Loki X Reader || Girl With The Gold Earring

6 | An Imposter

The next morning—drawing on old habits---Y/N wakes before the sun. Even so, she can hear someone in the kitchen.

"Mr Merlmon?" Y/N asks, padding across the tiled floor. It's warm, even though the sun can barely push its way through the shutters.

Mr Merlmon hums, dishing breakfast into a bowl, and pushes it into Y/N's hands.

It's the same red-brown-looking stew as yesterday.

Apparently, the author's way with food is not as nuanced as his way with words.

"Thank you."

"Did you sleep alright?"

"Fine, thank you." She takes a seat. "Mr Merlmon? Can I ask you, please...how can you shapeshift?"

His back is to her as he pours out his own breakfast and tossed the dirty pot in the sink. There's a pile of congealing dishes so high it makes Y/N's inner perfectionist shudder.

"Everyone can, they just don't realise it."

Y/N almost rolls her eyes. With a slight hint of sarcasm: "You're saying the magic was inside of us all along, and all we had to do was believe?"

"Not believe; be informed. I'm the first one to tell you you can do magic, aren't I?"

Y/N thinks about it. No one has ever really told her she can do anything.

Besides Loki. He's the only person to believe her hands are capable of doing something other than drag a dirty rag over dusty shelves.

Him, and this strange man sitting across from her, currently crushing peppercorns on the table with a paperweight.

"Yes. Normal people—common folk—we can't cast spells. Here, it might be a normal part of life but not in Asgard," Y/N says, believing it. She doesn't feel magic. She's always imagined if someone can do magic they can sense it moving under their skin, swirling about in their blood.

"The Vanir and Aesir Kingdoms were once one and the same," Mr Merlmon is saying, sprinkling the powdered kernels over her meal. "Our borders are just imaginary lines drawn on the land."

"Yes, but I thought magic faded from our side over time---"

"Nothing faded apart from the quality of our existence," The author states, another handful of peppercorns cracking under his paperweight. "Odin's ancestors---they hated magic. It gave people..." he took a moment, a hand waving as he searched for a word: "...free will. Power. The allfathers kept trying to crush the use of magic, but all they crushed were memories of how to access it."

Y/N chews on that thought, her teeth also working some sort of hot vegetable from her bowl. Eventually, she swallows. "So when you came here...the Vanir showed you how to find it again?"

Anthony nods.

"....So...I could? Access magic."

He stops eating and looks at her, as if thinking about it.

Y/N wishes he'd go back to turning his peppercorns into a fine powder; his shiny little eyes look out of place against the colourless strands of his thinning hair.

"Yeah, you probably could. I mean, you made it here, didn't you?" He gestures to the room, but Y/N knows he means the Vanir Kingdom.

She'd been thinking about that whilst lacing her boots earlier; how far she's come. She had expected homesickness—all those miles between her and her home dizzying—but feels none.

When Loki had left, he had taken Y/N's home with him.

"Magic is all about wanting." Mr Merlmon is continuing, and Y/N blinks. "You force things to move, you change things the way you want. That's the thing, you have to really want it. You gotta want it stronger than nature does. You have to overpower mother nature."