Fic Glee: Burn This Town Down Tonight (1/4), Lauren/Puck, Tina/Mike ensemble (Marching Band AU)
(Yay insomnia? I finally got this finished and edited; this is what's taken up a lot of my fannish time lately. Well, this and Tumblr.)
Title: Burn This Town Down Tonight
Author: escritoireazul
Written for: sotto_voice who loves marching band AUs.
Characters/Pairings: Lauren Zizes/Noah Puckerman, Tina Cohen-Chang/Mike Chang, Mercedes Jones, Quinn Fabray, Kurt Hummel, Blaine Anderson, Matt Rutherford, Finn Hudson, Santana Lopez, Brittany S. Pierce, Sam Evans, Will Schuester (later stories will include Blaine/Kurt, Santana/Brittany, and Artie Abrams, plus other pairings)
Author's note: This is a transformative work of fiction for the television show Glee. It is also an alternate universe in which they are all in marching band instead of glee club. I've played pretty fast with their ages, but most of the glee club members we know are juniors, except for Matt, a senior. This is story one.
Rating: 16+ for underage sexual activity
Word count: 13,500+
Summary: You'd think by now they would be prepared for how wild band camp gets, but Lauren Zizes didn't see these two weeks coming.
Burn This Town Down Tonight
Part One LJ, DW | Part Two LJ, DW
Part Three LJ, DW | Part Four LJ, DW
In just a glance, down here on magic street
Loves a fool's dance
And I ain't got much sense, but I still got my feet
"Girls in Their Summer Clothes" Bruce Springsteen
August
1.
By the time marching band camp actually kicks off in August before junior year, Lauren is ready for classes to start just so she’ll get a goddamn break from the rest of the drumline. Not that she hates them or anything, but unlike all the other sections except color guard, drumline doesn’t take the summer off. In June, they meet three times a week to practice. In July, four times a week. In August, they get two weeks off while the football players have their intensive camp, but then band camp begins. Anyone who’s around is expected to meet up for impromptu practices during their break anyway.
(She complains as much as the rest of them, and she’s sick of stinky boys and their stupid sometimes sexist bonding, but they’re gonna take high honors this year or drop dead in the middle of their drum feature. They came in second last year, behind Carmel, and there is no way in hell they’re letting that happen again.)
Marching band is serious business at McKinley. (Even after you graduate. When they lost to Carmel, her brother called and ranted for twenty minutes when he found out. Lauren sat there and took it. She was just a sophomore, the seniors hadn’t listened to her ideas anyway, but she should have tried harder. She should have made sure the freshman and sophomores were better. If she was half the leader her brother had been, they would have won. He doesn’t say any of that; she knows he’s not thinking it either. But all four years he was on the line, even when he was a freshman, the drumline won high honors and now, his first year out, they haven’t. She can’t help but feel like the replacement Zizes, and a faulty one at that.) Maybe it’s because they win competitions while the football team loses every game, but at McKinley, Friday night games are all about the halftime show and the band playing pep music in the stands.
Maybe that’s gonna change. They’ve got a new football coach, some ringer from Missouri who’s won championships at every school where she’s ever coached. There was a big rumble when she got hired, because first thing she did was say that her football players couldn’t also be in marching band. (Or play any other sports, but that part didn’t cause the same uproar.) That didn’t go over very well. Rumor has it, Mr. Schuester sweet talked her into changing her mind and her practice schedule, but from what Lauren’s seen of Coach Beiste, it’s pretty doubtful that she fell for Mr. Schue’s song and dance. In the end, she doesn’t care why Coach Beiste changed her mind, she’s just glad she did. Losing some of the football players wouldn’t matter -- whoever thought it was a good idea to give clumsy Hudson a sousaphone was an idiot -- but some of them, like Mike Chang in color guard and Sam Evans on saxophone, that would be a loss.
Still, there’s an unexpected benefit to a tough new football coach, and that is this: all the football players have been running two-a-days for the past few weeks, so now under the hot August sun, the view is even more impressive when they strip off their shirts. Goddamn, Coach Beiste may just end up being her new hero for a couple reasons.
During their midmorning break the first day, Lauren slumps into the shade, wets her washcloth with cold water from her thermos, and places it along the back of her neck. Her hair’s pulled back into two buns on the top of her head, tiny curls coming free along the nape of her neck, matted down with sweat.
The drumline and the color guard are always the last two sections off the field, not because they’re the worst, but because it’s a competition, sort of, who can be the toughest. Not necessarily between each other, but they definitely put the rest of the band in its place. They practice longer and harder and way more frequently. Even so, there’s always room in the shade for them if they want it, and today Lauren absolutely does.
Tina leans her practice flag against the wall and slides down to sit next to Lauren. It’s weird to see her without any make-up, even though she would have sweated it all off by now anyway. Her nails are intricately painted to make up for it, and her hair freshly dyed.
“So,” Lauren says, dragging it out a little. Tina doesn’t bite, just pushes her sunglasses up her nose and takes a drink of water.
Mike is standing by the bleachers, still in full sun. His shirt is off, and he kind of glistens a little, sweat and perfect fucking abs. Thank you, Coach Beiste. He’s watching them, spinning his wooden rifle mindlessly, whipping it around his hands with an ease that belies how difficult some of those moves actually are. The only reason Lauren knows they’re hard is because of Tina.
He grins suddenly. Lauren glances over at Tina and sees her smiling, too. She arches an eyebrow and bumps her knee against Tina’s thigh.
“Okay, spill, Cohen-Chang. You’ve been all giddy ever since you got back from camp, but you haven’t said a word about it.”
“I haven’t seen you,” Tina protests. “It’s not my fault you left on vacation as soon as I got back.”
“Whatever, you could have texted me, or emailed me, or called me.”
“I wanted to tell you face to face.” Tina tilts her head back against the wall, beaming at the sky. “It’s just that amazing.”
Lauren drops her voice into a hissed whisper. “You totally hooked up!”
Tina doesn’t nod, but she does smile even bigger than before.
“Damn.” Lauren gives Mike another look. He’s talking to some of the freshmen now, his back to them -- and what a back, goddamn, that boy is cut from all angles -- but he keeps twisting a little, glancing toward them and away. “Damn. He’s got it bad, too.”
“Yeah?” Tina leans into her even though it’s too hot to cuddle the way they will later in the season. “He’s really nice. I mean, really, really nice. I kinda thought, you know, football player, he’ll be just like the others, but no.”
Lauren grabs her wrist and gives it a little squeeze. Tina looks so happy, she can’t even be pissed that it took so long for her best friend to open up to her. She gets that sometimes, you need secrets.
There’s movement off to the side, and Lauren has trained herself to notice whenever the drumline section leader gets up, because even though the drum majors are still standing together, talking to Mr. Schue, that doesn’t matter for the drumline. As goes their section leader, so goes their world. Even if Matt, this year’s section leader, is possibly the quietest, least full of himself drummer and football player and senior Lauren’s ever met. He fucking knows his stuff, though, and so they follow him willingly. Sure enough, Matt gets up, picks up his snare drum, and settles the harness over his shoulders again.
“Damn it,” Lauren mutters, but wipes her face with the washcloth -- it’s still halfway cool -- takes a quick drink, and hauls herself to her feet, stretching her arms high overhead to work the tension out of her shoulders.
Tina’s expression twists into a sneer. “Puckerman’s watching you,” she mutters. Lauren finishes her stretch, not bothering to check. She trusts Tina, and anyway, she doesn’t care. (She viciously squashes that little part of her that does, the part that finds him hot as hell and wants to see if he’s as good with his hands on a body as he is on a drum. Hooking up with him, beyond being a phenomenally stupid idea, would break the code.) “Why’d they let him out of juvie anyway?”
There’s a lot of hate in Tina’s voice, but sort of, Lauren can’t blame her. It’s not necessarily that Puckerman was in juvie, because Tina’s not bothered by some rulebreaking. (Though possibly trying to steal an ATM goes too far.) It’s the whole thing with knocking up Quinn and then doing stupid, stupid shit when Quinn decided not to keep the baby. It’s not like anyone actually drew lines in the sand, but Quinn is their friend -- hell, Quinn is living with Mercedes still, too angry at her parents to go home -- and friendship trumps everything else. So Puckerman is the asshole who hurt their friend and went on a rampage after the baby was adopted that ended up with him in juvie.
(Sometimes, Lauren thinks that’s not exactly fair. Yes, he went on a stupid rampage and ended up in juvie, and Tina can judge him for that if she wants. But even though she absolutely, without any wavering, believes that it was Quinn’s choice whether to have an abortion or put the baby up for adoption or keep the baby, sometimes she feels a little sorry for Puckerman because it was his kid, too. She remembers when her brother’s girlfriend had that pregnancy scare a couple years ago, and Billy was scared, because yeah, they were way too young, but kind of excited too. His kid, he said, and one night they snuck up onto the roof and sat eating ice cream together and he whispered a little about teaching the kid to play catch and ride a bike and climb up on the roof and fix cars, just like he’d taught Lauren. There ended up being no baby, and Billy laughed it off after with relief, but sometimes, when they’re all so very carefully not talking about what happened between Quinn and Puckerman, Lauren can’t help but think about that night on the roof.)
Tina and Mercedes and Lauren are Team Quinn all the way, and so it doesn’t matter that occasionally Lauren sees Puckerman’s side of it, or that she’s thought him just about the hottest guy around since freshman year, or that sometimes he tries to talk to her before or after drumline sectionals and sometimes she wants to actually stop and listen to what he has to say. Quinn won’t look at him, won’t even say his name, and so he is totally off-limits.
Instead she shrugs at Tina. “See you at lunch.” She doesn’t even wait for confirmation, both because she knows they’ll grab lunch together on break, they always do, and because she’s a little afraid of what Tina might see in her face.
She picks up her quads and settles the harness over her shoulders, loving the weight of them pulling on her. Back at the end of eighth grade, she went with Billy to tryouts -- as a senior coming back for his final year, it was very unlikely he wouldn’t make the line -- and even though she knew there was no way an incoming freshman would make quads, part of her hoped the entire trip to school that she would.
She didn’t, but she wasn’t stuck on cymbals, either. She made the bass line, the only girl not on cymbals or in the pit. Probably Billy had a lot to do with that, because the other section leader was the kind of asshole who thought girls should play flute or, better yet, cheer from the sidelines, but she also played the hell out of her audition. Billy’d been on snare since his freshman year, one of the youngest to ever make the snare line, and he dragged her to the computer after the results were posted on the band’s website, and hugged her hard before she was even really done reading her name.
(Puckerman was also on the bass line, the two of them the only freshman. These days, she tries really, really hard not to think about that stupid party after they won their first competition, or the way Puckerman looked a little like a puppy dog for a couple weeks when she flat out ignored him after the party.)
Matt taps his sticks against the rim, a sharp sound that brings them all together around him. From the corner of her eye, she can see the biggest bass drum edge up next to her, and she very carefully doesn’t turn to look at Puckerman.
“Hey Zizes,” he says, his voice low. “Congrats on making quads.”
She clenches her hands around her sticks, but she can’t ignore that, she just can’t, not with his voice so quiet and not with her pride over finally, finally being where she belongs.
“Thanks.” Her voice is short, but she lets herself look at him quickly. His shirt’s off, and she’s not really sure how the guys stand wearing the harness against their bare skin, but god, she’s glad they do. He’s kind of golden from all the sun, and there’s this spot at his hip which cuts in so sharp she wants to bite it just to see what happens. She licks her lips without really thinking about it, and doesn’t notice until she realizes he’s staring at her mouth.
Fuck. She is so, so screwed.
“Line up,” Matt says. His voice carries well, but maybe that’s because he so rarely uses it they listen hard when he does. “We’re running the new cadence.”
Thank god for the excuse to move away from Puckerman. She joins the other quads and keeps her eyes resolutely on Matt, but she’s having a little trouble breathing steady. She does not want to kiss him. She can’t. Team Quinn, she reminds herself, and the friends code and--
Oh hell. She squeezes her sticks until her fingers ache, because she can’t lie to herself anymore. She really, really does want to kiss Puckerman again. And now that she’s admitted it, there’s only one thing to do.
Stay the hell away from him for the next two years. Despite twelve hour marching band bootcamp and sectionals on the weekends and long trips to competitions and then concert band season and crap.
She is so, so screwed.
This entry was original posted at http://escritoireazul.dreamwidth.org/330062.html with
comments. Reply here or there.
Title: Burn This Town Down Tonight
Author: escritoireazul
Written for: sotto_voice who loves marching band AUs.
Characters/Pairings: Lauren Zizes/Noah Puckerman, Tina Cohen-Chang/Mike Chang, Mercedes Jones, Quinn Fabray, Kurt Hummel, Blaine Anderson, Matt Rutherford, Finn Hudson, Santana Lopez, Brittany S. Pierce, Sam Evans, Will Schuester (later stories will include Blaine/Kurt, Santana/Brittany, and Artie Abrams, plus other pairings)
Author's note: This is a transformative work of fiction for the television show Glee. It is also an alternate universe in which they are all in marching band instead of glee club. I've played pretty fast with their ages, but most of the glee club members we know are juniors, except for Matt, a senior. This is story one.
Rating: 16+ for underage sexual activity
Word count: 13,500+
Summary: You'd think by now they would be prepared for how wild band camp gets, but Lauren Zizes didn't see these two weeks coming.
Burn This Town Down Tonight
Part One LJ, DW | Part Two LJ, DW
Part Three LJ, DW | Part Four LJ, DW
In just a glance, down here on magic street
Loves a fool's dance
And I ain't got much sense, but I still got my feet
"Girls in Their Summer Clothes" Bruce Springsteen
August
1.
By the time marching band camp actually kicks off in August before junior year, Lauren is ready for classes to start just so she’ll get a goddamn break from the rest of the drumline. Not that she hates them or anything, but unlike all the other sections except color guard, drumline doesn’t take the summer off. In June, they meet three times a week to practice. In July, four times a week. In August, they get two weeks off while the football players have their intensive camp, but then band camp begins. Anyone who’s around is expected to meet up for impromptu practices during their break anyway.
(She complains as much as the rest of them, and she’s sick of stinky boys and their stupid sometimes sexist bonding, but they’re gonna take high honors this year or drop dead in the middle of their drum feature. They came in second last year, behind Carmel, and there is no way in hell they’re letting that happen again.)
Marching band is serious business at McKinley. (Even after you graduate. When they lost to Carmel, her brother called and ranted for twenty minutes when he found out. Lauren sat there and took it. She was just a sophomore, the seniors hadn’t listened to her ideas anyway, but she should have tried harder. She should have made sure the freshman and sophomores were better. If she was half the leader her brother had been, they would have won. He doesn’t say any of that; she knows he’s not thinking it either. But all four years he was on the line, even when he was a freshman, the drumline won high honors and now, his first year out, they haven’t. She can’t help but feel like the replacement Zizes, and a faulty one at that.) Maybe it’s because they win competitions while the football team loses every game, but at McKinley, Friday night games are all about the halftime show and the band playing pep music in the stands.
Maybe that’s gonna change. They’ve got a new football coach, some ringer from Missouri who’s won championships at every school where she’s ever coached. There was a big rumble when she got hired, because first thing she did was say that her football players couldn’t also be in marching band. (Or play any other sports, but that part didn’t cause the same uproar.) That didn’t go over very well. Rumor has it, Mr. Schuester sweet talked her into changing her mind and her practice schedule, but from what Lauren’s seen of Coach Beiste, it’s pretty doubtful that she fell for Mr. Schue’s song and dance. In the end, she doesn’t care why Coach Beiste changed her mind, she’s just glad she did. Losing some of the football players wouldn’t matter -- whoever thought it was a good idea to give clumsy Hudson a sousaphone was an idiot -- but some of them, like Mike Chang in color guard and Sam Evans on saxophone, that would be a loss.
Still, there’s an unexpected benefit to a tough new football coach, and that is this: all the football players have been running two-a-days for the past few weeks, so now under the hot August sun, the view is even more impressive when they strip off their shirts. Goddamn, Coach Beiste may just end up being her new hero for a couple reasons.
During their midmorning break the first day, Lauren slumps into the shade, wets her washcloth with cold water from her thermos, and places it along the back of her neck. Her hair’s pulled back into two buns on the top of her head, tiny curls coming free along the nape of her neck, matted down with sweat.
The drumline and the color guard are always the last two sections off the field, not because they’re the worst, but because it’s a competition, sort of, who can be the toughest. Not necessarily between each other, but they definitely put the rest of the band in its place. They practice longer and harder and way more frequently. Even so, there’s always room in the shade for them if they want it, and today Lauren absolutely does.
Tina leans her practice flag against the wall and slides down to sit next to Lauren. It’s weird to see her without any make-up, even though she would have sweated it all off by now anyway. Her nails are intricately painted to make up for it, and her hair freshly dyed.
“So,” Lauren says, dragging it out a little. Tina doesn’t bite, just pushes her sunglasses up her nose and takes a drink of water.
Mike is standing by the bleachers, still in full sun. His shirt is off, and he kind of glistens a little, sweat and perfect fucking abs. Thank you, Coach Beiste. He’s watching them, spinning his wooden rifle mindlessly, whipping it around his hands with an ease that belies how difficult some of those moves actually are. The only reason Lauren knows they’re hard is because of Tina.
He grins suddenly. Lauren glances over at Tina and sees her smiling, too. She arches an eyebrow and bumps her knee against Tina’s thigh.
“Okay, spill, Cohen-Chang. You’ve been all giddy ever since you got back from camp, but you haven’t said a word about it.”
“I haven’t seen you,” Tina protests. “It’s not my fault you left on vacation as soon as I got back.”
“Whatever, you could have texted me, or emailed me, or called me.”
“I wanted to tell you face to face.” Tina tilts her head back against the wall, beaming at the sky. “It’s just that amazing.”
Lauren drops her voice into a hissed whisper. “You totally hooked up!”
Tina doesn’t nod, but she does smile even bigger than before.
“Damn.” Lauren gives Mike another look. He’s talking to some of the freshmen now, his back to them -- and what a back, goddamn, that boy is cut from all angles -- but he keeps twisting a little, glancing toward them and away. “Damn. He’s got it bad, too.”
“Yeah?” Tina leans into her even though it’s too hot to cuddle the way they will later in the season. “He’s really nice. I mean, really, really nice. I kinda thought, you know, football player, he’ll be just like the others, but no.”
Lauren grabs her wrist and gives it a little squeeze. Tina looks so happy, she can’t even be pissed that it took so long for her best friend to open up to her. She gets that sometimes, you need secrets.
There’s movement off to the side, and Lauren has trained herself to notice whenever the drumline section leader gets up, because even though the drum majors are still standing together, talking to Mr. Schue, that doesn’t matter for the drumline. As goes their section leader, so goes their world. Even if Matt, this year’s section leader, is possibly the quietest, least full of himself drummer and football player and senior Lauren’s ever met. He fucking knows his stuff, though, and so they follow him willingly. Sure enough, Matt gets up, picks up his snare drum, and settles the harness over his shoulders again.
“Damn it,” Lauren mutters, but wipes her face with the washcloth -- it’s still halfway cool -- takes a quick drink, and hauls herself to her feet, stretching her arms high overhead to work the tension out of her shoulders.
Tina’s expression twists into a sneer. “Puckerman’s watching you,” she mutters. Lauren finishes her stretch, not bothering to check. She trusts Tina, and anyway, she doesn’t care. (She viciously squashes that little part of her that does, the part that finds him hot as hell and wants to see if he’s as good with his hands on a body as he is on a drum. Hooking up with him, beyond being a phenomenally stupid idea, would break the code.) “Why’d they let him out of juvie anyway?”
There’s a lot of hate in Tina’s voice, but sort of, Lauren can’t blame her. It’s not necessarily that Puckerman was in juvie, because Tina’s not bothered by some rulebreaking. (Though possibly trying to steal an ATM goes too far.) It’s the whole thing with knocking up Quinn and then doing stupid, stupid shit when Quinn decided not to keep the baby. It’s not like anyone actually drew lines in the sand, but Quinn is their friend -- hell, Quinn is living with Mercedes still, too angry at her parents to go home -- and friendship trumps everything else. So Puckerman is the asshole who hurt their friend and went on a rampage after the baby was adopted that ended up with him in juvie.
(Sometimes, Lauren thinks that’s not exactly fair. Yes, he went on a stupid rampage and ended up in juvie, and Tina can judge him for that if she wants. But even though she absolutely, without any wavering, believes that it was Quinn’s choice whether to have an abortion or put the baby up for adoption or keep the baby, sometimes she feels a little sorry for Puckerman because it was his kid, too. She remembers when her brother’s girlfriend had that pregnancy scare a couple years ago, and Billy was scared, because yeah, they were way too young, but kind of excited too. His kid, he said, and one night they snuck up onto the roof and sat eating ice cream together and he whispered a little about teaching the kid to play catch and ride a bike and climb up on the roof and fix cars, just like he’d taught Lauren. There ended up being no baby, and Billy laughed it off after with relief, but sometimes, when they’re all so very carefully not talking about what happened between Quinn and Puckerman, Lauren can’t help but think about that night on the roof.)
Tina and Mercedes and Lauren are Team Quinn all the way, and so it doesn’t matter that occasionally Lauren sees Puckerman’s side of it, or that she’s thought him just about the hottest guy around since freshman year, or that sometimes he tries to talk to her before or after drumline sectionals and sometimes she wants to actually stop and listen to what he has to say. Quinn won’t look at him, won’t even say his name, and so he is totally off-limits.
Instead she shrugs at Tina. “See you at lunch.” She doesn’t even wait for confirmation, both because she knows they’ll grab lunch together on break, they always do, and because she’s a little afraid of what Tina might see in her face.
She picks up her quads and settles the harness over her shoulders, loving the weight of them pulling on her. Back at the end of eighth grade, she went with Billy to tryouts -- as a senior coming back for his final year, it was very unlikely he wouldn’t make the line -- and even though she knew there was no way an incoming freshman would make quads, part of her hoped the entire trip to school that she would.
She didn’t, but she wasn’t stuck on cymbals, either. She made the bass line, the only girl not on cymbals or in the pit. Probably Billy had a lot to do with that, because the other section leader was the kind of asshole who thought girls should play flute or, better yet, cheer from the sidelines, but she also played the hell out of her audition. Billy’d been on snare since his freshman year, one of the youngest to ever make the snare line, and he dragged her to the computer after the results were posted on the band’s website, and hugged her hard before she was even really done reading her name.
(Puckerman was also on the bass line, the two of them the only freshman. These days, she tries really, really hard not to think about that stupid party after they won their first competition, or the way Puckerman looked a little like a puppy dog for a couple weeks when she flat out ignored him after the party.)
Matt taps his sticks against the rim, a sharp sound that brings them all together around him. From the corner of her eye, she can see the biggest bass drum edge up next to her, and she very carefully doesn’t turn to look at Puckerman.
“Hey Zizes,” he says, his voice low. “Congrats on making quads.”
She clenches her hands around her sticks, but she can’t ignore that, she just can’t, not with his voice so quiet and not with her pride over finally, finally being where she belongs.
“Thanks.” Her voice is short, but she lets herself look at him quickly. His shirt’s off, and she’s not really sure how the guys stand wearing the harness against their bare skin, but god, she’s glad they do. He’s kind of golden from all the sun, and there’s this spot at his hip which cuts in so sharp she wants to bite it just to see what happens. She licks her lips without really thinking about it, and doesn’t notice until she realizes he’s staring at her mouth.
Fuck. She is so, so screwed.
“Line up,” Matt says. His voice carries well, but maybe that’s because he so rarely uses it they listen hard when he does. “We’re running the new cadence.”
Thank god for the excuse to move away from Puckerman. She joins the other quads and keeps her eyes resolutely on Matt, but she’s having a little trouble breathing steady. She does not want to kiss him. She can’t. Team Quinn, she reminds herself, and the friends code and--
Oh hell. She squeezes her sticks until her fingers ache, because she can’t lie to herself anymore. She really, really does want to kiss Puckerman again. And now that she’s admitted it, there’s only one thing to do.
Stay the hell away from him for the next two years. Despite twelve hour marching band bootcamp and sectionals on the weekends and long trips to competitions and then concert band season and crap.
She is so, so screwed.
This entry was original posted at http://escritoireazul.dreamwidth.org/330062.html with
comments. Reply here or there.