fandomtownies | Groovy Tunes, Friday

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Groovy Tunes, Friday

All of their houseguests were gone. As was all the fraught drama that Ezra's presence had brought.

Dante missed even that.

Because right now, working his shift on his own, his treacherous brain kept flashing back to a few weeks ago. White hair. Demons. His own blood circling down the drain. What it meant. What it didn't mean. What...

He was sitting behind the counter, plucking away at the strings of an electric guitar. But his attention kept slipping away from him to other stuff. Stuff he didn't want to think about.

Dante muttered a curse under his breath and got up to go digging for the loudest aggrotech album he could find.

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Octavia hadn't been here since she'd switched jobs. But the restlessness of the last couple of weeks didn't seem to be going anywhere, and there were reasons why she'd been drawn to this store in the first place. So she came in today, in search of something loud enough to drown out her discomfort with just about everything.

She gave Dante a nod as she slipped in, heading for the CDs.

"That's the fastest I've ever seen anyone go for those," Dante said. He didn't bother to get up.

Octavia shrugged. "I know what I'm here for."

At some point, maybe someone would introduce her to the concept of shopping.

... And then she'd probably get into what a pointless thing it was to go into store's just to browse things in case something happened to interest you. And probably something about money being even more pointless.

"More or less, anyway."

"Don't you work here?"

Like Dante kept track.

"No." But she didn't sound at all like she thought he should've known that. She didn't keep track of things like that. "I've been at the place with plants for months now."

She flipped through some CD cases. Trying to use her intuition on what looked promising and what didn't.

"Plants over music, huh?" Dante said. "Can't say I get that."

"Plants can be useful," Octavia replied, then rolled her eyes. "Not that you'd be able to tell from the ridiculous things people order from us."

She was never going to understand flower arrangements. She was also not very good at making them.

"Still, if I'm stuck here, might as well put it to use. Learn what I can about plants."

"Sounds like a really boring way to spend your day," Dante said, casually setting the guitar aside. "Need some help?"

"Being bored is a luxury," Octavia replied, so very dryly. Like someone who hadn't had that kind of a luxur very often in her life. Or ever, really.

As for his question... She browsed stubbornly for a few seconds longer, then said, "Maybe."

Dante slid out from behind the desk, padding up to their small CD selection. "So what're you looking for?"

The selection being so small these days was honestly part of why she didn't work here anymore.

(It was complicated.)

"Something aggressive."

Dante shrugged. "There's always Combichrist."

... You always lead with your fave, okay?

"And what's that?"

She didn't know anything about anything when it came to this.

Dante pulled the CD he felt honorbound to keep on stock out of the stacks.

Then he walked up to the stereo, jammed it in, and pressed play.

Octavia listened with a look of focus on her face. She didn't really seem to know how to do things in any other way, these days.

A moment or two after the beat kicked in fully, her fingertips were tapping the rhythm against the tough leather covering her thigh.

So maybe this was a winner.

"Thought you might like it," Dante said, satisfied as he leaned back. "Nothing better to get pissed to."

"I just need the noise," Octavia replied. Non-committally, when it came to what she needed it for.

But people with her general demeanor probably didn't come looking for aggressive music because they just liked a well-defined beat.

"Sure," Dante said, rolling his eyes. "I can grab you a few more from that genre, if you want."

"Thanks."

She was not great at this social thing. Not at all.

"I'd like that."

Dante would've probably been better at bullshitting his own version of social for the rest of this, if it hadn't been for the revenge of his unhealthy family-related repression habit.

"Okay," he said, snagging a few more CDs from the set up and wandering back to the counter. "I'm not gonna argue with anybody needing a little more aggro in their lives."

Family-related things were not great, all around.

"Is that what it's called?" Octavia wondered as she followed him to the counter. "I don't know these things."

They weren't as useful as knowing which plants could help you, so she hadn't put in the effort. Yet, anyway.

Dante shrugged. "It's a subgenre of a subgenre," he said. "Part of electro-industrial music, which is based on industrial. I can grab you some of those too."

"Maybe later."

Her relationship with buying things was weird. Her relationship with things that weren't directly related to survival was also weird.

Not that she knew that. "Subgenre of a subgenre?" she asked, instead. "Why does this time period insist on making everything so complicated?" It was like they couldn't just have a lot of things, they had to have a lot of a lot of things.

Dante rang up the CDs he had in his hands as he talked. "Hey, you might like the one kind and not the other," he said. "We have a lot of time to experiment with music and shit."

"Is that what I'm supposed to do with all the time I have?"

It was mostly a rhetorical question.

"If you want?" Dante offered.

A beat.

"I wouldn't know where to start."

Oh like that had ever stopped her from anything. For most of her life, she'd lived in a perpetual state of not knowing what others knew and clawing her way into things until she did.

"You pick something up and you go from there," Dante said, shrugging. "I mean, my band still needs a drummer."

Worth a shot, anyway.

Octavia paused.

Then: "Okay," she said.

Never one to back down from a challenge, even if it was one she'd just set for herself.

Dante almost blinked, but he took the surprise in style. "Cool," he said. "You wanna try the one set up in the back?"

Though referring to the theater as 'the back' still felt weird.

Well, it was what it was.

"Sure," Octavia replied. With only the vaguest idea of what a drum kit looked like. At least she knew what drums were, though: the ones with the hitting.

She was good at hitting things.

Dante led her through the hall down into the back, where indeed, an old drumset was sitting in the corner looking abandoned.

"There," he said, pointing at it. "Probably some sticks there that aren't broke, either."

"You hit them with sticks?"

Dealing with a novice, here, Dante. But she was intrigued, even if all there was to show that was the way she moved closer to the set, and circled around it with her head just slightly tilted to the side.

She flicked her fingers against a cymbal. Made a noise.

Dante chuckled, walking around to find a set of drumsticks. "Yeah, you do," he said, holding them out for her. "Sit down."

Octavia rolled her eyes at the chuckling, because appearing joyless was kind of a thing she did. Didn't seem to deter her any from accepting the sticks - and she'd definitely been thinking of the wrong kind of sticks - or taking a seat on the stool behind the drum set.

She looked it over. "That's a lot of things for hitting."

That was probably a good thing.

"You're not supposed to hit them all at once," Dante said lightly, "But you can hit 'em all in succession, I'm pretty sure."

She hadn't thought that. For the record.

And she was going to do that latter thing. Hitting them all in succession, one by one. She was holding both sticks, but used just one when she went through the set fron left to right. Tentatively, at first, but with a little more force, a little more assuredly for each successive one. Louder was better, if you asked her.

It was instinctive.

"Next thing is rhythm," Dante said. "But you seem to be getting the hang of it quick."

"Rhythm is easy." It came naturally, she'd noticed, at least in some other areas of life. "But there's two sticks...?"

That was where it sounded like it would get tricky.

"So you can hit multiple things at once," Dante said, shrugging.

Octavia's brief look seemed to suggest that wasn't exactly helpful.

Still, she took both the sticks, this time, and hit two different things with them. At the same time. "Like that?"

"Like the snare drum and the crash cymbal," Dante said, finally providing some details as he gestured at various components. "And you can hit the big drum by hitting that pedal with your foot."

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Groovy Tunes, Friday

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