A/N
I could have taken the time to go back and proofread the story like I said I would.
Well, the proofreading hasn't happened yet. One of these days it will, though. I'm sure of it. I think...I hope...
"I'll wash the dishes; you girls wait for me at the table so that you can finish up your English assignment if you're all done clearing the table."
"I'll help you, Fuutarou."
"Okay, fine."
"Awwww, that's no fair, Uesugi-san! You're letting Miku help you?"
"Miku's the one who gets the best test scores among you consistently; think of it as best student privilege. That, and we've washed dishes together before, during that one weekend when Nino got rid of most of you from the house when I came over to tutor."
"Ohoho, Miku, you've been putting the moves on Fuutarou-kun already, huh? I see, I see ~ "
"Ichika, it isn't like that! I'm just trying to help..."
"Alright, enough fooling around, all of you. What kinds of snacks does everyone not named Itsuki want?"
"E-Eeeeeeh!? I-I don't get a say in that, Ninoooooo...?!"
"Because you ate all the damn snacks earlier this week!"
As Nino and Itsuki briefly argue between themselves about snacks, Ichika and Yotsuba head to the glass table to get a head start on the English vocabulary and grammar worksheet that Fuutarou has prepared for them to complete while the young tutor in question and Miku begin washing the dishes that they've used for dinner in the kitchen. Indeed, having done this once before, Fuutarou and Miku have allocated roles to themselves to more efficiently complete this chore: Fuutarou, with his dish-washing experience at restaurants, handles the washing and scrubbing while Miku takes the soapy dishes from him, rinses them thoroughly with hot water and sets them in the dish-holder so that they can dry.
"Fuutarou, you missed a spot..." Miku says after taking a dish from him and looking it over carefully, and Fuutarou sets down his current plate to sidestep close to the third quintuplet to take a look.
"Hold it tight for me..." Fuutarou mutters, and he scrubs the missed spot clean with his other hand supporting the plate from behind. Since Fuutarou doesn't just take the dish from Miku, he has to lean in close to her to clean the plate properly - and Miku, realizing how close his face is to hers, leans her own face slowly away from his - but not because she wants to.
Once her small bout with Itsuki is done, with Itsuki grumpily joining Ichika and Yotsuba at the table to do her own tutor-assigned English assignment, Nino enters the kitchen herself to begin preparing some after-dinner snacks.
"Whoa - done with dishes already?" Nino can't stop herself from expressing her surprise to see Fuutarou and her younger sister rinsing down the sinks, with all the dinner plates and utensils cleanly scrubbed and sitting in their racks to dry. "And you didn't even use gloves!"
Scowling a little as he washes his hands in hot water to rinse them of dish soap, Fuutarou turns off the water and shakes as much as water off his hands as he can.
"This isn't a lot of dishes; I'm not gonna bother putting gloves on for this," he replies.
Nino scoffs at her tutor. "You're really lucky you showed up on the night after I did the dishes so you had nothing else to wash. If I'd thought to leave the dishes for you to do tonight, I so totally would have!"
Fuutarou stares at her with no change in facial expression.
"...and?" he asks simply while wiping his hands a little on the back of his shirt, in anticipation of visiting the bathroom again to wash his hands properly this time with actual hand soap.
"W-What do you mean, 'and'? That's a lot of dishes, you know!" Nino breathes hotly, bewildered at this lack of reaction from her classmate. "That was a whole week of dishes that I had to go through by myself, from five people!"
"So what, you want me to tell you good job and give you a headpat for doing all that work?"
"N-No! I don't want you giving me headpats, you creep!"
Miku's mind immediately snaps to the memory of Fuutarou giving her a headpat that one time after one of their earlier lessons.
"Then you should really get your sisters to give you a hand. Miku helped me just now, why not ask one of the others too?"
"Okay, Miku helps me sometimes, but that's really only after I'm teaching her how to cook. Ichika's sleeping most of the time, Yotsuba's probably out somewhere helping somebody, and Itsuki's in her room studying or something!"
"Yeah, half the time it's your fault that Yotsuba's out there somewhere."
"Shut up, will you!"
"And besides, I told you I used to work at a restaurant when I was younger, right? Dishwashing was always a job I could do; it was a job nobody else wanted to do anyway. You think a week's worth of dishes from five people is bad, try just a day from an entire restaurant."
"D-Don't you try to real-world me! That won't get you anywhere, and it certainly won't impress me!"
"You used to work at a restaurant, Fuutarou?" Miku asks curiously, having never heard this one from her tutor before.
"Yeah, as a part time when I was younger. Oh yeah, I only told Nino that, didn't I..." Fuutarou turns back to Nino again, though. "Besides, why the hell would I even want to try to impress you? You're gonna try to drug me again, I bet. Got any more drugs that I don't know about somewhere?"
Nino suddenly lashes out to smack Fuutarou across the face, but he banks to the side to avoid the slap like an Indian ringneck performing its mating ritual and quickly hops past the two girls to avoid more follow-ups from the second quintuplet.
"Don't take too long picking out snacks, Nino!" the tutor calls over, as if tauntingly, as he ducks into the bathroom to wash his hands a second time. Nino, shaking a fist at him, makes a pouting face of her own in his wake.
"God, he's so annoying..." she grumbles, glancing at Miku. "How the hell can you even get along with him, Miku? I can't stand that guy..."
"Do you regret joining us for studying?" Miku asks her sister, offering a teasing little grin of her own.
"From the beginning! And wipe that grin off your face, will you."
"But weren't you the one who said that I look better when I'm smiling?"
"Sh-Shut up! You're getting the context wrong!"
Miku promptly leaves her sister to get their snacks ready and sits down with her sisters to begin her English assignment. Normally English is her worst subject and she absolutely detests studying for it, but with Fuutarou teaching them, studying English has become significantly more tolerable now. Of course, it might not be strictly because of Fuutarou's teaching ability alone that she finds it more bearable than before...
Fuutarou also joins the rest of the quintuplets at the table, but to his slight dismay, some of the girls haven't really progressed very far into their worksheets.
"What've you girls been doing? Just chilling?" he asks, checking each of the quints' sheets. Despite working on their sheets longer than anyone else, Ichika and Yotsuba haven't even gotten past the first couple of questions, while Itsuki is already a quarter way through her sheet, and Miku is practically already halfway on the first side.
"English is so haaaaaard, Uesugi-saaaaan..." Yotsuba whines miserably, pulling her face off her sheet that she's tried completing with her nose as her writing utensil.
"Even though you all did pretty decent when we were reviewing before dinner?"
"Well, that's the thing - we study better if you're with us," Ichika winks at her tutor.
"Oh, is that so? Then what's gonna happen during midterms, then? You're just gonna forget everything because I'm not next to you all while taking them?"
"Ah! That's right, that's it!" Yotsuba's green hair ribbon stands erect at attention again. "We don't need to worry about bombing our midterms because we'll all be in the same classroom! That means none of us'll forget anything Uesugi-san's taught us! This is perfect!"
"Yotsuba, at the rate you're going, your ribbon has a better shot at scoring higher than you will on your midterms," Fuutarou says dryly.
"We used to joke that Yotsuba's ribbon is actually part of her head, and it's taking all the nutrients that's supposed to go into her brain," Miku smiles a little, looking up briefly from her work. While she's talking, Nino rejoins the study group with a big tray of snacks - strawberry Pocky pouches, milk chocolate Milano cookies, and five warm cups of heated barley tea to help reset the palette after eating such sweet snacks. Miku, seeing the snacks, frowns a little at the lack of snacks that she actually likes. "Is this all we have?"
"I mean, we still have the green tea macarons in the cupboard, if you want those - " Nino begins to say, but Fuutarou is already getting up, presumably to fetch those macarons. "Hey, wait, Uesugi - "
"Just get started on your work, I'll get it for Miku."
"Nino, could you please help me with this question? I don't know what this word means..." Itsuki asks, holding up her worksheet at Nino across the table, who leans in and squints to read the question.
"De...ba...tuh...?" Nino grimaces at the word. "I...I don't know either."
"'Debate'. It's 'とろん' in Japanese," their tutor explains while returning with the box of green tea macarons that he hands to Miku, much to her delight. "That's definitely gonna be on your midterms, no doubt about it."
"How did you know where the macarons were...?" Nino asks suspiciously as her tutor sits down next to Miku at the side of the glass table.
"I saw you pulling snacks out from the upper cupboard as I was coming out of the bathroom. Figured they'd be in there, too. Big snack cupboard you've got..."
"Well, yeah...kinda need it, when you've got someone like Itsuki in your family..."
"Ninooooooo..." Itsuki's menacing voice rumbles towards them like rolling thunder.
"Maybe not the time for Itsuki jokes," Fuutarou advises the second quint and points down to her own empty worksheet, causing Nino to stick her tongue out at him and begrudgingly begin her work.
Having watched Miku wash dishes with their tutor and seeing how close the two of them were (read: in proximity), Ichika suddenly scoots over against Miku, forcing her to accidentally push into Fuutarou.
"Alright, pack in, pack in! Fuutarou-sensei, Miku has a question ~ " the eldest quint sings.
"I-Ichika...!" Miku hisses back at her oldest sister under her breath, with her face reddening from the forced contact with their tutor, who looks down at the two of them with concerned suspicion of his own.
Ichika ducks in close to her younger sister so that Fuutarou (probably) can't hear: "Ask him the thing we talked about at dinner. Now's your chance..."
"You had a question, Miku? Even if Ichika's the one forcing you to ask it..." their tutor and classmate asks, deciding to brush off Ichika's out-of-place behavior just now. "Your weakest subject is English, after all..."
"Um...y-yeah...I have...I have a question..."
Taking a quiet but deep breath, Miku readjusts her headphones that've been knocked slightly askew from Ichika's push a moment ago. Looking up at her tutor, she then deploys her question:
"...what type of girl do you like, Fuutarou?"
All the pencils that are writing, tapping, or rolling on their respective sheets of paper simultaneously stop. Like a clock that's run out of battery, the rest of Miku's sisters, save for the eldest, freeze. Perhaps most surprisingly, the quintuplet who's asked this question herself looks straight up at her tutor after asking, as if this is just another question that she's asking her classmate as part of their tutoring session.
"...and what exactly does that have to do with our midterms, might I ask first...?" Fuutarou slowly inquires back with a narrowed eye of puzzlement.
"Indeed, I actually cannot agree more! Miku, please refrain fr - " Itsuki begins to say out of embarrassment for her sister, but Yotsuba, sitting next to her, trumps her protest with,
"Suddenly I'm interested too! Uesugi-san, do you have a type? Like what kind of girl suits your fancy the most?"
Fuutarou quickly scans the quintuplets. Miku is looking up at him intently; Ichika looks like she's enjoying the quiet chaos that she's helped to sow; Itsuki is hesitating on what to do; Yotsuba is also staring back at Fuutarou with excitement; Nino...hasn't really reacted much and is quietly filling out her worksheet steadily.
At first furrowing his eyebrows at this unnecessary distraction from their work, Fuutarou suddenly gets an idea.
"Alright, I'll tell you my preferences in a girl. My top five, in fact," he announces, gesticulating with a bit of added flair, much to Ichika's, Miku's, and Yotsuba's varying degrees of delight. "But! There's a catch - if you wanna know that badly, I'll tell you them one at a time for each worksheet that gets done."
"So you want us to finish these worksheets first before you can tell us...?!" Yotsuba groans, reeling in her seat at the table a little, but with instantly renewed motivation, she bounces back and grabs her pencil with conviction. "You drive a hard bargain, Uesugi-san! We'll take you up on it!"
"I-I want no part of this! Please leave me out of this!" Itsuki says hastily, looking around at her sisters with a bit of panic, only to find that all of a sudden, her entire family is now busy jotting answers down on their respective worksheets. "Wait, even you too, Nino?!"
"I'm just doing my work here ~ " Nino shrugs simply, not even bothering to glance up at her younger sister. Isolated as such, Itsuki weakly goes back to her own worksheet.
"Oh, but we can still ask for help for some of these questions, right?" Yotsuba asks with a weak laugh.
"Yeah, of course. That's what I'm here for..."
Within about fifteen minutes, the quintuplets, one by one, finish both sides of their worksheets with a little help from their tutor, and with each one complete, Fuutarou keeps his side of the deal.
"I'm done," Miku announces first, perhaps not surprisingly.
"Alright. Then first up - a girl who's resilient."
"Same here," Nino follows Miku, again perhaps not surprisingly.
"Second - a girl who's energetic."
"I'm done..." Itsuki says slowly.
"Third - a girl who's hardworking."
"Here, here ~ " Ichika is next to finish.
"Fourth - a girl who's outgoing."
"And I'm last as always!" Yotsuba giggles, showing her finally completed worksheet.
"And fifth - a girl who's always willing to help. Give me your worksheets, by the way, I'll grade them."
As the quints hand their tutor their English worksheets, Yotsuba tries to remember all of Fuutarou's preferences in a girl.
"Always willing to help...outgoing...uh, hardworking, I think...I forgot the others..." the fourth quint thinks aloud while using her fingers.
"Energetic and resilient," Miku finishes for her.
"Man...you're basically looking for the perfect girl, then, aren't you, Fuutarou-kun?" Ichika smiles teasingly up at her tutor. "I didn't know someone like you had such high standards for a girlfriend."
"Yeah...should stand to reason that I've never fucking had one," Fuutarou chortles darkly.
"But you don't want one ~ ?"
"I need to worry about taking care of my family first before worrying about how I'm gonna pick up a chick, Ichika."
"Aw, c'mon, lighten up a little. Then how's this - what do you find cute in a girl? As in, do you like girls with long hair? Short hair? Black hair? That kind of stuff!"
"Ichika, we really mustn't ask him such personal questions like that, he's our tutor..." Itsuki protests yet again, but this time, Fuutarou is the one to calm her down.
"It's fine, I did use this as a way to get you all to do your work here," he points out while grading the quintuplets' worksheets with a red pen, using the traditional circles and checks to indicate correct and incorrect answers. He does make sure to write the circles and checks small though so that he can go over the incorrect answers with each of the quints. "Hair preference...if I had to choose, I think...I've always liked long hair."
Miku, who'd been looking a little dismayed at all the previously mentioned qualities that she didn't have, magically no longer looks dismayed; Nino looks up to blink at Fuutarou and in doing so notices Miku's eager reaction.
"Aww...that means I'm out of the running, aren't I..." Yotsuba groans, adopting the dismay Miku once showed.
"In the running for...what, exactly?" Itsuki asks in disapproval.
"Aha, so long hair's your thing, huh? Well, what do you know, you've got a girl with long hair right next to you ~ " Getting up and tiptoeing around the third quintuplet, Ichika lightly lifts up Fuutarou's unoccupied left arm and sets its hand down on top of Miku's head. "So? What do you think, Fuutarou-kun? Miku's hair feels super nice, doesn't it?"
Glancing over at the top of Miku's head, Fuutarou can't see her face because she's ducking it down so that he can't see the blush that she's got.
"I guess so. I'm not too sure what exactly I should be feeling, though."
"What, doesn't it get your blood pumping, at the very least?"
"Not really."
Pouting at Fuutarou's lack of tact, Ichika turns to her trusty sidekick of a quintuplet.
"Yotsuba, CHEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEECK!" she rattles, pointing at their tutor.
"It's Yotsuba tiiiiiime!" the namesake quintuplet roars, and gunning her engines, she springs off the carpet to round the corner and dive at her tutor, who swiftly drops his red pen and rolls backwards to avoid the headlong dive-tackle from Yotsuba.
"Round two, huh, Yotsuba? And this time you've sold yourself out to the evil mastermind herself, Nakano Ichika!" Fuutarou once more speaks in an archetypal anime protagonist voice as he and the quintuplet in question both get up swiftly to their feet in their second showdown. "I can't have that happen here. I'll have you pay for your crimes!"
"The only one who must pay for his crimes is you, Uesugi-san!" Yotsuba counters, pumping her fists eagerly. "Surrender now, and I shall spare your life! Resist, and I can't guarantee your safety!"
"We'll see about that, Yotsuba!"
And with that, Fuutarou turns and makes a break for it. For the second time, Fuutarou runs around the first floor with Yotsuba nipping at his heels like a guard dog chasing out a cat burglar.
"...you told us about them doing this before, right?" Nino sighs as she watches the two of them do laps around the house, and Miku nods. "I guess this's what it'd be like if we could keep a dog and a cat around the house."
"A tutor really should not be goofing off like this..." Itsuki frowns deeply, munching on a bag of strawberry Pocky in the meantime.
"You're one to talk, Itsuki, watching them run around like that while munching on snacks. Is this like watching TV for you?"
"I mean, it is quality entertainment..." Ichika laughs as Fuutarou, intentionally pretending to trip again, lets Yotsuba catch up to him in the interest of time and gets tackled for his trouble to the ground, resulting in Yotsuba lying on top of him with her right ear conveniently resting on his chest.
Noticing where Yotsuba's head is, Nino takes a quick glance up at Fuutarou's chest - and sure enough, he's suppressing a noticeable grimace of pain that, to the others, probably can pass as a look of discomfort.
"Yotsuba, w-what are you doing now?! Please get off him, that is not something a student must do with a - " Itsuki begins to say, but then Yotsuba pulls her ear off her tutor's chest and immediately cries,
"Your heart's beating real fast, Uesugi-saaaaaan!"
"No shit, Sherlock, I was runnin' around with you this whole time!" Fuutarou barks back up at her, causing Ichika and Miku to laugh in the background. Nino, too, even snorts under her breath at this little element of manzai between the two of them. "Okay, that was enough screwing around - let's get back to work before Itsuki kicks me out of the house."
"I never said I would do anything like that..." Itsuki frowns indignantly back at her tutor as he and Yotsuba resume their spots at the table so that Fuutarou can finish his grading. "You are confusing me for Nino, are you not?"
"Well, you two were part of the Anti-Uesugi Fuutarou Coalition..."
"How the hell did you know we even had a name for that?!" Nino yelps out in surprise, staring back at her tutor in horror.
"Yotsuba told me about it. You know her - she can't ever keep a secret like that," Fuutarou thumbs over in Yotsuba's direction, who chuckles nervously and raises a hand behind her head in apology. "She sold you two out in exchange for some of the mandarins you had in the fruit bowl on the dinner table."
"HOW CHEAAAAP!" both Nino and Itsuki cry out in unison as Ichika and Miku once more laugh together at their sisters' own set of antics.
"Okay, done grading your worksheets..." Fuutarou says after a minute or two while the quints chat in the meantime, waiting for him to finish. "To the surprise of absolutely nobody...Nino did the best again with a score of 40."
The quintuplets let out a painful mix of reactions ranging from quiet cringes to loud groans as their tutor passes back their work. When Nino receives her paper back, just underneath her score, there's another number - 1.
"All this studying just to get these kinds of scores..." Ichika sighs, hanging her head in defeat after digesting the red 29 score on her sheet.
"I swear I studied very hard in English, too...!" Itsuki whines with a similar lament at her own score of 20.
"Were you even studying properly, then...?" Fuutarou asks the youngest quintuplet.
"Th-That is why I decided to give you a chance!"
"So I'll make the most out of that chance you're giving me. Let's start by going over the questions you got wrong - "
"Hold up, Fuutarou-kun, Nino's been studying English pretty hard lately, you know? She's been studying in her room at night lately, and she's studied so much that she's still managed to score the highest, even without your help," Ichika mentions enthusiastically as Nino looks away from both her older sister and her tutor.
"But English's her best subject; it's not like she needed to study that much to be the best among you girls at it."
"Oh c'mon, don't be like that. Here, I've even got proof..."
"Huh!? Wait, Ichika, wait, wait, wait, don't show him that, Ichikaaaa!" Nino cries out suddenly when she realizes what her older sister's about to do, but it's already too late, for Ichika has her phone out with the audio file ready to play, and her phone is already playing the voice file back by the time Nino dives for her sister's phone.
"What I wanna know is, why the hell do you have a recording of Nino studying English?" Fuutarou, bewildered at the fact that Ichika even has proof of her younger sister studying, reels a little with his eyes fixed on Ichika.
"I'll be honest, I used it as a way to convince Nino to come join us for this weekend," Ichika chuckles lightly.
"Ah...that's why?" Fuutarou nods firmly. "Good work."
As if this were all planned, Ichika and Fuutarou both raise their right hands and give each other crisp high-fives.
"Don't act as if you planned all this!" Nino blurts out in resistance. "Neither of you are that good!"
"Oh ho, but that's what you think. What if Ichika and I really are in cahoots?" Fuutarou projects to the second quint mysteriously, stroking his imaginary beard with posh authority.
Miku also begins to pout back at Fuutarou too. "Fuutarou, you let Ichika help you, yet you told me not to when I said I was trying to...?" she complains. "I see how it is. Meanie Fuutarou."
"Now, now, it all worked out in the end though, right? And also, Fuutarou-kun, you ought to praise Nino for all her hard work, right? Give Nino a headpat too!"
"Nuh uh, no way, no way! I'd rather die than let Uesugi pat my head like I'm his lapdog or whatever!" Strongly protesting, Nino cements her intentions by diving away from the glass table and lifting herself up to the long couch to get out of arm's reach of her tutor.
"Watch out when you go to sleep, Nino, Uesugi-san's hand might show up out of nowhere and give you a headpat while you're sleeping ~ !" Yotsuba catcalls creepily, and working off her tease, Fuutarou slowly reaches his hand out over the glass table towards Nino, even though she's safely out of his reach, while humming the Jaws theme, causing Nino to hiss like a cat back at him and kick at him with her feet.
"Um, can we please return to studying? It is late at night, and we really must wrap this up so that we can go to sleep!" Itsuki reminds everyone.
"But it's a Friday night, though? It's not like we have anything tomorrow," Ichika shrugs, but Fuutarou nods in agreement with the youngest quint as he resumes his seat again.
"No, Itsuki's right, I've been screwing around a little too much. Let's go over these answers real quick, shall we? Let's begin by me telling Yotsuba for the thirteenth time this week that you don't spell 'rice' as 'lice', goddamn it!"
Another round of hearty quintuplet laughter fills the warm Nakano living room.
"Eeeeeh...!? But - but Uesugi-san, we can't make a guest sleep on the couch here!"
"Don't worry about it, I've slept on worse. Besides, you're not the one making me sleep here, I'm doing it out of my own free will."
Studying is concluded for the night, and after about an hour of winding down consisting of another round of warm barley tea and some board games, the girls and their tutor are getting ready for bed, and Yotsuba, who's brought up the ever-important topic of where Fuutarou would be crashing for the night, is arguing with her tutor over the issue.
"But even still, we can't have that! What will our neighbors think if they hear about us letting a guest of ours sleep on the couch?"
"We have neighbors...?" Miku dryly points out.
"Yeah - last I checked, this whole thirtieth floor belongs to the Nakanos," Fuutarou shrugs. "Your nearest neighbors are like, three floors down or something because they haven't found anyone else to fill up the two floors below you."
"Y-You know what I mean, Uesugi-saaaaaan!" Yotsuba whines loudly, shaking her fists at her tutor and causing the hoodie of her bear pajamas to shake back and forth behind her neck.
"I don't see any problem with leaving him down here to sleep," Nino's voice calls out as the quint herself emerges from the bathroom, having brushed her teeth and otherwise prepared for bed. "Where else is he going to sleep, anyway?"
"He can take my bed," Miku suggests. "I can just spend the night with someone else."
Nino starts to frown at her sister's suggestion, but then, her expression lightens up. "Hm, yeah, sure, I'm fine with that," Nino nods quickly. "Just make sure to lock all your doors at night, everyone."
"I mean, don't we already do that?" Miku shrugs.
"Well, just in case you don't already. Don't want our doors unlocked during a night when Uesugi's over at our place, do we?"
"I really doubt locked doors can stop him, Nino..."
"I-If he tries anything funny and breaks into our rooms or anything, we can sue him for property damage! We should all have our phones near us too, just in case! That way, we can call Papa and let him know if he's - "
"Alright, calm down, Chris Hansen. None of you are even worth breaking into your rooms for, anyway," Fuutarou smirks.
"Th-That's because you've never had a girlfriend in your life, and you never will!" Nino retaliates angrily.
"Yeah, not when I've got the five of you on my hands - after I'm done tutoring you all, I'll be glad I never got a girlfriend in the first place."
"Then you stay that way! Hmph!"
Storming off and scaling up the stairs, Nino leaves the living room first and loudly shuts the door after herself; during her exit, though, Ichika, emerging from the bathroom next after Nino, calls out to Miku and Yotsuba.
"Itsuki's almost done, so you two can go get ready for bed," the eldest quint directs, and she turns to Fuutarou once her sisters comply and head off to the bathroom. "Come with me for a second?"
Silently following the oldest quintuplet sibling, the young tutor joins Ichika out on the veranda, closing the large glass door behind him to find Ichika leaning on the veranda railing and gazing up at the large stretch of black endless night sky over them.
"What's the occasion?" he asks her quietly, joining her briefly, though he doesn't quite see the appeal of staring up into an empty void.
"Oh, nothing much. I just wanted to ask you about how today went," Ichika smiles pleasantly back at her tutor.
"Surprising...I never thought of you as someone who'd go out of your way to ask me something like that."
To his small surprise, Ichika also gives him a little pout.
"Muuu. Fuutarou-kun, you can't just go around saying mean things like that to girls. Nino's right, you know? You won't ever get a girlfriend if you keep acting like this."
"Me getting a girlfriend aside, what did you want me to talk to you about?"
"But I just said it?"
"Oh, you were being serious about that."
"Geez! There you go again, being mean."
"Sorry, it took me a moment to realize you were being serious. I'm not used to you being serious..."
"Is it because of all the teasing I've done to you in all our study sessions?"
"Oh, so you're at least a little self-aware."
Ichika hangs her head in defeat. "You're never going to stop being mean, will you? You could at least try to be a little less mean - after all, Nino and Itsuki showed up for tonight, didn't they?"
"They did, yeah. And if you're to be believed, you were the reason why they even decided to join in the first place, even if how you did it was pretty shady..." Fuutarou gives a rather evil grin. "But I liked it. A little backstabbing never hurt anybody."
"Not only does that statement sound really wrong, but it wasn't even backstabbing to begin with. The only backstabbing that happened was Nino telling Itsuki to join us."
"I guess you're right." Fuutarou also leans on the railing, and Ichika, having taken her arms off the railing, resumes her own lean. "Today was...a handful, hah. It was bad enough trying to teach the three of you who've been with me since the start...but with those two added...hoo boy."
"But you expected to teach all five of us from the start, right? Like you were initially contracted to."
"Yeah, but going into it I figured it wouldn't be easy. Now I know it's going to be an absolute nightmare."
"We're trying our best, okay? Cut us some slack."
"I already was, not outright forcing Nino and Itsuki to join us earlier."
"Then why didn't you?"
"Didn't I explain that one before? I didn't want to alienate you girls; I wasn't able to make a good first impression, and doing anything that might jeopardize our relationship would've sealed Nino's and Itsuki's opinions of me before I could even get the chance to do my job."
"But it's not as though you could've convinced them to join otherwise; the only reason why they were here tonight was because of me."
"Yeah. You really helped me out there, not gonna lie."
"Fufufu..." Ichika smiles victoriously up at her tutor. "Then it looks like you owe me one."
"As much as I hate to admit it, yes, I do."
"Do you really dislike me that much, Fuutarou-kun...?"
"I don't dislike you, I just don't know what to think of you."
"Hey, what's that supposed to mean..."
"Everyone else acts in a way that lets me form a solid opinion of them. Nino doesn't like me, especially not when I'm in your house, but she's at least a nice enough person to give me a hand in some stuff. Miku likes me being around, and she's pretty cooperative in whatever I do. Yotsuba's cooperative too and she's a nice girl, but she's pretty zany, and she's nice to a fault. Itsuki doesn't like me either, and up 'til now, she's been pretty against everything I've tried to do."
"And what about me, then?"
"Well, the fact that you're not trying to kick me out of your house is great, for starters..."
"That's...a pretty low bar, I think."
"Not as low as you think if Nino used to be the one setting it most of the time, but I digress. You were there from the start too, taking my lessons...so I appreciate that. But despite that, you gave me a bit of a Yotsuba vibe - you'd goof off sometimes, not really pay attention, fall asleep in the middle of a lesson, and as of late not even bother to show up sometimes because of your part-time."
"Ehehe...sorry about that."
"So you'll excuse me for getting the sense that you don't fully feel invested in working to get your grades up."
"I'll be working on improving, Sensei, don't you worry about it."
"Sure hope I don't need to."
"Then how about Nino and Itsuki today? How was it, actually teaching them?"
"Not bad, surprisingly. I thought they'd be a lot snarkier and grumpier to me than they were, but they were actually manageable. Maybe they really do care about their midterms..."
Ichika turns to smile at her tutor. "Those two might act like that to you, but they're good girls. All of them are, really."
"I've yet to see it..."
"You will eventually, I'm sure of it. Given how long you're stuck with us..."
"Hey, if I didn't have to be stuck with you all for an entire year, I wouldn't have chosen to either."
Sighing heavily, Ichika leans back on the railing. "Does Raiha-chan have to deal with this kind of grumpy Fuutarou-kun every day too? I hope you don't act like this to her."
"She does, unfortunately."
"Oh dear...I pray for her well-being in the future..."
"She'll be fine, don't worry. Her grades are good, unlike yours."
"Aaaaah! You actually went there! Fuutarou-kun, you dummyyyyy!"
"Sorry, I couldn't resist."
"Was that another low-hanging fruit, then?"
"Yeah. I'm not much of a jokester, so I gotta take every easy joke that I can get."
"Hmph. At least you admit it."
Fuutarou straightens out his back and folds his arms, surveying the view of the city from their high-rise.
"I just hope that those two will stay, even after midterms...even if that's just a shot in the dark that I have. And I can't rely on your generosity or one of your sisters' to help me out this time."
"Just keep doing what you're doing. You're an earnest guy, and a hard worker. So long as you keep doing what you're doing, you'll be good...everything will be okay," Ichika says reassuringly.
"You think so, huh...?"
"There are some things that I can do, Fuutarou-kun, but at the same time, there are things only you can do, too," she murmurs comfortably. "So all you need to do is do them."
Ichika once more smiles pleasantly up at her tutor, which Fuutarou gazes back at for a moment.
"Huh..."
"...what is it?"
"...nothing much. It's just...the five of you were basically all born at the same time, so I didn't think that mattered all that much. And you didn't really give the vibe up until now, so that didn't help either."
Ichika feels a large hand rest on top of her head.
"But...I guess you really are the eldest, huh?"
Simply looking a bit confused, Ichika tilts her head to the side a little, much like her sisters would.
"...and what exactly is this guy doing?" Ichika asks, pointing up at Fuutarou's hand on her head.
"Weren't you the one who said to do this?" Fuutarou pulls his hand off the quint's head anyway.
"But I didn't do anything."
"You were the one who got Nino and Itsuki to join us. I think that's a pretty huge favor you've done for me."
"Is it...? It's nothing special, really..."
"Well, if you say so...by the way, it's pretty cold out, so we should head inside. Don't want you catching a cold the weekend right before your midterms..."
"It's cold? Doesn't really feel like it..."
At this, Fuutarou, who was about to head back inside, suddenly whips around and puts his hand gently but firmly against Ichika's forehead before she has a chance to react. Ichika inhales a little sharply at his sudden action, but she does nothing other than close her eyes when she feels his hand press against her head for a second time.
"Your temperature certainly is warm, but it doesn't feel like it's because of a cold or fever. Are you embarrassed somehow?" Fuutarou asks directly.
"W-W-Why would I be...!? I'm fine, there's - there's nothing wrong!" she stammers quickly.
"Oh, you must be one of those girls who gets all embarrassed because a boy touches you directly or something. My bad, I forgot you used to go to an all-girls' school..."
Wanting to object and tell her tutor that this isn't the case, Ichika realizes that it's probably for the best if she lets Fuutarou sit on his assumptions.
"You can head in first. I want to stay out here for a little longer," she says instead, gesturing towards the interior of the house.
"Sure, just don't stay out here too long."
"I won't, I won't."
Watching her tutor head back inside, Ichika turns to face the city again, her cheeks circulating pulsing warmth through them.
Nino and Miku listen to the last bedroom door close for the night outside. Already cuddled together underneath Nino's blanket, sharing the bed space with all of Nino's plushies and stuffed animals, the two sisters, pretending to have gone to sleep, listen to the ticking of Nino's nearby alarm clock in the darkness and silence of her quiet room.
Of course, it doesn't stay totally quiet for long, once the penthouse enters its deep sleep for the night.
"...let me guess," Miku whispers to Nino, lying on her side to face her sister in bed, "you walked in on Fuutarou while he was taking a bath."
"I-It wasn't - it's not like that...!" Nino hisses back quickly, but she, too, makes sure to keep her voice down. "Don't make it sound like I was trying to do something weird..."
"I wasn't trying to...you're the one who's assuming that I was...but that's besides the point. You talked to him about our eyes, didn't you? That's why you wanted me to come sleep with you for the night, right?"
Nino nods. "Uesugi said that he'd talk to us about it once we all went to bed."
"How do you know?"
"When he passed me my worksheet back that he graded for us, he wrote '1' underneath my score. I assume he wants us to talk to him at one in the morning."
Miku turns to look at the alarm clock that's also sharing the bed with them - it reads 12:52.
"Eight more minutes, huh..." she murmurs, settling back underneath the covers again. "...but is he going to come to us to talk, or do we need to go to him?"
"Uhhh..." Nino hesitates, realizing that she doesn't know that part. "I...I don't know...he didn't say..."
"Mm..."
"...you don't sound very concerned about that."
"It's Fuutarou." Miku lifts her head up off her half of Nino's pillow for a moment so that she can tuck in her hair more comfortably for the next few minutes. "I'm sure he'll let us know somehow."
Peering with a small frown, not that Miku can see it in the present darkness of their room, Nino takes a deep breath first.
"...Miku, be honest with me," she says slowly, "but what...what exactly do you see in Uesugi that makes you like him?"
"L-Like...?" Blushing before she can hide her face, Miku is very glad that Nino can't see her face like this at the moment either. "I don't...I don't like him..."
"No, like, you totally do, you don't need to hide it from me. Don't forget that I've basically been sitting in on almost every one of your lessons with him. I see how you've been acting around him. And I can tell you for a fact that over the weeks, you've definitely opened up to him more and more. Like, c'mon, Miku, Ichika and I are the ones who hang out with people the most; you don't think we'd be able to tell if one of our own sisters, whom we live with and have lived with for all our lives, is starting to have feelings for a guy?"
Unable to think of anything to refute Nino's observations, Miku slowly tucks her head in, as if that'll help her hide from Nino at all.
"I'm sure Ichika's noticed this too, but she just hasn't told you about it, so I did. Honestly, this's what I was afraid of, Miku...that something like this was going to happen. That bastard..."
"Don't blame Fuutarou..." Miku responds quickly, feeling a sharp stab of motivation to argue against her sister. "He didn't do anything in particular to...you know, make us like him. I just...I just...well..."
"You just what?"
"I just, um, feel...comfortable...around him. Almost like...okay, let me put it this way, I...I get a similar feeling whenever he hangs out with us as I do when it's just the five of us. I don't know...what it is yet. I want to know...I want to find out."
Miku feels Nino's hand firmly grip her top shoulder.
"You can't trust him still. No matter how much of that kind of feeling you get when you're with him, you can't let that make you forget that he's still someone we didn't even know until barely two months ago, no, not even two months ago."
"I can ask the opposite about you, Nino. I get that you don't like him because to you, he still seems like an outsider, but clearly he's not just an 'outsider' to us anymore." Miku reaches up with her left hand and firmly grabs her sister's to remove her hand from her shoulder. "He protected us from those bad guys at the warehouse. He's kept us safe during our trip to Honolulu during Golden Week. He's been tutoring me, Yotsuba, and Ichika for the past two months to help us improve our grades. Yeah, we might not have known him for very long, but to think that he's still an outsider...why are you so against him, still?"
Miku is at first only met with silence. Then...
"Something feels...off, about him. I'm not sure what it is about him either. I'm not just worried about him because he's an outsider. I'm worried because he himself might pose a threat to us one day."
"...I never knew you were into anime too, Nino. You've been holding out on us."
"I-I don't! I'm not a goddamn otaku like you or Yotsuba are! Where'd you even get that idea form anyway?!"
"Because you sounded like someone out of some kind of anime just now..." Miku proceeds to perform a flawless imitation of Nino's conjecture a moment prior. "Something feels...off about him. I'm not sure - "
"O-Okay, okay, shut up, shut up! You can stop now, you can stop!"
So Miku stops.
"You can make fun of me all you want, Miku, but you can't take away from what I'm trying to tell you. You might have feelings for him, but you mustn't let that stop you from seeing him for what he is."
"And that is?"
"A mage. A dangerous one, at that." Nino leans in closer to her sister. "Hasn't it ever crossed your mind what would happen to us if he, or someone like him, were to be contracted against us? As in, his job was to come after us somehow?"
"If you're trying to argue the same thing that you did from before, earlier this week - "
"I'm not, this is an actually legitimate concern, isn't it? Especially now that we know that we're not exactly normal ourselves!"
A soft knocking silences both of them because both quintuplets freeze up and huddle together at this uncharacteristic, sudden knocking at their door - until they realize that it can only be from one person whom they should have been expecting.
"I'll get the door..." Miku mutters, and she rolls out of bed to open the door slowly to find, sure enough, Uesugi Fuutarou standing in the doorway, having already changed into a different set of clothes to spend the night in, which only amount to a clean white tee and a pair of frayed red basketball shorts.
"Hey. Nino's inside, right?" Fuutarou, also whispering, asks Miku, who nods and steps aside to let him in, closing the door softly after him so that the other quintuplets won't be aware of what might be going on.
When she does, Fuutarou gestures for her to stand back, and he raises his hand up quietly to cast a large blue rune that silently embeds itself into the door. He repeats this action, with the two quintuplets inside the room with him watching silently, for each wall of the room, including the floor and the ceiling - and then does it all again.
"Okay, I've sealed the room from the inside so that we can just talk normally like this and have the lights on and it'll still be fine, we don't have to worry about waking the others up," the young mage informs the girls while he turns on the lamp sitting on Nino's desk for some illumination.
"Tch...magic sure is convenient, isn't it..." Nino grumbles.
"Yeah, and you're taking advantage of it right now."
"I know, you don't have to point it out to me."
Taking a seat on Nino's desk chair, Fuutarou watches Miku climb up onto the bed again to sit down on the edge, with Nino also sitting up on her bed to face him.
"If you're not comfortable with me being in your room again, we can head downstairs to the living room and talk there," he suggests.
"Well, you've already taken the time to, uh, seal my room, I guess...just don't make it long."
"Yeah, it's late at night, I was gonna try to keep this short anyway. So..."
Putting his hands together, Fuutarou gazes intently at the two quintuplets.
"Judging by your lack of reaction, Miku, I assume Nino's already told you why I'm here?" he asks the third quintuplet first, and she nods back at him. "Okay, that saves me a bit of time then. Just for the record, Nino was the one who walked in on me in the bathroom."
"Did you really need to mention that...?" Nino hisses angrily at her tutor.
"Well, just in case Miku gets the wrong idea, but anyways, yeah, that's besides the point. The point of why I'm here is to discuss your eyes." Fuutarou parts his hands at this time. "If I may, and if it's not an inconvenience to either of you...can you show them to me?"
"Why? Why do we need to show them to you?" Opposing the young mage's request immediately, Nino lurches forward on her bed to eye her tutor with deep suspicion. "You've already seen what Miku's look like. And...not to mention, you can already see mine, can't you?"
Fuutarou eyes her back with an equal force of intensity counter her suspicion.
"Do you go to a doctor to ask them to see what's wrong with you, and then when they ask to see what's bothering you, you tell them no? Then what the fuck was the point of even asking me to talk about it?"
"You can fucking talk about it without having to see them, can't you?"
"Nino, it's really not that big of a - " Miku tries to intervene, but Nino shakes her head vehemently, not having any of Miku's own backtalk.
"Let me handle this, Miku," Nino says firmly to her sister before facing her tutor again. "Talk first. Tell us about these, uh, 'Mystic Eyes' or whatever you called them earlier. Then I'll decide if we should show them to you or not."
Pinching the middle of his forehead in stressed disbelief, Fuutarou sighs heavily. "Alright, fine, have it your way, then. But can you at least explain to me the symptoms? Or what's been going on and such? How your eyes first came to be? I at least need to know these things so I can try to determine if they really are Mystic Eyes."
After deliberating to herself, Nino reluctantly relents. "Fine, I guess we should at least let you know that much. My eyes used to be blue like everyone else's, but during the first year of junior high, in like the first month or so, my eyesight suddenly worsened out of the blue...no, I wasn't trying to make a pun, by the way. It happened so suddenly - I remember looking up at the blackboard and finding everything to be blurry and unreadable. And then later, when I got my eyes checked to see how badly they'd worsened, I realized that the color of my eyes also changed from blue to purple. It bothered me so much that Papa took the time to get me a special set of contact lenses that changed my eye color back to blue. That was the first sign, but I didn't know it was a sign until super recently - on the night that you gave me the keycard that Papa gave you, that night."
"What happened that night?"
"I woke up in the middle of the night, at around like two or three in the morning, and my eyes felt like they were burning. Like, they hurt a lot. They stopped hurting on their own after a few minutes, but it was...it was like the worst shit I'd ever felt. And normally I'm pretty good around heat and hot stuff since I cook a lot, you know? So I was...I was scared and...and surprised, since I'd never had that happen before. It happened again the following weekend...the day you showed up on Sunday to tutor everyone in the morning."
"We also had this one incident earlier this week while you were out, Fuutarou..." Miku also adds, looking at her sister next to her to see if she'll try to interrupt her like before, which Nino does not, surprisingly enough. "I, uh..."
"Nino told me about it. The part where you wanted to attack our homeroom teacher, right?"
"Well...yeah, that happened, but..." Miku gulps, "...I was going to talk about how...how I dragged Nino out of anger into an alleyway on our way home because she was confronting me about what happened that morning..."
Fuutarou's eyes widen with urgency upon hearing this.
"...this I don't know about," he mutters seriously, leaning a bit forward in Nino's chair. The shift in tone towards seriousness is palpable in his voice, causing the two girls to subconsciously sit up at attention. "What happened?"
"She stared right into my eyes with her, uh, Mystic Eyes, I guess," Nino explains. "And then...seeing them, my eyes started acting up like they did before."
"And...that's when I learned that...Nino...also had weird eyes of her own," Miku mumbles dejectedly, lowering her gaze. "I let my own eyes out then because I wanted to scare Nino into being quiet so that she wouldn't bother me. If I knew she had special eyes of her own, I wouldn't have...done something like that..."
"They're hardly special, they've done nothing but bother me..." Nino tussles her hair a bit impatiently. "But that's what happened, in a nutshell."
"Do you know when your eyes first came to be, Miku?" Fuutarou asks the third quint.
"Mine? Uh...well...I had this...this one accident in junior high...about halfway through our first year..."
"What kind of accident?"
"I'll explain, she doesn't like talking about it - " Nino at first jumps in, but Miku shakes her head quickly.
"Let me explain...it's something I have to explain on my own," she insists, and so Nino backs down. "Um...do you remember what I told you back in Hawaii, Fuutarou? About how I used to be bullied because my classmates thought that I was the teacher's pet and everything?"
"Yeah, what about it?"
"So...there was a bully in my class, and one day she and her friends decided to play the, uh...I think it was called the 'knockout game' or something."
At this, Fuutarou winces a little. "Yeah...I heard about it at the time. Let me guess, they knocked you clean out?"
"Those bitches fucking punched her right in the back of the head during lunch!" Nino snarls with seething, smoldering fury as Miku nods slowly at her tutor. "They stalked her until they knew where she'd go to eat lunch and when she was alone, they rolled up on her and knocked her out! The rest of us were wondering where she was, and Yotsuba went out and found her unconscious in one of the hallways near her homeroom!"
"And she got shipped off to the hospital because of that?"
Both quints nod with different degrees of emphasis.
"After that happened, my eyes...they started becoming...weird," Miku mumbles pensively, looking down at her lap and the floor as though her eyes themselves are becoming heavy with emotion. "I started experiencing...what Nino was talking about."
Fuutarou nods slowly, like a therapist listening to the woes of his clients.
"Hm...alright," he concludes, muttering to himself again.
"So? Do we have these 'Mystic Eyes' that you told us about? And if so, what do they do?" Nino demands.
"Again, let me repeat myself that since I've never really had the chance to study Mystic Eyes or work with people who have them, my knowledge about them is both limited and purely theoretical," Fuutarou clarifies once more. "But if you're willing to let me take a closer look at your eyes, I'll be able to tell with a bit more confidence."
"Nino, just let him see them. Like he said earlier, what's the point of asking him about them if we don't even show them to him first?" Miku points out to her sister, who finally caves again.
"Fine, I get it, I get it...here."
Both quintuplets, in the relative darkness of the room that is lit only by the dim desk lamp on Nino's desk, shut their eyes for a second before reopening them, and Fuutarou finds himself gazing back at two pairs of eyes from which he can sense small but unmistakable signatures of mana. Nino's cosmic purple eyes with blue rings heatedly peer back at him, while Miku's cold, dilated black pupils with their outer blue rings shyly peek out from behind her peachy-red bangs.
"...I've never seen actual Mystic Eyes up close, but someone I worked with in the past said that if I ever see them or run into people who have them and they show them to me, I should be able to tell," Fuutarou says slowly, getting a good look at both pairs of Mystic Eyes. "And...assuming my lack of experience dealing with them doesn't get in the way, those sure seem like Mystic Eyes to me."
"What are they, then, Fuutarou?" Miku asks, and Fuutarou can sense the slight tinge of fear in her voice that makes it quiver ever so slightly.
The young mage closes his eyes to rack his brain of what limited knowledge he has on the matter.
"If I recall correctly...Mystic Eyes are special magic eyes that act as another conduit for magical ability. They're very rare, as you can probably tell because I've personally never seen anyone with them before, and they're probably even rarer than they've ever been due to the decline of magic these days. But I know that they're mutations of Magic Circuits that are located around your eyes, and they can be acquired both naturally and artificially - so you can be born with them, which is natural, or have them develop because of a traumatic event or by straight up replacing your eyes with artificial ones that have some sort of magical talent built into them, which is artificial.
"Mystic Eyes are very powerful and widely feared in the magical world because, like I said, they're a natural outlet for magical power. Think of them this way: normal people only have two hands, so let's say that if the more weapons you could use, the stronger you are, then naturally people would use two weapons, one in each hand, right? Well, Mystic Eyes are a free third or even fourth arm and weapon that some people have. And because they're a physical part of your body and thus connected to the rest of your Magic Circuits, once you get the hang of how they work, they're supposedly a very intuitive way of using magic, since, unless you're fully blind somehow, you use your eyes all the time in everyday life anyway; it's not like you need to learn how to use your own eyes properly. Depending on what they are, and how strong their effects are, they can range anywhere from being nice little augments to a mage's magical power to being straight up cheat codes that give their owners a colossal advantage in a fight, should they choose to use them."
While Fuutarou is explaining all this magical jargon, he realizes early on that his audience probably has no idea what he's talking about, as they're just normal girls who happened to stumble upon their Mystic Eyes, but since they asked for an explanation for what their eyes are, he at least wants to say this much.
"You two are wondering whether or not you're mages like me, right?" Fuutarou asks quietly, and the two girls nod, with Miku doing so first. "Then let me answer that for you now: yes, you are. There's no doubt about it - you're mages, both of you. I feel like that one big dude in that one movie who finds that kid in glasses with the weird scar and tells him 'You're a wizard!' or whatever."
"Your weird jokes aside, we're really mages? Like, as in, the same as...as you?" Nino asks slowly as well.
"The exact same, yes. It's not like there are 'types' of mages - there are different types of magic that you can use, sure, but as far as mages are concerned, it's either you are one or you're not."
"But we've lived our lives like normal people all this time. You're telling me my life's basically one of those animes that Miku and Yotsuba watch where I wake up and suddenly realize that I've been a mage all this time?"
"If you develop Mystic Eyes at all in your life like this, that means you've always been a mage. Normal people can actually develop Mystic Eyes, but those kinds of cases are supposed to be really rare from what I'm aware of...but that might be the case here, to be honest. Either way, the fact that you did develop those eyes means that yes, you've been a mage all this time. I told you before that normal people can become mages too, right? I'm one of them, in case you forgot."
Nino's lip trembles as she listens to her tutor delivering this revelation to them.
"...Uesugi, tell me this. And tell me this honestly," she whispers, "but...does...does Papa know...about us...?"
"I don't know. I may have worked with your dad for a while, but he likes to keep to himself most of the time. So it's a toss-up on whether he knows about you and Miku being mages; I never bothered asking him for much detail about my contract with you girls."
"But he hired you to keep us safe from other bad guys, right?" Miku mentions.
"Yeah, but your dad's in a position of power in this city that would've easily made him privy to the magical side of the world, right? As far as I'm concerned, he could've hired me anticipating a mage setting their sights on you quints, which we know for sure is actually the case. Maybe he hired me knowing who you girls really are, maybe he didn't. I can't, like, force my own client to divulge information that he has no intention of sharing unless it's critical information that directly pertains to my responsibilities."
"But us being mages like you's something that's super important, isn't it?" Nino asks.
"Is it, though? Think about it, I never knew about your Mystic Eyes either until very recently. And even now when I do, neither of you ever trained to be mages, and just because you have Mystic Eyes now and I've told you that you're mages, neither of you know how to fight like one. I still have to defend all of you, regardless of your familiarity with magic or not, mainly because you have no familiarity of it to begin with."
"All of..." Miku also leans in towards her tutor. "Then does that mean...Ichika, Yotsuba, and Itsuki...all of them, too...?"
"I won't deny that there's a high possibility that the others may also have Mystic Eyes," Fuutarou nods solemnly. "The five of you are quints; perfectly identical ones, at that. It might be one thing if only one of you developed Mystic Eyes, but now that both of you are here with them, chances are, the others either have them too, or theirs are still dormant for the time being. Have either of you felt anything from the others yet?"
Both girls shake their heads.
"So this really is your first actual exposure to magic, excluding myself, of course..."
"Fuutarou, do you think that whoever's after us...they're after us because of our eyes? Because...because you said before that normal people...there's no reason for mages to come after normal people. Our eyes are the only thing that's making us...not normal people. So...?"
"Yeah, they're probably after those, but I don't know for sure. They might not even know that the five of you are even mages to begin with, because I sure as hell didn't until recently and I've been tutoring three of you for the past two months, almost. You've been hearing about the recent kidnappings in the city on the news or whatever? Whoever's responsible for those clearly doesn't care that they're targeting normal people."
Nino leans back in her bed. "I'm still having a tough time wrapping my mind around the fact that all this time, that's what our eyes were..."
"It's not that surprising. Again, remember what I said a month ago - two mages can walk by each other out in the streets and not even know they just passed another mage. And, in this world, even normal people like me can learn how to use magic if they discover that it exists. It's rare that normal people with no magic bloodline or background actually become anyone relevant, but it can happen."
"...it's not like we have any kind of...special family background, either," Miku mumbles into her knees, which she's got tucked up against her chest again, as she's prone to do during long conversations like this. "Mama certainly never let us know about any of this..."
"Then...then what are our eyes even supposed to do?" Nino then asks, as would be the natural conversation flow. "Like, what can we do with them?"
"That I don't know. I said earlier that you can use them to perform magic...some of the strongest magic that's possible, in fact. I've been told that Mystic Eyes are held in such high regard that if you have them, no matter who you are, whether you're just a normal person or someone with actual magic relevance, they're a sure sign that you're a strong mage. Let's see...if I remember right, there's stuff like Mystic Eyes of Charming, which let you make someone become attracted to you...Mystic Eyes of Illusion, Mystic Eyes of Enchantment...those are some of the more common ones, I think...but as for what yours specifically do, that I can't say because there are supposedly a ton of different types of Mystic Eyes that can exist, and as someone who's just an observer, I won't know until you figure out how to use them and see them in action for myself."
Fuutarou points sternly at the two Nakanos.
"But don't you let that get to your head. You might be mages, and for now it may come as a shock to you two, but with time you'll get used to it since it's not like your lives are changed that much, at least not yet, so you might be tempted to play around with your eyes to see what exactly it is that you can do. I would highly advise against that, because now's not a good time to be doing that for reasons I need not mention. Keep them to yourselves for now."
"What about our sisters? Is it okay if we tell them?" Miku asks.
"I'd say...no, don't let them know. Only let them know if you can tell that they've gotten their Mystic Eyes too, because I don't want the others to start panicking like maybe you two have, but until then..."
"So basically what we've already been doing," Nino concludes.
"Right. But even then..."
Grunting a little as he gets up, Fuutarou glances down at the girls on the bed as he turns to leave.
"...even if you do find out what your eyes do, I would advise against becoming actual mages."
"W-We never said that we would!" Nino gripes back at him. "Stop assuming those kinds of things! I don't know about Miku, but personally, I hate the fact that I have deal with these!"
"That so? Then maybe I don't need to worry about you as much."
As he's heading for the door, Miku asks one last question.
"...why do you want us to not become mages, if we already are mages?"
Fuutarou's hand stops at the doorknob.
"...you can still live normal lives, even as a mage. It's actually living like a mage that I don't want you to do, because that shit isn't worth it. That'd be hell you're walking into if you do. Good night, you two."
The door closes with a soft, almost eerily silent click.