brendon park x emma nolan. 18+ MDNI. predator/prey dynamics. possessive behaviors. power imbalance. god complex. love at first sight if the person in "love" was a predator
The pen is blue.
That's the first thing that Park notices. Not her- not yet- just the pen, extended towards him in a small hand that's visibly shaking, a cheap ballpoint with a chewed cap and the logo of some medical supply company stamped along the barrel in white sans-serif font.
It appears in his peripheral the way most things below his sight line appear: as an interruption. (Everything is an interruption, considering his size, bigger than most, the kind of man that makes other men feel small in comparison, that makes rooms rearrange themselves around the fact of him the way villages rearranged themselves around the thing in the mountain that takes their livestock and their daughters and has never once been satisfied-)
It's a minor obstacle in the space between where he's standing at the nurses' station computer, pulling up imaging for a pre-op check that's already twelve minutes behind because radiology can't seem to run on the same clock as the rest of the damn hospital.
"I-I saw you looking for one. You looked like you needed it."
The voice is... small. Not quiet, exactly. Quiet implies intention, implies someone modulating their volume to match their environment. This is just... small, takes up no space at all, exists in the narrow column of air in front of him and doesn't attempt to travel any further.
Park looks down.
She's short. That's the second thing. Short enough that the angle between his eyeline and hers is steep enough to change the shape of her face- foreshortening the bridge of her nose, widening the size of her eyes, turning her her upwards gaze into something that looks less like eye contact and more like looking up. (The way a child looks up. The way something small looks up at something large and doesn't think to be afraid yet because it hasn't learned yet what large things do to small things that don't run when they should.)
Her scrub top is too big. A size, maybe a size and a half, the neckline sitting too wide on her frame, exposing the ridge of a clavicle that reminds him of a bird's bones. Hollow. Breakable. He thinks about how easily things that are built like her come apart, and the thought comes sudden, unbidden, a flicker of currents jumping between axons and dendrites, the briefest neural spark that should fizzle and die the way all intrusive thoughts should fizzle and die, should dissipate into the white noise of a busy shift and a surgery at two and twelve minutes of lost time he can't get back.
But it doesn't fizzle. Something dark in the back of his mind reaches out and snatches the dying flicker before it goes cold, closes a fist around it, drags it forward through the folds of gray matter and settles it into his conscious thought like coal in a nest of kindling. Something ancient and starved and holy in the worst way, living in the unlit nave behind his sternum, breathing slow, fed on small things for years. The thought grows teeth. Opens its eyes. Looks out through his and sees her standing there with her too-big scrub top and her bird bone clavicle and likes what it sees.
He thinks- more strongly now- about how easily things that are built like her come apart. How little force it would take. How she probably doesn't even know that about herself, probably never tested the boundaries of her own construct, never had anyone grip her hard enough to find out where the give is. She's walking around inside of a body she's never been shown the limits of, and something about that untested quality makes the back of his mouth water.
(He thinks about how those hollow bones would look spread out and trembling under his weight, stretching that tiny frame until her belly showed the ridge of him dragging back and forth inside her, until the give in her body became the only thing keeping her intact.)
(He thinks about the deer.
He was sixteen, hunting alongside his father in the Alleghenies, early November, the air cold enough to see his breath and the light coming through trees in long amber shafts that made the frost on the ground look like something out of a painting. The deer walked out of the tree line, a doe, young, standing in the clearing maybe fifteen yards from where he crouched in the brush and looked at him with huge, dark, liquid eyes that contained absolutely no understanding of the danger it was in. No fear. No wariness. No flicker of ancestral recognition that the shape in the shadows was a shape to run from. It just looked at him with the dumb, trusting curiosity of a thing that had never been hunted and therefore didn't know it could be.
His father whispered take the shot.
He didn't take the shot.
He went back the next morning. And the next. And the next. He brought grain, left it at the edge of the clearing, sat in the brush and watched the doe find it and eat it and lift its hard and look towards the place where he was hidden with an expression that was almost... grateful. Devotion of it indistinguishable from worship if you didn't know which one of them was the god and which was the sacrifice.
By the seventh day it walked right up to the grain and stood there, chewing, close enough that he could see the individual lashes framing those huge dark eyes, close enough that if he'd extended his arm fully he could have touched the velvet flat of its nose.
He didn't touch. Not that day.
His father asked him what he was doing. He said he was practicing patience. His father looked at him for a long time and didn't ask again.)
Her badge is clipped to the breast pocket: EMMA NOLAN, RN. EMERGENCY MEDICINE
The badge is clean and the photo looks like it was taken this week, the eager, unweathered headshot of someone who ironed her scrubs for picture day.
Her pockets are full. That's the third thing that does something to the inside of his chest that he recognizes immediately and doesn't bother to suppress. Both front pockets of the scrub top are distended, stuffed to capacity with supplies- pen lights, hemostats, a folded reference card, alcohol swabs, a roll of tape- and she offered him a pen. The absolute, guileless, unironic earnestness lands in the space behind his ribs that most people assume is empty and isn't. (There's something housed there. Something with stone walls and no windows and an altar that has never once been clean.)
She's brand new. He can smell it. Bright eyed, overprepared, hopelessly convinced that the distance between the classroom and the floor is a gap she can bridge with enthusiasm and color coded notes with textbook knowledge that has never once been pressure tested- walking into a building full of people who've had the softness ground out of them and expecting healthcare to be like the brochures. Expecting the job to be what their professors told them it would be. Expecting the people to be kind.
He looks at Emma Nolan and her clean badge and her bird bone clavicles and his teeth ache; a real, physical throb in his jaw, deep in the hinge where the masseter anchors to the mandible, the dull pressure of a bite that hasn't happened yet but wants to- involuntary and grandular.
(He wants, vicerally, to sink her between his jaws, feel the whole of her caught in the cage of his bite, the fine bones and the thin skin and the rapid, hummingbird pulse, to close down slowly enough that she'd feel every degree of increased pressure and understand, in the shrinking space between his teeth, that the only thing keeping her intact his his decision to not bite down all the way. That the structural integrity of Emma Nolan is not a fact. It's a favor. One he can revoke.)
He swallows and the ache doesn't leave. It just settles, migrates from his jaw into the back of his throat, takes up residence somewhere behind his soft palate.
Not here, not now. The thought doesn't come with urgency. It comes with the patience of something that has a den and a long winter and is in absolutely no rush because the thing it's watching doesn't know it's being watched and there's a specific pleasure in that- in the looking, in the having looked, in the accumulation of details that the source of the details doesn't know are being collected. Has been collected for the past thirty seconds and already has more details in it than she'd be comfortable knowing about.
He takes the pen.
Their fingers don't touch. She's holding it by the very end, maximizing the distance between her hand and his. Polite. A deeply ingrained, reflexive politeness, someone who was raised to be considerate of other people's personal spaces. Who says excuse me when passing by one person in an otherwise empty hallway. Who holds open doors for people thirty feet behind her. Who has probably never once in her life taken something from someone without saying thank you.
(He wonders what her thank you would sound like with his hand around her throat and his cock buried deep in her cunt. Resting on the column of her neck with his thumb against her pulse while she says it, so he could feel the words in her larynx before they left her mouth. Feel the vibration of her gratitude hum against his palm while he fucks her open, dragging every inch of his heavy shaft along her walls until he's grinding right up against her cervix, carving himself so deep inside of her, she'll feel him for days.
He bets she'd still say it. He bets she'd look up at him with those too big eyes, glassy and lust drunk now, lips parted and trembling, and moan a soft breathy "thank you" while he's fingers tighten on the carotids just enough to make her head spin and her pussy clench around him like a fist. The kind of girl who'd find something to be grateful for in the grip that's killing her.)
She's smiling at him.
It's a terrible smile. Not because it's unattractive- her face is good, open and symmetric, a mouth slightly too wide for the rest of her features in a way that makes every expression she produces disproportionately loud- but because it's real. Completely, recklessly, almost offensively real. No calculation. No armor. No awareness that the man she's smiling at has been described by three separate residents, in three separate interviews, as the reason I changed specialties.
She doesn't know who he is. Or she does know, in the abstract way that new graduates know things- a name on a directory, a face in an orientation packet- but the knowledge hasn't translated into the wariness it should produce. The knowledge hasn't reached her body yet. Her shoulders are open. Her weight is forward, on the balls of her feet, leaning towards him slightly, the posture of a person who moves towards other people instead of away from them because the world hasn't yet taught her that some people you move towards are the reason the lesson exists.
He wants to teach her.
The want is there, fully formed, sitting in his chest since the moment she extended a shaking hand with a cheap pen and looked up at him like he was a person and not what he actually is. Because she is smiling at him the way she would smile at anyone else. She has one smile and it costs her nothing and she has no idea- no framework, no instinct- that giving it to him is different than giving it to anyone else. That most people in this building are furniture and she is the first thing he's looked at in months.
He wonders how long it would take to make her stop smiling.
Not by being cruel. That would be too easy. He could do that in a sentence, in a comment. He could wipe that smile off her face in four seconds and she'd probably apologize for having it.
No. He wonders how long it would take to make her stop smiling at other people. To make the smile something only she does for him. To hollow out the indiscriminate generosity of it and reshape it into something specific, something that only activates when he walks into a room, that only exists on her face the way a reflex exists, involuntary and entirely dependent on the right stimulus.
He wants to be the stimulus. He wants to be the only one. Not by earning devotion but by salting the earth around every other altar until there was nowhere left to worship but at his feet.
The thought doesn't alarm him. He settles alongside the others- the bird bone clavicle, the overstuffed pockets, the voice that doesnt take up space- and it fits. Like the space was always there. Like he's been carrying the space of this particular want for a long time and she just walked into the hallway and filled it.
"I'm Emma," she says. "I just started today. Not just here. I mean this is my first- I'm a new grad, so everything is kind of my first-"
She's rambling. He watches her realize she's rambling. Watches the precise second she hears herself, the little spark of realization in her eyes, the flush that darkens the warm brown of her cheeks, deepening the skin below her ears and across the bridge of her nose into something richer, bilateral bloom, embarrassment heat he can see against her cheekbones until even the press of her lips looks swollen with embarassment.
She swallows and he watches the delicate tendons in her throat shift, flex beneath smooth skin, a subtle bob that makes his cock twitch and fuck, his mind goes straight to imagining putting his teeth on that tendon, the points of his canines resting in the shallow valley between the sternocleidomastoid and the strap muscles and holding. Holding until she stops talking. Holding until the rambling dies and her breathing hitches and stops and the only sound is the pulse he can feel hammering against his mouth.
He wonders if she would go still, frozen, every voluntary muscle locked, the ancient mammalian hardware taking over and telling her body that thing with its teeth on her throat might lose interest if she doesn't move.
(He imagines sliding two thick fingers between her lips right then, pressing down on her tongue until she gags, teaching her the only safe place for her words is wrapped around his knuckles while he finger-fucks her throat open, to make her drool and to make her apologize for the drool. The thought makes his cock throb so hard he has to shift, to keep it from pressing visibly against his scrubs.)
"Sorry," she says. "You probably don't care about any of that."
She apologized. She apologized for talking to him. For taking up space in his day. For the crime of existing in his vicinity with her shaking hands and her big eyes and her pockets full of supplies. She apologized like its second nature, like she moves through the world with sorry always on the tip of her tongue, making herself smaller, tucking herself into corners, the perpetual apology of a person who was taught that her presence is an imposition and never questioned the lesson.
He thinks: who taught you that.
He thinks: I want to meet them. I want to shake their hand. They did all the groundwork and they don't even know what they built.
Because that's what she is. Groundwork. A foundation already poured. Someone- a parent, a teacher, some formative cruelty she probably doesn't even remember- already taught Emma Nolan that the correct response to authority is deference. That the correct response to taking up space is apology. That the correct posture in the presence of someone who matters more than her is small. All that training, all those years of learned submission, and nobody bothered to teach her what it looks like from the other side. Nobody told her that making yourself small in front of certain predators isn't safety. It's an invitation.
He should respond. The social contract of this interaction requires it- a name, a thank you, a dismissal. This is a five second exchange. He's has millions of them.
He stands there with her pen in his hand and he looks at her and the thing in the dark of his brain, the thing living behind his sternum isn't opening one eye anymore. It's on its feet. It's pacing.
She's still looking up at him. The embarrassment hasn't faded. Her eyes are brown and in this kind of lighting they look almost black. Wet. Not crying-wet. Just the general shine of eyes that still react to things. Eyes that haven't been dulled by decades of fluorescent lights and administrative indifference. Eyes that feel things still and show the feelings and don't know that showing is giving and giving is losing and she's been losing since she walked over here.
He can see everything in those eyes. He can see the nervousness and the eagerness and the desperate, aching hope that she's making a good impression, and beneath it all, buried so deep she probably can't even name it, he finds the think he's actually looking for: the need. The need to matter to someone who matters, to be singled out, to be chosen, to have someone look at her the way he's looking at her right now and make her feel like she's the only person in the building.
She has no idea that need is a door. And she just showed him exactly where the handle is. That she is looking up at him with the same eyes as the deer. The same absence of understanding. The same willing to stand in the open and be looked at by something she should be running from.
"Thank you," he says. He clicks the pen. "Emma."
He says her name and watches what it does to her face the way he watched the doe's ears rotate towards the sound of his footsteps- a full body orientation towards a stimulus she should be flinching from and instead leans into. Her mouth opens slightly, a millimeter of space between her lips that she's not aware of producing. Her pupils dilate.
She doesn't know what any of that means. She doesn't know that her body just handed him a blueprint, that every involuntary response she's produced in the last ninety seconds is a map he's drawn of her. A map that shows him every unlocked door and unlocked window in the architecture of Emma Nolan, and she assembled it for him herself. Handed it over with a pen and a smile. Free of charge.
"Thank you for the pen, Emma," he says again, and he lets her name sit in his mouth a beat longer than necessary. Lets the second syllable land softer. Watches the softness hit her nervous system like the grain in the clearing.
She lights up. The smile comes back, wider now, and she ducks her head- a small, deferential, instinctive motion that exposes the back of her neck.
The back of her neck.
He looks at it. The fine hairs at her nape. The knobs of her cervical spine pressing against skin so thin he can see the vulnerable hollow at the base of her skull. She's showing it to him. She doesn't know she's showing it to him. She ducked her head because she's pleased and this is what pleased looks like on a body that hasn't learned to guard itself, and the back of her neck is right there, six inches from his hand, close enough that if he reached out and set his palm against the nape and squeezed-
She'd make a sound. A small one, startled, and he wants to hear that sound. He wants to file it along side every other response her body has produced in the last ninety seconds and then spend however long it takes learning which ones he can produce on command.
(He imagines setting his palm flat, fingers splayed wide, on the back of her skull until her cheek is smushed into his mattress, ass up high, her knees forced apart by the width of his thighs as he pushed his cock into the silk of her cunt. Hand locked on her nape the whole time, pinning her there, using the leverage to pull her back on his cock again, again, little muffled cries vibrating against his palm as her pussy flutters and clenches around the stretch of him-)
He doesn't reach out.
He gives her a nod- brief, professional, a nod that anyone watching would read as a senior physician acknowledging a new staff member and nothing more.
"Welcome to PTMC," he says.
She beams, full wattage, the kind of smile that uses every muscle in her face and crinkles the corners of her eyes and makes her look even younger than she is, which is already too young, which is already so young that thing in the back of his brain hums in delight. Delight in the guarantee, that this will be easy, that she will come willing, a lock he's already been handed the key to, that the gap between who she thinks he is and who he actually is will shorten until she she walks into the door he holds open for her and the door closes behind her and she realizes there's no handle on the inside.
She turns and walks towards the Pitt, her pigtails bouncing. Her too-big scrub top shifts on her shoulders with every step, exposing the nape of her neck and then covering and then exposing it again. He watches the rhythm of it. Bare skin. Cotton. Bare skin. Cotton.
She pulls something from her pocket. Another pen. Of course. Of course she has more pens. Of course she came prepared for every possible scenario except the one she doesn't know she's in.
He clicks the pen twice. It makes a tinny, unsatisfying sound that he's going to hear for the rest of the day every time he reaches for his breast pocket and feels the outline of a ballpoint he didn't buy.
He thinks of mythology- every religion, every dead civilization that scratched it's fears into cave walls and temple stones- of the offering. The first fruits. The unblemished lamb. The thing you bring to the feet of something vast and indifferent and lay down with trembling hands because you don't understand what it is, you just know it's bigger than you and the only way to survive in its proximity is to give it something. To feed it. To prove that you know your place in the hierarchy of the living and the thing at the top of the hierarchy is not you.
The offering is never for the god's benefit. Gods don't need pens. Gods don't need lambs, or the grain, of the wine poured into dirt. The offering is a transaction- worshippers buying the illusion of safety, and the god accepts because the acceptance is what keeps them coming back. Keep accepting and they keep giving. Keep taking the small things and eventually they'll give you the big things. Their harvest. Their firstborn.
Their throat.
Emma Nolan walked across a room full of people who knew better and she held out a ballpoint pen to something she mistook for a man, and she smiled her full, reckless smile, and she said you looked like you needed it.
An offering. Brought to the altar on trembling hands by a girl with bird bones and Bambi eyes who doesn't know the predator she walked up to. Who thinks the warmth she felt when he said her name was kindness. Who has no framework, no mythology, no ancestral memory whispering to her that thing smiling back at her from behind the altar has never once in its existence been kind. That it has only ever been patient. And that patience, in a god, is not a virtue.
It's a hunting strategy.
He thinks about the deer again. The clearing. The mist. The huge dark eyes and the absolute absence of fear. He didn't shoot it that morning. He sat in the brush and he watched it graze and he let it walk back into the tree line on its own legs and he came back the next day and the day after that until the deer stopped flinching at the sound of him and started walking towards the brush instead of away from it.
You looked like you needed it.
Yeah.
He did.
(Park puts the pen in his breast pocket. Accepts the offering.)
ok I'm having a bit of a shit week (I'm aware it's Tuesday), so I have been retreating to my happy place, aka Hanging Out With James Potter.
In the spirit of maybe making someone else's shit week a little less shitty, here is me impulsively sharing a random TLE3 scene.
with the eternal caveat that everything I share could completely change in the final draft. 🙃
Excerpt from The Last Enemy: Marauders’ End
The door swung open and James sauntered in. “All right, very funny,” he said, dropping himself in the armchair and kicking his feet up on the trunk that served as Sirius’s coffee table. He gave them an amused, exasperated smirk that suggested they were all in on the same joke.
“What’s funny?” said Sirius.
“Come off it. I know it was you.”
Sirius and Lily exchanged a confused look.
“What are you talking about, mate?”
James rolled his eyes, dug into his pocket, and pulled out a crumpled letter. Then he cleared his throat and read imperiously: “Dear Mr. Potter. We are pleased to inform you that you have been selected as Head Boy of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. Despite your rather colorful school records — nice touch, that — the Headmaster feels that you have exhibited exemplary courage, creativity, and leadership skills — pah! — We are certain you will…blah, blah, blah, responsibilities, blah, blah. Very clever. Very authentic. I’m impressed, really.”
Sirius gaped at him. Lily had covered her mouth in astonishment.
“So what does this do, then?” James went on, heedless to the shock on his friends’ faces. He held up a shiny red and gold badge. “Will it turn my hair green or piss at me if I try and pin it on?”
“You’re having a laugh, aren’t you?” said Sirius at last. “You’re not really Head Boy.”
“Of course not, because you sent me a counterfeit letter.”
“No, I didn’t.”
“Come off it,” said James, whose amused expression had at last faded into something more closely resembling genuine alarm. “Joke’s up, I figured it out. We both know there’s no way Dumbledore made me Head Boy.”
Sirius walked over and grabbed the letter from James, examining it closely. “Did you try any anti-counterfeit spells?”
“N-no…”
Sirius began to poke the letter with his wand.
“Mate,” said James, “just tell me you sent this letter.”
“Would if I could, Prongs. It’s legitimate. This letter came from the desk of Minnie McGee herself.”
“No…no. There’s no way.” He turned beseechingly to Lily, who was still hiding her mouth behind her hand. “There’s no way. Leadership skills? I mean, I wasn’t even a prefect.”
“Well, you are Quidditch Captain,” offered Lily. “That’s a leadership position.”
“But that’s…that’s Quidditch. Head Boy should be a prefect. Remus—”
“—was a bloody awful prefect and he’d be the first to admit it,” said Sirius.
“Yeah, but—”
“They’re probably hoping a bit of you-know-what will sort you out,” said Lily.
“You-know-what? I don’t know what. What?”
“Responsibility,” she whispered in a conspiratorial hiss. Sirius let out a bark of laughter.
James, for his part, looked at them with dawning horror in his eyes. “Oh, sweet Merlin with his knickers out to dry. They’ve made me a figure of authority.”
At this, Lily dissolved into giggles, falling back into the sofa cushions.
“It’s not funny. Evans, stop laughing!”
Lily sat up and gave a sharp salute. “Sir, yes, sir!”
“Nice,” said Sirius approvingly.
“Well, I learned from the worst,” said Lily.
James looked on with a sulky glare. “You know, I’m not sure I like you two being friends.”
“Cheer up,” said Sirius. “I’ll still be your mate even if you are Head Swot. I mean, not publicly, of course. And you probably shouldn’t eat meals with us anymore, but you can still sleep in the dormitory. For now.”
“Shut it.” James chucked his Head Boy badge at him. Sirius dodged and the badge hit the wall with a resounding ping. “This can’t be happening,” moaned James, sinking further into the depths of his chair. Then, he sat up abruptly. “Oh, Merlin. Who do you think the Head Girl is?”
“Probably someone really awful,” said Lily with a commiserative grimace. “Sorry.”
“Yeah,” agreed Sirius. “Probably some stuck-up, frigid goody-two-shoes who — ow! — hits disturbingly hard for a girl” he finished, glaring at Lily while he rubbed his shoulder.
“You think it’s McKinnon?” said James, wide-eyed and appalled.
“God, you’re stupid,” said Lily affectionately.
Sirius tapped her on the shoulder. “Should we tell him? I think we should tell him.”
“But he’s so cute when he’s terrified.”
“You’re mean.”
Lily stuck out her tongue. “And you used to be fun.”
“What are you two on about?”
Sirius smirked and gestured at Lily. “Head Boy, meet Head Girl.”
“What? You’re Head Girl?”
Lily shrugged. “That’s what the letter says.”
James’s entire demeanor was suddenly transformed. “Blimey, why didn’t you say something? Letting me prattle on and on like an idiot…”
“It was much more fun watching you angst.”
“Hey, if you two need a set of matching crowns, I know a goblin,” offered Sirius.
James and Lily both flipped him off in unison.
Sirius snickered. "Look at that. A united front. Just what Hogwarts needs."
three years of IKYLAO… we got house of the dragon s2… egg and dunk show…. life has feel so surreal!! anyway happy anniversary dear @fkevin073 your fic is forever in my heart ❤️
omg @ilcits your love for this story has meant so so much to me ever since I posted the first chapter for IKYLAO!! you were such a big part of why I finished the story in the first place when all the ao3 comments were going crazy. I love this story so much and to see that others enjoy it too means the world. thank you for everything ♥️
i was in high school reading the fic and now i’m in collage 😭 wow i cannot believe it, 2022 was such a ride but anyway update, college life has been so fun and i feel so happy there with my friends and i got into the cheerleading team <333
three years of IKYLAO… we got house of the dragon s2… egg and dunk show…. life has feel so surreal!! anyway happy anniversary dear @fkevin073 your fic is forever in my heart ❤️
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