John Hamish Watson had been shot. He was bleeding out into hot sand, tamped down by the to-and-fro transit of boots, tires, and convoys. He was bleeding out in a foreign land, under the desert sun. He pushed weakly against the ground beneath him, struggling to rise. He needs to finish tending the wounded solider he had been trying to save. The one who had been hit by the roadside bomb. The one he had been applying a tourniquet to when his world had shifted, narrowing to a point of searing pain, then exploding outwards as a sniper's bullet ripped through his shoulder.

John Hamish Watson was under no delusions about his chances of survival, or the chance of recovery for his fallen comrade. The one he had been tending to. The one now pinned beneath John's useless weight. His life did not flash before his eyes as he struggled to rise and finish his task. The life of the prone man beneath him did.

John Hamish Watson cursed the shoddy marksmanship of the enemy sniper. Instead of a clean death, he would bleed out over the next several minutes. Too weak to help someone with better chances of survival, too weak to make this death count. Just as he teetered on the precipice of self-indulgent hopelessness, he felt a spark of old determination grind into place deep within himself. He refused to fail, refused to give up when he could save another's life. He refused to succumb to the darkness without a fight this time.

With gritted teeth and sweaty brow, John Hamish Watson rolled off of the soldier beneath him. He hobbled-crawled-pulled himself alongside of the young man's injured side. He reassessed the condition of the bloody limb that had been caught in the blast. He knew that the tourniquet that he had applied would prevent this young man, this too young man, from bleeding out with him in the sun and the sand. He knew it would also probably claim the remains of the mangled limb beneath it. He knew this young man – this boy, really – would hate him for years, for crippling him. He knew this young man could grow past the resentment and mature into a good man who would change the lives of others.

John Hamish Watson knew it. He didn't suspect it; he wasn't having an out-of-body experience. He wasn't experiencing the mental distance of shock. Maybe a little, he was losing copious amounts of blood at this point, but he was used to the sensation of being near death. He was old friends with Death, had credentials. As Captain John Hamish Watson, he had met Death on the battle field. As Doctor John Hamish Watson he met Death in the field surgery tent and as a surgeon in the hospital. He and Death had a history.

Death surrounded John Hamish Watson. Death took friends, relatives, strangers, and acquaintances. Death would touch every individual in his life, every one he ever had met and would meet, and he knew it. And though Death reached out to embrace him, John Hamish Watson knew he would not, could not, die today. Because, at times like this, John Hamish Watson recalled another name, buried deep in his past, and another title, like Captain and Doctor that tied him to Death.

John Hamish Watson had been shot. And while he should have died, bleeding out into hot sand under a foreign sun, he knew he would survive. Because John Hamish Watson was Harry James Potter. And Harry James Potter was incapable of dying. He was the Master of Death.