AN: So I'm a little addicted to Logyn, and a bit obsessed with blood. My latest iteration of Sigyn is as tortured as ever, a Byronic heroine reverse engineered from my headcanons of Loki's kinks and reasons he never has any damn shirtless scenes! I've drawn inspiration from the film Secretary in creating a romance of repressed kink. The resulting trash is dedicated to my sicko boyf. And Tom Hiddleston. (If you're reading this, we can't be together, I'm sorry).

* Pre-Thor

Prologue

He returned from Muspelheim over his brother's shoulder, his blood darkening Thor's cape to a deeper shade of crimson. He didn't hear his bellow, nor see Thor's face as white as his own for once as he was rushed down the Bridge.

A particularly swift-moving Eldjötunn had bested Loki at his own game. The phantom of smoke had slipped unseen from a veil of steam to plant its searing blade between his ribs; taking him by surprise as he fixated on puppeting his own illusions to bait their opponents away from Thor and the Warriors Three, stealthily thinning the numbers from the periphery. With a lance of agony his own blood drowned the breath in his lungs. He fell to the ashes, his last thought spent wondering if he would escape his friends' notice this time.

As he now hovered on the edge of death in bloodless repose upon a healing bed, one of the Queen's own handmaids requested a private audience with her. Among the few picked to study under the famed sorceress, the woman specialised in Haematurgy. She spoke hastily now, her bloodstained hands twisting together in urgency.

'Your Majesty – the Healers say the Prince's blood is too rare to be restored. With your discretion – I'd like to offer an alternative.'

With a jerk of hope Frigga leant forward in her chair, desperation grasping through her normally calm gaze. 'Yes?'

'The –' Lady Sigyn's words hitched in her throat, and then tumbled from her lips. 'The Sanguine potion requires an ingredient I possess.'

The All-Mother's brows shot up. 'Loveblood.'

That of someone in love with the drinker. Frigga sniffed, the flash of suspicion in her eyes dimming to disappointment in her trusted attendant. 'No doubt you are aware of the side effects. A sly manoeuvre by your House.'

Sigyn shook her head. 'I'll stay out of his sight,' she insisted. 'I ask for no acknowledgement or reward. Only to save him,' she added in a murmur, 'for my Queen.'

Frigga's eyes narrowed in consideration. 'Restoring him would take more blood than one person can give – a much smaller one at that.'

'I can be given a transfusion,' Sigyn countered. She'd already thought of all this. The potion was simmering in her labroom, prepared and waiting for her blood to substantiate its volume.

'You would risk your life for that of my son?'

The younger sorceress' expression became pained. 'Please allow me, Your Majesty – I owe His Highness a debt. He wouldn't remember but he once saved me as a girl.'

Loki's significance to the handmaid became obvious. Despite their urgency, Frigga's gaze softened. Only she could understand Sigyn's capacity to love the slighter, quieter Prince. 'My child ...'

'Please do not add to my shame Your Majesty, I beg of you.'

'If you do this, you will have to spend the rest of your days outside his notice,' Frigga reminded her. 'Never speaking to him, never visible to his gaze ...'

'I swear on my life,' Sigyn vowed to the Queen's slippered feet, a crack in her voice betraying the tears that stung her eyes.

Loki returned with a fierce gasp of breath, sensation crashing over him like a wave. His chest ached deeply, and he clutched at it, searching in frustration for a wound he could not find.

'Be calm, Loki,' a familiar voice crooned. 'You're whole – you're healed.'

Mother. He relaxed at her words, instantly soothed for the moment. 'I thought … I was …' his words trailed off groggily. Glimpses of Hel swam in a kaleidoscope behind his eyes.

'You're back with us now,' Frigga assured him. 'Thor brought you back just in time for the healers to work their craft. We're incredibly lucky to have you still, my darling.'

A wild sense of ardour bubbled up in his chest from a deep reservoir of sentiment. Loki let his head fall back to the pillow, drawing a series of full breaths as a chuckle danced from his tongue. He'd eluded death once again.

'Enjoyyour victory, Loki,' Frigga enthused, rising to her feet and bowing to touch her smile to his forehead. 'There'll be a feast tonight in your honour, if you are up to it.'

He felt very up to it.

He readied himself with vigour, pausing occasionally to appreciate the glimmer of sunset through his windows, the birdsong on the breeze outside, the change in scents from study to bedchamber to bath. His skin felt somehow sensitised to the bathwater flowing through his hair and the fabrics of his raiment brushing into place.

Loki descended into the great hall feeling better than he had before he nearly died. When a beaming Thor lurched him into his embrace, Loki had no discomfort closing his arms around the barrel of his brother's chest. Ale was shoved into his hand courtesy of Hogan, but already his nerves tingled with a warm brew of affection.

'I don't understand all the fanfare,' sniffed a sarcastic Lady Sif. 'Loki was always known for leaving a party early.'

'But not before winning the last bet – or turning the tides to our favour as he did on Muspelheim,' Thor effused, clapping his hand on Loki's shoulder and giving him a shake.

'To Loki!' cheered Fandral.

The tides turned on the mood he awoke in with mercurial rhythm. Within a few days, the mania that stormed his veins courted a vague melancholy that was sometimes nauseating. Loki became unsure of how to occupy himself. He'd fallen with envy bittering his heart like a splinter, but the irritation of his ambitions seemed to have faded away most disturbingly. There were schemes he'd been formulating, but he found they now mattered little to him. His appetite grew fickle, and his already troubled sleep evaded him the more he came to care for his nostalgic obsession – with nothing.

After a particularly lachrymose evening he sought out Frigga's counsel, but she was reticent when he questioned her about his affliction. Normally so fluent with his words, Loki struggled to explain his experiences as he paced back and forth before her, raking his fingers through his hair.

'Like ... like an infusion of joy and sorrow … Incessantly spurring – but completely directionless –'

She was unconcerned. 'It's just a reaction to the transfusion. You were drawn back from death with a powerful revival. Your energies will reach equilibrium in short time.'

But they didn't. A week later he remained hypnotised, increasingly drawn to the source of his disturbance. He revisited the library day after day, leaving in dissatisfaction after dark when his candle ran low. One afternoon he had taken to roaming the shelves aimlessly, following a fleeting sense of significance that ebbed and picked up like the scent of a trail.

Loki stepped into the Haematurgy section and went still. The sense tugged him insistently, urgently, and he stumbled forward, feeling he was on the cusp of discovering something important.

He was alerted to motion up ahead and peered at the far end of the row to catch sight of a figure dashing between the shelves. His jaw tightening in determination, Loki jogged after them. He made out the shape of a woman eluding him. She showed no sign of stopping, and he was forced to pick up pace as he followed her out of the library entirely.

Loki exited the library and glanced both ways down the corridor to sight her sprinting away from him. Loki took to the right, lengthening his own strides, and sped after her while milling subjects glanced at him with confusion as he dashed past them. Her evasion soon led him through a maze of passageways with which he was unfamiliar. He pushed on with blood pounding through his legs, rushing in his ears, desperate not to lose her –

He rounded a corner, only to emerge into a deserted corridor. He stopped short, having glimpsed only a trail of burgundy hair, like a streak of dried blood against the stone. The Prince stood caught in place, utterly bewildered, his knowledge drawing a blank as he scoured the space for an exit. She'd vanished like a phantasm in the blink of his eye. He was accustomed to wielding illusions, not being haunted by them. Loki began to wonder if something might be wrong with him.

With a great effort he clawed his emotions back beneath a mask of composure. With a scowl he directed his mind elsewhere – he had more pressing matters deserving of his attention, left woefully neglected after his brush with death.

Thor's Coronation approached, the eldest brother's spotlight casting Loki in shadow. To his relief, and his horror, his sentiments began to ebb. The vivacity decayed in his veins, that sweet madness soured in his mouth like stale mead. Its departure left him colder than before. Hollower. Hungrier. His mood darkened and his tongue sharpened.

And then Gungnir was in his fist, and the rush of power that swelled through him occupied his heart enough that Loki began to forget the caress of that strange limerance that had lulled him for the blink of an eye.

She missed him from the library. She missed him from the great hall. From the corridors, the healing rooms where he regularly sought sleeping draughts, and the alcoves where he thought he went unnoticed.

As much as that, she missed Frigga's smile. The Queen's grief was a torture that eclipsed Sigyn's own. She'd hoped her love might temper the troubled Prince – but to her horror, it had sent Loki mad, and over the edge of the Bridge into the abyss below. Guilt gnawed at her insides like hungry rats. Frigga had trusted Sigyn to save him and she drove him to his death. She was selfish to hurt.

Every day she waited to be dismissed, to be arrested, but Frigga never spoke blame as she wept. Sigyn's sisters fussed and fretted over her health, observing that she had not been the same since she made the donation. Of course, they knew nothing of the potion, of the consequences it had wrought, and how little she deserved their care.

Sigyn's sacrifice had taken more from her than she'd anticipated. She had bled for him to the edge of death and was revived by three of her sisters, pooling their blood to restore hers. While her love had always been a burden, she'd never thought that giving it away would hollow her out so deeply. The day Loki had come looking for her, she could only sink against the other side of the wall in the concealed servant passageway and sob at the lost look she'd glimpsed in his eyes, realising it was only her own yearning reflected back at her.

Then seeing it poison him had turned that tenderness to toxin in her own heart. She vacated the Healing Halls, vowing never to heal again.

Save for the All-Mother, none had known of her infatuation. Freyja had tried to facilitate betrothals with soldiers, courtiers, and scholars alike with diminishing success. Unlike the Queen's other attendants, Sigyn was the only one who could see her son through his mother's eyes. With their bronze and gold legacies, the Aesir had always eyed the dark Prince with suspicion. But Sigyn saw the smooth palace marble in his pale skin, Odin's ravens in his black hair, and – if she had the fortune to catch a glimpse – Frigga's potion vapour in his jade grey eyes.

As youths it was Prince Loki who had drawn her first flush of lust, and a peculiarity of the situation had left her deeply imprinted with depraved cravings as she matured. While she withdrew into her academic obsessions she'd watched him detach himself to his own dark devices, and their paths ran parallel, never crossing until Sigyn's fateful intervention. Perhaps she'd only wanted to return the scar, and mark him as irrevocably as he had her that day in the palace gardens. But too late she had learned that blood was like fire; and the risk of playing with it equally as great.