Plum

WITHOUT FURTHER ADO, i present to you the marching band au~

maybe tweak some ages here and there. use your imagination. carl is in school for forestry, and instead of joining the military he's in his university's very militant-style marching band. he's a trumpet player. fight me. bea thinks it's super lame, but her pre-teen daughter, who refuses to respond to any name other than donut (it's gotta be some sort of phrase), thinks it's super cool carl is a performer. donut even insisted on doing majorette/color guard style routines for the talent section of the beauty pageants bea forces her into after watching carl's school perform a half-time show. bea hates that. bea thinks all of this is dumb. because bea thinks it's stupid, she keeps tearing up the mail carl is bombarded with from some dumb competitive marching corps called "dungeon crawler international", or DCI for short (no relation to the very real drum corps international, ALSO called DCI, obviously.) 

well, when bea leaves for vacation over winter break, carl finally gets his hands on one of those recruitment letters. he thinks it's interesting, but he wants to be a park ranger, not a musician. donut is obsessed with the idea and wants him to audition anyways. he shrugs it off, because it would require being away all summer and bea already thinks the music stuff is dumb. WELL, carl later finds out bea cheated on him over winter break, so he decides fuck it. im auditioning. donut is elated. despite not being her biological father, carl fights bea to let donut stay with him over the summer IF he gets into the band.

so ok he practices all winter for spring auditions for DCI. for the audition he's gotta play a piece and march a set for the kind of creepy director of the band (who is definitely the AI. idk if you've ever been in a marching band, but there is a lot of getting yelled at for toe and foot position, and it's usually by a crazy person on a tower over you with a big megaphone, shouting at people with a mysterious detached voice. it's a good role for the ai.) carls sort of nervous before the audition, and thanks to a accidentally-untied shoe, he steps out of his shoe at the beginning of the marching part of the audition and has to do basically the whole thing with one of his feet bare. the director absolutely eats this up, and offers carl a position in the band on the spot, commending him for his showmanship.

so ok he gets in, summer comes, he gets the lowdown on how there are 18 competitions this season, and the band has to place in all of them to go to nationals. he gets permission to let donut watch practices and she's thrilled to meet real actual color guard members, Elle and Imani. carl worries donut is bothering the women, but they're thrilled to talk to her and show her tricks she can use for future pageants.

carl slowly makes friends with other musicians, becomes especially close with another player in the trumpet section called Katia. His section leader is an older guy called Mordecai, and carl has to pretend the hot older guy the keeps commenting on his lips and posture isn't the most flustering thing in the world. to make it worse, mordecai is incredibly sweet to donut, and that's the final nail in the coffin for carl. this isn't much of a problem though, because the director seemingly hates how close the two are becoming, and keeps switching which instrument mordecai plays for each show. It's no problem for mordecai, whose done this for years and is proficient at most instruments, but it bugs carl to no end. 

I don't have much mapped from there but small things happen. katia switches from trumpet to sousaphone, which saddens carl. eventually carl gets the opportunity to switch to baritone, which he takes, however he regrets it because that's what the director apparently played in college, and he is delighted to believe carl chose baritone to get closer to him (not true btw.) there's a weird kid whose obsessed with music called prepotente who is too young to join the band but demands to watch every rehearsal. he takes an extreme liking to carl, who tries to placate the kid but is a like weirded out. 

so yeah, that's kinda it for now. very silly and definitely a crack au, but fun to think about. it was inspired by a marching arrangement I came across of take on me lol.