After the first death, there is no other.
- Dylan Thomas

The first time he experiences death first-hand, John Watson is seven years old. He wakes one morning to find his pet budgie, Tom Baker, lying on the floor of its cage. It is still, even when he prods it with one stubby finger. He's never seen his budgie sleep on the floor like this, so he heads downstairs to find his mother.

"Mum," he says, once he's found her in the sitting room, drinking her tea and reading the Guardian. "There's something wrong with Tom Baker."

His mother looks up. "Oh?" She flips quickly through the newspaper, to the bits that talk about celebrities. "Where'd you hear that?"

He points at the stair. "He's on the floor in his cage," he said. "Won't move."

"Ah, your bird," says his mother. She sets aside her paper and rises, holds out her hand. "Show me what he's doing."

John takes his mother up the stair and into his bedroom. "Look," he says. "He won't move, even when I touched him."

His mother studies the bird for a moment, the corners of her mouth turned down. Then she sighs and opens the cage door, gently scooping up Tom Baker in a slender hand.

"I'm sorry, love," she says, holding the bird out to him. "Your bird's died."

"Died?" John looks at the bird. It's not moving, even though it ought to be, because any time he's tried holding him the bird has struggled and flapped its little wings, trying to escape. "What's that mean?"

"It means," says his mother, dropping to a crouch beside him, the bird laying across her outstretched palm, "that he's not going to wake up again. That we'll have to find you a new bird, if you want one."

John frowns. "I don't want a new bird," he says. "I have Tom Baker."

"Tom Baker isn't a bird anymore, sweetheart," she says. The tone of her voice makes John look at her face, and he's surprised to see her looking very sad. "This is just a body, with no bird in it." She looks around the room and spies a shoebox, turns it over and empties out the pencils and crayons John had stored in it, and deposits Tom Baker's body inside. "What we have to do now is put him in this box, you see? And we'll have a little funeral for him – you can say what you liked about him, and we can have a little prayer, and then we'll bury him-"

"Bury him!" John shakes his head furiously. "Then I can't see him anymore!"

His mother sighs. "That's the problem of death, John," she says. "Once someone dies, you can't see them anymore, except in your memories."

John scowls. "How can I play with him, then?" he demands. "And feed him and give him water?"

"He can't play anymore," she says. He can hear the fraying stretch of patience in her voice. "And he doesn't need food or water, now. His body doesn't work anymore. He must have been sick, and we didn't know."

"It's a stupid body, then," says John, looking down at the tiny, blue bundle of feathers in the box. "I hate it."

John's mother picks up the lid and closes up the box, shutting Tom Baker away in the darkness. "Let's have a little funeral for him," she says, getting up. "It'll make you feel better."

"No it won't!" John stomps across the room and flings himself into his bed. "I don't want a stupid funeral. I want Tom Baker not to be dead!"

"All right." His mother holds the little box in both hands. "I'll leave you alone, then. For a little bit. Do you want some lunch?"

John says nothing, face smashed up against his pillow. His mother leaves the room without another word, leaving the door open just a crack behind her.

He doesn't cry. It would be stupid to cry about a bird. Instead, he thinks about how just yesterday, Tom Baker had been chirruping loudly, hopping from perch to perch while John did his homework at his desk. He remembers opening the cage and filling the little cup of seed. He thinks as hard as he can, trying to recall if there'd been any sign, anything at all, that would have told him that this morning, Tom Baker would be lying dead on the floor of his cage. There hadn't been. But he should have known. How could he have not known? Is it his fault that he didn't notice something was wrong until it was too late?

A few minutes later, he slides off his bed and swipes at his eyes (he hadn't been crying, he was just tired) and goes downstairs to find his mum. She's waiting for him in the kitchen, the little box on the table next to her gardening trowel. She's picked a spot near the azaleas. John stands next to her as she piles dirt over the box, and Tom Baker vanishes into the garden for good.

It's not fair, he thinks. A world where budgies can die for no reason isn't a very nice world, and suddenly John wishes it were him in the box instead of Tom Baker. Because he doesn't think he wants to live in a world that's so unfair.

It is the first time John thinks about dying.

It won't be the last.

The first time John kills someone, he is in a burning building surrounded by desert, smoke and screams. There is a man a handful of meters away, beyond a pockmarked wall, and he has a gun. He has been trying to kill John and his men for the last six minutes.

He's already managed to hit one of them, Captain Wissler. He's down with a bullet in his leg, and John is hurriedly winding a tourniquet tight around Wissler's thigh. He can hear the sizzle of bullets through the air, hear the popping sound as they strike the walls, the floors, the ceiling, but he can't move. Wissler is hit in the femoral artery, and the bleeding is immense. It's bad. It's very, very bad.

They have to get out.

This man, however, isn't going to let them out. He's positioned himself near the door, the only way out that isn't currently aflame. John's not certain how the fire began, but he doesn't much care about details. His patient is dying, and he needs to get out of this place, get through that door. Details be damned.

Wissler is going pale, his skin clammy to the touch. John becomes more and more frustrated with every shot fired, every word shouted in Urdu, every curse returned in English. Madness, he thinks. This is madness, all of it. Why are we doing this, day after day? He knows it's not the time for philosophical navel-gazing, but he can't help but wonder at the futility. The man will never stop shooting at them. He's likely got enough bullets to last the night. Of course, so do they, the four of them (three – Wissler is in no shape to hold a gun).

It's now or never.

John is a medical man. He's not a fighter, even though he's trained to shoot, trained to kill. He has a gun but he hasn't taken it up, yet. Hasn't needed to, not in a year of being in this particular level of hell. His men are good at keeping the heat off of him while he works to keep them hale and hearty. He's not even supposed to be out here, in the field, except he is. He is here, and there's a gun in his hand, and he's tired of this shit.

He pulls his handgun – Browning L9A1, he's only shot it a couple of times since training, and only after cleaning it, to ensure that it's functional – free from its holster, racks the slide, and takes stock of his surroundings: Ashdown to the right, engaged with the enemy. Murray to the left, firing only when the gunman peers out from behind his cover; he's conserving ammunition. He is also frightened.

"Murray," says John. "Over here."

The boy – he can't be older than nineteen, for God's sake – sidles up beside him, keeping his head low. "Sir?"

John looks at him, then looks back around the darkened, destroyed little room they're in, until he sees what he needs. "I need you to do something and I need you not to question it. Can you do that?"

Murray looks dubious, but he nods. "Yes, sir."

"Right – see that wall over there? The one that's mostly made of stone?"

"Yes, sir."

"I want you to shoot at it."

"I- Sir?" Murray stares at him, eyes round and confused. "But that-"

John holds up a hand. "I know. And I asked you, don't question it. Wissler's bad, and if you do this, he stands a better chance than he does now. Understand?"

Murray is quiet for a moment, thoughtful, and John can see determination fighting with self-preservation and fear.

The boy swallows hard, then nods again. "Yes, sir."

"Good lad." John smiles. "Do it now. Go. We haven't a moment to spare." He watches the boy slide away, crawl on his belly below cover, and take aim at the wall. John's got to do this right, the first time, because he only has one go at it, and he's not even certain this will work. It could kill him. All of them.

Or, it will get them out.

He hears Murray fire the first shot, and the bullet does exactly what he wants it to do – ricochets off the stone toward the gunman's little niche. There's a burst of frantic, furious Urdu, and he understands enough of it to know that his plan has at least partially worked: the gunman thinks there are reinforcements shooting at him from the other side of the room.

John gives Wissler another looking over – he's very bad now, no color to his skin, his pulse thready. He's out of time. John looks over the cover and confirms the gunman is firing on the other side of the room, takes a deep breath, and stands up.

"Sir!" hisses Ashdown, looking over at him. "Get down!"

John ignores him, quickly vaulting their cover, his pistol in hand. "Murray, keep shooting," he says. "That's an order." He steals across the room, forces himself not to think about the bullets that buzz past him, that any one of them could strike him at any moment. He's not thinking about dying because he's not going to die. Not right now.

He's on the gunman, pistol drawn and aimed at the back of his head, before the man knows he's there. John doesn't wait for him to turn around, doesn't say anything to him. He just pulls the trigger and puts a bullet in the man's brain.

It's done.

But Wissler dies of blood loss anyway, and John finds himself thinking that an eye for an eye is a pretty good system, actually.

The first time John thinks he's going to die it is not, in fact, when he gets shot during another firefight in Nadi-e-Ali. The bullet strikes him high in the shoulder and while he is aware of its proximity to his heart, and it hurts like hell, he is in no real danger of death. Second Lieutenant Murray is too quick, rolling him behind cover and binding his shoulder so tightly that there's no chance he'll bleed out before they can tend to him.

When the firefight is over and the area under control, Murray shoots him full of morphine and digs out the bullet with a knife he's wiped down with alcohol. It doesn't hurt as much as it should, but the pain is still so agonizing that John loses consciousness, his last thought a sense of pride that he's trained his men so well.

It is later, then, after he's been brought back to Camp Bastion, that he first faces his own death. It begins as spots forming round the wound in his shoulder, dismissed as merely pimples by a distracted nurse who changes his dressings quickly in between incoming wounded. It's not until the fever, which spikes in the middle of the night and wakes John from a deep sleep, that anyone figures out that something is wrong.

By then, the infection has developed a resistance to nearly all of the medications they have available to them in camp and it's clear that he's contracted some kind of infection. Through his fever dreams John attempts to diagnose himself, but as soon as he latches onto a thought he loses it, it vanishes under the thick, hot sand and smoke that fills his mind. Chasing after it only results in a landslide, and then there's only darkness.

Eventually, though, he surfaces enough to figure out that he has MRSA.

The sores are painful, oozing things that smell. The nurses draw straws to see who will have to change his bandages, bathe him, come anywhere near him. He's not covered with them, not yet, but they're all across his shoulder, trailing down over his heart. There's one on his leg now as well, one they haven't yet seen, but he can't muster the energy to open his mouth and tell them of it. All he can do is wait, wait for the moment where the sand buries him completely, smothers his breath, and there's nothing. No pain. He can feel himself fading, like the sun in a dust storm. Fading.

Please, God, let me live.

The next time he wakes, he knows he's no longer in the desert. There's a dampness, a chill to the air. He opens his eyes and everything is white – white walls, white ceiling, white lights, sheets, floors. It is the white of a hospital, a proper one. He's been brought back to England. He's lived; he is scarred and weak, his leg aches and his left hand won't stop shaking, but he's lived.

When he's discharged, however, and told he'll likely never be a surgeon again thanks to his trembling hand and army psychiatrist-diagnosed post-traumatic stress disorder, he almost wishes he hadn't.

The first time John is willing to die for someone happens a little after midnight in March, in a darkened swimming pool in London. He's wearing a vest covered in pockets of semtex, with the sinister red eye of a sniper rifle trained on one of the pouches.

There are also two madmen having a stare-down in front of him.

One of them is a well-dressed young man, eyes fierce and fixed on his target. He moves toward it carefully, a false casualness that belies a more predatory intent. His tone when he speaks drips with sarcasm, with thinly-veiled contempt, but there's something else there. Something unhinged and unpredictable. Dangerous.

The other is a man called Moriarty.

John watches what amounts to a pissing contest between two rabid dogs, a terrier and a greyhound perhaps. It's thoughts like these that keep him from panicking, from breaking down, because he is scared. He's frightened in a way he hasn't been in a long time, in another life, a desert ago. But it's not because of the explosives fixed to his body.

It's because he thinks Sherlock might die.

It's a strange thing, he thinks, to be more concerned for a life you've only just begun to know than for your own. Probably not very sane, or practical, but John thinks he's left those things behind and in their place he's got a sense of what's important, and the desire to protect it, at all costs. Isn't that what you learn in the military, after all? I, John Watson, do solemnly, sincerely and truly declare and affirm that I will be faithful and bear true allegiance to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, her heirs and successors and that I will as in duty bound honestly and faithfully defend Her Majesty…

But John doesn't fling himself at Moriarty for Queen and country. He doesn't do it because of a war, of a sense of duty to a fellow soldier. He's not in the Army anymore. He doesn't do it because he feel he has to.

He does it for purely selfish reasons. Because he has decided, recently but not too much so, that Sherlock is important, because he can't imagine life without Sherlock, and so Sherlock must live.

In the short time he's known Sherlock John has experienced things he's never thought possible, things no one else would want to experience, such as severed limbs in the refrigerator, bullet holes in the sitting room wall, dates that end in attempted murder by enormous arrow. Though he might not have appreciated them at the time he knows it all comes together to give him a life less ordinary, and if he's honest with himself that is the only thing that keeps him going. He's too far south of normal, now. Too far gone to ever come back, to settle down. He needs it, as readily as he needs to breathe, this not knowing what lurks behind kitchen cupboards, keeping his gun loaded and handy at all times, following Sherlock through alleyways and abandoned Tube stations and decrepit buildings.

John needs all of it, which means he also needs Sherlock.

He's not certain of when it changed from flatmates and tentative friends to brothers in bond, to something else entirely. It's been so gradual, so subtle, that perhaps even Sherlock himself hasn't noticed. John doesn't really think that's possible, but stranger things have happened (like being held hostage by a consulting criminal, for example). It's not as though he's tripping over himself, head-over-heels, none of that rubbish. There's a lot about Sherlock he doesn't like, but the fact is that he tolerates it. Tolerates the worst that Sherlock gives him, and that can be quite awful, really. Their row over the death of the old woman, all those deaths that Sherlock didn't seem to want to acknowledge. Perhaps he's completely incapable of it. That sort of thing, that callous disregard for human life, would have driven anyone else away ages ago. Any sane person.

It's been established that John isn't quite right, these days. But he also thinks it's not just his mind dictating things anymore. His heart's become involved, as well.

Afterward, when Moriarty's gone and only his sing-song voice remains, reverberating off the tiled walls, and Sherlock is pacing and speaking in staccato, John allows the weight of what's happened to press him down. He sinks into a crouch, breathing hard and surprised to still be alive.

He'd been prepared. Fully prepared. It hadn't been necessary, and a part of him is almost angry about it. How dare he take away this thing that I've offered, he thinks, and he knows it's not just a little insane. He doesn't care.

Sherlock looks paler than usual. His expression is troubling, because for the first time, John thinks Sherlock might actually be frightened.

"You okay?" John asks.

"Me? Yeah, fine." Sherlock keeps moving, waving the gun around carelessly. "That, er. Thing. That you, um, offered to do. That was, ah… good."

John looks ahead at water tinted blue. It registers, somewhere, that he's being thanked for what he's done, but he doesn't acknowledge it. It's too soon, too fresh in his mind, this new thing between them. Like a raw, open wound that's not quite ready to heal.

So instead, he offers up a joke. Sherlock responds in kind, and they share a look and a nervous, relieved little laugh.

And then everything goes to hell all over again.

When John opens his eyes next he sees stars, except that you can't see the stars in London. He blinks, and the not-stars remain, on the inside of his eyelids. Afterimages, then. He'd looked at something bright, something that burned itself into his retinas. He'll be seeing it for a while. The sun? Someone's torch in his face?

Explosion. That's it.

It explains the ringing in his ears, but not the smell of chlorine, or his sore throat or the throbbing pain in his left arm. He tries to sit up but someone's pushing him back down, gently, a strong hand firm on his good shoulder.

"Stay still," says a familiar voice. John opens his eyes again, but all he can see is a pale blur, a shape behind the blob of light and colour clouding his vision. He can't see their face, but he'd know that chaos of hair anywhere.

"Sherlock." John groans, lifts his good hand to his face. It's wet, with what he's not certain. "Moriarty-"

Sherlock shakes his head. "Not important, not right now. Later, yes, but after we get you sorted." He feels Sherlock's hands roaming his body, searching for injuries. Fingers curl around his left wrist, and it hurts.

"Broken," says John, wincing and trying to pull his arm away. "Leave it alone."

"You need medical attention," says Sherlock. He sounds irritable, which John supposes is justified, if they've just been blown up. "Where the hell is the bloody ambulance."

There are sirens moaning in the distance. "It's coming," says John. "It's all right. I'm all right."

Sherlock leans over him, peering down at his face. John's vision is finally beginning to clear, and he can see overbright eyes, bloodshot (from the chlorine, probably) and wary, flicking over his face as though he is trying to read him, as if John is a page full of words that he needs to memorise.

"I'm all right," says John. "Aren't I?"

"Can't be certain," says Sherlock. "Obviously you've hit your head, because only a brain injury would explain why you did what you did."

John frowns. "What did I do?" he asks.

"You don't recall?" Sherlock sits back, blinks. "I detonated the explosives. You flung yourself across the floor and tackled me straight into the pool. Bloody held me down, I suppose so I wouldn't catch fire – thanks, by the way - but you nearly drowned yourself in the process." He taps a finger against John's chest. "You're fortunate I was able to Google CPR on my phone before the water ruined it."

And John has a memory, a cool mouth on his, pressure against his chest, the surge of pool-water in his throat, rolling to the side and coughing it up. That's why his throat's sore. And that's why Sherlock looks wild, frantic. He'd thought John had died. He'd fought to bring him back.

John stares at him.

"You… saved my life," he says. His voice is little more than a croak. He's going to sound like a frog for days. "You wanted me to live."

"Of course I-" Sherlock makes a frustrated sound. "You daft idiot, why the hell would I not want you to live?" He pokes John in the chest again, looking utterly furious. "Is that why you did it? You thought you were more expendable, or some such rubbish?"

John shakes his head, and he swears he can feel water sloshing around inside. Or perhaps just his inner ear. "No," he says. "That's not why I did it."

Sherlock scowls. "Then why?" he asks. "Tell me why you were willing to die for me."

"I don't know," says John, after a moment. "I mean, I do know. I didn't want the world to do without you. You said there aren't any heroes, that you wouldn't be one of them – you're wrong." He coughs, a bubble of pool water coming up and choking him. Sherlock helps him lean to the side and spit it up. "God, that's bloody awful. I think I swallowed half the pool."

"It certainly tasted like you had," said Sherlock, pulling a face. "Remind me to only perform CPR on people who've drowned themselves in Earl Grey." He smiles a bit when John laughs, but the smile fades quickly. "I was wrong."

"Sorry, what?" John's delirious, perhaps he does have a head injury, if Sherlock's saying things like I was wrong. "Say that again?"

"I loathe repetition, John," says Sherlock, "but all right – I was wrong. There are heroes." He touches John's face, just barely, so that John isn't actually certain it's happening. Perhaps he just hopes it's happening. Sherlock looks at him so intently, it's easy to forget they're in the rubble of a swimming pool. It's just them, nothing else. No-one else.

Sherlock touches him again, and this time John can feel it, a finger against his right cheekbone. "They're extremely rare, but I'd say there are, in fact, definitely heroes. I'd just… never seen one until now."

John stares at him. The ambulance arrives then and it immediately turns to chaos around them, all flashing blue lights and yellow tape and men shouting about shutting down the gas lines, but still John watches him. He watches as Sherlock is pulled away and led to a waiting ambulance, given a cup of tea and checked over for injuries. John watches until the paramedics swarm in, blocking Sherlock from view, and all John can do is surrender to being a patient once again.

This time, however, it's different. It feels much the same, people bent over him, asking his name, taking his vital signs. There's the smell of antiseptic and the rasp of gauze against his skin. He can hear a gurney being brought over. All familiar things, things he knows intimately. But it's still different, very different.

Because this time is the first time he's thankful to be alive.

-end-