"Desperate for approval" - Park Joonggil x f!reader
"And here I thought hell-spawn were supposed to be difficult." Another stroke down your spine. "Turns out you're just like all the others. Desperate for approval. Desperate to be good at something." His lips brush your temple. "Even if that something is this."
content warnings - dark!joonggil, psychological instability, obsessive and controlling behavior, and an unhinged boss, non-con, manhandling, bruising, hair-pulling, and forced kissing, power-imbalance dynamics, “sir” kink, and a binding contractual arrangement.
word count : 4.6k
So. You’re the new one. The one they plucked from the filth and the flames, the deal struck in the stench of your own damnation. The Jade Emperor, in her infinite, bored wisdom, decided you deserved a second shot. A promotion, even. From tortured soul to tour guide. And for your mentor, your babysitter, your personal warden, you got Park Joonggil. Lucky you. He is all sharp angles and sharper silences. He moves like a blade through fog, and when he looks at you, it’s with the clinical disgust of a man finding a roach in his otherwise pristine kitchen. Hell-spawn. That’s what his eyes say every time they land on you. A stain on his perfect record.
You learn to walk on eggshells made of glass, to make yourself smaller, quieter, better. You learn to anticipate his critiques before they leave his thin, cruel mouth. The way you hold the scythe. The way you breathe. The very fact of your existence in his orbit is, apparently, a personal affront.
You tell yourself it’s fine. You’re on your best behavior. You will be the most meticulous, the most invisible, the most grateful little reaper he’s ever deigned to tolerate. You are not going back. The memory of that place, the endless, shrieking dark, is a physical ache in your bones. You are not going back. Then comes this soul. A panicked, fluttering thing that catches a whisper of the living world and bolts like a startled deer. One second it’s there, the next it’s just a ripple in the air, a faint, mocking laugh on the wind. Your blood, what passes for it now, turns to ice. Your lungs seize. All you can see is Joonggil’s face. The slow, deliberate way he would dissect your failure. The verdict. Incompetent. Damaged. Hell-bound. No. You spend an eternity in a few frantic minutes, chasing shadows through the thinning veil. You can’t fail. You won’t. The desperation is a hot, frantic pulse behind your eyes.
And then you feel it. That shift in the atmosphere. A pressure drop, like before a storm. The air itself seems to curdle. He’s here. You freeze, your back to him, every muscle locked. You force your hands behind you, a pathetic attempt at hiding your trembling, at looking casual. You turn, and there he is, a monolith of judgment against the grey. “What are you doing?” His voice isn’t loud. It doesn’t need to be. It sinks into you, a hook in your chest. “No… nothing.” The strut is a lie. You’re a marionette with tangled strings. His head cocks, a predator’s curiosity. His eyes drop to your hidden hands. “What do you have behind your back?” He takes a step closer. Then another. The space between you feels like the edge of a cliff. You open your mouth, a pathetic, pre-rehearsed lie dying on your tongue.
His phone chimes. The sound is obscenely cheerful in the heavy silence. He pulls it out, his gaze never quite leaving you. You watch his face as he reads the screen. You don’t need to see the notice. You know. Runaway soul. Escort: You. His eyes snap to yours. They are flat. Absolutely dead. You don’t think. You just go. A violent wrench of will, a twist of your newly-granted power, and you’re gone, teleporting blindly, anywhere away from that look. But he is better. He is always better. He is there before you’ve even fully landed, his hand closing around your arm, a manacle of cold fury. He yanks you back. “What,” he says, his voice dropping to something even more terrifying, a low, intimate growl, “is going on?”
The story spills out of you. The soul’s panic, your failure, your terror. You leave out the part about fearing him, about fearing hell, but it hangs in the air between you anyway, a stench you can’t hide. When you’re done, he releases your arm. You stumble back, cradling it. He just looks at you. A long, slow inventory of your worthlessness. “You know what happens when this happens,” he says finally. His eyes are lit with something that might be satisfaction. He has you. The little hell-spawn finally tripped. He can send you back. He can be rid of the stain. “Please.” The word is ripped from you, raw and ugly. You hate the sound of it. “Please help me. I swear, this will never—I’ll do anything. It won’t happen again.”
He watches you beg. He drinks it in. Then, with a flicker of contempt, he turns his face away, dismissing you. “And why should I help you?” He starts to walk. He is leaving you. He is leaving you to your fate. You can feel the heat of hell licking at your heels. “I’ll sign it!” you scream. Your voice cracks. “I’ll sign a reaper’s guarantee of responsibility!” His neck snaps toward you. The movement is too fast, too avian. For the first time, a flicker of something else crosses his face. Not pity. Never pity. But interest. A cold, covetous gleam in his eye. He turns back, slowly, fully. He takes a step toward you. Then another. He doesn’t stop until he’s close enough that you can feel the chill radiating from him, until his face is inches from yours. He tilts his head, studying you like a new, particularly useful species of insect.
“A guarantee,” he repeats, the words a silken threat. He reaches out, and with one cold finger, traces the line of your jaw. It takes every ounce of your will not to flinch. “That is… an interesting offer.”
He doesn’t look at you like you’re saved. He looks at you like he just found the perfect place to drive the knife. And you know, with a sickening lurch, that you haven’t escaped him. You’ve just signed your name on the dotted line of your own undoing.
You think it's over. You think the begging, the pleading, the utter degradation of offering your very soul on a silver platter, you think that was the worst part. You are so naive. He teleports you both to his office. Not your shared workspace, not some neutral ground. His office. The walls are the color of old bone, and the air smells like paperwork and secrets. And there, on his desk, pristine and waiting, is the cotract. It wasn't conjured. It wasn't summoned. It was already there, lying in wait like a spider in the center of its web. "Sign," he says. Not a question. Not an invitation. You reach for it, your hand trembling, and his voice stops you cold.
"You know what this entails, correct?" You look up. He's watching you with that same flat, dead-eyed interest from before. A scientist observing a specimen. You swallow. "Yes, sir. I do." "Explain it to me." He gestures lazily at the paper. "What is this?" You want to scream. You want to throw the paper in his face and run. But the alternative was hell, the real hell, the one you remember in your blood is worse. So you play his game. "It's a reaper's guarantee of responsibility." He sits. Slowly. Deliberately. He leans back in his chair, crossing one leg over the other, the picture of bored authority. "And what does that mean?"
You hate him. You hate him with a purity that feels holy. But you answer. "It means... the reaper who asked for help has to do anything the reaper who is helping asks of them. Anything." His eyes never leave your face. He's cataloging every micro-expression, every flicker of fear, every bead of sweat you don't actually have but somehow still produce. "Good. Very good." He signs his name with a flourish Park Joonggil, sharp and final then slides the paper across the desk toward you. "Your turn." You pause. The pen is cold in your hand. The paper waits, blank and hungry beneath your signature line. Every instinct you have is screaming. Don't. Don't. Don't.
But you have no other options. You sign. The moment the pen leaves the paper, he smiles. It's not a nice smile. It's the smile of a man who just watched you swallow the poison he handed you, thinking it was medicine. Then he's gone a ripple in the air, a faint displacement of atoms, and you're alone in his bone-white office with your signature bleeding into the contract. You stand there for what feels like hours. Minutes. A lifetime. Then he's back. Just appears, right in front of you, and you jump like a startled animal.
"It's done," he says. "What?" Your voice is too high, too fast. "What's done? The soul—you found it? You brought it back?" He tilts his head. That predator's curiosity again. Then he moves. He rises from wherever he was standing and walks toward you. Each step a drumbeat. Each step a countdown. You back up. Your spine hits the wall. "Well," he says, and his voice is soft now, almost gentle, the way a cat's paw is soft just before the claws come out, "I might have been the one to let that soul go in the first place. When you weren't paying attention."
The words don't make sense. They can't make sense. You stare at him, your mouth opening and closing, a fish gasping on dry land. "Why," you finally manage. It comes out broken. "Why would you do that?" He stops. Inches from you now. Close enough that you can see the flecks of something dark in his otherwise empty eyes. Close enough that his breath, cold as a winter grave, ghosts across your face. "Because," he says, and he reaches up, tucks a strand of hair behind your ear with a tenderness that makes your skin crawl, "I needed a way for you to sign that contract."
The world tilts. You feel it the floor dropping out from under you, the walls closing in. It was a setup. It was all a setup. The runaway soul, your panic, your desperate pleading, your offer of the guarantee and he orchestrated every second of it. "You," you whisper. "You planned this."
"Of course I did." He says it like it's obvious. Like you're an idiot for not seeing it sooner. His hand moves from your hair to your chin, gripping hard enough to force you to look at him. "Do you have any idea how long I've waited for a way to make you useful? Hell-spawn, foisted on me like I'm some kind of charity worker, expected to train you, to mold you, to waste my time on something that should have been left to rot in the flames." He leans closer. His nose almost touches yours.
"And now," he breathes, "you belong to me. Anything I ask. Remember?" You can't speak. You can't move. You can't even cry. He smiles again. That same smile. The poison. The trap. The spider, finally wrapping its prize. "Welcome to the team," he says. And then he's gone again, leaving you pressed against the wall of his office, the contract still sitting on his desk, your signature still wet, and the terrible, crushing weight of what you've just done settling over you like a shroud. You are not going back to hell. You are going somewhere much, much worse.
You think the contract was the worst of it. You think signing your freedom away, watching his smile curl like smoke from a fresh lit flame and you think that was the moment you hit bottom. You don't know what bottom is yet. But you're about to learn. The next weeks are a masterclass in destruction. He keeps you close now, always hovering at your shoulder during escorts, his presence a cold burn against your back. And every mistake the ones you make, the ones you don't, the ones he manufactures in the space between one breath and the next he pounces.
"You call that a transition?" His voice cuts through the silence of a funeral procession, loud enough for everyone to hear. The other reapers glance at you, then away. Always away. "Pathetic. Even hell's rejects should manage that much." In front of everyone. Every single time. He waits until there's an audience, until the other reapers are close enough to witness your humiliation, and then he unleashes. Your grip on the scythe is wrong. Your posture is wrong. Your face is wrong, you exist wrong, you breathe wrong. He finds the fault because he is looking for it, because he has made it his mission to find it, because the contract gave him permission to own you and he intends to collect every penny of that debt.
The others learn quickly. They stop meeting your eyes. They stop sitting near you during breaks. You become a ghost among reapers, invisible and untouchable, and every night you go back to whatever corner you've claimed and you tell yourself it's still better than hell. You are lying and you are starting to know it. The last soul of the day is a quiet one, an old woman who goes peacefully, almost gratefully. You're guiding her toward the light when you hear him behind you, his voice low and casual as he tells your co-worker to wrap it up. Then his hand is on your arm. Cold. Inescapable.
His office. Again. The bone-white walls, the desk where your signature still feels fresh, the couch you've never sat on because you've never been invited. "Sit," he says. You sit. He doesn't join you. He leans against his desk, arms crossed, watching you with that same flat, cataloging gaze. The silence stretches. You learn new ways to be afraid in those seconds. "Strip." The word doesn't register at first. It hangs in the air between you, a foreign object, something that can't possibly mean what it sounds like. "What?" His eyes don't leave your face. "Strip. Now."
You're on your feet before you decide to move, fury and fear tangling into something that feels like fire. "You are insane—" You're already turning, already reaching for the thread of power that will pull you out of this room, out of his sight, out of this nightmare "I wouldn't do that if I were you."
His voice is soft. Almost kind. It stops you cold. You turn back. He's smiling.
He walks toward you, slow and easy, a predator who knows his prey has nowhere left to run. "Unless, of course, you'd like to find yourself back in hell." He tilts his head, considering. "I hear the welcome committee misses you." Your power dies in your chest. Your hand falls to your side. He walks past you, his shoulder brushing yours and sits on the couch. The one you just vacated. He settles in, making himself comfortable, and then he looks at you.
You're standing with your back to him. You can feel his eyes on you. On your ass. On the curve of your spine. On every inch of you that he now owns. "Come on," he says, and there's amusement in his voice now, a chuckle he tries to hide behind his hand. "It's not that hard. You've done this before, surely. Stripping. Begging. Being useful." The word drips with contempt. "Or was hell all fire and no fun?" You turn.
Your hands go to the buttons of your shirt. One by one. The fabric parts, slides from your shoulders, puddles on the floor. You're wearing black lace beneath it not because you planned this, not because you wanted this, but because it was Tuesday and it was clean and now it feels like a joke the universe is playing on you. His eyes don't move from your body.
You step out of your pants. Black, matching your bra. You stand in the center of his office in nothing but lace and humiliation, and you try to cross your arms, try to cover yourself, try to hold onto some shred of dignity "Hands at your sides." The command is quiet. Absolute. Your arms fall.
He pours himself a drink. Whiskey, amber, swirling in a crystal glass. He takes a sip, and his eyes never stop moving over your breasts, your stomach, the curve of your hip, the place between your thighs that you're desperately trying not to think about. He's memorizing you. Imprinting you. Filing you away in whatever dark cabinet he keeps his trophies. He leans back. Crosses his legs. Takes another sip.
The silence is a living thing. It crawls over your skin, into your lungs, behind your eyes. You can hear your own heartbeat. You can hear the ice shifting in his glass. You can hear everything and nothing and all of it is terrible. He waves his hand. A lazy gesture, like he's dismissing a servant. "Take the rest off." Your fingers don't want to move. They're numb, frozen, someone else's hands entirely. But they reach behind you anyway, because the alternative is hell, because the alternative is worse, because you signed your name on a piece of paper and now you belong to him.
The bra falls. You step out of your underwear. You stand naked in front of Park Joonggil, and he looks at you like you're a painting he's considering buying. Like you're a meal he's deciding whether to eat. Like you're nothing and everything and all of it belongs to him. "Good," he says finally. He takes another sip of his whiskey. "Now. Let's discuss what anything really means."
And you understand, with a clarity that feels like being split open, that this is only the beginning. That he will never stop. That he will find new ways to take from you, new pieces of you to claim, new humiliations to catalog and savor. That the contract wasn't the trap. The trap was ever thinking you could escape him at all.
You think you understand what it means to be owned. You think the standing, the stripping, the way his eyes crawled over your naked skin like ants over something dead you think that was the lesson. He's about to teach you the rest. He settles back against the couch, whiskey in hand, and he tells you his plans. Not all of them he's not stupid enough to show his whole hand but enough. Enough for you to understand that this wasn't about one night. This wasn't about one humiliation. This is forever. This is the rest of your existence, however long that may be, stretched out before you like a road made of glass and you're barefoot.
"And if you don't listen," he says, swirling the amber liquid, watching it catch the light, "if you fail to comply..." He looks up at you then, and his smile is soft, almost gentle. "Well. You remember hell, don't you, darling? The heat. The screaming. The way it feels when your skin burn but it just keeps burning, forever, because that's the point, isn't it? Forever." Your throat closes. He pats his lap. Uncrosses his legs. Places his drink on the table. "Come sit."
The command is casual. Friendly, even. Like he's inviting you to join him for coffee. You move. What choice do you have? Your feet carry you across the space between you, each step slower than the last, each heartbeat a small death. You reach him. You turn your back to him instinct, modesty, some pathetic attempt at preserving something and you start to lower yourself onto his lap. His hands stop you. Turn you. Arrange you like a doll.
You're straddling him now. Facing him. Your knees on either side of his thighs, your naked body inches from his clothed one, your face near enough to feel his breath. Whiskey and something underneath something dark and hungry. Your hands go to his chest. Not because you want to touch him. Because you need distance. Because if you don't push against something you'll collapse into nothing. He doesn't allow distance.
His hand closes around the back of your head, fingers tangling in your hair, and he pulls you forward. His mouth crashes into yours. It's not a kiss, it's consumption. He kisses like he's starving, like you're water and he's been in the desert for years, like he wants to crawl inside you and live there. His tongue, his teeth, his breath flooding your lungs and you bite him.
Hard. You taste blood, copper and salt, and you think yes, yes, finally something, finally I hurt him back His grip doesn't loosen. If anything, it tightens. He holds you there, your teeth still in his lip, and when he finally pulls away it's slow. Deliberate. A string of saliva and blood still connects you, stretching, thinning, finally breaking. His lip is red. Split. He laughs.
It's a low sound, rumbling in his chest, and you feel it through your palms where they still press against him. He laughs, and his eyes are wild now, the flat deadness replaced by something alive and terrible. And then you feel it. Beneath you. Against you. Between your thighs.
He's hard. He's hard, and you're naked, and you're straddling him, and he's hard and you can feel every inch of him through his pants and you look down..you don't mean to, you don't, but your body betrays you and you look. He grabs your waist. Grinds you against him.
The friction is electric. Wrong. You feel yourself react..your body, that traitor, that animal and you feel yourself get wet, feel the heat pool between your legs, and he feels it too, feels the evidence of your betrayal against his straining dick. "Shit." His voice is different now. Lower. Rougher. "Fuck. Damn."
His hands leave your waist. You hear the sound of a zipper. Feel him shift beneath you. And skin. Hot skin against yours, his dick freed from his pants, pressing against you, finding you, positioning itself at your entrance. "Wait—" The word is small. Pathetic. He doesn't hear it. Doesn't want to hear it. He pushes in.
The stretch is too much. You gasp or maybe you scream, you're not sure anymore. He throws his head back, his carefully styled hair falling across his forehead, covering his eyes, making him look like someone else entirely. Someone undone. Someone feral. "Fuck." He looks down. Between you. Watches himself slide into you, out of you, into you again. Watches where you're joined, where he's taking what belongs to him now.
"This," he says, and his voice has dropped even lower, deadly and dark, "is the tightest cunt I've ever had." His hands on your waist. Gripping. Bruising. You'll have finger-shaped marks tomorrow, purple and black, souvenirs of this moment. He moves you on him, uses you, your body a thing he's operating, a tool he's finally found a use for.
"You gonna take what I'm about to give?" His voice is dark, wet, a whine wrapped in silk. He bites his lip, and the sight of it the sight of him enjoying this, enjoying you makes something in your stomach twist. He slams you down onto him. Harder. Again. His hands on your waist, controlling the rhythm, controlling you, and you can't help it, you can't stop it, your body tightens around him without permission, without thought, just pure animal response to the friction and the heat and the terrible, shameful pleasure that's building low in your belly.
You're close. God help you, you're close. "Joonggil—" He stops moving. Just stops. Looks up at you with those flat, dead eyes that are suddenly very, very alive. "You call me sir." The words are a lash. You feel them on your skin. "Sir," you breathe. "Sir, I'm—I'm cumming." Your forehead falls against his neck. You can't look at him. Can't see whatever's in his eyes while your body betrays you, while you shatter around him, while you prove everything he's ever thought about you.
He chuckles. The vibration of it travels through his chest, into yours. "Knew it," he murmurs against your ear. "Knew you liked being fucked like a little whore. Shit—I'm close—" His mouth is on your chest. Teeth, tongue, suction he's leaving marks, painting you, claiming every inch of skin he can reach. You'll wear these bruises tomorrow. You'll wear them for weeks. You'll wear them forever, probably, because nothing about Park Joonggil has ever been temporary.
"Shit, I'm cumming—take it, take it—" You feel him spill inside you. Feel his body tense and release. Feel his hands grip your waist so hard there will be fingerprints there too, purple and black, his signature on your flesh. Then it's over. He leans back. His hands leave your waist. For one horrible moment you're just perched there, on his lap, on his couch, in his office, naked and empty and utterly lost.
Then he grabs you by the hair. He yanks you back not gently, just yanks until your face is inches from his, until you're staring into those eyes that have never once looked at you like a person. "This," he says, tapping your cheek with his free hand, "is where you belong. And this—" he shifts beneath you, makes you feel him still inside you, still softening, "—is mine. This cunt is mine. Do you understand?" You nod. Or try to. His grip on your hair doesn't allow for much movement.
"Yes," you whisper. His eyes narrow. "Yes what?" The word catches in your throat. Sticks there like glass. But you swallow, and you say it, "Yes, sir." He smiles. "Good girl," he says, and the backhanded praise is worse than any insult, because it means he's pleased, and if he's pleased he'll keep you, and if he keeps you this will happen again and again and again until there's nothing left of you but a raw, trembling thing that exists only to say yes sir when he tells you what you are.
He releases your hair. You slump against him, too weak to move, too broken to care. "See?" His voice is almost gentle now. Almost kind. He strokes your back like you're a pet he's just finished training. "That wasn't so hard. You just needed someone to show you your place." You don't respond. You can't.
"And here I thought hell-spawn were supposed to be difficult." Another stroke down your spine. "Turns out you're just like all the others. Desperate for approval. Desperate to be good at something." His lips brush your temple. "Even if that something is this." The tears come then. Silent. Betraying. They slide down your cheeks and drip onto his chest, and he doesn't wipe them away, doesn't acknowledge them at all, because your tears are just more proof. More evidence. Another fault for him to witness.
"There it is," he murmurs. "Crying on my chest after I fuck you. Sweet thing." He tilts your chin up, makes you look at him. "Don't worry. You'll get used to it." You just sit there, naked and used and crying, while Park Joonggil strokes your hair and tells you what a good girl you are, what a perfect little whore, what a treasure it is to have finally broken you in.
And you…you sit there, straddling your nightmare, and you realize that this is what he wanted all along. Not just the contract. Not just your humiliation. You. All of you. Every inch. Every secret place. Every part you thought you could keep for yourself. He owns it now. He owns all of it.