Date Night
Summary: It's the first date for all of them, but… oops, someone forgot to check the calendar first…
Notes: Will contain several prompts from the E/O challenge. And since I can't write a story with just 100 words with the Winchesters for my life, I decided to give you that instead. Title is from the movie with Tina Fey and Steve Carell, but the story is not in the tiniest bit related to the movie plot. It's practically based on a song by Reinhard Mey, a German songwriter and singer, who really has a knack for describing life-like situations. Set in an all-human AU. Oh, and a big apologize to the inhabitants of the real Lawrence, Kansas, in case I got anything wrong with your sweet town.
Extra-Note: I sneaked in the titles of some TV shows. Extra virtual cookies to everyone who is able to find them.
Disclaimer: Do I really have to say it? *looks up to see nods from Dean, Cas and Green Arrow, who just swept in* Okay, okay, I'll do it. Whatever you recognize in this little tale, it's not mine. Otherwise some shows would still be on, and on some other shows characters wouldn't have to leave. And I would have a bit more money at hand from the songs I used for inspiration alone.
Chapter 1 - Introduction
Lawrence, Kansas.
A nice little town right in the middle of nowhere and anywhere, surrounded by cornfields. And cornfields. And on top of that – cornfields. Its inhabitants were sure that they were the corn center of Kansas, but the not quite bigger town of Smallville, just a few miles north, claimed that title for itself.
But when you got to dig a little deeper, you could see that Lawrence was a bit more than just a regular Midwestern town. Sure, they had their typical joints, like Ellen's Diner or the old movie theatre or Seb's bar, but on the other hand they had some places they were sure not every small town had. Just like the pastry shop on the corner of Franklin & Bash, owned by Gabriel Milton, whom the townspeople pretty fast referred to as "the heaven-sent gift for the sweet teeth in town". Little did most of them know that Gabriel grew up in Lawrence, along with his brothers and sisters. But when Gabriel just had turned ten, the children's life took a wrong turn. Their mother, who really never got over the fact that her husband just left her one day, took off herself in a kind of religious fever and was never seen since then. Lucky for them, their Uncle Chuck agreed to have custody over the younger ones, including Gabe, Cas and Anna. The older kids, led by Michael and Lucas, were already on the way to their own lives, but they all stayed in town more or less. After a few years, when every search party for their mother came up empty, a judge wanted Chuck to have the kids' family name changed to his surname Shurley, but the dedicated writer wanted his nieces and nephews to keep the name Milton, since he didn't want them suffering from his less successful books.
But the Milton kids weren't the only kids in Lawrence who were met with a cruel change of fate. Only a few years after the Milton case, the young lives of Sam and Dean Winchester also took a dark turn. On their way home from a kids-free-weekend in a mountain retreat, their parents, John and Mary Winchester, died when their car crashed with a semi-truck only a few miles out of town. In the weeks following their funeral, both boys, five-year-old Dean and barely-a-year-old Sam, were centered in a juristic battle between Mary's relatives, the Campbells, and their appointed (by John and Mary in a written document of a last wish) guardian, Bobby Singer. And lucky for the boys, the judge took only one look at Samuel Campbell, the patriarch of the practically unknown family, and decided to keep the boys in town, in the capable hands of Bobby Singer and his neighbor Ellen Harvelle.
Over the years, Dean, Sam, Castiel and Gabriel met each other on several times. At first, Dean and Gabe really couldn't stand each other, but after a few clashes, they found they had something in common. First, both were big brothers, and as that, dedicated guardians to their little ones. Second, both grew up without their parents. And last but not least, they both had a sweet tooth. But while Gabe's one was not too picky about what kind of sweet treat (as long as it was all sugar), Dean had developed a special liking to all kinds of pie.
But not only had the elder brothers of the quartet some things in common, the younger ones had too. Both Sam and Cas were A-grade students, top of their classes and even had the opportunity to study at Harvard (Cas) or Stanford (Sam). But both declined and started their studies at the Kansas A&E instead. While Sam chose to go for a career as a lawyer (or as Dean had put it, to become one of the "Suits"), Cas enlisted himself in Psychology with a later specification on Children's Psychology. He knew first-hand what traumatic events can do to a child's mind, and so it was crystal-clear to him to help other kids with overcoming such events.
None of the four could pinpoint it, but somewhere along the road they all had fallen in love. Not with just anyone, but with one of their quartet. The big problem was that none of them could utter their true feelings. Dean was too much an alpha male, Sam was afraid of the reaction, Cas was too deep in his books to notice anything at first sight, and Gabriel… well Gabriel was too dedicated to his work that he also failed to notice anything. But thanks to some "playful" threats from Ellen, her daughter Jo, the three elder Milton brothers Michael, Lucas and Balthazar, and last but not least one Bobby Singer, all four of them managed to open their proverbial eyes at the right time. And so, after years of goofing and dancing around each other, Dean and Cas as well as Sam and Gabriel were heading for the preparations for their very first date.