A/N - Written for the LJ community 10_hurtcomfort. As the title of the community suggests this will be a 10 chapter fic. The chapters will all connect. Once again, this is not compliant with the S2 finale.

In war, as in chess, you must make sacrifices. This was one of the first things that John Connor learned as a child - you make sacrifices and you always save yourself, no matter who or what will be destroyed in the process. It was this principle that caused him to leave his uncle to bleed to death from a wound caused by a T-888 just before Judgment Day. It was this principle that caused him to flip the switch on the old pocket watch that still hung around his neck and murder the object of his first love so many years before. It was that damnable lesson, he knew, that would cause him to send Allison Young to her death.

He should not have grown close to her, should not have let himself love her. He often wondered if he would have been so drawn to her had she not been wearing Cameron's face. John nearly choked on the irony of it - Cameron was the one that stole her face. She didn't know, of course, couldn't know. No one did.

He often wondered which he would miss more. He had missed Cameron with a deep bone ache for years, always regretting the move that caused him to destroy her. He could have fixed her, had she not hung the key to her death around his overly emotional neck. Still…he always knew that somehow he would have a second chance. She would come back to him, perfect and whole and undamaged and he would do everything within his power to keep her that way.

And now there was Allison…with her jaded eyes and sad smile, with her rough hands and gentle ways, with her volatile emotions and unwavering loyalty… She had been with him now longer than Cameron ever had and he did not know how he would find the strength to let her go. Cameron's face came to the forefront of his mind then, exactly the same…yet horrendously different with the emotions bled away and the wide unblinking eyes…

He drew a new resolve from the both of them - from Allison's frail humanity and Cameron's cold exterior, from the fact that they both loved him in their own ways, from the fact that they both believed in him.

He sighed, pulling the sleeping girl closer to him and burying his face in her hair. War was made up of sacrifice, and sacrifices were never easy.