Addiction and Relapse

Addiction and relapse in the novel emerge not as a single, uniform condition but as a destructive pattern that can take different forms: Jungkook returns to cocaine and nearly kills an opponent, while Cassiopée struggles through withdrawal from illicit substances. Their stories connect substance use to difficult circumstances without reducing it to those circumstances, and contrast the immediate force of relapse with the slow, uneven work of support and change.

Jungkook’s relapse and its consequences

Jungkook’s return to cocaine is exposed at Ares Garden through a phone call from Namjoon to Shelby. Namjoon says he believes Jungkook has taken drugs and is beating his opponent nearly to death. Shelby rushes to the venue, carrying her skateboard, and enters through a secret passage from the bar. On the ring, Jungkook is so consumed by rage and hallucinations that he does not recognize that his opponent is motionless. The crowd urges him onward, turning a private loss of control into a spectacle supported by the room around him. Shelby’s shout breaks through the noise; when a spectator moves toward her, Jungkook leaves the ring and intervenes.

The crisis does not end with his departure from the fight. Jungkook tells Shelby that he took cocaine because he wanted to force her out of his thoughts, then cruelly denies that she matters to him. His explanation places the relapse alongside an attempt to reject emotional closeness, but does not make his conduct less harmful: he has endangered his opponent, frightened Shelby, and used his pain to wound her. The reversal is stark. He protects her from a spectator immediately after describing his desire to push her away, while his rescue cannot undo the rejection or the violence that brought them there.

Chen bars Jungkook from Ares Garden until further notice, saying that he cares for him but cannot accept what happened. Namjoon is angrier still: he says Jungkook has relapsed and refuses help despite badly needing it. Their responses distinguish affection from permission. Chen’s decision removes Jungkook from the setting where the violence occurred; Namjoon’s frustration names the limit of what a friend can accomplish when Jungkook will not accept help. After leaving Ares Garden, Namjoon goes to see Sunmi and tells her Jungkook has caused trouble again. The news travels through a circle of care, but the scene does not suggest that concern alone has already resolved the crisis.

Changing the setting, not simply repeating the fight

Jungkook later goes to Knock Out in Ellensburg, an equipped training gym with punching bags, speed bags, weights, pull-up bars, and a practice ring roughly the size of the Ares Garden ring. He is there as a student seeking a change, not as an underground boxer. He completes a set of twenty pull-ups, moves to bench presses, and finds that lifting does not release his anger as he hoped. He then faces a new-looking punching bag, a sharp contrast with Ares Garden’s visibly worn equipment and its accumulated history of blows.

At 19:30, after training, Jungkook removes his gloves and hand wraps and lies on the floor. He has struck no person. His anger has quieted, and he feels relaxed rather than simply relieved to have finished. The account presents the new gym as a different environment in which physical effort can bring an unusual calm without becoming an underground bout. This is a meaningful alternative, not evidence that one workout has cured him: the lingering soreness, his dissatisfaction during the session, and the contrast with his earlier conduct keep the change provisional.

That distinction matters because the narrative gives violence more than one reinforcement. At Ares Garden, a crowd cheers as Jungkook attacks an incapacitated opponent; at Knock Out, training takes place without an adversary to injure. The change of setting and activity offers a way to work his body without reproducing the lethal logic of the ring, though it does not erase his earlier relapse or establish that he has permanently abandoned underground fighting.

Cassiopée’s difficult abstinence

Cassiopée’s experience supplies a contrasting account of substance recovery. On Friday, December 6, she is asleep with her head on a table and wakes when Dorcas puts a hand on her back. She has not touched illicit substances for weeks, but the period of abstinence is difficult and her sleep has suffered. Dorcas asks whether she has had a bad night. Cassiopée describes insomnia and says that two people having sex kept her awake; music did not help, so she went outside for a two-hour walk. She reassures Dorcas that she was dressed warmly.

The scene makes abstinence concrete through its ordinary cost: exhaustion, a disrupted night, and the effort of finding some way to pass the hours without returning to substances. Dorcas checks on her rather than treating abstinence as an effortless success. Cassiopée’s weeks without illicit substances are significant, but the account preserves the difficulty beside the achievement. It neither turns recovery into a sudden transformation nor supplies a final outcome for her struggle.

Support, accountability, and the limits of recovery

Jungkook’s family history offers context for his vulnerability without presenting it as a simple explanation for his later substance use. Years earlier, in a house in Gangnam, Seoul, eight-year-old Jungkook tries to break free from his older brother Ye-jun, who is restraining him so he cannot run downstairs into his parents’ argument. Jungkook says he is tired of their fighting. Later, Sunmi recalls that she first knew him as a quiet child; after his father hit him, he claimed that he had fought at school and that Namjoon had helped him. Sunmi believed him until Jungkook ran away from home at sixteen and sought refuge with her. His father did not look for him, and Sunmi welcomed him without hesitation. She remained concerned about his behavior and about his early exposure to things a sixteen-year-old should not have been involved in.

These details place Jungkook’s relapse within a longer life marked by violence, secrecy, and refuge, but the novel does not collapse those experiences into a diagnosis or claim that his past makes relapse inevitable. In the present, Namjoon’s alarm, Chen’s ban, and Sunmi’s continued care represent distinct responses: friendship, institutional accountability, and a place of welcome. None is shown as a substitute for Jungkook’s own willingness to accept help.

The wider relationships also complicate any easy account of rescue. Shelby’s presence at Ares Garden interrupts an immediate danger, and another student later observes that Shelby seems more open and less cold than before. Jungkook deflects the credit, pointing instead to her therapist and the help she receives in moving forward. That exchange resists casting romance as a cure. Across Jungkook’s cocaine relapse and Cassiopée’s abstinence, change appears as fragile and uneven: a boundary imposed after violence, a different way to train, a friend’s check-in, and weeks endured without substances. The narrative makes room for these steps without pretending they settle what comes next.