Loki X Reader || Girl With The Gold Earring

PROLOGUE

In a small dressing room, a group of women begin unfastening Loki's shirt buttons.

On Asgard, it would always be manservants piecing together The Prince's armour before public appearances; slotting the heavy plates into place and encasing his head in a golden helm.

Loki finds himself embarrassed as the women strip his clothes from his body.

He had not liked the clothes—long things his new servants had given him, more a robe than a shirt—but finds himself missing the heavy fabrics as they leave his body.

The women drape him in new ones; thick and weighty and brighter than he's used to---rich reds and deep purples.

Loki can feel the women's gazes wandering as they dress him. They narrow their eyes at his charcoal hair as if thinking it too dark, his bare patches of skin as if thinking them too pale.

He waits for another layer of clothing to be added---to smother their view---but the women leave his arms and shoulders bare, his chest covered in nothing but a silk shawl.

When they ease his feet into shoes they are nothing but string sandals.

Turning away from him momentarily, they begin to prepare something at a small table.

It's stained like the one in Loki's beloved studio, dashed with colour and littered with bowls.

When the women turn around they have wet pigment cupped in their palms. It leaks into the creases of their hands as they methodologically paint.

Loki recognises the patterns they draw onto his skin from the papers and books he had been given; crosses, dots, lines pressed on with the pad of a thumb.

The paint smells of red dirt paths, and dries quickly. Several flakes crumble from his forehead and shatter on the tiled floor.

There are velvet boxes atop the dressing table, dishes and plates. They're loaded with gold and glass things with little hoops and studs, delicate chains dribbling like paint from a dish.

The women take them up in their fingers---the thin metal strands like spider webs stretched between branches---and use them to decorate Loki's face; sliding cuffs onto his helix, his lip, the sides of his nose. As bangles are threaded up and down his arms, one of the women takes a thin needle from a dish and sterilizes it over a wax stick's feeble flame.

Loki winces as she uses it to pierce his ears.

Silently, he lets it happen and thinks of home.

-- ❈ --

As a woman fastens a final necklace to Loki's throat, a door opens and a man enters.

He looks Loki up and down as if assessing the women's work, and then says something in that complicated language with too many vowels.

The ceremony is starting.

-- ❈ --

The sun is too bright as Loki steps out onto a stage.

The Vanirian symbols the women had dabbed onto his skin peel as though they don't want to be there.