I want a summer camp au so badly for TAZ. I don't even care who is in it. I just want to see my beautiful children at camp.
so i think it would make more sense for everyone to be counselors, but it’s more fun for me if they’re campers. taako and lup resent their family for sending them away to the middle of bumfuck nowhere for the summer.
lup warms up to the idea of “camp” much more quickly than taako does. she’s all about building fires, roasting marshmallows… telling scary stories that make magnus wet his pants.
speaking of scary stories, one night a counselor tells everyone about the thing that lives in the forest - though “living” might be too generous a term for what it does. it’s attracted to - or, well, enraged by - the glow of the campfire, and if you’re not careful, it might snuff you out along with the light. if you go into the woods during the witching hour… if you peer just past the treeline… you might find a dozen pairs of hungry eyes staring back.
it’s meant to be a cautionary tale about not staying up past curfew and/or going out into the forest alone - so obviously after everyone else goes to sleep, greg grimaldis dares lup to go check out that noise they heard in the brush. if she can stand fifteen minutes alone in the woods, he’ll give her fifteen dollars.
lup’s not a chicken, so she goes.
surprising exactly no one, she does not come back. must have been eaten by the hunger, yeah?
(she went too far into the woods, got a little lost, tripped on a root, and sprained her ankle badly enough that she couldn’t get up and find her way back)
taako, magnus, merle, and barry head into the forest to look for her. shenanigans ensue. i think they get spooked by a noise, and someone throws lit matches towards the sound. you know, so that the hunger will chase the light instead of them as they run away. good plan, guys.
in the chaos of their escape they a. start a small forest fire and b. lose barry. whoops.
thb have to find lup and barry and get out of the burning woods before someone gets hurt; camp director lucretia is going to kill them if they get out of this alive.
anyways their terrible, horrible, no good, very bad night in the woods is the plot of the story, i think. here’s some less dramatic headcanons that may or may not fit into the above au:
though she knows how to roast the perfect marshmallow, lup prefers to set hers on fire and eat the charred remains, much to taako’s dismay.
taako teaches barry how to swim in the lake so he doesn’t have to wear floaties in front of lup
at one point, merle gets dared to eat poison ivy (he does)
magnus does not get dared to eat a rock (but he does)
kravitz, who attends the music camp across the lake, accidentally(?) shoves merle into the afformentioned patch of poison ivy. however, it’s magnus who breaks merle’s arm on the way to the nurse’s office. he’s never going to hear the end of that one.