Loki had always thought hair was disgusting. It just didn’t make sense, that anyone could willingly tolerate such unruly messes. When wet, hair clumped together in unflattering positions. After waking, hair revealed itself to be wildly untamable. It became filled with knots and frazzles and grime.
He could admit though, that in the certain lighting hair could have a rather curious effect. And it was in no doubt that the stuff was highly prized by those who had it, as all effort would be put forth to show it in its most desirable state.
For a reason he had never been certain of, Loki had been born with not an inch of hair, and his body had never seen fit to rectify the matter.
It had not bothered him overmuch when he was a child, but around the time when Thor and his friends began to be more aware of their appearances, Loki had found himself realizing—with a slow, sinking feeling—that to everyone else, he must appear unsightly. The certainty nagged at him until he could not face leaving his room in the morning. In secret, he tried spell after spell found in old books, guaranteed to make hair grow. None of them worked—whether it was the fault of the spells or of himself, he could not discern.
That was where his mother found him, when she ventured to his rooms one afternoon.
Loki had not known his mother very well. His impressions of her were formed of glimpses in formal occasions and the rare times when she would visit his and Thor’s quarters, visits always heralded by hours or even days of nagging by the nursemaids, demanding everything be tidied up and clean and respectable. She would sweep into the room in a cloud of perfume and bright gowns, long golden hair piled atop her head regally. And she would always pick Thor up and swing him around, laughing; but to Loki she would turn with a mock-serious expression and introduce herself, as though he were someone of great importance. It could never fail to entice a grin out of his solemn face, and the rest of the night would be spent in exited stories, before at last they must get to bed. She then reached down and kissed them both on the forehead before withdrawing, and Loki would squeeze his eyes shut and try to capture those few last moments, to lock them in his memory like a precious gift.
And so when Loki found his mother standing at the door to his room, his first thought was only confusion and a mild sense of guilt. He quickly closed the spellbook he had been reading.
“Mother?” he asked hesitantly. “Why are you here? Is something wrong?”
“Of course not, Loki,” she answered, stepping forth. He made room for her on the bed, and she perched beside him, Loki looking at the floor in sudden shyness.
She picked up the book and flipped through it. Loki bit his lip and fidgeted, wanting to grab it out of her hands, but not quite daring to. She turned to the page he had been reading and sighed. Then her eyes lifted to meet Loki’s anxious gaze.
“Were you trying to make yourself hair?”
“Yes,” Loki whispered. He twisted the end of his tunic distractedly.
“Why?”
Loki met her eyes with incomprehension. “Everyone else has it!” he said at last. It was not the answer he had been searching for, but it was a reason, and a valid one. He hoped his meaning would somehow communicate itself to her, because he didn’t know what to say. He stared at her beseechingly.
“And that is why you want hair,” Frigga stated neutrally.
“Yes—no. But it won’t work!” He found that tears were threatening to fall, mutinously, from his eyes. He took a ragged breath and tried to calm himself.
Frigga sighed, reaching out and hugging him to her closely. After a moment, Loki went limp in her hold, burying his face in her shoulder. Up close he could smell her perfume more clearly than anything else, and it seemed to fill the air like it had volume of its own.
“I can help you, if you would like me to,” Frigga said at last. Loki looked up in sudden hope. “Really?” he asked.
She nodded slowly.
And so it was that the effects of his quest ended with an unexpected gain, for after the making of a special wig, and after Frigga taught him spells to guard against it falling off in fights or rough play, she did not end her visits to his room. In fact they became fairly frequent, and she soon went on to teach him spells of her own knowledge, or talk to him about what interested him. The visits were never planned, never prepared for—and Loki felt a certain smugness in the knowledge that not once did she do such things with Thor.
Thor had always thought Loki’s vanity baffling and amusing in equal measures. When he met Loki one morning with a head of fine brown hair, Thor did not recognize him at first, only turning when he spoke, gaping in shocked surprise. The slight boy standing before him did not look like his brother, and the effect was disconcerting—and yet Loki was smiling a smile of triumph, and Thor scrambled for something good to say.
“Ah—you have hair,” he managed at last.
“I am glad you noticed,” Loki replied pompously. “If you did not, that would say disturbing things about your perception.”
Thor frowned. Loki was very infuriating sometimes, he thought, and told his brother so. Loki only laughed.
“Brown hair, of all things?” Thor had been hiding behind the statue for reasons other than eavesdropping, but he could hardly move now, or he would be seen. At least, that was how he justified it to himself, curiosity making him strain to hear the end of the conversation.
“It looks beautiful with his eyes.” The retort was his mother’s.
Odin sighed a long sigh. “People will talk,” he muttered.
“As if they did not before?” Frigga laughed. “You amuse me.”
“But brown hair? Why not blonde? Our ancestry is filled with blonde hair.”
“And that is precisely why I could not give it to him.”
Thor frowned, and resisted the urge to peek around the edge of the statue.
“What do you mean by that?” Odin asked, a hint of sharpness entering his tone.
“Loki is different,” Frigga replied, more quietly. “He has always been, and he will always be. It is not healthy for him to feel he must be just like everyone else.”
“When has he ever been given that impression—?”
“Always! Don’t you see? Already, it is affecting him—he wonders why he is so different. Just as I told you it would. We should have informed him from the start.”
“Impossible.” Odin’s tone was brisk, unyielding. Frigga sighed.
“Sometimes, I fear your unbending nature will bring a grave undoing.”
“Is this a prophecy?”
“No—it is an observation.” Her skirts rustled as she walked away, and Odin sighed before walking after her.
Thor waited until they were clear before tumbling out of his hiding place, mind buzzing with questions. The conversation he’d heard had not made much sense to him, but he knew it had been important. He rushed off to find Loki.
Though not as much as it had once been, Loki was still closer to Sif than any of Thor’s other friends, in that strange way of two souls who had more in common than either would like to admit, brought together and pushed apart by their very natures. And so it was great news among the palace gossip when they, apparently, had the biggest—and most dramatic—falling out seen in quite some time. And falling out it was in truth—for the altercation ended with a quickly muttered spell, and all of Sif’s long, beautiful, curly golden hair falling out of her head into a heap on the floor. (After that, it was said in whispers, the Lady Sif had injured the prince so badly he was not seen out his rooms for a month.)
She reacted quite pragmatically, all things considered—winding a scarf about her head when not in battle, and silently daring anyone to say a thing. Unsurprisingly, no one did.
But that was not the end of the story, no indeed—for half a year later, when the wonderings of when Sif’s hair would grow back had all but changed to wondering if, Loki presented her with a marvelous gift. It had been made of pure gold, they said—strands as thin as silk, waves that curled just as her own hair once had. Perhaps that was true, and perhaps not—those who saw it swore they could not have been mistaken.
But the two retired together, and when Sif was next seen, though she once again wore a head of hair, it was not her own. Instead, the locks were straight and brown, a perfect match for Loki’s. Speculation abounded, but there was never a more tight-lipped pair, and whatever had truly happened to end the quarrel was just as mystifying as what it had been about.
After he fell, he began to fragment. It started somewhere in the depths of a star, or perhaps floating through cold, airless wastes, utterly alone. His mind was the first to chip, subjected to such strain as it had been—memories floating away quite suddenly and with no reason. It scared Loki more than anything had ever scared him before. Without magic, he still had power in the form of words; without words, he still had power in his self; without a self, he still had his mind. But without his mind, what was he?
Nothing.
He fought, but fought against an unseen, unknown foe. He twisted tales out of the depths of his soul to replace the places where things just ended. He fought, bitterly, desperately, the last fight he would ever fight, the most important and only fight left to him. And still he fractured, watched his mind fall to ashes under shaking fingers.
And after that, his body. Clothes—stripping him down to utter nakedness, floating away in the depths of space—but he could be no colder than he was already. Skin. His hair, gifted to him by his mother so long ago. It was no more than an outward reflection of what had already taken place inside him, and he could do no more than watch.
When he finally hit the ground, after he had been found, it was his tattered mind he pulled about him first. There could be no saving it—but at the moment he did not really care. He did not really think he could care ever again, and the thought was, strangely, unbothering.
After that it was his armour—one piece after another—scavenged and forged and shaped from magic itself. His helmet he made from tarnished dreams and the afterglow of dead stars.
But the hair came last—longer than it had been before, with ragged ends that he could not brush smooth. It was not, he thought, as much a work of art as his former one had been. Whatever touch his mother had, he lacked, and the finished thing was sharp and slick and ugly, with lines that snagged and caught on the insides of his palms.
But, putting it on, he felt more complete, and the old spells were familiar, falling into place with ease.
It flew off as they traveled with the tesseract, swept away by oceans of blue. Loki could not much bring himself to care, for he had hated the wig with a peculiar sort of loathing, and yet been unable to part with it. That an outside force could do so was a relief he would not admit. Thor eyed him askance when they landed, and Loki thought pointedly, you had no idea what you were doing, did you.
Thor shrugged, acquiescing. Loki had never needed to talk to speak his thoughts.
The new hair came with impressive speed, considering he was a prisoner. It was brought—of course—by Thor, probably for the simple reason that Thor was the only one who came, without fail, to his prison every week. When Loki saw it he could not help the small huff of surprise that left his lips.
“Sif gave this to you?” he asked, incredulity for the moment winning over his desire to never speak to Thor again.
“Aye. It was the only one we could get on such short notice. I don’t know where it came from; I do not think I have seen her wear it before.”
“You wouldn’t,” Loki said softly.
It was a plain brown, as his hair had always been—but long, longer than even his last wig had had the dubious honor of being, and with an unmistakable curl.
“Mother is making a new one as we speak,” Thor went on, as if worried Loki might still be unsatisfied. Loki almost laughed at the irony. He was the prisoner, and yet it was him everyone wished to please. Well… that was, perhaps, a rather skewed view to take—he had no real delusions of such—and yet, for a moment, the feeling nestled in his heart, like a warm, dark ember.
“I shall anticipate it,” he said dryly, and turned the wig over in his hands.