Loki X Reader || Girl With The Gold Earring

14 | Maps Of The Land

Looking like he's waiting for an apothecary's diagnosis, Loki perches on the dining table, pulling the collar of his shirt down with one finger.

With unwavering concentration, Aasta examines the exposed patch of blue skin.

Thoughts swell behind her eyes but she doesn't voice them. Her nose is inches from The Prince's bare chest, but her face remains expressionless and unreadable as she turns her head this way and that; as if hunting for irregularities—reflections—for dregs of the spell clinging and distorting the light.

She drags her thumb across it in the same way Y/N had done; as if trying to get it to smudge—which it doesn't.

Then she runs a nail over the pale skin next to it.

It doesn't fragment and tear away, it doesn't stain, the colours running.

She can't peel the healthy part of the spell away to expose more of what's underneath.

His Jöttunn skin is just there—as if the illusion has simply dissolved like melting snow exposing grass and spring flowers beneath.

When she has gone several minutes without saying anything, Loki can't help asking:

"Do you think it's bad?"

Drawing away, Aasta fixes his shirt for him. Noticing his eyes obsessively flicking downwards, she fastens it right up to the collar. When the blue patch is all tucked away:

"Now, I don't think we should go labelling it good or bad."

"That's what I said," Y/N pipes up helpfully.

Loki looks as though he has already decided it is bad, Aasta's assurances not managing to reach him. "But what could cause magic to fade like this?"

"Lots of things. Illness, stress, old age—"

"So it is bad?" His face has turned a waxen grey sort of colour

"No, no, not just that," Aasta soothes, her eyes mild calm and truthful. "There could be so many other reasons."

He looks up at her expectantly, waiting, and she shrugs, grappling for words.

"Well, perhaps Her Royal Highness is just distracted by other things—"

"Like me going missing," the sentence is muttered like an expletive, his tone dripping with oily self-hatred.

But Aasta is shaking her head. "You couldn't stay there, Loki." The letters of his name are curved and softened by her country accent, and he looks up, their sound still foreign from her tongue.

Her expression is as serious as stone, her words deliberate gifts pressed into his hands:

"It was noble of you to try. You're loyal to your kingdom; more loyal than most of the people that live in it. But your parents were asking too much of you. Just because you can do something, that doesn't mean you should. Not if it was hurting you. Not if it didn't feel right."

-- ❈ --

Rivers on maps are simple things. They're smooth lines, clear trails one can trace with a finger.

Real rivers, it seems, are more like a bundle of yarn that has been battered across the country by a very large cat. They loop and they double back in on themselves, they narrow into impassable corridors and then widen out into desert-like lakes. They become too shallow to pass, and then suddenly swell, a thousand currents dragging and pushing, fighting over who will get to yank each boat down to their silty depths.