A/N: I'm so so sorry I took so long to write this chapter! /.\ do forgive me eep. If you're following me on Instagram, you might sort of know what I have been going through the past two weeks, which, albeit a seemingly short time, have been perhaps the most eventful two weeks of my whole entire life.

I often think about how writing requires an objective mind void of distractions; recently it's been of the latter because of a certain someone, and I don't quite know how to handle it since, well, it's really been ten years since I've last talked to him! It's the same guy I wrote about in my final author's note in Baked Love ^^

How strange the world works. I feel as though someone is writing my story. How strange, how very, very strange.

Enjoy the chapter.

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[Vanilla]

Somewhere along the way, days have become much shorter than nights and here I was, emerging from the conference room having bid Chef Marseille and the team a brief farewell before entertaining thoughts of retiring to Cinnamon instead of my apartment. Meditations of Leroy waiting in the latter with a simmering pot of chicken soup and the image of it steaming in a bowl—glistening clear broth, onions, carrots and all—was enough to imbue a sense of purpose in my feet despite the cold.

I was midway down the steps of Anton plaza, headed towards the front gate when the buzz of a text caught my attention. Leroy had returned to Cayenne and appeared to have been, indeed, in the process of testing out an old creation of his which was what we established as a decent way of figuring out the extent of his condition.

It was in receiving this text that I recalled the list of ingredients Chef Marseille had entrusted me with, meant for the bonus round that was to be held in less than twelve hours. I responded to Leroy's text before making a U-turn and going back up the stairs into Roth hall, informing him that I was to be giving the ingredients in the storage room a quick check. He'd given a quick show of disappointment in the form of an :( which I'd found myself laughing at.

Pulling out the list and attaching it to a handy clipboard I preferred to bring around, I made my way down to the basement of the building where the storage and freezer rooms were, apart from the wine cellar. They weren't very hard to identify and the food safety foundation course taken by every first-year student helped in that we had been showed around and taught exactly how food should be stored in a proper manner.

The logistic checklist had in one of the columns, checkboxes for valid expiry dates beside the name of each ingredient and while there were a mere forty or fifty items in total, I could tell that I was going to take some time.

"Hey, you're kinda late."

I'd scanned my student ID by the entrance to the cellar just as Chef Marseille had reminded me to and rounded the corner to see a small group of three other assistants with checklists in their hands. "Oh, um. My apologies. I was... well. I have no excuses. Should we get started then?"

One of them snorted. "Too busy partaking in cancel culture?" I'd paused, stunned into confusion.

"Um. Sorry. I don't seem to quite under—"

"Here, take this," one of the storekeepers swapped his checklist with mine, snatching it out of my hands and removing it from the clipboard before handing the latter back to me with his attached. "Marseille claims you're pretty fast on things so guess you wouldn't mind taking the meats instead. Can't waste your amazing brain on stuff like canned food, can we?"

I gaped, incensed, and highly disturbed. "I'm sorry but I don't think that's how it works. I do apologize for not being on time but, well, I was handed this specific checklist and I'd very much prefer if—"

"Yeah exactly, you were late so... the least you could is make up for it by doing the harder ones. We all want to get this over done with. You're that way," the seeming leader of the group jerked a thumb over his shoulder and I stared past it down the hallway.

None of them appeared bothered by whatever that had just happened, occupied with checklists of their own and were heading towards their specified, allocated storage rooms before I could protest. I thought of giving Chef Marseille a call but a single glance at the screen of my phone confirmed either poor or a lack of reception.

I sighed.

At the top of the list were dry-cured smoked meats stored in low-light conditions and as though spending the entire morning and afternoon staring at a computer screen wasn't enough, the next fifteen minutes in a dimly-lit store room squinting at tiny words on paper took the cake.

Naturally, I was physically fazed by the end of the section and was near aghast to learn that next on the list were red and white meats in the freezer room. Once those were out of the way, I would be spending the rest of the evening in Leroy's room with a bowl of piping hot chicken soup, listening to the music he liked.

It was on my way to the freezers further down on basement two when I had the idea of collecting samples for Leroy and drafting up yet another list of dishes and ingredients that we could run through. The point was to narrow down the exact level of severity and perhaps give his taste buds a quick test on the level of sweetness he seemed desensitized to. After all, more information was always going to give a better and more accurate diagnosis once he'd made an appointment with an expert. What had started out as an idea rippled into decisive waves and soon, I was hastening towards the storage rooms in an attempt to finish the remaining items on the list and collect some samples on my way back up to the ground floor.

There being less than ten ingredients remaining made things much more optimistic than I'd first put them out to be and so the initial plan had been to run through everything as quickly as possible and be out of the walk-in freezer room in less than five.

The first blast of frigid air that hit me in the face was perhaps the best of signs that I wasn't quite going to last any longer than three minutes in the life-sized refrigerator; searching for labels under the fluorescent lights and breathing out wisps of air every now and then, turning over packages and counting, checking their conditions for tomorrow's use.

I was on the different cuts of poultry when I heard something clicking against the door of the freezer room. The scratching of metal against metal and the clink of what sounded like a hasp or a lock. Mildly confused, I checked the safety light I'd switched on that would have alerted those outside the room that it was not empty and indeed, the bulb was red.

I pushed against the door.

And then, with all my weight.

"God, you can't be this much of an idiot," I breathed, heading for the other side of the door where the safety bell was located and pushing the button twice. Once short and the again, for long. They can't have gone too far.

When nothing seemed to be happening on the outside in the next fifteen seconds or so, I simply opted for the safety release handle that, by the very definition of the term, would allow the freezer to be opened from the inside and thus reasonably prevent against moronic situations like these from happening but lo and behold. Something was keeping it jammed.

I pushed the safety bell three times, again, before staring at the malfunctioned release, but also stepping away from the door that was directly under a vent spilling out blasts of chilled air.

"You must be the silliest person on earth to—good god, can't they hear the bell?" I seethed in white, quickly driven to madness by the extent of their atrocious attitude and careless behavior, whoever was in charge of locking up the rooms. I glanced at the screen of my phone. Nothing. No reception whatsoever. "What complete morons."

This was no ordinary situation, at least according to what various safety classes had prepared us for. No other contraption should override the safety release on the inside and unless the other side of the door had a hasp that someone could have put a padlock over but this was usually the case for chiller rooms that were not in normal use, which would explain the need for a security lock to prevent against theft, but... but goodness, for whoever it was to do that, it must somehow mean that the safety light was not in proper working condition on the outside of the room.

It was at the first shiver that I began to realize how much unnecessary time I'd spent in refrigeration. I was standing the closest I could do the safety bell, ringing it every few seconds or so whilst taking the deepest breath I could, and exhaling to rid of the adrenaline that would only cause the further depletion of somewhat limited oxygen in the room.

Three vents. Negative ten degrees Celsius, according to the wall thermometer. The floor had to be some kind of galvanized steel; that or aluminum or stainless, which might be what the ceiling and walls were made of, four to six inches thick but with some kind of insulating foam underneath the steel sheets but were they soundproof? The lighting was not going to provide an ounce of heat. The doorway had a row of thick plastic curtain sheets flapping in the continuous blast of numbing air and was by rational deducing, the worst place to be positioned at.

I moved away from it. Needless to say, the first of logical concerns should have been, in chronological order, the fear of hypothermia. Then frostbite, and then air supply. But reasonably speaking, or at least within my current state of disbelief, someone had to have heard the safety bell and would either be running off to inform the person-in-charge or done something about it themselves. Judging by the time it took for me to arrive at basement two and the last text I'd sent to Leroy, he would have... he would most certainly have noticed the abnormally long time I was taking down here in the storage rooms.

I was in a dress shirt, a blazer, tie and muffler. No extra padding. No coat. No thermal underwear.

Process of elimination; banging on the door like an idiot for attention just in case the safety bell wasn't at all in working condition—no, because breathing quickens with energy and energy is lost with further exertion in addition to location of door, plastic curtains and air blast; shouting was as stupid, waste of breath, unclear if the room was soundproof and, again, unnecessary heavy breathing; vent one, two and three leave northeast, northwest and southeast corners free of indirect air blasts but northeast was shelves of frozen food and northwest was empty metal flooring which I wasn't going to sit on because that would only mean more rapid loss of heat but I wasn't going to stand either because conserving heat meant conserving energy and I needed all the energy I could afford at present. Perspiring and breathing had to be kept at a minimum level or more heat was going to be lost.

"Good god, why didn't I think of wearing the coat inside."

Shivering was keeping me warmer than I would've been without it but the mere boosting of heat production by tenfold was in simple terms a major source of energy depletion and perhaps the ultimate cause of exhaustion.

I needed insulation. Some thick plastic sheets layered between stacks of products caught my eye and it was after calculating the opportunity cost of the heat energy I'd exert trying to get them that I decided to do so, dragging them to the southeast corner nearest to the safety bell and sandwiching myself between some cardboard boxes and the sheets that I proceeded to lay on top of me to reduce as much areas of exposed skin as I could, since they radiated the most heat.

I was also careful not to be sitting on the metal floor that was scientifically speaking a decent conductor of energy and possibly the coldest surface in the room. My best bet was a foam cooler box.

With most of this set up, I curled further into myself, only reaching out every second or so for the safety bell. Focusing on constant intervals. And the flame of a candle that seemed to be the only semblance of heat left remaining. Trying not to lose consciousness.

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[Leroy]

It was after getting off a call with a general practitioner stationed in the hospital that I got a gist of the funding I needed to be getting anywhere with the current state of my taste buds. Every single step of the way from the initial consultation to the referral to the specialist's consultation and then the diagnosis, the treatment, the post-treatment required some form of major sum.

Doesn't help that my only source of heavy loans was the very person I couldn't afford to let in. He'd do onto me exactly what he'd done to Annie and then pull out every resource he'd initially thought of investing in the prodigy he thought I was going to be. Including Annie's treatment charges.

I was striking out the practitioner's number on the sticky note I'd copied the original list of contacts onto whilst finishing up the last couple of spoonfuls of chicken soup that tasted a little off when I gave the clock on the quick check. Fifty-two minutes. Any time now.

The front door opened, and my first thought was to tease him about punctuality but the figure at the door turned out to be Raul.

"Oh. Hey man," he nodded, removing his muffler and then, his coat. "Uh, why do you look like that?"

I turned back to the clock. "I'm waiting for someone."

"Playdate, you mean?" He laughed shortly, then did something weird with eyes. "So uh... you know what happened, right? Like the whole Pierre fiasco and everything and Headmaster Birchwood being in on it. Hey you think his daughter knew?"

I stared. "What fiasco." His eyes popped.

"Dude you're kidding. Don't you ever read the Chronicle? I thought playdate writing for them would, I don't know, make you do stuff. Go read it."

I reached for my phone, checking the lock screen for text notifications but there was none. He was taking a little long.

"I read his blog," offering an alternative wasn't much of an excuse but it was at the very least, true. I spent five seconds thinking about it before sort of realizing that it had been a week since I last checked in on his posts. The interschool hadn't exactly given us the luxury of time.

"No man, it's different. This stuff's serious. He didn't tell you about it? Birchwood's probably going on trial. Pierre might have it bad too. The whole competition's rigged or something and, like, it's probably going to affect our scores. Might even end up cancelling the whole thing."

I frowned. He'd said nothing about that. "You sure about this?"

"I mean, playdate's the one who wrote the article. Pretty sure he's legit I mean, he's not the kind to be spreading shit for no reason, right."

Clearing the table and dropping him a quick text for his location, I tapped the shortcut I'd saved in the browser of my phone and scrolled through his blog for some kind of pre-emptive information.

"Heard some of the organizers were in on this. Like, exposing Birchwood I mean. Playdate couldn't have gotten all that info on his own, right? So. I mean, some people hate on things for no reason anyway... you okay man?"

He had a comment section at the bottom of every post that was usually filled with encouragement from his godfather's end. Sometimes the kid. That was not what I was looking at.

"You seen him today?"

Raul paused at the bottom of the stairs. "Er, no but I saw his friend, the Chinese girl, come out of the conference room an hour ago or something. Thought he should be here by now if you're expecting him."

The usual had pushed to the very bottom of the comments by a bunch of anonymous shits with less than a brain cell hiding behind technology on the majority of his recent posts. Most of them were censored, meaning they hadn't any profanities, but I had the common sense to assume the ones that did would end up in his inbox pending for approval or something. He hadn't said a thing.

"You should call him, man."

I already was. His number was on dial before Raul said anything, but it was seconds later that it came back with a dead line. The call was not going through; he's either turned off his phone or in the middle of another call. Both were unlikely.

"He mentioned store keeping."

"Yeah, there's no reception down there. We did that in our first year too, remember?"

I knew him. He wasn't the kind of person to dive in and out of focus, tempted by distractions or by anything irrelevant. His work was fast and that applied to just about any task he was entrusted with. I tried his number again and ended up with the exact same result.

"People usually take fifteen minutes max."

Raul shrugged. "Maybe they gave him a longer list. He's probably done it many times." Haven't heard him mention it even once.

I left the dishes in the sink and I don't think I've ever done that but there was something—something off about the way things were and I was reaching for my coat, scarf and shoes before thinking twice, ringing him all the way down hill, past the plaza and into Roth hall. The building was near empty.

It was pretty much silent all the way down to where the storekeeping area was and it had been a good couple of months since I made any visits so I was stuck outside the gate for a minute wondering how the hell I was going to get past it when I recalled the student ID requirement and realized I hadn't thought of bringing it along. Ah, fuck.

I was searching my pockets when I heard it. The ring of a bell.

It sounded like it was coming from way two or three floors down into the cellar, travelling its way upwards and almost inaudible past the closed gate. It rang, shrill, twice. And then stopped.

I paused, hovering between reality and mere imagination—then, footsteps. Someone was in a hurry, making for the gate and he all but froze the moment we met. A stiff smile surface. "Hey. Uh, think something's broken downstairs. Gonna head to the staff room for some help."

He tapped his ID on the card reader and the gates opened for him to slip past. I swapped places with him while they were. He didn't look very happy about that.

"Wait, you're not supposed to go down there without permi—dude. Hey!"

The hallway was dimly lit, looking like how it usually would minutes before locking up the place but the fluorescents at the end down south past the dry-cured meats were bright, leading down to the second basement where the freezers were. Still no bell.

I turned the corner and farther down the cellar was another door. It was ajar. Yanking it open made hushed voices clear about a hundred feet to the right end of the hallway. Two or three people. Whispering. The second door was opened and the light from the inside of the storage was turned on, filtering into the narrow corridor.

Initially, I thought it was him. Possibly giving out final instructions or finishing up the last of storekeeping duties that he for some reason was entrusted to a day before the final bonus round but it was nearing the voices that I could tell none of the three belonged to him. I wasn't quiet. They heard my footsteps and stopped completely.

"You seen Julian White?" I asked at the doorway before registering the people standing just beyond it, huddled in a group and nearly jumping at my voice. His classmates. They seemed to know exactly what I was thinking—that something was up. Something was wrong.

"No, we're just locking up." It was the guy I threw a frying pan at. The girl had a phone in her hand and but it wasn't clear what she was doing. There wasn't any reception down here.

The other guy turned to the one who spoke; glaring, but nervous. Tight-lipped.

"So you're standing around for fuck?"

They shut up further. The girl looked down at her phone and the guy with a bruise on his face had his hands behind his back. He said something about wrapping up last minute checks but there was no list, no documents, no nothing they had on them. With what happened a couple of weeks back, I wasn't in the mood for talk, let alone anything more than two sentences with mindless shits like them but it was clear that they knew something and wasn't telling.

I looked around. Nothing out of the ordinary. The dry storage was in place. The entrance to the cold storage to the right was closed. Their faces were paling by the second and just from the look in their eyes, any fool could've sworn they were hiding something.

One of them gave it away with their eyes. A glance towards the freezer.

The slow, almost feeble ring of what was otherwise the shrill safety bell inside the room was back. Twice. Then stopped.

I turned on them.

"You've got to be fucking kidding me."

"I-it was supposed to be a prank!" The girl had the nerve to be defending. She snatched something out of the other guy's grasp and it turned out to be a key. Rusty with the end of it broken off. "Like, just five minutes and we were going to let him out. It was just to teach him a lesson not to mess with us and if he'd apologized or something, like, or asked us to let him out we would totally have done that but he's just staying in there all quiet and—"

"Oh my god Brianna can't you just shut up?" The guy who had been holding onto the rusted thing was a hissing fit. I was looking around. Before, I hadn't noticed the padlock attached to the hasp that was overriding the safety release on the inside. "The key broke, okay? It's not our fault. We were gonna let him out forty minutes ago."

I shoved them aside, inspecting the padlock for a second. It was old but the shackle was the short type—thick, durable brass. The hardest kind to break. For no reason, I tried jerking the door open with a foot on it. The hasp did not budge. To see if he could hear me from the inside, I balled up a fist and slammed it against the door twice.

There was a moment of silence in which the three of them stood idly by the side like a bunch of useless fuckers, waiting for a response like I was while the fire inside burned with rage and the fumes and smoke, black with poison, torched everything within reach.

Then it returned; the ring of the bell, three times now and the last one, longer than usual. He took notice. He knows I'm here.

The kettle's boil died down to a simmer and it was then that I recalled the dangers of burning over in the white of rage, blind and the consequences of it all. I wasn't going to add to the list of things I was hiding from him. The least I could do was learn.

"Get an instructor," I said to one of them. Meyers or Li, I didn't know which. Whoever it was, they didn't look very keen which was full of bullshit. "Move it? What the fuck."

"Yeah but if we get the school involved, then we're going to end up in real shit for—"

"Okay, so you prefer spending ten years in jail for a fucking murder attempt?" I shouted, on the verge of beating some sense into him. I decided it was a waste of my time and moved on. The girl panicked at jail and said she'd go up to get someone before running off.

It wasn't like I trusted her, but that I had no other choice. I looked around for something hard and heavy enough to break the padlock. The other half of the rusted key was jammed into the hole and there was no saving it. A fire extinguisher hung by the corner of the dry storage, protected by a metal case. That, I opened up and grabbed.

"Call the fire department?" The guy I tried to talk some sense into earlier on was apparently the biggest disappointment of the human race. His brain, if it even existed, shut down completely and hadn't even thought of a solution that he could translate into action. Standing still was the only thing he could do.

"Uh, yeah. I... gotta get reception." He snapped out of it, glancing down at his phone. "Fuck." Then ran off.

"You, get here." I told the last of them, needing to know what exactly they'd done to the lock and what the hell it was doing there in the first place. Smashing the bottom of the extinguisher against the padlock produced an unholy clank, scratching against the inside of the hasp that the shackle was put through. It swung around and then, back to the same position. It was hard to get an accurate hit. "Where the fuck did you get this?"

"Just... it was in the utility room upstairs," he explained, standing around. Useless. He shook his head. "Dude, we tried with a hammer. Don't think it's going to work... honestly, we were only going to have him in there for a minute. He keeps messing around with people he should be keeping quiet about. We just heard he was gonna be here so, like... it was just a prank."

The hasp wouldn't budge and the padlock was just stubborn as fuck. But the hasp, depending on the design or how they'd added it onto the door, there'd be something like a wing screw that had its end on the other side of the door. The freezers Siegfried had in his restaurants all had one, and the screw would connect to the hasp on the outside. Meaning, if he unscrews the wing nut on the inside, the hasp could drop, and he'd be able to open the door regardless of the padlock.

But there was no way to let him know; and he wouldn't be inside for the past god knows how long in the negatives if he did.

"Someone should lock you up in there dressed in whatever it is you're wearing now," I said to the guy, who came back with a hammer while I continued to slam the bottom of the fire extinguisher against the corner of the padlock, hoping to break the shackle's catch on the inside of the lock.

Footsteps. The one who left to give the fire department a call was back—phone in his hand, jittery from the nerves. "Five minutes, they said."

I turned back to the padlock and continued hacking away at it. The next of options was to increase the force by raising it above my head and possibly smashing it hard on the shackle by nearly throwing it against the hasp. I gave them the cue to step back, ready for a god-forsaken screech and possibly creating a huge dent in the extinguisher with the impact I was about to—

Clink.

I had it over my head when the sound, clear as day, slowed things to a stop. The hasp fell to one side, dropping an inch and then, all the way to the ground with a clang as soon as it was unfastened.

He'd unscrewed the wing nut on the inside.

I dropped the extinguisher and made a break for the door, yanking on the hinge and swinging it full open to the blast of cold fucking air and saw his body, limp and kneeling against the metal, fall forward towards me. He wasn't even shivering by this point. There was little energy in him remaining.

"Oh shit. Oh shit oh shit is he oka—"

"Get the fuck upstairs and show the medics down as soon as they come, you son of a bitch."

I had my coat, blazer, muffler wrapped around him in seconds, cupping his face and then, his hands. Then ordering the other guy to hand over his jacket whilst moving him away from the freezer room and kicking the door shut. He was cold. Freezing. Ice. His eyes were closed and his breathing, laboured.

"Vanilla?" I held the sides of his face, massaging the area below his eyes. "You're out. You're fine. Don't sleep. Just stay with me."

His ears were bitten stiff and most of his body remained limp as he leaned against me for support, legs on the ground and not quite working as much as I'd liked.

"Leroy?" He breathed into my muffler, moments after I started warming his face and stuffed his hands in the pockets of my coat.

"I'm here."

He laughed once, weak. "Could have really used... a candle."