Author's Note: Personal Prompt: Henry asks Robin for help with his homework. Part one of two.

It's not often that Robin feels particularly knowledgeable in the homework department. Street smarts, how to pull a pint, or tune a string, how to palm mute, or play a good lick. Sure. Those things he can handle. And he's been known to supervise designated reading time, or make sure that the math gets done, or the French vocab gets studied. He can walk Henry through how to work himself toward an answer, even if he doesn't always know the solution himself. So he's not completely useless to the aim of getting all of Henry's schoolwork sorted.

But he never learned French, and he's always been shit at math, and he skived off quite a few history lessons in his day, so it's rare that he feels uniquely qualified to assist with the lessons themselves.

But today there's nobody better.

Henry had texted Robin excitedly the moment school got out to tell him that he needed his help – his social studies teacher had set an assignment to find someone from another country and interview them about what it was like to live there, and for Henry it had been a no-brainer. He was doing his little report on England, and Robin was to be the resident expert.

Finally, a subject he can excel at.

He's working most of the week, and Henry needs time to get the project done post-interview, so they're putting off this week's guitar lesson in favor of having a nice chat around the kitchen table about where Robin hails from. He'd even arranged to drop Roland back with his mum a night early (something she'd been absolutely thrilled about) so they wouldn't have distractions.

At Henry's request, Robin had made dinner. "Something England-y" had been the order, and so Robin had gone the relatively easy route and thrown together a shepherd's pie (cottage pie, really, if one was being technical, but for Henry's purposes, they'd called it a shepherd's pie). And of course, Henry had insisted there be tea and biscuits after, on account of how he felt it was very British and appropriate. Robin had chuckled and gone along with it.

This is how he finds himself boiling a kettle and pulling down three mugs from the cabinets. Regina's been across the hall getting the washing started while he and Henry cleaned up the dishes, but he figures she could go for a cuppa. She has more mugs than a household of two needs, a good dozen at least, from the massive ones he's seen her use for morning coffee or granola, to several more reasonably sized ones in tasteful ombré designs, or chic shapes, or monograms, plus a few that clearly mark memories.

The three he happens to grab tonight are an eclectic mix. There's one emblazoned with the art from The Lion King national tour, a cool blue-to-white ombre that looks like it belongs on a magazine page, and a little cream colored one with red trimming and a crest on the side. He drops tea bags into each of them (he'd had to go to the grocers for ingredients for the cottage pie, so he'd stopped off for proper tea and proper biscuits too), then drums his fingers on the countertop as he waits for the kettle to whistle before pouring the steaming water into each mug in turn.

He glances at the clock to note the time, then pulls down a plate and rips open a package of Hobnobs, pouring out enough to fill the plate and then bringing it to the table.

"And now," he tells Henry as he sets the plate between them and nips a biscuit for himself, "we wait."

He takes a bite, and figures Henry will reach out and do the same, but he doesn't. Instead, he's eyeing the mugs on the countertop with a thoughtful little grimace.

After a moment, Robin asks, "What?"

"You probably shouldn't use the Harvard mug," Henry tells him regretfully, and Robin squints toward the little row of cups to make out the writing on the cream and red one. Sure enough, below the crest is a ribbon scrawled HARVARD. "Mom gets weird about it. She only ever uses it when Grandma is here."

"Why?" Robin asks. He knows she'd gone to college in Boston; he'd think a keepsake from the town where she met Daniel would get more use. Lord knows she's worn that Boston College sweatshirt til it's gone thin.

Henry just shrugs and says, "Cuz Grandma gave it to her. Mom says Grandma got annoyed that she only had stuff from where my dad went to college, and not from where she went. She gave us a blanket too, but it's up in the guest room closet. Mom never uses it."

Robin hears the last part, dimly, but he's mostly caught up in rapidly chewing his latest bite of biscuit enough that he can garble, "'Where she went'? Your mum went to Harvard?"

"Uh huh. Twice."

Robin's brow furrows, "What do you mean twice?"

"She went for regular college first," Henry tells him, "And then she got an NBA."

"You mean an MBA?" Robin clarifies, and Henry nods and says Yeah, that just as Regina strolls into the kitchen. He cranes to look at her, and questions, "You have a Harvard MBA?"

She pauses for a second, her gaze swinging toward Henry, and then the counter, before she lets out a soft, almost defeated sigh, and says, "That reaction right there is why I don't talk about it."

"What reaction?" Robin asks, as she closes the distance between herself and the counter and picks up one of the mugs to give it a sniff. A glance at the clock and Robin is standing, too. They've been steeping plenty long now.

Taking the blue mug, Regina blows out a breath and tells him, "If I had an MBA from the University of Baltimore, you'd think, 'Oh, that's nice' and that would be that. But it's from Harvard, so you have to make a big deal out of it."

"Well, you went to Harvard; that's pretty fucking impressive," Robin reasons, pouring milk into his and Henry's cups, and earning himself a stern warning of, Language, from Regina. "I'm sorry, I just – that's a big deal."

"So I've been told," Regian mutters frostily, and Robin is starting to realize just why Henry wanted him to shove the mug back in the cabinet.

"Clearly I've touched a nerve," he says, as he brings their mugs to the table.

Henry reaches for the Lion King one, muttering a quiet, "Told you," and leaving Robin with the dreaded Harvard cup.

Regina leans against the counter, mug cradled in her hands and mouth pinched into a scowl. Finally, she says, "Harvard was… not my dream. It was Mother's. Harvard, or Yale, or Dartmouth, or Princeton, or Brown – but Harvard in particular. And once that acceptance letter came, all my other options flew right out the window."

"Other options?"

Her shoulder jerks in something resembling a shrug and Regina tells him, "I wanted to go to Stanford. I wanted to go somewhere far away, and with better options—"

"Better options than Harvard?"

"Yes," Regina insists. "Harvard is… traditional. Academically. And with a mother like mine, I sure as hell wasn't going for a concentration in philosophy or gender studies or… folklore and myth. I had to study something sensible, and useful. Stanford had more 'acceptable' options to choose from. But it didn't have the prestige, so—"

"Stanford didn't have the prestige?" Robin interrupts to question. "Isn't it one of the best schools in the country?"

"It is," Regina says with a little too much bitter enthusiasm. "A point I tried to make, to no avail. But it's no Harvard. According to my mother, you don't go to the number six school in the country when you got into a top five. And when you get into Harvard, you don't go anywhere else. She wanted maximum bragging rights at the Club—" Her voice goes prissy and high, mocking, as she chirps, "'My daughter is studying economics at Harvard.'" She drops back to her normal voice with a sigh, and adds, "It was never about me, it was about her, and status, and appearances. She wanted her daughter to go to Harvard – she wants Henry to go to Harvard, so she can brag on him too."

"No, she doesn't," Henry pipes up sullenly from beside Robin (he hasn't sipped his tea yet, has just been blowing on it gently as it steams). "She doesn't think I'm good enough because I suck at math. I'll never get in with Cs."

Robin scowls, glancing back at Regina.

He sees an expression cross her face, something angry and cold, and then she sets her mug down with a crack and a little slosh, shaking spilled tea off her hand absently as she crosses to Henry and gives his chair a little tug until she can crouch beside him and order gently, "Look at me."

He does, and Robin can see the edge of disappointment in his expression. Disappointment with himself. Whatever the boy's grandmother has said to him has clearly stuck, and Robin adds it to the list of things he wants to throttle that idiot woman for.

Regina settles her hands on her son's knees, frustration vibrating off her so hard Robin can feel it where he sits, as she tells him, "You don't—You do not suck at math, okay? You are average at math – and that's perfectly okay. You're great at reading, and writing, and you love music and like science class. You don't have to be great at everything, no matter what Grandma says – most people aren't." She pauses for a moment, looks her boy dead in the eyes, her fingers clenching slightly on the legs of his trousers as she insists, "I will never expect that of you. I don't care what she wants; I care what you want. And you know what? I wasn't very good at math either. I got all As in it at Bryn Mawr because I had tutors – and if you want to go to Yale or Dartmouth, or some other Ivy League piece of crap—" Henry smirks at that; so does Robin "—we'll get you a tutor, too, if you're struggling. But only if that's what you want. If you want to go to UCLA, or Florida State, or hell, the University of… Wisconsin," she stutters it out, clearly just trying to pluck a state school from the middle of nowhere, "I don't care. I want you to be happy, and I want you to choose your own path. Not mine, or your grandmother's. Yours. Okay?"

Henry nods, a little smile peeking its way onto his face, that sullen bent of not-good-enough all but gone. Robin falls in love with Regina all over again, watching her own smile bloom at knowing she's chased away some of her son's anxieties.

He knows plenty well what it's like to have expectations placed upon you and to not meet them, and he can't help admiring the way she steadfastly refuses to allow Henry to suffer the same.

She gives his knee a little pat and then pushes to her feet, and urges, "Now, get back to work. I want to hear all about England."

She glances toward Robin, giving him a warm smile that he returns in kind before sitting a little straighter as Henry finally tries out his proper English cup of tea. He deems it, "Okay, but not as good as mom's mint one," and he hears Regina chuckle from behind him as she retrieves her own mug and rejoins them at the table.

They spend the rest of the evening there, talking about England, about prep school (yes, he, too, went to prep school, much to both their surprise, though he'd never gone to uni), about things like Parliament and weather and football and all the proper things to put in a primary school project.

Regina sips her tea and nibbles her way through a biscuit, laughing at some of his stories. Henry eats four biscuits, dunking a couple into his tea til they go all soggy, and snickering as a bit drips down his chin when he takes a bite.

It's homey, and lovely, and Robin can't think of much that could be done to make it better.