Title: Rejected
Fandom: BtVS
Author: badly_knitted
Characters: Principal Snyder.
Rating: PG
Word Count: 400
Spoilers: Set after Band Candy.
Summary: Snyder has spent his life on the outside.
Written For: Challenge 315: Amnesty, using Challenge 143: On The Outside.
Disclaimer: I don’t own BtVS, or the characters; they belong to the great Joss Whedon.
A/N: Quadruple drabble.



Snyder had been young once, many years ago, in what felt like another lifetime. That damned band candy incident had brought it all back in excruciating detail, his high school years when he’d been a socially awkward teen, desperately wanting to hang out with the cool kids but always rejected, on the outside looking in.

He hates kids, and teenagers are the worst, especially the popular and pretty ones. He’d never been either, a borderline geek with no athletic ability whatsoever and looks not even his own mother could love, ears that stuck out and a hairline that had already begun to recede. The other boys had mocked and taunted him, the girls had laughed at him, and no matter how hard he’d tried to fit in he’d been treated like dirt, bullied and pushed around.

The ache inside has never gone away, turning him bitter and resentful, but that’s okay because he isn’t a kid anymore.

Now he has all the power, he can put kids like the ones who belittled him in their places and make sure they stay there. He’s the school Principal, he makes all the rules, he gets to say who belongs and who doesn’t and he has the authority to make it stick. Nobody gets to tell him what to do, not now. Well, there’s the school board, and the mayor, but they respect him because of the way he runs his little empire. They need him.

It’s a heady experience, being able to make kids suffer the way he once did, to threaten them with detention, even expulsion, to hold their futures in his hands. He can make them or break them, and he knows which he prefers. It makes him feel tingly, almost happy, to think of withholding the right to an education from those who don’t deserve it.

So what if he still doesn’t have any friends? He has something better than that: influence. The mayor listens to him, and so does the chief of police. It’s a good position to be in. He got this job because of who he knows; he doesn’t need for them to like him.

But still, deep down in the depths of his shrivelled soul, he wishes he knew how it felt to be popular, to be liked and accepted by his peers, to maybe even be loved.

All he’s ever wanted is to belong.


The End