Jungkook and Shelby's Pact to Overcome Their Vices Together

Jungkook and Shelby's Pact to Overcome Their Vices Together is the couple’s shared intention to turn away from destructive habits before those habits pull them back into despair. The pact gives their relationship a language of mutual effort, but it is not a guarantee of recovery: Jungkook returns to the Ares Garden ring, admits how powerfully the vice draws him, and tells Shelby he can only do his best. Its force comes from that gap between what they hope to do together and what neither can control alone.

Origins and Meaning

The pact emerges from a relationship shaped by trauma, fear, and the possibility of care. Shelby describes their plan as learning to love together and moving away from their vices so they do not fall back into an oppressive void. Her words frame change as a shared practice, not a rescue in which one partner is responsible for curing the other. The commitment asks both of them to recognize what pulls them toward harm and to resist treating that pull as inevitable.

Their histories help explain why the promise matters, without making either person’s behavior a simple consequence of the past. As a child of eight, Jungkook tried to intervene in his parents’ argument; his older brother, Ye-jun, held him back to keep him from entering the dangerous scene. Jungkook’s anger and distress were already bound to violence in the family home. Later, his father instructed him that men must not cry, imposing silence as a rule for how a boy should handle pain. The pact points in a different direction: toward naming difficulty and asking for change rather than disguising distress as strength.

Sunmi Eun’s history with Jungkook also supplies important context for the possibility of support beyond the couple. She first knew him as a quiet child, then saw him return with a battered face and acceptably explained it as a school fight. At sixteen, after he ran away from home, he sought refuge with her; his father did not look for him, and Sunmi welcomed him without hesitation. She remained concerned as she saw the darkness around him deepen and learned that he had been drawn into things a sixteen-year-old should not have touched. The pact therefore exists within a wider network of care, even as Jungkook’s reluctance to seek help remains a problem for those close to him.

The Pact Tested by Relapse

The clearest test comes when Shelby confronts Jungkook over a series of actions that contradict their shared intention. She recalls that he returned to the ring when the opportunity arose, and that a blonde woman had left his room the previous week; he then ignored Shelby for days instead of explaining what had happened. To Shelby, the silence makes their time together seem insignificant to him, even though it matters deeply to her. Her decision to leave the car before he can respond turns the pact from an abstract promise into a boundary: she will not stay beside him while he chooses his vices and shuts her out.

Jungkook later gives Shelby an account of the relapse rather than continuing to evade her questions. When he learned that Ares Garden was available to him, he says he entered a trance-like state and felt the vice overpower him. Returning to the ring felt good in the moment; seeing Shelby’s tear-streaked face afterward made him regret going. His explanation does not erase the breach or make the return harmless. It does, however, distinguish immediate gratification from the remorse that follows, exposing the cycle that the pact was meant to interrupt.

He also explains the history with Kayla Brown. They met when he was a first-year student and she was a third-year; she seduced him, and they became friends as well as sexual partners. After she left for Washington, D.C., to work with her father, he did not see her again until recently. Jungkook says he does not know why she returned and that he pushed her away. The disclosure answers part of the uncertainty that had accumulated between him and Shelby, but it follows days of silence and does not undo the damage caused by withholding an explanation.

Support, Limits, and Responsibility

Jungkook’s return to the ring also alarms Dorcas Peters. She knows that Shelby has changed: with help from her therapist and support from people around her, Shelby has become more open and less cold toward others. Dorcas credits Jungkook with helping Shelby regain trust and feel loved as she is, while insisting that he must not hurt her. Her perspective makes the pact’s mutuality more complex. Their relationship can be a source of confidence, but that does not make Jungkook’s conduct harmless or place Shelby in charge of his recovery.

Dorcas has particular reason to worry about violence. After Namjoon Kim tells her what happens at Ares Garden, she recalls that Shelby dislikes violence yet stepped into the ring after only a week of training with Jungkook and punched Lexie in the face. What might look like simple evidence of the couple’s shared world is, in Dorcas’s view, a warning: the violent environment can draw Shelby into behavior she would ordinarily answer with words. Her request that Jungkook leave that climate behind extends the pact beyond private habits to the circumstances that reinforce them.

Jungkook does not make the promise Dorcas wants. He tells her he cannot promise to stop and does not know how the situation will unfold. He does affirm that his love for Shelby is sincere and says he will do his best. The qualification matters: the book presents commitment without pretending that affection guarantees control over addiction, violence, or relapse. His answer leaves responsibility unresolved, but replaces denial with an admission of uncertainty.

Care Without a Cure

Other moments in the story show why the pact’s promise of mutual support can matter, while also showing why it cannot substitute for consent or professional care. During an earlier panic episode in an art classroom, Shelby recoils when Cassiopée Smith touches her shoulders and refuses further contact. At Ares Garden, Jungkook finds Shelby crying in the shower, turns off the water, and stays beside her until she calms. When her injuries later make her break down in the bathroom, he kneels and rests a hand on her knees as she seeks comfort. These scenes distinguish support that responds to Shelby’s state from any assumption that closeness alone can fix her distress.

That distinction appears again when Madison Jefferson finds Shelby in a panic. Shelby pushes Madison away, believing she may be in danger; Madison leaves to find Jungkook, who comes quickly and holds Shelby as she recognizes his familiar spring scent. He comforts her until her breathing returns to normal. In another intimate moment, Shelby starts to move away from a waking Jungkook, but he entwines their fingers and asks her to stay; she chooses to rest her head against his chest. The scenes give the relationship its gentleness, but they do not cancel the earlier rupture. Care is meaningful precisely because it must coexist with boundaries, choice, and the need to address the causes of harm.

The pact’s unfinished quality is clearest when Jungkook reflects on the two months they have spent together. He sees changes in himself and regards being with Shelby as the best thing that has happened to him, yet recognizes that his old habits persist and that his inner demons have not disappeared. The relationship has made change imaginable, not automatic. Their agreement is therefore less a declaration that they have overcome their vices than a measure of what is at stake when they fail to confront them—and of the difficult, continuing work required to choose one another without making one person the other’s cure.