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This whole damn apartment is just way too silent. Karkat needs sounds, he needs something to listen to. And that something isn't the smooth rolling tone of Gamzee's voice, no, much as he likes talking to him when either of them is currently making sense, much as he needs it, he needs something else right now. Sound he can dig his nails into, beautiful noise he can swallow like broken glass and spit back up and let it become beautiful. The sound of struck keys glittering in the air like perfect fucking diamonds, so he feels like he's offering something imperfect in return for it, and that only makes him want to speak out harder.
John fucking Egbert's voice.
He attacks his keyboard before he even knows what's gotten into him, and then he does know. There is so much frust in him, burning like acid in his stomach, all amplified by all these people he keeps worrying about against all sanity because clearly they can't take care of themselves. He curses and waits for a reply and when it comes it's almost curt but still laced with that cheer that makes his hair stand right on end and his teeth bare in preparation for blood and fight.
But humans don't fight like that, not with extended claws and fangs ripping apart the skin almost tenderly, they don't fight someone like they want to kill them and keep them forever all at once. And John doesn't fight with every line of his body, they don't fight each other with arms and hands and fingers, leaving bruises, not nearly often enogh. But they fight with their fingers nonetheless in a way and leave their bruises somewhere different than skin, somewhere it counts just as much.
Karkat lays the cello down into its felt coffin and slings the strap over his back, and the whole contraption is taller than him and nearly makes him bend underneath it. But he manages, and the muscles he has developed through rigorous, stupidly stubborn training, hold up to the weight and he carries it like he deserves to carry it.
John doesn't live all that far away. Karkat walks under the weight and don't even mind, he'll be out of breath when he arrives there and he doesn't care because John will see his face and give him hell about it and he can give him hell right back. Hell is easy to give if he can cradle it in the palm of his hand and let it flow out of him by the strength of his arms and it fills the air and he gets madder and madder by the way that John touches the keys, cut-glass sounds. He wants to make him so mad that he beats them, that he smashes his hands down on that goddamned piano and makes a sound that's beautifully angry. He wants to.
Sometimes, John gets him to play softer pieces, all wavering curling notes that linger in the air. Karkat hates him for it. It's perfect.
He arrives lugging the cello like a sack of rocks, like something that he hates, like it's a nuisance. Like it's a weapon that he can break over John's head. He wants to play, but then he doesn't, his fingers still clumsy and stiff and the joints just subtly different to human ones enough that he has to bend his hands oddly when he plays, and all the notes come out weird.
John opens the door wide and is almost grinning, it's so flagrantly inappropriate and Karkat suspects that he knows it, plays it up, plays up all their differences and lets them turn into hard edges deliberately, for skin to catch on.
“That looks heavy!” he says, and makes that incomprehensible human motion that's meant to usher him in, and Karkat shows teeth, a fake smile more than a snarl.
“No, that can't be,” he says with just the right amount of acid, “it's a bouquet of beautiful hateflowers that I've personally picked to shove down your obvious comment dispensal unit, colloquially known as throat. It's a damn cello, of course it's heavy.”
And it doesn't even rib John on. He doesn't start out with a baseline of angry, there's no constant pressure in him that keeps on drawing out noise, at least he doesn't act like it. But he can get fizzing mad when he's had enough of letting things drop off his good-nature body armour. He's terrible, just the way it should be.
Karkat almost expects him to bring out milk and cookies. He's just that kind of person. But all he sets out are two glasses of lemonade, and then he hovers around his piano, like he's drawn to it and can't wait to set his hands down and play the haunting refrain of the day.
“You can start or I can if you don't want to. Be my guest! That's funny, because you're really my guest,” he says, almost enough to trip him up, and it's such an easy ploy to get Karkat to go first, but he circumvents that and says, “If you feel like it then sure, go first,”
And because John knows him, to do him a favour, to piss him off eternally, he does. They have an understanding in that way, even if Karkat started out eternally confused. Like an improvisation. He's not sure if it's meant to work, so many ill-fitting pieces, but it does, in a way that makes that angry spark in him flare and then die to a hot glow.
John sits down, and damn that he has to turn his back for it, because now all that's left to stare at is the lines of his back, almost straight with just the slightest slouch.
He's grown, gradually, and gradually he's become way to tall, which is to say topping Karkat by about two inches. That reminds him how mad he is that he's still so stunted, and that his growth spurt is late in arriving – everything is, he's a regular little late bloomer, no thanks to his blood – and that he still looks like a box on legs.
John rustles the pages of some notes, lays them flat, and puts his fingers down on the keys. He puts a dramatic pause right there, like he's waiting for a sunrise or a drumroll, and gets a “Whenever you're ready,” from Karkat's direction on the couch. It's flat and childish and he hardly cares.
The music starts. Air and wind, he takes his aspect and runs away with it and spins it into something that drops like a chill down Karkat's spine.
John sits there and lets his hands fly over the keys, fast, a piece that has far too many tricks in it, things that sound good and make him look advanced. The notes climb up until they're more a vibration in the air than sound itself, until they sound like dry icy air high above something, high above everything, and then trickle down in a row of flourishes, sweet and skittering, reverberating.
It's so beautiful it makes Karkat sick.
He forgets to breathe. He wants to play, right now, somewhere he's aware of that – drown out the glassy piano with music that speaks out blood. But he's preoccupied with listening, as well, getting his breath stolen ot of his lungs by the music and staring and shivering when the ice water chill goes back up his spine again. How can an amateur play this good, how is it that he forgets to turn the pages and plays out of his mind, out of memory?
It's so beautiful he fucking hates it.
He lets out an angry little huff of air, and John shifts in his seat, and abandons the notes. His hands come down heavy on the keys, the noise sudden and startling, deep and so loud that he feels his skin prickle. Now he's beating the keys, like he hates the hell out of his instrument and has to hit it to make it speak and that's ridiculous but it's true, and when the sound stole his breath before those few notes make it come back quicker and then John all but slams his hands down a last time and pulls back, turns around, easily.
“You improvised,” Karkat says like an accusation, and John grins with way too many teeth. He gets so giddy from this, it's disgusting to watch.
“Still up to your game, or did that discourage you?”
“Shut up,” Karkat says quicker and angrier than he intended to, madder because he's not sure how much it is a joke and how much of it's meaned as a genuine question, “shut the fuck up and listen.”
He has a stand for his notes, and he arranges them carefully. He feels dependent on them sometimes, still recalling that moment when meaningless squiggles turned into something that he could put into sound. Into words, even. The cello speaks, it speaks blunt and heavy low lines, like thrown punches to the gut in a good way.
He doesn't wait, he doesn't even ask if it's okay to put a hole in the carpet – there are a lot of holes in the carpet already – he just straightens his back until it hurts and bows his arms and fits his alien fingers around the human instrument and starts to play.
He faces John, and he's glad about it and resents it. Because he feels open and exposed, but that makes him play all the harder, and first he trips over the notes and fumbles and the anger makes him screw up more, but then it makes him surer. Forget the notes, the music is right there in his head and it's what he's thinking, verbatim without words. The cello is an instrument full of anger, like a voice from out of its hollow body, and he lets it speak. The bow shreds over the strings, giving each low note a biting rough edge that cuts like it's supposed to, a row of punches to the wall leaving bloody knuckles, thrown words and thrown glares and resentment that he revels in at that moment.
He enjoys the sting of the bile, and John's grin that has changed to puzzlement but he can tell that he's listening, hard. Karkat enjoys the pain in his fingertips and in his back and moves the bow like he's dragging it across his own spine, drawing out a storm, boiling blood, from the air. He forgets that his hands hurt, he forgets everything but to move them and yell in spite of being quiet, his teeth bit tight together, and stares down into John's eyes right to that sharp, glassy core that no one thinks is there. It's like looking at each other naked, it's like what that would be like, so uncovering that it makes him giddy-sick. It's wonderfully, horribly intimate.
The notes quaver in the air, drawing themselves out long and slow, segue into a succession of dull blows. Karkat plays until his arms ache, until that ache turns into something like icy dullness, and he doesn't stop until John stands up and touches his arm and doesn't break the spell because it hangs in the air still, like a world full of sound between them. Karkat's arms hurt and he's quiet, almost trembling, in something like a trance. Fuck this beautiful music for opening him right up, bless it for exposing black bile underneath.
“You improvised,” John offers, and only Karkat could really see that edge in his smile, and there's an understanding, and a lot more right with the world.