Sanctuary Ficlet: Lying To Protect
Title: Lying To Protect
Fandom: Sanctuary
Author: badly_knitted
Characters: Helen Magnus; mentions Ashley, and John Druitt.
Rating: PG
Spoilers: Series one.
Summary: Helen Magnus hates lying to her daughter, but isn’t it better than the alternative?
Word Count: 307
Written For: mirrored_illusions’s prompt ‘Sanctuary, Helen (and Ashley), how do you tell your daughter her father is Jack the Ripper?’ at
fic_promptly.
Disclaimer: I don’t own Sanctuary, or the characters. They belong to their creators.
A/N: Slightly AU since this was written before I’d seen the whole series.
Ashley believes her father is dead, because that’s what Helen has told her all her life. It seemed the simplest and most appropriate course of action, because how can you tell your own daughter that her father is the man known as Jack the Ripper?
What would it do to Ashley if she knew that half of her genetic makeup comes from an evil, brutal, and sadistic serial killer who preyed on woman more than a century ago? Surely it’s better for her if she never finds out.
Before they injected the source blood, John was a good and decent man; sometimes he still is, but the dark side of his nature is always there, lurking beneath his seemingly civilised exterior and there’s never any sure way of knowing if and when it might break loose again. It makes him unpredictable and lethally dangerous, and Helen wants to protect her daughter from him in every way possible, even though she hates lying to Ashley about something so fundamental to her very existence.
At one time she’d thought that when Ashley was old enough to understand, she’d explain, tell her everything, but she’s old enough now, and has seen more than enough, yet Helen still holds back. The longer she waits, the harder it becomes to broach the subject. What could she say? ‘I lied to you, your father isn’t dead, he’s just an irredeemable murderer?’ Wouldn’t that knowledge hurt Ashley more than believing her father dead? Does Helen have the right to burden her only child with the weight of her true parentage?
So she puts it off again, it’s not as if John Druitt is any kind of presence in her daughter’s life and in the end, perhaps the lie is kinder; the truth can wait until telling all becomes unavoidable, and hopefully, it never will.
The End