Rakim had sort of told himself ahead of time that his date probably wasn’t going to work out to guard against disappointment. He discovered that he didn’t fully have a plan for if his date actually did work out, that he wasn’t sure if he was even prepared for that. If things went further, what would it really mean for him?
“So, what does the devil do for a living, Ogun?” He strove to hide his nervousness as well as he could. The chimera had been a good host so far, hadn’t shown him any real red flags quite yet. One step at a time, he tried to tell himself. “Right now, I’m working as a DJ at a club downtown now and then,” his lion head answered, “but what I really want to do is to work with prosthetics someday.”
“Oh, so that’s why you have all this stuff lying around!” All of a sudden, all of the scraps of electronics and mechanical devices scattered across the apartment fell into place. “How did you manage to get your hands on this much of it anyway?” Part-time work as a local DJ didn’t sound like a wealthy occupation, and the apartment wasn’t exactly high-rise.
Ogun shrugged. “Junkyards, mostly,” his dragon head answered. “I mean, I guess it’s not very glamorous for me to admit digging through scrap heaps to scavenge for bits and pieces of this and that, when it all comes down to it,” his ram head admitted. “Still, you’d be amazed at what perfectly good tech people will just throw right out the moment it malfunctions, even only a little,” his snake head explained. “It comes with the territory of living in a wasteful capitalist society, I guess” he shook his lion head dejectedly. “Often it doesn’t even take all that much work to fix. Why throw something out when you can just repair it, you know?”
“That does make a lot of sense,” Rakim nodded. “I know I might never be able to make it into anything official like that,” his dragon head regretted, “I mean, even getting in seems to cost money I just don’t have. But hey,” his ram head went on, “a man can dream, can’t he?” There seemed to be no harm in that. “At least it’s giving me something to do right now, for what it’s worth,” his snake head finished. It was even how Ogun had met the octopus he’d bought the hookah plant matter from – she also scavenged junkyards. “I guess that’s true!” Rakim conceded.
“People have been trying to build things that are almost like body parts but not quite without really being able to for a pretty long time, when you stop to think about it. Wings!” Ogun’s lion head smiled. “People have been trying to build wings just like yours for such a long time, for example.” The bat turned over what he’d said in his head a few times. “You’re right, I think that goes all the way back to... gosh, it goes all the way back to Antiquity, doesn’t it?”
He could tell that Ogun was trying not to stare at his wings. Rakim tried to look like he hadn’t noticed. It was normal that his attention would be drawn to them, given what they were talking about, wasn’t it? “People wanted to fly. Can you blame ‘em?” This brought up complicated emotions for the bat. “Heh, I guess I can’t.” He knew he’d done nothing to earn his wings. He’d just been born with them. Then again, he’d been born targeted by multiple intersecting oppressions, and he hadn’t done anything to deserve that, either.
“Man, it must be so wonderful to be able to fly!” His snake head sounded so excited, oblivious to the emotions that he was stirring up in his guest. Yet, Rakim couldn’t help but notice, there wasn’t a trace of the resentment that he’d come to expect from non-fliers when they’d talk to him about things like this. Ogun just sounded happy for the bat that he’d have been able to. He clearly would’ve liked to have been able to fly as well, but Rakim didn’t get the sense that Ogun would have just ripped his wings off his back to put them on his own if he’d been able to. It was somewhat refreshing, for what it was.
“... It really is. I’ve often wished I could share it with people.”
The lion head chuckled, pausing the game to light up and pass the hookah to Rakim. “Ah, the best things in life are always better shared, aren’t they?” The bat nodded heartily. “Still, there’s been so much work put into it for so long... Sometimes I wonder if we’d have found everything else we found along the way while looking for it if we’d known how to fly to begin with.” His dragon head frowned, seeming to have found something wrong with what he’d just said. “Actually, your people have been coming up with automatons since the early days, haven’t you?”
Rakim had just been about to point this out, but he’d been glad to have been beaten to the punch. “We did! I guess you could make the argument that no one knows how to find artificial means of doing something like someone who’s done the real thing themselves,” the bat began, “if you wanted to be rude about it,” he added, tongue firmly in cheek, “although that’s not going to be true in every case either. I can fly, but I couldn’t build any of this,” he gestured at the room.
“Oh, let me show you something!” Putting down the hookah again, Ogun got up to navigate his cluttered apartment with apparent ease, seemingly as used to where everything was as though it were the back of his own hand, all messiness aside. “You’ll like it I think. Well I hope! It’s okay if you don’t,” his snake head smiled. “Show me!” Rakim found his enthusiasm communicative.
The chimera started digging through a few of the scraps that he had lying around. “Ah, here it is!” He pulled something out to bring up in front of his guest’s eyes. The bat gasped, his heart fluttering as he thought about the amount of precision work that had to have gone into what he was seeing. “Oh, wow!”
It was a butterfly, just like the one he had seen when he’d run into that forest that time.
“You like it?” On some level, the look of wonder on Rakim’s face was the entire reason for which Ogun really did any of what he did. What was the point of new technology if not to resurrect our ailing modern sense of wonder? “I love it!” You could see every spring, every gear, every nut and bolt that had to have been put together just right, ever so carefully, knowing that the slightest excess of force would have been sufficient to break it.
He reached for it with his finger tentatively, almost afraid to touch it out of fear of damaging such a fragile contraption. “It must’ve taken you so much time to put this together,” he observed. “A bit,” his ram head admitted, “patience is really important to any of this in general of course, but yeah, it took a bit. I like to think I’ve gotten better since then, but it was the first thing I made that made me think I could make things.”
“So it’s when you became a new person, in a sense,” the bat smiled, “a person who makes things, just like a caterpillar becomes something that can fly.” Ogun’s lion head chuckled. “I hadn’t thought about it like that, but yeah, definitely.” This date was turning out to be full of surprises, and it wasn’t over yet. “I like it. It’s like the caterpillar went through a whole other phase of transformation after the organic butterfly, like it was just supposed to, you know?”
Ogun liked the way Rakim’s mind seemed to work. “Just think about what must go on in a cocoon when no one can open it without wrecking it,” the bat went on, “it’s almost like alchemy, isn’t it?” Alchemy had always been about personal transformation. “Your people came up with that too, didn’t they?” It hadn’t occurred to Rakim when he’d brought it up just then, but he had to acquiesce to that as well.
“It must be so disorienting, don’t you think?” The bat raised an eyebrow, encouraging the chimera to elaborate. “Becoming something completely new and different like that. We don’t really go through anything quite like that, you know? It must be such a big shift to adjust to for everything... I’m sorry, I don’t mean to empathize with creatures that are basically bugs if it’s weird or anything,” his snake head apologized.
“No, I get what you mean,” Rakim reassured him wistfully, “it must be awesome, though, on some level. I wish they could describe it to us.” It had hit very close to home, for reasons he couldn’t explain to his host quite yet. “Sometimes it’s the world I wish I could transform,” his lion head half-jested, “sometimes it’s myself,” his dragon head rasped, bittersweet. As used as he was to his own form in terms of using it himself as such, he would never get truly used to being seen as a monster.
The two of them gamed on into the night.
“I love playing old games, don’t you?” Ogun was striving to keep the conversation on cheerful topics, as much as he was able to. “It’s just like listening to old music, I mean, it sort of brings back the experiences that came along with them at the time, you know?” The bat nodded. “You’re right, it does.” They were playing Super Metroid. “You played this when you were a kid too, didn’t you?” They were getting close to the end. “Yep, I did,” Rakim nodded.
They were coming up to the part with the hatchling.
“Oh man, this part gets me in the feels every time,” the bat admitted. “I love a man who can express emotions like that,” his dragon head smiled. The hatchling moved away from Samus, whimpering its unearthly whimper as it realized what it’d done. It ran away with its guilt as the heroine bravely strode onward into Tourian. Rakim thought of all the trouble he’d gotten his mother into over the course of his life, of every fire that she had ever willingly walked into for the sake of others.
“This is so cool, actually,” his ram head continued as Samus fought Mother Brain, “when you really stop and think about it. I mean, there she was, on a mission to exterminate every Metroid in existence, you know?” Samus was in dire straits! “Like they were all the same, and their very existence was a threat.” At the last second, the hatchling barged into the room, throwing itself on Mother Brain to save the life of the woman who it had imprinted on after it had been born. “But just because she saved it, helped it be born, and took care of it, it...” Ogun turned a head toward Rakim just as Mother Brain was about to kill the hatchling, and paused.
Rakim looked like he was about to cry.
“Hey...” He put his arm around the bat’s shoulders, careful not to hurt his wings as he did. “Are you okay? We can stop playing if you want, you know.” Ogun tried to give Rakim a weak smile, one that he hoped would convey understanding rather than dismissiveness. “No, don’t worry about it. I mean, thank you! Thanks for saying so. I’ll be okay.” He was feeling so self-conscious about this. It seemed stupid for him to get so emotional over something so small.
“Oh SHIT are you okay?!” Ogun panicked. “I told you, I’m fine!” Rakim said, standing up, more defensively than he’d meant to. “Your crotch!” A chill went down his spine. He’d thought Ogun had still been asking whether or not he’d been okay about the game, but it turned out that hadn’t been it this time. “You’re... There’s...!” It was the bat’s worst nemesis of all.
It was the blood.
“FUCK!” Ogun finally understood what was going on, just a little bit too late. He was disappointed with himself for his reaction, but he’d really had no idea, and couldn’t go back to have a different one then. “Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck FUCK!” Rakim was having a complete panic attack, determined that his dating days were over for good, that he never wanted to risk having to go through something like this ever again. Ogun struggled to figure out how to react as his own heart raced increasingly fast.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to overreact!” He’d just been worried that the bleeding had been caused by a nasty wound. In a sense, it had. “I’m, I’m sorry,” the bat countered through his hyperventilation, “I didn’t mean to lie, I’m not a liar, I, I...” He found he could no longer speak as his meager attempts to apologize dissolved into uncontrollable sobs wracking his accursed body.
“Of course not.” Rakim pushed away Ogun’s attempts to get close to him at first, blinded by his breakdown. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry...!” Ogun persisted, gentle, yet unyielding. “You didn’t, you didn’t lie to me, Rakim.” The bat finally let Ogun hold him in his arms, giving up his resistance as the chimera wrapped his arms around him. “You didn’t do anything wrong.” Time seemed to stop.
Ogun held Rakim close to himself as Rakim sobbed and bled in his home on their date.
It was true that, if someone had asked Ogun whether or not he felt ready for something like this beforehand, he may have not felt up to it. He may have been worried that he would do something wrong, that he would make his date’s situation worse through his clumsiness somehow, and left the situation to someone better prepared for it than he was. But he’d already become attached to Rakim by then. He was glad to have met him. He wouldn’t back down.
“Oh gosh,” his ram head apologized as he tentatively removed his arms from around Rakim while trying to convey that it didn’t imply that he was withdrawing his support as well, “where are my manners, let me get you something for that.” Being cis, single and gay while living on his own meant that Ogun didn’t exactly have tampons lying around the house in case someone happened to need one, but he ran nervously to grab paper towels, hand towels, bath towels, toilet paper, basically whatever he found first that seemed like it might help, and just brought it all as fast as he could.
“Uh, I can let you clean up in private, if you want.” They hadn’t seen each other naked yet, and Ogun assumed that Rakim would have wanted his date’s first impression of his genitals to have taken place under better circumstances. “I’ll go get you another pair of pants, okay?” He dashed off. The bat stumbled to the washroom, cursing himself for not having remembered his cycles better. He hated having to think about them so much that he often reflexively pushed them out of his mind, as if his mind recoiled from such a rebarbative task as remembering them when they shouldn’t have been happening to him in the first place.
“Here,” his host’s ram head told him through the partially opened washroom door, “I hope these will fit you.” Ogun was taller and heavier than Rakim, and the chimera’s pants looked baggy on the bat, but they were better suited to going out in public than a pair of pants with a bloodstained crotch. “Don’t worry, I’m going to make sure to have what you need for that around the house from now on.” Rakim frowned. “You mean you still want me to come back?” Ogun blinked. “Well of course! I mean, do you still want to?” Rakim’s tears dried up. “Well yeah! I mean, why wouldn’t I?”
Ogun was relieved. “Next time, I’ll take you over to the club I DJ at if you want. We’ll have fun!” This sounded like an encouraging prospect. “Yes, I think I might like that.” Ogun looked at the time. “It’s getting to be late morning. Do you want to stay over today?” Ogun thought that Rakim may have needed time to recover emotionally from what had just happened. “Can’t. Gotta head back.” Rakim was already worried that his mother Irshad would have been worrying about him by then. He usually went to bed around 8:30 am, and got up around 3:30 pm. “Do you want me to walk you home?” The bat smiled an ironic smile at him.
“It might be a long trip. You see, Ogun... I flew to get here.”
On their second date, Ogun took Rakim to the Bolgia to dance with him, just as he’d promised. Rakim finally understood the ecstatic trances that his mother had described having undergone during whirling while training with her Sufi master. As modern arrangements of tracks from their favorite video games permeated their movements while light and darkness fought for control of the dance floor as they always did, their arms flowed around each other’s bodies like tendrils from another world, and they danced their hearts out to the unapologetic glory of being too many things at once...
