Without Fear
by Bil!

K+ - Angst – J, (E) – Oneshot

Summary: John isn't afraid to die.

Season: One. (Ignores subsequent seasons' canon.)

Spoilers: Rising, The Eye, Hot Zone, Siege.

Disclaimer: As ever, not mine.

A/N: I had the sudden urge to write something based on the lines 'I could not love thee so, my dear, Loved I not Honour more' (Richard Lovelace). I got this instead.

I may have misremembered how Siege went, having not seen it in a while, but this is how this story played out in my head, so I went with it.

Without Fear

John wasn't afraid to die.

His stepmom had taught him that, though it hadn't been her intention. The turning years couldn't fade the memory of how she lay small and frail on the white hospital bed, nothing like the vivid, vibrant woman who'd taught him duty and courage and laughter. Every day that passed gave the sickness strength, while every breath she drew drained her a little further of life and fight. John sat beside her bed for weeks, did his homework there, ate his meals there, helplessly watching her struggle through an unwinnable battle.

"It's not the dying I mind," she told him, her voice a death whisper and her eyes almost closed, weak and feeble now when she'd always been so strong. "I don't mind dying but I don't want to leave you behind."

They were alone in the hospital because there was no one else. They had no one else, unless you counted John's father, who was off on some mission on the other side of the world and hadn't spoken to either of them in years anyway. There was just her, weak and fading, and John, fighting against hot, hopeless tears as he clutched at her hand and pretended it wasn't frail and wasted in his.

"It's not the dying I mind," she repeated faintly as her eyes drifted closed, her eyelashes long and stark against her gaunt white cheeks.

"Aren't you afraid of dying?" he asked in despairing surprise, sixteen years old and caught between youth's belief in immortality and reality's certainty of mortality. He stared at her, feeling sick and angry and scared, unable to cope with this nightmare that refused to end.

"Why would I fear it?" she whispered, and forced her eyes open to meet his blurred gaze. "To die will be the biggest adventure yet. But I don't want to leave you." He lifted her hand to his cheek, unable to stop his tears even though he was too old for tears because this was the biggest, worst, most horrible experience of his life. Her fingers weakly brushed at his hair, the hands that had kept him on his feet his whole life now unable to help even themselves. "I don't want to leave you."

But she did, for all her battling, for all her efforts – she left him and John shattered the vase of flowers he'd brought her on the heart monitor in a furious attempt to stop its taunting, monotonous sound. Knowing it was coming didn't make the loss any easier. Nothing could ease the gut-wrenching pain of losing the one person who'd always believed in him.

Death was a relief to her, he knew; an adventure and an escape from the prison of her own body. So at her funeral John didn't cry for her, he cried the lonely tears of a boy with nothing left.

But he was never afraid after that. Death, death was easy. It was living that was hard. So he went faster, higher, further. He pushed himself harder than anyone else, found the edges of the limits and went beyond them... And he never feared the spectre haunting the corners of his life because he knew death would take him one day, knew it with clear, delphian certainty as crystal sharp as the memory of his stepmom's ice-cold cheek, and feared it not at all. He didn't seek it, but he didn't fear it.

After all, death was a small price to pay for life.

That was why he flew test planes to their limits, pulled stunts that turned onlookers white, laughed at the voices of caution that tried to tie him down. But he also tried to keep himself from getting too close to anyone else because he remembered with perfect clarity the gaping hole that loss caused and he never wanted to go through that again.

In time, he flew through war zones unafraid, flirting with death while the planes and choppers surged under his hands as if they were a part of him. And then when his superiors were too scared to send in a rescue for men who deserved better, John took matters into his own hands and the fear he felt wasn't for himself. After all, the woman who had taught him not to fear death had also taught him love and duty and he would do his duty to the men who trusted him because it wasn't within him to do anything else. He wouldn't – couldn't – let their families suffer that old, familiar loss without at least trying to prevent it.

When his superiors punished him for their fear and sent him to the death-land of Antarctica, John just laughed. Death was an old friend, ice was no colder than the hole in his heart, and here in the blizzards and snow winds were tests for the best of pilots.

Then someone fired an alien drone at him and turned his world on its head.

-

John wasn't afraid when he stepped into an alien funfair ride bound for another galaxy. After all, the worst that could happen was that he would die, and he left nothing – no one – behind. Nor was he afraid when he set out on a crazy rescue mission in a craft he didn't know against an enemy he didn't know with a team he didn't know. He'd get them all back to safety and if it meant he had to die then that was the price of it.

John wasn't afraid to die.

But he didn't die. He lived. And then the woman who'd plucked him out of Antarctica gave him responsibilities and trust and offered him her unconditional faith. He had teammates and friends and duties. Despite himself the people around him wormed their way into his soul, fitting themselves into a hole he'd never thought could be filled. Teyla, with his stepmom's undaunted courage; Ford, with her sense of duty; McKay, with her infinite knowledge. Elizabeth, with her compassion and belief. Belief in him. They believed in him – and he rediscovered fear.

He wasn't afraid to die, no, he wasn't afraid of that – but he was sixteen years old again and absolutely terrified because once more he had something to lose. Everything to lose. He could die himself and he wouldn't care, but he couldn't let them die. Not while there was life in his body. He wasn't strong enough for that.

It was the sixteen-year-old who killed Kolya's men; the sixteen-year-old trapped again in a haze of desperation, loss, and grief with the words "Doctor Weir is dead" ringing in his ears. It was the sixteen-year-old, frantically afraid, who broke quarantine during the nanovirus crisis. Who because of that fear nearly got too many people killed with his own thoughtless stupidity, even if he did manage to save the day again in a desperate, unafraid-to-die gesture of defiance to the universe.

It was the sixteen-year-old who left the control chair to head to the jumper bay when it became obvious they'd never get remote control of the jumpers before the Wraith siege grew too much for Atlantis's defences. The sixteen-year-old, ready to make this one last mark on life before he embraced the death he'd forgotten how to fear.

But Elizabeth stopped him before he got there, his name in her voice like a physical chain pulling him back to life, tying him to living, and he turned to her, to her eyes wide with fear—

("You can't!"

"I have to and you know it.")

And John understood then that they were the same under the skin. He read it in her eyes, just as he'd read it in his stepmom's eyes, just as she was reading it in his eyes: I don't fear to die, I fear to lose to death.

If he died, she would lose. Just as he'd lost when his stepmom died, just as he'd lost when he'd thought Kolya had killed her.

But Elizabeth was strong, stronger than he knew how to be, and she swallowed down fear in an act of courage John knew he could never match:

"Go."

And this time when John faced the death he had boldly courted almost his entire life, he felt fear.

He wasn't afraid to die, but he was afraid of leaving her behind.

Fin