#jackson tide

the star on the back of his hand is his first tattoo, he got in memory of his mother. the simple wave on his bicep is for his dad (who he has a little bit of conflict with so its not a very detailed tattoo lol)

Tassell shudders as the wet grass beneath the windowsill clings to her bare feet, squinting into the sudden darkness, already missing the warmth of her bunk and dormitory. She glances back at her exit route and prays no watchman on a late-night patrol notices the shutters hanging slightly askew. 

A glint of light catches her eye, and she pads across the lawn, melting into the scrubby woodland that circles the grounds. A long beam of torchlight dances amongst the oak trees and she follows its flickering, ignoring fallen branches scraping at her trouser-legs. The breeze is bitingly cold, and Tassell pulls on long military-issue gloves that hang from her belt. Soon she is close enough to see the boy holding the old battery-powered torch. She watches the group glance back furtively, beginning to chat amongst themselves as they deem the coast to be clear. A peal of laughter rings out through the night, and an olive-skinned girl with choppy black hair is hushed by her two friends.  

“Are you three playing jesters? Fools out for a stroll?” Tassell’s mouth quirks up at the shock on their faces. She catches the eye of the boy with the torch, his dark brown skin tinted silver by moonlight. Her older brother glowers back at her.  

“Tass,” he begins, “You shouldn’t be out here.” 

“Neither should you. Seriously Jackson, are you stupid? Sneaking out is against the rules. Obviously.” 

The girl, Reef, and the other boy, with the camera around his neck and a hand tugging at his floppy blond fringe, shoot Jackson twin looks of annoyance. Seete, the blond, murmurs something Tassell doesn’t catch.  

“Yeah, I know,” Jackson mutters to him before crossing his arms over his chest. “Get out of here Tassell. We don't have time for this.” 

You'll have time for it when the sergeant has you running drills instead of eating dinner for a month. She opens her mouth to say as much but Seete nudges Jackson’s shoulder. His voice is hushed but Tassell recognises two words. [REDACTED LOCATION] Her stomach drops.  

“You’re not...” her eyes are wide as saucers. Jackson pinches the bridge of his nose in exasperation. 

“[REDACTED LOCATION]? There's no way you snuck out to go there- They'll whip you when you’re caught, you know!”  

"Don’t worry about us,” Seete’s tone is far too patronising to be addressing someone only 3 years his junior. “I’ll just take a couple photos then we’re out of there!” 

 Photographing [REDACTED LOCATION]. Oh God. If the rumours of the past months were true, if the reason [REDACTED LOCATION] was forbidden was because it was the location of a new military base-  

“Jacks. That’s espionage. They’ll shoot you!”  

“Not if we don’t stand around arguing with a thirteen-year-old girl who thinks she knows everything! Look, if you don’t like it, go back to school. I don’t want you trailing after us like a kicked mutt.”  

Her brother turns away from her and gestures for his friends to follow. Reef whispers a breezy apology to Tassell and then they’re gone. Disappearing into the scrub like ghosts. Tassell rocks on her heels, stunned into silence. Tears begin to well up and she blinks furiously, noticing a stinging pain in her ankle. She lowers herself down and pulls off her gloves to inspect the scratch, smearing the light trickle of blood with her fingers. Her eyes dart to a wobbly black line that runs parallel to her cut, and, as she squeezes them shut, she is struck by a memory that she had tried so hard to forget. Guilt and nostalgia and treacherous disobedience coil within her stomach like snakes. 

Hot tears streaked down Tassell’s face like blood from a wound, flooding her mouth with the taste of salt. Jackson stood before their father, defiant and desperate. The argument washed over Tassell like a crashing wave, cold and violent. Her ankle throbbed. The tattoo she’d begged her brother for so desperately was half-finished and crooked. A purple bead of inky blood threatened to splash onto the pebbly sand. Hush Tide held a needle and inkwell in each hand as if they were the scales of judgement.  

“-a tattoo? Jackson Tide, you’re a god-damned idiot. What will people think of our family now? Social pariahs, dissentients - Christ's sake, Jacks, the enemy marks their skin like this. And now you’re matching, the two of you. I won’t stand for it-” 

Their father had promised that day to send them to the military school. [SCHOOL NAME]. The stories she’d heard of that place – the beatings, the rules dictating every aspect of the cadet’s lives. Gone would be the freedom she and her brother once knew. No more adventures exploring the tidepools, no more forts made deep in the forests. She sobbed as if her heart was breaking, clinging to Jackson, her lifeline.  

“Hey, hey, you’re okay!” her brother awkwardly placed a hand on her back. “No matter what happens there, I promise I will always look out for you.”  

“Look out for water-rats, there’s an outpost round these parts.”  

Tassell rises slowly, trying not to give away her position. Dead leaves shift under her feet. 

The voice was hushed, slight drawl and unfamiliar slang marking the speaker as Sagebrush State born and raised. An enemy soldier. 

Another voice rises further away, less of a shout and more a panicked yelp, a student’s voice – Jackson's voice? 

Crack! Rattling gunfire pierces the night, and, in an instant, she is running. Running, stumbling, wailing like a lost dog into the darkness.  

Her breaths are short.  

Gasping. 

The air is thick with gun smoke and a choking mist crawls down her throat, clinging to her eyes and twisting the trees into cloaked soldiers with grasping, gnarled limbs. Sulphur stench fills Tassell’s nostrils, making her gag. Her bare feet plunge into ice-cold water and she keels over with hands outstretched. Her tears are carried away by the fast-moving stream she grovels in, panting. Even in the haze of terror she begs for forgiveness for her cowardice, disgusted by her flight.  

Would it be better to rise and run into the gunfire now? To at least die with some semblance of honour? 

“To die for one’s state is to die... is to die well... To die for one’s state is-” Tassell’s recital is cut short by a splash upstream.  

She wonders lazily when she had stood and picked up the slick rock she now held at her side. A lurching figure pushes towards her through the fog. She sees cream fabric and blond hair. 

Seete.  

Something swells inside her, rising and heaving, lapping at her spine. Her thoughts drifted to an old memory, an octopus unfurling slowly and crushing the shell of a crab in its black-rock beak. Her mouth stretches into a scowl so wide it splits at the corners.  

“This is all your fault, you know.” The sound of her own voice startles her. Raspy and thick from crying.  

“Everything really is your fault. I shouldn't be here. My brother shouldn’t be here.” She pauses and swipes a fist under her running nose. “I really hate you. I do.” His hand clamps down on her wrist like a vice and her voice rises into a scream. 

“Get away from me! You disgust me, coward, turncoat, wanting Jackson to be just like you!” 

The heavy thud of stone against meat feels familiar, natural, like the steady march of a military parade. A gurgle slips from the boy’s mouth before he falls backwards into the water. The current washes the flow of blood from his temple, revealing perfect white bone. Tassell is down there with him, perched atop the struggling body, a vulture croaking out accusations.  

“You-” Thud. “-ruined-” Thud. “-everything!” Viscous liquid coats her arm up to the elbow and the rock sends splatters streaking across her cheeks as she draws it up from the water and back down in a frantic rhythm. The thrashing becomes weaker and weaker until the figure underneath her is limp. A final bubbling breath slips away with the tide.  

The mist fades from her vision and Tassell falls still. Her heart rattles inside her chest, acid panic still pumping within her alongside each frenzied beat. She looks down and finally sees. 

Swollen tongue lolled from purple lips, eyes and nose collapsed into a fleshy cavity.  

More than that. His clothes, which bulged strangely as water rushed through them, were not those of a student. A stylised sprig of sagebrush decorated his lapel. A chest holster rested over his heart, hanging looser than it should from narrow shoulders. The body beneath her is not Seete, but an enemy soldier.  

The tread of footsteps through dry underbrush lifts her from her daze, and she looks up to see Reef of all people, leading her brother in a half-stagger half-run through the woodland. 

Jackson’s face was smeared with blood, gluing one eye shut and dripping from the tip of his nose. A long slash ran diagonal between his eyebrows. He leaned into Reef’s shoulder, looking smaller than Tassell had ever seen him. Reef was sobbing, heaving huge, ragged breaths. It was so different to her usual easy grin that she seemed a complete stranger. Her eyes widened as she recognised the girl in front of her.  

“Tassell!”  

Jackson’s head snapped up at his sister’s name, silent relief flooding his features. 

“Seete’s gone,” the older girl moaned, “They shot him.” 

Tassell pulls on her gloves with agonising slowness. The blood on her hands is replaced by thick leather, spotless, unscathed. She runs a finger over her collar. 

In the shining moonlight, she can almost see the badge that will be hanging there by tomorrow. Bravery in Combat. Youngest undergraduate to dispatch an enemy soldier. 

Her brother staggers towards her, placing a hand on her shoulder and gently pushing her forwards. The three fall into a stumbling run back to the school, Reef on point, eyes rolling, Jackson urging them on. Floodlights dance through the trees and the whir of a helicopter overhead is accompanied by a sick shuddering rattle, a drowning man’s final breaths.  

Basically what you need to know is there are two and a half universes that feature the beloved Tassell Tide, each one containing multiple timelines. Consider it to be a plait, with different groups of hair with individual hairs as hyperspecific timelines.

The main universe is the original Hunger Games universe. In this, Tassell Tide won the 26th Hunger Games at 16 years old. Her father is Hush Tide, her mother is Starla Tide (deceased). At the time of winning, her brother Jackson Tide is 19 years old.

That story mainly follows her relationship with Minnow Thread, another victor. The two bond over their experiences in the games, relying on each other to survive on their mandatory visits to the Capitol. They share secrets about themselves that no one else knows, beginning to heal together the best they can while still living under the Capitols thumb. The “canon” ending is the good version of their story, ending with them living through the war and finally being able to live together in peace in their 60s until they die of old age. The “bad endings” of the story is a sort of butterfly effect, with a few small actions ending in either Minnow or Tassell killed, either for Tassells deep involvement with rebel activity in District 4 or Minnow for her husbands links to organised crime (or in a rare timeline, her violent attack of Capitol officials at a party after learning something horrific relating to either her deceased children or Tassell)

Whatever happens in the bad ending, one of them has to live with the death of the other, their one true confidant (and in some endings, before they have the chance to tell the other they love them)

Tassell copes a little better in the bad ending than Minnow would, because of her brothers support. He is also deeply involved in rebel gatherings, which she only discovers after winning her games. But their relationship is often strained at least at first in many timelines, bc Tassell is vastly changed by the trauma of her games. I think I have reblogged a post about doomed sibling relationships that relates a little to their relationship in Hunger Games universe.

However, the “doomed siblings” applies far more to the other universe, which I’ll call the Hanging Rock universe for now. This is the one that you’ve read. Essentially in this AU, after killing Seete, Tassell goes down one of two paths. She either has a realisation of the wrongness of the world they live in and slowly unlearns it’s propaganda (and joining in a resistance movement with Jackson (who is always a rebel of some sort in every universe)), or sort of just mentally distances herself from her actions and the terrible things happening around her. She quickly climbs the ranks in this bad timeline, physically very strong and able to kill easily. She is essentially an attack dog for the states army and is feared by both sides eventually.

The climax of this bad timeline is when, after not seeing her brother for years because of being deployed all over the country, she is asked specifically to deliver an execution (something she does often). She arrives and discovers Jackson is one of the people sentenced for execution because his rebel group was ratted out by someone. She is still living in this haze that she uses to cope with the killing, and executes her brother as ordered. However this is the final straw and she snaps, realising what she has become.

With her incredible knowledge of weaponry, inside knowledge of the command systems and military secrets and pure horrified rage, she is a force to be reckoned with.