Loki X Reader || Girl With The Gold Earring

25 | The Tipsy Dragon

Some hours later, the shock of Alfdis' little talk was beginning to wear off. It had faded into a low, dull throbbing of anxiety and apprehension, and Y/N dealt with it by another sketching session that lasted well into the night.

Her sketching is improving significantly, bringing truth to the phrase 'practice makes perfect', although practising has not been Y/N's intention for several days. Loki tends to draw as an expression of joy---to encapture beauty and pleasant moments, whereas Y/N has become rather fond of the opposite. She does not note down the existing beauty she sees, she creates her own, and seeks refuge in it. She is soothed by the blank span of the parchment, content within the minimalistic tangle of fluffy black lines.

With every passing day---both concerned for their separate futures---Y/N and Loki find the fog of apprehension surrounding them growing darker and thicker. It mars Loki's view, filling his head and getting in his eyes, snuffing out his artistic inclinations as beauty becomes more and more difficult to find. His chambers---usually riddled with balls of parchment like apples fallen from a tree---has become bare, as if that tree has suddenly stopped producing fruit.

Not for Y/N, though. This uncertainty, this shifting, harsh reality, seems to have only fueled her yearning for the dull, predictable parchment and gentle sweeps of charcoal. Things are simpler there, in her two-dimensional world of black and white, and---while Loki's enthusiasm for art appears to have trickled to a stop like a well run dry---Y/N now spends most of her spare moments hunched over a notepad of some sort.

So far, she has worked steadily through four of them, despite---to conserve space---making sure to keep every sketch huddled so close to its predecessor they sometimes overlap.

Presently, Y/N has each book spread about her---for reference---the weak flame of her wax stick just about illuminating their smudged pages enough to make out the chaotic scramble of shapes. They look fuzzy in the soft light, half alive, like spectres, or shadows with no source. She is ashamed of many of them---embarrassed by their disfigurement---and the binding of each notepad is fluffy with stubs of torn-away sheets of parchment she'd banished in frustration.

She is tempted to remove the page she is working on at the moment, and takes it in finger and thumb as if to do so, but stops herself. Most of it is still fresh and vacant, and can be used for at least three other drawings if she keeps them clumped cosily together.

Sighing---which momentarily set the flame of her wax stick into a panicked frenzy---Y/N turned the notepad around and began the picture again. She can see where she had gone wrong. The mistake sits strangely with the rest of the image, ugly and ill-fitting, like a mangled limb. Loki had given her a wad of kneadable rubber that she could use to scrub away the lighter lines, but the heavier ones will just smudge should she attempt to remove them. She doesn't mind starting from scratch, anyway. It's not like she'd be able to sleep if she tried.

Her drawing is of the heavy-shouldered tomcat that keeps the servant's kitchen free of mice in exchange for the occasional saucer of sour milk or scrap chicken bones to gnaw on. He turned up one day of his own vocation, so could be anywhere from a few months to sixteen years old. Some of the staff have bet coppers on his age, but they won't know how they faired until the cat stops showing up, which Y/N thinks is rather morbid. She had taken an instant liking to his wide, serious face, and she liked how his fur appearss to be dappled with light even when he's in the shade.

She wanted to do him justice, so tried to imagine what Loki would say had this been one of their sketching sessions in his chambers.

'He'd probably say the cat looks like Ylva,' Y/N thought, and listened to her quiet laughter bouncing about the mess hall.