"We can't keep him here much longer.."
Her brother spoke the words with a kind yet firm tone, and Irelia knew he was trying to remain as pleasant as possible. The playful tinge in his voice was still there, but it had begun to slowly hollow out ever since their father's death. Since that day, Zelos never looked the same, as complete as he used to in the innocence of their childhood, a fact which pained her every time she set eyes on him.
"Why shouldn't we? Something serious had to have happened to him if he was forced to jump off the side of a waterfall," she protested.
"You can't speak of a man like some kind of dog you want to adopt," Zelos sighed as he leaned back against his bedframe. They had gone into his bedroom to discuss the matter privately - what was this mysterious man doing on the lake shore, what business did he have at the top of the mountain, and most pressing, what would they do about the body of his unfortunate comrade who didn't survive the transit? "Look at the weapons they had on them," her brother continued. "You don't see the average person walking around wielding a greatsword. It's likely he's some kind of drifter or mercenary, neither of which we want to be in the company of."
"He has several broken ribs, Zelos," Irelia persisted, reminding him of the injuries she had witnessed the man struggle with when he first awoke. "Neither of us can adequately treat his wounds, so you would either have to fetch a healer or let him stay with us for a few days so he can recover on his own. And you know the attitude of the elders towards the sellswords that roam the countryside. They'd refuse him, saying that men who decide to make a living by the sword without taking a sacred oath to preserve their honor have no place in Ionia. Even though he is a sword for hire, in his condition he wouldn't be threatening us, especially not you."
After their father's mysterious passing, the art of Master Lito's fabled Hiten style had naturally passed down to the elder of his two children, Zelos, who was a distinguished swordsman in his own right. Their father had not neglected to impart some of his teachings to his daughter as well, but it was specifically Zelos who had been groomed for the particular duty of continuing the tradition of their swordplay. Irelia gave a passing glance to the massive blade, once proudly wielded by their father, which now hung on the wall above Zelos' bed. The Sword That Takes Breath, it had been reverently named, both referencing the immaculate flow of Master Lito's technique which made the sword look like a living, breathing entity, and the deadliness of his stroke as it only took one well-timed blow for the blademaster to slice through an enemy and steal their breath away.
She could sense Zelos start to relent at her reasoning, although his stubborn streak prevented him from giving up his position so easily. "It's just not right, Irie, to provide all this service for an unknown mercenary who literally washed up on our doorstep. Not to mention the body of the man he brought along with him. We're going to have to bury that, you know?"
Irelia nodded. The crushing impact of cold death upon the lifeless man's face provided an indelible image in her mind, one she was more than ready to cover up and move along from. It wasn't that she was irreverent to the deceased, but on the contrary, she had always disliked the Ionian funeral tradition of dressing the dead into formal attire and performing a candlelight vigil around its coffin before lowering it into the ground. The sight of the cadaver, slowly decaying despite the mortician's best efforts to preserve the deceased's dignity, was something Irelia could never stand. It had taken all her willpower to keep her eyes fixated on her father's body when the time had come for his own funeral procession. She much preferred to memorialize her father's legacy through the past recollections of the time he had spent with her and Zelos, as well as the teachings he had handed down to them over the years.
Rising from her seat, Irelia made her way to the door. "Hey, what are you doing?" a surprised Zelos called out to her.
"I'm getting answers."
She had already gotten a name from him the first time they had crossed paths. The second time, she had discovered his profession. For her next audience with him, she was going to find out his purpose.
Irelia entered the spare bedroom to find Jax in the same position she had previously left him in, lying prone with a constant gaze staring at the ceiling. Her discussion with Zelos had run longer than she had anticipated - Irelia silently apologized for the inconvenience.
"Jax, correct?"
The mercenary didn't move, but Irelia attributed it to a desire to remain as still as possible, considering the nature of his injuries. She took his silence as a sign to continue.
"I was wondering about a few things," she started to address him, eliciting a slight turn of the head and the focus of his watchful eyes on her. The intensity of his gaze unnerved her, forcing her to drop eye contact as she couldn't get herself to look at him, finding a distraction by adjusting the window sills to block a little light from entering the room.
"If you're going to ask me questions and expect answers, the least you can do for me is look me in the eye when you do so," came the trade. Not only had he noticed her slight bashfulness, but he was straight up calling her out on it. It was amazing how he, in his state of weakness, was making her feel like the vulnerable one.
Irelia slowly brought herself to look at his face again. He seemed to look around Zelos' age, with the veteran scars of a few battles indicating that he had weathered the scenes of death on the battlefield before and wouldn't be impressed by anything less than completely purposeful interrogation from her. She decided to get straight to the point.
"What brought you to such a desperate measure? You risked both of your lives with that jump, and you can tell how severe the consequences were," was her first dart.
"We were trapped into a corner," he explained calmly. "It was either fight the bandits which outnumbered us or take our chances with Mother Nature. Seems like she wasn't going to let me go without paying a hefty price."
"So you two were mercenaries," Irelia said straightforwardly what she could have easily guessed, but she wanted some background to it.
"He was a mercenary," Jax replied. "I still am. Once I'm able to move again I'll have to rejoin the company. They'll have pegged me for dead and probably moved on from this failed mission, but I'll be sure to return."
She knew how whimsical the wandering life could be, but she didn't expect it to go to the extent that Jax had related. "How could people be so heartless to their own brethren?" she wondered, thinking out loud more than actually asking a question.
"Our little band of brothers," Jax said with a mocking undertone that was not lost on Irelia, "is managed by a smart man. Very pragmatic, very ruthless, but if I were in his shoes I'd follow his example in a heartbeat. A common mercenary like me is just stock that he's gambling on putting an investment into. And since we've all got terrible odds to survive, you can guess how much our commander could care about men who don't come back to him within a day."
The bitterness in his voice was seeping into her skin, and Irelia didn't want any more of the malice entering their conversation. "Stop talking about yourself like you're just some object to be sold on the market," she pleaded. "You're in Ionia. The people of this land respect the individual potential which lives in each and every one of us. You were fortunate enough to survive that encounter; surely that has to mean something?"
"It's just how the cards fell," Jax shrugged dismissively. "But I would've gladly swapped places with Karzak in a heartbeat. He was a courageous man, and a good friend. If anybody in our company could've embodied strength, it was him. If anyone deserved to get out of that mess alive, it was him. Great, we're in Ionia, land of harmony and balance, right? Was there anything that was possibly fair about his death?"
Irelia couldn't answer for a second, shocked by his outburst. Once she had re-gathered her courage, she timidly tried to give a typical Ionian explanation for his misfortune. "We can't know why or how things go they way they do. Suffering is inevitable in any person's life, but the monks teach us that the ability to let go of it and not allow it to cloud our minds will set us along the righteous path."
That was the correct answer to give, the mantra she had been taught by the Hirana monks in the northeast, known for their strained discipline and tremendous self-control. In her heart, however, she wanted to agree with him, to protest that it wasn't fair and to lament the fact that they couldn't bring back the dead. Her father had suffered the same fate, contracting a mysterious illness in the middle of the night without any forewarning. He had enjoyed excellent health for his entire life, but once he had developed that cough, he had just gradually grown weaker and weaker until one day he simply passed away. There was no compensation for that, but Irelia was just a young girl at the time, and the elders had given her the only recourse they believed was acceptable.
Jax could see past the regurgitated schoolhouse teachings she forced herself to deliver him. "You can't believe that, can you? Sure, I can't do anything to bring Karzak back from the dead, but you can't just tell me to let go of this incident and try to move on. I have to do something about his death, else all his effort, all his hard work, will have just scattered to the wind and dissipated in vain."
"You can't even sit up from the bed, though," Irelia pointed out. "You'll have to at least stay a few days with us so you can fully recover before you do anything rash. My brother and I can easily provide for you, so that shouldn't be an issue."
Zelos hadn't exactly given his full consent to acting as Jax's temporary caretaker, but Irelia knew her brother would relent to her if she insisted. She just had to convince herself she was making the correct choice.
"Nothing rash, huh? You're a very trusting type, taking some random mercenary into your home and allowing me time to recover. What's to stop me from turning on your eventually and killing you and your brother?"
His threatening hypothetical scenario didn't frighten her in the slightest. "If you really wanted to do that, you wouldn't have been the type of person to save me from those bandits in Xiuguan."
Her answer had silenced him for a moment. "If they had been allowed to carry out what they were planning to do… the fact that I had idly passed by would have been unforgivable."
"For someone who laughs at our teachings, you're concerned about your own conscience?"
Jax exhaled deeply, and Irelia knew he was trying to hold back. "Just because I'm a mercenary doesn't mean I have I don't have my own set of ideals. I still have my aspirations, my beliefs, my future to look towards."
Irelia frowned, realizing the incongruence between the occupation this man chose and the words coming out of his mouth. "And you think this lifestyle can help you fulfill that?"
"No." It was the first time during that conversation he had broken eye contact with her.
That brought her to her final question. "So what do you want now?"
She could tell he had given the matter quite a bit of thought, as he uttered his answer clearly and without any hesitation. It was a fairly predictable response, the kind of thing which a man driven to despair would seek out.
"Vengeance."
A/N: I did say there'd be character building and I went deep, man. Pretty much nothing but dialogue and I placed the story in a direction where I could take it many different ways. You could make a great story out of Jax's wanderings around Valoran and how his history of fighting eventually led him to the Institute of War, but that would be a tale for another time. The tricky part here is getting both him and Irelia involved, so there'll probably be a time skip even though these last two chapters were directly linear.