Drabble

[beer_good_foamy]

Here's a drabble that popped into my head and seemed to fit today's open_on_sunday challenge ("Twist/Plot")

Survival

Once when she was 12, Sam Zabuto lost Kendra in a crowd.

He found her staring at a group of dancers in front of a flatbed truck with an old-fashioned sound system blasting bass-heavy music; Marley, Tosh, Burning Spear. A boy, maybe 14, took her hand with a smile and pulled her into the throng. She danced for a few moments; when she saw Zabuto, she obediently returned to him.

All the way home there was a twist in her step, a backbeat of her own.

It took an extra week of training to get her defensive stance right again.

Comments

[frayadjacent]

Ah, this is great. Thanks for sharing!

[beer_good_foamy]

Thank you!

[ladyjane]

Awwww, poor Kendra. I miss her. She never had a chance to be a woman in her own right.

[beer_good_foamy]

Yep. :( Thanks!

[norwie2010.livejournal.com]

Now you made me all sniffly for Kendra!

[beer-good-foamy.livejournal.com]

Sorry. :) Thanks!

[gillo]

That ending has such sad implications. I hate Zabuto, and we never even saw him.

[beer-good-foamy.livejournal.com]

Thanks!

I like to think Zabuto's position is a bit complicated. His job is to get her ready to fight, which as far as he knows can come at pretty much any time, and if she's not ready then, she's most likely dead. But yeah, it's not a pretty picture.

[red-satin-doll.livejournal.com]

I rarely ever think of Kendra, to be honest, (and I feel bad about that because I'm not sure the writers ever really saw her as a complete person either) but this is gorgeous and sad. I can imagine that they way Kendra was trained was very much how Slayers had been trained around the world for centuries - and in a lot of cultures, a child might be given over to a shaman to live with them and apprentice (the same was true in europe in the middle ages actually, in terms of artists and craftspeople).

But you capture how out of step with the times that way has become - and you capture her youthful yearning. Poor girl really never had a chance - if you're being trained to be a "death dealer", how and when can you fully experience joy?

[beer-good-foamy.livejournal.com]

Thanks! And yeah. Kendra tends to be forgotten a lot, which is understandable since she was hardly the most fleshed-out of characters, but when you look at what the show implies, her fate is one of the most tragic in the Buffyverse - especially with the suggestion that this has been standard operational procedure for millennia.

(I have a whole backstory for Zabuto in my head that I might turn into fic one day. Which is a lot to form on the basis of a name and a few vague allusions, and which in itself is a bit problematic with all sorts of post-colonial stuff, but... so far I've only written him once (http://beer-good-foamy.livejournal.com/28696.html#cutid1) and I wouldn't mind exploring him a bit further, even if he is practically an OC.)

[red-satin-doll.livejournal.com]

I just read the story you linked to and like it quite a lot - I'm surprised you haven't explored that already because these two stories seem so rich with possibilities. The contrast of the old man and Faith was very well-done. Faith's got as many daddy/parent issues as Buffy does. I think it works better than if it had been Buffy in that circumstance, as you've written it. And I'm still fascinated by the "Slayer lineage", and the idea that Buffy is Kendra's "sire" and Faith's "Grandsire", to use the terms used to refer to the Fanged Four, although that isn't spoken of as such on the show. (And of course, the new Slayers have two mommies (plus a lesbian midwife)...but I digress.)

Zabuto basically being an OC is probably a good thing because it gives you plenty of room to play. So yes, consider this a request to write more about Zabuto's world, if your brain takes requests.

[beer-good-foamy.livejournal.com]

Heh. Funny you should say that, since this is actually a spiritual spinoff of a longer fic I'm working on that's pretty close to the lineage theme. It should hopefully be done in a day or so. Have you been hacking into my computer or something? :)

[red-satin-doll.livejournal.com]

Silly, I used my incredible powers of mental telepathy.

[local-max.livejournal.com]

Dude.

(It was then that Zabuto decided that the problem was that Kendra had too many shirts. He realized that allowing her two was a foolish act, bound to lead to the kind of frivolous thinking that would get her killed.)

[beer-good-foamy.livejournal.com]

Heh.

Kendra actually has a number of simple cotton t-shirts, all equally practical and unflattering. Zabuto buys them in bulk.

[speakr2customrs.livejournal.com]

This was extremely stupid of Zabuto. Didn't he realise that dance and combat are linked? Hadn't he ever seen Capoeira in action? He should have encouraged her to move with the rhythm rather than trained it out of her.

[beer-good-foamy.livejournal.com]

In retrospect, that would probably have turned out better for everyone, yeah.

[angearia.livejournal.com]

/o\

[beer-good-foamy.livejournal.com]

<3

[thenniel.livejournal.com]

Aww poor Kendra!

[beer-good-foamy.livejournal.com]

Pretty much, yeah. Thanks!