SFSD-X

Round 2 - Alternate History & Antiheroes

The prompt for this round was a fictional antihero in the setting of a historical event;

https://www.wattpad.com/137763770-ooorah%27s-sfsd-x-round-2-alternate-history-%26

We were each given a different prompt; mine was: The Great Train Robbery - Jax Teller.

Of course, in the finale, Jax kills himself by riding his Harley into an oncoming semi. So I chose to set this story towards the end of Season 3, soon after they've returned from Ireland, having rescued Jax's baby son. At that point, he has decided that he no longer wants to follow the ideas in his father's manuscript (which his father wrote for Jax before he died).

I've tried as far as possible to make this both historically accurate, and true to the series. I was fortunate with the prompt in several ways;

1. Jax's father, John Teller, was born in 1940. In Season 3 we learn that John had an affair with Maureen Ashby, in Ireland, around 1990, and together they had a daughter (Trinity Ashby). So it's quite possible that he had been visiting Ireland regularly, prior to this.

2.  The Ashbys lived in Ulster, and are aligned with the Unionists. Father Ashby is the 'True IRAs' Consigliere. So it's not inconceivable that he would have held the same, or a similar position forty years earlier, perhaps reporting to 'The Ulsterman', who was responsible for much of the planning of the Robbery in real life.

3. Most of the money taken during the Robbery was never recovered. A lot of it was Irish currency. We can speculate that, given the opportunity, an early Unionist organisation would have engaged with a robbery to raise funds for The Cause.

4. There were two men present at the Robbery that were never formally identified. The detectives involved in the case, and others, have since named them, but I figured that for the purposes of the story I could have my characters step into those identities. I've not had them assume false names, though, because the story is too short for the reader to become familiar with false identities....