Les vices

Les vices names a recurring pattern of self-destructive indulgence in Jungkook’s life: the rush of illegal fighting, the rewards of being watched, alcohol, and a vision of sex built around brutality rather than tenderness. The pattern is compelling because it makes him feel powerful and alive, but it also narrows his sense of what he can choose. As his relationship with Shelby develops, the story places that appetite for excess beside the possibility of a different kind of intimacy.

The seduction of excess

On January 15, Jungkook sits in his car outside Ares Garden, gripping the steering wheel and questioning whether he should go inside. The hesitation matters because the ring is not merely a place where he fights: it is where he feels alive. He relishes the crowd’s admiration and cheers, which feed his pride and ego, and the intimidating image he projects—dark-eyed, hellish, and dangerous—makes some women desire the demon that seems to emerge in combat. The attraction of vice lies partly in this audience: fighting offers both physical release and a public identity that confirms his power.

That identity also shapes how Jungkook understands sex. On January 25, seated in a leather chair at Aphrodite’s Love with another whisky, he watches the club around him and imagines Shelby beside him: holding her close, dancing with her, and kissing her as if his life depended on it. The tenderness of the fantasy unsettles the harder persona that has defined his relationships. The narration abruptly mocks the idea that he could make love, insisting instead on his established preference for sex without love and for brutality. It presents Kayla Brown as the familiar alternative: someone who knows his preferences, which the passage identifies with roughness rather than tenderness. The clash between the imagined closeness with Shelby and the old sexual script makes vice visible not simply as appetite, but as a habit that resists emotional change.

Rage, danger, and recognition

The pattern becomes physically dangerous when Jungkook leaves the club in anger, mounts his motorcycle, and accelerates into traffic. He rides above the speed limit, narrowly avoids cars, and experiences the landscape as a blur before his vision goes black. The passage makes the cost of his rage immediate: what begins as an impulse to escape or discharge anger places his own life at risk, while the speed and loss of perception echo the loss of control he once found exhilarating in the ring.

Later, Jungkook explains the return to Ares Garden to Shelby as a relapse into a familiar vice. He recalls that they had agreed to learn how to love together, yet he had also hoped that doing so would quiet the demons occupying his thoughts since childhood. When he heard about Ares Garden, he says, he entered a trance in which the vice overpowered him; fighting on the ring felt good, but seeing Shelby’s eyes red from dried tears made him regret going back. His account does not present the pleasure of fighting as false. Instead, it shows how quickly that pleasure can coexist with remorse and damage to a relationship he wants to protect.

He also gives Shelby the history behind Kayla Brown, rather than leaving her as a simple emblem of his old habits. Kayla had been a third-year student when Jungkook was in his first year; she seduced him, and their friendship became sexual. She later left for Washington, D.C., to work with her father, and Jungkook did not see her again until recently. He does not know why she returned, but says that he rejected her. By telling Shelby this history alongside his admission about Ares Garden, he exposes the earlier sexual relationship and his more recent choice to refuse its continuation.

Restraint and alternative outlets

Jungkook’s refusal to return to illegal fighting becomes a practical test of whether he can interrupt the habits he has described to Shelby. When Andrew Wilson asks him to speak to Andrew’s father, Jungkook rejects the request and makes clear that he has left the illegal fights behind and promised the people close to him that he would not go back. The promise is not effortless resolve: he had already told Sunmi what happened at Ares Garden, giving her the details rather than concealing them. She saw that he needed to talk, let him finish, and then held him as he sobbed. Afterward, he sought Shelby in the waiting room and buried his face in her neck, returning to a familiar source of comfort. The sequence sets disclosure and support against the secrecy and solitary rush of his former outlet.

At Knock Out, Jungkook finds a different use for the physical skill that once belonged to the ring. On April 25, wearing gloves and listening to Metallica’s “Enter Sandman,” he works a punching bag while other clients watch. He concentrates on the exercise as a relaxing release, distinct from rage or sadness: he can exert himself without needing to hit someone. The contrast is precise. The bag gives his strength somewhere to go, but does not require an opponent, an audience’s acclaim, or the escalating danger of an illegal fight. That day, Namjoon is not there to cheer him on; he is outdoors with Dorcas and Cassiopée, picnicking, reading, and painting, while Jungkook attends to his own training.

The change also reaches beyond where Jungkook directs his aggression. After Shelby has trembled, he rubs her back and holds her close until she falls asleep. Thinking of the two months they have spent together, he recognizes that being with her has changed him, even as he acknowledges that old habits and inner demons remain and that lasting change will take time. The scene refuses a clean cure: affection and progress coexist with the persistence of what he is trying to overcome.

By July, Shelby can name the difference in his way of relating to her. The young man who had been untactile and brutal now seeks hugs, hand-holding, caresses, kisses, and affectionate words, while retaining his blunt, sexually explicit manner. Their demons have not disappeared, but, in Shelby’s view, they surface less often; she feels more confident in herself and in Jungkook because he asks for her consent before acting. Her growing sense of safety gives the contrast its weight: the answer to self-destructive excess is not that Jungkook becomes someone without desire, but that intimacy increasingly includes attention to Shelby’s boundaries and reassurance that he does not want to hurt her.

Narrative significance

The concept’s force comes from the gap between the identity Jungkook performs and the account the narration makes of it. The combat persona promises mastery, yet depends on being watched and admired; the sexual bravado likewise presents hardness as the only available form of desire. When the narration interrupts his fantasy of tenderness with a mocking insistence on his old habits, it exposes that certainty as a script, not an immutable truth. The later chapters do not erase the script or declare him cured. They instead measure change in choices: physical effort can be separated from the urge to injure, and desire can coexist with tenderness and attention to another person’s consent. Vice remains a pull, but it no longer has to dictate what Jungkook does with his strength or how he approaches intimacy.