Title: Gone Too Soon
Fandom: BtVS
Author: badly_knitted
Characters: Buffy, Kendra.
Rating: PG
Word Count: 400
Setting: From the middle to the end of Season Two.
Summary: Like all the Slayers who came before, Kenda lived too short a time.
Content Notes: None needed.
Written For: Challenge 405: Amnesty 67 at fan_flashworks, using Challenge 35: Elusive or Ephemeral.
Disclaimer: I don’t own BtVS, or the characters.



Slayers are like mayflies, Buffy thinks; there one minute and gone the next, leaving a vacant space for the next generation to inhabit. She’d thought she’d come to terms with the idea of dying young, but then there’d been the prophecy, and she’d realised she might not even make it to seventeen… She’d been terrified, desperate to live, ready to walk away from her responsibilities if it only meant she’d survive a little longer…

Only when it had come right down to it, she hadn’t been able to let someone else go in her place, hadn’t been able to justify putting her life and what she wanted ahead of what was right. She was the Slayer; stopping the Master was up to her.

So she’d gone, and she’d died, and then she’d been brought back to finish the job. She’d been dead probably less than a minute, and yet it had been long enough for another potential to be called, gaining her full Slayer powers.

Kendra.

Their first meeting had been full of misunderstandings, but once Giles had sorted it all out and everyone involved understood what had happened, why there were now two Slayers instead of the usual one, it had been kinda cool, like gaining a protégé. They’d fought side by side, and Buffy had given Kendra the benefit of her experience, then they’d said goodbye, promising to keep in touch.

Kendra shouldn’t have come back, not even to help fight the very big evil her Watcher had detected brewing in Sunnydale, because now Kendra is dead, her life snuffed out like a candle flame, and nobody will even know what she might have achieved if she’d only gotten the chance.

Buffy wants to scream and cry over the unfairness, because it’s just so wrong! Why do Slayers have to die before they even get to live? Why is there only ever supposed to be one when there’s so much evil to fight? If there are so many potentials, why can’t there be a whole host of Slayers?

There’s no time to be angry, no time to grieve, no time to wonder if there might be some way around the One Girl in all the World rule, because if Angel awakens Acathla there won’t be a world. But someday Buffy’s going to find a way to build a Slayer army, and then maybe they’ll all get to live.


The End