The boy named Maeda is staring back at Uesugi Fuutarou, who himself is seated in reverse on his own folding chair with his arms calmly resting folded on top of the chair's backrest. The lightbulb hanging over them illuminates just enough of him to allow Maeda to see enough of his face, and Fuutarou's eyes are also chillingly calm and unblinking, as though broodingly searching Maeda's own eyes for the answers that he seeks from him tonight. The sight is enough to send the prisoner into a small state of silent shock, spooked at the sight of his new captor who's brought him to God knows where, planning to do God knows what to him, especially with that baseball standing next to him that's covered with dried bloodstains that are God knows how old.
"...w-wait...wait, I know you. I - I recognize you...!" Maeda stammers quickly, finally able to break through his minor state of shock paralysis. "You're - we go to the same school, don't we...?!"
Fuutarou simply raises an eyebrow at him.
"...not only do we attend the same high school, but you and I have even passed each other in the hallways sometimes. Granted, we never openly talked like this so none of our encounters were really worth noting, but given the fact that you're in this line of business, I daresay you probably heard a thing or two from your employer," he says quietly. "Or are you going to tell me that you swear you don't recognize me at all right now?"
"N-No, that's not - " Maeda inhales sharply through his teeth before sighing heavily. "Ugh, you're right, okay? I do recognize you. And more importantly, I was in fact tasked with trying to investigate you and try to figure out more things about you."
Fuutarou raises an eyebrow, quietly surprised at the lack of resistance that Maeda is showing. Usually the people he interrogates in this room are not this accommodating - but perhaps there is a first for everything.
"First things first though, I want to know who your employer is. I assume it's Shirazumi Rio?" he asks first.
"That's right, that Rio guy's my employer. Technically," Maeda answers grimly.
"'Technically'? Explain that part to me."
"Well, I just...look, I'm a fuckin' delinquent, alright? I'm just a fuckin' dilenquent; that's the first thing ya gotta know 'bout me," Fuutarou's schoolmate groans. "I sometimes hang out with a few other shady assholes up north side, but usually I run solo, y'know, just do my own thing, don't bother anybody unless I gotta. Well, one day one 'a my buddies comes along 'n tells us that there's this dude who's lookin' to hire some street trash like us and that the pay's apparently pretty good for the kinda shit we're expected to do. So we were like, sure, yeah, why not, couldn't fuckin' hurt if we can make some decent cash outta this. So we hit up this other guy who's supposed to be like a recruiter for our 'employer' or somethin'? I dunno exactly, but that's what he seemed like to me."
Maeda clears his throat real quick.
"Anyway, he - he looks at me when we meet up with him and asks me how old I am, 'cause I'm the youngest outta my crew. I tell him I'm still a high schooler, y'know, ask him if that's supposed to be important at all. He said not to him, but our employer might be interested and so asked me what school I'm attending, and when I tell him Asahiyama High, he's like, a'ight, then I got somethin' different for you to do."
"And that's to investigate me."
Nodding, Maeda looks down at his bonds that keep him confined to his interrogation chair.
"Yeah, exactly. They basically wanted me to find shit out about you, even try to get close to you 'n all if I could, but try as I might, I never seemed to be able to run into you whenever I wanted."
Fuutarou gives a short snort under his breath. It makes sense that Maeda could never find him, since he as a mage has the means to keep himself hidden from regular folk. This also eliminates Maeda as any potential threat to himself, seeing that he is in no way a mage, and although there possibility is there that Maeda might be lying to him, the chance of him doing so successfully is almost nonexistent.
"What about the quints?" the high school mage pushes the subject further into a relevant tangent. "I'm sure Shirazumi or your recruiter or whoever also wanted you to do something about the quints too, yeah?"
The mention of the quints sends Maeda into an uncomfortable squirm in his chair.
"Y-Yeah...damn, you really are as fuckin' scary as they say," he groans again, almost as though he's succumbed to wailing.
"Scary? How so? I haven't even done anything yet, we've just been talking."
"No, it's not us talkin' that's scary, it's how you just seem to know shit, y'know?"
Fuutarou simply smirks. "Well, just knowing about things own its own isn't enough to scare people. It's what happens after that does. You don't need me to tell you this, but personally, I think I'm a lot scarier when I've got this bat in my hands." He gives the old bloodstained bat next to him a small tap.
"A-A-And you'd be fuckin' right about that!" Maeda almost shrieks with fright, now that the bat is being mentioned directly. Fuutarou has to stifle a chuckle because of how ridiculous he finds the extreme contrast between his usual look and the tone with which he's speaking now.
"Tell me what they asked you to do with the quints," Fuutarou says to Maeda. "I assume you already know about my involvement with the quints - what were you supposed to do about the quints? Because it doesn't make any sense for them to tell you to come after me in any way when you could just go after the quints who're the much weaker links."
"...I was supposed to track them. Study their behavior, uh, as in, where they'd go and all that," Maeda replies. "I got to the point where I know what all of their schedules are like, what classes they have, the academic stuff. But I couldn't for the life of me fuckin' track them outside of school; this whole time it's felt like they'd just disappear as soon as they left school. I remember this one time when I even managed to follow one of 'em when they were headin' home for the day, and I look away for one second and look back the next only to find that they just fuckin' vanished; it's so weird. But I guess it ain't so weird if you had a hand in that?"
"I'll leave that to your imagination as to how," Fuutarou gives a short, confirming nod.
"Shit, bro, there were times when I had so much fuckin' trouble followin' them around even inside the school! Just compilin' the whole list of their schedules was hard enough because I had to ask around, y'know, ask their friends or people I thought were their friends or even the teachers themselves to find out what classes they had! In fact, fuck, the whole reason why I even resorted to making a list of their schedules in the first place was because it was damn near impossible to try to follow 'em around on foot on campus!"
"But that was it, then? All they asked you to do was just stalk them?"
"I mean, yeah. They didn't want me to do anything to them, in case that's what you're askin'."
"Well, I'd like to know everything that they told you to do. I wouldn't put it past Shirazumi to've told you to, like, attack the quints out in broad daylight, for example, seeing that they've been attacked before."
"Funnily enough, I get where you're comin' from with that. I guess the reason why they didn't tell me to do anythin' crazy like that was because I'm just some dude they literally grabbed off the street to do some wetwork. That, and I guess since I attend the same school as you guys, they can't risk losing a mole like me, y'know?"
He doesn't need to know that Shirazumi would prefer acquiring the quints in healthy condition most likely, Fuutarou thinks to himself. Other than that, Fuutarou knew that someone or something was following the girls around at school, so he put up additional layers of magic wards to protect the girls and make their movements much more incognito so that they wouldn't be followed as easily, and it appears to have worked against a normal person like Maeda. He should have suspected earlier than this that Shirazumi would think of trying out a strategy like this, to plant a mole in their very school to scout out what they were doing, since that way Maeda could potentially feed valuable information about the girls' plans and make Shirazumi's objective of capturing the girls much easier, considering he'd have pinpoint accurate information to work with to find the quints.
"Then why did you show up earlier tonight? You're not a mage, so what were you trying to accomplish? Were you just reinforcements for Shirazumi?"
"Y-Yeah, that's it. Literally Shirazumi-san sent out a...a signal that he uses whenever he wants anyone in his gang to show up to his location urgently. I was in the area, so I tagged along with a few others who were on their way."
"I'm rather surprised that Shirazumi has that much power over you guys when you all're literally just a ragtag gang that he puts together via recruiters. He paying you well or something? I'd fucking hope so, if he can just straight up call your asses over to him whenever he wants."
"I mean, it's good enough to convince a solo dolo guy like me to sign up, so it's pretty damn decent, yeah. Think of it as not havin' to worry about rent for a good few months."
Fuutarou laughs shortly. "Aha, now there's something I can relate to. Understandable, then."
Maeda scoofs back at his interrogator. "What, for real? Why's a guy like you talkin' like rent's hard to pay sometimes?"
"Mmm, not so much anymore, but back in the day when I was younger it certainly used to be. You bringing up the rent gave me some rather pleasant flashbacks to those times, that's all."
"Uhhh...judgin' by the look on your face, it don't seem all that pleasant..." Maeda says slowly, his freshly widened eyes looking uncertainly back at Fuutarou.
"Relax, you're probably just looking too deep into it. Also ignore the bat I have next to me."
"I wasn't even tryin'a talk about the damn bat, but now that'cha brought it up, I can't help but to keep it in mind whenever you say shit!" Maeda hollers.
"That so. Speaking of saying shit, answer me this, actually: why did you decide to rat out your employer? Because it doesn't seem to me that you're lying, you seem like you're being pretty truthful for the most part. He not paying you enough or what?" Fuutarou continues the interrogation, though by this point the ominous atmosphere of the questioning is rapidly subsiding.
Maeda shakes his head slowly, trying to come up with something to say.
"Shit, bro, I ain't out here tryin'a die. Yeah, sure, I'm a street rider and a gangbanger sometimes, but I ain't like most other street trash, okay? I don't do shit I don't like, especially when it comes to illegal shit or shit that involves doin' bad stuff. Stuff like killing and all that. Like, I'll do drugs, right? I'll steal, y'know, that sorta crim stuff, but I don't wanna have to stick a knife in anybody unless I really ain't got a choice. I know what Shirazumi's up to can't be anythin' good, though you shouldn't ask me to tell you about any of it 'cause I know fuck all about whatever the fuck he's doin'. So now that I'm in this kind of a situation, right? With you interrogatin' my ass with a bat next to ya lookin' like how it does right now, shit, I figure you'll be more lenient with me than Shirazumi ever will. That's all."
"Some trust you got," Fuutarou remarks with another short, amused scoff. "You saw me gut your buddies earlier tonight, and you still have the balls to put your trust in me to not do the same to you? Especially in the situation you're in right now?"
"Hey, hey, don't - don't get me wrong, you still scared me shitless earlier when I woke up in here. But now that we've talked, at least I don't get the impression that you're just another nutcase like a lotta other crackheads I run with. It's either I take the chance that you'll let me outta here in one piece if I cooperate, or get my head ripped off in the same situation if I were dealin' with Shirazumi-san...or so I hear he acts like that."
"Wouldn't surprise me, seeing that he's a fucking cannibal and all."
"W-Wait, what?! He's a c-cannibal!?"
"Sounds like they don't tell you about that detail, huh? Then again, why would they..."
"No but for real though, how the hell do you know that? Why'd they never tell me?"
"Well, you should already know why, so that they don't scare off potential expendables like you from joining them. Shirazumi needs the menial labor, after all. As for how I know, well, again, there's a reason why they told you to try 'n keep an eye on me. Shirazumi and I've already had a few run-ins; I run this city, not him, and he's coming in here like he's the one who owns the damn place, and all the more so if he's after the girls I've been assigned to protect."
Now equipped with the critical information that his technical employer is a cannibal, Maeda slumps slightly in his chair, letting his gaze fall down to the floor as he now contemplates what he should do in his situation. Fuutarou reads his expression correctly, having had the same thought cross his mind many times in the past with the matching body language to pair with such times, and after a brief pause, he grabs the bat and carefully rolls it away from the two of them, into the dark sides of the garage that serves as the Uesugi interrogation room.
"Tell you what, Maeda; consider yourself lucky because I don't usually give people I drag in here a choice of any kind," the high school mage speaks calmly as he stands up just to flip his chair around so that he's sitting properly in front of his schoolmate. "What do you think about being my mole? How does playing the reverse card sound to you?"
Maeda, looking back up at his captor once Fuutarou starts talking again, initially appears confused. "Playing the reverse card? Whaddya mean by that?"
"Basically, do for me what you were doing for Shirazumi and his gang. I'd like you to feed me intel about what Shirazumi and his gang's up to," Fuutarou clarifies.
"I-I dunno 'bout that one, man. Especially now that ya just told me 'bout how Shirazumi-san's a fuckin' cannibal, I figure he's just gonna eat my ass if they find out I'm snitchin' on 'em, y'know?"
"And that's where I step in and tell you that if you are ever threatened like that, I come in to save your ass, but I don't think it should ever come to that. In fact, I don't even want you doing anything risky; literally all I want you to do is to keep acting like you've been. Pretend like you're still trying to dig up anything useful about me or the quints. And on the off-chance that you come across anything that you think I should know about, you feed it to me. I want you to stay lowkey at all times; if you think you're gonna get into a sketchy situation, just avoid it and think of your own safety first. Because if you blow your cover, that's gonna immediately tip Shirazumi off to the fact that someone put a mole in his gang, which would be me, obviously. So for both of our sakes, you staying lowkey is top priority. But if you ever do get yourself into some shit, I'll come bail you out. I'm even willing to give you a bit of a salary of sorts if that's what it'll take for you to snitch for me, though don't expect anything big."
At the sound of a possible stipend, Maeda's eyes light up quickly.
"W-Wait, so - so that means...this means that I can double-dip, right? 'Cause technically I'm gettin' paid by Shirazumi's gang for what I was supposed to do, y'know, the whole stalking you and the quints thing. You'll seriously let me double-dip on this?"
"I kind of have to, right? Seeing how I said that I need you to stay lowkey and all." Fuutarou narrows his eyes back at his schoolmate. "You're not going to be blowing all your cash just to get high now, are you?"
"No, hell no, I stay away from that shit, man," Maeda sighs heavily. "I'ma be real wit'cha here, I might'a easily been a druggie like the rest of 'em, but I've seen the kinda shit that can happen; I've seen my boys get fucked up bad by the shit that's circulating on the black market in the past few years. I don't wanna end up like 'em, man, that shit ain't for me."
"Then why do you need the money? Since you sounded pretty excited when I mentioned the whole salary thing for you."
"Uh...just to get by, y'know? I don't really do much, man, I just kinda hang out and do whatever. I'm, uh, what do they say sometimes...I'm just a free spirit, man, I just kinda do whatever."
"Hm. So let me guess, you became a gangbanger because that's what pays the bills for you."
Maeda gives a little scoff of his own. "Ya got me, bro. I didn't like the idea of havin' ta work an actual job just to get paid, y'know? And not to mention, I fuckin' hate the idea of gettin' bossed around..."
"But somehow you were okay with getting recruited to become part of Shirazumi's gang?"
"That's 'cause we're still gangbangers, bro. Yeah, sure, they can try bossin' us around, but we aijn't gonna take that shit lying down. Well, that's what we would'a done, before I found out about the whole Shirazumi-san bein' a fuckin' cannibal part, so now I'm not so sure."
"So I guess to put it lightly, you're a freelancer."
"Freelancer...I've heard that word get used here 'n there. Yeah, I guess that's what I am."
"Fair enough. Then do my terms sound good enough to you? Though, I should mention right now before you to agree to anything that if I find out that you're still trying to find out shit about me or the quints, I'm gonna drag your ass right back here and bust your kneecaps open with that bat I had with me until now so hard, they'll be putting your legs back together in hell."
"I-I ain't gonna snitch on ya, I promise! I ain't tryin'a die out here, I already told ya!"
"Fair enough." Fuutarou reaches into his pocket, inside which sits a remote garage door opener that the young mage uses to open the door directly behind him. As the garage door opens noisily with much creaking to reveal the dead of the night in the former business square, Fuutarou gets up from his seat and moves behind Maeda to release him from his constraints, waiting for him to slowly get back up to his feet and rub his wrists where some of his bonds that were digging into his skin were beginning to irritate his skin as well. "Just head out from here; you should find a taxi waiting for you in the parking out over there. I've already paid the fare, so just tell the driver where to take you and he'll get you home." Fuutarou points off in the short distance at the taxi whose lights are on in the abandoned parking lot of Daikazoku Business Park.
Still not totally sure of what to make of how his situation just unfolded, Maeda turns around to give his former captor a puzzled look. "...I get that you're bein' nice to me 'n all 'cause you want me ta snitch on Shirazumi-san's gang 'n all that, but seein' just from this place alone, I get the feelin' that you ain't normally like this. I'm just curious, what made me the exception?"
"Well, the fact that we've made before makes things a little different," the young mage explains briefly with a slight gesture from his hands. "Everyone I've had to deal with before in here had the displeasure of being total strangers to me, and it doesn't help that most of the time they've been pretty uncooperative until I start doing things like bust a kneecap or two or break a rib or two to start getting them to fucking listen to me. Not only have we bumped into each other before, even if we never actually talked face to face, and the fact that you've been pretty cooperative with me so far tonight makes me less inclined to resort to actual torture methods on you. And just like how you said that you aren't like the other guys you hang out with in that you don't like doing cruel things, believe it or not, I also would rather not have to do things like crack a skull open just to get some answers; if all I had to do was calmly talk to people to get them to work with me, just like what we were able to do just now, I'd just do that. Just a friendly reminder, though, that I'll only maintain this mentality towards you so long as you do as we agreed; you try anything I find funny, and this special treatment I'm giving you is null and void. I'll leave what happens afterwards to your imagination."
"Shit, man, am I supposed to be scared hearin' that, knowin' what might happen to my ass if Shirazumi finds out that I'm snitchin' on him and his gang?" Maeda wonders aloud with another light groan.
"Probably, yeah. Shirazumi's probably gonna be too busy to give a rat's ass about you, whereas I will actually come find you and kill you myself if I feel like you're acting out of line. Whether or not that's preferable to Shirazumi possibly ripping you to pieces and then consuming you to feed his cannibalistic tendencies is up to you."
"Well fuck, you didn't have to put it like that!" Maeda recoils a little at Fuutarou's rather sadistic remark as he takes a few steps towards his freshly gifted freedom, but he stops halfway and turns around back to his schoolmate and former target almost sheepishly.
"So, uh...how, um, how we gonna keep in contact? So I can, uh, get paid 'n all that?" he asks while awkwardly scratching the back of his head.
"We can meet up at school. I'll make sure that you can run into me every once in a while; I'm afraid that I can't give you any of my contacts just in case you get compromised."
"Compromised? What's that mean?"
"As in if things go south and shit hits the fan, mainly if you get caught ratting your own gang out like I hired you to. If that happens and they jack your phone or something and find my number or email on that shit, that's going to put me in a potentially bad spot because then, they can start tracking my phone if they get someone who knows how to do that shit."
"Okay, fine. So just keep actin' like shit's normal, and feed you info whenever it's convenient...I can do that. See ya at school then, I guess."
Bidding his newly hired counter-snitch farewell for the night, Fuutarou watches with crossed arms for a few moments as his former captive and schoolmate trudges across the mostly empty parking lot over to the taxi and awkwardly get inside before the paid taxi hums away into the city night.
"...we should get some drinks tonight, whaddya say?"
As Fuutarou clicks his remote garage opener to close the door, he turns to find his father giving him a big grin, having entered the garage through one of the back doors concealed by his son's magic.
"Drinks? What's the occasion?" the high school mage asks nonchalantly while folding up both his chair and Maeda's to put off to the side and picking up the bonds that once tied Maeda's hands together behind his chair.
"The fact that you let a guy you dragged in here for interrogation off the hook without roughin' him up even once. I can't even remember the last time you've done that."
"Yeah? I can't remember the last time I've had someone who's been so cooperative with me, either," Fuutarou shoots back calmly. "It's nice for once to have someone work with you for once without you having to spend the effort breaking them in first."
"I'll toast to that, hahaha!"
"Anyways, no, I don't feel like drinking tonight. Like someone we know, I only drink on special occasions, anyway."
Isanari watches his son toss the cut bonds away into an old, somewhat banged up waste disposal container and grab the bat that he's rolled away to put away properly in a nearby closet that shelters Fuutarou's various instruments of torture and interrogation.
"So you think this's gonna pay off, then?"
"What, paying off the guy?"
"Yeah."
Fuutarou rolls his eyes a little. "My plan with him isn't anything big. Like, I'm paying him off just so that I don't need to worry about him screwing with things down the line, so in that sense, it's good that I was able to take care of this now rather than later. I don't expect him to pull off anything big for me and I'm certainly not counting on him or having him be an integral part of my overall plan on dealing with Shirazumi. If he can somehow feed me some crucial intel, that'll be great, but until that happens, like I said, I'm not expecting any miracles out of him."
"Heh. Now that sounds more like the Fuutarou I know," Isanari gives another hearty laugh while Fuutarou feels a very short vibration in his pocket, indicating that his phone is giving him a notification. Pulling out his phone to see what it is, he reads the text message that he's just received.
"...can't stay, gotta go," the young mage says quickly, and his father, looking down to see what's up, spies his son's almost trademark steeled expression and icy look, his default expression when he has something urgent to take care of.
"Alright, off ya go, then. Stop by over the weekend at some point, Raiha's plannin' on makin' your favorite curry again."
"I think I will, then. Tell Raiha to make mine a little spicier than usual this time."
The father and son of the Uesugi household both exit through the concealed back door to head to their respective destinations - Isanari back to the office that serves as his home, and Fuutarou to the Pentagon high-rise, the home of the quintuplets.
The digital clock on the third quintuplet's bed is about to hit 3:00AM, and its owner is lying in bed, under the covers, with her pillow pressed tightly against her chest with the assistance of her arms when it usually should be behind her head.
Ever since the incident she had in the kitchen, Miku has been unable to get herself to come out of her room. When her sisters, who naturally got concerned with her behavior, knocked on her door earlier that day to ask her what was going on, she implored them to just give her some space, that she wasn't feeling well and that she'd recover by the next day. To Nino and Itsuki specifically, Miku went the extra mile to text them the truth, that her Mystic Eyes were flaring up again at an unusual time, but she didn't go into detail about what had happened and maintained that this was something that should go away on its own, and that they needn't make a big deal out of this.
Key word, should.
A third of the day later, and Miku knows that her eyes have not calmed down. Several times throughout her self-imposed quarantine, Miku has peeked out from behind her pillow, only to be slapped with the reality that her world is slowly accumulating the same haunting black lines that she first saw etch themselves onto that cup she washed in the kitchen. They litter themselves onto everything she sees - her desk, her bed, her covers, her clothes, her desk lamp, her phone, her clock - anything she has placed her eyes on, slowly but surely, over time, they have begun sprouting those same harrowing lines that she cannot bear looking at.
There was a point when Miku tried forcing herself to get acclimated to this new world that she's been seeing by staring at the chair in front of her desk. Get used to looking at this chair. Look at this chair. This chair. This chair. This chair...
But such a tactic has failed miserably, with Miku relapsing into the shelter that the darkness of her pillow provides while being careful as to not touch the lines that she sees on it, too, lest she put more gashes in it as well, just like she did to the cup downstairs in the kitchen. And now, her newly developed condition has developed to the point where simply seeing is unbearable. Not because the act of seeing is painful at all, but because the jarring lines she's seeing in everything are putting such an uncomfortable kind of weight on her mind that she can't quite explain.
It's so bad that Miku almost prefers having her nightmare return to her so that she can deal with that instead. Almost.
But comparisons aside, the third quintuplet feels so miserable that in her silent desperation to claw her way out of her predicament of possessing this shattered, faulty vision, she has texted the only person she knows who might have any hope of a chance of diagnosing and perhaps even treating her condition. In a situation like this where she cannot rely on her sisters for assistance, mainly because she locked herself out of such an option, her tutor is her very last line of defense. Her affection for Fuutarou isn't the only reason she's turning to him directly for help, either - after all, the whole reason why she's quarantined herself in her own room is because she doesn't want to see these polluting lines appear on her own sisters. Miku can't be sure what she'd do if things came down to that.
So she has given Fuutarou a text, having forced herself to look at her phone that's grown a few disturbing lines across it while carefully avoiding them while texting, and now she waits with labored patience for his arrival as though she were hanging off the side of a cliff, clutching onto a life-saving rope that might be able to pull her up to safety if someone were to come along and help but with failing strength in her arms that cannot hold on much longer.
Her tutor hasn't given her a reply back yet. That's usually how their correspondence goes; if the girls text him in any capacity, usually he doesn't text them back because he'll talk to them about whatever they texted him about the next day at school or something. Fuutarou texting them back has so far been a dead giveaway that he doesn't plan on meeting them in person to talk to them and therefore must send a text as the next reasonable alternative. Even still, Miku, who's used to a life of getting immediate texts and replies back from her sisters whenever they share correspondence, can't stop her doubts from leaking into her mind and clouding her thoughts, their invasion facilitated by her heavily weakened mental state in the past eight or so hours of dealing with her cracked vision that's been causing her to see all these creepy lines everywhere she looks. Doubts that tell her that Fuutarou is too busy with his own work to have the time to come babysit her all the time.
And to make things worse, these doubts are then trailed by another smaller but no less beleaguering influx of counter-doubts telling Miku that even if Fuutarou does show up as she texted him to, wouldn't she be wasting his time? All the girls are strongly aware of how busy their tutor is, especially nowadays. It hasn't been that long since Fuutarou basically had to babysit all five of them because of the brief falling out that Nino and Itsuki had that resulted in Fuutarou having to run around and essentially drag everyone together to make them get along so that they could actually study like good students and avoid getting their asses tossed out of high school prematurely. What about any of what Miku is doing right now is supposed to be a good idea in light of those events? Why is she possibly forcing Fuutarou to waste even more of his precious time and effort to come diagnose something about her that he might not even be able to help her at all with? Besides, she was eventually able to get used to the nightmare that started haunting her a couple years ago; how is what she's suffering right now any different? Eventually with time, she'll used get used to this too. She's done it before, she can do it again.
But even as she tells herself this in her head, Miku can hear her gut screaming at her that this is something much, much worse. The nightmare she could tolerate and get used to because it's a nightmare, it's a dream; she can deal with something that she knows is only going to be confined in the dark depths of her own mind. But for her to see the effects of her nightmare begin to leak out and become real, become part of the real world - this cannot simply be ignored like the others, Miku feels. But even knowing this, even if she is right in thinking that her new symptoms cannot be left alone to fester into something much worse, what exactly can be done about it?
Is there nothing that can be done? Must she live the rest of her life in a world filled with these horrifying lines that will surely reduce her mind, given time enough, into nothing but a puddle of broken thoughts and painful memories?
Here's a better question: how many times must she hide here in the relative comfort and safety of her own bedroom, waiting for someone to come bail her out of her various crises? Ever since they met Fuutarou, and especially after they found out who he really was and what his true job was in regards to them, Miku has been working hard to be more like Fuutarou and grow out of her former shell of icy aloofness and detached ways of life. She thought she was doing a good job and making some nice progress towards becoming a better person - only to find herself back at square one, cowering underneath her covers with her face planted into her own pillow all because she can't stand looking at a couple of lines.
A single, soft knock at her door swiftly pulls her mind out of the viciously viscous quagmire of dark, slowly swirling thoughts that Miku's been letting herself sink into in the middle of the night, and it's also enough to cause Miku to pull the pillow away from her face, her hopes sharply rising at the possibility that Fuutarou, by some small miracle, has actually chosen to pay her a visit upon her selfish request. This possibility becomes reality as the lock on the door clicks open, and Uesugi Fuutarou steps inside and shuts the door silently behind him so as not to alert the rest of the quintuplets.
Extremely relieved to see him, Miku finally finds the strength in herself to sit up in her bed, but as soon as she sets her eyes on him, the middle quint remembers the reason why she didn't want to lay her eyes on anyone important to her and quickly looks away. Fuutarou hasn't turned on the light in her room or anything, so while she's long since gained relative night vision inside her own room, she can't tell whether or not there are any lines over her own tutor. She'd rather not know at all, so she does her best to keep her eyes looking away from Fuutarou as he sits down slowly in her own chair to face her.
"I could feel your magical energy even down in the living room," he says quietly. "What in the world did you do?"
"...I don't know," Miku says even more softly. Her voice comes out as a shaky squeak; ordinarily Miku would be incredibly embarrassed by this but she just doesn't have the emotional strength to feel embarrassed at all tonight. "I was just...talking to Itsuki when she came back home today, and after we were done talking, I finished washing some dishes and cups in the kitchen, and then..."
Miku has to pause there to stop herself from just completely flying off the rails emotionally, and Fuutarou patiently waits for her to recollect herself so that she can continue.
"...when I was washing one of the cups, I saw a...a weird line across it. I...I didn't know what it was...I thought it was just a weird stain, or...or maybe a crack in it, so I...I tried to wash it away, and...my thumb, it...it..."
As Miku is talking, Fuutarou takes careful note of Miku. Her Mystic Eyes are glowing more brightly than he's ever seen it, and with it, a staggering amount of magical energy resonating from them. As he mentioned to her upon entering her room, Fuutarou was able to sense it even outside her room, even through the protective wards that he's set up in each of the girls' rooms specifically to prevent such a situation from happening, so whatever these Mystic Eyes are capable of, it's potentially more than what his own magical wards are capable of, and that doesn't sit well with him.
"...it just...my thumb just...went into the crack, and...and it just...it made the cup...like...split open..." Miku is clearly having trouble solidifying her thoughts. "It...might still be downstairs...unless Nino did the dishes after dinner or something..."
Mystic Eyes...lines...Miku's thumb going straight through them...the quintuplet's description of what happened to her today is sounding more and more familiar the longer he sits on everything Miku has told him thus far. He vaguely recalls being told about a certain exceedingly rare pair of Mystic Eyes that had similar symptoms, but he can't quite remember what. He may need to message that one friend of his to refresh his memory, but in the meantime...
"So you've holed yourself up in your room here ever since?" Fuutarou correctly conjectures, and Miku nods slowly.
"Now, it's gotten so bad that...everything I look at, I start seeing these big...scary lines over them," she croaks weakly. "I've been stuffing my face into my own pillow just so that I don't have to look at them. Since it's dark right now, it's not so bad since I have a lot harder of a time seeing them, but...I'm sure they're still there."
The two high schoolers fall into a relatively long silence. Miku isn't sure what Fuutarou is doing, and his silence is pressuring her to speak back up again, so she does.
"...I...I don't want to start seeing these lines over my sisters. I don't know much about them, but...but I'm pretty sure that I don't want to have them show up on my own sisters. I don't want to see them on you either, Fuutarou."
That would explain why Miku is so awkwardly looking off to the side of the floor at their feet, Fuutarou thinks to himself.
"So...um...that's why...I texted you, on the off-chance that...maybe you could do something so that I don't, um, have to...deal with these weird...lines and stuff..."
The third quintuplet lets her voice disappear like water poured onto a midday summer curb waiting for her tutor to say something back, but still he does not relent. At this point, all the doubts that Miku let rot in the back of her mind while waiting for her tutor to show up begin rearing their own ugly heads, and they suddenly seize control of Miku's thoughts for good this time, causing her to start mumbling almost incoherently while still glueing her eyes down at the floor,
"...I'm sorry, Fuutarou...I thought...I thought that...you could help me with this...I didn't want to waste your time...I genuinely thought that you could help...even though you've helped us all so much already...but I forgot that you don't know a whole lot about our Mystic Eyes...I don't know why I thought that you would be able to help me with this...when this should've been something I needed to handle on my own...I'm sorry for wasting your time...I'm so - "
Fuutarou gets up from his chair and plants himself right in front of Miku who's sitting on the edge of her bed. He puts one hand behind her head and gently but firmly leads her head towards his chest in order to emulate Miku's earlier behavior of stuffing her face into her pillow while he opens a small blue tuning rune right behind the back of her head.
"Sit still and give me a minute or two," the high school mage orders solemnly. He's using the same tone of voice that he gives whenever he's lecturing the quints during their tutoring sessions or administering mock exams to them, and perhaps as a reflex, Miku quietly obeys and immediately ceases her depressing rambling so that Fuutarou can concentrate on his work.
And Miku needs not wait long for Fuutarou to swiftly make headway: no more than a few seconds in, and Miku already feels the sharp edge of mental discomfort and stress break inside her mind, giving it some much needed space to calm down and relax. This sense of relief is markedly different from the ordinary feelings that Miku experiences whenever Fuutarou is around, so it must clearly be part of the work Fuutarou is doing to help her with her situation.
But this special feeling of relief doesn't just stop there. It remains in her head, and before she realizes, Miku senses that this relief is permeating throughout her senses and is quickly evolving into something bigger, though she can't quite put into words what she's feeling. It's like the more Fuutarou works on whatever he's doing, the more Miku feels like she's being filled with a growing sense of...nostalgia. Happy nostalgia, as though she's lucidly dreaming about the simpler, happier days of her younger years. Like she's being transported back to the days when she and her sisters were truly identical quintuplets, playing soccer after school with their classmates in their after-school soccer club or watching the summer fireworks with their mother as part of their yearly summer family tradition. And with these surging feelings of nostalgic euphoria, the cold emptiness she's felt in her eyes as a result of her unleashed Mystic Eyes slowly but surely flakes away until her eyes feel as though they've finally returned back to normal. And all the while, Miku has since planted her face into Fuutarou's chest, slowly and steadily breathing in his scent that is familiar and overwhelmingly comforting, which further helps to further purge her senses of the cold, hair-raisingly eerie unfamiliarity that she'd been inundated with for the past eight or so hours, ever since her Mystic Eyes somehow activated on their own to do whatever the heck she did to that cup.
After about ten minutes, the young mage finally closes the tuning rune behind Miku's head.
"...how're you feeling now?" he asks softly, and Miku first responds with a snuggle with her face into his chest before saying back,
"...a lot better."
Fuutarou would move away from her to get a better look at her, but he finds himself somewhat locked in place due to Miku's arms wrapped around the back of his waist.
"...so how long are you gonna keep me here?" he asks curtly.
"...until I'm satisfied," Miku replies just as swiftly.
"And how long's that gonna take?"
"The whole night."
"So you just want me to spend the night with you."
Miku nods, still with her face against his chest. "If possible, yeah. But only if you don't have anything else you need to do tonight."
"Well, you know me, I always got something to do. But you seem like the bigger priority tonight; just let me get a better look at you to see how you're doing now."
So very reluctantly, Miku relinquishes her tutor so that he can turn on the desk lamp for a bit of light with which to review the third quint's current condition. Her Mystic Eyes are now gone, now longer glowing eerily in the darkness like it was when he first arrived, and the levels of ambient magical energy in Miku's room have been reduced back down to nothing again as should be the case.
"...so what did you do this time, Fuutarou?" the quintuplet asks quietly as her tutor is scanning her.
"To put it simply, I performed a deep tuning on you. Think of it as a deep cleaning when you go to the dentist - I even named it after that, since it's the best way for me to explain that to someone like you without any magic knowledge."
Miku nods, but then her eyebrows furrow somewhat. "...wait, then if you could do this all along, why didn't you do this sooner?"
"Because a deep tuning is substantially risky, because it requires the tuner, in this case me, to have intimate knowledge of the magic circuits that he's working with. A deep tuning can only be performed safely when the tuner has spent a substantial amount of time with the person whose magic circuits they're tuning. If they don't possess that intimate knowledge, then they can easily make a mistake in the tuning process; at worst, they can leave permanent damage to their magic circuits. In your case, if I screwed up my deep tuning, there might have been a chance that, depending on how badly I fucked up, I would have left you with permanent vision damage."
"...can't be much worse than what I was dealing with all day today, though," Miku remarks dryly in sharpened self-depreciation.
"Maybe not, but neither is what I want. But that's the main disadvantage of performing a deep tuning; you need to know the person first, and well. The main advantage of a deep tuning is the ability to do what I just now - recalibrate your magical condition and restabilize it despite having very little knowledge about your Mystic Eyes and what exactly they've been doing today, since at the end of the day, your Mystic Eyes are created by your magic circuits, and those I know a bit more about. This might just be a temp fix and it might flare up later again, but if it's gotten you to calm down again for tonight, then that's all that matters for now. I've been hesitant to do it because I'm not sure if I know you enough to attempt a deep tuning on you, but because I considered your condition bad enough, I decided to take the risk. Thankfully, it went smoothly."
Fuutarou pauses, slowly looking a few inches off to Miku's left at the wall behind her.
"...I'm pretty sure I said this before, but I'll reiterate because of what you said a little earlier: I consider nothing I do for you girls to be a waste of time. Never be sorry for asking me for something. I'm here right now specifically because of situations like this that might arise, and all the more important that I am because I'm probably the only one in this whole city who can do this. While you probably should've texted me earlier about something like this, you still did the right thing contacting me to check up on you."
Reaching over to the desk lamp, the young mage switches it off.
"Alright, now get some sleep, I think you'll need as much of it as you can for school later today. I'll stay here until you fall asleep, so don't worry," he says, but when he looks back over to Miku, he sees her in the dark putting her pillow back in its proper place after dusting it off a little. She then peels the covers back and pats the side of the bed that's facing Fuutarou.
"Not unless you get some sleep too," she demands softly.
"...but does it have to be with you?"
Miku nods. "I'm still scared, Fuutarou."
"Lying is bad, Miku."
"And you know what else is bad? Leaving a girl by herself when she's not having a good day," Miku pouts back at her tutor. "Now get in already so we can sleep."
Groaning, Fuutarou peels off his jacket and leaves it on Miku's chair and slowly climbs in after taking off his shoes and socks. Once he's laid himself down on his half of Miku's bed, the third quint tosses the covers over the two of them and snuggles right back up with him.
"...I didn't brush my teeth or do anything, and I still have my clothes on. Are you sure you're okay with this?" the young tutor sighs heavily.
"What, it's not your first time sleeping with me, if that's what you're concerned about," Miku reminds him with a cheeky smile.
"I'm well aware, thanks. Whatever, it's fine..."
Miku pretends to go to sleep, but she leaves her eyes open slightly ajar in the darkness to maintain this guise in order to enjoy as much time as she can resting with her tutor and classmate, listening to his firm, steady heartbeat and his calm, controlled breathing. To her pleasant surprise, she feels a familiar hand pat the top of her head this time, but it doesn't stop there: the hand even lifts up a small lock of her peachy-red hair as though to play with it a little and stroke the rest of her hair slowly and gently.
A/N
Allow me to clarify one thing, and that's that I will update this story whenever I have the time and the motivation to do so. I don't care if this fic is considered the "best" QQ fanfic or that a lot of people are waiting for me to update this story, I will take however long I feel like to put out another chapter; I'm under no obligation to follow some kind of schedule in regards to updating, and I have no intention of making it the case, even if I have had streaks of frequent updates in the past; neither am I being paid in any capacity to write this story so I have nothing of that sort of obligation to fulfill either. So leaving me a review asking me to update this story or any of my other works for any reason will simply be ignored, no matter how good of a reason you think it is, so it'll just be a waste of time on your part. I will write and update as I see fit.
On a separate note, I commissioned some pieces of art for this fic, and I will post them on my Twitter account since I don't know how else to share them with you, other than the scuffed crop that this fic's new cover art turned out having. My Twitter handle is TouhouSniper98, so please check them out if you'd like.