SPN FIC - It's the Great Pumpkin, Dean Winchester
Continuing the saga of the Farm Verse, at the request of jensenlover89 -- who created this gorgeous banner to help prod the Muse along!
It's the boys' second year on the farm, and they've grown to feel at home. In between jobs, there's plenty to keep busy with -- including a new project for Dean that starts off small and becomes... well, ENORMOUS.
"Dude," Sam said, peering down into the bucket, and nudging it gently with the toe of his boot. "How many pumpkins are you planning on, exactly?"
CHARACTERS: Dean, Sam, Jamie, and Wendy the dog
GENRE: Het (AU future!fic)
RATING: PG
SPOILERS: None
LENGTH: 4000 words
IT'S THE GREAT PUMPKIN, DEAN WINCHESTER
By Carol Davis
Dean's quest began, as many things do, with a seed.
Well…
Okay. With an entire dented aluminum pail full of seeds.
"Dude," Sam said, peering down into the bucket, and nudging it gently with the toe of his boot. "How many pumpkins are you planning on, exactly?"
"Dunno," Dean replied. "A bunch."
"There's like - a billion seeds here, man."
Dean scowled at that for a moment - and took his own long look down into the pail - before he shrugged. "I figure not all of 'em 'll sprout. Germinate. You know? There's gotta be some duds in there. And I could remind you about the great radish experiment. At Pastor Jim's that summer. Remember? You spent the whole damn summer watering and fussing and picking bugs off the leaves and driving the rest of us absolutely freaking insane, and you ended up with three radishes." When Sam didn't reply, Dean prodded, flipping up fingers as he spoke, "Count 'em. Three little radishes, all in a row."
"I remember," Sam grumbled.
"I got this all figured out, man. Besides. My tomatoes? You gotta admit, I grew some awesome tomatoes. How much harder could pumpkins be?"
"I guess we'll find out," Sam said.
~~~~~~~~
"Can I tell you something?" Dean asked on an afternoon when the little plants were the size of his thumb.
Jamie smiled at him from arm's reach away.
"Of course," she said.
She'd pulled her hair back into a loose ponytail, and there was a big smudge of dirt across her cheek. No makeup. Old, stretched-out t-shirt and jeans, a beat-up pair of white Keds. Sitting on her heels in the dirt, with the summer sunlight falling on her back and shoulders, she was close to being the prettiest thing he'd ever seen. And her being willing to crawl around on the ground with him, tending to his little plants?
Tough to beat something like that.
"I couldn't do this all the time," he said quietly. "Some people do. You know? Up before the sun, out in the fields doing their thing all day long. That's awesome. And I guess we'd be kind of screwed if nobody was willing to do it. But me - it's kind of not what I am. Couldn't be out here all the time, communing with nature. That kind of stuff."
"Sure," she said. "You have a different calling."
He looked down at his hands, caked with grime. "But when I do do it? God, it feels good. Being out here. Nurturing something like this. Helping it grow. Most of the time, when I get my hands dirty, it's from digging up a grave. This is - it feels like it's healing my soul. And that probably sounds pretty stupid."
"I don't think it's stupid at all."
"For real?"
"It's part of why I decided to come here. To stay. When I was a little girl, my grandparents lived out in the country. Not a real farm, just a big piece of land, but they grew their own vegetables, and they had some chickens. I loved helping them. Working in the garden. Those were some of the best times in my life."
"And now you're here."
"Now I'm here. With you and your pumpkins."
"And my compost."
She laughed abruptly, giggling at first, then full-out guffawing, her head tossed back. "Yes," she said when she could manage a few words. "You and your compost. My grave-defiling, produce-growing G-man and his compost."
When she fell silent, there was something in her eyes.
"Tomatoes, too," he said, before she could put the something into words. "My tomatoes friggin' rock."
~~~~~~~~
For the kids, he figured; that had been his plan from the get-go. A big open field full of pumpkins for the local kids to run through, looking for the one that would make the perfect jack o'lantern. It wouldn't generate much income, because there weren't that many local kids to begin with, and he was far from the only person growing pumpkins within, say, half an hour's drive.
For weeks, he marveled at the thought of a dozen kids of varying ages, shapes and sizes running through the field, shrieking and laughing, the way he and Sam had done so long ago it seemed like someone else's life.
"You sure?" Sam asked, somewhere along the line.
"Yeah."
"You want a bunch of noisy ankle-biters running around the place."
There was no criticism in Sam's tone, or in his eyes. He seemed honestly curious. Maybe he had a little yearning of his own to hear the laughter of children. To sit on the porch in the sunshine, in the old rocking chair he favored, sipping a beer and watching little kids have fun.
"Yeah," Dean said.
But when the pumpkins started to grow, another thought occurred to him.
Out at the far edge of the field, one of the pumpkins had had a growth spurt and was far and away the biggest of the bunch. Dean took to calling it Sam in the privacy of his thoughts, because the thing had the potential to be the Sasquatch of pumpkins. When it got to be the size of a melon, while the rest were still tomato-sized, he pointed it out to the human Sam and said, "There's a contest, you know. Down at the county seat. Biggest pumpkin. They give out cash. And a ribbon."
Sam pondered that for a minute, then observed, "People work their whole lives on something like that, Dean."
"Yeah. And?"
"It gets kind of intense."
They'd both seen a news article the year before: two men bickering over pumpkins. There'd been shots fired. A broken nose, a broken arm. Somebody's truck had been trashed. It had seemed to both of them at the time that it was like so many stupid fights - no real point to it, nothing gained at the end of it. Less than nothing, really, because both participants were disqualified from the competition they'd fought so bitterly to win.
"Kind of want to give it a try," Dean said. "Just to see."
Sam shrugged, the kind of shrug that said he was willing to stand around and watch.
"A nice one, though," Dean said. "Some of those big suckers are uglier than sheep shit. Just a big giant lump of stuff. Couldn't take a ribbon for something like that. It'd be like pinning a ribbon to the biggest compost heap."
"So you want to grow the biggest pretty pumpkin."
"No harm in that," Dean replied.
"But you're still gonna do the other ones. The littler ones, for the kids."
There was a yearning in Sam's expression that made Dean think of a much tinier Sam, in rolled-up jeans and a warm sweater, prowling earnestly through the pumpkin patch Pastor Jim had brought them to on a chilly October Saturday. He did not want just any pumpkin, he'd announced; he wanted his pumpkin. Finding it took the best part of an hour, and when he had finally made his choice, the fruit was too big and heavy for him to lift.
There had been tears of dismay. Of defeat.
"Course I am," Dean assured his brother. "Got a whole field of 'em out there."
~~~~~~~~
He thought, for a fleeting moment (or maybe it was just blind hope) that most of the effort involved in growing the biggest pumpkin rested firmly on the pumpkin's own shoulders. That maybe big-ness was the result of good genes, or some fluke of nature.
As in Sam's case.
Who knew it'd involve plucking all the littler pumpkins from that particular vine? Untethering the vine itself from the ground to prevent it from tearing away from the stem? Devoting tender care to the leaves and roots, setting up a whole damned irrigation system to provide water to the plant, yet keeping the moisture off the leaves?
And the bugs.
Son of a bitch.
"The tomatoes were not this hard," he grumbled, not especially interested in whether anyone could hear him or not.
"No?"
He sighed. Sighed again when Jamie rested her hands on his shoulders and began to massage out some of the kinks.
"World record's over a ton. You know that? A friggin' ton of pumpkin. This isn't gonna get anywhere near that."
"You could -"
He shook his head, hard, before she could complete the thought. "Not giving up. Didn't get into this so I could give up."
~~~~~~~~
"That's impressive," Sam said in the heart of the August heat, when Dean had taken to supplementing the irrigation system by hauling buckets of water out to his struggling pumpkin from the faucet in the barn. For some reason, Sam seemed to flourish in the heat; rather than sit indoors in front of a fan (as was Jamie's usual choice, when she wasn't in town, working in the air-conditioned comfort of Stony Joe's, or soaking in a cool bath in her tiny apartment over the bar), he preferred to tote his book, or his laptop, or both, out onto the porch. That gave him the ability to survey their kingdom every time he looked up, he told Dean. He was drenched in sweat most of the time, but seemed not to notice. Nor did he seem to notice, or care, that he was almost perpetually sunburned.
"Feels good," he shrugged when Dean pointed out that he was very nearly deep-fried.
Compared to Hell, Dean supposed, it wasn't bad.
As the two of them had, time after time, the pumpkin endured. Grew larger day by day, and looked healthy.
By Labor Day, it was the size of a beach ball.
By mid-September, the top of it was level with Dean's belt buckle.
By the first of October it had reached shoulder height.
"Damn," Sam said when he strolled out through the field to join Dean alongside what Dean now thought of not as Sam but as The Pumpkin That Ate Cleveland.
"I think it's the dirt," Dean mused. "You think there's something in the dirt?"
"What, like fallout from outer space?"
"I mean - I composted the hell out of it. I guess that helped. But, dude. Everybody in town talks about my tomatoes, and it's not like I know what the hell I'm doing. I follow instructions off the Internet. And now this."
Curious, Sam leaned in closer to the gigantic fruit.
"Look out!" Dean yelped. "Don't scratch it, you dumbass!"
"It's fine," Sam soothed. "I'm not touching it. You told me all about fungus and mildew and how not to damage the skin. Believe me, I heard you. I have nightmares about you building a force field around this pumpkin."
"Better not scratch it," Dean muttered.
Keeping a respectful distance, Sam circled the pumpkin, hands clasped behind his back. "That's gotta - I don't even know how much that thing weighs. Are you still figuring on hauling it all the way to the county seat? We could get one of those little trailers from U-Haul, man, but it's gonna be one bitch of a job getting it up onto a trailer."
Dean scowled at him.
"Dean," Sam said.
"Yeah. What?"
"You weren't figuring on us lifting this thing, were you?"
"It ain't that big."
"Dude."
"We could build a ramp. Roll it up."
"Roll it," Sam echoed.
"Those guys in Egypt hauled giant friggin' blocks of granite up a slope to build the pyramids. How hard could this be?"
"You're not serious. Are you serious?"
"It's a fruit, Sam."
"And if we scratch it in the process, you're gonna have a massive stroke and die. Dean. That pumpkin weighs half a ton if it's an ounce! There's no way the two of us are gonna get it up onto a trailer - and that's assuming it doesn't get any bigger in the next two weeks, which seems pretty unlikely - unless you've developed some fantastic power of teleportation you didn't bother to tell me about."
"Okay," Dean said. "I'll do it myself."
"You do that," Sam told him, and turned to walk away.
~~~~~~~~
"I get no respect," Dean said, after he'd finished chewing and swallowing his mouthful of burger. Breaking the habits of a lifetime was no easy task; Dad had stopped chiding him about his table manners when he was in his mid-teens (had, apparently, figured it was a lost cause), and he'd always made a point of ignoring Sam's frequent and fervent complaints.
But now?
Girlfriend.
Not somebody he'd been leaving behind after a few days. Somebody who was sticking around for the duration.
"You get a lot of respect," Jamie told him.
"I do?"
"You do."
"When's that?"
"In town. Everybody who comes into the bar talks about your pumpkin."
"Yeah?"
How anyone had found out about the thing, Dean wasn't sure. Okay, it was visible from the road, but it wasn't like that road ever saw much traffic.
Maybe the UPS guy had said something, after he'd dropped off one of Sam's many eBay purchases. Or the guy who came periodically to pump out the septic tank - maybe he'd spilled the beans.
Or… okay. Dean himself might have mentioned the pumpkin a time or two.
Briefly.
In passing.
"They're impressed, huh?"
"They are."
And that was fine. That was all sorts of fine. The blistering heat of late summer and early fall had given way to crisp, cool days and chilly nights, Sam had stopped leaving shreds of his charbroiled skin all over the house, and the dog had stopped panting and gasping (something she seemed to do only in Dean's presence, never in Sam's, as if she were aware that Dean found it panic-inducing and, like Sam, she found making him hyperventilate to be The Best Game EVER).
The run of small-caliber cases that had dragged Dean reluctantly away from the care of his pumpkin had dropped off to a trickle.
Life was good.
Until the truck started cruising by.
It was easy enough to recognize; it was painted a peculiar shade of green (bile-puke green, Dean thought) and bore a pattern of rust spots and dents that was recognizable from a considerable distance (particularly with the aid of binoculars). At first, Dean figured someone new had moved into the area, or someone who'd been around a while had decided to add a junk truck to their fleet of vehicles rather than haul manure, or some similarly disgusting cargo, in anything nicer. If it had kept going, without slowing or stopping, that would have been a reasonable assumption.
But it slowed. Stopped.
"Who is that douchebag?" Dean demanded of his brother, as the truck slowed once again at the end of their driveway, chugged and coughed for a minute, then broke into warp speed and vanished from sight in a cloud of dust.
Sam blew out a long breath and said nothing.
"Well?" Dean prodded.
"I'm kind of thinking it's the competition."
"Compe -"
Broken bones. A bruised spleen. Shots fired. Somebody's Ford F-150 beaten all to shit, windshield smashed, tires flattened.
"Seriously?" Dean groaned.
"I told you, man. People devote their whole lives to this stuff."
"It's a frigging pumpkin."
"It's pride. Ego."
"It's a pumpkin."
"I'm just saying. If that thing keeps getting bigger, you might wake up one morning and find it in pieces all over the field. You know what they said in that documentary - people set up surveillance systems around their property. Guard dogs. They don't take any chances."
"That's out of control, Sam."
"Yeah. Tell me about it."
Dean shifted his chair a little and stared out across the field at his pumpkin, golden in the afternoon light.
"Stupid sonsofbitches," he muttered.
~~~~~~~~
He'd done more annoying things in his life than this, he figured. More worrisome things. More dangerous things.
So this was no big deal.
It was cold out here, but what the hell.
This was his pumpkin. The golden-orange, perfectly shaped, scratch-free, fragrant fruit he'd spent almost five solid months cultivating. It was a thing of beauty, second only to his Baby. And, well, Jamie. Though not in the same category as Jamie, being that Jamie was not a pumpkin. Or any other variety of produce.
"Warning shot," Sam had insisted when he saw Dean toting the shotgun.
"I'll start with that," Dean agreed.
"Dude. You can't shoot people over a pumpkin."
"I can shoot 'em if I feel they present a clear and present danger to my health and safety."
"Dean."
"It's loaded with rock salt."
"Take the dog."
Dean's gaze shifted over to the retriever, who was sprawled out on the rug in front of the fireplace. She peered at him through one eye and displayed no desire to move. He could summon her, he supposed, but how much of a vandalism deterrent she'd be was in serious question, given that in sixteen months he'd seen her bark only at squirrels, and the occasional possum. The UPS guy, the solid waste guy, three Jehovah's Witnesses, a whole parade of Mormon missionaries, a vinyl siding saleswoman, a guy with a braid and one eye trailing what he insisted was a fleet of UFOs, a family in an aircraft-sized Winnebago who'd gotten lost on the way to Missoula, and a teenage girl looking for a missing horse had all walked up onto the porch completely unthreatened by what Dean had once thought of as their guard dog.
"Yeah," Dean said. "No."
He did take along a plastic tarp, the battered rollaway-bed mattress they'd found out in the barn, and a couple of moth-eaten wool blankets, along with the gun, a thermos of coffee, and a box of glazed donuts.
No big deal, he told himself.
After all, he'd sat vigil like this a thousand times. Dad had taught him to be patient. Alert. Focused.
Even when he was freezing his ass off.
He'd been out there for something like five hours when Jamie's little white Subaru pulled into the driveway. He hadn't been expecting her; when she was scheduled to work at Stony's until closing, as she'd said she'd be doing tonight, she'd usually spend the night in town (sometimes with him, sometimes not) rather than drive out to the farm.
Tonight, apparently, she'd figured coming out here was worth the trip.
"Hey, there," she said when she was near enough for him to hear her.
"Hey. Kinda late."
"Sam said you were out here. Thought you could use some company."
"Sam called you?"
"I called the house. Wanted to see how things were going. He said you were out here standing guard. Unless it's -"
She grinned. It was cute, that grin, out here in the moonlight.
"What?" he asked.
"Halloween's not for another two weeks. But -"
He hiked an eyebrow.
She nudged him over a little so she could sit beside him on the battered mattress. "Once a year, on Halloween, he appears in the pumpkin patch, to bring toys to all the good little girls and boys. That what you're waiting for? The Great Pumpkin?"
"I get no respect," he sighed.
Jamie chuckled softly and snuggled closer to him, tucking an arm around his waist. "You get all kinds of respect, G-man. Plus a variety of other things that are usually best left unnamed in front of a mixed audience. I do wonder, though" - and she tipped her head to gaze up the considerable height of the pumpkin - "how in the world you're figuring on moving that thing."
"Dunno."
"It's gonna be quite the undertaking."
"Maybe I won't move it, then."
"No?"
"I don't know if that was ever the point. Really."
"Then you don't want the blue ribbon?"
"Kinda don't want to get involved in the crazy. Been thinking about it, while I sit here with my teeth chattering. Halloween's in two weeks. The littler pumpkins are ready to go, and we were gonna do the pumpkin patch thing next weekend. So I could leave it here, and let the kids go bananas when they see it." He let his gaze run up the pumpkin's glossy surface, then went on, "I thought about Sam, when he was little - see, we went out to a pumpkin patch this one time, and he spent the whole damn day picking out the right one. Then he couldn't lift the thing, no matter how hard he tried. Burst into tears. Just sobbed and cried till he had snot running off his chin, because he had it in his head he was going to pick his pumpkin and carry it home. It wasn't all that big, but he was only like three. Three and a half, I guess."
Jamie chuckled softly. "So you decided to grow a pumpkin that he still couldn't lift. As strong as he is."
"That was part of it, I guess. Not all of it."
"It is pretty. As pumpkins go."
"Yeah."
"You did a lot of work, and you have something good to show for it. Maybe that's a blue ribbon all by itself."
They sat in silence for a while, Jamie's head tucked into the crook between Dean's head and his right shoulder. The warmth of her felt good - even better, after she'd lifted the blanket he'd slung around himself and draped it over herself as well.
As relaxing as it had been to work out here in the sunshine, it was even more so, sitting here in the dark, listening to the rhythmic whisper of her breathing.
"You figuring on staying the night?" he asked softly.
"I could."
"Cold out here."
"We could warm things up."
"Yeah?"
"Ever make love in a pumpkin patch?"
"Not that I remember."
"You game?"
"Always," Dean replied.
~~~~~~~~
He made sure they all knew: the people in town, the people passing through town, anybody who'd stand still long enough to listen.
He hand-painted a sign on a scrap of plywood that he propped against a tree at the foot of the driveway: NOT ENTERING THE DAMN CONTEST. GO HARASS SOMEBODY ELSE. After three return visits, the driver of the puke-green truck seemed to accept the message at face value, and failed to return.
He did attend the contest, however, along with Jamie, and Sam, and the dog.
"That is one seriously ugly pile of sheep shit," he said of the enormous, lumpy, sickly-yellow winner.
He stood with Jamie in the gazebo at the center of the town square, watching Sam romp around with the dog; watching winners and losers roam amongst the collection of enormous pumpkins and the food and souvenir stands; watching the afternoon drift lazily by.
"Penny for your thoughts," Jamie said, smiling.
"Totally worth the work," he said.
"Yeah?"
He'd left a visiting Garth in charge of the pumpkin, a job Garth - for some reason - accepted with relish. The fact that Garth was carrying on an animated conversation with the pumpkin as the Winchesters, Jamie and the dog left for the county seat was mildly disturbing, but then, Dean figured, he had seen a lot more peculiar things in his life.
"Kinda nice," he said to Jamie.
"Anything in particular?"
"Being able to do something other than kill things. I mean - that's what I do. Probably always gonna be what I do. But it's nice to be able to -"
She leaned in, smiling, and kissed him.
"Yeah," he said when she drew back. "That's nice too."
"You can make a lot of things flourish, if you give them a chance," she told him. "You willing to give it a chance?"
"Us, you mean?"
"I think that's what I mean."
"I don't have a real good track record with that kind of thing."
"It only takes once, G-man."
It was there in her eyes again: the thing she kept not-saying. The thing he'd begun to suspect she wasn't saying because she figured he wasn't ready.
"Yeah," he murmured. "I guess maybe it does."
And he slid his arm around his girl, hugging her close, so they could watch Sam and the dog and the roaming families and the slow descent of the autumn sun together.
* * * * *