Memento Mori, a supernatural fanfic

Disclaimer: not mine! You no sue.

So, Marishna on LJ mentioned the idea of having a deathficathon and I thought "cool!", and then I heard rumours about people thinking about writing fic for Dean's birthday and I thought "cool!" And then I wrote this, and because I am ridiculously impatient I couldn't wait for either event to actually post it. So, here's my early Dean's birthday deathfic. Whaddya mean, morbid?

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Memento Mori

The second time Dean Winchester died was the day of his forty-third birthday, and he might have found some weird satisfaction in that fact if he hadn't been too busy being ripped apart by zombies to notice. The last thought he had before he finally found out the reality of all this afterlife crap was I wish I coulda had a chance to say goodbye to Sam.

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Dean's forty-second birthday – the last one he would get through in one piece, not that he knew that then – was spent on a beach. That's the sort of thing normal people might even do, go to the beach for their birthdays, except they would probably go to Hawaii or Florida or at least fucking Cape Cod, not some fucking freezing cold strip of gravel in freakin Washington State in January. Also, they would probably not spend most of the day (in the driving rain, mind you) tracking some kind of ugly-ass sea-monster that eventually turned out to have migrated to Alaska or some other ass-end of nowhere where Dean wasn't. It was not a great birthday, not that Dean had really had a great birthday for a good few years now. It wasn't like anyone ever called him to wish him many happy returns.

It wasn't like Sam ever called.

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Forty-one wasn't exactly a milestone age, but Dean hadn't exactly celebrated his fortieth, so when he found himself at Harvelle's that night with no hunt as yet to go to in the morning he had an extra beer and toasted himself. He'd made it a lot further than he'd ever really expected, and though a good portion of that was down to luck, there was plenty of skill in there too, so he figured he deserved that beer. He toasted Sam, too, not that Sam really needed Dean's good wishes any more. After that he toasted Jess, because he remembered Sam saying once that they had the same birthday, and he was getting kind of tipsy and slightly maudlin. Ellen came over to invite him to stay in the back room, and he did, and remembered another birthday at the Roadhouse back before Jo got married, when he'd had a warm body and bright hair to share this very bed with. He didn't think Ellen had ever found out about that one, mainly because he still had all his limbs attached. In the middle of the night he woke up, thinking he'd heard his phone ringing, but when he reached over to pick it up, it was silent and dark.

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The day Dean turned forty, he realised that he hadn't spoken to his brother in nine years.

The day after he turned forty, he woke up with the worst hangover he'd had in a freakin long time, and wished he was dead.

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The Impala finally died a death about three weeks before Dean's thirty-ninth birthday, which was why he spent it sitting in a police cell in Cleveland, planning how he was going to get the hell out of there before the cops finally came up with his rap sheet. Grand theft auto was one thing (and the cops had raised their eyebrows a little, looking at his greying temples which, against all the odds, made him look distinguished rather than pathetic), but there was a whole load of other crap he did not want to come out, because he quite enjoyed his freedom thank you very much, and prison orange was definitely not his colour. In the end, he pulled the old paperclip lock-pick trick and shimmied out the window (and remembered afterwards why really he was a little too old for shimmying these days). Turned out Cleveland cops were not overly blessed with brains, which was lucky for Dean, but kind of a drag for whoever owned the '65 Mustang he boosted two streets over from the copshop. Not that he drove it far – conspicuous cars were pretty much a flashing neon sign when they didn't belong to you – but since it was his birthday, he figrued just once, for old times sake. He even found a radio station playing Black Sabbath and turned it up loud, and there was no-one riding shotgun to complain.

So yeah, it wasn't exactly like old times.

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Dean didn't realise he'd turned thirty-eight until about a week after it happened, when he noticed the date on a faded muscle-car calendar in a diner in Salt Lake City. Three weeks in the freakin desert in January had left him with a weird kind of disconnected feeling that was kind of like snow-blindness, and in fact, probably was snow-blindness to some extent. Out there, the days had faded into one another until it seemed like time really wasn't so important, and he was beginning to see why the mormons were so freakin crazy, because by the time he finally rolled into whatpassed for civilisation in Utah once again, he was beginning to see things slithering at the edges of his vision, things he was pretty sure weren't really there. Two or maybe three days before he finally caught the cowboy ghost (seriously, cowboy ghost, it was freakin laughable) he'd been tracking, it struck him that this was maybe what it was like being psychic, and then he decided that maybe he was psychic, because it could run in the family, right? Then, of course, he imagined the face Sam would pull if he told him his psychic power was seeing creeping things that weren't there in the Utah desert, and that made him laugh like he was out of his mind for about ten minutes.

Being thirty-eight kind of sucked, but spending almost a month in Utah definitely sucked worse.

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Dean spent his thirty-seventh birthday under heavy sedation at a hospital in a town which he would later be sure was in Louisiana – or maybe Tennessee? -- but would never quite remember the name of. It pretty much sucked, because having a birthday in January and having spent most of his life in the Midwest one way and another, he had pretty much ended up freezing his ass off almost every year, and it would have been nice to have been able to enjoy actually being warm for once. No-one at the hospital knew it was his birthday, of course, because of the whole fake name thing, and Dean himself was in no condition to tell them (not that he would have anyway, because it would have kind of blown his cover). It took what felt like freakin months for his ribs and shoulder to heal properly, and that basically meant he had to go without his favourite shotgun the whole time, because the kick-back was too harsh (that was how he'd acquired the shotgun in the first place, because Sam was too much of a pussy to use it properly). The whole thing had been stupid, bad luck combined with bad judgement, and the fact that, even after all these years, sometimes he still forgot that he was hunting alone. Exactly six years later, the same problem was going to get him killed. Not that he knew that then.

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When Dean turned thirty-six, he realised that he was only four years away from forty – forty, Jesus – and decided that, Sam or no Sam, he was going to the goddamn Grand Canyon. Of course, it took him three days to get there, so it wasn't really still his birthday when he arrived, but no-one gave a shit about that, least of all Dean.

So yeah, the Grand Canyon? Actually quite big. Bigger than Dean expected. He watched the sun go down, and it was fucking spectacular, but there was no-one to help him remember it, and although he did take a picture with the phone that Sam had left behind when he'd gone, a camera phone which was now hopelessly antiquated, that wasn't much use, given that about ten minutes later he hurled the phone into the canyon. By the following year, the colours would have all but faded from his memory, and by the time he made his final, fatal mistake, he would hardly remember that he'd visited the place at all.

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Thirty-five years old meant pizza and beer and a crappy movie on the only cable channel that the motel he was checked into offered. Of all those things, the beer was the only one that was remotely satisfying, and Dean definitely had more than his fair share. It was quiet and uneventful, and Dean managed to not sustain a single injury, except a paper cut from the pizza box, which he just chalked down to brutal irony. Thirty-five years old, and not dead yet. It wasn't much to celebrate.

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On his thirty-fourth birthday, Dean seriously considered shooting himself in the head. He had the gun out and everything, loaded and ready, and really the only thing that stopped him was a call that came in just as he was clicking off the safety, and a desperate woman's voice gabbling something about a missing girl and a string of murders in Iowa and a guy she'd met who'd told her that maybe he, Dean, could help her. He'd taken her details and hung up, and then he'd looked at the gun for five long minutes. After that, he'd packed up his stuff and headed west.

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Dean slept with Jo for the first and last time on the day he turned thirty-three. It was something they'd danced round years back, after they'd first met, and never actually done anything about, and it wasn't like they really did anything about it this time, either, just did it and moved on. It was pretty much the way Dean liked these things to go, mutual pleasure with no strings attached, no reproachful glances or morning after silences, and in the depths of the night, with his alcohol flowing warm through his veins and Jo's warm body beneath his, he could almost forget it was his birthday.

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Dean never really could remember what happened to him on his thirty-second birthday, because he spent the entirety of it as blind-drunk as it was possible to be without sustaining actual alcohol poisoning. He actually started drinking two days beforehand, so by the time the day itself rolled around, he had got up a nice head of steam and been kicked out of half the bars in the city. That was OK, because his goal – as he explained with heavy emphasis to this one Greek guy he met in a corner by the jukebox – was to get kicked out of all of them before he gave up the ghost, so he figured he could manage to sustain himself at least another twenty-four hours. The Greek guy laughed and asked him what he was trying to prove, and Dean grinned back and said that if he could get kicked out of all the bars, all of them, that would really piss his brother off.

The conversation with the Greek guy was pretty much the only thing Dean remembered about his thirty-second birthday itself, but he sure as hell remembered the two days of vomitting and clammy skin afterwards, and he remembered the way he couldn't look himself in the eye in the bathroom mirror. That wasn't anything to do with the drinking, though.

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The first time Dean Winchester died was the morning of his thirty-first birthday, and he didn't find any weird satisfaction in that at all, but then, the fact that he woke up in the hospital with the nurses giving him that pitying look and the doctors telling him how lucky he was to survive and realised pretty damn quickly that what they weren't telling him was what he should really be worried about, that kind of chased any thoughts he might have had about dates and coincidences and goddamn irony right out of his head.

He was lucky to have survived, they said. Lucky. Dean had been carried into the hospital covered in his brother's blood, and he would walk out again on his own two feet like nothing had happened, except he would be alone, and this time it would be for good.

Dean didn't think they knew what lucky meant.

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Sam tried to make Dean celebrate his thirtieth birthday, even sprang a surprise six-pack on him and offered to take him out for dinner (which was laughable, since it would be Dean – or at least, the guy whose name was on the credit card in Dean's wallet – who would end up paying), but Dean wasn't really in the mood, feeling old and, well, kind of emo, not that he was going to admit that to Sam. We'll celebrate next year, he said. I promise. And Sam sort of gave him a half-smile, and Dean remembered something Sam had said once about Jess having the same birthday as him, and thought that this was probably a difficult day for Sam, and that it kind of sucked that Dean's birthday would forever be associated with death. I promise, he repeated, and Sam popped open a beer and said I'll hold you to that.

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