Chapter Text
The main problem for Karkat seemed to be that he wasn't a goth. Like, at all. If it weren't for Kanaya accompanying him, Karkat wouldn't have been able to get into a third of the places that she used as her hunting grounds. He was a fucking EIC of a high-minded low-budgeted Alternian American news site, he didn't own any black eyeliner, and when he went to get his hair cut, he told the stylist "just chop off enough I can fucking see again, I don't care, it'll just grow back."
But when Kanaya had her midlife crisis of sorts and panicked about how she was potentially going to dramatically outlive Karkat, she'd been the one to propose turning him. So at the end of the day, it was her fault for not picking a moirail more suited to luring in people to eat.
He reminded Kanaya of this as he stood in her hive, situated in an obnoxiously cozy suburb of Austin, Texas.
"In my defense," she said as she set out a pitcher of orange juice and a tray of snacks, "I was not considering your prowess as a future rainbow drinker. My fixation was the more selfish concern of not having you in my life, and I acted on the basis of romantic impulse rather than logic or tactics."
Draped across Kanaya's puffy chaise lounge, Rose let out a sigh. "Matters of the heart are inexplicably bound up in the mythos of the vampire, and thus I would imagine the rainbow drinker as well."
"Oh, yes," Kanaya agreed. "A working pump biscuit is paramount to understanding our dubious plight. Are you quite comfortable?"
Kanaya was extremely good at grooming her thralls and getting regular meals on her proverbial nutrition plateau. She had a thermal hull filled with snacks and refreshments for her guests, and the optimal furniture for entertaining them. Her manners were seductive and played into exactly what humans looked for when they were approached by one of their vampires.
Also, he could not overstate enough: goth clubs. People who went to them were a lock on wanting to be bitten.
"Shoes off?" Kanaya asked.
"Oh, yes," Rose said, and fell across the chaise heavily. Her human bosom heaved with a breath. "Though perhaps your fledging would like to go first?" She cast a far too knowing smile Karkat's way. "It would leave the evening open for us."
Kanaya gave him a look, leaving it up to him. Rose was a frequent visitor, and was used to Karkat's presence enough he wasn't fearful of throwing off their game.
But also, "Yeah, sure. I have more articles to read through and funding to get sent out to the fucking freelancers. Getting anything out of payroll is a nightmare."
Rose turned her arm to him with a flourished twirl of her wrist. "You sound like you'll need your strength. Please, avail yourself."
He didn't love how she was so beyond being afraid of them. But he also didn't like when people were afraid of them. So he sighed and went over, sitting on the round puffy footstool by Rose.
She smiled at him. He gave her a much more sardonic, mean grin back. She was entirely unmoved, until he took hold of her wrist and sank his fangs into her arm.
With a dreamy sigh, her head lolled back.
Kanaya sat on the arm of the sofa and leaned over to drag her claws through Rose's hair. "Thank you, my dear."
"Happy to be of assistance," Rose said.
Karkat rolled his eyes, but got to work. He didn't want to hang around if they were going to be like this all evening.
Red, rich human blood filled his mouth, and Karkat swallowed.
Karkat went home to his respiteblock on the seventh floor of a moderately nice gated apartment complex that was situated just far enough away from the local university to not be filled from corner to ceiling with fucking students.
He got the impression that everyone here was the same as him: a goddamn workaholic who didn't know when the fuck to take a breather. The walls were thin, but the building was mostly quiet. People didn't try to hang out together or become friends. Karkat only knew three other people who lived there, and he had no intention of expanding that number. There were no parties on the roof, no invitations posted in the mailroom, and through mutual unanimous agreement, when everyone used the downstairs gym, they resorted to headphones to avoid conversation.
His respiteblock was long, sectioned off with screens Kanaya had brought him when he first moved in, and had its own washer and dryer. And there was fiber internet, though Karkat refused to pay out his chute for the full speed.
There was also, critically, a balcony opon he could keep a few plants, a purgatory where greenery went to slowly decay and die. The view was nice, not overlooking anything particularly scenic, but still nice.
It was, to Karkat, absolutely fucking perfect. He loved it. Since hatching on Earth, it was his favorite place he'd ever lived.
Arriving home, he plucked up his work laptop and settled onto his preferred chair to check his emails and read through pitches. He approved a few ideas that would be good to bring in the proverbial clicks, then two that he thought were actually interesting that absolutely would not build traffic. Fuck metrics and fuck human internet.
Around an hour into his work, the other reason Karkat enjoyed his apartment so much started up.
He tended to sit in the chair closest to the left wall. It gave him the best opportunity to listen as the music began.
Karkat had gotten a new neighbor about three months ago. He'd moved into the apartment on the corner. They'd only met briefly, as the human had said, "Shit, sorry, maneuvering all this shit is a face full of ass and not the fun kind," as he awkwardly shoved some kind of equipment into the apartment on the day he moved in. He'd blocked Karkat off in the hallway for a solid three minutes as he got his things inside, and gave an apologetic wave after.
That was the only time they'd spoken. But Karkat knew his neighbor by now. The guy was probably named Dave or DSL, if the packages that came to his door were to be believed.
And he was a musician. Not a shitty live band that rended Karkat's aural sponges to shreds with their noise, but a good one. Or so Karkat assumed; he didn't know much about music, only what he liked. And he liked Dave's music.
Through the afternoon and deep into the night, Karkat was able to overhear the way Dave put instruments together. He could hear through the walls as melodies were tapped out on keyboard, different samples lining up. Often, there'd be synths and then guitar and drums and strings and brass and other shit Karkat didn't have the name for, and he'd get to listen as Dave built a song from the ground up.
Something about it soothed Karkat, bringing his thinkpan from a boil down to a simmer as he worked.
Tonight, Karkat listened as his neighbor seemed to be messing with the presets on his keyboard, playing the same three songs over and over, taking time to modify stuff in between. It was methodical and repetitive in a pleasant way.
Karkat had the songs memorized before long, humming along as Dave played, listening for what he'd tweaked this time.
"I think the last version was better," Karkat murmured as Dave played. This preset was too high, pitchy to the ear.
Halfway through the song, it stopped, and his neighbor was silent for a while. Then, he played again, and the sound had been adjusted to something broader, fuller, and way less ear-mangling.
Karkat nodded along as he and his neighbor worked though the night.
"Maybe if you tried any kind of dress sense at all, you could lure in some poor bite-happy bastard who'd overlook everything else," Dirk said as he tapped out a cigarette from the mirrored little cigarette case he carried. He flicked his lighter.
"You will not light that in my workspace," Kanaya flung out, her voice drenched in compulsion.
Dirk stilled all at once, then sighed and put his lighter away, holding the cigarette between his fingers as he gestured. "Anyway, you have a decent build, dude. We could work with this."
If Karkat were to rank Kanaya's thralls, Dirk would be somewhere in the middle. He was not nearly as annoying as Rose, but he couldn't keep his opinions to himself, as if he were some expert on being a rainbow drinker.
Which, he definitely wasn't, though he was Kanaya's oldest thrall. They'd met in design school and had taken one look at each other and elected to become allies against all who would oppose them. Dirk was a recurring satellite orbiting their lives now.
"If I don't let Kanaya dress me, why do you think I'll let you do it?" Karkat asked him incredulously.
"Dunno. I bet with both of us workin' in tandem, we could hold you down and take some garment scissors to that fucking sweater you like so much."
Kanaya smiled from where she was fixing something on her sewing machine. "The thought had crossed my mind," she said quietly.
"I'll compel you to go shove your head up your own ass," Karkat threatened.
Shoving his little addictive cancer stick in his mouth, Dirk crossed his arms and leaned back against the wall. "Believe it or not I'm not trying to fuck with you right now. I'm still happy to keep my donations going to the Keep Karkat From Starving Club, but it's not a longterm solution, is it?"
"And changing how I dress is?"
"Yes," Kanaya and Dirk said in unison.
"Perhaps how you speak to people around you too," Kanaya offered helpfully.
"Also, it's mighty unfair that I'm here, dressed to impress the local vampires, and you are covered up like a grandma weathering the refrigerated section of the HEB," Dirk added.
"You literally came here to get bitten, it's your fetish," Karkat told him.
Kanaya shot him a displeased look over the meticulous tinkering she was doing with something in the metal compartment of the sewing machine. Which meant he was being a nookmunch and needed to tone it down.
Holding up a finger, Dirk said, "One, we've been over this. Being useful is my fetish, don't get it twisted." He held up another. "Two, if you think you can make me feel all sullen and ashamed, try harder, Vantas. I'm the one making an effort here." He lifted his chin. "So, you gonna bite me or what?"
Karkat mindlessly read over some corporate emails about site traffic and which articles were good (see: popular and easy to google) and which were terrible (see: well-written interesting pieces that Karkat snuck onto the site by manning the CRM himself when no one was looking) as his neighbor worked on scoring something.
It was hard to keep up his ire. This was part of why Karkat tended to visit Kanaya's house rather than invite her over. That and her being his sire and the way she hated Midtown traffic. But if Kanaya knew that so much of his habitual surly bullshit just melted away when he was at home, he didn't know what would happen. Something catastrophic, surely.
The wall between his apartment and Dave's was so bad at blocking noise, Karkat assumed it was made of two inches of papier-mâchéd special stardust and fiber cereal. All evening, Karkat listened to a very strange score being built.
He wasn't sure what kind of project it was. Back when Dave had first moved in and shown himself to be musical, Karkat had looked him up, mostly to see if he was part of a band that would be coming by and ruining the peace Karkat so dearly enjoyed.
In looking, Karkat had only found a professional site for DSL ("you want em i got em" whatever that meant), showcasing his portfolio, listing his rates, and professional inquiry information. Dave apparently worked on everything from scoring podcasts to making OSTs for video games to the occasional small film. He seemed like the model of a working artist.
Whatever he was doing now was a lot of fucking synths. Karkat listened as Dave laid down various sounds, all a little eerie and just barely beyond recognition as physical instruments. More than once, Karkat tipped his head back and frowned, muttering, "I don't think I get this one."
It was eleven in the evening when Karkat was watering his planets, hoping a few would come back to life, when he heard it: piano. Just a normal, seemingly acoustic piano.
Walking back inside his block, Karkat drifting to the wall and listened as the piano played over the track. Suddenly, everything Dave had been working on, the eerie centerpiece of the music, it all became the elaborate undercurrent to the stark, quick dance of the keys. All his fucking around abruptly made sense, going from an unsettling atmospheric piece that could have been for a spooky project to something complex and beautiful, turning the horror into just a haunting.
Karkat was smiling. He could feel the unnatural set of it on his face.
It was so quiet, and Karkat stood so still as he listened, he vaguely heard a distant, "And that's how we fuckin' do it," through the wall as the piece ended.
Karkat resisted the urge to clap. That'd be really fucking weird.
"You could always bite me," Jake offered, not for the first time, as Karkat took a break from his work and leaned on the railing of his balcony.
Karkat's other neighbor was Jake, who was a UT student, though Karkat tried not to hold it against him. He wasn't a partier or a heavy drinker or anything. As Karkat understood it, Jake was supposed to inherit some important company or something, with the stipulation that it would wait until he finished a graduate degree. So Jake had been finishing a graduate degree for many, many years, essentially lighting money on fire in the attempt to get out of his pre-planned life.
It'd be pathetic if not for the genuine fear Jake carried every time the looming spectre of his future was mentioned. Karkat mostly felt bad for him.
He was also In The Proverbial Know about rainbow drinkers thanks for his fiance, Dirk. And he was very eager to be of assistance.
However:
"Did your doctor clear you on the horrendous debilitating anemia thing?" Karkat asked.
Jake's face fell. "I don't know what else I could shove in my gob to fend off that nasty affliction. I've tried the reddest meats I can stand and all the green veg. The iron pills upset my constitution something fierce."
"Well, then no one's biting you again, idiot," Karkat told him kindly. "You threw up and passed out last time."
"That was six months ago! Can't we give it the ol' college try again?"
Karkat was determined not to sink his teeth into Jake, no matter how much he asked and made big pleading eyes and suggestively unbuttoned his shirt. The guy was so fucking anemic, it was a wonder he didn't pass out when he stood up too fast.
Of course the one interested human who wasn't into all-black ensembles also had a blood condition preventing Karkat from thralling him. Life was terminally fucking unfair.
"Not happening, Jake," Karkat said.
"Fucking phooey," Jake muttered, leaning his head on his arms as he rested on the railing of his balcony, not ten feet away from Karkat. "You're a frighteningly clever fellow, Karkat. I'm sure you'll lure someone into your parlor. Maybe you should loiter around the coffee shops, if Kanaya's clubs aren't your jelly and jam."
"I don't want a college student who's going to move away the second they get their degree," Karkat muttered. "Someone stable to Austin would be nice."
"Well, I know you can make that happen," Jake said encouragingly. "You've just got to eject the stick from your ass and finally ask somebody! Before your illustrious sire grows weary of your ornery heel-dragging."
Kanaya wouldn't, was the thing. She wanted Karkat to figure out a solution, sure, but she was also pathologically driven to take care of people, especially him. She'd let him feed off her thralls forever.
It was Karkat who didn't want that to be a permanent solution. There were limits to how much he'd siphon her pity humors, and that right there was one of the big ones.
"You just got to— to march up to someone next chance you get! Next time you see a person that catches your ganderbulb, you walk right up to them and you say something charming! This is Austin! Oh, such a weird town with such weird people in it! Lay it all out on the table and see what they think of the inventory on offer!"
Karkat narrowed his eyes at Jake. "When was the last time you talked to someone you weren't already acquainted with? Someone outside our group?"
"I fail to see how that's relevant!" Jake said, but grinned at him. "But really, if you ever want a backup, I'm here."
"Your blood is literally deficient, it'd taste terrible," Karkat reminded him. Then, "But thanks. I appreciate it."
Because this was the other problem:
Humans tasted good. Really good. Good enough Karkat regretted feeding on them because the idea of going back to troll blood seemed torturous. He probably could and he might even have better luck with it all since trolls were more prepared to believe in rainbow drinkers than humans were prepared to believe in vampires.
Hell, he had a lot of contact information for the Alternian community. He could probably find some trolls thralls really easily.
But then he'd have to explain things about his blood, and about his complicated relationship with the quadrant system, and no fucking thanks. Just navigating it with Kanaya and her limitless patience had already been a lot.
So, he held out hope that he'd find his niche. His hunting ground. Anyone willing to tolerate his neurotic bullshit enough to get his fangs in them metaphorically and literally.
The stress was starting to get to him. Which made him even more surly and not-seductive, which didn't help matters.
Goddammit, maybe he would have to cave and go bite some overtired and edgy students. Go find the graduate students and offer to take their mind off things. It'd probably work.
The second Karkat stopped having standards, his life was going to be so much simpler.
None of this was made easier by the fact that Dave hadn't been playing any music for the past few days, nearly a week.
It took two days for Karkat to notice, to realize he was in a worsening mood and then to realize what the cause was. But Dave didn't make anything, didn't even fuck around with his presets. It was quiet enough that Karkat—
Okay. Karkat had genuinely worried that something had happened. Like, Dave had one of those human heart attacks and was lying on the floor dying, or something. So Karkat had gotten an empty glass from his cabinet and pressed it to the wall, pressing his ear in turn to the end.
And there was the sound of someone walking around, of running water, of the little noises of habitation.
So Karkat stopped being a creep, but didn't stop worrying.
What could he do? Knock on Dave's door and go, hey, sorry to bother you, but I've spent most nights for the past few months listening to you like a voyeur, and you stopped making music so what's up with that, huh? Absolutely fucking not.
His biggest fear was that Dave had just… changed to working with headphones on. Just a whim that would alter the routine of Karkat's life intractably.
But no. Dave was going through something. Karkat could tell because he took to going out on his own balcony, slouching against the railing, and sighing a lot.
Karkat itched to ask if there was anything he could do. But that would place him solidly back in creepy territory, and Karkat drank blood to survive but he was trying not to be a prick about it.
So he complained instead.
"I'm a little confused," Rose said over her glass of wine. "Are you perturbed by this noisy neighbor or do you passionately miss his racket? Your lips are saying one thing but the look on your face is raising objections in the court of subjective reality."
"How can you see anything on my face in this light?" Karkat said, waving the the dark, gloomy corner of the club they were sitting in.
"You literally glow, Karkat," Rose reminded him.
Oh, right, he always forgot that shit. "While I appreciate being the recipient of one of those human breaks from my neighbor's constant cacophonous bullshit," he said, "it's also creeping me out. He keeps going out on the balcony and looking like the simpering premoult love interest in a play where the hero fucking slept through curtain call. It's depressing."
"So, allow me to draft the facts as I understand them: We have a situation where you have some familiarity with a human who lives very close to you. Someone who you could make a fair assumption is relatively unattached, or at least adverse to socializing every night. Who you feel a connection to despite not having met them but once." She smiled and tilted her head in a way that made Karkat feel like she found him adorable. "You see where I am going with this, surely?"
"You want me to thrall him?"
"I think you should at least say hello," Rose said. "Also, I have been running the gambit of hypotheticals in my head, and if I were a musician who had been working consistently for months, I don't think I would be threatened by my neighbor perhaps mentioning overhearing my work." She waved a finger at him. "I would perhaps soften the reality of the situation, maybe say something about… how you couldn't help but notice that he's taking a break, and how is that going for him. Neutral, but a safe opening volley to any rational person."
"And then you want me to thrall him."
"I think you want me to tell you that you want to thrall him because you are still young enough a rainbow drinker that your autonomy as a vampiric operator makes you nervous," Rose said, and took a sip of her wine like a punctuation mark.
Goddammit.
"Maybe consider toning down the glowing when you make this overture," she added. "Try not to fuck it up too much."
Karkat was working up the nerve to say something. He had plenty of opportunities; Dave frequently went out onto the balcony, sometimes twice a night, and Karkat could see him from where Karkat was sitting, reading. He was hyperaware that the only thing separating him from a conversation with his neighbor and potential thrall(?) was a sliding glass door and his own fucking hangups.
But Dave looked so fucking dejected as he stood out there, backlit by the light pollution of the city. As he spent more time just idly observing Dave from afar, Karkat thought he looked really… nice.
God, Karkat was the fucking prime rib of moirail material, he was so fucking pitiful. He was a grown-ass adult, he should've been able to go and have a conversation with a human.
It took him a few days to work up the courage. But he was going to do it. He finally shored up all the determination fluid from his perseverance gland, and he was ready. Next time Dave wandered out to simper and sigh over the railing like his guitar had broken up with him, Karkat was going to casually wander out there and say something. He even spent the day getting his glow under control, subsuming it as much as possible.
Then, as he was waiting for it to happen, he heard a weird noise through the wall. It began as a plucking of strings, so sharp it sounded artificial at first, a rising and pulsing wave. It repeated over and over for almost a minute as Karkat squinted at the wall in confusion.
Then, another, different plucking wave of sound laid in counterpoint to the first. It was like rain against an electric roof. He didn't really know what to make of it.
More notes added in, but it was the same pattern repeating over and over.
Then, then, then: the violin slid like a beautiful knife right through the plucked notes, the tonality so beautiful and vivid, Karkat's untrained ear knew immediately it was a real fucking instrument. The way it sighed and shivered and almost trembled along was alive.
The foundation continued to repeat endlessly, insistently, and Dave played against it in different ways. Sometimes long sustained silver drags of sound, sometimes faster and playful, then settling into a meandering hum.
Karkat realized he probably was playing with one of those loop pedals. Just building something to toy with.
He hadn't known Dave could play violin. Piano, guitar, some woody wind thing he couldn't name, yeah. But the violin was new.
Karkat stood there gawking at the blank wall listening for the entirety of Dave's performance, all the way until it ended with the abruptness of the loop being kicked off and a final held note of the violin. Then, silence again.
The spell broke, and Karkat rubbed his eyes. It felt like he'd forgotten to even blink.
Outside his balcony, he could see Dave. He was leaning against the railing, looking at the bottle in his hands, idly peeling the label off with his fingernails.
Karkat grabbed his watering can and let himself out onto his own balcony.
Across the gap, Dave looked up at the sound, and immediately froze Karkat in place with a glance. His face was perfectly calm, but his eyes were a little wide. Surprised. Which, Karkat was his only direct neighbor and this was the first time they were out at the same time, so yeah, that tracked.
"So, uh," Karkat said, super fucking casual. His voice sounded like he'd never heard it before, completely off to his own ears. "Back into the swing of things?"
Dave continued to stare at him, his lips parting slightly. "Uh. Sorry?"
"I just mean," Karkat said, anxiety flooding his veins. It was so fucking weird, he spoke 'to' Dave all the time while he was experimenting through a track, but actually saying anything to the person? "You're sounding better finally?"
"What do you mean," he said back, placid and flat.
Karkat wasn't sure which part hadn't been clear. Maybe he'd misunderstood the whole thing. "Wasn't that you with the looping and the— I assume it's a violin, but I don't really know much about music."
"You heard that?" He was still staring very hard at Karkat.
"Obviously or I wouldn't be asking. You went almost a week and a half without making a racket, I almost assumed you had one of your human cardiac attacks since normally you never shut up, but—"
With his nocturnal eyes, Karkat could see the way a flush slammed full force over Dave's face, all his blood suddenly there across his cheeks. His eyes popped even wider before he quickly, without another word, retreated back into his apartment and out of sight.
Karkat gawked after him, before rewinding what he'd said and reviewing the mental tape.
Oh, for fuck's sake.
He hurried back inside his own apartment. Godfuckingdammit, how had he screwed that up so badly? Just when things were getting back to normal with Dave. Just when he'd finally started playing music again.
Not longer after, Karkat got a string of DMs on his computer.
TT: Karkat, is your noisy neighbor by any chance Dave Strider? Is the neighbor you have been complaining about perhaps Dave Strider, my fucking brother?
TT: I only ask because my brother just regurgitated a wall of text at me concerning his troll neighbor telling him off for having been playing his music too loud and never "shutting up" and I cannot help but consider the similarities, Karkat.
TT: Please understand that I love my brother dearly before I say this: your taste in potential thralls is atrocious.
TT: Do you have any idea how much shit Dave has given me for my "elaborate longrunning lesbian vampire LARPventures" in the past year?
TT: For fuck's sake, he's been struggling with a creative ennui since he completed his last project, and you break your months of silence to tell him he never shuts up?
TT: Incredible. You've singled out the truest of non-believers in our family.
TT: He's not even goth, Karkat.
For the next week, Karkat didn't hear anything from Dave's apartment.
He wasn't prepared for how crushing the change was.