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Rakim had met Dana after he'd already gone out with Ogun, Soma, and Scylla.

He'd still been pre-op at the time. Fortunately, they hadn't had any hang-ups about it. They were an... equal opportunity employer, as far as such matters were concerned. Dana wasn't really the kind of person who cared a lot about what other people looked like in general. To be fair, the way they usually lived their life didn't make it all that important in a lot of ways. They weren't seeing a lot of people, metaphorically, and they didn't see anyone, literally. The circumstances of Dana's life had made sure of that. The bat had first met them on the Internet. That was the only place where they could really afford to get to know people before making arrangements to have them over safely. No one had ever seen Dana and lived to tell the tale.

Of course that hadn't been their fault, but it was something they had to guard against.

Rakim got to know them over several protracted chats over a couple of weeks before suggesting to meet them in person. For most people they knew, even and especially people who they cared about, Dana often refused to meet in person because of how risky it could be. Not only for obvious reasons, but it was also often risky to have people over in complete darkness, without having visitors know where anything was ahead of time. For the bat, however, they had made one of their rare few exceptions. Meeting them for the first time, Rakim couldn't help being reminded of that scene in Frankenstein in which the monster is talking to the non-sighted man - but didn't want to think of Dana, Soma or Ogun as 'monsters.'

Not in the traditional sense of the word, in any case.

Before they would have people over, they had to make sure that everything would be in safe, easy locations to remember. They lived in darkness often enough that, even though their eyes worked well enough when they would have the lights on all by themselves in their home, they had become more used to operating in darkness than the vast majority of sighted people would ever be able to. It would have been almost easier for a non-sighted person to have visited Dana than for a sighted person to do so, since at least, it would have put them on equal footing, and the visitor would already have developed ways of interacting with people without seeing them. Sighted visitors had much less practice, so it took more getting used to for them.

They had tried to go out with a non-sighted person a while back, Rakim had learned, but while the logistics had been easier to work out, they had ended up breaking up with her because of irreconcilable ideological differences that had eventually reared their heads. It wasn't that they had to be on the exact same wavelength as the people they'd date on every single level or anything like that. Dana had had no problem with learning that the bat had been Muslim, for one thing. They were an agnostic, themselves, and very comfortable with that fact, not looking for certainties of any kind, since they were comfortable with the idea of a God that chooses not to ever show their face to the world once and for all. It had felt affirming to them.

Dana had never been with a bat before. Rakim's echolocation had made it uniquely easier for the two of them to have been able to play safely when they had had him over for it. They would let him touch their face to 'see' how they looked but, even without touching anything around him, he would usually always be able to tell where everything was around him. His hearing was finely tuned enough that he had been able to find out about their hair without having had them tell him. Dana telecommuted from home for their technically advanced computer job. They didn't go out because they couldn't, but they didn't let it stop them from being an intellectual, artist and activist from the confines of their lair as much as anyone else.

Rakim had told them about Irshad, Ogun, Soma, Scylla, about everyone in his life who'd been important to him, basically. He had already had two boyfriends as it was who he was already determined to be able to be as devoted to as he could, so he hadn't been looking for a third person to get serious with, but Dana and he played, and the two of them became friends. When the two of them would play, they were very skilled at coming up with elaborate scenarios that would make the most of the darkness around them rather than having it be an obstacle to things between them, and they knew how to use a lot of the objects that they had acquired over the years in inventive, creative ways that made the bat keep coming back for more.

He had never asked what their 'real' gender had been. Dana didn't want people to know. They had been remarkably good at interfacing with people without those people ever finding out. They had only been interested in being with people to who it didn't matter. Rakim had learned that many of Dana's other friends had also been regulars at the Bolgia, perhaps unsurprisingly, when he stopped and thought about it. Once they had seemed to have been in a weird emotional place when the bat had gone to see them. They hadn't said anything about it specifically but, even though he couldn't see them, the bat could still always tell when they had had something on their mind. He had asked, but Dana had had a hard time talking about it.

Instead, they had asked him if they could 'show' him something, metaphorically speaking, in any case. He had agreed. He had heard them opening a box under their bed, that unmistakable clicking sound, and take out an object that he'd initially mistaken for something else. It had been a flute. Without a word, Dana had brought it to their lips, and had begun to play. It had started out as a soft, gentle, melodic sound, a snake charming song that sounded as though they should have been able to tame any wild beast with it, slowly growing in complexity and intensity to a fevered apotheosis. They had learned to play a very long time ago, but they had not played for anyone in a really long time and had missed it, they had explained to him.

He couldn't help noticing the sound of Dana's hair responding to the music as they had played. In the privacy of his mind, Rakim wondered how it must have felt to have been in their situation, to have heard this sound the way they had as they had played, and to have had their body respond to it in such an intimate, primal way as that. In time, the bat got his own flute, and brought it to them to ask them to teach him how to play. At first Dana had hesitated, not wanting to make him feel as though he had to learn how to do such things just to please them, but the bat had persisted, explaining that he didn't feel obligated to do so but that his interest in learning how to play had come from a place of sincerity. They had eventually accepted to.

In time, the two of them had played together in the darkness. It had been different from when the two of them had played before, but it had seemed to have made Dana so happy. The two of them grew weirdly close in spite of only remaining friends with benefits after that. One day, Rakim had brought his flute to Soma's grove, and had played for him as a gift. The snake man's joy had been so palpable at listening to his boyfriend play for him that the bat had had to tell Dana all about it next time he had seen them. He could always tell when they smiled from the way that their voice would sound different when they would speak to him with a smile on their face. When Rakim transitioned and became a cyborg, they proved very supportive to him.

Dana had never cared much about what his body looked like. They wanted him happy.

One day, when they were in the middle of a date at their place, the bat thought that he heard someone coming near their door. Before he could bring it up to his host, it became unnecessary to do so, since the sound of someone picking the door's lock demonstrated it to them all to clearly. This turned out to be just the sort of situation for which the safety measure that Dana insisted on every time, that Rakim wear a blindfold while in their place at all times, even in spite of the cover of darkness, proved essential to the bat's survival. If he had not been wearing them when the door was forced open, there would have been a risk that he would have been a goner. But the fact that he couldn't see the home invader was a serious problem.

"Who goes there?" They spoke loud and clear, demanding an answer. It was still a bit too dark for them to have been able to tell, but they had a very bad feeling about it. The bat, his blindfold firmly around his eyes, could still hear the invader closing the door behind them after having entered, to make it so that no one outside could see or hear any of what was about to happen inside of Dana's home until one of the other two could have opened it again. They had no intention of allowing that to happen. The invader made a beeline for his host and Rakim, hearing them doing so, interposed himself between the two of them hurriedly. "Who are you and what do you want?" he asked bluntly.

He heard the invader swing some sort of long object around them at top speed. Some sort of staff weapon with something on the end of it, his echolocation told him. Remembering the blindfighting that his mother had taught him back when she'd still been alive, he brought his arms forward toward the invader's weapon, using his forearms to redirect it forcefully away from its target. Borrowing the momentum from his parrying, he continued his spin into a kicking strike that forced the invader to step back away from Dana's location. Whoever this person was, they meant serious business, the bat could tell. They weren't messing around. It seemed as though they meant to kill him, or to kill his host, or possibly to kill both of them.

He had no intention of allowing that to happen. His host had been far too polite to him over the passage of time for him to have been willing to allow any harm to come to them for any reason by that point, and he wasn't about to allow Ogun to have made such a sacrifice as the chimera had made to save him to forego having a sense of self-preservation about it. Something else flashed into his mind when the invader deflected his follow-up attack with their weapon to force him to block another strike which they redirected their own parrying's momentum into their own follow-up attack more directly: this was someone who was intimately acquainted with how to fight blind, possibly even more than he was.

Rakim deployed his echolocation all over the room, combining it with everything he remembered about where all of the objects in Dana's home were situated. Was there perhaps any way in which he could use his knowledge of the way in which things were set up to his advantage? But he didn't have enough time to come up with a plan before being forced back into dodging a low strike aimed toward his legs this time. The bat wanted to ask his host what could have been going on but there was no time to do that either, and he knew enough to know what he had to do - he just wasn't sure of how best to do it by that point. He extruded the razor-sharp claws that he now could to deflect the staff weapon more effectively.

This person wasn't making things easy on him. When he was locked into a clanging standstill with his metal claws against whatever their staff weapon was made of - there was no way that could have been wood, he determined - the invader abruptly ripped the blindfold off his face, as though they had very specific plans that would require him being able to see in mind. Rakim closed his eyes in a panic, moving aside with a chain extended between his hands as he span to parry a descending arc before finally reaching under their defenses with his elbow. His metal claw became embedded in the wall when they dodged his following thrust into it.

As they tried to take him off guard while he pulled it out of the wall, he emitted a high-pitched bat screech into their ears, forcing them to cover them and to inadvertently drop their staff weapon. Before Rakim could take advantage of it, he could tell through his eyelids and from the sound that they had just turned the light switch on, illuminating the whole room. Since it was the only thing he could do, the cyborg bat turned off his photoreceptors altogether at that point. Dana could see him - his eyes were now wide open, but they were blank as though the Void itself was seeping out through them. At first Rakim didn't understand how it was possible for the invader to have survived having turned the light on themselves.

It seemed obvious to him when he thought about it in retrospect, but the mind doesn't always respond as well as it should in situations of great mental distress, even when you're a cyborg. Disoriented by the unexpected maneuver, the bat's legs were swept back, making him fall to the ground when the invader picked their staff weapon up out from under him to hold it up behind their head, ready to bring it down on him with his defenses shoved too far aside for him to have been able to bring them to bear against the finishing arc that they had in mind for him. Closing his eyelids vainly over his 'off' photoreceptors as a reflex to brace himself against pain, he electrified his body, determined to at least take down the invader with him in death.

Before the invader was able to complete their finishing move, Dana broke their broom over their back and they fell to the ground, unconscious. "Who... was that?" They could read his puzzled expression even with his disconcertingly blank stare now. "Jealous ex, that anglerfish girl I told you about that time, as a matter of fact." Both of them panted as they struggled to catch their breath after what had happened. "If we should ever part paths, Rakim, not that I'm planning to, but... You'd behave with more grace than this, I should hope?" The bat nodded. "Yeah, you can pretty much take that for granted coming from me. Though I'm glad to hear you wouldn't be planning to either, naturally," he smiled. "Thanks for saving my life," he added.

The end of her staff weapon had been shaped like a hammer. Was it made of marble?

"Now I need to buy a new broom," Dana stuck their tongue out. He heard them blink. "So you can just... turn these off like that now?" He nodded again. "Yeah! I mean, I can hear you, but I can't see shit." He understood now that it was because the anglerfish had been non-sighted that she'd been able to survive turning on the light to threaten the bat with instant petrification. "Wow, you... you're beautiful, Rakim..." He blushed, and gasped. "Oh, stop," the bat waved off cutely. "I've always been able to tell you were." He heard their neck move in a way in which he could tell that they were nodding. "I... Does it hurt when they're like this?" It did look a little creepy. "No, not at all," he shook his head. "So you could do this every time?"

He nodded. "I could. Would that make things easier for you? Would you like that?" They nodded. "Yeah! I think I'd like that." Dana felt as though a whole new world had just been opened up to them. Rakim touched their face, and felt them smile.