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It takes Dave a couple months of asking (or nagging depending on who you ask) to convince Karkat to join a music session with him. The troll doesn’t understand why he’s so insistent on it, and he's pretty suspicious that Dave is just setting him up for failure. Dave denies it - he just wants to jam out with his bro, what's wrong with that? When Karkat finally caves in, he makes the stipulation that there’ll be no rapping. It’s agonizing for Dave to concede.
By the next day, Dave’s finishing setting everything up in the common area, just a simple deck connected to a husktop. He thinks it used to be Sollux's? Whatever. He has his headphones on, testing to make sure everything’s working properly. There’s a stack of records in a disorganized heap next to him. He’s already got records on, planning on starting off simple. Both songs have the same tempo, which means Karkat won’t have to struggle with beatmatching, at least this time. He’s pretty sure they’ll only really use one side for the most part but it’s better to be prepared.
Karkat arrives a few minutes later. Dave’s got his back to the entrance but it’s hard not to notice when the dude’s around. He’s got this way of walking that’s the most beautifully graceless thing Dave’s ever witnessed. Kind of this short-strided hunched over clomping, loud enough to hear over music. He makes his way over and carefully sits on the edge of the bench before scooting himself into place. ‘Is that it?’ he asks, prodding at the turntable. ’I thought there’d be more.’
‘I mean there could be more. I could set up all my sweet gear, but this is enough for the first lesson. It’s how I started at least.’ He idly spins the record on the platter closest to him.
‘You learned everything from your guardian, right?’
Dave’s expression dips into something unreadable. ‘Yeah.’ He sits up a bit straighter. ‘Anyway. Sit your ass down because school is in session, take out your notes ‘cause it’s time for your lesson, I’m guessin’ I’m the best in-' He cuts himself off when he notices Karkat rapidly boiling into phase one of tantrum mode.
'Strider what part of ‘no rapping’ did you not understand, you ignoble douche? Was it the "no" or the "rapping" or was it both?? You've made it clear that you’re incapable of grasping basic ground rules. Also, you're objectively a terrible rapper.'
‘Whoa now.’ Dave’s caught Karkat tapping his foot out the corner of his eye while he’s dropped rhymes before, so it’s hard to take any real offense to that one. ‘Them’s fightin’ words.’ Karkat gives him a Look before going back to the tables.
He’s mimicking Dave and lightly turning the opposite record, trying to get a feel for the grooves in the vinyl. ‘Do you know where you’re going with this? So far I haven’t been schoolfed on anything but how much you suck at honoring your agreements.’
'Look,’ Dave says. ‘I’ve got this bro. I'm keeping it all organized. It’s going to be a proper lesson, alright? I even made a syllabus for you, as official as it gets.' He flips open Rose’s book and hands it over to him. It’s redundant to keep calling it Rose’s considering they claimed it within the first couple weeks on the meteor. At this point they still do mostly because Dave thinks it’s funny.
Karkat squints at the page it’s opened to. 'It’s a bunch of drawings of human penises.'
Dave turns the book around to look at it. 'Oh shit, my bad. Wrong page.’ He finds the right page and passes it back to Karkat. ‘Here.’
Karkat takes a deep breath, and hisses it out between his teeth. 'This is just another page of dicks, Dave,' he grinds out, throwing his hands up. 'I expected this, I knew you were just going to screw with me the whole time!'
'Ahaha, basically.’ Karkat is so easy to rile up. ‘No but seriously I have it all worked out. You just gotta follow along and enjoy the ride, we’re doing this Strider style.' Dave finally takes off his headphones and sets them off to the side. He leans over the table to grab the earbuds he set there and plugs them in, ignoring Karkat’s grumbling. It’s something about how much easier it’d be if he just kept things in his sylladex like a reasonable person. There’s nothing ‘reasonable’ about Karkat’s inventory, he practically picks up anything he passes by. Dave’s pretty sure the guy has at least three chairs in there.
Dave pops one earbud in and offers the other to Karkat, who hesitates before taking it. ‘Why didn’t you bring another pair if you knew we were doing this?’
He shrugs. ‘I have another. I’d need to use a splitter and I don’t want to bother with it. Nothin’ wrong with sharing anyway.’ He bumps the touchpad on the husktop to wake it up and double checks that everything’s set up properly. Karkat cranes over his shoulder to watch. The program’s more basic than what Dave’s used to, but that’s to make it easier on Karkat.
‘That looks pretty simple.’
Dave scoffs. ‘Just wait until we get started. Speaking of which, how much do you know about turntables?'
Karkat squints at it. ‘There’s records, a needle, and an assload of buttons and knobs. Does it work anything like a record player?’
‘Yeah. Yeah, you’ve basically got this down already.’
Karkat points. ‘These are for pitch and volume, right?’ At Dave’s nod, he points at the lever-looking thing at the bottom. ‘What about this thing.’
‘That’s the crossfader. We’re gonna be getting pretty intimate with it today since it's used in most of what we'll be doing.' He slides it back and forth a few times. ‘You’ll figure it out.’
Karkat looks pretty intensely focused now. There aren’t a lot of things Karkat isn’t intense about, and apparently it’s no different with learning.
‘First lesson.’ He sets the needle on the platter closest to him into place. ‘You said you know how a record player works, it’s the same deal here. Some people mark all over their records to keep track of out where to put the needle, especially for sets, but we don’t need to right now. We’re just dicking around today.’
‘Okay? That’s all basically common sense.?’
‘Next up's hand placement.’ He puts his hand where it should be on the record, which is awkward since he has to lean at a bad angle. ‘Not too much pressure or you’ll just stop the spin.’
Karkat sets his hand down, but it’s more perpendicular to the table than it should be, which isn’t going to work. ‘There?’
‘More to the left.’ He still doesn’t have it. ‘Dude, no.’ Too far. Of course they're running into angle problems. ‘You’ll knock the needle off if you keep it there.’ Apparently teaching someone is a lot harder than just doing it himself.
Karkat’s getting frustrated. ‘You didn’t exactly do a great job of demonstrating. If this is just the basics, it’s going to be a disaster when I get to the actual scratching. Should I move over so you can show me or something?’
Dave reaches over and grabs Karkat’s hand, moving it to the correct position. ‘Right there.’ He moves them back and forth a few times to show the basic movement, slowly at first, then smaller sharper movements, showing what chirps are like. ‘Your arm should bend naturally. There’s some room for you to maneuver, but you’ll just make it hard on yourself if you’re too far out of that sweet spot.’
Karkat’s gone quiet. Dave follows his eyes down to where his hand is still lingering over Karkat’s. Yeah. Okay, that’s maybe kind of gay now that he thinks about it. He withdraws coolly and bites back any comments (‘no homo’ in particular) he wants to make, opting to drum his fingers on the table instead. ‘Um. That’s where it goes,’ he reiterates.
‘...Right. I've got that. Next?’
‘Okay, uh. Let’s move onto the real basics.’ Dave switches the turntable on and Karkat jumps when the record suddenly starts moving under his fingertips. ‘We'll start off easy. This first one’s called a baby scratch.’
---
‘Okay, so this one is a crab scratch. Perfect for you, right?’ He demonstrates a few times, rapidly drumming his fingers against the fader. He moves the needle to a different spot on the record and does a few more, mixing other techniques into it, blatantly, shamelessly showing off.
Karkat attempts to mirror his actions, his fingers slow and clumsy on the crossfade. It could definitely sound better. 'Ugh.'
'Dude, this isn't an easy one, I didn’t expect you to get it in this first session. Took me a while to get it down too. Just gotta-'
'Practice?’ Karkat snorts. ‘Obviously. How old were you when you got it?'
'Uh. I started learning early, but I was probably eight?'
Karkat's eyes narrow. 'That's like four sweeps.'
'Nah, it’s three point sixty-nine,' he responds, raising an eyebrow suggestively because there’s no way he has the willpower to stop himself from jumping on that opportunity.
Karkat doesn't get the refrance, just frowns at Dave like he’s being pedantic. Bummer. 'Man... I wouldn't have been able to get that sort of thing before the time powers. Guess they’re useful for somethin’ that isn't dogpiling with my own corpse over and over.'
The troll mulls it over. ‘Your powers really suck to put into practice. Then again, I never even figured out how to use blood. I think the Denizens are supposed to explain your aspect? Or at least test their application. Mine didn’t last long enough to.’
‘I heard about that. Pretty sure you aren’t supposed to kill those. In like, any case.’
Karkat bristles. ‘What, you think I had a fucking walkthrough? There was a huge glowing monster, it started screeching at me, I killed it, end of story.’
The two of them fiddle with the console, Karkat tapping against the the crossfader while Dave takes over moving the record itself. Dave's a little distracted. ‘Hey, let me try something?’
‘Because that's not suspicious. What is it?’
‘Trust me on this.’ He pulls out a microphone, plugging it into the husktop while Karkat watches, wary. Dave shoves it at Karkat’s face. ‘Say something.’
He swats at Dave's hands, but there’s no real force behind it. 'No? Get that thing out of my face, asshole.'
Looking satisfied at the recording, he clicks around on the computer. Reaching over to the tables, the clip starts playing, skipping and distorting as his hands fly across his turntables. It’s short since there’s not much recorded, but it actually kind of works.
Karkat doesn’t seem impressed. 'Are you serious? Nobody wants to listen to that. It's like steel wool against my clots.'
'Nah man, it’s great. Now we just need to sample you singing.’
Karkat’s eyes narrow. 'I don't sing.’
‘No? I do.’
Karkat leans in, suddenly interested. 'Dude, really? I'd pay a full booncase to hear that.'
‘Here, I’ll open one up.’ With a little fiddling with the timeframe, he loads up SBAHJ's site. ‘Check it,’ he says, clicking the link.
Karkat watches and listens, looking comically serious and thoughtful through the shitty song. By the time it hits that horrible high pitched autotuning, he actually laughs. Dave feels blessed by the sound, like his ears are being graced by a choir of kind of awkwardly stilted angels. 'That doesn't count, you can barely hear your voice in that. How many effects did you put on it?'
'All of them.' Dave's grinning now, sort of lopsided. He’s not used to making the expression. 'You know Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff's entire aesthetic is built around this sorta thing. Every song I've made for it is autotuned until it's incomprehensible and that's before the file’s even been compressed.'
'It still doesn't count. Don’t you even think about trying to rip me off.'
'That’s cool. I'll still get my boonies out of you eventually. Got to keep hoarding cash for my boondollar pile. Cozy as shit.'
‘Boondollars, really?' Karkat scoffs. ‘I guess I can’t judge you on that.’
‘You still sleeping on those dumb horns?’
He shakes his head. ‘No, that started feeling too weird after the. You know. The Gamzee thing.’ Right, having your weird clown friend murder a bunch of people might put you off horns, considering they already suck to begin with. ‘Mine's, well,’ he trails off, mumbling under his breath. Dave’s pretty impressed that he can manage to be inaudible. It doesn’t seem possible. Maybe he’s just mouthing the words to pull it off?
‘Repeat that?’
He looks almost pained. ‘They’re keep cases. Don’t judge me.’
‘Keep cases? Wait, you mean like the ones you put DVDs in? Holy fuck you really are dedicated to your romcoms. All snuggling up with them every night, troll Will Smith’s face the last thing you see before you knock out.’
‘Eurghh.’
‘Hey, no, this is a judgement free zone. It’s pretty endearing to be honest.’ Dave reaches over to turn the tables off. ‘So what did you think of all this? Feeling schoolfed up the bone bulge or whatever?’
‘I wouldn’t put it that way.’ Karkat says. ‘I learned some things, though. It wasn't too bad.’
‘Yeah. Good first lesson in music. We’ll get you jamming out to your own tunes in no time.’
‘Uh.’ There’s a long pause after that. Karkat looks like he wants to say something, rocking back and forth a bit. ‘Not a first lesson. You were already beat to that.’
Dave looks over at him, eyebrows raising, feeling like he misheard. ‘I was what now?’
Karkat ducks his head, turtleneck going up to his chin. He mumbles, which is pretty much the volume of a normal person speaking: ‘I can already make music, just not like this.’ Dave openly gawks.
‘You serious? You’ve never said anything about that.’
‘Is it that hard to believe?’ He puts a bad imitation of Dave’s voice on. ‘You're telling me Karkat Vantas can actually do something, he’s not a completely useless piece of shit? Someone go alert the others, this might not be the alpha timeline.’
‘I just didn’t know you played an instrument.’ It shouldn’t be that much of a surprise. Everyone he knows seems to have some kind of musical talent. John’s been taking piano lessons since he was ten, while Jade can play some pretty sick bass riffs. Rose? She was practically a professional orchestral violinist by thirteen.
‘It’s not really an instrument, I just. I’ll show you. He turns around, popping his earbud out and switching sides as he drops his crabtop out of his sylladex, leaning over awkwardly to type on it.
Dave turns around too. ‘What’s with you and that thing? You could just put your laptop on the table.'
Karkat looks defensive. ‘There’s not enough room, idiot. Plus I like my crabtop, okay?’
‘Fair enough.’
It’s a bad angle, they both have to hunch to get to the right height, Karkat moreso than Dave as he clicks through folders.
‘This is still a no judgement zone, right? I didn’t give you shit the whole time we scratched, if you make me regret this I’ll never do any of it again.’
Dave nods. ‘Obviously. How dumb do you think I am? Why would I jeopardize the chance to see your mad skills?’
Karkat rolls his eyes, skimming through the songs he’s saved, pointedly ignoring the ‘SO SHITTY’ folder. Also the 'BULLSHIT GARBAGE' one. There's a few like that. Apparently he finds one he’s willing to share and loads it up in his music player, hesitates, and finally hits play. Dave’s eyes widen behind his shades. Is - is that chiptune? Or something like it, Dave doesn't actually listen to much electronic music. He never would’ve pegged Karkat as the kind of guy that's into it.
He glances over at Karkat, who's still wearing his ever-present scowl, but it's not as sharp. There's less tension in his shoulders. His posture isn't as rigid as usual. They're little changes, but they’ve spent enough time together that it’s enough to start sliding into the uncanny valley. He snaps back into focus when he notices Karkat looking at him expectantly - he didn’t realize he was staring. ‘So?’ He looks kind of self-conscious.
'It's kinda avant-garde.'
Karkat pauses the track and slaps a hand against his forehead, dragging it down his face. 'Avant-garde is what someone says when they're too concerned with someone’s feelings to flush them down the gaper. Avant-garde is when a freshly-pupated wiggler builds a hive and forgets to tell the carpenter droids to build an entrance. It's-'
'No dude, it's good.'
He stops his embarrassed tirade and turns to look at Dave. 'Yeah?'
'You've obviously got your composition down. It's pretty sweet.' Karkat crosses his arms and averts his eyes, clearly not used to being complimented.
'How long have you been doing it?'
Karkat considers that. 'A while. I don't know, it's. Relaxing, I guess. Like coding but not as touchy? More experimenting, less computer smashing when something goes wrong. If you haven't noticed, I'm a pretty angry guy.' Dave opens his mouth, but Karkat isn't done, waving him off dismissively. 'I know. I see the surprise slathered across your face. Your shock is grub sauce after eating a particularly messy slice of sauce disc.’ Why trolls call pizza sauce discs is beyond Dave’s comprehension. ‘Whoops, didn't mean to blow your mind!’
He keeps going; he gets like this sometimes, it’s better to just ride it out than try to interrupt. 'The thing is, my fury is absolutely justified considering the waist-high feculence I’m forced to trudge through on a daily basis. So when I have the opportunity, instead of screaming and punching things - and don’t think I don’t do that too - I sit down and start a new song. It's distracting. Takes the edge off.'
He clicks over to a different song, one a little faster-paced. Dave’s noticing that all of Karkat's music's got this vague quality that’s hard for him to pin down. Melancholy, maybe? He likes it. It suits him in a weird way.
The ever-present tension still hasn’t returned. Apparently the music really does take off some of the edge for him. Huh.
‘What’s that one?’ Dave asks, pointing to a file labeled PHANTOM_ECHOES.grb.
‘Uh, that’s an older one. It was inspired by this comic I read back when I was five.’ He suddenly frowns. ‘Scratch that. Inspired makes it sound like it’s actually good.’ The worst part is he’s not even fishing for compliments. The guy genuinely hates himself and anything he’s ever done more than two minutes in the past. Like a self-loathing goldfish.
‘You gotta cut that out, bro. Seriously, have I ever hesitated to call you out when you’ve done something lame?
‘Yeah, sure.’ He still sounds unconvinced, and clears his throat. ‘Anyway, that’s it. There’s the extent of my talent.’
‘You should teach me.’
Karkat boggles at him. ‘What?’
Dave leans back, rolling his shoulders and stretching. This positioning is so bad, he’s really feeling it in his back. ‘Only fair, right? I’ll school you on the manual, you'll teach me the digital. Cultural exchange, one freaky alien to another?’
Karkat looks embarrassed, but he’s considering the idea. Dave’s a bit surprised, he expected him to shoot it down immediately. ‘We could try it.’
‘Sweet. I never really learned, it was always more Jade’s thing.’ It really is a medium Dave has no experience in.
‘Was it? I didn’t know that.’ He suddenly looks pensive. Oh right, Karkat kind of had this weird thing for her at one point. Which was great, considering the fits he threw over the idea of trolls getting their mack on with humans. Too late for that. Even if she liked him, he wasn't going to get any human makeouts for three years.
‘I did mix her stuff though. Guess I can mix yours too?’
‘Maybe. Most of the others weren’t into music, since it is - was - pretty niche on my planet. Tavros had an acoustic guitar. Nepeta played the xylophone or something? The wooden kind.’
‘Marimba, I think.’
He nods, only half paying attention as he clicks around. ‘Sounds right.’
The program he uses to compose his stuff pops on the screen. ‘Whoa,’ Dave says.
Now he understands why Karkat didn’t seem surprised by the mixing software. The screen's a mess of buttons and Karkat’s obviously not having any trouble navigating it. It’s all written in trollspeak, which just makes it more confusing. He can’t read a word of their godawful scribbles.
Karkat, on the other hand, never even has trouble with Pesterchum, despite Trollian being his native client. It’s weird that the trolls have no difficulty with English. Apparently they get some kind of biological trolltech translators implanted when they’re young. A babble-bug or something? Gross. Probably helps his people with their intergalactic takeovers.
‘Right so here’s the problem: there’s no way I’m ever going to be able to read any of that.’
‘Hngh.’ Karkat’s slumps a bit. If he’s not careful he’s going to slide off the bench. ‘Language barriers are so stupid. If Sollux was here he could set it up for you. If I try, something’s going to break, or explode, or worse. Past me had the intelligence of a sack of cholerbear excrement and tried messing with the code himself once. I had to defragment. Literally. Do you know how hard it is to get husktop shards out when they're embedded in your walls?’
‘I can relate to that? My house was full of things that could kill you and my modus used to fling swords and shurikens everywhere. Lucky I didn’t kill myself.’
‘Oh.’ He chews his lip thoughtfully. ‘I don’t know... Maybe I can make out a diagram of what does what. It’d be, uh. Pretty rough, but it might work.’
Dave winces. ‘Oh man, with you drawing it all out? That’d be such a clusterfuck.’
He shrugs a shoulder. ‘‘Probably. I guess you’ll have to figure it out as you go. Do you think you can memorize some of the buttons? It’s pretty second nature for me at this point and I know you’re more than smart enough to get pretty much anything in here if you try.’
‘Yeah?’
Realizing the offhand compliment, he ducks his head, opening a songfile. ‘Obviously you’re more intelligent than I assumed you were when we first met? That’s not much of a feat, since I thought you were pretty fucking stupid. But you’re not, otherwise I wouldn’t be sitting here doing this with you.’ The troll's borderline tsundere. It makes Dave wonder if he and the others have been full of shit about how ultraviolent his species is.
He scrolls through the songfile's timeline, and a ton of what are probably bleeps or something line up across the screen. It’s a technicolor mess.
He points out some of the lines, what instruments they are. Then he hits play. ‘I should have picked something easier. You won't start like this when you compose yourself, obviously.’
Dave watches the instrumentation fly across the screen as the song plays. It almost seems like it makes sense. But when song finishes, the screen starts flickering gray and Karkat swears, mashing his keyboard. The project goes blank, all the lines disappearing.
Karkat’s clicking through his music folders and even checks his recycling bin equivalent. Nothing.
'The hell was that?' Dave asks. 'Guessing that's not normal?'
'I - fuck. You know how I talked about the coding thing?' Dave nods.
'He sucked so bad back then. He was testing code and attached a ~ATH script to that song, and it ending must have counted as its death? It's probably permanently gone. God I hate him so much. I wish he could have just choked on his own mastication muscle and died so I wouldn’t have to ruminate on all his mistakes.'
‘Y’know it’s pretty much hilarious that you blame some abstract ‘past you’ for everything, like nobody else has one.’
Karkat theatrically rolls his eyes. ‘Wow hey, you’re right! I've never thought of that. Some pretty cool insight you’ve got there, but have you considered shutting up? That’s such an implausible concept to apply to you that it’d also be hilarious. Funniest thing I’ve ever heard! My sides would drift off into the worst part of the ring and wind up getting lovingly fondled by a particularly amorous horrorterror’s squirming mass of tentacles.’ Dave just shrugs in response.
By the time the lesson’s over, they both feel like they’ve made some decent progress. Neither of them say it - they don’t need to - but it was fun. Karkat’s actually the one who asks if Dave wants to do it again some time.
---
They go on like this for a while, Dave having some trouble with pitch, Karkat with rhythm. A few months in the future, but not many, they’ve both improved enough to actually like their work.
Eventually with minimal advice from Karkat, Dave makes a song he’s particularly satisfied with, citing his muse as his inspiration. They’re both genuinely excited to show it off.
The two of them head out to Can Town and approach the mayor.
‘Hey,’ they both say at the same time. Karkat shuts up and lets Dave speak, considering it’s his project for the most part.
He looks at them.
Dave’s suddenly nervous. This is a lot of pressure, considering the mayor’s opinion is the most important one on the meteor. He’ll be miserable if it falls flat with him. 'Can… um. Can we show you something?’
Karkat takes out his crabtop and the mayor approaches it curiously, peering at the screen.
They wait, holding their breath. It feels like the longest four minutes of their lives.
The mayor claps after the song finishes and Dave and Karkat melt.
