A/N: Ahh!! I'm so sorry I'm late ;-; what is with me and sleeping the night before updates. I was so close to being done with the last couple of paragraphs.

I will be moving the see-saw chapters up earlier in the book so that it is better spaced out and might be adding some from time to time even after finishing the book before then moving them to the appropriate chapters in the front! I realize that I'm not exactly following the timeline I'd set out to do (Vanilla's high school experience as a ten-year-old and then Leroy's first couple of non-serious girlfriends back when he was twelve and thirteen) but I was somewhat dying to write this one so I decided to skip right to it ;-;

I'm sorry if you'd have preferred I went by the timeline but I really do think some readers have been really intrigued/curious to hear about this ever since the first couple of chapters where Vanilla learns that Leroy was the one who changed the recipe for the vanilla ice cream flavour in the parlour he now works at. This is the story of how he got hired. 

Enjoy.

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How six mere hours could feel like an entire year's worth of brain juice and social battery, Leroy did not know. He'd upped and left the campus at the dismissal bell on his first day of culinary school with the heaviest limbs and the worst headache that couldn't even rival how he felt after a nine to ten o'clock shift in his father's production kitchen.

The bell was shrill and unholy; the last time he'd heard anything similar was back in second grade of elementary school, eight years ago. Of which six, he'd spent with Siegfried in New York and California and Shanghai and London and Seoul and Singapore and Manila—cities he could see himself falling for in the absence of everything that wasn't within his control. As a child, that all had been severely limited.

Where the little lion had acquired a set of well-trained, polished culinary skills under his belt full of kitchen knives, meat forks, spatulas and ladles, he'd left little to no room for hand-raising and textbook-reading in an environment that was without the whir of commercial exhaust hoods, the spit and crackle of oil, the punch of profanities, the heat, the fire of the kitchen.

Classrooms were quiet. At least compared to a production kitchen, they were. He'd forgotten how structured they were supposed to be with one-hour periods ending on the dot and having bells and people speaking without raised voices and clocking in but for the sake of attendance or even things like standing up when picked on to answer a question in the middle of class all because he'd had, so coincidentally, chanced a glimpse up at the sky past the windows.

Minding his own business without spending too much time associating himself with the individuals coming up to him for a quick chat made for a grand total of zero friends on his first day of school. This had been the complete opposite of what his father had encouraged—having expounded the wonders of what he called 'social networking' and establishing of connections with those who had the potential of going farther than the rest. Leroy had been so against this that he considered having made no contact with anyone else on his first day of school to be a stunning achievement. Obedience did not exist. He'd never heard of such a complicated word. R-e-b-e-l on the other hand, five letters. Easy.

He'd found himself seated beside a noisy Italian over the hour-long welcome speech by the school's headmaster first thing in the morning, senses dulled by the sheer number of people (all freshmen) gathered in the auditorium. Naturally, he hadn't the slightest will to converse; nor did he possess the relevant skills to do so. The noisy Italian, who had insisted on going by Raul, turned out to be a classmate of his with a stunning ability to come up with conversational topics at every turn of Roth hall on their way to the commons for lunch.

Still as a flame without a whisper of the wind, Leroy had little to no recollection of school as a structured phenomenon and thus found himself expectedly indifferent to its social workings. It wasn't so much as he'd forgotten how it was like in the first place. Age was a critical factor.

High school seemed almost like society on a smaller scale. Observations of a change in social behavior did not surprise him but merely imagining himself as part of the system was enough to turn him off. Clusters was what he could associate lunchtime with. People sat together; they arranged to sit together. No one was eating alone and by extension, he wondered if that meant no such person should exist in the first place. People who ate alone.

It was an interesting phenomenon. Leroy had always eaten alone. Albeit in the privacy of his father's apartment.

Maybe the people who ate alone did not like to be seen eating alone, and so would eat somewhere else. Somewhere in the absence of those surrounded by company. He'd forgotten how it was like to be present in that sort of company. Still, it was when he was asked by the Italian classmate to join his table at lunch that he soon realized that eating alone wasn't necessarily something he disliked doing.

The phrase was 'come to do.' Eating alone was what he was used to doing and whether he liked it or not was a vague and ambiguous question he never thought of answering. Leroy had joined them at their table regardless, somewhat going with the flow just to make things easier. Declining was another layer of complexity; it involved having to deal with a response he thought harder to accommodate but then this was all before the unanticipated self-introductions at the table and the socializing that went on after that over what would have otherwise been a quiet (average-tasting) school lunch.

At present, the sun was as harsh as the day had been on him—barring down the soaked back of his dress shirt which was a whole other issue he struggled with. There were no uniforms back in kindergarten or elementary school. The parts of his skin that were exposed to what was left of the awful August heat were all but fired up. He'd somehow made it to the station without going blind from the scorched pavement that had lost all detail in the ivory heat of the sun, boarding the train back home.

It had been a mere week since they'd moved into the apartment a station away and Annie had found herself a full-time vacancy at a grocery store down the street. He'd spent the days leading up to school unpacking on her behalf but there was a point in which even Leroy himself had the ability to admit just how hellishly bad he was at being neat and orderly. Either way, he hadn't much space to work with in the first place. The kitchen, he could barely put up both arms without hitting something and the one storage room housed a mattress for his mother and nothing else. The couch was his bed.

Two o'clock in the afternoon was not a pleasant time to be walking about in the most unholy of weathers. Holding a candle inside was heat enough for one. And while everyone else from school was out and about, eager to spend time with newfound friends with whom they'd had an exciting day in class with, Leroy hadn't a single bleep of social battery left by the end of mere introductory classes to be part of anything that did not involve just himself.

And to reward himself for getting through what he thought to be the most draining day since his first time in a production kitchen six years ago, the little lion decided to go for his usual.

Vanilla ice cream.

He'd often found himself attributing several reasons to the recurring event; claiming that it had little to do with cravings for the specific flavour or a sentimental attachment to the name and its complete lack of symbolic meaning. It was, as he so believed, a habit of his.

And habits were universal. They applied to every single human being on earth and he had reason to have a habit and everyone had habits, so. This was his habit. After all, some would go for what they liked, again and again. And Leroy did not see a problem with that.

On days like these, he would have been satisfied with the usual store-bought, supermarket-grade tub of vanilla ice cream that was the most affordable version of his necessary fix, found at his convenience.

But just a corner down the train station was an ice-cream parlour he'd taken notice of since moving in a week ago. He'd chanced upon it on his way to a hardware store for some furniture glue and had stopped to admire the posh interior that seemed to him either newly renovated or completely brand new, furnished to look completely different from the salon and diner it was wedged between.

At present, Leroy was standing before the entrance of the parlour, feeling his pockets to gauge the amount of change he had before hesitating, still, and then going in.

The place wasn't exactly the talk of the town, and by that, he meant it was empty. Not a single soul. He made a quick assessment of the parlour's scoop pricing and general menu displayed on the blackboard above the store's backlit logo before counting the change in his pocket, somewhat glad that he was the only one in the store. He set aside an exact amount for a small-sized ice cream cup and neared the counter for his usual.

It had all started a while back. His first trip to an ice cream parlour at the age of three or four. He couldn't quite remember. All that was left in that memory of his was a younger Siegfried against striped wallpaper, white plastic seats and a single, most unforgettable piece of advice on a scorching summer afternoon very much like the present day heat.

Come to think of it, the short few hours his father had on Sundays to spend with the little lion had always seemed to involve something culinary-related; whether it be picking up a new technique or learning how to spell sous vide but that day—that day had been different. That day was when he learnt: trying out the most common flavour at every first-time visit to an ice cream parlour was a determining factor of just how good they were.

Needless to say, it hadn't made sense to a mere toddler sizzling at the thought of wasabi­-flavoured ice cream and blue cheese as a summer special. It was a year after that, as Annie had decided to give in to the boy's repeated demands for the dessert after his first experience (now, without Siegfried), that he'd begrudgingly started to realize the truth in the advice given by his father.

In conclusion, vanilla wasn't exactly what he'd call his favourite. It wasn't something like that. The flavour had simply... become a habit of his.

"A small vanilla," he nodded at the only full tub on display that was ironically placed closest to the cash register. The staff member attending to him had slid open the window of the display case and reached in for a generous scoop, albeit struggling a little in the process of doing so. The scooping tool appeared uncooperative against the seeming resistance of an untouched tub of ice cream that when, transferred into a paper cup, did not exactly look like the luscious ball of creamy goodness Leroy had been anticipating.

He paid in change, exact, and sat at the table farthest away from the counter. His first spoonful was the epitome of average.

In fact, Leroy had become so trained in assessing the quality of any dish that he could disregard the toying bias of things like the weather, sudden cravings or hunger pangs, which often played a part in making a dish seem tastier or somewhat dull in comparison. After dealing with the initial relief of having a soothing chill down his throat and air-conditioning blasting at his back, he rated the store's vanilla a grand three out of ten.

And whilst quietly finishing the rest of his mediocre cup, the bored lion had took to staring at the wall his table was adjacent to, adorned with chalk doodles of its customers and dated as far back as six months ago.

So he had been wrong about the parlour. The initial assumption was that the store was brand new or recently revamped, which explained the posh furnishing and the signage put up by the sidewalk about two-for-one waffle bowl deals and first-come-first-serve complimentary drinks. He nearly snorted. Marketing tactics were the easiest way to understand the exact state of any business and this one was close to screaming desperate.

Calm was the colour of a frozen lake on a snowy evening. He could feel it on the tip of his tongue; a wave in which he could drown and be lulled by the silence of a chill, absent of the heat that he bore inside.

Methods of acquirement and taste did not matter in his case. The calm was here regardless of time and space and it was embedded in the very thought, the very idea of a common ground (or waters, per se) in which he could seek—a tether to the rising smoke of his flames.

Whether it was moving four times, or letting go of the diner, or attending culinary school after being home-schooled for six years, this was his constant. A spoon of vanilla ice cream; enough to still the flickering of a candle in the wind.

"Only eight flavours?"

A voice from the back end of the store disrupted his peace and the space, being nearly empty and void of obstructions, lent volume and reverberation to the words being spoken. Leroy turned to see a man speaking to the only staff member out front tending to the display case, behind the counter. They nod.

"But I said fifteen by this week, right? I thought we came up with the rainbow fluff and mint monster thing."

The lone customer resumed his private business of ice cream, unwilling to spare the already limited energy he had to process whatever was going on between the one he assumed to be the owner and his employee.

"But uh... we did think of that but we thought you meant improving the others first. Or it would make more sense to swap them out with the flavours that don't sell instead of just adding on."

There was a pause in their conversation as the owner gave the ice cream tubs a scan. "I told you to get rid of the vanilla, though. It never sells. And I'm pretty sure it was full by the end of yesterday."

As much as he had been trying not to pay any attention to the conversation, Leroy found himself unsurprised by the state of the parlour. He did give the cup in his hands a three out of ten.

His thoughts and all were contained in the safe space of his mind—unheard and unreviewed by those beyond it until the owner seemed to spot a single scoop of vanilla ice cream missing from its tub and, surprised, pointed this out to the employee in a tone that was almost condescending. "Guess you served one today." And that was when he'd taken an interest in the sole customer seated farthest away from the counter; turning to him and starting towards his table.

The instructions to inwardly curse when being approached for a conversation was most likely written in the lion's DNA and so when the owner of the parlour crossed to room to invite himself into the seat across him, Leroy was not in the most pleasant of moods. "Hey kid. I see you got the vanilla."

This was not enough to provoke a response from his tight-lipped customer, who simply nodded once.

"So... how's your cup? You like it?" His eyes went to Leroy's uniform and it resembling the kind that students from private boarding schools tended to wear egged him on. "Gonna tell your friends about it? We'll have three new flavours by next week, so. Promise you'll like 'em." As though having not enough unique flavours was the issue he had.

Fortunately for the owner, this did not sit well with Leroy and had, in fact, crossed the candle. "Why?"

The man across him seemed to register the sudden mood. His smile seemed to fade. "Why what?"

"Why new flavours?" He finished his cup, placing it aside and reaching for his own bottle of water. "Nail your originals."

The owner appeared mildly confused. "Our new flavours are the originals. It's gonna be what makes us unique."

"That doesn't make any sense."

This seemed to irk the adult he was having a conversation with, and putting up walls of defense was always the next step for an offended ego. "We're still trying to find our originals. They should be our best-sellers, right? Like, our specialty. And you don't know this 'cuz you're still a kid, but sometimes it ain't that easy to set yourself apart in a world that's pretty much all the same. People copying one another. Trying to outdo others. To be 'original'. It ain't as easy as it sounds," he snorted. "Stuff like vanilla... it's too simple. Everyone has it."

Leroy did not usually have in him the will to argue or change the opinion of someone else he did not necessarily care about, let alone a stranger disrupting his peace and quiet. He found himself scoffing—presently ticked off and quite frankly, incensed by the man's arrogance.

"The base of your ice cream. Did you even age it? There's a reason why she's having a hard time scooping it out of the tub. It's not smooth. No air bubbles. Chunks of ice crystals all because you're impatient. Either that or you're just lazy to make it the night before. You can tell from the texture that table sugar's in the recipe so it's obvious you're cutting cost or just buying from convenience. Try liquid sugars. The beans you use are probably the kind you find down the street in a grocery store. You need something at least full-bodied. If you can't afford grade A, go for lower grades but at least know where they come from. Bourbon vanilla is what you're looking at. Bean length also matters. And don't cheat just to get black specks in the ice cream. You probably threw the whole pod into the grinder or something. And using extract isn't a bad thing. Aroma is more important than taste in overall flavour, and extract gives that quick burst. But you wouldn't know.

"You think it's boring. Simple." He stood to leave. "He's not."

*

He was hired on the spot back then. Leroy had by the magic of his words seized the eager owner and woken him up from a dream, somehow seducing him into buying his help and then commissioning him to craft a recipe for the store at an unimpressive rate.

Leroy hadn't thought much of the pay. He couldn't have foreseen four months down the road, when the money seemed to matter the most with monthly bills hitting an all new high for Annie's medical needs.

Back then, it was having access to the machines and the ingredients and having his fix every week, testing, and trying things out for the perfect, complex cup of snow to enjoy after a tough day at school—distant and apart and not quite present despite being surrounded by people.

It was in that cup that he found company. 

And in that moment that he did not feel as though he was alone.