A/N: The weather is sticky, the promised thunderstorms keep skipping over my home town just leaving me with humid air that makes me sleepy.

Enjoy!

Queen Belle's library had hosted academics for years. There was a treasure trove of works within it's walls and it would take Belle many lifetimes to work through it all, so academics from all over the world came to use the library when they needed one obscure work or another.

There was always one nook that was Ben's though, because he was as much a reader as his mother was and every academic knew that the south facing window on the seventh mezzanine was Ben's nook. He was daydreaming at the moment. He had cracked the window open a little and could hear the birds outside but he was mostly lost in the heady silence that made his mom's library so comforting.

It was a warm and thick silence, with occasional murmurs from two academics or the team of librarians that looked after the books. New professors or students who occasionally let out a gasp at the sheer size of the room – those were Ben's favourites because the gasp was quite audible and the sound travelled far. If he was close enough he loved seeing the expression on their faces, and the sense of wonder and excitement that revealed just how much a bookworm that person was. On occasions, a select few had looked up in horror, those tended to be students who had needed a book for an essay or a project, and they were daunted by the impossibility of the room before them. But they were out much faster than they thought they would be, because there was always someone who knew what they wanted.

The silence was punctuated by the low words of others, or the flicking of a page if there was someone near enough. The sun was warm where Ben sat in his nook and his eyes roamed around the scattering of figures that occupied the space. Maybe fifty people were moving throughout the library, which could have felt busy in any other place, but not here. There was a magic to the library that seemed to centre itself in the whole castle.

The smell was always intoxicating to Ben, it brought back floods of memories, of his mother bringing him here, sitting for hours learning different things, finding the dark corners of his father's room and bringing light and love back to the books there. It smelled of old and new books, a strange yet wonderful mix. He remembered as a child running up and down the stacks, running his fingers along the covers. Feeling the older books heavy bound in leather with decorative ridges and tracing the gold lettering. They could sit side by side with newer books in their simple jacketing and covers without jarring.

There was a thump that made most jump, bringing Ben back from his thoughts but he chuckled at the reddened face of the student who collected the tome from the floor. The noise of the Prince's laugh soothed the air once more and the library fell back into its usual warm steady thrum of energy.

Ben stood and stretched, picking up his book and his rucksack he wended his way to the spiral staircase and listened to the noises as he reached the ground floor. He heard the words of the librarian at the desk, and smiled as Helga explained the system to the new wide-eyed kid that stared up in wonder.

He nodded his head at Helga and checked his book out, but he lingered at the door. Taking one more deep breath, he closed his eyes, imprinted the image of the library into his mind once more, and finally left the room he loved the most.