Hey guys. So, just had a lot of thoughts this morning while reading something about the Professor and his teenage years, and it got me to thinking about his storyline, how it developed, how he's changed... and it just sort of ended up here. Funny how that happens.
Well, here's the story. As usual, disclaimer: I don't own Professor Layton or any of the games, none of the characters or storyline, and make no profit off of this story. If I did, I certainly wouldn't still be here, writing fan fiction. (Okay, yes I would.)

1. Fencing.

Gressenheller University was a diverse place to learn, that was no doubt. They had classes on things that Layton had only dreamed of learning about as a younger man. With all the normal classes, there were a couple sports teams. They were the Griffens, and wore the emblem proudly.
Hershel Layton sat alone at a table, going through paperwork and signing the blanks, picking classes. Pushing his reading glasses further up his nose, he scanned the list of extracurriculars the school offered. Rugby, a chess club (he played chess outside of school enough that he wouldn't need that one, although it could provide him with a diverse array of opponents.) His eyes stopped on one particular line. Fencing. Hershel sat completely still, the bustle of other students talking and milling about him lost to him. He was not there, at a table, picking classes. Hershel was sent back a couple years ago, to a sunlit room and white uniforms, masks, the tap of feet on hardwood floor, and hard breathing.

"Stop- running!" The words were squeezed out between moves. Hershel shook his head at the other boy, though the motion went unnoticed. Randall lunged and lost his footing (he would later say he slipped in sweat, but Hershel knew he was pulling his leg.) Hershel moved to parry, but remised instead- hand twisting, guiding the sabre in a series of moves he had memorized, trying over and over to master it without fumbling. He didn't, not this time, and he wasn't surprised. The two stopped, and Randall pulled his helmet off. His sweat-plastered hair glowed in the sunlight filtering in through the tall windows.
"Don't say anything about it or I'll have to skewer you." Hershel pulled his mask of, sighing as he did. Randall was always encouraging him, telling him he was good at it. He would work on that move for weeks, try it every time he had the opportunity. Randall would tell him afterward that everyone has something they can't master, and it's fine if Hershel never did it. Randall would say he believed in him as a person and as a fellow fencer.
Hershel wouldn't master the move until a year later, when he was back to back with his best friend. Two wild-haired boys, not knowing what they'd gotten into, fighting side by side, literally. He wouldn't even think about it, would execute the moves without hesitation, and would only think about it afterward. One more opportunity to wish he'd been better.

Hershel snapped back to the paper, the words suddenly coming back into focus. No, fencing was not for him. He would, in years to come, use it to fight and defend those without the means to. As an activity- with the intent to enjoy it? No. He'd done that. The time to do it was past. Without looking at any of the other classes available, he flipped to the next page.

2. Piano

Sound played across the house like a dance, floating from window to door and down the hallway, graceful notes on the wind of springtime. Randall was over, having spent the previous night with him. They had read to each other from a schoolbook for a few hours, until they got bored and suddenly, reading turned into a spontaneous game of detectives and hiding from Hershel's father while he pursued them throughout the evening, trying to persuade the two youngsters to go to bed. He failed, ultimately, and they ended up dozing off sometime well after midnight. Randall had sprawled across the bed and Hershel had ended up in the large, cushioned chair that sat on the opposite side of the room. When he woke, his friend was still asleep, a tuft of crazy hair the only thing visible of him under the cover of blankets and clothing. Hershel then made his way to the sun-room, where his piano sat. He played, a tune of quick fingers and dancing melodies fit for adventure and excursions. The tune reminded him of the summer spent playing at pirates and exploring the surrounding woods. It would become the song he played when thinking of his adventures with Randall and a few others, the theme-song to put to memories.
He quit piano, right before he went to Gressenheller. Of course, he loved it, but with studies and more responsibility, the young scholar imagined his time spent pursuing other objects of interest. And, in a way, he was correct. He found Claire, and that reawoke his need for the piano. Because of Claire, he was told that he could use the school's grand piano on the off-hours, after anyone else would be using it. He would find himself there after seeing Claire, playing old songs he he had taught himself. He'd spend hours there, sometimes regretting it when early morning classes were first thing on his list the next morning. But then Claire started coming to listen to him. She would sit on the floor beside him, studying. She would read, or figure out problems. One day at lunch, she whistled a song under her breath. "What!" She had asked. He just shrugged and smiled, cheeks getting red. "I bet you could sing wonderfully." She laughed, thanking him, but assuring him that she would stick to other hobbies. Besides, she would tell him later, Clair de Lune was never meant to have spoken words. It would sound too simplified then, she'd say. That was what sparked it- that day at lunch, listening to her whistle gentle notes and break off in the middle of a stanza to talk about something with her new professor. Hershel taught himself to play Clair de Lune on the piano. He never showed it to her, not purposefully. One night she surprised him, and he was in the middle of practicing it. She had cried, and he never knew why. She had only assured him that she was happy. He thought about proposing to her that night, wanting to always be the cause of her happy tears, to be the source of her music and everything else.

3. Archaeological excursions.

It started with Randall. That wasn't an archaeological trip, necessarily. No funding, not blueprints and histories and overseers with the right equipment. But it was the start of it all.
Part of his schooling included off-campus work. He'd been selected to go on a "field trip", so to speak, with a handful of other students. He was delighted. There was nothing he'd been looking forward to more. Claire sent him off with a note telling him to have fun and saying she was looking forward to his return. So, off he went, trying to recall everything he'd been taught, playing over different scenarios in his head and imagining finding relics and artifacts. Of course, the trip went much differently. They were unfortunate enough to get stuck under a professor who didn't want anything to do with anyone who didn't have a degree and official title. They were stuck to cleaning the artifacts, to doing paperwork. The week dragged by slowly. Finally, an opportunity for action presented itself.
The head professor had experienced health issues lately and for this reason could not go down in the mine shaft himself. Somehow, one of the secondhand men in charge persuaded him to send a couple of the boys down and let them have a chance to look around and still get the job done. Hershel volunteered quickly, along with two others. None of them knew each other well, but they were comrades for the moment. Gideon and Sean made quick friends, both more talkative than Hershel, but that was fine. They were bright and ready to go, so down the mine shaft they went.
Issues occurred, opinions differed, and there was an accident. Hershel gave up his safety harness for Gideon, who needed to be brought back to surface immediately. Sean offered to stay, but Hershel could tell he was nervous and assured him it was fine, to go. An extra harness was procured, but only after he was stuck in the shaft for four hours. It got dark on him in the last hour, and he could feel the tunnel get progressively colder, and his thoughts progressively darker. He found his mind wandering as he looked up, out of the dark, and wished he could be out. Then came the guilt- Randall had felt this, he was sure, but twenty times worse. He had felt falling, and betrayal, and pain, the darkness consuming, fear and- and Hershel was to blame. When they dropped the harness to him, he wouldn't take it. Wouldn't acknowledge them. He saw only in a haze, and every time he thought he could resist taking the harness, he saw Randall asking him to. He saw a lot that night, and when he finally came up, he wouldn't talk about it. When he got back, he told Claire, and he regretted it, worried she would think he was crazy. She held him and talked about logic and the stages the mind goes through, about chemistry and scientific terms he could understand. He knew they both knew it was more than that, but it was enough. That night, he changed his idea on what he would be. "Professor" Hershel Layton would suit him just fine.

4. Poetry and Coffee

He would laugh about it, later. Poetry never suited him, but he liked it. He liked words and he liked twisting them about, making them stretch from the box they were usually contained in. He liked trying to describe indescribable things, like the way Claire looked when she got frustrated over an essay, sipping coffee that was still too hot and scalding her tongue. Indescribable things, like how her little fingers wrapped around the coffee mug and how the sun striped her hair and made her eyes look dark.
Words were never enough, and he could always convey that through his lack of them. That's why poetry was appealing. He had to fight for it, for the method, the lilt to the pattern. It had to sound good when read in silence, and it had to make sense when read aloud. It didn't have to be understood by anyone else, because when he wrote about the freckles that danced on her cheeks when she smiled, it was a routine only those who could appreciate it could understand, anyway.
So he wrote. He wrote about her and he wrote about what he saw outside the coffee shop window. He wrote about the occasional bad food they got and how they'd laugh about it. He wrote about the cat that always hung around until the shop closed, and was rewarded with its patience by the leftover scraps from pastries that were left over that day. Whatever came to him, he learned to paint a picture by it with words. Claire would bring him a tea after while, take his moleskin journal, and read. One day, she started doodling beside one of the poems. Before long, that too became a routine. He would write for a while while she drank coffee and worked on homework, and then they would switch. She would take the words he had written in hand and read them, occasional smiles playing across her face. Then she would take up the pen and draw. Funny pictures of oddly-shaped people would accompany a story he thought was supposed to be sad, and then he'd see the humor in it. Once she drew a raincloud over a particularly love-filled piece, and told him that it was sad because so many didn't experience it.
She was part of the process. So when she was gone, he found himself sitting alone in her chair at the cafe, moleskin sitting unopened on the table before him. Her story had closed, and somehow it seemed wrong to reopen the book without her. Without the inspiration, there could be no art.

5. Puzzles

He loved them. That went without saying. When he was younger, he could vaguely remember his brother reading him riddles out of a newspaper. After a few months of this, he became very disappointed when he realized all the riddles were the same. His father started coming up with some, but they were all too easy. Then it happened, and Hershel didn't hear another puzzle for quite some time. He would come up with them, though. When he laid in bed beside his brother, alone otherwise, he would think of riddles and then pose them to those he came into contact with the next day. He would think of ones with sticks, with moving pieces.
When he got a home, and the Laytons realized how much he loved puzzles, they did everything they could to nurture that. Hershel had to thank them for that. He grew up learning puzzles by heart. When he went to school, math was his favorite. He could appreciate that while the rules never changed, the problems could always be different. Different equations, ways of wording a problem- one different symbol and the entire problem changed. But it always came out the right way, if you worked it right. The rules never change.

1. The hobby he could keep. Or, more than a hobby.

Problems- puzzles. They were constant. Like math, like the sun coming up every day whether it was seen or not. As a child, he turned to them. It kept his mind of things. As teenager, archeology was his interest. He loved to make discoveries, to find the answers to certain pieces. He was so involved in it that he made the decision to study archeology and supposedly spend a large majority of his life looking for more puzzles.
Then he met Claire. She was a puzzle. She was some sort of enigma, an ever-changing assortment of pieces he slowly saw come together the longer he was around her. She was his favorite riddle.
Then he lost her. Like he lost so many others, and suddenly he found himself lost again. He realized, however, that he could find one constant. The one that had always been. Every puzzle has an answer, she had told him. So he set out to answer the hardest questions.
His life was a question he would spend a lot of time trying to answer. A riddle without rules, a puzzle with no edges. So he continued, plotting on day after day, seeking questions to answer in hope that he could put more pieces together in the search for answers to his own questions. So, when a request for his skills was put to him- he would agree, wholeheartedly. That was all there was to it. Nobody could take questions from him, not a soul on earth could stop him from keeping his solving as many as possible. Nobody could change the rules.

He had found the one thing that could not be taken from him, and he would cling to it as long as he had ability to.