Feeling a familiar discomfort that she'd rather not be familiar with, Nakano Miku opens her eyes to the disturbing sound of water droplets quietly splashing into an open but enclosed body of water.
She sits up, knowing exactly where she is while her chest fills swiftly with the usual sense of painful dread that always accompanies her upon her entry into this world. Once again, the bloody mirror sea stretches out in all directions beneath her, with the black, infinite canvas sky stares back down at the third quintuplet with uncaring impunity.
But it doesn't take long fir Miku to realize that something is...off, for she quickly realizes that she was given no warning about her sudden, unexpected entry back into this hellhole. Granted, it's not like she can predict her usual entrances into this nightmare, but this time there was no clamminess in her hands, no excruciating pain in her head to warn her of her imminent return to this visceral bloodborne ocean that sits so still it could be easily mistaken for a limitless expanse of dark red glass.
Miku slowly gets up to her feet this time. It's strange...she is back in this nightmare without her usual pounding headache and without the clamminess that normally invades her entire body, so she ought to be relieved, but Miku still finds herself occupied by a different kind of dread. While she hasn't exactly gotten used to these conditions, by this point she has been dragged into this world with such conditions affecting her that she's accepted them as normal. Now that she is here under these unknown, painless circumstances, Miku is oddly afraid of what is going to happen. At least with the pain, she knows what to expect, but now that there isn't any, what must she prepare herself for...?
She receives her answer in perhaps the worst way that she can imagine: a high-pitched scream that practically shatters the still, musky air from somewhere in the distance behind Miku, who spins around immediately in fright and alarm, almost jumping where she stands as though she were just jumpscared while playing a horror game.
Miku recognizes that manner of screaming: that's Itsuki. What is Itsuki doing here?
Whatever hesitation and apprehension Miku had regarding her surroundings get kicked off to the side of her mind by a swift surge of alarmed concern for her younger sister, and the third quintuplet dashes towards the source of the scream. But sprint as she might, Miku cannot seem to find Itsuki's exact location; that probably shouldn't have been a surprise, since everywhere Miku looks is nothing but an endless expanse of bloody red sea. Itsuki is no longer screaming either, wherever she is, but Miku can now hear her sister whimpering and whining constantly, and this, along with her apparent lack of talent in any physical activity, aggravates her to no end. Finally, once she's become out of breath and must halt to recover her short-lived stamina, Miku desperately cries out herself:
"Itsuki!? Itsuki, is that you?! Where are you?!"
Right when Miku shouts "Where are you?!", she turns around in an effort to look all around her to make sure she hasn't overlooked an area of the endless glass sea that she's traversed. There, kneeling on the surface of the sea as though she were always there and Miku had simply ran straight past her, is the fifth quintuplet, staring wide-eyed back up at her older sister with fat tears streaking down her face. To Miku's subconscious relief, Itsuki sports no eerie lines or dots on her body.
Itsuki's shining, bright red Mystic Eyes stare back at Miku's.
Before Miku even has a chance to blink more than twice down at her sister, Itsuki leaps up from where she sits and bear-hugs her older sister, breaking down in her arms and sobbing hard due to the unfamiliar stress induced by this oppressive liquid wasteland.
Kneeling down herself from her own physical exhaustion, Miku hugs her younger sister back tightly, cradling her head into her ample chest in an effort to hide Itsuki from the rest of this cruel world. She'd never once anticipated something like this happening, a situation where she'd meet one of her own sisters in this nightmarish place. In fact, she's still gripped by such disbelief that Miku is genuinely concerned that she herself is hallucinating somehow, that there's no way that this could be the real Itsuki whom she's hugging right now, that this is just nothing but a big, cruel trick being played on her by this nightmare.
But the cries, whimpers, and muffled sobs coming from her chest and the warmth slowly returning in Itsuki's body now that they have reunited in the unlikeliest of places plant enough harried confusion in Miku's head to make it hurt, so in the end she still got another pounding headache, just in a different form. But her new headache isn't enough to stop Miku from keeping her priorities in order, which is to comfort this Itsuki first until she's calmed down enough to find out what the hell is going on.
"...is this really you, Itsuki?" Miku whispers once the fifth quintuplet has stopped crying. Itsuki, for her part, still refuses to pry her face away from Miku's chest, as if she doesn't want to be subjected to looking at a world filled with nothing but blood.
"...what do you mean...?" she croaks lightly. Hearing Itsuki talk like this wrenches Miku's gut horribly; the quints have all heard Itsuki when she gets scared or frightened, but this isn't something you'd hear out of a person just because they're watching a horror film or had some ice get slipped down the back of their shirt; this is pure, unadulterated fear that is enough to paralyze someone and reduce them to nothing but tears, as it has clearly done to Itsuki. It's all the more gut-wrenching given that the previous night was the first night that these two quintuplets specifically have talked in any serious manner by themselves.
Miku swallows with difficulty, trying her best to maintain her own composure. "You're...you're not supposed to be here, Itsuki. How did you...how did you get here?"
"I don't know...I swear, I don't know..." Itsuki clenches her eyelids even harder over her eyes, squeezing out more tears like a hand towel being wrung of water. "I just...I just...woke up here...I don't know how I got here..."
The third quintuplet decides to assume that this is in fact the real Itsuki she holds in her arms and hopes that she won't regret making this assumption, but it's one that she must make since there isn't any point to doubting as such. This gives her the luxury of trying to figure out why Itsuki has ended up here, in a nightmare that only Miku is supposed to know.
"...Itsuki, I know this is going to be hard for you to do, but..." Miku says quietly, "...show me your eyes for a second."
Even though Itsuki's scarlet Mystic Eyes are painfully etched into Miku's recent memory, the older quint must ascertain this sight one more time to eliminate any doubt in her head that she's seen them here. So Itsuki painfully obliges and reluctantly pulls her head up, but she doesn't meet Miku's own eyes. Sure enough, Itsuki's mysterious Mystic Eyes remain embedded on the surface of her lenses, with no trace of the ordinary Nakano blue.
"...what about mine? Are...are mine...can you see mine?" Miku breathes slowly.
After obeying Miku's second order, Itsuki nods shortly and quickly before burying her face back into Miku's bosom.
Putting her hand behind Itsuki's head, Nakano Miku blinks emptily over the top of her younger sister's head. She's never realized this herself until Itsuki showed up tonight and confirmed it for her, but Miku cannot feel her Mystic Eyes being active. Normally, out in the real world, now that she's gained enough control over them, Miku is keenly aware of when she has her Mystic Eyes surfaced and visible, because her eyes begin feeling a little bit heavier in their sockets; not only that, but the eyeballs start feeling like they've been put underwater, like Miku is fully submerged in a body of water with her eyes completely open but without the need for swimming goggles. She does not feel any such physical feedback here in this nightmare, and the water of this bloody sea has always been too murky and dark to be capable of providing reflections, so it's not like she could have simply looked down at the water to take a look at herself.
A creepy feeling crawls up the back of her neck like the thin legs of a spider: does this mean that every time she'd been dragged into this nightmare, her Mystic Eyes were always there, staring...waiting? Even before she knew they existed?
More relevantly, could the reason why Itsuki is suddenly here because of their meeting earlier that morning? Could something have happened when their Mystic Eyes looked into one another?
Both quintuplets lose track of time as they try their hardest to find mental and emotional refuge in one another without each other knowing, if there were any sense of time to lose in this place at all. Surprisingly, or perhaps not that surprisingly, Itsuki is the first to recover, now that she has the company of one of her siblings to anchor her distressed thoughts and mental state.
"...Miku, just what in the world is going on...?" she sniffles quietly, her voice barely louder than a whisper. "What is this place...? And why are we here...?"
Miku is unable to respond at first. Her mind has become jammed with her petrified thoughts as the implications of this whole situation tumble around messily in her conscience, but Itsuki's voice is what her mind needs to latch onto as its own anchor so that Miku can manage to drag herself out of the high-speed whirlpool that's trying to suction her into the dark depths below.
"...listen to me...carefully, okay?" Miku chokes a little, trying her best to take a deep breath. At this point, Miku is more shaken than Itsuki is, and the latter is beginning to realize this herself after hearing Miku begin to talk. "This place...you know how...remember when you, me, and Nino had that talk about Ichika and our Mystic Eyes in the middle of the night some time ago?"
Itsuki nods slowly, her eyes already wide in fright as to what she's about to hear.
"Remember when we told you that...that Nino and I had signs that told us that we had Mystic Eyes? Well...this was mine."
"...th-this place...?"
"I have this...one nightmare that I keep having every so often. It started...after I got out of the hospital back when we were in middle school. Whenever I have this nightmare, I get dragged into this same place every time."
Itsuki's own Mystic Eyes have already begun to tremble in their sockets even before Miku is finished speaking. "...y-you had to deal with this...? Every...single time? I..." The youngest quintuplet can't stop herself from crumbling back into tears again, and these tears she's ashamed to show her older sister, so Itsuki returns her face slowly to Miku's chest. "...I had...I had no idea that this was...this was what you were talking about...I'm...I'm so sorry..."
Miku shakes her head, refreshing her hold around Itsuki. "Don't be, Itsuki. I'm...I'm used to this by now. I just...didn't want anyone else to know about this. And I certainly never expected any one of you to actually come in here with me. Like, for example...Nino knows about the fact that I keep having this nightmare, but she's never been here with me like you are right now. So...how the hell did you come here?"
"That is what I would like to know as well, but...but that is besides the point!" Itsuki looks back up at Miku, this time with an interesting look in her eyes, one that is both saddened and angered simultaneously. "You should have not kept something like this to yourself. You should have talked to someone about this! Keeping something like this all to yourself...that is just...too much..."
Forcing herself to take a look around, Itsuki cannot do so for very long at all before she is forced to retreat her eyes back into the safety of her older sister's bosom.
"Don't worry about me, I'm not scared of blood like you are...whatever the term for that is."
"H-Hemophobia."
"Yeah, that. So...don't worry about me. It's you I'm worried about." Miku gulps again a little. "...I'm just scared that...I might be the reason why you're here right now."
Itsuki looks back up at her sister, widening her eyes again. "Huh...? Wait, what do you..."
"Remember earlier this morning, when we met in front of Fuutarou's home? We looked at each other with our Mystic Eyes. I'm...I'm wondering if...that's the reason why you're here right now. I might have...dragged you in here on accident."
Biting her lower lip, Miku bows her head.
"...this is all my fault, Itsuki. I didn't mean to do this. I didn't want to show you this place, not you out of all my sisters."
"But...but...how is that even possible? Just because we looked at each other with our Eyes, now all of a sudden something like this is happening...?"
"I don't know either, but this is magic we're dealing with, after all."
"Then how do you know it's your fault? What if...what if it's just my own fault for letting myself get dragged in here?"
"Well, I...look, none of us know anything about magic. I just...it just has to be because of me, right? Like, who's the one who's been having this nightmare regularly? Me. So it has to be my fault."
But Itsuki shakes her head. "I do not think we should be thinking about whose fault this is or not. Not right now, anyway. For now, we should think of some way to leave this place."
Miku blinks down at Itsuki. "But...usually for me to leave..."
It is at that moment that both quintuplets stiffen up where they sit, both flooded by a fresh sense of acute fear. Behind Miku rises from the still, bloody water a familiar corpse scratched with a myriad of disturbing jagged lines and dots.
But it doesn't float up to the surface lying on its back, however. This time, it emerges from the bloody water standing.
Not knowing what the hell she's supposed to be looking at, Itsuki opens her mouth to begin screaming, but no such scream is emitted. It's as though seeing this unidentified creature, with its mutated, blackened figure as though it's been charred despite coming out of a body of water and all its twisted lines and dots that are enough to drive any ordinary person mad just looking at them, has taken her entire voice away, so all she can do now is gape back like a fish that's been out of water too long.
Miku isn't scared shitless like her sister is, naturally, but the difference in entrance of this corpse tips her off that something is about to happen, so the third quintuplet instinctively releases her sister to turn around and face the -
A sharp, dreadful pain pierces through the center of her thorax. Miku quickly glances down, only to see what vaguely looks like a sword made out of condensed black liquid buried in her abdomen, right underneath her breasts. There is a large black dot through which the katana has entered.
Why did these lines and dots have to come back on her body now?
The middle quintuplet doesn't have time to process anything further. The distorted corpse smoothly pulls out the sword, and Miku's body crumples lifelessly to the surface of the ocean - but Miku is still conscious throughout the whole process. She cannot speak or move, but she can still witness everything that is happening, and she is forced to witness this corpse slowly approach a freshly screaming Itsuki stare with renewed tears pouring down her face.
The last thing Miku sees before her own vision blacks out suddenly is blood squirting viscously from where Itsuki's eyes should be.
Practically barging into the office, Uesugi Fuutarou almost throws the door shut behind him to announce his arrival, and his younger sister Raiha snaps her gaze up at him from down on the floor, kneeling next to Nakano Itsuki on her futon.
"Onii-chan! Itsuki-san, she - she's - !" Raiha says worriedly, but Fuutarou is already taking a knee down next to the quintuplet with her face in her hands and puts his hand on her back.
"Itsuki, what's wrong? What happened?" the young mage asks in a low, urgent voice.
The sound of her tutor's voice finally unlocks Itsuki's frozen state, and she slowly peels her face off from her hands. For the split second that he has of her face as she turns to look up at him, Fuutarou spies her Mystic Eyes - and the two black pupils within them are...bleeding?
Sharply inhaling, the fifth quintuplet moves the fastest Fuutarou has seen her move and pretty much drags him towards her, pulling him in so that she can bury her face into his chest, much as how she did with Miku while in that nightmare. As the high school tutor secures his own arm around Itsuki's, he's forced to feel Itsuki's strong but urgent heartbeat, and he can tell that she's had a pretty bad nightmare just before he arrived.
"Poor Itsuki just woke up screamin'," Isanari calls over quietly from his desk, typing away calmly at his work laptop after setting down his mug of morning coffee. "It was pretty bad. Haven't heard a girl scream like that since Haruna gave bir - wait, I shouldn't say that."
"I was about to say," Fuutarou scowls heavily at his dad for this crass joke he was about to make in poor taste. "How long's she been like this, then? When did she wake up?"
"She just woke up like ten minutes ago, basically for a bit longer than we called you," Raiha explains quickly after returning from the kitchen with a glass of water. "Itsuki-san, please drink some water, it'll help."
"Not now, Raiha, she'll need some time. Just set it on Dad's desk for now, I'll give it to her once she's calmed down. Go get ready for school."
Raiha glances hesitantly and worriedly down at her upperclassman friend. "O-Okay..."
"I'll drop you off at school today, Raiha," the Uesugi patriarch offers, calling to his daughter over his shoulder while clicking away in his email.
"Er, you don't need to, Dad - "
But Raiha cuts herself short when she spies her father clench his teeth a little and gesture subtly over to the two high schoolers on the futon, and looking over at them again, the elementary schooler now understands and nods shortly, placing the glass of water intended for their guest on an open spot on her dad's work desk and hurrying to pack her belongings for school. Isanari, for his part, finishes up his morning office routine of checking emails and gets up from his desk, draining the rest of his coffee before putting his mug away in the kitchen sink to be washed later and throwing on a light button-up long-sleeved shirt over his clean white tanktop, but he doesn't bother buttoning the shirt up.
"Call me if you need anything, kid," Isanari says as he and Raiha pass the two high schoolers on their way out once Fuutarou bids his own younger sister good luck at school.
"Yeah. And make sure you're bringing that helmet I bought the other day for Raiha, we really don't need you driving around getting citations from the cops."
"Yeah, yeah, I get it, I get it. C'mon, Raiha."
Uesugi Fuutarou waits for the front door to shut and listens to the rest of his family depart the floor, their steps audible due to the clanging and reverb of the rather shaky stairs that lead up to the second floor where their office and home is located in this almost-abandoned business park. Once the engine of his father's motorcycle is revved up and blasts out of the compound, Fuutarou looks down at the top of Itsuki's peachy-red hair. He recoils his head back a little, though, since in his concern over Itsuki's well-being, he's forgotten about her infamous ahoge that loves to poke him in the eye whenever it gets the chance, but today it seems it's not in such a mood, for it is deflated and resting over the front of her head, perhaps reflecting what Itsuki is feeling inside.
"...how're you feeling, Itsuki?" he asks in a low voice down to his student. Since she first glomped him, Itsuki has steadily weakened her once tight grip on her tutor, so Fuutarou is hoping that she's at least feeling a little better now that he's here. Sure enough, she responds, but she refuses to pull her face away from him just yet.
"...a bit better..." she croaks weakly. "...you're real, right? This is really you, isn't it, Uesugi-kun?"
"If you know of another, let me know. There's only room for one Uesugi Fuutarou in this city."
Unable to help herself, Itsuki smiles a little at Fuutarou's strange response, which finally gives her the motivation to give him some space so that they can converse properly.
"...I am so sorry for making you come here. This was not...how you planned things to go today, right?" she apologizes a little tearfully, wiping the last remnants away from her eyes with the back of her hands. Her Mystic Eyes are still active, and Fuutarou can get a better, deeper look at them. Sure enough, the black pupils in her eyes appear as though they are leaking black liquid to the sides - in fact, they look as though Itsuki's eyes have been slashed by a blade that's been swung horizontally.
"No, but that's besides the point. If my sister calls me and tells me that you've woken up screaming your ass off for some reason, then how do you not expect me to come running," Fuutarou shrugs lightly. "On that note, was my dad right? That you really did wake up like that just before I got here?"
Itsuki nods shakily. "It was b-because of a nightmare I had...I'd never had such a...a...what is the proper word I am looking for...visceral nightmare before. Everything seemed so...so real...I just..." The fifth quintuplet trails off, so overcome by the recent trauma that she's developed and shutting her eyes tightly in an effort to dispel these horrible feelings.
"Well, if it'll help you at all, explain what happened to me. I don't know if I can help at all, but it's better that you talk this one out and not keep it all to yourself."
These words quietly remind Itsuki of what Miku told her in the nightmare, about how Miku chose not to let any of her own sisters know about what she'd been going through until very recently. Squeezing her lips together for a moment, Itsuki parts them to heed her tutor's advice and share with him what she's experienced.
"...when I went to sleep earlier this morning after you and Miku left, I found myself in...in this...place. This...dimension, even. There was nothing but...but b-blood everywhere. It was like...a whole ocean of blood I found myself sitting on when I came to in there. You know me, I...I have hemophobia, I think you have been able to tell by now. So I just...could not handle seeing that much blood, all at once, all around me. And as if that were not enough, I just...as soon as I realized that it was blood that I was sitting on and was surrounded by, I started having this...this terrible headache. Not a normal one, but...a headache that felt like my head was going to explode or something. It was not normal - I do not know how to explain this adequately, but I honestly felt like the world itself was trying to make my head burst. All of that made me start screaming in that nightmare because I...I did not know what was happening."
Fuutarou grabs the glass of water that Raiha drew for their guest while Itsuki is recounting her tale and hands it to her, and Itsuki gratefully receives it and takes several big gulps of water in an effort to eliminate the hiccups that she's got that are giving her a hard time speaking.
"Then, Miku...Miku found me. She must have heard me screaming when I first found myself in there somehow. Miku tried comforting me as best she could, but she said that she was scared that she was the one who must have dragged me into that nightmare, and when I asked her why, she said that this was the same nightmare that she had been having for the past several years, ever since she got hospitalized in middle school. Just as we were starting to talk about how to leave that dream, though, something...something appeared behind Miku, and it...it...it s-stabbed her, I think, I don't know...and once it was done with Miku, it came over to me, and it...it..."
Itsuki is unable to finish her thought and slowly sinks her face back into her hands.
"...I take it that it has something to do with your Mystic Eyes looking the way they do now?" Fuutarou asks solemnly, causing Itsuki to dart her face back up.
"Wait...it - they look different? H-How so?"
Fuutarou pulls out his phone and unlocks it to access its camera function to use its selfie mode as a mirror of sorts to show Itsuki what he means.
"You've never seen what your own Eyes look like, do you?" Fuutarou asks, this thought just now crossing his mind, and Itsuki shakes her head. "Then take a look for yourself. You see those black lines in your pupils? The ones that go sideways? Yeah, those weren't there before."
Moaning quietly in a garbled mixture of fright and terror, Itsuki tears her eyes away from Fuutarou's smartphone screen as he puts it away.
"I should've asked this first: is there anything wrong with your eyesight right now?" the high school mage inquires.
"My eyesight..."
Looking back up at Fuutarou to focus on her eyesight, Itsuki doesn't find anything wrong with it at first, using her tutor as a focal point. However, she then realizes that her peripheral vision is looking a little...blurrier than she remembers. Slowly growing alarmed, Itsuki darts her eyes away from Fuutarou to look at things further away - and that's when she utters a small, terrified gasp.
"Oh...oh no...U-Uesugi-kun, my...my eyesight..." Itsuki stammers softly, desperately squinting to correct them. "It's...it has worsened, I think...I was always far-sighted, so the only time I would need my glasses would be to see things close to me...but now, I - the rest of the kitchen from here, it has become somewhat blurry...!"
Inhaling sharply through his teeth, Fuutarou gazes directly into Itsuki's quivering Mystic Eyes. "Ah, shit..."
Looking back at her tutor, Itsuki straightens up her posture, now starting to tremble a little with her newfound discovery. "Uesugi-kun, please, tell me, what is happening to me right now? These - these Mystic Eyes, what are they doing to me? And - and my sisters, what are they doing to my sisters? How did we end up with these things? Will these things make me go blind eventually? I don't want that! You must tell me, please!"
Fuutarou sits before Itsuki next to her futon with a look that Itsuki has never seen him have, a look of pure puzzlement and quiet consternation. With his arms folded across his chest and his own perpetually tired black eyes drifting left to right across the floor in between him and his classmate, the young mage, for the first time, appears to be at a loss for what to say or do.
"...Uesugi-kun? Uesugi-kun!" Itsuki's voice raises itself from a small whimper gradually to a hoarse cry. "Uesugi-kun, you are a mage, correct? You - you must know what is going on!"
"As a matter of fact, I don't," Fuutarou says suddenly and sternly, silencing the fifth quintuplet with impunity. "Why else am I sitting here not saying shit? These are Mystic Eyes we're dealing with here, and a third-rate mage like my dumb ass has no fucking clue how to deal with them other than know that they exist!"
The sudden self-depreciation coming out of her tutor knocks Itsuki's thoughts off-track as she now notes a sense of helplessness from her tutor, something that does not befit her image of him at all. Their all-knowing classmate and tutor, hired to both teach them and protect them, stumped at what to do regarding her Mystic Eyes? The situation is sounding much, much worse than Itsuki imagined it to be herself, but oddly, she's not so worried about that anymore. Nevertheless, Fuutarou looks back up at Itsuki to remake eye contact with her.
"Looks like I'll have to dig around even more about this, if it's actually having a tangible effect on you," Fuutarou concludes darkly. "I was hoping that your Eyes could just stay as they were, but I guess I was being too hopeful since I'm already too busy with so much other shit. "In the meantime, tell me the last part of what happened in your nightmare. What did that something to do you after stabbing Miku?"
The hard look in Fuutarou's eyes and the darkly motivated, powerful drive in his voice that have quickly replaced his helplessness overwhelm Itsuki's own sense of helplessness and compel her to answer her classmate promptly.
"It - It took out a blade of some kind, I think, and it - it cut my eyes, just my eyes," Itsuki murmurs, forced to look away and down at the floor again. "That was when I woke up, and I did so screaming. That is why...Raiha-chan called you to come over to see what was wrong with me, since I was not responding to anyone else."
"And you said that Miku is also having this nightmare?"
Itsuki nods. "I mentioned earlier that...she told me that she feels responsible for what I had to go through."
"Then the three of us need to talk again at some point soon. If I'm gonna make any headway into what the hell is going on, I'll need all the details that I can get, but that's for later. How are you doing right now? Do you feel like you can head out today?"
Inhaling deeply, Itsuki slowly and painfully nods.
"My eyesight is only a little worse, so...it should not stop me from being able to walk around outside. Besides, we have already committed to working together to convince Nino to return home with me," Itsuki says after a deep breath. "I just hope that...the rest of today will go without a hitch. Just...please excuse me if I behave...well, how should I say..."
"If anything goes wrong, you call me or have one of your sisters call me," Fuutaoru says firmly, "and I'll do whatever I can to help. In the meantime, I'd like you to get ready to leave now. I'd much rather bring you with me to go pick up Miku."
"Eh? Wait, um...was the plan not to bring Miku here first...?"
"Well, that kinda got chucked out the window when I came running here to see what was going on with you."
"Auuu..." Itsuki whimpers again a little. "...I'm sorry for inconveniencing you again like this."
The youngest quintuplet then feels a big hand slap lightly down on top of her head.
"Inconvenience? Funny way of saying 'responsibility'," Fuutarou sighs. "All you need to do is tell me to jump, and all I'll ask is how far or how high. Besides, I never said this whole thing was an inconvenience to me; all this forced me to do was to make a change of plans, which I'm a little too used to doing by this point, so don't worry about it. Also, regarding our change of plans, it should be fine if you come along with me over to your place when we go pick up Miku since I can just cast a spell that makes it so that the others won't know you're there, as long as you don't make any sudden noises."
"I-I see..."
The young mage heads over to his father's office to go over his dad's business email, making sure that Isanari isn't slacking on the job or hasn't missed any email on accident, as he sometimes does. While Fuutarou is taking care of that, Itsuki, who assumes she ought to use this time to get ready to head out, gathers her school uniform to go change in the bathroom, which is the only room in this small suite where she can change clothes safely with a boy nearby.
As she's changing, Itsuki feels herself yearning a little for a bit more of Fuutarou's close company, and she feels her cheeks heat up in reaction to this thought. First the night before yesterday, and now this morning - does she seriously have feelings for her own tutor? After all those times that she's preached to her sisters about how it is improper to have an explicitly personal relationship with Fuutarou? How is it that she's the one to turn on her own advice now? The shame proliferates in her mind endlessly, but try as she might to guilt-trip herself into returning to what she feels should be proper behavior that she must demonstrate between student and tutor, Itsuki can't keep down her desire to be back by her classmate's side.
She still hasn't fully recovered from the nightmare that she and Miku apparently shared - the sight of a world filled with nothing but blood has burned itself deep into the core of her mind, like a deliberate splash of permanent ink that will probably never come off no matter how much she tries to scrub the vision away mentally. For heaven's sake, she can't even handle seeing her own blood from something like a nosebleed and is scared of vaccinations at the hospital, so how on Earth is she supposed to calm down so quickly after having a nightmare like that? Of course she'd still be quite shaken from such a harrowing experience, and that's without getting into how oppressive that world seemed to be; just being there felt like torture on her mind.
So naturally she would want to seek out the comfort of someone who knows what she's going through, right? And one of those people is Uesugi Fuutarou, her tutor, who is a mage and would probably understand what's going on. So of course she'd gravitate towards him, at least until she's calmed down enough to put this jarring experience behind her, however long that'll take.
But do her feelings simply stop there?
Itsuki shakes her head frantically, and her long peachy-red quintuplet hair flies about as a result, whipping around her shoulders and across her face. She can't have those kinds of feelings for him, can she? No way, not like this. They've only barely known each other for a little over three months or so. While Itsuki herself hasn't really put much thought into having a committed relationship with a guy, she has at least set standards for herself such as not dating until after high school, since she earnestly believes that that sort of thing should be something only responsible adults should do, and that she ought to put her efforts as a teenager into her studies to secure her future...not that she's made much progress on that on her own. Because of all the studying she's done and the time she's devoted to it, she's never had the time to spare for relationships outside of her family, so maybe this is just a lack of social knowledge that she's dealing with. Maybe these feelings are just the result of unforeseen events outside of her control (for the most part), and she's merely confused as to what she should feel and how she should act. She's just an ordinary high school girl trying to be a good student, after all, at least before all this magical stuff started happening and Uesugi Fuutarou became their tutor.
But Itsuki can't turn away from the implications that her interactions with her tutor over the months have produced. She can't deny that she has in fact slowly warmed up to him over the weeks, accruing both admiration and respect for him for juggling two ridiculous responsibilities in both tutoring and safeguarding her and her sisters at the same time; the fact that he is frequently sacrificing both his own health and safety for their sake, even if it is to be expected and merely part of his responsibilities, only serves to further elevate her opinion of him. Once Itsuki got over her initial distrust and dislike of him, she has enjoyed Fuutarou's company and companionship thoroughly, even when they are together with the others too, and Fuutarou himself has reciprocated and treated Itsuki much more benevolently since then as well.
If it all stopped there, then Itsuki could convince herself that she only thinks of Fuutarou as a close friend. This, she can accept - with how much time Fuutarou has spent with her and her siblings, it's only natural that they become close friends; they kind of have to, if Fuutarou is to successfully tutor them back onto a safe path to high school graduation. Itsuki wishes that this is all that she needed to think about, because even if she really did have genuine feelings for him, she could at least smother them with doubt and a strong conviction to stay devoted to a life of purity and diligence.
And then she stayed with him that night in a block away from his home, in a night when no winds blew and the moon was full, bright, and beautiful.
If her feelings for him aren't genuine, then why did she tell him that the moon looked beautiful that night? Checkmate, Itsuki.
Her chest is thumping hard by this point, and Itsuki's head is pounding. It's an absolute quagmire inside her mind right now, and she's caught up in a violent whirlwind that's kicked up into high gear before she could really stop it, so now Itsuki finds herself battered over and over again by a wombo combo of her true feelings towards her tutor, the mental scarring she's received from her nightmare, and her attempts to focus on her task today, which is to meet up with Miku and then with Nino to try to talk her into returning home. It's gotten so bad that the youngest quintuplet has totally forgotten why she's even entered the bathroom to begin with until she almost jumps again from hearing a knock behind her on the bathroom door.
"...Itsuki? Something wrong? You've kinda been in there for a long time, is your stomach hurting or something?" Fuutarou's voice, partially muffled by the door in between them, trails through for Itsuki to pick up.
"N-N-No, n-nothing's wrong...!" Itsuki stumbles over her words awkwardly as she just as awkwardly changes the rest of her clothes as fast as she can. Since Fuutarou mentioned the possibility of her stomach hurting, though, Itsuki does take the time to use the toilet before exiting, and she finally emerges from the bathroom with freshly washed hands and changed clothes, finding her classmate patiently waiting for her on the couch with his phone in front of him. The futon that Itsuki has borrowed to sleep in during her past two nights over at the Uesugi household has been put away.
"You good to go?" Fuutarou hops back up to his feet to greet his student, but he stops when Itsuki isn't looking back at him like she usually would, especially not with that troubled look on her face. Thankfully, her Mystic Eyes have retreated, so at least he doesn't need to worry about them somehow turning rogue. "...I take it the answer is no. If you've got anything bothering you, tell me now, before we leave. It's best if you leave here with a clear mind so that you don't have stuff bothering you for the rest of the day, so if there's something on your mind, let's sort it out now."
Slowly holding her left elbow, Itsuki lets her eyebrows furrow with difficulty.
"...I know that you are not exactly comfortable with talking about magic or anything related to magic with us, so...you do not have to answer me," she mumbles, "but...if I may ask, um...how did you deal with something like this, if you ever did? Like, having...having a nightmare that was almost certainly magically induced?"
After a long pause on Fuutarou's end, the young mage responds, and Itsuki looks up at him to pay attention.
"I wasn't always a mage, so I do actually remember the times when I was, uh...disturbed, I guess, for lack of a better term. But I didn't really do anything special to deal with them. I was always working to earn money for the family to pay off our debts, and becoming a mage was more or less a means to an end for me. Yeah, the nightmares that I had during my first couple years of being a mage sucked, but I just powered through them since I didn't have much else of a choice. And that kind of advice obviously isn't very useful for you."
"You had nightmares too?"
"Yeah, but most likely not exactly the same one you had just now. It's not as though all mages have weird nightmares when they first become mages, that's not how it works...in case that's what you're thinking."
"Um...how...how did they happen? What caused them for you...?"
Fuutarou's eyes widen slowly as he takes a deep breath, wondering to himself to what extent he should answer such a question. Itsuki is afraid that she may have crossed the line and quickly looks away in case her classmate reprimands her, but to her small surprise, he doesn't.
"...without trying to sound too dramatic here, being a mage is pretty, uh...brutal. It's one thing for an adult to become one or a child to become a fully-fledged mage after studying and training to be one all their life, but I didn't have either of those luxuries. I became a mage when I was like...seven, I don't know, I forget the exact time now. I said just now that I used it as a means to an end over everything else, so I had to learn how to be a proper mage and fast. The magic world doesn't care for your circumstances; it just constantly shits down your throat until you start fighting back or until you die. So it didn't matter if I was just a kid; I had to do what other mages around me did if I wanted any chance at all to make it as one and be able to support my family. Things like murder, for example."
Itsuki's eyes snap open wide.
"Murder, theft, surveillance...I did anything that a kid like me at the time could do, which wasn't a lot since logically speaking, who would want to hire a child mage? All the best-paying contracts naturally couldn't rely on the unpredictability of some kid who's just started out being a mage, right? If you as a client had this job you needed to get done and you were willing to pay top dollar for it because of its nature or whatever, you wouldn't trust a kid to carry it out when you can invest your money into another mage who's preferably got the experience and knowledge to handle it, and they'd always be older mages. So I had to go after the real shitty jobs, the gritty tasks that either didn't pay well enough for most other mages' likings or were just more suited for a kid like me, which, luckily for me, there were always a few like that. Sometimes there'd be jobs that other mages just didn't want to deal with because of what they had to do, and I'd take them since I didn't have any other choice."
Fuutarou raises a hand to take off his cap for a time being.
"Those kinds of jobs fucked me up real bad. They would've left an impression on me even still if I had done them now or if I were older, like an actual eighteen-year-old adult, I feel like, but I did them as a kid who was supposed to be in elementary school. Like, imagine Raiha right now with a gun or something shooting bad guys up somewhere - that's what I was doing when I was her age, shit like that. So yeah...I've had my fair share of nights when I'd wake up screaming like you did. If you don't believe me, I can have my dad vouch for me."
"N-No, you...there is no need..." Itsuki shakes her head frantically again. "...I'm so sorry for making you bring this up. I was...I was being so insensitive...I never knew..."
"I mean, obviously you didn't, this is should be the first time I've even talked about myself to this extent. And for what it's worth, I've mostly gotten over them now, and I consider myself pretty lucky that I haven't completely lost my mind because of them. I just brought that up since I wanted to answer your question, and that was the best way I could do so."
Taking a step forward to his student, Fuutarou shortly reaches out a hand again to place it gently on Itsuki's head, and the quintuplet quietly accepts it without flinching this time.
"For as much as I've been through, though, make no mistake, Itsuki, our experiences are very different; don't start feeling sorry for me just because you think I've been through more than you have or because I've had to deal with magic for way longer than you have or things like that. As much as we as humans like to compare the amount of pain and suffering and difficulty we've been through, there's almost no benefit to doing that because that causes us to lose sight over current problems that actually need to be addressed. The most it really does it give us wider perspectives on other people's problems and our own, but wider perspectives alone doesn't do much to actually solve them. The nightmare you experienced earlier today is way more relevant than some dumb nightmares that I had years ago that don't matter now - and besides, just because I've been through a lot in the past doesn't meant that you haven't been through a lot tonight with that nightmare of yours. Whatever pain I've been through before has no right to diminish the amount of pain that you may be experiencing right now."
The young mage isn't sure if Itsuki is even listening, for she has merely been standing before him without a sound with his hand on her head, so he awkwardly withdraws it to see what her reaction will be.
It ends up being a soft hug, as the fifth quintuplet takes a pair of steps forward, as though subconsciously seeking the warmth that was withdrawn from her, and just as awkwardly places her arms next to Fuutarou's sides. At first even the young mage himself doesn't quite know what Itsuki is intending to do, but he understands soon enough and returns his hand back to its rightful place on her head as he monitors Itsuki's physical conditions: normal temperature, a strong, steady heartbeat, and consistent breathing. It appears that she's managed to return to normal.
"Whenever you're ready," he chuckles quietly.
"...just a little longer, please," Itsuki asks politely.
"Your sisters are gonna throw a fit if they find out about this, you know."
But not even the mention of her sisters' potential reactions can deter Itsuki at this moment in time. Maybe her feelings for him are still a little bit hazy and inconclusive, but no amount of nightmares can disturb her as she is now.