With a pained groan, Ranko sat up. Her head was throbbing something fierce, and she wasn’t quite sure where she was. Blinking the blurriness from her eyes, she slowly began to recognize the bedroom that comprised nearly all of her little apartment above the bar. She rubbed her temples, wincing and retreating from the touch of her own fingers. “What the…?” She heard glass strike glass, turning her body in her bed to face the source of the sound.


    Seated in one of the wooden dining chairs that had been pulled closer to the bed, Hana perked up as Ranko stirred. Her half-full bottle of beer rested on the small white nightstand next to three empty ones, and her leather jacket lay draped over the back of the other dinette chair. “Shhh. Take it easy, baby. Slowly.” Hana stood, closing the half-meter gap and sitting on the edge of the bed to Ranko’s right.


    Ranko blinked up at her in the darkened apartment. Her eyes didn’t seem to be working quite right, and there was a constant hum reverberating in the back of her skull. She felt like she was on a boat, because the bed seemed to slosh around whenever she moved her head. “What happened?”


    Hana frowned, gently brushing Ranko’s unruly red hair from her eyes with her fingers. “There was a fight in the bar.”


    Ranko groggily revisited the various flashes in her mind, working to separate dream from memory. I sang that weird song… and then there was a guy, and he grabbed my necklace. And he hit me, and then… smoke?


    “I… I think I remember.”


    She lifted the covers and looked herself over. Her body seemed mostly intact. She was absolutely swimming in a gray tee shirt with the logo for Jim Beam screen printed across her chest.  For as oversized as it was on her, it had to have belonged to Hana. Besides the shirt, she wore only the pair of green cotton panties she’d had on the night of the attack. Why didn’t they just bring me up here in what I was wearing? She remembered with horror that her assailant had torn her shirt with a visible cringe, first at the realization that the garment had been borrowed from Izumi, but then at a much more fearsome thought. What… else did he do to me? Did he… oh, gods, how do I… Those guys weren’t even martial artists, and they just… two seconds of being caught off guard, and… fuck! How could I let this happen to me?! What do I do now?


    Reading the terror in her young charge’s eyes, Hana spoke up in a soft, soothing voice. “You’re all right, honey. Yui and I changed you out of your clothes when we brought you upstairs.”


    The redhead’s cheeks warmed, and she averted her eyes from the bar’s proprietress and matriarch. While it had never much bothered her in her former life, since accepting herself as a girl, she had begun to feel far more protective of her body. The idea that two members of the haphazard clan of wayward women had seen her nearly nude, especially while she was unconscious, was a lot for her to take in.


    Ranko swiveled her legs off of the bed on the side opposite Hana, standing and turning toward the bathroom. She made it one step before her body careened uncontrollably to the right side and she collapsed to the floor in a heap.


    “Ranko!” Hana rushed around to the other side of the bed, picking her up off the floor and sitting her back in the bed with a surprising amount of ease. “You need to take it easy, sweetheart. The doctor said you’ll be alright, but you got your bell rung pretty good. Stay put for now if you can. I’ll get you whatever you need.”


    Ranko blinked slowly, rubbing her throbbing temples. “Doctor? I… don’t remember.”


    Hana nodded. “There was a doctor in the bar with his date and a few friends. He checked you over before we ever even got you up off the floor.”


    The apartment door flung open with a bang and a crash, and Yui burst into the small room. “I heard a loud noise, is she… Ranko! You’re awake!”


    Ranko winced, covering her ears and recoiling from the sound. Every noise reverberated in her skull like a gong being thrown into traffic. “Hey, Yui.” She let her head fall gently back to her pillow, covering her eyes with her forearm. The afternoon sunlight from her lone window seemed awfully bright today for some reason, and it hurt to look at. “Please don’t yell,” she pleaded.


    “Shit, sorry, sis.” Yui kicked off her chunky black heels, both to respect her sister’s home and to minimize the sound of her footfalls, and stepped closer to the edge of the bed on her bare feet. “How you feelin’, kiddo?”


    “Like I got hit by a dump truck full of shrine bells,” the redhead lamented with a pitiful groan. “For a second, I thought those guys were going to kill me… or worse. Why did they stop?”


    Yui opened her mouth to answer, but Hana hushed her with a quick hand on her forearm. “Don’t worry about that,” Hana replied. “You’re safe now, and that’s all that matters.”


    Ranko started to sit up again, and Hana made a scolding noise, clicking her tongue. “Uh-uh, young lady. I told you, you need to stay in bed.”


    Too groggy to be embarrassed at being called a lady, Ranko could only groan. “I really gotta pee, though.”


    Yui walked around to the right side of the bed, offering her forearm down to her sister. “Come on, I’ll walk with you.”


    Ranko swiveled her legs around, hanging them off the bed and sliding her backside off the mattress. Clinging tightly to Yui’s arm, she wobbled forward, leaning on her sister until she made it into the narrow bathroom. “I can use the counter from here. Thanks.”


    She shimmied carefully to the toilet, taking care of her business and standing again, putting the majority of her weight on the periwinkle blue countertop. As she passed the mirror, she stopped to look at herself. There was a large purple splotch on her cheek, and an angry red stripe around her neck from where the choker had cut off her airflow. Both were fading, no doubt due to the amount of time she’d spent unconscious. Aw, man, again with the bruises? Guess I’m gonna be stuck wearin’ makeup again. Fuck, that shit feels weird on my face. Stupid Cat’s Tongue. She opened the bathroom door, and Yui immediately reached out to brace her again.


    Yui took slow, cautious steps, only one to every two of her sister’s unsteady minces, as she led Ranko back to the bed. “Is there anything else you need, sis?”


    Ranko blinked up at her. “Aspirin? Like, all of it?”  The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.


    Yui smiled faintly. “I think we can manage that.” She scooted off to the kitchenette, starting to fill a square juice glass with water from the sink.


    “I thought I saw smoke. White smoke. Just before I blacked out.” Ranko rubbed her temples again, leaning her head back against the white headboard. She winced, inhaling sharply through gritted teeth as her head made a quiet bong sound against the hollow aluminum frame.


    Hana shook her head. “No, honey. It must have been the concussion.” She turned in her chair, flashing Yui a look that, had Ranko seen it, she would have clearly recognized as a wordless go with me on this. She stretched her arms toward the ceiling, vocalizing through a loud yawn.


    “Ma, why don’t you let me take a shift with her? You’ve been up here all night. You need your rest, too.” Yui sighed, shaking her head in her mother’s direction. Her facial expression was one of disappointment, even though both women knew there had never really been any other expectation when one of their number needed help.


    She… watched over me… all night? Ranko blinked, looking over the woman in the chair to her right with her mouth hanging open. She really cares… that much?


    Hana waved the offer off with a flick of her wrist. “Nah, I’m good. You and your sisters need to get the bar ready for tonight. I’ve got a few more hours in me yet.”


    After rummaging in one of the drawers in the tiny corner kitchen, Yui walked to the bed and handed her young sister four round white pills. She leaned over, helping to support the glass of water in Ranko’s hand until she could swallow them and then setting the rest of the water on the nightstand nearest to Hana’s chair. “Alright, then. If you insist, I’m gonna get back downstairs and help them finish prep. Izzi and Mei will want to know she’s awake. Should I send them up?”


    Hana shook her head, not giving Ranko a chance to answer. “She needs rest. We all want to see her, but let’s put her needs first for now.”


    Yui nodded. “Of course, Mama.” She grabbed her shoes from the floor and exited the apartment, closing the door carefully to minimize the sound.


    Hana moved back over to the bed, sitting next to Ranko gingerly. She began gently stroking Ranko’s hair, careful to avoid both the lumps where her head had struck the bar, and her recently-pierced earlobes.


    “Mm. That feels nice, Mama.” Ranko still couldn’t believe that she was using that term for anyone, but at the moment, she gave herself permission to do so on the basis that she was feeling pretty pathetic. “I’m sorry I lost the fight.”


    I gotta find a place to start training again. Losing to those jerkwads, that’s just… unacceptable.


    Hana gave her a little tsk. “Don’t you dare apologize, Ranko. Don’t you dare. Just, you rest.”


    The redhead sighed softly, her shoulders slumping a bit against the headboard. “I just, after the thing with Mei, you all made it sound like it’s kinda my job to keep the riff-raff out, and… they messed up the whole night.”


    “Honestly, Ranko,” Hana said, shaking her head with a furrowed brow and pursed lips, “do you really think I’m more worried about an hour of lost drink sales than I am the safety of my girls?”


    Ranko rolled over slightly, sitting on her hip and looking up at her caretaker. “Mama, why do you do it? Look after us all like you do?”


    Hana smiled, sighing a little distantly. “It’s a long story, baby.”


    The teen tried her best to smile. “I ain’t going anywhere.”


    Hana looked at her young ward contemplatively for a long few moments. “The thing is, I’ve never talked about it with anyone before.”


    Ranko looked up at her with a goofy grin, her eyes not exactly pointing in the same direction. “Lucky for you, I’m pretty sure I’m not gonna remember this conversation tomorrow either way. C’mon. You listen to us talk about stuff all the time.”


    Hana chuckled, pausing for another long moment before answering. “Fair enough, I suppose, but if you do remember, it stays between us. None of your sisters even know.”


    Ranko nodded as gently as she could, her head still not especially fond of moving.


    “Well, when I was… well, not much older than you, I guess, I started working here. Back then, the bar was called the Bottle and Brew, and it was owned by this nice old guy named Ito. I had my own challenges, not unlike some of you girls, and Ito looked out for me like I was his own. He taught me everything he could about the industry, and I was hungry to absorb all of it; I knew within six months of working here that I wanted to own my own bar.


    “Problem was, I was something of a wild thing. I got in the bad habit of taking guys home from the bar after my shift, and one thing led to another, and I ended up getting pregnant way before I was ready to. Luckily, my parents didn’t disown me like Izumi’s did, but it was pretty obvious that I wasn’t going to be able to take care of a baby on my own. It was the hardest thing I ever had to do, but I put my daughter up for adoption.


    “Some sixteen years later, Ito was talking about retiring, and about that time, my father died. He left me a little bit of money – not anything crazy, but enough that I was able to buy the bar. That would’ve been… oh, ‘74. In truth, Ito all but gave it to me; I didn’t pay half what it was worth, but it was enough that he could afford to retire on. Within a few months of owning the place, I was doing a little better for myself, and I thought I might try to find my daughter and see what happened to her.


    “When I originally put her up for adoption, they gave me the name of the family, and when I looked them up, I was surprised to find out that they lived just a few blocks from here. I gave some cheerleader a couple hundred yen to borrow her yearbook, and I was able to see a picture of her for the first time. And, surprisingly, it turned out that I recognized her. She used to walk by the bar every day on her way to and from school, and I’d seen her more than a few times. She always looked so sad and distant, and it broke my heart even before I knew who she was.


    “For months, I waited for her to walk by every afternoon during prep, trying to find the courage to go talk to her. I followed her a couple of times, being entirely too chickenshit to go introduce myself, and learned that she liked this little cafe that used to be down on the corner. She’d go there on Thursdays with some friends. It’s gone now. Anyway, I finally decided I would try to meet her there and introduce myself.


    “I got all dressed up…” She chuckled, shaking her head. “Last time I actually wore a fuckin’ dress, come to think of it. I opened the front door, and as soon as I did, she came running out of a little anime shop across the street, in the plaza over there where that martial arts studio is. I saw that she was being chased by a couple of guys - police, it turns out. I didn’t even think. I just grabbed her arm and yanked her inside, and hid her up here from them. She’d apparently stolen a couple of wall scrolls or something, but I didn’t care. For the first time in her life, I was able to protect my little girl.”


    Ranko blinked. The story was starting to sound familiar. “Wait a minute… are we talking about Ayako?!”


    Hana nodded. “We sat and talked, and I asked her about her family. She said she was unhappy with her adopted family, and I could tell she was basically acting out to get attention. I offered her a job and told her she could stay here. I didn’t really need the help, and she couldn’t even work nights at her age, but I was so happy that she decided to stay with me.” She sighed remorsefully. “To this day, I still haven’t told her the truth.”


    Ranko nodded slowly. “So, you didn’t set out to take in girls like us.” Another phrase that felt strange crossing her lips. “But then Ayako found Yui out back.”


    Hana smiled. I’m glad that Yui had confided that story in her. She doesn’t share it with many people, and it means they’re getting close. “Exactly. And I couldn’t turn her away - and even if I’d wanted to, I couldn’t explain to Ayako why I’d take in one teenage girl I’d just met and not another, so Yui stayed. And then in time, Yui found Izumi, and Izumi found Mei.”


    Ranko cracked a little smile. “And that means, I’m the only one you actually ever chose all by yourself.”


    Hana laughed a little. “I suppose you are, but if you ask me, you were more of a team effort. We all talked about it, and we unanimously decided as a family before we invited you to stay.”


    Ranko purred quietly into Hana’s gentle brushing of her hair, listing to her right and leaning her head on the tall woman’s shoulder. “I’m so glad you did.”


    Hana leaned down, brushing away the bright-red bangs and giving Ranko a gentle kiss on her forehead. “So am I, baby girl. So am I.”