route_1065 | what if the world was made of other worlds

Entry tags:

what if the world was made of other worlds

Who:

exeggutorhead
Where: Goldenrod Music Store
When: Today, afternoon
Summary: Envy teaches Miguel how the play the piano. Hopefully they won't kill each other
Rating: G _{possibly PG for language}
Log:

Well this was... unexpected. It was one of the last things he had thought would happen really, when he first set his eyes on the lanky boy with the ridiculous hair. He had hated - no, Miguel doesn't hate - disliked him a lot already from the start. Then the christmas episode happened and now this.

In a music store, by a ~~harpsichord~~ Piano. Envy beside him on the wide stool, willingly (but maybe not all too happy about it) offering to teach Miguel how to play.

Yeah, he certainly hadn't thought this was gonna happen.

"Right, so, how exactly do I do this?"

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Envy had not exactly been expecting this to happen either. Sure he'd offered back on Christmas, but he hadn't thought that Miguel would actually take him up on it. Or that he'd actually (somewhat reluctantly) decide to go through on it after all. Neither of them had ever made it much of a secret that they'd barely tolerated each other since the moment they met, but since Tulio had gotten poisoned during that bug swarm and they'd had to work together, Envy hadn't been feeling quite as much dislike for Miguel.

Not to mention, maybe this could help get Miguel off his case about sticking with the two of them.

It was a good thing he'd already built up an identity in this shop as 'that nice young man who comes in to play sometimes', because that made borrowing the piano for lessons a lot easier. He glances over at Miguel before putting his hands on the keys in the proper position, "You put your hands like this first."

He withdraws his hands and gestures at Miguel to copy him.

Miguel had made some improvements regarding Envy. He wasnt.. disliking him a lot anymore. That said, he didn't like him. No, he just.. tolerated him to some extent. That didn't mean things were fine and dandy between them though. Quite the opposite. It was still a horribly awkward tension constantly present whenever they tried to not argue, be at each others throat, or compete about Tulio's attention.

They seemed to have at least one thing in common and it was this. Music.

"Right, like this and.. then I just press the keys?" He doesn't do it just yet, instead glancing at Envy for confirmation.

"Yeah, but not yet. Your hands are off..." He frowns, and just reaches on over to start adjusting Miguel's hands to the right position. He's way too impatient to just tell him what to do. He doesn't find it awkward, but that doesn't mean he's going to keep it up any longer than necessary. Once he's satisfied with the hands, he moves his own back to the keys on his side of the piano and plays an upwards scale.

"Try that." And then as an afterthought, "Can you read music?"

"Ookay." He just lets Envy do what he does. Tulio isn't here to stop them or keep them down, so he is best off trying not to argue or question or it WILL heat up into an argument, he's sure. Miguel does what he is told, and lo and behold, he does it and he does it easily. See Miguel. See Miguel excited.

"No, I learned how to play on my own. Without papers and all that."

Okay well Envy will give him a grudging nod, since that was pretty good, especially for his first time playing. And hey, maybe this won't be as frustrating as Envy thought if Miguel picks everything up that fast. He too, is attempting not to start an argument that would be easy to escalate.

"It'd be better if you learned how to read it anyway, it's not hard." He gets up, turning to say, "You...keep doing those scales, backwards and forwards."

Envy goes to the front to borrow a pencil and a scrap of paper from the front desk, and when he returns sits down to start scribbling down the scales Miguel was playing on paper, labeling the notes. He's also still paying half-attention to what Miguel is doing, correcting him if necessary. When his drawing is done, he taps Miguel's shoulder to stop him, and holds up the music. "See, this is what it looks like on paper. It's easy."

Remain optimistic and cheerful. That's all he have to do and things will go just fine. Hopefully. Well, thankfully, Miguel is good at that, and he happily keeps playing the scales. It's real Harpsichord for christ sake! Or well a Piano, but that's pretty much just the modern counterpart to Harpsichord. You know what, that's even more awesome. He's playing an instrument that didn't even exist back home!

"Riiight." He takes the note from Envy and stares at it for a while in silence, trying to make sense of the lines and letters.

"I.. think I get it. Maybe. This is like, their names? The notes' names. And I just.. have to know which note corresponds to which... symbol." Short pause. Did that even make any sense? "Right?"

"Right, each note has a letter, and there's one for each hand. It repeats all the way down the piano."

He keeps explaining the notes and how they work until he thinks that Miguel's mostly gotten it, then draws up a short, very simple melody. "Here, try this one."

It was weird really, having gone this long without an argument. Almost like they were actually getting along. Envy tries to ignore that.

He looks at the melody, then at the notes again, then at the keys and back at the melody. And then he presses a key. Imagine someone writing on a computer's keyboard for the first time, and you get an idea of what it looks like. He plays the short melody over a few times, succesfully improving each time until he can play it almost without hesitating. (Hey, he's no musical genius)

"Well, that was pretty easy."

Well, as the first student Envy's ever had, he's definitely not doing badly. He looks impatient at first, when Miguel is going slowly, but as he actually improves that starts to get replaced by something resembling enthusiasm. "Heh, you're picking up better than I thought you would."

He cracks a slightly competitive grin before turning back to the paper to write down a melody that's slightly more complex than the first. "See if you can get this one."

While Miguel can play and recognize those few notes fairly easily now, with every new note that appears he has to go through the melody-note-keys procedure. He smiles a bit at the.. compliment? He will take it as a compliment.

It takes a little longer to learn this than the first one, but he does it and throws a slightly smug grin right back at Envy. "Easy."

Well, it's as close to a compliment as Miguel is going to get out of Envy anyway. He keeps on giving Miguel little melodies, figuring that it was working well enough so far. Besides, it made things feel a bit more normal, to present the lesson as almost a competition. Even if it was one that Envy didn't mind losing, if you could call it losing, because he was still accomplishing what they were there for in the first place.

Eventually, between songs, he figures that he may as well voice something he's been a little curious about. "So what did you play before?"

Migel gladly accepts this as a contest rather than an actual lesson of some kind, and it lowers the tension and the awkward feeling a bit. It's pretty repetitive of course, but it's not like he minds. At some parts he only have to glance at the note to know which key to press, and he can pull off the melody-note-keys procedure fairly quickly now.

"Mandolin - whenever I got ahold of one - and Lute, they're pretty smiliar."

Even Envy knows that the repetition is how the learning happens, even if he is going at a...more accelerated pace than most actual piano teachers would suggest. But hey, Miguel seems to be getting it, and it's not like they'll have access to a piano forever.

"I've seen people play those, but I've never actually played one myself." Kind of normal conversation how did this happen.

"It's pretty easy. I learned it without.." He speaks slowly, makes pauses and all that, concentrating on the Piano and talking at the same time.

"...proper teaching, so.." And there he trails off, struggling with this little part of many notes in succession.

Envy lets him try to get the notes a little longer before moving his hands to the keys further down. "Here, it sounds like this." He plays the section Miguel's having trouble with at normal speed, and then again more slowly so that he can see what Envy's hands are doing.

"This isn't really proper teaching either, but..." he shrugs, "I haven't ever taught anyone before."

He mumbles something that sounds vaugely like "Oh, okay thanks" and then repeats the melody a few times over, making sure he got it right.

"I've never had anything even remotely like a teacher, so I dunno, but I think you're doing pretty well."

...Woah wait a second, is he complimenting Envy? What even happened.

"Trust me, you weren't missing out too much if you managed on your own."

Envy had liked exactly none of the people he'd learned from, even if he'd liked the music itself. "If I'd been one of my old ones, we'd still be working on your hand position."

He makes a little bit of a face at that. If given the option, he'd have rather learned on his own too.

"If you say so."

And here's quite an impressive eyebrow-raise.

"What? Is that really important?" Because to Miguel, that sounds just as weird as proper pen grip, if he'd known what that is.

"It is important, but I think making me do it for an entire lesson was more about discipline or something. You've been doing fine without all that." He waves a hand dismissively, not noticing that he complimented Miguel this time.

"How much longer do you want to keep going?"

"Sounds just like a big waste of time to me", and here he stops for a moment to glance at Envy. "You were you an unruly kid?" There is nothing condescending or mocking or anything like that in his voice. Just general curiousity.

"Uh, well. Until you tire. Or I tire, I guess."

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what if the world was made of other worlds

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