to ensure history does not repeat // josephine one-shots

lance
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to ensure history does not repeat // josephine one-shots Aug 29, 2020 23:22:20 GMT -5

Post by lance on Aug 29, 2020 23:22:20 GMT -5

It's been sobering, meeting scores upon scores of people who see her as something akin to a savior. Someone who will bring about actual, meaningful, lasting change to her home instead of sitting atop a throne built on lies and corruption. Sure, she knew that there were people that were suffering in Six. Sure, she knew that the response from the person who should actually give a damn about the people as a whole and had the power to do it was lackluster.

But she wasn't the only one who suffered. No. Perhaps that's how her campaign had gained momentum in the first place. Perhaps that's how she feels it in her bones, that she has an actual, real chance to make a difference in someone's life.

Perhaps that's how she knows that she's in the right. Calliope Bloom had ten long years to build up a plan, do genuine good by the people who had elected her into office. And she had spent all that time resting on her laurels, doing nothing as tragedy after tragedy wrought her home.

No more, she had decided. Not one mother, father, parent, child, sibling, or loved one should suffer if it could be prevented. Would suffer, if she could help it.

Josephine Davenport had lost all that she had held dear in a single explosion that had shaken the district to its very core. And if Mayor Bloom was hide in seclusion and do nothing about it, well, then she would have to be replaced.

She wasn't just one person, she realized. She was just the figurehead of an entire movement.

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lance
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to ensure history does not repeat // josephine one-shots Aug 29, 2020 23:56:46 GMT -5

Post by lance on Aug 29, 2020 23:56:46 GMT -5

There's stories, so many stories of those who have suffered. And though Josephine was one of the hardest hit, she was far from the only one who had lost on that great day. Not that she'd ever suffered that delusion in the first place, but there was a difference between having a vague idea of someone's suffering and getting to see it firsthand.

One of the most poignant was that of a young man, someone who carried a look of barely-concealed grief even now, months after he'd lost his mother in the explosion. She'd had a particularly bad case of some sort of virus, one that had attacked the lungs of her already weak constitution. For the better part of a month and the majority of the family's funds, they'd fought to bring her back from the brink - only to have all of that progress and her life ripped away in one fell swoop.

Mayor Bloom hadn't cared. She'd watched on with apathy while this young man watched on with horror, the same that she had.

But she cared. As she gave him a hug and let him sob into her shoulder, she cared, so, so much.

It was a pain she knew personally. A pain she would fight to protect as many people from, as long as she still drew breath.

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lance
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to ensure history does not repeat // josephine one-shots Aug 30, 2020 2:32:38 GMT -5

Post by lance on Aug 30, 2020 2:32:38 GMT -5

There's more from the hospital alone. She made it a priority to learn the names of each and every person that died in the explosions that day, contact each and every one of their family members.

It was hard. Very hard. Reminders of Charlie filled her head with each and every person she talked to, each child she held tightly with a mother's embrace, each parent who sobbed into her shoulder. There's one of a wheelchair bound old woman, taken in to celebrate one year of beating cancer, who turned out to be the only person in a party of children and grandchildren to survive through fate alone. And another of a child orphaned because both of his parents worked in the same field, were childhood sweethearts that followed a passion to their graves.

It hurt. But she remembered them all. She had to, for there was no other choice if she was to honor their memories. Right alongside her own dear Charlie.

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lance
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to ensure history does not repeat // josephine one-shots Aug 30, 2020 2:37:42 GMT -5

Post by lance on Aug 30, 2020 2:37:42 GMT -5

The hospital isn't the only story that she uses, of course, though it is one at the forefront of her campaign. But one does not garner such solid discontent against an incumbent through one bad incident alone.

Mayor Bloom is a weird one. A young woman who rose out of nowhere with seemingly no qualifications for the job, yet one who managed to not only secure the office ten years ago but beat off another challenger five years afterwords. Yet she's largely apathetic to the fate of her people, acting the role of the recluse that thinks the will of their people isn't something to take seriously.

When Teddy Ursa switches camps, choosing to put his support behind Josephine instead of the mayor he'd supported in the past, she takes it that the move is more than just symbolic. That there's more to the story than a privileged young woman who just so happened to claim one of the most important seats in the nation for the better part of a decade through sheer chance.

So she starts expanding her avenue of attack. And beyond that, she begins to dig.

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lance
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to ensure history does not repeat // josephine one-shots Aug 30, 2020 2:45:18 GMT -5

Post by lance on Aug 30, 2020 2:45:18 GMT -5

It's easy to find people who've had a bone to pick with the dear mayor beyond even the sacrilege of the hospital incidents. A lower class that thinks themselves scorned and ignored by the person who should be helping them. Academics, the chief engineers beyond the academy, who find that Bloom's views and their own do not often align.

And whispers. Rumors. That the gigantic pool of candidates ten years ago was intentionally built up to split the vote. That the woman who had run five years ago in a prelude to her own throne-breaking attempt had little chance of anything equating fair. And that the grand idea of democracy might very well be corrupted by a shadow council that controls things from the inside out.

Josephine is new to politics, just like so many others that have once found themselves running for mayor. Even Calliope Bloom, at one point. But that does not mean she can't see when something is fishy. There were always suspicions, how one so incompetent and apathetic could hold onto a seat past her first tenure.

Teddy Ursa gives her the information she needs to move those suspicions into something more credible.

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lance
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to ensure history does not repeat // josephine one-shots Aug 30, 2020 13:51:33 GMT -5

Post by lance on Aug 30, 2020 13:51:33 GMT -5

After that, it's not just a campaign to right the wrongs of her past, to protect others from a fate that no living being should ever have to experience. It becomes something more urgent, something more dangerous, something that feels like it's covered in yellow tape with a flashing DO NOT ENTER sign glowing blood red above the entrance.

But she has nothing left to lose. It's why she signed up for this job in the first place. This duty, this purpose. Win, and she can change the lives of hundreds, even thousands, of people that have spent the better part of the last decade suffering and chafing under misrule.

Lose? Well, she hadn't heard reports of the woman who had challenged her five years ago. Reports of death, reports of disgrace, reports of anything, really. That's fine with her. She can handle being forgotten.

But she won't handle not giving it her all when there are lives at stake. It's an easy decision to cut through the yellow tape, walk through the forbidden entrance - consequences be damned.

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lance
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to ensure history does not repeat // josephine one-shots Aug 30, 2020 13:54:10 GMT -5

Post by lance on Aug 30, 2020 13:54:10 GMT -5

It's not something she can bring up on the campaign trail without proof. And as important to the district as Teddy is, sharing details about what she has learned is the opposite of progress. It would force a confrontation she is not ready and willing to have, put innocent lives on the line, and transform the contest from democratic election to something more personal, something uglier.

She is not that kind of person. That kind of candidate. She is someone who is looking to heal, not baptize the district in a cleansing flame.

So it's news that she'll carry to her chest, news that'll stay close to her heart. She's carried heavier burdens before than a secret. Even one as serious as this.

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lance
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to ensure history does not repeat // josephine one-shots Aug 30, 2020 13:58:27 GMT -5

Post by lance on Aug 30, 2020 13:58:27 GMT -5

On the campaign trail, things go as planned. She holds rallies, highlighting her own plans as well as the usual political barbs aimed at her opponent. She makes her grand speech, written directly from the heart, and afterwords spends hours talking and listening to the voices of the people she is fighting so desperately hard to represent.

It's strange. It's not like anything she had ever imagined herself doing across her many years. Her first dream was to work in medicine and heal in a more literal sense. Her second was to ensure her child got to live his own dream in her place. But both had been ripped away from her, and she had been left to the mercy of an apathetic system.

No more. Never again. If mayor or political martyr is to be her fate, then that is one she'll carry gladly.

There's more strength in her old bones than she gives credit to, even if the burdens she carries are unlike anything she has ever felt.

But she has one thing going for her that Calliope Bloom does not, and that is the respect of the common people. And to Ripred above, she prays that'll be more than enough.

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