Mid 1960's – Late 1970s
After spending many decades bouncing around though numerous occupations, Ashley started to feel that it was finally time that she started to get serious about settling down to focus on what she needed to do in order to prepare herself to become ready to fully take on the responsibilities of helping her mother co-lead the Sanctuary Network. In order to become more involved in the ever-increasingly sophisticated financial aspect of 'Project Freedom' outside of just being a name on a stock holder certificate, Ashley had made her intentions clear that she wanted to ultimately take the majority of the load off of her mother so Helen could focus her energy elsewhere. To do so, Ashley decided to enroll into a local college to build credits for business management and to strengthen her math skills before transferring to a university to get her bachelor's degree.
In the spring of 1969 Ashley got accepted into Yale as part of the first group of women to be integrated into the establishment starting that September, and so moved to live close by to the campus in New Haven, Connecticut. Under their School of Management she completed her Master's degree in one to two years and then got accepted into several of their PhD programs. All throughout the 70s and into the early 80's, Ashley had been tirelessly moving from one program to another, starting with Accounting, then Financial Economics, then on to Operations, and then finally stopping at Organizations and Management. She didn't think that she would particularly need a degree in Marketing and so decided to not add it to her repertoire. Each program that she did take however took anywhere between the range of three to five years to complete depending on the required course load.
In mid-December of 1978 Ashley was sitting at her desk working on her doctoral thesis for her Operations degree when her mother decided to stroll through town and pay her a visit on one nice afternoon. It was barely just after Ashley had finished lunch when she stopped by which meant that the tea was still warm when she arrived. As Ashley scribbled away, Helen walked over to the left side of the desk to inspect one to the reference texts Ashley was using, flipping through several pages of the book.
"If you would like to read it, you can have at it. But just so you know, it's as dry as winter air," Ashley cracked.
Helen wasn't fazed by it being a less than entertaining read. "That's all right. Given how many scientific peer-reviewed journal entries I've had to read and write over the course of the last two centuries of my life I'm pretty used to it by now."
Ashley by this point was getting a little frustrated with how slow her progress on this paper had become and sat back in her chair. The work load was also starting to weigh on her. She wanted to relate to her mother and her own experiences in graduate school. "How was it that you were able to go through medical school TWICE?" she questioned a bit confounded with how much time and work that entailed to become a licensed physician with their own practice.
Helen turned to lean and sit on the edge of the desk. She looked over at her daughter with a cheeky smile, "I was able to go through it twice because the second time around I had already known all of the answers."
"Ugh, not fair," bantered Ashley.
"Such are the perks of being a time traveler," her mother reveled.
Ashley had a hunch that her mother wanted something from her as she characteristically has never shown up to one of her residences just to hang out. Every meeting between them has had a purpose for one particular reason or another. Getting to the chase, Ashley swiveled in her chair to fully face her mother and asked, "So, what brings you by to my neck of the woods?"
Helen gave a warm smile at her intuitive daughter in which Ashley noted that there was a distinct twinkle in her eyes. "I decided that it's finally time that I have your brother. I've been monitoring my hormone levels these past few months and the optimum time frame for re-implantation would be over the course of the next two days."
At finally hearing the long-awaited-for decision, Ashley bounded out of her chair to give her mother a huge enthusiastic hug. The sudden embrace of her overtly excited child almost knocked Helen off-balance from her perch on the desk.
"You sure?" Ashley beamed.
"I'm sure," Helen confirmed with a happy laugh.
Ashley couldn't wait to start. "Where are we going to do the procedure?" she asked eagerly.
"With assistance from the Dean, I was able to schedule a small private room at your university's medical school to use tomorrow morning. I've already stocked it with the equipment that we need," She said brightly.
With that news, Ashley rightfully abandoned her work on her thesis for the time being. How could she possibly think about any of that right now when her mother just told her that she was going to have a baby?
The next morning couldn't have come fast enough. Once the two of them made it into the room, Helen outlined the importance of what was to happen next.
"For this procedure, while it will be a lot less involved than what I had to go through for your re-implantation simply because we will be using your phasing ability instead of open surgery, it doesn't mean that there's no associating risk factor. At this stage of development there is high chance for spontaneous miscarriage which means that during the re-implantation, we have to be very precise in the location in which the embryo is placed and take extreme care in connecting all of the delicate blood vessels to the uterine lining to make sure there is an established and secure blood flow, both supplying and retreating. I don't think I have to remind either of us about what the consequences are should we fail to do this right. We get one shot at this and one shot only," she heavily emphasized.
Ashley nodded. "I understand".
At that, Helen laid down on the medical bed and unzipped her jeans, pulling the top of her pants down low enough to fully expose the entirety of her lower abdomen to just above her pubis. As her mother got settled, Ashley took her brother from her heart with her dominant hand. Being that Ashley was left-handed meant that Helen was to hold on to her empty right. Using their neural connectivity, Helen was able to guide Ashley exactly through the procedure almost as if she were the one doing the placing herself. Helen knew she found the right spot when she could detect the nutrient rich tissue that was unique to the womb itself.
"Ideal placental attachment is near the fundus which is at the top of the uterus. If attachment is too low, the placenta could grow over the cervix either partially or fully, causing a condition called 'Placenta Previa' which can lead to a mass hemorrhage during labor; killing both myself and the baby," she warned.
"Good to know," Ashley heavily breathed.
Helen could feel the careful and deliberate positional adjustments Ashley made. "Up a little higher, over just slightly to the left, there, right there, just like that." For the next few moments, Ashley worked cautiously on making absolute sure the connection between her mother and her brother was complete, before slowing un-phasing him, feeling a strengthening pulse form between the two of them, bringing him back to life. Helen was grateful for the phasing this time around as it automatically took care of the temperature difference issue, making the transfer much less of a shock to the embryo to resume regular cellular functioning again from being in a cryogenic state; an extremely delicate issue that she had with Ashley. Once Helen was confident that the re-implantation was successful, she signaled that it was okay for Ashley to let go of him and to pull her hand out her body. Once done, Ashley then un-phased their hands and wheeled the ultrasound machine over to the side of the bed, passing the gel to her mother. Helen then took the transducer and expertly ran it over her belly until she found what she was looking for.
At finding a steady heartbeat and catching sight of tiny movements, the two of them each let out a huge sigh of relief. "And there is your brother," she happily smiled at Ashley, both of them grinning ear-to-ear. Helen then spent the next half hour performing a routine prenatal scan documenting measurements and printing out sonogram photos. At the end of the session Ashley helped her mother clean herself up.
As Helen got up off the bed and they made their way to the door to leave, she made a statement. "Now comes the hard part, for me to not jeopardize this pregnancy. If I've timed this right, his due date should fall somewhere near the end of July."
When they got back to the house, a thought popped into Ashley's head when she saw all of her text books lying about. "I need you to teach me," she told her mother. "I now have less than eight months to learn how to deliver a baby. I need you to teach me how to be 'you' if something were to go wrong during the birth." Ashley knew her mother well enough to know that she would prefer a home birth. Not just out of personal preference for comfort, privacy, and control, but to also keep random other people from asking too many questions about her history, or lack thereof. Ashley herself was born in her mother's bedroom suite at the Old City Sanctuary and she suspected that her mother would want something similar to that this time around for her brother.
Helen understood exactly where her daughter was coming from with the request. "Seven and a half months is an incredibly short amount of time to cram that amount of information. It's going to take a considerable amount of absolute focus and dedication to get through it all." She then glanced around the room, realizing how much work Ashley was already undertaking at the moment. "I'm sorry to burden you with this on top of all your school work, I didn't…"
Ashley instantly shut her mother down when she heard her apologizing for the inconvenience of having to do extra studying. "Don't be sorry! You have nothing to be sorry for. You having my brother is definitely NOT a burden! I've waited so long for this moment to finally happen and you've waited even longer." She took both of her mother's hands in her own. "The both of you are what's truly important right now, not some fancy degree that I can always finish later. You got that?" she said sincerely. Helen nodded and Ashley gave her a hug. "I'll be fine, I can make it all work out, trust me. Besides, being your lab assistant for years at the Sanctuary has already made things a lot easier." she comforted.
However within the next day, they immediately encountered a logistical issue involving the differences in geography between Ashley and Helen. Helen at the time was living in Ottawa and had expressed her wishes that she wanted the baby to be born in Canada. With Ashley wanting to be involved in the pregnancy as much as she possibly could, to be there for her mother 100% of the time, it meant that she would have to commute back and forth to Yale. Being that it was a seven and a half hour drive between the two locations one way meant that it would be more feasible to just teleport the distance. Her mother only agreed to it on the condition that Ashley restricted her teleports to only what was minimally necessary for classes, traveling exclusively between the two houses, nothing more. Something which Ashley was more than okay with.
A great unexpected benefit that Helen had gained with Ashley being around was that Ashley insisted on being her food tester. With her super enhanced senses of smell and taste she could almost instantly detect if there was something wrong with the food, discarding it before Helen could ingest it to prevent any possible harm to the baby from a food-borne pathogen.
As the months started to pass, to make things very convenient for pregnancy check-ups, they converted one of the spare bedrooms in the 4-bedroom house into a small medical lab, complete with everything that they could possibly need including their own personal ultrasound machine. Helen was also little by little donating small quantities of her blood weekly to create a personal blood bank just in case it was ever needed.
In the creation of the nursery, Ashley took over the majority of the small renovation project. Aside from getting help from James to secretly acquire and place a set of beautiful antique dark oak bedroom furniture her mother had originally kept hidden in storage for over a century at the London Sanctuary, she first had dutifully repainted the entire room the particular shade Helen had wanted, followed by installing all new baseboards and crown molding that still fit with the design of the rest of the house. On a nice bright and breezy day, they had opened all of the windows in the house which provided proper ventilation for Helen to paint a cute African savanna theme all around the room, filling it with tall grasslands, acacia trees, and little animals roaming all over. The room was then adorned with small adorable stuffed lions, elephants, and giraffes strategically placed around the space; sitting on top of the large wooden dresser and both end tables, as well as temporarily in the seat of the rocking chair and in the crib itself.
Things started to get really exciting once Helen began to noticeably show. Not only did both of them enjoy watching her belly grow to full term, making it more real for the two of them of his impending arrival, but it also meant more interaction with the baby as he was getting big enough to the point where they could each discernibly feel him move and kick. Ashley particularly loved tracing her fingers over her mother's skin, poking at his feet if he was positioned just right.
A few days after the middle of July, a week before Helen's prediction for her son's due date, nearing lunch time hours she started to have some pain that was definitely not the same as the Braxton Hicks contractions that she'd been having irregularly for the last three months. Ashley found her around eleven AM standing in the upstairs hallway, bracing herself against the wall just next to the doorway of the nursery.
"Are you all right?" she asked, placing her hand on her mother's shoulder.
Still leaning forward, Helen let out a breath. "Ooh, I think your brother's coming a little earlier than I expected." As the pain ebbed away, she placed a hand on Ashley's shoulder to help her straighten and placed the other on the side of her belly.
Ashley got super excited. "How far along do you think you are?" she smiled. "Do you think he'll arrive today?"
Helen could see Ashley was practically bouncing, causing herself to smile at the simple joy of the sight. "I'm not sure. The only way to know would be to check." With that, they took a short walk into the little lab, where Ashley put on a glove.
Being that Ashley didn't have any actual practical experience with delivering human babies, just knowledge, Helen had to rely on using the neural connection between her and Ashley, using Ashley as a medium through which she could easily check the dilation and effacement of her own cervix. While it was intimately awkward, they both understood that it was medically necessary.
At the current moment, Helen was only about three centimeters which meant it'd still be quite a while before she'd hit active labor. So, they chilled for the majority of the day and even did the laundry.
Every hour they checked in-between the slowly progressing contractions, which eventually made Ashley a little curious as to what they felt like when Helen hit six centimeters in the early night. Helen however decided to wait to give Ashley a taste of it until she was eight centimeters dilated and the pressure to push started to present itself. At the moment she took her mother's hand, Ashley doubled-over and practically fell to the floor beside her mother's bed. The look of agony on her face said it all.
"I kind of don't want to have any kids of my own now," she panted. It was like whole body menstrual cramps, but about ten times worse. What she didn't expect is how steel-like the tension was wrapped completely around her middle, from the front to the back.
Once the contraction passed, Helen gave her a comforting smile. "Hmm, we'll see. You may change your mind about it," she teased as she let go of Ashley's hand, reaching over to lightly run her fingers through her daughter's hair as Ashley looked up at her from a heavy kneel. To give Ashley some credit to her discomfort, Helen did opt for a completely natural drug-free birth; she knew her physiology could tolerate it very well. Ashley too, could tolerate large amounts of physical pain, however unlike her mother who had been gradually building up to that point for the last half day, Ashley had instantly fell into the deep end; being caught completely off-guard by the surprising onslaught of pain.
Once Helen reached ten centimeters after a total seventeen hour labor, bringing them into the morning of next day of July nineteenth, she requested that Ashley fetch her Uncle James from London. She intentionally waited this long after learning from Ashley's birth at how over-bearing he could be during the whole process. She didn't want to make the same mistake twice. Not only was he brought in for moral support, but she truly wanted him to be present for the birth of his new God son / nephew. Plus, he took over the role of being the photographer to help visually document this precious moment, occupying his attention and leaving Ashley free to fully assist her.
By that point, Helen had moved off the bed to squat forward on her knees bending over several soft fluffy towels on the floor, partially holding on to the bed for support. She had started to become really hot earlier, stripping off more and more clothing until all that had remained now was her bra. Reaching down, Helen could feel her son's head begin to crown.
Ashley scooted closer to be within just inches of her. "What do you want me to do?" she asked, slightly terrified.
After taking a large strained breath and wincing, Helen replied with, "Nothing, just stay close." The burning sensation increased to being tantamount to fire with the next contraction as she pushed his head through. She could feel his body shift within her, her body positioning his shoulders to come through on the next contraction. When it finally hit, with a final great big push he slipped from her body into her awaiting hands. Helen let out a breathy sigh of relief, leaning back on her ankles as she lifted him to her chest, eventually positioning herself to sit comfortably on the floor. Ashley covered them with a large warm blanket as her brother began to wail and Helen removed the last piece of clothing she had been wearing. Within minutes of clearing his airway he had latched to a breast and began to feed, which was excellent news in helping to progress the passing of the placenta twenty minutes later. Helen had insisted on delayed cord clamping until that moment.
Helen was tired, hot, sweaty, in a mild amount of pain and discomfort as her uterus continued to contract, completely naked and covered in bodily fluids from the waist down, but all she could think was that it was so damn worth it to have finally brought her son into the world. There was no better feeling than to have him finally in her arms nursing as she placed a kiss to the top of his head which was full of dark colored hair just like his father's.
Ashley sat in awed wonder at the miracle of her new little brother. "He's amazing," she voiced.
"He's beautiful, Helen," said James.
Comfortable with letting the two of them bond for the foreseeable future until her mother felt ready to take measurements and run a newborn physical exam, a process in which Ashley would be needed to lend help, Ashley curiously asked her mom if she had picked out a name.
As Helen gazed down at the ocean blue eyes staring up her, eyes similar to her own that she knew were a shade that would never change, she replied that she had, partially.
"I've had a middle and last name chosen for several years now, but I could never settle on a first. I was hoping you could help me pick one out," she said looking up at her daughter.
Without a single moment of hesitation, Ashley blurted out the name, "Tristan".
Helen gave a knowing smile at that. "You always did like that name," she said warmly as she tenderly rubbed the tiny boy's back. "And so it is, Tristan James Druitt."
At the recognition, Ashley and her Uncle James shared a smile at Watson being made his namesake.
"You gave him Dad's name," Ashley said softly, kindly surprised.
"It's only fair," she gave a cheeky little smirk before getting more serious. "Besides, even though the name 'Magnus' has a lot of good weight behind it, it won't work with what we are planning to do; especially now hiding back through time." Helen briefly paused and gave a solemn look as she continued. "I've also unfortunately come to learn from my past experience of when I passed my name on to you that I inadvertently put a target on your back, to which I want to say that I am sorry."
"Awww, Mom, you don't have to apologize for that. I loved the name. So I got used to it being either feared or revered. What's Sanctuary life without a little bit of danger involved?" Ashley offered as consolation.
Helen shook her head, staying firm on her position. "That is something I shouldn't have made you get used to, and I know you can see that." She insisted, giving her a 'look' to which Ashley backed down with a small acquiescing nod.
"No," Helen continued, taking a confident breath. "This little one is going on a different path all his own. No one will be looking for him with his father's name until long after now into the twenty-first century."
Authors note: Based on information provided in episode 4x13, the Underground Sanctuary could either be located somewhere in South America (potentially near the border between Peru and Bolivia) or in Coober Pedy, Australia. I'm leaning more towards it being in South America since that is where she is known to have based a mining company and it's next to a known atrial pathway to Hollow Earth. I'm not so sure about Australia, as all that is listed on the screen in the SCIU data base is that she opened a provisions store there. Though, researching the actual location does fall in line with mining and underground living, so its still a possibility.
Also, major note. The actor that I envisioned to play Ashley's brother is Brendan Penny. Both Brendan and Emilie Ullerup play siblings on the Hallmark TV show 'Chesapeake Shores'. I like Brendan's and Emilie's chemistry together; the way they can read and play off each other. He in my mind is a very believable fit, coincidentally also looking like he could be an actual child between Druitt and Magnus. Other coincidences include a similar birth date, his middle name, and location of birth. For his birth date, at the time I started this story I had no actual clue as to when Brendan's real birthday was as it wasn't listed on his IMDB page, which was kind of a bummer as 'Sanctuary' uses the actors real birthdays as gauges for their characters. So initially, I had randomly guessed Brendan's age, always intending for my OC to be born around mid-late July in the years '79-'80. Surprisingly enough, over a month ago, Brendan himself posted on Instagram about his birthday, confirming it as June 22nd, 1979 (He posted on the 21st saying that his 40th birthday was tomorrow). I almost hit it dead on exactly by accident. For the middle name being the same, James, for me it was always going to be James after Watson. As for the location of birth, it worked out nicely for me to use Ottawa. Ottawa is geographically close to Montreal and New Haven. I wanted the location to be a major Canadian city in that general Eastern region of the county and I didn't want to reuse Montreal as I wanted to keep with the 'use it and lose it' motto I had created back in Chapter 4. Also, a bit of an upcoming surprise in the next chapter, the actor I believe has also coincidentally lived in Toronto, another city I had planned on using for my OC when he's older.
*Bonus Points* To anyone who thought of the well-known tragic 12th century Celtic love story 'Tristan and Isolde' when they read the name.
