A/N
I've got the month of October cleared to do nothing but write fanfics. Let's make the most of it.
Uesugi Fuutarou looks down at himself suddenly.
He's not sure why he must, but he does. This feeling of strangeness, this feeling of helplessness - Fuutarou knows it well, for it's an immediate giveaway that just like that one night a few weeks prior, he is dreaming.
He has to be, because the ground is much closer to his source of vision than it is nowadays.
His vision flickers. He's now walking through what appears to be an empty indoor parking lot. Fuutarou's senses are clouded by haziness, the sort of mental blurriness that only dreams can inflict, and despite knowing that he's in another one of his weird dreams, the boy can't do much to snap himself out of it. He's tried - not just a few times, but many times - but to no avail.
His vision flickers again. He's now in the hospital, the very same hospital he now works at in the present day. The hospital lobby looks quite different than it does now - it's almost nostalgic, seeing the hospital lobby like this.
His vision flickers again. He's breathing heavily, resting his back against the side of a barren tree. The air feels cold, though his skin feels numb as though his entire body has been injected with anesthesia, so while he knows the cold is biting and brutal, Fuutarou can't feel it very well.
His vision flickers again - Fuutarou isn't getting much time to sit back and relax to take in each of these scenes. Now, he's back inside the hospital, in one particular room of the structure - the room that, if possible, he would rather not have to enter ever again in his life. The ticking of the clock on the wall is the most distinct thing Fuutarou remembers back then, and so that ticking is the loudest thing he hears as he sits on a chair, waiting for the door to open.
His vision flickers one last time - he never hears that door open. Instead, he's standing on the sidewalk in the middle of the day. A policeman is escorting what appears to be an indignant young lady away from him, while a young girl with long, peachy-red hair approaches him by carefully climbing down the flight of stairs to his left. He watches her approach him, and once she's level with him, she gives him a cheeky smile.
Fuutarou knows what that smile means, so he squeezes his eyes and braces for the imminent -
BANG!
The real Uesugi Fuutarou's eyes snap open, the immense volume of a jump-scare-inducing gunshot still ringing in his ears.
As if to taunt him, the darkness of the house is occupied with the usual ticking of a clock on the wall nearby. Fuutarou has gotten used to the incessant ticking of his clock, but sometimes, especially on nights like these, he feels an unreasonable urge to throw something at it, but he refrains. It's not like he's got neighbors to worry about nearby that would be bothered by it, but still, he refrains.
To distract himself from his waking thoughts and tribulations, the young mage pushes himself off his futon and walks with his back somewhat hunched over to a nearby desk, where a tall stack of papers sits, and he sits down at this desk and takes the top few pages to browse through them steadily. Today is Monday - the beginning of the week whose end is marked by their finals day. This is the last stretch before then - and Fuutarou, having gotten as much of his magework and other responsibilities out of the way so that this last week is as free as possible for him to dedicate to tutoring the girls, intends to make full use of it.
However, intentions aren't enough to leave him with clear mind, as his own occasional nightmares prove. Because those aside, this is legitimately the first time he himself feels nervous about their progress and their future results on their finals. The girls have actually been slowly improving - so unlike before, when Fuutarou didn't really have much faith in them to score well on their exams, now, the girls really do have a real shot at passing their finals. And not just for the subjects that they normally excel at, all of them.
It's rather strange, actually - either Fuutarou has been so busy with his other non-tutoring obligations or he's simply been too negligent towards the quints that he hasn't noticed their academic improvement lately. It's almost as if he's still stuck two months in the past, when he mentally prepared himself by considering the girls a bit too stupid to get their grades up anytime soon. But in fact, he possesses the evidence of their improvement in the form of mock exams and worksheets that he's been assigning to the girls as auxiliary homework on top of their usual homework from school, and if he compares them with the kinds of scores they all got a month ago or so, their scores have in fact been getting better like upwards trends on stock market graphs. Slow, incremental improvement, to be sure, but for five girls who could be considered failing just eight weeks ago, such improvement is almost staggering.
Fuutarou raises one hand up to his eyes and cups them with the palm, rubbing the top half of his face slowly. Just when did they actually start getting serious about their academics like this? Even though this is what he wants as their tutor, the young mage feels like he hasn't even done all that much, not with all the times he himself has neglected their tutoring in favor of stalking the night in the city like a DC character. So to him, the logical conclusion is that the girls' improvement is not so much the result of his own efforts but more so the girls' own collective efforts. All he's done is help steer them in the right direction.
Setting down his currently held sheet of paper briefly before rotating it out for another one, Fuutarou sighs softly. This is good - maybe this'll mean that eventually, the girls will become capable of studying and learning all by themselves, which then means he can stop being their tutor.
Tutoring, huh...it's been two, no, three months since he first became the quintuplets' tutor. It feels like it's been much longer than that.
After reviewing a few of these papers on his desk, Fuutarou leaves them where they've been sitting on the desk and proceeds to get ready for the rest of the day.
"Up here should be fine, yeah."
Opening the door to the rooftop of one of the school's main classroom buildings, away from the building that contains the school cafeteria in search of some privacy, Nakano Nino leads two of her sisters, Miku and Itsuki, in tow and shuts the door securely after the two of them step out onto the roof.
"H-How did you know that this rooftop is accessible by students?" Itsuki asks a bit nervously - understandable, as it was against school rules at their previous academy for students to be on any rooftop on campus unless they had expressed permission by a member of the faculty. She, Miku, and Nino all hold their lunches of hot, freshly made beef bowls that they've procured early from the cafeteria at Nino's urgency.
"Yotsuba blabbed about it to me the other day. Said that she ate lunch with Uesugi-kun at one point here," Nino explains, sighing somewhat and relaxing on a bench, the same bench that Yotsuba sat on with their tutor during said prior engagement. "You know Yotsuba, you let her go on and on and eventually she'll spill something that she didn't mean to."
"When did she tell you?" Miku asks, also taking a seat down next to Nino while Itsuki sits on Miku's right, sandwiching her.
"I said the other day. Like, over the weekend? I think Saturday..."
"So...what was it that you wanted to talk to us about?" Itsuki leans a little forward in her seat to glance over at the older of her two older sisters as the three of them begin to dig into their beef bowls. Her voice is still hesitant and timid. "You sounded so urgent when you told the two of us to come follow you for lunch today."
"Yeah, because today's like the perfect day we have to just talk among ourselves," Nino points out. "Ichika's hanging out with some of the friends she's made here at this school, and Yotsuba's helping out our homeroom teacher at the faculty room since they need someone to carry some new projectors to some of the classrooms."
"Then this is about Ichika," Miku deduces quietly before closing her lips over a chopstick-ful of steaming rice and slices of beef.
"Sure is. Who else would it be about..."
"What is the matter with Ichika, though? I do not recall her doing anything out of the ordinary recently," Itsuki points out.
"No, it's not that. It's just...I've been thinking ever since the last time the three of us talked that one night."
The two younger quintuplet sisters first slowly glance at each other, then over at Nino together.
"Nino, I don't think there's any reason for us to, like...be suspicious of Ichika or anything," Miku says calmly. "...at least, not at this moment."
"That's right...we have finals at the end of the week; we cannot be wasting our efforts worrying about what one of our sisters is up to," Itsuki agrees wholeheartedly. "We have been doing so well to get our grades up, and it's only been recently that we've all finally improved to the point where passing our finals is no longer just a pitiful shot in the dark."
"Then let's talk about it here so that we don't need to later," Nino simply shrugs - her social skills give her a distinct edge in her ability to commandeer the conversation over her two younger sisters, the two quintuplets who don't have as much social experience as the rest. "But it's not just about Ichika - this is about Uesugi-kun too."
The direct mention of their tutor's name swiftly changes the other quints' attitudes towards the topic at hand, and the two younger sisters sit up, rapt at attention now.
"H-How so...?" Miku murmurs seriously.
Nino lets her back hunch a little as she collects her thoughts. "Like I said, I've been thinking: you told us that night that Uesugi-kun told you about how Ichika's a mage, right? And not only does she have Mystic Eyes like us, but she's able to use it like how she used it on Uesugi-kun himself once. I've been thinking - what if Ichika's been working with him all this time?"
"Working with him? As like, mages...?" Itsuki says in a hushed voice.
"No, that's...that can't be right. Nino, you're going too far with this," Miku objects quickly, the rapt attention on her face quickly degrading into disagreement.
"Am I, though? Think about it." The second quintuplet points at her younger sister with her wooden chopsticks. "We're all mages, right? On the account of us having Mystic Eyes. And it seems like we're all discovering our magical bullshit or whatever earlier or later than others. Naturally, there's gotta be someone among us who realizes that she's a mage first out of all of us - and as far as we're concerned, the first one is Ichika for reasons we've already mentioned."
Nakano Nino turns her waist to face her sisters in full.
"The fact that Uesugi-kun is a mage shouldn't be a coincidence. As in, it shouldn't be a coincidence that Papa had him become our tutor; that much should be obvious to us now. We know that Ichika's been out doing her own thing for a while now - for the last couple of years or something. As a matter of fact, she's been off doing her own thing ever since Mama passed away, right? Going to this part-time job of hers that none of us know really anything about and such? And it's likely that Mama herself might have been a mage with how busy she was when she was still alive. What if Ichika's intending to go down that same route, the same route that Mama took, whatever it was, exactly? And what if she's having Uesugi-kun help her do it?"
"But the fact still stands that we did not know Uesugi-kun beyond three months ago - " Itsuki begins to debate, but Nino cuts her off.
"Maybe we didn't, but Ichika's had God knows how many chances to be by herself doing her own thing, like I said, over these past couple of years. Don't you think there's a good chance that maybe she's gotten to know Uesugi-kun first? Like, the two of them met or something around the city somewhere, and they started working together or something, I don't know."
"So you think they're collaborating, or that they have been for all this time," Miku determines. "Then...the implications of this are..."
Miku falls quiet. Itsuki's eyes glance to her for a second, and for that second, she thinks she sees a strange look in her older sister's eyes, but that look is fleeting and evaporates before Itsuki can really make heads of tails of it.
"Well, first of all, it's obvious that they've known each other for all this time, right? Like, think about it, Ichika's always been pretty nice to him, and she's never been against him tutoring us," Nino continues.
"But she was against it at first. Remember the night before we met Uesugi-kun?" Itsuki points out. "The original plan that we had to deal with the tutor before we found out that it was Uesugi-kun?"
"Yeah, but then, as soon as she realized who it was, she stopped being against it. That doesn't strike you as weird in hindsight?" Nino counters. "And so ever since then, she's always been super supportive of his tutoring. And, not only that, but Uesugi-kun lets her go to her part-time job whenever it conflicts with his tutoring. He usually chews Yotsuba out for skipping out on tutoring to go help out people at school, yet all he does is just sigh at Ichika and let her go out to her part-time whenever she says she needs to go?"
Nino's arguments begin to weigh down on both Itsuki and Miku, and Itsuki's joined her fellow quintuplet sister in being silent.
"B...But..." Miku finally lets her voice eek out of her throat, "...that one time...when they met at Starbucks...Fuutarou said that they had a bit of a fight, and...and that Ichika used her Mystic Eye on him. And...and from what he's told us about mages, it doesn't seem like...mages are usually friendly towards each other. So...so can we really be sure that Ichika and Fuutarou are good friends...?"
"Oh c'mon, that just means that they've had a bit of an argument. Who says you can't be good friends and still have arguments every once in a while? I mean, for fuck's sake, just look at us! Look at all the arguments that I've had with the two of you!"
"Yes, but...to the point where Ichika would use magic on Uesugi-kun...?" Itsuki shakes her head a little. "I...I do not claim to know much about mages - none, in fact. But just from what we have seen in the incidents that we have been involved in, and certainly you can attest to this better than we can, Nino, but...I cannot say that using magic in a hostile manner like Ichika seemed to have done to Uesugi-kun at Starbucks is something that...that friends would consider doing to one another...?"
"But you can't say that for sure. The world of mages or whatever can be super different from just normies like us, right? Before we found out that we were mages, anyway," Nino shrugs. "Like, they can behave super differently from us. Maybe it's acceptable for them, because it's not like Ichika or Uesugi-kun's ever brought it up since then, right? So they must've made up or something."
"Okay, then...what are you trying to say, Nino?" Miku asks, putting strength behind her voice to wrest control of the conversation away from Nino and towards herself and Itsuki. "What's the point you're trying to make here? Because as odd as all this is, admittedly, now that you've brought it up, right now we ought to be focusing on our finals. What's any of this got to do with that? Because if you really wanted to talk about this, shouldn't you save this for later, after finals when summer vacation starts and we actually have time to do whatever we want?"
"Well, first of all, I wanted to get out of the way now because I feel like I'll forget some of the stuff I wanted to talk about," Nino talks back, "but more importantly, I'm bringing this up because Uesugi-kun's so damn tired all the time!"
Both Miku and Itsuki blink exactly once at their older sister.
"...come again?" the youngest quint asks blankly.
"It's because Uesugi-kun's so fucking exhausted all the time!" Nino gripes angrily, repeating herself for her sisters' convenience. "I know he's taken some time off from tutoring us recently, but he hasn't even been using that time to rest up so that he can tutor us better! Not to mention, it's always embarrassing as hell seeing him knocked out cold in class every damn day!"
Miku and Itsuki slowly exchange glances, as if they're at a loss for words.
"That's why I'm bringing up Ichika being a mage to you two right now, because I feel like Ichika's dragging him around all the time and making him feel more and more exhausted over time!" Nino sighs heavily. "Or at least, maybe not dragging around, but getting him to do stuff for her constantly!"
Hearing one of her sisters clearing her throat, Nino snaps her indignant gaze up at the source, which seems to be Miku.
"What, Miku? Shouldn't you be on my side on this? You're the one who would care about something like this the most, right?"
"Well, yes, if you put it that way, but more importantly..." Miku sets her locks directly back at her sister's. "...Nino, are you perhaps...concerned...about Fuutarou?"
Nino's face for a few moments is locked in an incredulous gaze back at her younger sister, but of course it doesn't stay this way for long, for it gets dropped in favor of a face full of enlightened embarrassment and fuming words.
"I-I-I'm not CONCERNED about him! I'm j-just bringing this up because - because we need him to do his job as a tutor, for all of our sakes! We can't have him do his job badly because he's too busy with all the other stuff that he's got! I'm just - just trying to point out that Ichika might be one source that's giving Uesugi-kun more work that's making him underperform at his job as our tutor!" Nino bellows hotly.
"But...Nino, up until recently, did you not always state that you did not care for his tutoring?" Itsuki tilts her head a little in confusion as Miku begins to snort under her breath. "If I may ask, whatever happened to the staunch resistance that you had for Uesugi-kun and his tutorship? And we should have asked you this before, but...you did not stop attending Uesugi-kun's lessons when you said that after our midterms, you would stop, and yet - "
"IT'S BECAUSE I REALIZED THAT HE'S A GOOD TUTOR, ALRIGHT? I said it, fucking goddamn it!" Nino bawls. "More than that, though, it fucking sucks studying alone! I tried doing it for the past couple of weeks after midterms - it fucking sucks! I wanna study with everyone too, like, c'mon, you know me! And the most reliable way I have to be able to study with everyone is to join everyone when Uesugi-kun's tutoring!"
"Ah...she finally admitted it..." Miku covers her mouth a little with her hand that isn't holding her chopsticks to hide a cheeky smirk.
"H-Hey, I'm not the only one who's like this! You've got another quint right next to you, Miku! Itsuki was the exact same way, fucking change my mind!"
"W-Well, it is...it is true that I was against Uesugi-kun's tutoring at first, but at least I came to the conclusion that I required his assistance on my own eventually! That, and who was it that dragged me into receiving tutoring lessons from Uesugi-kun in the first place, might I kindly remind you?" Itsuki barks back at Nino, her cheeks also becoming hot with emotion.
As Nino and Itsuki start bickering, Miku sighs loudly. "All this fuss and getting worked up about Ichika and Fuutarou, only to find out it's because you're worried about Fuutarou's health..." Miku groans a little. "Why can't you be more honest with yourself, Nino? Otherwise, it'll cause misunderstandings like this..."
"I AM being honest with myself!" Nino argues hotly.
"That's exactly the kind of thing someone who isn't being honest with themselves would say."
"No it's not!"
Sighing much like Miku before her, Itsuki resumes eating her lunch. "At least it is good to know that we are all now on more or less favorable terms with Uesugi-kun," the youngest quint declares lightly, raising another pair of chopsticks' worth of rice, diced spring onions, and beef to eat after she's done talking. "Certainly, he was correct in stating that having all of us study with him willingly was his highest priority."
"We did waste a good ten weeks getting to this point, though," Miku mumbles before also partaking in more of her own beef bowl.
"I know you're trying to pin the blame on me right now, Miku," Nino hisses, following suit after her younger sisters.
"Who else..."
"Hey, it's not like I was the only one who was against it in the beginning! Again, look at who's sitting next to you!"
"Yes, I'm hearing her talk to me right now."
"Your other side, damn it!" Nino begins to rapidly shovel the rest of her food into her mouth in her dominant anger and embarrassment that gives her the ability to consume food twice as fast as she usually does. "God, I hate him, I fucking hate him! Making me embarrass myself in front of my own sisters like this..."
"You sure about that...?" Miku murmurs to her side nonchalantly.
"YES! Because at the end of the day, I still maintain that he's still an outsider and he always will be!" Bolting up to her feet quickly, Nino holds onto her now-empty beef bowl to dispose of it properly. "You want me to prove it? Fine! I'll fucking prove it!"
And before either of her sisters can stop her, Nino storms off the roof and slams the rooftop access door behind her.
"I hope you did not tease her too much," Itsuki sighs heavily in her wake, somewhat amazed that Nino even has it in her to eat faster than she can. "You know how Nino is - for as much as she loves to tease us, she has never been one to take teasing well when it is done to her."
"I know. Even still, she needs it every once in a while, if only as a vibe check," Miku remarks. "In any case, let's just finish eating quickly, lunch is about to end soon."
After school, the youngest quintuplet is seated politely at the shoe lobby of the Nakano penthouse, patiently waiting for their tutor to arrive to begin their scheduled lesson for today. She's not the only quintuplet waiting for his arrival; as a matter of fact, all five quintuplets are now gathered in the living room waiting for Uesugi Fuutarou to show up, as they have done for their past several tutoring lessons. Itsuki just happens to be the one who's taken it upon herself to wait for their tutor at the shoe lobby. The young tutor was due to arrive half an hour ago, but he has yet to make his entrance, which is strange given his usual punctuality, despite the social deviance he usually displays at school. He has at least texted Ichika to inform the girls of his tardiness, so it's not as if they need to worry about his safety, but still, Itsuki can't help but feel a tad bit nervous about the situation.
That, and the conversation she's had with Miku and Nino earlier at school during lunch has put her mentally in a strange spot. Ichika collaborating with Uesugi-kun, and possibly for longer than they could have imagined? Itsuki wants to banish the notion as preposterous, but she can't fully pry it from her mind now that Nino's sowed it so adamantly. Could Nino actually be onto something with that? That Ichika has a direct hand in Uesugi-kun's work as a mage because she herself is one? That perhaps...perhaps, just maybe, all this...mage business has intertwined everyone's fates? That it truly was no coincidence, as Nino stated, that Uesugi Fuutarou was the boy chosen to not only tutor them, but to protect them from danger as well?
Itsuki tries to shake her head to clear her thoughts but to no avail; the preoccupying thoughts cannot be shaken off and stick to her mind like drops of rapidly drying glue. The youngest quint knows that it is dangerous for her to entertain such thoughts this close to finals, as was discussed earlier at school when Nino started going off on this tangent, but she can't help herself: could Ichika really be a fully-fledged mage like Uesugi-kun himself? That she, too, like Uesugi-kun, is stalking the night just like he is, performing nightly vigilantism, in the shadows where the rest of her family can't see, with perhaps the exception of their father? Certainly in years past, there would be nights when she would return home late at night for reasons she did not want to share and those that could not be explained by her sisters when they tried to figure out why, though to be fair, Ichika has not been demonstrating such behavior lately. Perhaps she stopped her own nightly escapades because she met Uesugi-kun, and now she's entrusted him with whatever her nighttime responsibilities were before they met?
So many possibilities, no little answers - given Itsuki's frustrations with her own lack of ability to self-study, this kind of situation, too, is starting to get on her nerves, now that she can't get the thoughts out of her head. Also, now that she's on the topic, why has Ichika decided to keep her identity as a mage a secret from the rest of her sisters? Given that it's Ichika, it's safe to assume that she did so in order to protect the rest of the quintuplets; just from what little they know of the magic world from Uesugi-kun, that explaination seems the likeliest. Then what of that fateful weekend night at the warehouse, when the quintuplets were taken hostage at Nino's blunder? Ichika could have probably done something about the situation there, but she didn't, which means that either she isn't anywhere near the practiced mage as Uesugi-kun or she deliberately chose not to act in order to keep her double-identity a secret from the others.
Gripping her skirt more tightly on her lap, Itsuki purses her lips tightly. If only she could simply go straight up to Ichika and ask her these questions directly, but she knows she can't do that. But, then again, since they're all quintuplets, won't Ichika also know that eventually the rest of her sisters will also awaken their own latent magical powers sooner or later, like what's been happening to Miku and Nino? Those two can't keep their Mystic Eyes and their magical powers, should they have any, secret forever; eventually Ichika will find out about them, especially given that it's Ichika, who, being the eldest quintuplet among them, can figure out what's going on with her sisters faster than any of her sisters can. Honestly, all Itsuki probably needs to do is just wait, and the opportunities that she seeks will show themselves in due time.
A sudden, somewhat loud thump against the wall just outside the Nakano penthouse's front door rudely drags Itsuki out of her own deep thoughts and causes her to spring back up to her feet. The thump is loud to her, but not so loud that her sisters would hear from behind her in the living room, so the youngest quint opens the door to find -
"U-Uesugi-kun...?!"
The Nakano quintuplets' classmate and tutor has his face pressed against the wall next to their front door, down on his knees that somehow continue to support his weight as he remains with his face planted against the cold, air-conditioned wall. Alarmed, Itsuki reaches out to push her tutor to the side so that she can get a look at his face, and what she sees makes her gasp with a hushed voice.
"He's...dead!"
Uesugi Fuutarou snores loudly with both of his eyes wide open.
"...tired," Itsuki finishes, her face relaxing into a look of incredulity. "Uesugi-kun, what did we say about getting some proper rest today?"
Fuutarou shakes his head like a dog being awoken from a nap once Itsuki's shaken him enough to wake him up.
"Mmmmph? Sorry, come again?" he asks, getting quickly back up to his feet. "Oh, I actually made it to your house. Good, good."
"Don't make it sound like getting here in itself was a gamble!" Itsuki reprimands him. "And I said that we told you to get some decent rest at some point, didn't we? You'll need it to tutor us properly this week before our finals!"
"Right, right. I mean, yeah, I did get some decent rest, I actually went back home to sleep this time," Fuutarou says, rubbing his right eye with his right hand while giving Itsuki a thumbs-up gesture with his left."
"...just being able to sleep at home constitutes good rest to you? Then how long did you sleep tonight?"
"A whopping three hours. What a steal!"
"Uesugi-kun!" Itsuki growls his name again, this time sounding legitimately angry with him while putting her fists against her hips. "If you feel that you must rest some more, you can do so here. I will make sure that you leave this place well-rested if you cannot keep yourself awake for our lesson!"
"But then how're you girls gonna learn?"
"Well, since you have not been by for a few days recently, we have all been studying together in your absence whenever possible. We have been taking your advice on teaching each other whenever you are not here, and it appears to be very helpful."
"That's good to hear, but I'm afraid that won't quite be enough, not when you girls all are just barely starting to get passing scores on all your subjects. We gotta finish strong, and I gotta be there for it as your tutor. That's why I went ahead and prepared...this."
Itsuki watches as Fuutarou pulls his messenger bag in front of himself and rummages through it briefly before, to her downright horror, pulling out a, unbelievably thick stack of papers; he may as well have ripped open a full ream of printer paper and pulled out all of the contents.
"I've curated these sample questions myself, either by taking them from reference and study books or just straight up making them myself," Fuutarou beams with satisfaction while Itsuki begins to tremble and sweat on the spot; Fuutarou has been inflicting a sort of trauma on the quintuplets and forcing them to develop a phobia of worksheets with how often he's been assigning them to the girls lately. "At least twenty unique worksheets, and copies for each of the five of you. If you can go through all of these before finals, you'll have an even better shot at passing all your finals - or at least I hope that's the case."
Fuutarou looks up from his ream of papers only to find the front door closing right in his face.
"O-On second thought, Uesugi-kun, l-let us just - just cancel today's lesson. Your, uh, your health is, um, very important after all, and - and I would prefer if you took today off to take b-better care of yourself, so - "
"Itsuki, my health is not an excuse for you to not study. Also, don't shut the door in my face after I basically sleepwalked my ass over here from home."
With the most reluctance Fuutarou has seen come out of Itsuki, the youngest quintuplet slowly reopens the door and, with her ahoge bobbing dejectedly, slowly accepts the ream of worksheets from her tutor as the latter lets himself inside the penthouse and closes the door behind him.
"Ugh...so much work here..." Itsuki sighs uncomfortably as she begins to peruse the worksheets, but then she stops in her tracks as she steps back onto the floor out of the shoe lobby while Fuutarou pulls his own off to enter the house properly. "Wait a minute...Uesugi-kun..."
"Hai, Uesugi dess," the tutor answers crisply, but his voice is still quite groggy.
Itsuki's hands grow a bit slack as she takes another sigh, this time much deeper and sincere than her first.
"...unbelievable. Consider me astounded," Itsuki shakes her head with a weak smile. "Do not tell me that these were the reason why you got so little sleep last night?"
The tutor simply shrugs as he steps past the youngest quint to head to the living room where the rest of his students await.
"I'll leave that to your imagination, but...what I will say is, I can't slack off myself when you girls have been putting in work lately."
Itsuki lowers her stack of papers given to her by her tutor, watching him disappear around the corner and begin greeting the rest of her sisters. Slack off? If only that were true, and if only just for his sake...
"I'm not studying with you anymore!"
Nino's signature loud voice grabs Itsuki's attention this time, and the youngest quint gasps a little, having forgotten to warn her tutor of Nino's potentially disagreeable attitude that she's got in store for him today, so she rushes into the living room herself to find Nino and Fuutarou in the middle of a stand-off in the living room with the rest of their sisters looking on with mixed reactions.
"Mhm. What brought this on, exactly?" Fuutarou asks calmly, groaning a little as he eases himself down onto the floor on his usual side of the glass table.
"I intend to make good on my promise that I'd only study with everyone for our midterms and that's it! So from now on, I won't be studying with you anymore!" Nino declares even more fervently, pointing a finger down at the seated tutor, who lays his head down on the table.
"Fuutarou, are you...are you alright?" Miku asks with heightened concern, seeing their tutor put his head down like this with worry splashed on her face, as this is the first time Fuutarou has acted like this. Usually their tutor would get the rest he needs just from sleeping in class at school, but for him to need even more rest on top of what he gets at school is a sight that the girls have never seen before.
"Yeah, Uesugi-san, you don't look so hot right now. You should get some more sleep right now if that's what you need, we'll be fine on our own," Yotsuba says to Fuutarou, already by his side with her hands on his shoulders.
"You're the last person I wanna hear that from, Yotsuba," Fuutarou grumbles sleepily. "Maybe if that came from one of your sisters I'd believe it, but not from you."
"H-Hey, what's that supposed to mean!? I'm being bullied right now! No bully!" Yotsuba pouts annoyedly, feeling miffed that her extension of goodwill has not been reciprocated.
"Yeah, these aren't quite real bully hours yet, Fuutarou-kun. But Yotsuba's still right; if you need to get some more sleep, you should probably do that. Even if you are Fuutarou-kun, I can't imagine how on earth you'll be able to tutor effectively when you're half asleep," Ichika agrees, taking Fuutarou's other side and putting her hands underneath his left armpit. "Yotsuba, get his other arm. On the count of three - one, two, three!"
Synchronizing their strength, the two sisters manage to raise Fuutarou up off the table and drag him over to the long couch, where they dump him and Ichika pulls his left leg up so that he's lying on the sofa properly at least.
"Shit...not gonna lie, this feels pretty embarrassing when I'm supposed to be tutoring you all right now..." the young tutor sighs feebly, forced to accept his situation to get at least a bit more rest.
"At least it's not as embarrassing as failing all your exams like we do every time we get them," Miku shrugs, pulling off her cardigan after setting her headphones aside on the corner of the glass table and draping it over her tutor like it's a blanket.
"Uh, hello!? Are you all just gonna ignore me here or what?!" Nino barks at everyone in the living room while Itsuki finally sets down the stack of worksheets that Fuutarou has bestowed upon her upon his arrival. Her sisters merely glance over at her, and the looks on their faces for the most part convey the same message.
"...well, if you wanna go back to studying by yourself that badly, then be our guest," Ichika shrugs lightly, but the sound of Fuutarou's snores grabs her attention again. "Sheesh, for him to fall asleep that fast...just how much has he been beating himself up lately?"
"When he first arrived, he faceplanted into the wall next to the door and that was how I found him," Itsuki sighs with her oldest sister. "I did tell him to cancel our lesson today half-jokingly, but...seeing him like this, maybe I ought to have been more serious about that notion..."
"I don't know about the rest of you, but I don't mind him staying longer than usual tonight to teach us once he wakes up," Miku says to her sisters. "Of course, I'll be studying in the meantime while we're waiting for him to wake back up. I'm assuming those are worksheets Fuutarou got for us to do today?" She points over at the stack of papers on the glass table.
"Yes. Twenty unique worksheets, one for the each of us," Itsuki explains curtly.
Snorting weakly, Ichika puts a single hand on her hip as she takes a glance down at the worksheets procured for them by their tutor. "I can't help but feel like I'm looking at more effort done by one person than all the effort that I've put into anything in my own life."
"Well...that actually wouldn't be too far from the tru - " Itsuki begins to say, but she's interrupted by Nino turning after she's had enough of being with her sisters to head for the stairs. " - wait, Nino, where are you going?"
Nino glares back hard at Itsuki. "Like I said, to go back to my room to study on my own. Did you not listen to me just now or what?"
"Wait, wait..." Nino's youngest sister hurries around the glass table to catch up to Nino. "You - are you being serious right now?"
Inhaling sharply with anger, the second quintuplet then turns fully to Itsuki to aggressively confront her. "Your ears full of earwax or something or what? I even told you that too, about how I was going to prove that I fucking hate Uesugi-kun!"
"Wait, what on earth even happened? Did something happen between you two earlier at school or something?" Sensing the situation intensify, Ichika looks on sharply with alertness to her two sisters at the base of the stairs.
"Nino's been like this since lunch. We were, uh, talking about a few things, and...I teased her about what's been happening with Fuutarou, how we've all been studying with him and stuff, and...she took it badly, so ever since then she's been like this," Miku shakes her head with a sigh of her own. "I thought she'd cool off when we got home, but it looks like she hasn't..."
"But Nino, our finals are at the end of this week! We have been making so much progress getting our scores up together for the past week or so; for you to just ditch us like this now, is that not going to put all of our efforts to waste?" Itsuki tells Nino.
"What's me leaving to go study on our own go anything to do with our scores? If anything, I'm only hurting my own scores; the rest of you can keep studying together like you have been," Nino hisses sharply back at her youngest sister.
"Then at least study with us until Uesugi-kun wakes up if you insist on being this way!" Itsuki pleads.
"No! Ugh, God, just seeing him here's enough to make me fucking puke!"
Finally realizing that there's no way she's getting through to her sister at this rate, Itsuki suddenly steels her resolve and develops a hard look of her own to equip herself adequately to deal with her older sister's bullshit.
"Nino, Uesugi-kun has been working hard to get us to the point we are at now. For you to suddenly leave like this would mean not only wasting our efforts, but his efforts as well!" Itsuki points over at the sofa, though neither Itsuki nor Nino have a good angle of their snoozing, lightly snoring tutor who's fast asleep.
Nino, who follows Itsuki's finger in the direction that it's pointing, clenches her teeth with closed lips, and Itsuki can see the look in her eyes sharpen intensely to the point where she gives truth to the phrase "if looks could kill".
"Shut the fuck up, Itsuki, you dumb bitch," Nino spits down at her sister, as she's standing on a slightly elevated position over Itsuki. "He's just a hired tutor at the end of the day. An outsider. If anything, he's meddling with affairs that should've stayed within our own family. Don't you fucking dare try to make him out to be anything more than that, because he's not."
"Itsuki, there's no point arguing with her right now."
Joining her youngest sister at the base of the stairs, Miku, having pulled out a smaller stack of worksheets from the original stack that Itsuki brought in with her, hands the twenty sheets up at Nino. "Here, at the very least, take these with you. If you're going to study on your own today, you might as well do it with the best study material we can get our hands on easily."
"I don't fucking need these."
Before anyone can object, Nino, with surprisingly crisp accuracy, throws her left hand out and slaps the stack of worksheets being offered to her out of her hand, causing them to get scattered all over the floor and the base of the stairs.
Watching the papers fly in every conceivable direction, Nino, blinking awkwardly at what she's done, watches the last piece of paper flutter and come to a rest next to one of the dinner table chair's legs. It may have been her intention to slap the papers away, but seeing the stack of papers basically explode into individual sheets gives her a better scope of what she's done; that, and she kind of expected Miku to have a better grip on those sheets. But there's nothing that she can do about it; she has to stand her ground despite her actions, since it's not as though she can really apologize for them now.
"Pick them up."
The eerie amplification of Miku's soft-spoken voice instantly demands Nino's attention, and her eyes can't help but flick down to Miku's, whose eyes have not yet gone Mystic, but Nino can sense magical energy emanating from them without a doubt, not unlike the last time Miku gave her a very similar look. However, having felt this once before, the older quintuplet is better able to resist its oppressive nature and remains steadfast, failing completely to notice the look on the quintuplet standing next to Miku.
"You're seriously letting yourselves get conned by these stupid fucking scraps of paper?" Nino growls back strongly, stooping down to pick up one such worksheet and looking at it in utmost disgust. "He was even late today when usually he always comes on time, and now he's fucking sleeping when he's supposed to be teaching. I don't care if he's tired or not, that's his damn problem and not ours. As far as I'm concerned, he's getting worse and worse at his job, which means the fact that we've been improving our scores despite that is more because of our own efforts and not his!"
Nino then holds the worksheet in her current hand with both hands this time.
"If you think Uesugi-kun just handing us some worksheets and calling that tutoring should be considered teaching, then you're fucking wrong!" she asserts angrily, and she emphatically tears the worksheet in half. The hair-raising sound of ripping paper slices through the air of the first floor of the Nakano penthouse. "Fuck these worksheets, and fuck Uesugi-kun, that bast - "
Before she can finish her sentence, however, Nino feels a sudden surge of magical energy. Two of them, actually - one of them is from Miku, naturally, but...it's the second magical energy surge that is foreign to her that really sets off Nino's mental alarm bells.
And before she can turn to this new source of magical energy, Nino suddenly feels something wrap around her neck for a split second. The sensation is too short for her to identify exactly, but if she had to guess what it was, it was almost as though an invisible hand, for a few milliseconds, had grabbed her neck to choke her.
The second quintuplet doesn't have time to dwell on it, though, for another hand sails through the air at her, much like her own, and slaps her left cheek perfectly and produces the crispest SMACK that also reverberates through the first floor after the torn piece of paper before it.
Yotsuba yelps at the sound of the loud slap, so surprised is she to even hear it in the first place. To every onlooking quintuplet's surprise, including Nino, Nakano Itsuki now stands on the elevated base of the stairs of their home, with her right hand still outstretched from the follow-through of her perfectly executed slap. As Nino recoils back from the slap she's just taken, her eyes meet with Itsuki's.
A pair of neon red lights glares back at Nino. In each eye, there floats a nebulous red haze that fills the iris, encapsulating a smaller circle of dim blue light that further houses a condensed circle of darkness at the very center. With how bloated Itsuki's pupils got, it is physically impossible for Nino to have missed them.
"Apologize. Now."
The sheer amount of conviction and command in her voice...Itsuki has never sounded like this before in Nino's memory. As such, after she blinks her own eyes to suppress her own Mystic Eyes from surfacing in response, Nino can't stop herself from reacting on instinct.
PUNCH.
Before Itsuki can react, and it doesn't help that she has some of the slowest reactions among the quintuplets, Nakano Nino sinks the knuckles of her right fist square into the center of Itsuki's face. Whether it was to get payback for Itsuki slapping her in the first place or to get rid of the strange eyes she's seeing that she doesn't feel comfortable staring back into, Nino isn't quite sure - but just like how she slapped Fuutarou's worksheets out of Miku's hands, she can't take that punch back now. Itsuki is forced to stumble backwards, and thankfully the wall is there to stop her momentum before she can fall over completely.
"NINO! What did you just - " Ichika starts to shriek, beginning to lurch forward in alarm that there's a fight that's about to go physical on the verge of breaking out between her sisters which has never happened before, but to her shock, Itsuki momentarily darts her eyes over in her oldest sister's direction after getting slapped once she's regained herself.
"Please do not interrupt us, Ichika."
"Th-The fuck was that for...?!" Nino whispers fiercely through her teeth that have been kept clenched this whole time, and she keeps her punching fist clenched. "Why did you fucking - "
"Allow me to reiterate the hard work that Uesugi-kun has put into being our tutor," Itsuki talks right over Nino with no concern for what she has to say as she takes a few steps back towards Nino to where she was originally standing before she got punched in the face. Blood is slowly beginning to drip down Itsuki's right nostril, much to the rest of the quintuplets' alarm save for Nino. "He has put in so much effort into tutoring us. Never mind his other line of work he maintains as a mage, just his efforts of being a tutor alone are more than commendable for reasons I need not explain. Our personal opinions of his character are not relevant in this matter, and as such, I will not tolerate you speaking ill of them, and I will not have you wasting such effort, especially when we are the intended beneficiaries in the first place. You will apologize to Uesugi-kun when he wakes up later today, Nino."
Baring her clenched teeth down at Itsuki, Nino also clenches her other fist along with her jaws.
"And to think that you were just as against him as I was until right before midterms...you really let yourself fall for his sweet-talk or whatever, huh...?" Nino scowls irately.
"Says the one who admitted that Uesugi-kun was a good tutor earlier today at lunch, but that, too, is besides the point," Itsuki immediately fires back - any sort of retort of this level from Itsuki is highly unusual and a clear indicator of how genuinely pissed off she is right now.
"Well, clearly it's not, given how heated you're getting just because I called these worksheets nothing but scraps of paper!" Nino responds antagonistically.
"And that would be because they are not. Look at these worksheets again, Nino. Perhaps telling you to take a second look at them will get this across to you."
Itsuki, stooping down and grabbing another of the scattered worksheets, stands back up again and practically shoves it right in front of Nino's face so that it's impossible for the elder quint to ignore what the younger is trying to relay.
"I could not believe it either when I received the stack of worksheets from him when he arrived, but the truth cannot be denied. These are all handwritten - every last one of them."
Nino's eyes widen against her will when her own eyes behold the truth that Itsuki is currently shoving in her face. Indeed, every single problem on this side of paper in her face is, in fact, Uesugi Fuutarou's handwriting. As if in disbelief, Nino also glances down at the rest of the worksheets on the floor; sure enough, from her angle, all of the dropped sheets have the exact same style of handwriting as the one before her.
Even still, she doesn't waver. "Again, that's not our fucking problem. And if anything, that's totally stupid for someone like him to do - why the shit would someone like him ever think that handwriting a hundred individual worksheets was a good fucking idea? How the fuck does that make any sense to anyone here? Besides, you told us that his dad has an office in their house, right? Why didn't he think to just use the copy machine or printer in his dad's office? There must be a printer or something in there that he could've used instead!"
Itsuki, in her anger, admittedly did not think that far, and the question at first puts her in an awkward spot of her own, but like Nino, Itsuki refuses to back down and let Nino's question stump her for long.
"Regardless of his reason not to, the fact remains that he chose to write these by hand. That alone should be proof enough of the commitment he has made to tutoring us."
"Yeah, more like a commitment to brag to us about how he doesn't need a printer, I bet!" Nino crosses her arms strongly. "He's just trying to flex, that's all this is! You can't convince me otherwise!"
But Itsuki need not speak again for the atmosphere to grow slowly but surely anti-Nakano Nino; Nino herself quickly realizes that all eyes are on her, not on Itsuki, which more than likely means that she's being perceived as the one at fault here. Fuutarou's soft snores can be heard in this brief moment of silence, but no one's really paying attention to that right now.
"...just calm down and stay here to study with us, Nino," Miku whispers, almost underneath her breath. "You're not going to get anything done trying to study by yourself and we all know it. You certainly aren't getting anything done punching one of your own sisters in the face and giving her a nosebleed, either."
"Yeah, Nino, that was - that was going too far. I get that fights like this can happen from time to time, but there was just no need to be throwing punches like that," Ichika also adds, hoping that her subconscious authority as the eldest quintuplet will do something to finally put a lid over this boiling situation.
Surveying the rest of her family, Nino gradually drops her gaze down to the base of the stairs at her feet, between her and Itsuki.
"...fine. I see how it is. Seems like you all eventually came to prefer that bastard rather than me, your own sister. Yeah, I see how it is...I figured things would turn out this way."
Miku and Itsuki, the two closest quints to Nino, now begin to sense the air about Nino slowly begin to heat up as Nino herself recalibrates the tightness of her clenched fists by clenching them even harder than before.
"Fine! If this's how it's turned out, if this's how much you all don't like me now, then I'm out! I'll just get myself the fuck out of this shithole!"
"Huh? Wait, Nino, hold on, that's - you're not being serious right now, are you?!" Yotsuba yelps again, having felt the pressure in her chest build up for the last ten or so tense minutes as the situation between her sisters unfolded.
"I am!" Nino swiftly turns to Yotsuba with her furious blue eyes. "As a matter of fact, I've been thinking about it for a while now, but I've realized that this house's been making me sick! It's making me fucking sick to my stomach, and now I've had enough!"
Turning around sharply to head back up to her room, Nino begins to climb the stairs, but Itsuki, sensing that her older sister is being downright serious about leaving the house, barks back up at her in an effort to stop her.
"Father will not like it when he hears of this, Nino! Please reconsider your actions at once!"
"That negligent fuckface hardly ever comes home anyway!" Spinning around a hundred and eighty degrees to unleash her emotions on Itsuki, Nino roars down the stairs at her youngest sister. "How the fuck are you going to live a life like that and still have the - the audacity to call yourself anyone's father, for fuck's sake?! Fuck that asshole, I don't give a fuck whether he feels disappointed in me or not, because it sure doesn't fucking matter what we feel about him!"
"Regardless, you cannot deny all the things that he has done for us. Without him, none of us would even be here in the first place! Being able to live lives of luxury like this would have forever remained a pipe dream!" Itsuki furrows her eyebrows harder, doing her best to ignore the chilling sensation of blood slowly creeping down her face and lips. "If Father's sentiments will not sway you, then think about Mother! How would she feel about this right now, Nino? Mother was the one who told us to stick together no matter what! I will apologize to you as well, for I admit I went too far myself. You cannot leave, not now of all times!"
Nino simply sneers down at Itsuki.
"And you should drop that dead-Mama-substitute attitude of yours. You won't ever be half the mom Mama was, you fucking whore."
The second quintuplet turns to continue up the stairs, and once more she's stopped. But she's not stopped by a voice this time - rather, as Nino turns around to see what's grabbed her by back of her blouse, Itsuki yanks her backwards so that her own right fist can connect with Nino's face to return the favor in full.