let me do my job as a narrator.
Ordinarily Fuutarou is not the type to take a dip in the tub; given the usually busy person that he is, his view towards baths is that of a waste of time when he could simply take the alternative that is a quick and easy shower that takes less time, generally speaking. But at Ichika's insistence when she came up to the bathroom door to tell him to take a bath, not just a shower, Fuutarou didn't feel like going against her. After all, he's the one intruding on their house for tonight, and if she wants him to take a bath, he'll do so against his own preference; it wouldn't sit right with him if he went against the owners of the house, especially against the one who's the most mature among them.
Oh well. Since he's already here, he might as well take some time to relax, which is what Ichika wants him to do anyway, telling him to take a whole bath like this. So he slowly spreads his arms out and rests them across the side of the tub, letting his neck muscles relax and sag the rest of his head backwards comfortably.
But of course he can't just relax like this. As his arms spread themselves out and nestle down against the sides of the tub, Fuutarou's mind gets to work organizing his thoughts and the events of the past few days.
The detonator rune that he destroyed with his summoned knife two nights ago was indeed rigged to blow upon destruction or tampering, and in expecting it, Fuutarou was able to parry the force of the small magical explosion at the last second to protect his hands, face, and much of his chest. However, his parry was hasty, and as such he wasn't able to nullify the explosive force entirely, so the bottom layers of magical energy still hit him, injuring him across the center of his chest and leaving him with a nasty cut that spans across both of his own breasts. As large as the wound was, thankfully the magical explosion wasn't terribly concentrated; Fuutarou has reason to believe that whoever rigged that bomb only meant for it to maim and distract, not necessarily to kill whoever tries to defuse it, so the cut that he received from it wasn't able to pierce deep into his body and only mostly did epidermal damage instead, keeping his lungs safe and his ribs intact for the most part, though the ribs nearest to the cut naturally feel quite sore.
The explosion also happened to clip his smartwatch. He didn't leave it behind at home because he didn't feel like he needed it for tonight; he did so because he needs to get around to repairing it from the magical damage it's taken, on top of the physical damage too. He can repair it in both cases, but it's going to take him some time - hopefully he can come up with another alibi to give to Yotsuba to keep her from worrying about it.
He's taken the time to patch himself up so he just needs to deal with a layer of gauze around his chest to hold the magical stitches he's put on himself in place - correction, the gauze is there not to hold the stitches in place, but merely to hide them from view. Then again, his white dress shirt would've sufficed if hiding the magic stitches was all he needed to do, but just in case something happens that he'd lose his shirt in some bizarre circumstance that he can't imagine, that gauze is there.
Though, now that he's in the bath, none of that matters because obviously his shirt is off and he's also taken off the gauze around his chest with it.
Since the wound isn't exactly healed all the way, Fuutarou has made sure to fill the bathtub with just lukewarm water so that his wound won't get aggravated. While he did already take the time clean the wound when he treated it, there are still some dried spots of blood dotting the outline of the large cut, so Fuutarou has peeled whatever he can safely remove off and tossed the specks into the bathroom wastebasket so that they won't dirty the bathwater, on the strange off-chance that Ichika also asks him to keep the bathwater, which he wouldn't understand why.
As for the drugs...once the plastic explosives were defused the hard way, Fuutarou gathered all the metal cases and put them back in their long cardboard box to take to the hospital to store them there with Dr. Nakano's approval. Keeping small amounts of drugs in the adjacent abandoned buildings around their own office at Daikazoku Square is fine by Fuutarou, but a quantity like that is just nothing but bad news, especially if gangsters and drug dealers show up to their door because they've tracked the drugs down somehow. And he's already had enough of that with debt collectors in the past...
The biggest problem that Fuutarou needs to assess following that incident is the fact that his presence is now on the news. His escape on street-level was caught on tape by one of the on-board cameras from a nearby police car, so footage of him is now circulating through the news outlets, though he doesn't need to be worried about being identified under normal circumstances because the cardboard box, luckily, blocked his face and upper body from view of the camera. Even still, a description of his mage's outfit is now in circulation as well, though he can deal with that over time with large-scale silencing spells that will cause the city to slowly but eventually forget about his description, so long as he doesn't do anything to renew the public's interest in him.
But it's not the general public he's worried about, it's the bad guys. The gangsters, Rio himself. Now that his stunt is being reported and circulated, Rio knows without a doubt that Fuutarou is actively working to obstruct his or her progress in the city, and that's a huge advantage that Fuutarou has lost in his silent opposition to Shirazumi Rio. The wounded mage expects Rio to retaliate in some way, by either going after the quintuplets again, now that Rio will probably make the connection that the same mage who thwarted his plan of kidnapping the quints is the same guy who got on the news for interrupting the police's drug bust, even if Rio himself or herself isn't the one actually responsible for setting up that drug cache in the middle of the city, or by hastening whatever schedule or agenda that he or she's got in motion.
Fuutarou is betting his chips on the former, that the quintuplets will once again be in danger. Ichika's suggestion of having him stay over for a night couldn't have been more fortuitous, because it gives him the perfect alibi he needs to stay with them in the aftermath of his bungled investigation to ensure their safety from an attack, should one come.
Briefly running a hand across the magically stitched wound on his chest that is still healing, Fuutarou frowns to himself. Should the girls be attacked as he suspects, and it's Rio himself or herself, would he still be in good enough shape to fight? As Nino unwittingly demonstrated earlier with her slap, the wound is still quite sensitive and raw, and even the lightest of attacks would force a debilitating reaction out of him, and that's all Rio would need to take advantage of to make short work of him, and Fuutarou doesn't expect Rio to be a mere pushover as far as magical ability goes. At least it's only the pain that he needs to deal with; he himself isn't functionally limited at all, though perhaps some of his stronger attacks that could take a toll on his body would have much more immediate and worse repercussions for his wound.
While he soaks in the bathtub, deep in his own thoughts, the door to the bathroom opens suddenly, without warning, and Fuutarou glances up in time to see the door also close behind the girl who's just entered...only to immediately scowl irritably back up at his sudden visitor.
"...aren't you supposed to be minding the food right now?" he asks in disbelief at Nino standing at the door of the bathroom, her tense blue eyes fixed on the blue-hued stitches that hold the large cut across his chest closed together. The second quintuplet has since changed out of her school clothes and into her new Asahiyama High tracksuit for the sake of comfort for tonight.
"Food's going to take a bit to prepare, so you let me worry about that," Nino snaps back, but Fuutarou senses a distinct lack of animosity in her voice now, compared to their usual discourses throughout the day.
"Fine, I'll leave that to you, but just because you're the one barging in on me, doesn't mean I like that very much either."
"Shut up, this isn't your house. If I want to come into my own bathroom, I will."
"One of these days you're gonna wish you didn't say that, just saying." Fuutarou still scowls back up at Nino. "So what the hell do you want? You wouldn't just barge in here knowing I'm trying to take a bath without wanting to talk to me about something."
For a moment, Nino doesn't answer right away, because her tense blue eyes are glued to his chest, whose wound is barely able to peek out from the top of the water. Because Fuutarou hasn't used hot water to fill the bath, the bathroom air is clear and unfogged, allowing Nino to drink in every detail that she sees.
Fuutarou's body, save for his limbs, sports a large number of scars of varying sizes, in addition to the fresh new wound on his chest currently and will surely leave a scar in its place once it's healed too. Many of the scars are big, wide, and sprawling, like tire marks plastered over his skin, but a fair number of them are also much thinner ones, as though he's been slashed and stabbed many times. In a few places, there are even scars on top of scars, and from an angle, they almost look like a very weird tattoo of sorts, though a second look would clarify that this is not the case.
"So that's why you acted like that earlier today right before we got home, huh?" Nino folds her arms at her bathing tutor. "When I hit you on the chest like that."
"Yeah. Maybe next time you should be careful and not hit people carelessly like that."
"You can't blame me for that, I didn't know. That's your own damn problem for not taking care of yourself like Ichika told you to."
"Mm, you're not wrong there, so...thanks for the advice, I guess. Though, again, I have to wonder when you started giving a shit about my health like Ichika or Miku do."
"I don't, okay? Don't get the wrong idea here, I'm just letting you know so that I don't have to keep listening to Ichika or Miku fawn over you like they always do."
"Fawning...? Well, I'm aware that they do care about me, but I think what they're doing is understandable, since I guess they see me as more than just a tutor..."
Leaning his head back again, Fuutarou closes his eyes while keeping his arms spread out on the side of the tub behind him.
"Anything else you wanna vent at me? I'm almost done with my bath, so - "
"You saw them, didn't you? Miku's eyes, that is."
Just as they close, Fuutarou's black eyes open again at the mention of Miku's strange eyes.
"...from when you joked about intentionally bombing your midterms, right?" he murmurs quietly.
"Yeah. So you did see them."
Fuutarou does not answer, so Nino takes this as a yes.
"You knew about them, didn't you? Answer me honestly."
"I did not, no."
"Liar, you didn't even show any kind of a reaction when Miku showed them. I was watching you at the time, don't even try to hide it."
"I'm not lying to you, Nino, I didn't know about this at all. Tonight was the first time I've seen Miku like that."
Hearing the solemn sincerity in Fuutarou's voice, Nino feels compelled to give him the benefit of the doubt for now.
"Then do you know what they are? Why does Miku have those kinds of eyes? Tell me."
"Before I do, tell me what happenned, if something did happen."
Nino pauses for a moment, wondering to herself if it's okay for her to disclose something that's involved Miku without her sister's knowledge, but for her sake, Nino resolves to see this one through.
"Yesterday, our homeroom teacher came in before class started to see if you were there to give you a stack of study guides for you to hand out to the class. You weren't there, so Yotsuba took them for you, and the teacher started talking smack about you, and that pissed Miku off really bad. She looked at him with those same eyes that you saw on her earlier when she cussed me out. I think...I think if I didn't stop her at the time yesterday morning, she might've...done something really bad."
The second quintuplet parts her arms from their armfold and puts her hands on her hips now.
"What are they, Uesugi? I've...I've never known about them until now. Miku said told me earlier yesterday after school that she's been hiding them from us for the past two and a half years, and the rest of us had no idea. Ichika, Yotsuba, and Itsuki have no idea either, though that might be different now after tonight."
"I'm not sure, though I can guess as to what they are with the limited knowledge about the situation I have now."
"Anything's fine. I just want an idea of what it is, because neither of us - me and Miku, that is - have any clue what they are."
"Sure. But before that, answer me this, and answer me honestly, just like what I did for you: are you only asking about Miku's eyes, or are you asking about them because of someone else's, too?"
At this, Nino takes a cautionary step backwards, away from her tutor.
"...so you did know...you knew all this time...!" Nino bares her clenched teeth back at Fuutarou, who rolls his eyes.
"So you wanted to ask about yourself, too, right? And no, I did not know all this time like you think - "
"I don't believe you for a fucking second, Uesugi. I didn't want to ask you about this in the first place because you might act differently towards us, especially Miku, once you learned about our eyes, but now that you've asked me something like that, it's clear now that - "
"Then why the fuck did you even ask in the first place?"
"Because Miku showed them on her own on accident, and you were literally right in front of her! Of course you wouldn't miss something like that! And you're a mage, too, right? You probably feel something like that too if I can feel them, of all people!"
"Speaking of feeling, I felt the same about you earlier last weekend when I went into your room to wake you up. That's why I was reaching out to you right before you woke up, because I wanted to check to see what was wrong with you to be giving off such a strong magical signature like you were. Turns out you were alright, so I let it go - but I guess I still needed to worry about it."
"Yeah, because you probably already knew this about us. You're up to something, aren't you? Fucking spill it already."
"I'm telling you, I'm not hiding anything, I'm just learning about all this today. The only thing I've got to hide is the fact that the soup in the kitchen's going to boil over in about a minute if you don't go take care of it soon."
Having completely forgotten about their dinner that she's in the middle of preparing, Nino jumps a little in fright at Fuutarou's reminder.
"We'll talk about this again later tonight after we're done with dinner!" Nino hisses at him and turns to leave.
"Yo, hold up, one more thing," Fuutarou calls after her, and so Nino freezes before she opens the door and turns around to face her tutor one more time before leaving. "While at the moment I just don't know enough to say this with confidence, I do have a guess to what your and Miku's eyes are for now. But again, I'll elaborate further later after dinner - and after we study a bit more, of course."
"Ugh, more studying...?" Nino groans.
"Yeah, of course. Did you already forget what I'm staying over for?" Fuutarou smirks a little. "But I guess for now, I'll give you something to think about until we talk again later. Those eyes that Miku showed - they might be magical eyes. I don't know too much about them because I hardly run into them myself, but in the magic world, they're known as Mystic Eyes."