Entry 6: A Light in the Dark
29 Dec 2024Teltin
Logbook: CMDR TeltinDate: 27 Apr 3309
Got a message today. Thought it’d be more bad news or another debt collector, but it wasn’t. It was Jules. I almost didn’t open it. Figured it’d be some guilt trip about leaving Oort, but it wasn’t that either. It was a video message. Seeing her face again after all this time—it hit harder than I expected.
Jules looked younger than I remembered—late twenties, maybe pushing thirty—but space has a way of aging people faster than the calendar does. Her dark auburn hair was tied back in that messy braid she always wore, a few loose strands escaping to frame her face. No silver streaks yet, but there were shadows under her hazel eyes. Sharp eyes—sharp enough to see through me when I lied, and soft enough to remind me why I cared. They still had that fire, like she could take on the whole galaxy with a wrench and a bad attitude.
Grease was smudged along her jaw and knuckles—like she’d just come off a job and hadn’t even bothered to clean up before recording. She always worked like that. Said the grease proved she’d earned her pay. That’s Jules. Too stubborn to quit and too good at what she did to ever be out of work.
She wasn’t just a mechanic—she was a prodigy with engines. Learned young, fixing scrap haulers in backwater docks to keep food on the table. By the time she hit twenty, she could rebuild a reactor core faster than most tech crews working in shifts. Oort’s problems weren’t mechanical—not when she was on call. And it wasn’t charity, either. Mechanics make decent credits out there. Mechanics on a station like Oort are always busy. Something’s always broken, always needs fixing. Jules has skills, good ones, and she makes enough to get by. Still, she looked steady. Reliable. Like she’d held the station together with spit and grit when everything else threatened to come apart. That’s Jules.
I leaned back and just let the video run again. She talked about the repairs piling up, how the station’s systems were holding, but they were having to rewrite the book on station engineering more than they’d like to. Nothing critical, just enough to keep everyone on edge and scrambling to stay ahead of the next issue. Supplies were starting to run thin with more pirates hitting routes near the edges. She missed me. That’s what she said. That she missed having someone around who wasn’t just looking out for themselves.
Jules and I—what we had, what we have, is complicated. It wasn’t love, not like the storybooks. Not really. It was something closer to survival, two people leaning on each other just enough to keep from falling over. We had nights where the drinks ran out and the laughter didn’t, but we also had fights that could’ve leveled rooms. I think, in the end, we both knew it was complicated. Maybe it could’ve lasted, maybe it couldn’t—we never really figured that out. We were too busy leaning on each other to question where it was heading. And even after I left, she didn’t hate me. I thought she might, but she didn’t. Maybe she understood why I left better than I did.
Seeing her again reminded me of what I left behind—and why. Oort wasn’t just a stopover for me. It was a place where I tried to rebuild, and Jules was part of that. She was part of the reason I kept going when I wanted to stop. And now she’s out there, still fighting, still fixing, and maybe she needs me to do the same.
I sat there staring at the screen for a long time, trying to decide if I should respond. I didn’t know what to say, not after walking away. But hearing her voice, even just a recording, hit me harder than I thought it would. She still believed in me, even after everything.
Maybe that’s what I needed. A reminder that I’m not just running cargo and dodging bullets for myself. That there are people out there who still think I’m worth something.
I haven’t stepped back onto the Phantom yet. But I will. Not because I need to prove anything to myself—but because they need me. And for the first time in a long while, I think that’s enough.