Nakano Nino opens her eyes slowly, finding herself lying on her back on her bed in her dark bedroom.
It's Sunday morning; even without having to look at the clock or her phone, Nino knows. Not because she's some kind of psychic or savant, but because she's been on her phone for much of the time that she's holed herself up in her room. Being alone like this and not interacting with anyone for extended periods of time is a lot tougher than she thought - Nino is fully aware of the fact that her initial anger from Friday night is probably responsible for convincing her to isolate herself like this from the rest of her family, but she didn't expect her time in her room to be so...boring.
But her phone could only occupy her so long; she can only watch so many videos of cute rabbits and chat so much with her friends over LINE before she finds herself slowly sinking back into the quicksand that is her smoldering, hazy feelings.
Nino slowly turns to lie on her left side, gazing quietly at the wall next to her bed; against the wall and on the side of her bed sits a particular plushie doll of a white rabbit with silvery-blue human hair arranged in long braided twintails, a detached fluffy white collar, and a white dress, and the doll gazes emptily back.
But it's not the doll that her eyes concentrate on; it's the purple hue that rebounds off the doll and the wall behind it, and Nino knows without a doubt the source of these lights.
It was sometime yesterday that Nino noticed that despite wearing her contact lenses, her mysterious purple Mystic Eyes now simply activate straight through them. If she does this, her eyes do begin to sting a little with discomfort, but it's nothing unmanageable, especially after the piercing pain she had to deal with when she got her shoulder stabbed by that one asshole on Friday night. It also means that she can have her Mystic Eyes active even while wearing contacts, so now she can use her Mystic Eyes and still maintain full vision, not that she knows what she's even going to use her Eyes for and how. She figures this started happening on Friday night since she doesn't remember this phenomenon happening before this week.
Despite her newfound ability to use Mystic Eyes even through her contact lenses, Nino can't help but feel perturbed. Her dad gave her those contact lenses back in middle school, and they were able to return her eye colors back to blue to match the rest of her sisters'. So if she thinks about it, in hindsight, Nino can see that these contact lenses were probably given to her for the intended purpose of stifling her Mystic Eyes, or their development, more accurately. So now that her Eyes are activating even with the contacts, that either means that her contacts are growing weaker over time or her Mystic Eyes have gotten much, much stronger. Given how she's been behaving the past two days, though, Nino is forced to acknowledge that it's probably not the former.
At least one good thing that the self-quarantine has managed to accomplish is get Nino to calm down. Like an isolated brush fire with no fuel to burn with, going into this quarantine, Nino knew even on Friday night that the only way she'd realistically manage to calm herself down is to spend the weekend on her own to let her anger and frustration burn out, and so she purposefully refused to let herself talk to anyone in the house. At least, that's what she likes to think - Nino isn't quite sure if she entered this silent approach to interacting with her sisters, what little she's done of it the past two days, more for their sake or more for her own.
She didn't mean to hit Yotsuba. Now that she's had the time to let her extreme anger slowly but surely die down, accelerated by the fact that it is utterly boring being her own room all day with nothing but her phone for entertainment, Nino has found her good senses slowly but surely coming back to her like a snail hurrying across a sidewalk in the wake of a rainy day. So even though her stubbornness stubbornly insists her to continue feeling irritated at Yotsuba's fondness towards their tutor, Nino does recognize that she was acting totally out of line on Friday night, and that hitting her own sister over it was not the right thing to do, especially when she made no effort to properly convey what she was feeling that night to her and Uesugi-kun.
Speaking of which, the source of why all of this happened clearly lies with her conflicted feelings, and since right now is two o'clock on Sunday morning, as indicated by the home screen on her new phone, this means that Nino spent all of Saturday picking through her own sentiments and organizing her thoughts. It's not like she had anything better to do, after all. And now, finally, she thinks she's got most of her thoughts sorted out - and if not, at the very least her mind doesn't feel like one hell of a hazy mess anymore. Or maybe that could just be because she's not pissed off as fuck now.
Nino, however begrudgingly, has forced herself to acknowledge the fact that she does, in fact, harbor feelings towards Uesugi Fuutarou. The secret double-life he leads as a high school student and their tutor by day and a vigilante mage by night, working and fighting to protect the quints from harm, the silent-but-savage, no-bullshit attitude and fighting style he employs against bad guys, and the willingness and decisiveness with which he dives into conflict - she has to admit that these things about him appeal to her quite a bit, even if he's only doing this for them because of his contract with the quintuplets' father. Specifically, that last bit about his decisiveness and willingness to dive straight into danger for the sake of others, most exemplified when he kept Itsuki safe on that one night during or before midterms week, is exactly what she's done for her own sisters when they're in trouble, and his fighting skill and experience that is very conspicuously evident just from watching him in action is the kind of thing Nino secretly wishes she had. After all, if she were just as skilled as Uesugi-kun, she would've beat up those three gangsters on Friday night without having to get injured or put both herself and her sister in danger because of her confrontational behavior. And while he doesn't quite match the white-knight-in-shining-armor archetype that she's grown up fantasizing about at times, given what she usually sees out of guys her age or older and how spineless or idiotic they can be, Uesugi-kun is honestly one of the best, if not the best, candidate to fit that white-knight dream of hers, albeit in sour armor rather than shining.
At the same time, though, Nino still resents him deeply for how invasively he's entered her life and the lives of her sisters and family, excluding their father, of course. With the promise she made to her sisters six years ago at the time of their mother's death and holds very dear to her heart acting as burner fuel for this resentment, the second quintuplet doesn't feel like these embers will burn out anytime soon and will reignite easily with whatever chance they get, and if it isn't more bad guys providing the spark, it'll most certainly be Uesugi-kun. In addition, she still stands by her argument that she made to Yotsuba just before the two of them got attacked that Uesugi-kun didn't need to be their tutor and their bodyguard or whatever his official position is at the same time; he could just be their bodyguard while someone else handled their tutoring, someone else who wouldn't be as invasive or involved with their lives like Uesugi-kun is currently. It also ticks her off that her father, for as smart and accomplished as he is, being head physician of the city's hospital and all, apparently didn't think of this too, unless, of course, Uesugi-kun himself was the one who convinced their father to set their contract this way. But given Uesugi-kun's personality, he doesn't seem like the type of person who'd willingly take on more work like this, right? Even he's admitted himself after they got done with midterms that he underestimated the workload that's involved with both tutoring the quintuplets and making sure that they're safe in the city. And given that he's the super-optimal, super-efficient type of guy, which he'd perhaps need to be in the first place to do what he does, Uesugi-kun probably wasn't the one who set the terms of his contract this way, and thus Nino has to assume that her father was the one who made things this way. So what was her dad thinking when he began to employ Uesugi-kun like this?
But then this would mean that Nino would be doubting her own papa and trusting Uesugi-kun, which would be contradictory to what she's feeling towards him, at least the resentful parts of them. Is she willing to do that? Who does she trust here? It's not like she or her sisters have had that much of a relationship with their father, admittedly, because of how much he focuses on his own work at the hospital; it's probably not a stretch by this point that the quintuplets have a deeper relationship with the tutor that their father has hired to work with them than their own father himself. Even still, though, he is still their father at the end of the day, the one who pledged to take care of them after their mother died. Nino can't just ignore the fact that he's the reason why she and her sisters need not suffer through poverty anymore and have been able to live their lives out in luxury and comfort. So for the sake of her current situation, Nino goes with her father's judgment, though how much of it is just because it's convenient for her to do so is still a matter of internal debate.
At the very least, though, she's able to clarify to herself that this isn't full-blown hate that she feels towards Uesugi-kun. Although her resentment could very easily be incited to intensify into full-on hatred, the one fire retardant that's keeping it from doing so is the fact that her tutor is, to her knowledge, unaware of the promise to her sisters, the ultimate source of all this trouble. And it's not like her sisters have told him that, given how he had no idea why she was acting the way she was on Friday night, probably because they understand that it's a very important family matter to her and have the decency to not divulge it to someone outside the family, even if they're someone as close to them like Uesugi-kun. And however unreasonably angry she can get towards him, Nino just can't get herself to completely detest him for something he's never known. Now, if he knew about her promise and proceeded to belittle it or disrespect it in some way, then all bets are off, but that's not the case right now.
Besides, he doesn't seem like the type of person who'd do something like that.
The inclusion of magic further complicates things. Nino still doesn't feel comfortable with the knowledge that she is, apparently, a mage, but the past few weeks of living with this knowledge and seeing that, for the most part, her daily life didn't really change that much has helped her come more to terms with it. This makes sense, since Nino prioritizes the daily life that she can have with her sisters, and so long as that doesn't change, even something like being a mage or whatever is something she can get over.
But as mentioned earlier, her inability to protect herself and her sister on Friday night is a huge sore spot for her to consider now. Up until this point, all the confrontations she's had to deal with were against spineless assholes who backed down so long as Nino put up a strong enough front; after all, the most those kinds of guys were looking for were a date with her sisters or, at worst, a chance to be up to no good with them. While she and her sisters were technically in a worse situation at the warehouse two months ago, Friday night was the first time where Nino personally was faced with a situation where her lack of proper fighting ability directly led to her and Yotsuba's predicament before Uesugi-kun showed up. That was the first time where the boys she was confronting approached them with the intent to injure and possibly even kill, not to just flirt around and hit on them. Well, maybe literally.
The fact that one of those bad guys was also a mage himself throws yet another wrench into her already complicated thoughts. Even she could tell that his magecraft wasn't quite on par with what little they've seen out of their tutor, but still, his ability to hit Yotsuba somehow without even making contact with her directly was very strong, and Nino only has herself to compare when she remembers diving on him to try to hit him and consequently got surrounded immediately by his friends in the process.
All this to say, was Miku right after all? Should the two of them ask Uesugi-kun to also teach them magecraft on top of tutoring them? Would he even teach them? Probably not, but as Friday night proved, Uesugi-kun can only respond so quickly to crises like that. If those guys wanted to, they could have easily killed her and Yotsuba or, if they were better at their job, dragged them away before Uesugi-kun could get there and successfully kidnap them; in that sense, they were lucky those guys wanted to kidnap them first and started fighting among themselves so that their tutor could show up. So the natural solution to this is to learn how to defend herself because she herself is a mage, evidently. Nino knows that if she does begin learning magecraft seriously, it'll obviously be some time before she'd be able to adequately defend herself; she only needs to look at herself being a bad student with terrible grades to know that. But still, if she points this out to Uesugi-kun, surely he'd at least see the merit of this, since the quints being able to defend themselves will make his job easier and less taxing.
But again, asking him to do that would mean that she's letting him take an even tighter hold on the lives of the Nakano family, on her and her sisters. Asking him to teach her magecraft would be self-defeating and, as mentioned before, invalidate the whole argument of why she's angry or resentful towards him in the first place.
Finally, when her sisters and Uesugi-kun came back from lunch, Nino could hear people working in the kitchen; normally her sisters don't have a reason to be hanging out in the kitchen for so long since none of them know how to cook; the sole exception is Miku, so Nino assumed yesterday that Miku was trying to practice cooking on her own, but then, thanks to the lack of soundproofing in their home, Nino was able to hear their tutor's voice along with Miku's downstairs; the fact that Nino's room is situated literally right over the kitchen means that she can hear their voices all that much more, even if they still end up sounding muffled and incomprehensible most of the time if they aren't outright shouting or yelling.
In her boiling anger over the past two days, Nino somehow managed to forget that Uesugi-kun knows how to cook as well, just not as well as herself, but Nino realizes that he's good enough where he could actually take her place in teaching Miku how to cook instead of her. And given Miku's relationship with him, it's safe to say that Miku would rather have him teach her rather than her own sister.
Nino's hands have been tightening into fists again subconsciously, and it's only when her fingernails whose nail polish have been going neglected start to dig a little too deep into the skin on the base of her palms that she realizes what's going on and forces her hands to loosen up. She hates this feeling most of all; she hates this extreme dichotomy that she finds herself in, like she's found herself on a tiny strip of land in the middle of a bottomless chasm opening up on either side of her, with the tiny patch of ground that she's on crumbling away slowly, bit by bit, until she's forced to make a decision and plunge herself towards one direction or the other. For someone who's prided herself on being swift and decisive about important decisions and problems in her life, her inability to do so here, now that she's taken the time to organize her thoughts like this, is now the most frustrating thing of all.
Coughing a little, the second quintuplet realizes that her throat is extremely dry; she doesn't quite remember the last time that she's had something to drink; the weekend's just been a blur, no thanks to her own self-quarantine that's beginning to take its toll on her mental health, as if her own turbulent feelings haven't already. So she convinces her sluggish and lethargic body to pull itself out of bed, off the covers, grab her contacts case so that she can put them on down in the bathroom, and slowly emerge from her room to head downstairs.
Opening her eyes suddenly, Nakano Miku purses her lips instinctively, thinking that it's another panic attack she's about to have. She checks the clock on her desk, which reads 2:05 AM, a bit earlier than when her panic attacks usually start, but she braces herself for it anyway, the familiar feeling of dread creeping up her spine and up her neck.
...strangely, it never comes. Miku spends the next fifteen minutes lying in her bed, awaiting the panic attack that she's been through many times before and so fully expects tonight, but...it just doesn't happen. Her heart doesn't randomly start accelerating in its beat, sweat doesn't begin sprouting from her scalp and from the pores all over her body, and her eyes don't start to drill her skull with phantom pain.
Staring in mute wonder up at the ceiling, the third quintuplet slowly sits up with furrowed eyebrows, unsure of what to make of this situation. Her initial reaction is one of cautious suspicion, of course - just because she's not getting her panic attack now doesn't mean it can't happen later. Heck, maybe it's something totally new that's going to happen...and knowing her luck, it's probably something that'll be even worse.
But this cautious suspicion doesn't seem to yield anything either. She just continues to lie in bed, waiting for something that isn't coming for a full half an hour after she's woken up.
Maybe her real panic attack has yet to happen, since it's usually around three in the morning that she suffers from them, but for now, it appears that she'll have some peace to herself during this time of the night. But she can't seem to fall back asleep either, probably because of her frightful anticipation of her panic attack, so Miku continues to lie in bed, gazing quietly up at her dark ceiling.
Fuutarou ended up staying with them for a few hours after they arrived back home from Saizeriya, working with her and teaching her how to cook; even Yotsuba, after she got bored watching TV, joined them towards the end when Fuutarou was showing Miku the basics of how to make onigiri in case they wanted to make a quick snack for themselves while he wasn't there to make them proper meals, so she and Yotsuba learned how to make onigiri together. Miku smiles gently; the fresh memory of learning how to cook from Fuutarou is already one of the fondest memories she's had with him, because just like the solo lessons they've had before, back when Nino and Itsuki refused to join them for tutoring and on days when both Ichika and Yotsuba were out doing their own thing, Fuutarou focused solely on Miku and paid so much attention to her in his efforts to teach her properly, and Miku can't help but feel warm and bubbly on the inside thinking about it.
His way of teaching, especially when Miku can compare it to Nino's teaching, couldn't be more polar opposite from her older sister's; Nino's method of teaching was to point out mistakes that Miku makes and assuming a mindset of "you're supposed to know this, how do you not know this". While Nino is regardless a good teacher because her cooking experience still far outstrips both her own and Fuutarou's, Miku has admittedly grown rather tired of Nino's way of teaching, indicated by their recent lack of cooking lessons together. Fuutarou, on the other hand, just like with his regular tutoring for the most part, closely worked with her for almost the entire time. He showed her things step by step, showed her examples of how to prepare certain foods and apply certain seasonings, and showed her how to cut vegetables and meat quickly and efficiently. And because Fuutarou himself said that he needed more cooking experience and needed to warm up the skills he already had but hadn't practiced lately, he frequently worked alongside her, and so it definitely felt like the two of them were learning together, rather than Fuutarou fully teaching Miku. As such, the experience felt much more organic and cozy than anything she'd felt with learning from Nino before. Of course, she's still got a very long way to go to actually become proficient at cooking and making meals for her family, but the path to get there seems much less daunting now that Fuutarou has spent Saturday afternoon teaching her. In fact, together with Yotsuba, the three of them were even able to make dinner together for everyone, even if it ended up being something as simple as seasoned onigiri.
Eating lunch and parfaits together, practicing cooking together, making and eating their homemade onigiri together, talking together, joking and memeing and laughing with everyone together...yesterday was bar none one of the best days that Miku has had in recent memory.
The parfaits in particular...Miku slowly raises her right hand up to her lips as her cheeks begin to warm up in the darkness of her room. Fuutarou himself didn't realize it when everyone started offering him bites out of their own parfaits at the family restaurant yesterday, being the sometimes-dense workaholic that he is, but Miku did end up finishing the rest of her matcha parfait with that same spoon that she used to let her tutor taste her parfait with. The legendary indirect kiss, as foretold by the girls in her old school back at Black Rose. Miku herself never thought much of it, convinced that she'd never come across a situation where that would be a thing, and yet here she is, with an undeniable claim to an indirect kiss with her own tutor and classmate.
It even embarrasses her now at a time like this, dwelling on her indirect kiss with Fuutarou like this, so Miku forces herself to move on. That, and the fact that she derived so much enjoyment out of her Saturday that she spent with her sisters and Fuutarou makes her feel sad that Nino was not there to join them. Of course, how much she would've enjoyed it if she were actually there is a rather contentious matter, since Nino would have probably argued with Fuutarou at some point and would have especially disliked Fuutarou teaching Miku how to cook, given that such a responsibility is supposed to be hers first and foremost. As awkward as it feels to think this, Miku believes that it may have been for the best that Nino stayed home; while she doesn't want to say that Nino would have ruined their lunch together at Saizeriya, Miku can't deny that the added dynamic of having Nino with them would have changed how the day went, and Miku certainly wouldn't have had an opportunity to cook with Fuutarou the same way.
Even still, if Miku could have her way, she would have brought Nino with them. Their mother told them to always stick together, after all. Honestly, if Fuutarou wasn't the one inviting them to lunch because of the promise he made to them for their midterms, or to Itsuki, specifically, then the sisters would have never went at all; it's just that since they didn't want to waste Fuutarou's goodwill, they made an exception this time, along with Fuutarou's assurance that he'd make it up to Nino at the very least.
Speaking of Nino, she was quiet the whole day in her room. She came out a few times to go use the bathroom and such, but for the most part she was the same as on Friday. However, upon nearing Nino's room, Miku did feel a considerable drop in the "temperature" around her room as their Saturday progressed, though she can still feel the magical residue that Fuutarou warned her about through the wall that separates their two rooms. Miku hopes that Nino has calmed down; on the rare times that they did see Nino whenever she went to the restroom, she noticed that her older sister didn't look angry so much as she just looked tired and miserable, so there's evidence to believe that she's starting to burn her anger out. Hopefully she can recover enough to go back to school with them on Monday; having to miss school days because of what happened on Friday night wouldn't be good, and certainly both Fuutarou and their father would be displeased with it.
And speaking of her sisters, what about the stuff Fuutarou told her about Ichika? The news that he leaked to her about Ichika also being a mage and even having her own Mystic Eye came as a complete shock; she had no idea about Ichika's situation, and the fact that she's never told them about being a mage or having a Mystic Eye is doubly as surprising. In hindsight, perhaps this shouldn't have been too surprising, given that Ichika was the first one among them after their mother died to start seriously branching away from the rest of her sisters in securing an identity for herself; yes, Yotsuba was the first one to differentiate herself physically by beginning to wear a hair ribbon similar to the one that she wears today during the weeks leading up to their mother's death, but it was Ichika who cut her hair, once the pride and joy of their quintuplet connection, began hanging out with other girls at school, and took part-time jobs on her own accord. So it's plausible, with what she knows about her and Nino's Mystic Eyes, that Ichika may have had hers awaken first, as perhaps is appropriate.
But none of this explains the most pressing question of all regarding her oldest sister, which is why Ichika has apparently decided to keep her identity as a Mystic Eye-wielding mage a secret. Why has she not divulged this to them? The most reasonable answer Miku can think of goes something like this: assuming that Ichika was in fact the first quintuplet among them to awaken her magical eye, perhaps she was scared of telling her sisters about it. Ichika was never like Miku or Yotsuba who love watching anime and never entered the whole chuunibyou stage during junior high, as some boys and girls during that age may be prone to doing, so maybe Ichika didn't want to let the rest of her sisters know because she would have faced ridicule by the rest of them for being a closet chuunibyou? Or maybe it was a lot more serious than that, in that Ichika was scared of what she'd discovered and kept it to herself in fear that her sisters would begin shunning her for having some kind of weird power?
Whichever the origin story, though, it's evident now, judging by Fuutarou's testimony that Ichika used her Mystic Eye on him, that Ichika has not only been magically self-conscious but also practicing her magecraft, at least when it comes to her Mystic Eye, whatever it is. This is an irrefutable conclusion, given that neither she nor Nino know what their own Mystic Eyes do and can hardly control them outside of having them surface and become visible to others, while Ichika apparently managed to stun their own tutor, a fully-fledged mage, just by looking at him, even if it was only for a few seconds. Now Miku can see why Fuutarou told her and Nino that Mystic Eyes are extremely powerful, if it can let even amateur mages like Ichika do something like that.
Even more confusingly, if Ichika knew of her own power and Mystic Eye, why didn't she use it against those gangsters at the warehouse when they went to hopefully release Nino from their clutches? Was it because there were just too many of them there? Because her Mystic Eye just doesn't work against that many people? It would make sense if it were a numbers problem; she clearly decided that it was worth using her Eye on Fuutarou, probably because he was the only person she'd have to deal with, while there were like five or six bad guys at the warehouse, and so maybe she felt that she couldn't possibly use her eye against so many people at once at risk of receiving severe retaliation on her part. Even still, when that guy who got on top of Nino started trying to rip her clothes off to do horrible things to her, shouldn't that have been as good of a time as any to pull out her trump card and try to stop him? As far as Miku recalls, Ichika didn't do anything to try to save Nino other than yell at those thugs with her sisters.
Why did Ichika keep her Mystic Eye a secret from them? And does her part-time job that she's rarely talked about with her sisters have something to do with it?
As the third quintuplet mulls silently over these thoughts, she senses a shift in the magical signature she's felt in the other room all this time; soft footsteps on the other side of the wall separating her and Nino's rooms can be heard to correspond with this movement of magical presence, however slight, and the door to Nino's room opens quietly. After a few moments that she spends listening to Nino slowly climb down the stairs, presumably in the dark and without her contacts, Miku also quietly gets out of bed and grabs a dark blue cardigan from her closet before opening her own door to follow after her sister.
Nakano Itsuki spent all of Saturday after they returned from the family restaurant that Uesugi-kun took them out to studying. As today was supposed to be an auxiliary lesson day that got cancelled in the wake of what happened on Friday night, Itsuki decided to study on her own to make the most out of the cancelled lesson; and because Uesugi-kun decided to stay until dinner teaching Miku how to cook in Nino's absence, the youngest quintuplet figured that she could ask her tutor whatever questions she had from her studying while they were eating.
That was the plan at first. Itsuki swears by her family's name that this was her intention.
Instead, she's managed to accomplish absolutely nothing but discover a way to waste five hours sitting at her desk in her room doing absolutely nothing. If staring down at her open Language Arts textbook and her notebook were a subject, she would've aced it immediately, because that's all she's managed to get done yesterday. She's only been able to finally focus on studying a few hours after dinner, and so she's been up late into the early Sunday morning studying to make up for what she didn't get done earlier on Saturday.
She didn't expect to learn what it feels like sharing an indirect kiss with a boy yesterday.
Even as Itsuki lies in bed, trying to go to sleep now that she's done what studying she can, the youngest quintuplet can't get her suppressed embarrassment out of her head, and it keeps taunting her, like a troll underneath a bridge somewhere. Why did she even think that offering Uesugi-kun a spoonful of her own dessert was somehow going to stop Miku from doing it too? Clearly in hindsight Itsuki meant it as a distraction since she didn't manage to think her own actions through enough, but maybe she just wanted Uesugi-kun to eat up some more; compared to the dishes the rest of quintuplets got, Fuutarou's servings were consistently smaller, with the parfait he treated himself to providing the most stark contrast between their meals at lunch, and he wolfed all those down in mere moments - and Itsuki thought she ate fast. So Itsuki conveniently bases her reasoning on her own goodwill, that she just wanted Uesugi-kun to have a bit more food, given that he was the one paying for everything and all.
This does not, however, explain the fact that after Uesugi-kun ate the bite of her parfait, Itsuki immediately went back to eating her own parfait without a second thought, using the exact same spoon.
Itsuki is surprised that she even managed to realize that she'd shared an indirect kiss with her own tutor. The youngest quintuplet has traditionally never really cared much for things like this, things that girls her age would gossip and yap about. Dates, romance, boyfriends - she never really had the time or desire to care about those things, as she favored studying and being a good student above all else. Whatever she learned about such talk, she learned from Nino, naturally. And of course, Itsuki never had a boyfriend of her own and didn't plan on getting one any time soon.
And yet, somehow, Itsuki of all people remembered the whole indirect kiss thing and is being embarrassed over it.
Honestly, this whole situation feels so contrived, but Itsuki figures that since Miku, Yotsuba, and Ichika all fed their tutor a bite out of their own desserts yesterday, she would've had to do the same just because she'd be the only one left out, and her sisters would peer-pressure her into doing the same anyway. So maybe this situation would've happened one way or another. It's just that she can't get over the hypocrisy that she's demonstrated to herself, having all these thoughts of student-tutor fidelity and trying to enforce proper behavior between Uesugi-kun and her sisters when here she is, lying in bed, guilty of committing a sin that she's been trying this whole time to prevent.
Most surprising of all, however, is that she hasn't been beating herself up mentally over it. She would think that for all the talk and behavior that she's shown trying to maintain "proper relationships" between the quintuplets and their classmate and tutor, Itsuki would be much harsher on herself than she is now for breaching the terms of her own preaching, but she's just not. Perhaps she herself is the one who's been growing lax and complacent recently; heck, she's the one responsible for their lunch excursion with their tutor yesterday for Saturday lunch, having Uesugi-kun to promise buying them parfaits at Saizeriya on the rooftop of their high-rise the night he protected her against that Shirazumi Rio person.
Now that she thinks about it, Itsuki silently realizes as she turns in her bed while tucking herself more tightly underneath her covers that ever since that night, Itsuki herself has slowly become more and more receiving of Uesugi-kun's tutorship. While this might sound rather redundant since after midterms she permanently joined the others as part of Uesugi-kun's study group, to clarify, Itsuki notices that she's been paying more attention to the lessons Uesugi-kun conducts for her and her sisters than her own teachers at school. Normally this would be absolutely sacrilegious to the old Itsuki; had this been two months ago, she would freak out over the fact that a mere tutor is somehow teaching the school material better than her own teachers were, but that isn't happening either. And it's not just because Uesugi-kun has redoubled his own efforts in teaching the quints more thoroughly, as he said he'd do after Nino helped him keep his tutoring job. Essentially, over the past two weeks, Itsuki is aware that she's developed in the opposite way of Nino; while Nino grew quieter and more reserved, Itsuki grew more vibrant and interactive, absorbing everything Uesugi-kun was teaching them like a sunflower drinking up the sun's rays as it travels across the sky, but Uesugi-kun being a good tutor isn't enough of a reason to explain why Itsuki has been willing to overlook some of the transgressions that her sisters or she herself have been committing.
Itsuki sighs quietly, brushing some of her peachy-red hair away from her face. She can't believe it - does she really have feelings for him? Itsuki, who's the Shut-In Quintuplet #2 after Miku? Itsuki, who's never tried going for any kind of serious relationship with a boy? While Itsuki would like to get married one day, she figured it would not be until well after she graduated university; if she had her way, Itsuki wouldn't even allow dating for high schoolers until they graduated high school and entered university, so basically once they turned eighteen. And yet here she is, unable to determine whether or not she harbors feelings for the boy who's been hired to tutor them that extends beyond the threshold of what she considers to be the proper relationship between them.
But she can't deny that there are many things about Uesugi-kun that she admires, perhaps almost too many: despite his delinquent-like behavior and appearance and his propensity to sleep in class almost all the time, he still manages perfect grades, perfect test scores, and, technically, near-perfect attendance excluding the odd day or two when he's stayed home to recuperate from injuries and such, all while juggling the responsibilities of the dual-sided nature of his contract with the Nakano family of both tutoring and safeguarding the quintuplets. And Itsuki has already gone over the small inferiority complex she feels in regards to her tutor, how he's talented enough to do all that in his situation while she, on the other hand, can't even get good grades on her own while living a life of wealth and comfort.
The biggest thing that she's come to admire about him, though, now that she's spent the last two weeks diligently attending his tutoring sessions, is his tutorship. When Itsuki mentioned earlier that she felt like Uesugi-kun was doing a better job of teaching than their actual teachers at school, that wasn't meant to be an exaggeration: he's been able to teach them school material in ways that even she and her sisters can grasp, though their retention of such knowledge is another matter that they still need to work on. Perhaps this should be expected out of a private tutor; the whole point of tutoring is to personalize teaching a particular subject and have it catered to the student in question, right? So Uesugi-kun is just doing his job; there shouldn't be anything particularly impressive about that.
But that would be ignoring the fact that he's been able to pull this off for her and her sisters, the quintuplets who became notorious at Black Rose for consistently getting among the lowest scores in tests in their grade. While as of the last two weeks Miku has returned to consistently beating Itsuki in terms of their mock test scores that Uesugi-kun gives them every other day or so to help them review the material that they've studied with him, the most valuable thing that Itsuki has gotten out of the past two weeks' worth of lessons is confidence, confidence that she's properly learning the material and can translate it directly into better scores. That, short of actual test results, is something Itsuki values greatly, as it was a very rare feeling to have studying on her own, and yet in these first two weeks of properly studying with her tutor alone, she's had that confidence much of the time.
Wouldn't this simply be gratefulness and appreciation instead? Maybe Itsuki's lack of relationship knowledge and emotional experience is getting the better of her here and making her jump way ahead of herself. Yeah, that sounds about right; these can't be genuine feelings that she has for Uesugi-kun, like what she'd feel if she wants to enter a relationship with him or something. She's just getting them confused with sentiments of appreciation for a job he's doing well. There's no need to overthink this, none at all. Itsuki is fine with allowing herself and her sisters to treat Uesugi-kun with more familiarity, and that's all he is. A private tutor who's also become their friend.
As if right on cue, Itsuki's mind flashes back to the night on the roof of the Pentagon, where she and Uesugi-kun stood together for a little while, and the moment where he put his hand on her head...and the sight of him smiling and laughing when they shared their bits of banter. That opens the floodgates of her recent memories of the last two weeks, all the moments that they've shared just in these two weeks alone of Uesugi-kun talking, joking, and bantering with the quintuplets.
If Uesugi-kun is just a friend to her, then why does seeing him laugh and smile make her feel content? It's not the same feeling that she gets when she sees her sisters laugh and smile. If he's just a friend, then why did she feel okay with telling him what happened when their mother died when she ran into him at the cemetery? That isn't something she just tells anyone she knows, given how sensitive it is.
Itsuki quietly wonders if this is something Nino is feeling too. After all, they're the two who made up the Anti-Uesugi Fuutarou Coalition at the start, though they each had their own reasons.
Speaking of Nino, actually, when Itsuki returned to her room after they came back from lunch, she carefully stepped by Nino's room because she remembered what Uesugi-kun mentioned about the temperature being higher around her room or something. Sure enough, now that she knows what she's looking for, the ambient temperature in front of Nino's door seemed like it was a bit higher than the rest of the house. It could just be her imagination, of course, a sort of placebo effect that's occurring simply because she's working with prior knowledge of something that's supposed to be there, but Itsuki trusts her own judgment and has determined that Uesugi-kun was right. Now why could that be? Normally Itsuki would have never given it a second thought, but if Uesugi-kun was the one who brought it up, surely it must mean something? He's not the type to bring up idle chatter like that unless someone else does it first, and nobody prompted him to mention something like that yesterday as far as she can recall.
The youngest quintuplet spends a few more minutes lying in bed, pondering to herself this curious development when she remembers the conversation that her two older sisters Nino and Miku had in the middle of the night some time ago that she accidentally eavesdropped on. Actually, Itsuki forgot all about this strange conversation that those two were having - though she's not sure if she remembers everything, she does recall that Nino was in fact changing, according to Miku, and it seemed like Nino was having complicated feelings in regards to Uesugi-kun. So perhaps this was when it started? And that conversation was sometime after the end of midterms, probably the weekend right after, so the contents of that conversation between them are probably still valid.
There's also that weird talk about Mystic Eyes and magecraft and stuff, about how Miku talked about getting Uesugi-kun to teach her magecraft, too. Nino and Miku were mages all this time too - Itsuki remembers hearing that part and feeling utterly shocked. Her sisters, mages? As in the same type as their tutor? Then - then because they're quintuplets, does that mean that they are all mages too?
Then if that's true, does that explain why Itsuki was also able to sense that weird rise in temperature near Nino's room? Is she, too, somehow a mage? The possible revelation makes Itsuki's head start to spin. How? She's never done anything special other than study, which itself is probably not really all that special, especially when she keeps bombing all her tests for the most part. She's never felt like anything special, either. So how is she a mage?
Then, again as if on cue, Itsuki hears the quiet, careful opening of a door down the second floor of their penthouse. Because her room is furthest from the stairs, it's hard for Itsuki to gauge, especially with her head underneath the covers like this and the quietness of the opening door, how far away the sound is to estimate which one of her sisters is emerging, so Itsuki listens for the speed with which the footsteps reach the stairs, which is quite fast, so it could be either Ichika or Nino since their rooms are closest. And since Ichika doesn't usually just wake up randomly in the middle of the night, and given Nino's situation the past two days, Itsuki guesses that it's Nino who's finally come out of her room, probably to go use the bathroom again or something. She wants to also get up and go talk to her, but Itsuki doesn't want to incite her, so she stays put in her bedroom.
However, to further complicate things, she hears yet another door open, with the corresponding pair of footsteps also heading towards the stairs. What is going on?
Wait a minute - could this be Nino and Miku again, meeting in the middle of the night to talk once more?
Now her curiosity reaches a boiling point at which it can no longer be contained. Itsuki, driven by such bubbling curiosity that she can't keep suppressed, quietly slips into action herself and gets out of bed to tiptoe over to her own door, unlock it and open it slowly so as to not make any noise, and continues to tiptoe up to the railing to begin eavesdropping on her sisters again.