Title: Understanding Sacrifice

Timeline: Set during, but not focused on IMToD. It's really just mentioned at the end.

A/N: I don't really know why I wrote this. It's been sitting with me for awhile and I though I'd share it.

Sacrifice (n): giving up of something valuable or important for somebody or something else considered to be of more value or importance.

John understood sacrifice all to well. After all, he was a soldier once.

But after his wife died, John sacrificed two things he hadn't meant to: his boys. They were not born soldiers. He had made them into soldiers.

He had seen the face of soldiers. He had seen the desperation and hope in those sad, brave, determined faces of old men and young. He could hear in the voice of a soldier something different than that of anybody else. He could hear the voice of a man all at once happy and sad. It was a phenomenon that he did not understand. How one can be so sad and so happy at the same time. This was the life of a soldier; happy to serve his country, regretful to have left his family, to have to give up, if only for a short time, his life and everything that he had known.

Wasn't that what he had forced upon his children? Forced them to be torn away from anything that they'd know? Forced them to be brave in the wake of an enemy? Introduced them at a young age to the terrors of the world? How could he?

So John understood sacrifice. He understood that to sacrifice something was to give something up. And he had given up his sons to the never ending battle of good and evil. He had sacrificed his family.

But had he really? Most soldiers were forced to give up their family to be able to serve their country. But John had given up his children merely to serve himself. For this, he felt ashamed.

And as he watched his son lie in a hospital day, inches from death, he knew that he had missed something about sacrifice. This wasn't sacrifice. This was selfishness. Somewhere along the line, he had made a mistake.

I'd love to hear what you think.

Next chapter of "The Calm Before the Storm" coming either tomorrow or the next day.