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An idle day in summer. That was all it was. Henry reclined against a beanbag, his nose buried in a book. He was reading about the deep ocean and the strange things that lived there, because someone had left the book sitting on one of the desks in the library, and it had seemed sort of interesting. It wasn't as if he had anything better to do, since his parents had left him there for the day, and it was summer, so there wasn't anything to do for school.

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He liked the library a lot. It felt kind of stupid to say that these days, when everyone was in high school already. School wasn't really fun anymore, and everyone was rapidly becoming too cool for just about anything, if they hadn't been well into that phase already. Even Henry himself was starting to find that things he used to love felt more like chores now than anything. He'd always liked learning well enough, but he was starting to learn that doing it on someone else's terms wasn't so much fun.

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The pace at which things were going now was also a little... Well, there was nothing he could really do about it, since he knew university would be even worse, but he really did miss being able to discover things at his own pace. He had been voracious for knowledge when he was younger, and it had always felt like its own form of exploration when he was doing it of his own volition, just to see what he could find.

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But now it felt more like he was jumping through an elaborate series of hoops set out by someone else, and while it was still fun sometimes, there wasn't that same sense of easy wonder that there had been before. And now, with the pressure on, it was feeling more and more like work that he wasn't even paid for.

There was never any question as to whether he would do it though. Just like there had never been any question that he would be going to university.

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And not just college or anything either, but university -- and even that had been a compromise between what his parents had wanted and what he was capable of. His father would have liked Ivy League, and he sort of felt that his mother would have too, but at least she had realized, quietly, sometime in his middle school years, that he didn't have what it took for that level of competition. She must have been the one to break the news, just as slowly, to Henry's father.

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They didn't talk about it, but he had been relieved to stop hearing about it, as the years went on.

University was going to be tough enough, if he was going to get into the kind that his parents would be satisfied with. Actually, it was kind of a rare moment for him to be out here doing almost nothing. It wasn't nothing, exactly, since he was reading something, but it wasn't volunteering or an extracurricular or tutoring sessions or anything structured like that.

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No one else was here, it was just him and a book, and he wasn't reading it for any reason beyond the fact that he had wanted to.

He smiled a little to himself, tracing the edge of the page idly with one finger. The book, strictly speaking, wasn't really the right reading level for someone like him. Actually, it was way below the level of the books he usually read these days. It was probably meant for elementary schoolers, or middle schoolers at most.

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There were a lot of pictures, more than he had gotten used to seeing in a long time. But he didn't really know a lot about deep sea ecosystems, and in this case he felt that the pictures really added a lot to the experience. The animals he saw were so bizarre looking that he doubted a text description could really have done them justice.

He was about to flip ahead, maybe see what other weird creatures there were to see in the pages of the book, when the sound of laughter cut through his thoughts.

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He looked up without really meaning to. It had been quiet in the library for some time now, to the point that he had gotten used to it, and began to take it for granted. It was a beautiful day, and despite the fact that it was summer, mercifully not many people had been here when Henry had arrived. That in itself was a little unusual, since even though not a lot of kids liked the library, a lot of parents sure did.

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Reading was the kind of thing that parents wanted their kids to be doing, and the fact that there were librarians present as well as content catered for kids meant that a lot of busy parents more or less got away with dropping off their kids and leaving them here. That last part tended to be to Henry's chagrin, since it made the place noisier and more crowded, and it was hard for him to get any work done when things were like that.

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But there was also not a whole lot he could do about it, so he tolerated it as best he could. Though increasingly it meant that he did his work at home, away from the possibility of more distractions. It was nice that he had the option, he knew; he was aware that not everyone had the luxury of choice, and that some were forced to make do as best they could with what the library offered anyway, because they had nothing else.

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Still, he had missed being at the library once he had transitioned to doing most of his work from home. At least when he was here, it felt like he had a sort of reprieve from... well, from everything else, he supposed. He wasn't entirely sure how to put it into words. The atmosphere at his house was often suffocating, and it wasn't all due to the fact of Henry's own inadequacy. His father's work was important, he knew -- and it was stressful, and weighed on him heavily sometimes.

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Even when Henry had been very young, when he had known almost nothing about what his father did, he understood that his father was often stressed and unhappy for it, and that when these days happened, he was to be very quiet in his room and leave his father alone.

Which wasn't to say that his father was a cruel man, or that he lashed out often. As he grew older, Henry began to recognize the small blessings he did have, in how much worse it really could have been.

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He knew kids with broken families, or parents who treated them badly, and his father had never been... that. But Henry's father was a distant man, and never one for much affection; and as the years went on and the weight of his work bore down on him, it felt to Henry as if his father had only grown colder with time.

Another peal of laughter interrupted his thoughts, and he realized with a start that he recognized the voice. It came from the entrance, a pair of teenagers walking together.

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They were about the same age as he was -- and yes, he did recognize them; they were in the same year of school. The taller one, the one smiling down at his companion with a conspiratorial expression -- that was the boy that had signed up for Henry's father's experiments.

... Maybe it was a bit presumptuous to call them his father's experiments. Henry knew that his father wasn't in charge, that he was simply working as part of a team.