Regular Ray, as Ray tended to think of him, though snow was one of the greatest things ever. Snow was fun, and Regular Ray was all about fun. Until he’d moved to Saskatchewan, nowhere Ray had ever lived had really had enough snow to build stuff out of, but it was easy to gather enough for snowballs. Snowballs were fun. You could throw them at people. Siblings, friends, parents, cousins, girls you liked, complete strangers, random politicians, dogs, and, on one occasion Ray still remembered with glowing fondness, nuns who thought it was appropriate to discipline prepubescent ninjas by making them sit inside after class writing lines. And, now that Ray was in university, there was also the particular and hard-to-miss target presented by a certain overgrown roommate. Snow was the cold, damp projectile of the weaponry world, and Regular Ray loved it.

Unfortunately, there was also Ninja Ray. Ninja Ray didn’t give a damn how much fun snow was. Ninja Ray found snow to be a nuisance. Not because it was white, and a black-clad ninja tends to stick out in the middle of a snowy field, but because it made everything quiet. It wasn’t just quiet because if there was snow, it was generally cold, and when it was cold, people were generally inside. Snow acted as an actual sound blanket, muffling everything. On the street, a car would have to be almost on top of you before you heard it. This might be advantageous to a ninja on a mission, but Ninja Ray had no mission beyond ‘get through school and try not to attract any more attention than absolutely necessary, please, for the love of God’, which wasn’t a very impressive mission as far as ninja missions go. As it was, the muffled snow-induced silence was simply a breeding ground for paranoia in the mind of Ninja Ray. Rationally, Ninja Ray knew the odds of another ninja creeping up on him in the middle of Saskatoon, in the winter, and stabbing him in the back weren’t very good, but at night, snow was the breeding ground for irrationality, too.

Ninja Ray was also of the opinion that certain incredibly tedious lessons of his childhood could have been eliminated in favour of ninja training for blizzard conditions, because Ninja Ray and Regular Ray tended to combine into just plain Ray the rest of the time.

Regardless of what he thought of snow in either state of mind, Ray was very certain about one thing when it came to snow.

“What kind of country gets a snowstorm in the middle of Goddamned October?”

“Canada,” Thor answered calmly. “And it’s hardly a snowstorm. And the forecast was calling for snowfall tonight. If you’re going to bitch every time it snows and you aren’t prepared, I’m getting a new roommate.”

Ray scowled, shivered in his hooded sweatshirt, and jammed his hands deeper into the pockets of his pants. “It didn’t really snow last year until November,” he muttered sulkily.

“Last year was a fluke. Clearly, the weather was going easy on you so you wouldn’t flee the province,” Thor said, without a trace of sympathy.

Normally, Ray liked Thor. Certainly, Thor was a twitchy, paranoid, uptight guy with no sense of adventure and very little sense of fun, but Ray didn’t mind. He still liked Thor. Despite his mountains of flaws, he was still a good guy. Unfortunately, Thor, who would usually agree to anything and showed no signs of having ever possessed a backbone, had occasional flashes of being a perfect unsympathetic asshole to his fellow man. Namely, Ray.

“Your country is stupid,” Ray said sullenly, toes curling painfully in damp sneakers as they walked.

Thor rolled his eyes. “It’s not even that cold. There’s just a bit of a wind and a lot of snow.”

“I’m cold,” Ray said, stressing the important matter.

“I don’t really care, Ray,” said Thor, who, Ray noted, was wearing boots, gloves, and a long jacket. He put it down to a weird Canadian snow-sense.

“I’m going to get frostbite,” Ray persisted.

“No, you’re not. Seriously, man, stop whining. There are better ways to keep warm.” Thor pinched the bridge of his nose, looking pained but not, Ray thought, particularly cold. Stupid Northern Canadian Viking bastard.

“Well, sorry if some of us didn’t grow up where there’s eleven bloody months of winter a year, Thor, but for those of us from more civilized areas of the world, this qualifies as cold, annoying, and inconvenient. And I’m going to get frostbite, and I’ll die out here in the snow before we make it back home, and you’ll have to explain to the authorities . . .”

Thor groaned and stopped walking. “Ray, shut the fuck up and stop your damn whining and bitching, or I swear to anything you’ve ever held sacred that, ninja or no, I will pick you up and shove you headfirst into the next garbage can we walk past, steal your shoes and socks, and walk back to the apartment alone.”

Ray hesitated. He only came up to Thor’s shoulder and Thor was a Viking. But Thor was the crappiest Viking Ray had ever heard of, and Ray thought it was quite possible that he had a kilo or so on Thor. But people had a way of surprising you, especially when they were angry, as Thor clearly was to judge from the redness of his face. It would be best not to press the matter any further but . . . “I am really cold, Thor,” he mumbled.

“Fuck,” Thor sighed, “it’s like being outside with a five-year-old.” He looked at Ray, and sighed again. “It’s maybe twenty minutes before we’re back at the apartment, okay? Can you hold off the whole dying thing for twenty minutes?”

Shivering, Ray nodded.

“Right.” Thor hesitated, then pulled off his jacket. Underneath was a baggy blue sweatshirt (although virtually everything was baggy when Thor wore it) with frayed cuffs and a hole at the collar. Even with the snow beginning to collect heavily on his pale hair, and dusting the dark fabric of his shirt, he didn’t look cold. He threw the jacket to Ray.

It was a clumsy toss, but Ray didn’t feel like criticizing his roommate at the moment. He put the jacket on. The sleeves were too long, falling past his fingertips, and it was tight in the shoulders, but Ray didn’t feel like complaining about any of that, either. “Thanks,” he said as they began walking again.

“No problem” Thor muttered. “Anything to stop your whining, eh.”

Ray grinned up at his roommate, balled the sleeves of his jacket around his hands, and cheerfully caught a snowflake on his tongue.