With her hand lightly maintaining contact with the wall, Ranko completed a third tentative lap around her studio apartment. Finally, she could walk well enough that she felt confident enough to brave the stairs. The night before had been the first time she’d been alone since being attacked in the bar three days prior. She’d finally managed to convince Mei to go home a little after four in the morning so she could get some sleep. Ranko loved Mei to death, but boy, that girl could talk up a storm.


    She pulled on her gi pants and an oversized pink T-shirt bearing the logo of one of the many idol groups she’d started to cover in her singing, slipping on her black shoes. Standing from the edge of her bed, she walked carefully to the apartment door into the small landing area and gingerly made her way down the steps to the back room of the bar below.


    “Hello? Anybody here? Mama?” Ranko turned right into the kitchen, looking for Hana or any of her sisters and finding that she was alone. Maybe up front? She traversed the narrow hallway toward the public area of the bar, but as she passed Hana’s office, she found the door uncharacteristically ajar. She stepped into the cluttered room, checking to see if anyone was present and finding no one.


    The cramped space looked as if it hadn’t been cleaned in a year. Piles of paperwork nearly a half-meter high in places, including dozens of envelopes that had never been opened, dominated the cheap particle board desk and the side table in the corner to its right. Behind the desk, a ratty black office chair with strips of criss-crossed duct tape covering the worst of the rips in the seat cushion awaited an occupant. To the left of the desk, a small gray plastic waste bin overflowed with empty beer bottles. A small orange terracotta planter hung from the ceiling in the corner behind the door; it might have been pretty once, but the succulent that had occupied it was long dead. The reddish carpet was almost brown with ground-in dirt from years of traffic in work shoes. The right wall was dominated by a blood-red leather couch, cracked and worn all over to the point that the seats were more likely mottled in different colors than the cows the material had come from.


    A rusty beige metal filing cabinet stood against the left wall, just in front of the desk, with a combination television and VCR atop it. As she turned to leave the room, she noticed a stack of video cassettes piled to the left of the monitor. Each had a date written on the label in Hana’s handwriting. She hadn’t paid much attention to it before, but Hana had once told her that there were security cameras throughout the bar that recorded everything.


    She tried to will herself to walk out of the room, but she could not. I have to know what happened. Hana told me not to worry about it, but I can’t get it out of my head.


    Ranko rifled through the tapes, finding the one with Wednesday’s date and popping it into the slot underneath the black-and-white security monitor. She shifted aside some of the clutter that buried the ragged red leather couch along the back wall, sitting down. After searching between the couch cushions for a small black plastic remote control, she pressed the double-forward arrow on it. Scanning the four small pictures in the corners, she identified the lower-left quadrant as the camera most likely to show the assault. She stared intently, barely blinking as the evening zoomed past her eyes at sixteen times normal speed. Steeling her nerves as she saw herself lean over table six, she swallowed hard and pressed play. It took three pushes of the button before the monitor responded, owing to the failing batteries in the remote control.


    There was no audio in the recording, but Ranko heard the events in her mind as they replayed in front of her eyes. The shrieks of the crowd. Mei screaming her name. She watched as her assailant grabbed her necklace. In one of the other quadrants of the screen, the second attacker closed on the table from the direction of the men’s room, shoving a young woman in his path to the floor in his hurry to help his friend.


    Ranko winced as the man in the video tore Izumi’s shirt at her neckline. At least my boobs weren''t hanging out, she thought with a sigh of relief. She recoiled at the image of herself being struck in the face. Her shame wasn’t just at the thought that she’d been hit, but that the guy had actually slapped her with an open hand, like… well, like a girl. Ranko watched as her form staggered back and crashed into the bartop. Both of her attackers leered over her, and the rest of the patrons in the bar, who had given the altercation a wide berth, continued to make their way to the front door. Some had even used the fire exit in the back between the bathrooms.


    And then, there it was: a flash of white smoke. “I knew I saw it!” she exclaimed aloud. She traced the smoke back to its source, and found Hana’s image, standing behind the bar, discharging a fire extinguisher into the eyes of the two huge men. They both recoiled, and lights began to flash through the windows; Ranko correctly guessed it would be the police.


    As the brutes backed away and the bar patrons continued running for the exits, Yui vaulted over the bar top, kneeling over Ranko. She lifted Ranko’s head in her arms and cradled it gently, bending herself over Ranko’s unconscious form. As the crowd stampeded past, Yui shielded Ranko’s body with her own and ensured no one stepped on her as they made their escape. She caught glimpses of Mei and Izumi darting through the crowd, Mei finally dragging someone back toward Ranko by the hand. That must have been the doctor, she thought. The man turned his head to face the camera, and she smiled weakly in recognition of Daijo, the nice middle-aged man she’d signed her first autograph for a little more than a week ago.


    A tear ran down her cheek as the rest of the encounter played out. She couldn’t believe what she had seen. Four women, none of whom had a lick of training in martial arts or self-defense of any kind as far as she knew, had stood up for her. They stood no chance to win a fight with the brutes, but they had defended her anyway. Protected her. Saved her. Ranko wasn’t especially used to being the one on the receiving end of such actions.


    She saw a policeman walk by the window in the recording, leading the man that had slapped her in handcuffs. She kept watching, waiting to see what happened to the other man, but before he appeared in any of the four quadrants of the monitor, she heard the front door of the bar opening. Shit. Somebody’s coming. Quickly, she ejected the tape and returned it to its place, feeding a blank tape back in the unit to capture the new day’s security footage. She turned off the monitor, shuffled the mess on the couch to hide where she’d sat, and stepped out of the office just in time to be seated on a metal stool at the kitchen prep counter when Yui walked through the saloon doors.


    “Oh hey! Look who’s up! How are you feeling, hon?” Yui waved with two extended fingers, the rest of her hand still clenched around her styrofoam coffee cup.


    Ranko rubbed the back of her neck nervously. “Oh, morning, Yui. I’m okay. My head’s still ringing a little, but nothing I can’t handle. And I was going a little crazy up there after all this time, so I wanted to come down and see if I could help with anything.”


    Yui nodded. “I don’t doubt it. Mama’ll kill me if I put you to work, but how about you sit up front and keep me company?”


    Ranko nodded, smiling softly. “I’d like that.” It was one thing to know Yui and the other girls had been willing to help her with money and a place to stay, and teach her how to fasten a bra and run a cash register, but Ranko saw them in an entirely new light after learning they had put themselves at risk of physical harm to protect her.


    She pushed her way through the saloon door, stepping on the footrest of the nearest bar stool and lifting herself up onto the brown vinyl seat. Yui began slicing fruit for garnishes, just as Ranko had done on her first day. Even though it had only been a few days, being in the main bar again felt surreal to Ranko. She had to fight to keep the flashes of memory from the attack, now bolstered by what she’d seen in the video, from overcoming her senses in the present.


    “You holding up okay, Ranko? You look a little… off.” Yui finished washing her hands, drying them on the thighs of her black jeans before setting to work coring pineapples for the bar’s signature Dragonfire cocktail. “Anything you wanna talk about?”


    I better not tell them I watched the tape, Ranko thought. They clearly didn’t want me to know. But maybe if I can get her to admit it… Unauthorized usage: this narrative is on Amazon without the author''s consent. Report any sightings.


    “I’m still trying to remember what happened. Piece things together. But everything after the guy grabbed my necklace is kinda… fuzzy. Mei said I hit my head on the bar?”


    The blonde nodded, throwing another handful of pineapple chunks into the commercial juicer behind the service bar. “Mm-hmm. Had a lump the size of a tennis ball, too. Izzi thought she was gonna have to blow out your hair to hide it for a while.” She glanced over at the redhead perched on the stool across the counter. “You look like you’re doing a bit better now, though. Bruises are almost gone, too.”


    Ranko nodded, using a bit of her hair to obscure her still-sore cheek from view. She smiled up at the slender barkeep, still somewhat dumbstruck with how her respect for her big sister had managed yet another quantum leap when she had thought it was already at its maximum potential. “Honestly, I’m kinda surprised I didn’t get squashed, with everybody tryin’ to get out of here before the cops showed up.” C’mon, Yui, take the bait…


    Yui, however, did not even look up from her work, continuing to remove the spiky outer skin of another pineapple with her knife. “Eh, most everybody was outta here already by the time you went down.” She turned back to the counter behind the bar, dumping two more heaping handfuls of pineapple chunks into the juicer. “Good thing that doctor guy stuck around to help, though.”


    The redhead looked down, sighing a bit. She really doesn’t want me to know what they did. “Yeah, I guess so.”


    The blonde looked up at her sister with a playful smirk on her face, careful not to distract herself too much from her knife work. “Man, that guy was fallin’ all over himself to be useful, too. Could barely talk for the first couple minutes. With the way he was lookin’ at you before shit hit the fan, if I didn’t know better, I’d think Dr. Hottie had a thing for you.”


    “A… thing?” Ranko blinked, shaking her head. “Whaddya…”


    “A thing! Ya know! A crush. An inkling. An infatuation. A sudden urge to get in your freakin’ pants. Fuck, girl, did you fall off the back of a truck or something?!” Yui giggled, rinsing the sticky pineapple juice from her fingers in the steel sink behind the service bar. “I mean, I guess you do have a head injury…”


    A guy was… interested in me? Ranko blinked again in surprise, her cheeks warming. Besides, like, freakazoids like Kuno who just want anybody they can get their hands on? I mean… a doctor? Like, a respectable guy? The heat in her cheeks could have boiled water for tea. I mean, I guess good on me, especially considering I’m barely figuring out how to girl, but… I don’t know how I feel about that.


    Her eyes darted around the room, seeking a distraction from her embarrassment. In the periphery of her vision, she noticed something had changed in the room since last she’d seen it. Off in the corner by the ladies’ room, the little triangular stage was piled high with… stuff. There were dozens of small flower arrangements, small boxes that looked like they might contain candy, a few folded pieces of paper, and even a huge pink teddy bear that was about as tall as Ranko. “What the hell’s all that?” she asked Yui incredulously.


    Yui responded with a warm smile. “That, dear sister, is all for you. The people who were here that night - your adoring fans - came back to check on you, and they started leaving things for you when they saw you hadn’t been back on stage. They’ve been worried about you. We haven’t said anything publicly; we wanted to wait until you were back on your feet, and give you a chance to decide if you even want to keep working here and singing after all of that. But the gifts kept coming.”


    I have fans?! Like, people who actually care about me and the fact that I got hurt? Ranko blushed furiously again. “Well, first things first. You’re not getting rid of me that easy. I’m not the backing-down type.”


    Yui smiled. “I kind of figured you’d say something like that.”


    Ranko slipped off of her bar stool carefully, approaching the stage at an almost timid tiptoe. Yui grinned as she watched her, as it looked quite a lot like Izumi did when she walked up to the Christmas tree.


    The young songstress carefully sat cross-legged on the floor at the foot of the stage, beginning to slowly dig through the pile. She had no idea what to do with all of the flowers, but she pulled a particularly pretty white daisy out of one of the bundles and smelled it. She broke the stem off at about seven centimeters, tucking it into her hair behind her right ear. Something about the totality of the experience - having been protected, having been fawned over, having had a moment of vulnerability and living to tell about it, and having been gifted a massive pile of girly treasures to cheer her in her recovery - gave her an even greater comfort in her feminine skin than she’d previously known.


    “It’s a good look for you.” Yui smiled, biting into one of the oranges she had started cutting for garnishes.


    Ranko began sorting through the pile, making separate stacks for candies, notes, and flowers. This done, she opened the first of the notes, expecting it to be some gross declaration of lust from some random dude, but instead found it to be a respectful note that simply read, Wishing you a fast recovery. We can’t wait to see you on stage again!


    The vast majority of the letters were similar in tone, though there was the occasional get better soon so I can take you on a date that got tossed aside. There was even one such letter from a girl, with a Polaroid photo included. Ranko jokingly showed it to Yui. “What do you think, sis? Is she your type?”


    Yui blushed and shook her head. “Nah. Looks a little young for me, but if I could sing like you, I’d have girls lined up around the block.” She sighed wistfully, imagining such a scenario.


    The glass double doors at the front of the bar swung open, admitting a bright beam of sunlight. Mei entered the room first, with her sister Izumi in tow. “Oh! Hey Ran-chan! How you feeling?”


    The redhead smiled, still sitting on the floor. “Better. Just sitting here going through all this loot.” She couldn’t help but giggle at the thought of it. She turned back to the pile, pulling the huge pink teddy bear out of the back from where it was leaned into the corner. It was exactly the sort of stupid thing she’d always tried to win at the local fairs for Akane, a lifetime ago. Back then, she thought of such things as a kind of goofy gesture, usually to make nice and get Akane to stop pounding the crap out of her for who-knew-what reason, but now, she saw it with a different perspective. Its fur was soft, and it tickled a little as she ran her ever-so-sensitive fingers over it. She imagined it would make a nice pillow. Straightening the red ribbon tied around its neck, she wondered if she should name it. My gods, she thought to herself, her eyes rolling harder than she knew possible. I really have become a freaking girl, haven’t I?!


    Ranko stood carefully with a hand up from Mei, propping the bear up in one of the booths on the left side of the room opposite the bar counter. “I think I want to try and sing tonight.”


    Yui looked over at her from behind the counter, a concerned mask on her face. “Are you sure you’re ready for that? You don’t look especially steady on your feet yet.”


    Ranko bobbed her head gingerly. “Mei can help me pick out a few songs I can sing standing still, or even sitting down. But, all these people cared enough to do all this for me. I want them to know I’m okay, or that I will be soon enough, at least.”


    Yui nodded, resting her hands on her hips in an admonishing stance. “Alright, but two conditions. One, you gotta convince Mama when she gets here. If she says no, it’s no. And number two: absolutely, positively no waiting tables tonight. You can sing, but the rest of the night, your butt is in a chair, and if you touch one glass without drinking from it, I will kick your pretty little ass myself. Have I made myself clear?”


    The young singer blushed, looking down shyly. She didn’t feel that she needed quite as much babying as she was receiving, but a part of her - that was growing larger than she cared to admit - felt special because they felt inclined to do it.


    Izumi grinned excitedly, throwing her arm around Ranko’s shoulder. “I’m going to run back home for a minute, then. If tonight is to be your triumphant return, you need an outfit that makes a statement.”


    Ranko winced, but nodded, a soft smile crossing her lips. She dreaded to even wonder what Izumi would dress her in for her performance, but she almost didn’t care as long as she got to sing. She felt ridiculous admitting it, but she ached to feel the cold aluminum of a microphone in her hand again.


    As Izumi made for the door, Mei grabbed Ranko by the wrist, hooking her fingers into her younger sister’s dragon bracelet and beginning to pull her gently toward the karaoke machine to pick songs.


    The pair stopped when Yui snapped her fingers loudly. The sound echoed through the otherwise-quiet bar room, and both young women turned their attention back to the Phoenix’s mistress of mixology. “Sorry, sis. Condition number three. Get your little butt upstairs and get some more rest now, while you can. We’ll get everything ready for tonight. Mei knows what she’s looking for. I’ll talk to Mama for you when she gets in. But for now, you, shoo.”


    “Yes, mother,” Ranko replied in a mocking tone punctuated with a giggle, and she gingerly made toward the saloon door and her apartment beyond.