Thickened Skin

by moonship

Part Three: Pressure

Malekith would watch her from the gangway on occasion, gripping the guardrail hard enough his knuckles turned gray. 'Jarnsaxa' treated the vessel like a work of art she couldn't wait to explore or understand, coaxing words out of rarely-used throats as she asked questions about magnetic fields, the methods they must have used to navigate in utmost darkness, and how they used to slip so seamlessly between the Realms. Everything they had was 'very different', she insisted. She touched screens and switches with clever hands, navigating her way through the processes with blue console light and the aid of exceedingly uncomfortable soldiers.

In those early days- and on occasion, in the far-spanning years when pale-haired svartálfar boys and girls were running barefoot along the shores where his own children used to play- Malekith was forced to remind himself his purpose was to live as a leader, not a man. He was a vessel, devoid of any purpose but wiping the skies clean of stars. There was no Algrim left to nudge him back on course in the rare moments he threatened to stray. Asgard was a Realm where vengeance had been taken by another, its halls and towns empty but for patrolling soldiers wearing white, vacant masks. For the time being, even the Aether was beyond his grasp.

For her part, 'Jarnsaxa'- thief, Asgard's harlot, unworthy, blessed, touched by the approving sands of cities long fallen to ruins- was unconcerned about her situation. Give or take a thousand years, the Aether would burn her to nothing as if she were one of the Kursed. Instead of readying herself, she hurried around the ship at all hours, peering at blue console lights and muttering under her breath as she did so. Sometimes, she bumped into things, overconfident in her ability to make her way in the 'darkness'. The staff would clang against a wall, giving away her presence even if she was out of sight, and effectively ruining the air of spare elegance she tried to convey in her worn clothes and pretty jewelry.

He never had to listen for the clang. When she was nearby, he felt the tug of the Aether as if it were gently mocking him, or as if the weapon was stirring beneath her skin and readying to burrow beneath his own. Not long after, he would hear a hiss of pain when she banged her knee, or the light clanking of her boots. Always, Malekith would close his eyes—one half-blind, the other clear-sighted as ever- and remind himself to wait. As he outwaited the guardians, so would he outwait Jarnsaxa.


'Meals' were little more than soft, tasteless squares to unwrap. They were engineered to provide necessary nutrients and to suppress the pangs of hunger during endless campaigns. Nonetheless, they always ate together in the captain's cabin that had once been Algrim's and that belonged to her for the duration of the flight. He made no attempt to hide his daily visit to her room, leaving the others to draw their own conclusions. Malekith knew without asking it suited Jarnsaxa as well. There was—accord, just as there was in the village where she'd been passing for one of the Midgardians.

They always ate in silence, taking longer than necessary. One day, she paused, the pad of her thumb lingering at a corner of her mouth. There was a crumb stuck just to the side of her upper lip. She said to him, "I've been thinking of a new name for myself." She never spoke as formally as he did, but he recalled she sounded different when she was young, that she didn't used to have little lines that showed at her forehead when she was lost in thought.

Malekith glanced up from his chalky ration bar and said only, "You have a name." As the frown lines appeared again, he once more pondered her existence. To take the Aether into oneself was a sacrifice: it was not sympathetic to the frailties of its hosts. She had welcomed the force of it in, fought for it in reckless foolishness and motivated by nothing more than juvenile love. Just like Asgardians, her kind bled out quickly enough with a blade buried in their side: Algrim would have dispatched her at the first opportunity had Malekith not been half-mad with pain and greedy for what was rightfully his.

'A single blade in the side,' he thought darkly. As if she knew what he was thinking, she tightened her fingers about her 'dinner' until it crumbled onto the tabletop. There was nothing of the woman who ambled through his ship as if it were her possession. She was remembering youth and hiding away while the woman who protected her crumpled to the floor. He was remembering the false illusion of her, wide-eyed, but stubborn and ready to face her fate with some dignity.

"Well?" she asked, and he was acutely—aware she was an instant away from doing something that was going to infuriate him.

When she spoke again, she said his mother's name, that it 'made a nice sound' and she would take it for herself if she didn't find anything she liked better. Her cruelty was far more subtle than his; he could tell by the quick, thoughtful flash of a smile that passed over her face. Struck speechless, he sat back heavily in his chair. The Aether had carried a part of him with it, capricious and unpredictable as any old power, seeding itself in her mind and planting memories long forgotten to anyone but himself.

It was to his credit that he merely recited the names of his ancestors in his mind instead of giving in to the urge to draw his blade: 'Jazal who begat Nachte who begat Gramal who-'

Was there ever a Jazal, or had it been-

He couldn't finish his train of thought. The implications of her words were too much for him to take in at one time. She merely picked a crumb up off the table and popped it into her mouth, tilting her head to one side as she drew invisible equations on the tabletop. She left streaks on the metal wherever she 'drew'. "You dare much, Jarnsaxa," he finally said, his face smoothed out to its careful, unfeeling blankness. Her neck was small and would be very easy to snap. "Get out."

She left him in her own chambers, and he counted it a shallow victory against her.

'Gramal who begat Hekhem who begat Kitharn who begat Malekith who begat-'

Six names in, he realized he'd forgotten to include some earlier, less important king and started over from the beginning.


Malekith slept less and less often, plagued by flashes of concrete Midgardian jungles and clever hands with badly chewed fingernails writing primitive formulas out on paper whenever he tried to rest. Instead of sleeping, he paced, he planned, and he rushed the growth of his arm. He did too much too soon, pushing himself to the extent that the repeated rituals and the pain that accompanied them left him retching and half-conscious. Jarnsaxa must have known the reason for it, yet said nothing. By then, she'd already found her own tasks to satisfy her insatiable desire for knowledge.

Not long after the dreams began, she came to his room for the first time. He recognized her approach by the odd prickle began at the back of his neck, and in the whisper of old magic spreading along the scarred side of his face and down the spindly, reforming arm strapped to his chest.

There was a sudden thunk followed by a soft hiss of pain as she bumped into storage crates that were moved there for two reasons: the sake of convenience and the fact he now thought her too confident in her ability to navigate his ship. With nothing more than a smug twitch of his lip, he went back to work on his overhead diagrams. Projected screen was layered upon projected screen, jammed with as much information and snatches of thought as he could fit upon them. He drew the branches of the World-Tree for the thousandth time and willed her on, preoccupied and not particularly wanting to deal with another of their stand-offs unless he could end it with a dagger jammed into her eye socket.

He expected the courtesy of her announcing herself as much as she planned to do so, which was not at all.

"You can't move through the Realms the way you used to," she said as she joined him. She always arrived as an equal, like the Aether-keepers who had walked alongside his ancestors in times of great peril. While she limped slightly from her hallway 'accident', she was leaning less heavily on her stave that evening. Nonplussed, and with his jaw already tightening in response, he gave a curt jerk of his chin that passed for a nod of acknowledgment. The movement was less of a 'hello' as it was an 'I see you breathe and walk.'

"Are you one of us then, focused on the slightest of our inconveniences?"

He never called her 'Jarnsaxa' if he could avoid doing so, deliberately choosing his words in such a way he never had to use her name. Names were sacred things, and he had no use for the way she tossed them aside. He had even less use for her and the spare elegance with which she moved now, or the way she wielded the Aether as if it were an afterthought and not the last hope of a dying people.

"What kind of answer is that?" she gave him an impatient glance, one he thought lingered too console screen with its blue glow continued to emit its soft beeps and clicks as Malekith drew lines and whorls through the air, the movements charted across the screen as he linked Realm to wormhole. She stretched out her own hand, rising to the tips of her toes as she reached out and erased a line of data. "Here, the disruption of the spirit energy at these coordinates-"

He grabbed her arm without thought for the consequences- and not just because she was wrong about the placement of a distant black hole influencing the placement of the next portal to Asgard. Her hair stirred bout her gaunt face, eyes darkening to a color he knew too well. 'Use it, and burn yourself away.' She did nothing more than twist her wrist free as the Aether fell from her fingertips, warning him away with nothing more than that single gesture.

His temper frayed from lack of sleep and the utter strain of her invading everything from his work to the hidden corners of his mind, he took a purposeful step forward. Cloaked in her own magic, she held her ground, close enough her breasts brushed against his chest. For the first time in a very long while, Malekith wanted.

"With or without the Aether, you overstep yourself," he whispered harshly, his breath hot against her ear and the skin of her neck. She was too close, too warm, and he could see delicate threads of red running just beneath the skin in response to his nearness. They stood that way for far too long, coldly silent in spite of the coiling tension between them and the beckoning ripple of Aether that refused to give him any peace.

"I will be waiting for the moment you are at your weakest and when I have finished, your sacrifice will have no meaning. I will burn away the very memory of your husband's family and strike down whatever rises to take their place in Asgard."

"No," she said calmly, the way she always said the word: no, he would not have the Aether. No, she would not condemn the Asgardians, in spite of what they had done. No, she would not give in fully to the sweet, slow pulse of the Aether and follow its will to the end. Always 'no'. Jarnsaxa tucked a strand of hair behind her ear in a way that he could only describe as thoughtful and preoccupied, as if she were already thinking too hard about what he said. "And you never will."

"Shall I tell you stories of your Asgardians?" he asked caustically. "You can listen to the old tales in the old tongue—instead of pushing them into a corner of your mind." He understood now that she was one of few left alive who knew them in all their pride and brilliance, how their ships once sailed unadorned skies. He could twist the knife in her side as well as she could jab at him, and he was glad to do so: she held the Aether, but he would not be her passive toy while she waited to die. With an awkward hand, he traced the line of her jaw with his thumb. There was no kindness, there—malice, perhaps, but no kindness.

Jarnsaxa turned her head sharply and tried to bite his hand in retaliation for that. He yanked his thumb just in time to save it from her teeth, startled by how surly and undignified she was when patronized—nearly as startled as he was by how close they were, and the way he'd started to touch her.

"I've crawled over the back of the World Serpent—don't think it'd be hard for me to take off a finger with my teeth."

"You have taken worse," he answered curtly.

Unrepentant, she stepped around him so she could take a closer look at the map etched out on one of the screens. "You deserved worse. I gave you mercy instead."

Control—without control, everything fell to pieces.

As if they'd never stood chest to chest and as if he'd never touched her the way a man did a woman, he gestured toward a curved, bright line on the screen that flared out like a lens at the edges. "You came about Asgard. Look, there."

"I see it," she said, the lights from the console flickering off of her face. She sounded rather distant then, her gaze unfocused. "Right there where the portal to Jotunheim was."

"One setting of your Midgardian sun, two at the most—that should please you well enough."

"It does."


The second time, she came to him white-faced and smelling faintly of wine from the cryogenic storage. They were a hairsbreadth from Asgard that night, and the fact she was out of time was how he knew to expect her. The muscles of his shoulders were bunched tight as he let her inside, and he saw the outline of her body was clearly visible through the whisper-thin fabric of a shift. She'd no doubt taken it from one of the female soldiers: a gift from an old lover of theirs, perhaps, or something purchased on a whim. He didn't care—for better or worse she was there, trying to give the whole affair some sort of dignity. That alone was enough to keep him from showing her the way back out.

They lapsed into their silence as she helped him off with his armor, slightly clumsy fingers bumping the breastplate against his arm and prompting him to wince. "Are you afraid?" he asked, and the glint of red in her eyes was frightening and beautiful all at the same time. He could tell she was—not of him, but from remembering her years in Asgard and her beloved who would never understand or forgive what they were about to do in the darkness. He bit out the words that were easier than kindness, using spite to build the wall between them ever higher. "Were you thinking of your Asgardian when you decided to come to me like a wife?"

She bloomed to life before him, lashing out with the power she hoarded so greedily and using it to raise him high, slamming Malekith back with an audible clang where his boots struck the wall. Pinned there, he didn't struggle, welcoming the sight, as well as the sharp flare of pain that spread from the back of his neck clear down to his hips. "He was better than you will ever be," she grit out in her stilted way of speaking that was a mix of base Midgardian and centuries among the elite of Asgard. "So was his mother."

He regarded her down the length of his proud nose, half-stripped of his armor and with his eyes heavy-lidded. "'Iron-Knife'- I do not care." She dropped him with no warning, braids rustling at the back of his neck as he hurtled toward the floor. Malekith landed in flat-footed crouch and with grunt of pain, breathing heavily as he pushed himself back to his feet.

Jane-turned-Jarnsaxa drew in a shuddering breath, conflict written all over her face. "Come here," she said at last, pale and drunk and extending her hand with all the benevolence of a woman who could strike him down with but a thought—and who repeatedly decided not to do so. She took a step back toward his bed, beckoning with a crook of her fingers and a gentle shiver of magic that brought to mind the sands of Svartalfheim in the Time Before. "It's been cold."

Her shift fluttered black-and-silver. Malekith went to her willingly through the fog of Aether, brushing his knuckles lightly along her cheek before she snuffed out even the faintest traces of was anger and dislike between them, but just as much want, and a synchronicity that no one left alive was able to understand. Hers was the only face he saw among endless numbers of the faceless, the only name left for him to speak, and though she kept the weapon from him; she held the great hope of his people.

Both of them had known this was coming- one way or another, in peace or in violence. Better now than in Asgard, where it would be nothing but spite and guilt.

The first time was quick and perfunctory: it had been so long for him, and Jarnsaxa was warm and obliging now that she'd made her decision. The second time lasted longer, and he took her with all the long-repressed frustration within him as they struggled for dominance on the bed, clutching at one another. Gray bled into his white skin as Aether flowed between them, slithering along clenching fingers and straining shoulders. Wrapped in the black weight of it, neither of them saw or cared.

"Tell me your name."

"Jarnsaxa."


Author's Note: So… … I don't even know. Expect periodic revisions as I find and repair massive plotholes. I should probably apologize to God and man. I wrote and revised this while intoxicated.

This is looking like it's going to be more interaction and low plot, but as I write this, I get the impression it's going to span a Long Damned Time. For the third time: … I don't even know.