in which enzo says the wrong thing and is promptly reminded why that was a mistake.
Fay had been having a perfectly good day until Enzo opened his mouth.
She was sitting at her kitchen table with a cup of tea she'd forgotten to drink and a notebook she'd forgotten to write in. Most of the afternoon had been spent doing absolutely nothing productive, which had been the entire point. Enzo had shown up two hours ago, invited himself inside, stolen one of her cookies, and made himself comfortable like he paid rent.
At some point the conversation had drifted from books to Bonnie to some random argument Damon had started the night before. Fay wasn't paying much attention anymore. She was mostly listening to the sound of Enzo's voice while trying to remember what she'd originally planned to do that day.
Then he laughed.
Not loudly. Not enough to be suspicious. Just enough.
Fay glanced up from her notebook.
"What?"
"Nothing."
That answer immediately irritated her.
People who said nothing were almost always hiding something.
Enzo looked entirely too entertained with himself as he leaned back in his chair.
"You've got that look again."
"What look?"
"The one where you're about to be annoyed."
"I'm not annoyed."
"Not yet."
Fay narrowed her eyes. Unfortunately, that only made him smile.
The conversation should have ended there. It probably would have if Enzo had possessed even a single self-preservation instinct.
Instead, he tilted his head. "You know, you're a little sensitive sometimes."
The silence that followed could have frozen a lake.
Fay stared at him. Slowly. Very slowly. Then she set her notebook down.
"A little what?"
"A little sensitive."
The fact that he repeated it so casually made everything worse.
Fay sat back in her chair.
"Interesting."
Immediately, Enzo knew he should have stopped talking
"Very interesting."
"Love."
"No, go on."
"There isn't anything to go on about."
"Apparently there is."
Fay crossed her arms.
"Wow."
"What?"
"You think I'm sensitive."
"I said a little."
"Oh, that's MUCH better."
Enzo rubbed his face. The argument had officially escaped containment.
By the time he left an hour later, Fay had informed him that he was rude, annoying, impossible to live with, impossible to date, and absolutely not welcome back in her apartment.nEnzo had taken this information remarkably well.
Which was also annoying.
The apartment felt much quieter after he left.
Not peaceful.
Fay spent the next hour trying to remain offended.
She made it almost the entire hour.
Then there was a knock at the door.
She already knew who it was.
When she opened it, Enzo was standing there holding a paper bag from her favorite takeout place and another bag filled with enough candy to make a dentist cry.
Fay looked at the food.
Then at Enzo.
Then back at the food.
Her annoyance immediately found itself facing a serious challenge.
"You think this fixes everything?"
"No."
"It absolutely sounds like you think this fixes everything."
"It does have a strong track record."
Fay tried very hard not to laugh. Unfortunately, that only made it worse. A few minutes later she was sitting at her kitchen table eating noodles while Enzo acted as though he hadn't caused the entire situation in the first place.
Honestly, that might have been the most irritating part.The man called her sensitive, got thrown out of her apartment, came back with food, and somehow still ended the day sitting in her kitchen.
Fay took a bite of her dinner. Maybe she was a little sensitive. She immediately decided she hated that thought.
Enzo caught the look on her face and started laughing.
She left Lynchburg with a backpack, a broken suitcase, and a very firm policy about people. Enzo was driving back from the best mood he'd been in in years.
Pairing: enzo st. john x fay nima (self ship)
Setting: post season 6x14
The suitcase had a broken wheel.
Fay had noticed it around mile three. She had not stopped. Stopping would have required acknowledging that this plan had a flaw in it, and she was not prepared to do that yet. Maybe mile five. Maybe Mystic Falls. Maybe she would simply drag it all the way there and let it die on arrival and that would be that.
She kept walking.
The skirt was long and dark blue and it was her favorite one, which was the only reason she'd packed it, and it was not ideal for this, but very few things about today were ideal and she had made her peace with that approximately never. Her backpack sat high on her shoulders. Her edges were starting to do something in the humidity that she refused to think about. The suitcase dragged behind her on three working wheels and one loud, grinding, deeply personal complaint about the situation.
Mystic Falls was another twelve miles.
She knew nobody in Mystic Falls.
Good. That was the whole point.
Enzo was driving with the easy, loose energy of a man who had just gotten exactly what he wanted, which for once, he actually had.
Sarah Salvatore had chosen him. Freely. He'd needed it to be free had constructed the whole thing so that it would be and it had worked, and now the road was open and he had nowhere urgent to be and he was allowing himself, in the privacy of an empty highway, to feel good about it.
He almost missed her entirely.
She was on the right shoulder backpack, long skirt, a rolling suitcase with some kind of catastrophic wheel situation that he could actually hear from inside the car. Just walking, steadily and with some force.
He passed her.
Drove another quarter mile.
The sound of the suitcase wheel was still somehow in his head.
He slowed down. He wasn't entirely sure why. She was just an interesting picture young woman, full backpack, modest blouse, long skirt sweeping around her ankles, broken suitcase, middle of nowhere, totally alone. It was strange enough that he wanted to know the shape of it.
He reversed.
Fay heard the car before she processed what it was doing.
She heard it pass her, which was normal. Then she heard it slow down, which was less normal. Then she heard it actually reverse back toward her, which was the kind of thing that made her hand drift automatically toward the front pocket of her backpack, where the pepper spray was.
She didn't look at it.
Policy.
The car rolled up beside her and matched her pace and the window was already down and she stared straight ahead and kept walking.
"Rough day?" said a voice. British. Easy. The particular tone of someone who found everything faintly entertaining, including, apparently, her.
Fay said nothing.
"The suitcase," the voice offered, helpfully. "It's making a sound.
"I know what my suitcase is doing."
"Just checking."
She kept walking. He kept rolling. The car was moving at approximately the speed of someone who had fully committed to being annoying and was settling in for the long haul.
"Where are you headed?" he asked.
"Not your business."
"Fair. Are you all right?"
"Absolutely fine."
"You're walking on the side of a highway."
"People walk."
"Not usually like this."
She looked at him then, just to make sure he received the full effect of her expression, which communicated very clearly that she had assessed him and found nothing worth her time. He was watching her from the driver's seat with his arm resting on the door and an expression that was almost a smile. Sharp face. Dark hair.
She looked back at the road. "I'm fine," she said. "You can go."
"I'm in no rush."
"Good for you."
"I could give you a lift..."
"No." She scoffed
"You didn't let me finish."
"You were going to offer me a ride," she said. "I'm saying no to the ride. You can finish the sentence if you want but the answer will still be no."
A pause. "You're quite sure about that."
"I'm quite sure about that."
He just continued rolling along beside her at three miles an hour like this was a completely normal thing to be doing, and she kept walking, and the suitcase kept making its noise, and the situation was what it was.
"It's twelve miles," he said, after a while.
"I know how far it is."
"To Mystic Falls."
She didn't say anything to that, because she hadn't told him where she was going, and he'd said it like he already knew, and she filed that away somewhere in the back of her mind under strange and worth remembering and kept her face even.
"I'm not getting in your car," she said.
"You mentioned that."
"I'm mentioning it again."
"Noted." He didn't sound deterred. He sounded, if anything, like he was enjoying himself, which was its own specific kind of irritating the kind that got under the skin not because it was aggressive but because it wasn't, because he was just there, easy and unbothered, like her refusal was a perfectly interesting response that he had no particular problem with.
She walked another hundred yards. He drove another hundred yards. The suitcase wheel screamed.
"You know," he said conversationally, "I'm not actually going to do anything. I'm just going the same direction."
"I don't know you."
"Enzo," he said.
"I didn't ask.
"Now you don't have to."
Fay's jaw tightened. She was aware of the pepper spray in the front pocket. She was aware of exactly how many seconds it would take her to get to it. She was doing a quiet, private calculation about whether this man was actually a threat or just genuinely the most persistently annoying person she had encountered in recent memory, and the answer was leaning toward the second one, which was almost worse, because you couldn't pepper spray an annoyance. Well. You could. But you'd have to justify it later.
"Please," she said, and she said it with a very specific flatness that was not a please in any traditional sense, "go away."
"In a bit."
"Now." Fay demanded
"You know, most people would just take the ride..."
"I am not most people and I would like you to take your car and your accent and whatever this is." she gestured vaguely at him without looking, "and go literally anywhere else."
"The accent," he repeated, like he was genuinely curious what she had against it.
"It's doing a lot of work and I don't appreciate it."
He laughed at that. and she hated that it didn't sound mean, it just sounded like she'd said something that landed, and she didn't want to land anything with this man, she wanted him to leave, she wanted very badly to not be having this interaction on the side of a road in the middle of nowhere Virginia with a broken suitcase and sweaty edges and twelve miles still to go...
His phone rang.
The sound that came out of that phone was she didn't have an immediate word for it. High-pitched. Urgent. Whoever was on the other end had something to say and was saying it at volume, and Enzo's whole energy shifted in an instant, that easy amusement snapping into something more alert, and he said "yes, I'm yes, I heard you " and then he was accelerating, just like that, the car pulling forward and past her and down the road, and within about fifteen seconds he was gone.
Fay stood there.
The road was empty. The suitcase was quiet for once, because she'd stopped moving.
She looked up at the sky.
"Thank you," she said, out loud, to no one, or possibly to God, or possibly to whatever patron saint covered men who have the decency to leave when their phones ring. "Thank you. Genuinely. From the bottom of my heart. Thank you."
She stood there one more moment.
Then she picked up the suitcase, adjusted her backpack, and kept walking.
Twelve miles.
Fine.
Mystic Falls had a hotel.
Nima knew this because she was standing in front of it, reading the rate on the small placard by the door, and then she was walking back out of it, because the rate on the small placard by the door was not something she could do anything with. The woman at the desk had watched her read it and had not said anything, which Nima appreciated. There was nothing to say. The number was the number.
She had eleven dollars.
She walked the main street once, slowly, the suitcase dragging behind her on its three working wheels and its one ongoing complaint. There was a grill. There was a pharmacy. There was a hardware store that was closed. There was a church. There was a board inside the grill with local listings that had a flyer for a missing cat and an advertisement for something happening in September and nothing else. She stood in front of it for a moment and then walked back out.
She found a bench in a small park off the main street and sat down on it and took out her phone.
Twenty nine percent.
She looked up motels. There was one, four miles out on Route 7. She looked at the rate. She looked at her eleven dollars. She looked at the rate again.
She put her phone away.
The light was going. Not gone yet but going, that particular gold and low quality that meant dark was maybe an hour out, which meant she had an hour to figure out where she was sleeping, which was fine. She had been in worse situations than a park bench at dusk with eleven dollars in a town she didn't know. She had a list. It was a long list. This did not crack the top ten.
She was very tired.
Not scared. Just tired. The kind of tired that had been building since somewhere around mile seven and had settled into her shoulders and her feet and the backs of her eyes and was not going anywhere.
She sat with it and looked at the trees and did not make it into anything larger than it was.
That was when she heard someone cutting through the park.
He almost walked past her.
She could see the moment he registered her a slight adjustment in his stride, the particular hesitation of someone deciding whether to say something. She kept her face even and waited for him to decide no and keep walking.
He stopped.
He was around her age. Maybe a year younger. Dark hair, tired eyes, He looked at her and then at the suitcase and she could see him doing the math she hadn't asked him to do and didn't particularly want him doing.
She waited.
"Hey," he said.
"Hey," she said.
He didn't leave. Fay had given him the flat, even look that usually communicated clearly that she didn't need anything from anyone standing in front of her, and he'd received it and stayed anyway, which was either obliviousness or something else. Fay hadn't decided yet.
"You just get here?" he asked.
"Why do you ask."
"You've got a look."
"What look." Fay remarked sarcastically
He thought about it genuinely, which she hadn't expected. "Like you're deciding if this was a good idea," he said.
Fay looked at him. That was accurate enough that she didn't respond to it, which was its own kind of response and she knew it.
"I'm fine," she said.
"Okay," he said, in the tone of someone who believed her and also didn't, which was a difficult combination to pull off and he managed it without appearing to try.
He sat down on the other end of the bench. Not close. She looked at the space between them and then at him and he was already looking at the trees, not at her, like he'd simply decided this was where he was sitting and it had nothing to do with her, which she did not entirely believe but could not immediately disprove.
They sat there.
He didn't say anything. She didn't say anything. The park was quiet except for the suitcase, which made a small noise when she shifted her weight, which she ignored.
A minute passed. Maybe two.
"Is there a motel in this town," she said finally. Not a question exactly.
"Route 7," he said. "Four miles out."
"I know about that one."
He was quiet for a moment. "It's not cheap," he said carefully.
"I know that too."
Another pause. Fay was aware of him thinking, not in a way that felt calculating, just genuinely working through something. She let it happen. She was too tired to stop it.
"There's a place," he said. "Where I'm staying. It's my sister's, technically, and some other people live there too, it's it's a lot to explain. But there's space. If you needed somewhere."
"I don't know you," Fay said.
"No," he said.
"I've been sitting on this bench for twenty minutes. You've been here for four of them."
"Yeah," he said. Just that.
Fay looked at him. He wasn't doing anything with his face wasn't trying to look trustworthy, wasn't leaning forward, wasn't performing sincerity at her. He'd said the thing and now he was just sitting there, looking at the trees, like the offer was on the table and she could do whatever she wanted with it and he genuinely had no attachment to which way it went.
She looked at the suitcase.
She looked at her phone. Twenty nine percent. She thought about four miles and the motel rate and how her feet felt and the dark that was now very seriously coming and the eleven dollars that were not getting any more than eleven dollars no matter how many times she counted them.
"I'm not going to be agreeable about it," she said.
"About what."
"If I said yes. Which I haven't. I'm saying I wouldn't be I don't do that. I don't make myself easy to have around because someone did me a favor."
"Okay," he said.
"I mean that." Fay stated sharply
"I know," he said. "I believe you."
She looked at him one more time. He looked back at her the same way he'd been looking at her the whole time steady, not pushing, not waiting for anything in particular.
"What's your name," she said.
"Jeremy."
She nodded.
"Nima," she said.
He nodded once. Didn't comment on it, didn't repeat it back to her, didn't make anything out of it. Just took it and sat with it like it was enough, which it was, because it was all she was giving him.
She stood up.
She picked up her backpack and put it on and adjusted the straps and looked at the suitcase wheel which made a noise in response to being looked at, which was new.
Jeremy stood up and reached for the handle without asking and she opened her mouth and then closed it and made a silent, private exception on the grounds that the wheel situation had become genuinely structural and this was not the moment for principle.
They walked out of the park.
One night.
She was not making any promises beyond one night.
The town moved past them, small and old and lit up in the way small towns lit up at night warm windows, quiet streets, the distant sound of the grill still going. She looked at it and thought about the British man on the highway, the way he'd said Mystic Falls like he already knew, and she thought about Jeremy saying it's complicated about the people where he was staying, and she thought about the fact that she had walked twelve miles to a town she'd seen on a sign once and knew nothing about and was now following a stranger through it at night.
Well, she thought, in the dry flat part of her brain that observed her own life like it was mildly interesting television, that's one way to do it.
I'm working a little fay and Enzo fanfic it's like how they met, I've actually been working on it for a couple of days now but it's getting ready to post soon!!!
The idea that E.nzo hates when Fay straightens her hair not because he thinks she looks bad with it straight, but because he genuinely loves seeing her natural curls out makes me emotional. Fay loves her natural hair too, but sometimes it gets exhausting and she just wants to do something easier with it for a while.
Meanwhile E.nzo is always in the background like “you know I prefer your curls, love.” He’d absolutely encourage her to wear her natural hair out whenever she wants because he genuinely thinks it suits her and because he loves seeing her comfortable in herself.
Fay sitting there like “literally nobody cares about Memorial Day” while E.nzo is trying to drag some amount of enjoyment out of the day anyway is so funny. Especially because he’d absolutely be the type to romanticize tiny things for no reason. Like he’s trying to make drinks, put music on, maybe convince her to go somewhere, and she’s just staring at him like federal holidays are a government psyop.
And he’d keep pushing it just enough to annoy her
“You truly enjoy none of them?”
“No.”
“Not even a little?”
“Enzo, I literally do not care about Memorial Day.”
“You are deeply committed to this hatred.”
Meanwhile she probably does enjoy herself eventually, she just refuses to admit the holiday itself had anything to do with it
Amashusho y'indirimbo Game Over ya Asinah na Neg G akomeje kuvugisha benshi
Amashusho y’indirimbo Game Over ya Asinah na Neg G akomeje kuvugisha benshi
Umuhanzikazi Asinah ukunzwe cyane hano mu Rwanda, benshi bakaba baramumenye mu njyana ya Dancehall, yashyize hanze amashusho y’indirimbo ye yitwa Game Over afatanyije na Neg G the General ikaba akomeje kubica bigacika hano mu Rwanda.
Asinah akomeje kwerekana ko yazanye imbaraga muri Muzika bitewe nuko akomeje gukora ibikorwa byinshi bitandukanye, dore ko hadaciye kabiri akoze amashusho…
