Page 18 of Odin

TWENTY

They build three snowmen, at the farthest corner of the roof from the raven family, for Odin had left their snowdrift shelter untouched. Freyja found leaves and sticks to give the men faces, and Odin was struck with the memory of the last time he'd made men out of snow.

It was the last night he'd seen his sons alive. Vali had been bitter, slinking off to sulk when Odin refused to take the boy raiding with him. Vidarr, the more persuasive of the two, had tried to get him to stay home, instead of leading his men. Odin had suggested they build Vidarr his own army of snowmen to defend them while he was gone.

He'd given them faces and weapons and even armour made of sticks and leaves, and they'd still been standing, surrounding the house, when he'd arrived home. But they'd been poor defenders, because his family had not survived the attack.

Odin fell to his knees, nearly toppling the last snowman, which was the same height Vidarr had been, when he'd last seen him. Round as a ball in his winter clothes, just like the snowman. Oh, by all the gods...if he'd loved Frigg more, would he have stayed? Would he have been able to save them?

A hand landed lightly on his shoulder. "Olaf? Are you all right?"

What must she think of him? Some protector, sniffling and weeping in the snow. "I was thinking of the last time I saw my son. When we built snowmen together."

Her voice was dull, flat. "I'm so sorry for your loss." Her arms came around him, hugging him, heedless of his tears or his weakness. Offering her own strength. Something no one had ever offered him before.

He fell in love with her all over again.

TWENTY-ONE

Snow started to fall in earnest, bringing Freyja to her senses. What the hell was she doing hugging Olaf on the roof?

She'd lost count of the times she'd counselled grieving or soon to be grieving families in hospital, but not once had she ever been unprofessional enough to hug someone. Okay, most of the time they'd looked like they wanted to strangle her for being the bearer of bad news, which had made it easier, and she hadn't slept with any of her patients' families like she had with Olaf, but...

Oh god, if he'd had a son, that probably meant he had a wife, too. Which made their nights of hot sex even worse.

Freyja mumbled something about going inside, and quickly moved away from Olaf, back into the relative warmth of the building. Warmth that would dissipate quickly until the power kicked back in, or sunlight hit the solar panels in the morning.

She and Olaf would just have to snuggle up for another night together. And if it was anything like the last two nights...

Her cheeks burned at the thought. No. She was not getting naked with Olaf again. The first night, she hadn't known who he was, so it was kind of excusable, but last night...last night was never to be repeated. Ever.

She'd left the lanterns on the roof, so she used her phone flashlight to guide her to the kitchen. The pizza had been hours ago, and it was probably dinnertime by now. With no power, she'd have to scrounge for something in the store rooms that didn't need cooking. She vaguely remembered seeing jars of pickled herring and tins of sardines, neither of which appealed to her.

Maybe she should just go for some liquid bread, she thought, reaching into one of the beer cartons. That's what ancient people had called beer, hadn't they? Instead of cans, though, her hand closed around something plastic and crackly – a bag of barbeque flavoured chips. Beer and chips, then, she decided, digging around until she found a can as well.

She took her plunder back to the cafeteria, which was now lit by the lanterns Olaf had brought down from the roof. He just sat there, his arms folded on the table, looking at her.

She should have thought to grab him a beer, too. "There's more beer in the store room. Proper food, too, though most of the stuff that doesn't need to be cooked is fish."

Olaf shook his head. "I am not hungry."

Freyja didn't think she was, either, but she opened the chips and popped a couple in her mouth, just to stop herself from saying something stupid. Then she cracked open her beer, taking a long pull from the can, before setting it down firmly on the table. God, that stuff was awful. Worse than some of the stuff she'd drunk as a student back home. She'd preferred fruity premixes back then, but the last time she'd had one of them was...Halloween, the holiday she now hated more than any other day on the calendar.

She should tell him. He'd told her about losing his son, so she should tell him her whole sordid story. What she was really running away from, though she'd since learned there was nowhere in the world she could run to where they didn't know, or wouldn't find out. Better than Olaf heard it from her than Saint Nik, though he was in hospital, wasn't he? He'd be out soon enough, and seeing as he was the one who'd told everyone else on campus, he'd probably get a kick out of telling Olaf, too.

"I used to be a doctor. Well, I finished my degree, and my internship, and I was well into my residency at a big city hospital. I hadn't decided what I wanted to specialise in. I was leaning toward emergency medicine, but my dad kept telling me I should become an anaesthetist, because the demand was so high for them, and putting people to sleep had to be way easier than triage when everything's crazy and happening at once..." She couldn't help smiling a little at the memory. That was what she'd liked most about medicine. Not all the study and memorising stuff, but the way her mind would go calm in all the chaos and she could make split second decisions and know she'd made the right call. Calls she would never make again, because of him.

"Anyway...I was on rotation in the oncology ward. I absolutely hated it there, because for every person who'd had their tumour or whatever successfully removed, there were half a dozen others who weren't so lucky. People whose lives were suddenly cut short by a random cell abnormality that just wouldn't die. We'd fight them in every way possible, with every weapon modern medicine could provide, even nuclear ones, and it still wasn't enough. Cancer is like cockroaches, I swear. Just when you think you've killed it, a dozen more pop up, livelier than ever, while the poor person knows they're going to die. And when you're the doctor, you have to tell them. You have to give them the bad news that they're not going to make it. That you can't work miracles or magic and they're going to die.

"Some people were really good at it. Some even made a career out of hospice medicine. Once girl I knew, this calm serene sort of person you just knew was some sort of saint, told me you had to think of it as end of life care. Just like newborns had midwives to usher them screaming into this world, some people needed someone to be there to usher them out of it with as much dignity and kindness as they deserved. And they do and I know she's right and I hope she's still doing a fucking amazing job with her terminal patients and that she can do it for a really long time, but that wasn't me. Death was like the ultimate failure to me. Patients would come to hospital for help and I felt like such a fucking failure if I couldn't help them.

"It was even worse when we got kids, or young people. People the same age as me, looking at the pointy end of death when they should have decades of life ahead of them. The parents were worse – they looked like zombies, desperate for a miracle they knew couldn't come, utterly horrified that they were going to outlive their kids. Which shouldn't happen, you know?"

Olaf nodded gravely.

Right. He did know. Better than anyone.

"Anyway, that year, Halloween was on the weekend, and my roommate decided she wanted to throw a party. She'd been assigned to the maternity ward, but we both managed to get our rosters to match so we'd be free that night. She did a lot of night shifts, so she finished before I did, and she came to remind me about the party. I was doing my final rounds of my patients for the shift, dragging my feet a bit, and she caught me in the room of a patient who hadn't been conscious for days. The doctor in charge said he wouldn't last until morning, so I knew someone else would be in his bed when I came back to work the next day, but I just wanted to take a minute...I don't know, to say goodbye or I'm sorry or whatever it was you said to the people you failed to save.

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