Carry On Simon

Chapter 4

Baz leaned against his bedpost wearily, blowing his dank locks of hair  out of his eyes in indignation. Both the boys were exhausted after their first few days of school, and were already burdened with cumbersome amounts of homework from each and every one of their classes. 

Baz glanced over at Simon, looking down his nose at the other boy sprawled on his bed, casually flipping through the pages of Advanced Dragonology. Simon looked up when he felt Baz's gaze on him, meeting his eyes. He'd always noticed Baz's eyes - so dark and heavy, but so wild that they could hold down hurricanes. Baz flicked his eyebrow when Simon turned, turning up the corner of his mouth in his patented smirk.

"How interested are you in 'Advanced Dragonology', Snow?" He asked, pushing off the bedpost and crossing to the window, already ensconsed with frost for the coming winter.

"About as interested as I am in the rest of my classes," said Simon, mindlessly thuming the time-stained pages of his textbook. "Really, this year, my classes seem less and less important; like they're just, y'know, background noise to what's really happening." Baz nodded, and leaned over Simon. He craned his neck to look up at the taller boy, who flicked his eyebrows and snatched the book out from under Simon's hands. 

"Baz!" He exclaimed, reaching up to try and grab the book from where his roommate held it, just out of his reach. "I need to study!" 

"I thought you said it didn't matter," said Baz, waltzing around the room with the book held over his head. "You said it was just background noise, anyway."

"Well, background noise is still important! Without background noise, you can't have, well, foreground noise!" Baz laughed and leaned against the window, tossing the book back onto Simon's bed, where it landed with a definitive thump. Simon rolled his eyes and sat down on the floor, pressing his back up against the bedpost of Baz's bed. 

"Let's not." Said Baz, letting his gaze fall wearily out the window and onto the snow-drenched grounds, so youthfully white that they were still unbroken by footsteps.

"Let's not what?" 

"Anything. Let's not do anything, today. It's too beautiful a day to waste with 'Advanced Dragonolgy.' It's the type of day that's meant to do something with." His fingers traced the frost lining the edge of the glass, moving in swirls around the icy perimeter. 

"Baz, we can't ditch class. We'd miss so much, not just dragonolgy, but also alchemy, and runes, and transformations, and- " Listed Simon, but he was cut off by Baz's voice, emergng from behind the scarf he was already wrapping around his neck.

"Look, Snow, I'm not forcing you to go anywhere. For all I know, you might be filled with the unquenchable desire to walk out of this door right now, go down those steps, and walk to class like you've done every other school day since you were ten years old. But I'm not going to, not today. One day, you're going to look back on all these days you've lived, doing the same thing over and over, and you're going to wonder what you were living them for." He stood up, and put his hand on the doornob, talking to Simon over his shoulder. "At least, if you ditch, just this once, you'll have one more day worth remembering. I know you don't have anything on your mind right now except your big fight that's coming. But, until that big fight, you might as well have some fun along the way, right?"

Baz swung the door open, the tails of his coat snapping around his ankles as he left. Simon watched his fingers slip around the doorjamb and out of sight, and heard his footsteps recede down the staircase. Baz always had great stories to tell after he spent a day ditching school; he would recount to throngs of avid listeners his adventures in the haunted forest with the ghouls, or swimming with the merwolves in the moat during the summer. Simon remembered overhearing such tales of adventure and excitement, and wishing he could spare the time to have adventures like Baz did - careless, wonderful adventures that didn't put his life at risk for once.
Baz couldn't be far off by now, he might still be able to catch up. After all, what was one day, right?