Julieta Juris

[Location: Space, Lanrange 3. P.D 325]

Julieta Juris stands in the hangar bay of the Arianrhod Skipjack-class ship, clad in her pilot suit. Her breath is slow and deliberate inside the helmet—measured, focused, and sharp. She stands before her EB-08 Reginlaze, its pale blue armor gleaming under the hangar lights like a knight’s polished blade. Its sensors flicker alive, responding almost to her heartbeat.

Across the deck, Vidar—his masked visage unreadable—oversees pre-launch procedures for his own machine. The atmosphere between the two is taut but not unfriendly. A tension born not from rivalry, but from shared discipline.

Julieta: “Commander Vidar... Do you truly think they’ll come? The Martian rats?”

**Vidar’s voice filters through the helmet’s modulator, smooth and mocking, but never unkind. “They’ll come. They always do. Desperation makes even rats brave.”

**He steps closer, folding his arms behind his back in that aristocratic manner that Julieta has learned to mimic subconsciously.""

Vidar: “But tell me, Julieta Juris—do you fear them?”

She meets the question with the stiffness of a soldier before her superior, though her eyes flicker with that quiet fire of pride. “I fear only being unworthy of Rustal-sama's trust. These children—these barbarians—they believe might is everything. I’ll show them that discipline, that purpose, is what gives strength meaning.”

Her gloved hand brushes against the cold armor of her Reginlaze. There is no warmth in the touch—only reverence, almost religious. Vidar chuckles lowly, the sound echoing like steel against glass.

Vidar: “You’ll learn, Julieta. Ideals are useful until the void strips them away. Out there—” he gestures to the black expanse of space beyond the hangar’s energy field “—there’s only instinct and will. Remember that when you meet your ‘barbarian.’”

For a moment, she hesitates. She wants to retort—wants to assert that she knows the meaning of will—but instead, she nods. Julieta: “Understood. I’ll bring back proof of my worth.”

---

The catapult doors slide open, revealing the stars—cold, infinite, and merciless. Julieta’s Reginlaze is loaded onto the launch track, systems green, telemetry syncing to fleet command. Her HUD flares with blue as she exhales slowly.

Julieta (to herself): “Strength is not chaos. It is control. I am Gjallarhorn’s blade. I am humanity’s order.”

With a thunderous propulsion burst, her machine rockets out of the hangar and into the void. The world narrows to silence—the kind that only exists in the vacuum of space. Her thrusters flare a deep cyan trail as she maneuvers toward the debris field ahead, where IFF markers of unidentified suits flicker like ghosts.

Then—movement. A red and black frame darts through the field, trailing sparks of shattered metal. It’s a Tekkadan ace, piloting a heavily customized Gundam.... The pilot? You.

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[Location: Earth, Vingolf. P.D. 331]

The banquet hall droned with polished music and the clink of crystal glasses, a sea of dress uniforms and carefully arranged smiles all turned in her direction. Colonel Julieta Juris accepted the praise with the same stiff, mechanical politeness she’d learned to mimic over six years of peacetime Gjallarhorn. A decisive blow against the Brewers’ scattered remnants, they called it. A textbook operation.

She’d nodded through the toasts, her custom Reginlaze Julia’s silhouette displayed on a holographic banner behind the podium, and answered each commendation with the words that felt most natural: “For the continued peace of the Earth Sphere.” Not a single mention of Commander Rustal, she’d learned to keep that one clamped behind her teeth in public now, though the sentiment still beat like a second heart.

But the walls of the venue had begun to press in, the perfumed air too thick, the sound of other people’s admiration too suffocating. As soon as protocol allowed, Julieta slipped out through a side terrace door, trading the glittering ballroom for the cold bite of an open-air garden balcony. The sky above Vingolf kept its artificial dome partly dimmed for the night cycle, scattered stars competing with the distant lights of docked Arianrhod ships.

---

She let out a breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding and leaned her forearms against the frosted railing, ignoring the goosebumps rising along her bare collarbone. The dress uniform’s formal jacket still felt like a costume she’d been stuffed into, no matter how many medals they pinned to it.

Absently, she reached into a small pocket sewn inside her sleeve, a habit Galan Mossa had once scolded her for, and crumbled a piece of dry bread crust she’d smuggled from the dinner table. She popped a pinch of it into her mouth and chewed, gaze fixed on nothing.

The terrace door hissed open behind her. Familiar footsteps, unhurried and steady, stopped a respectful distance away.

Julieta didn’t turn around. She knew the cadence. Knew the weight of that particular stare on the back of her head, the same one that had tracked her through countless sorties and debriefings over the past few years. A fellow ace. One of the few people in the whole sprawling organization whose presence didn’t make her feel the need to stand at attention or put her fist through a wall.

“You’re supposed to be inside, basking,” she said flatly, still chewing. “They’ll start talking if we both disappear. They always start talking.” No response, just the quiet shifting of a stance she’d memorized.

She finally glanced over her shoulder, expression unreadable. “I’m not being dramatic. I’m just... not built for these things. You know that.” The breadcrumbs were still stuck to her lower lip. She didn’t notice. “I can kill six mobile suits before breakfast and still get an after-action report filed perfectly, but a room full of smiling bureaucrats makes my skin itch.”

The wind picked up, rustling the stray strands of hair that escaped her regulation twist. Julieta turned back to the stars, fingers tightening on the railing. A long silence stretched, easy rather than awkward. That was rare for her. Most silences felt like a trap waiting to spring. This one felt like the still space between heartbeats in the cockpit, right before she pulled the trigger.

“The pirate commander was just a kid,” she said suddenly, voice dropping. “Maybe seventeen. He called me a demon before I took out his machine. Said I was no better than the Human Debris we saved.” She swallowed. “I told him I was human. I told him that’s the whole point. But I’m not sure he believed me. Sometimes I’m not sure I believed me.”

The confession hung in the frozen air. Julieta never talked like this in front of anyone else, not the command staff, not Rustal, not even Gaelio during their stilted, gentle attempts at courtship. But this person, the one standing behind her with that maddening, patient silence, had long ago become an exception she couldn’t explain.

She finally turned fully, leaning her back against the railing and crossing her arms. The moonlight caught the scar along her jaw, a souvenir from a debris impact five years ago, one she’d refused to have medically smoothed away. Her eyes, sharp and golden as ever, fixed on the figure in the doorway.

“Don’t just stand there with that look. I know that look. It’s the ‘Julieta is being too hard on herself again’ look.” A crumb of bread fell from her lip as she huffed. “I’m not. I’m stating facts. I’m a weapon that learned to fill out paperwork, and you...”

She stopped. Something faltered behind her gaze, a crack in the blunt, unpolished armor she wore like a second skin. For years, she’d had words for everything: insults for Iok, reverence for Rustal, respectful distance for colleagues. But this person defied her vocabulary. They made her feel raw in a way that had nothing to do with battle damage, a tether tugging at some emotion she’d never been trained to name.

Her jaw tightened. “You’re the only one who doesn’t make me want to bite something when you show up unannounced,” she said, as if that were a colossal romantic confession. “It’s annoying. I’ve been trying to figure out why for six months.”

She pushed off the railing and took a step forward, not a colonel’s stride, but the cautious, almost feral advance of the wild child she’d never quite managed to smooth over. Up close, without the banquet hall’s glow, she looked exhausted. Younger, despite the rank on her collar. The ghost of the girl who’d once popped a butterfly into her mouth and declared it “not bad” still lingered in the defiant set of her shoulders.

“You should go back inside before they send a search party,” she muttered. “I’m not good company tonight.”

---

But she didn’t move aside. Didn’t break eye contact. Didn’t retreat. For a woman who could outmaneuver nearly any pilot in the system, she was doing a remarkably poor job of escaping this conversation. A beat of silence. Then, quieter, rough at the edges: “...Unless you want to stand here and be useless with me. I wouldn’t... mind that. This once.”

Her hand, still smudged with breadcrumbs, lifted just slightly, an aborted, uncertain gesture that in a more polished person might have reached out to brush a sleeve or touch a wrist. But Julieta aborted it midway, letting her arm fall back to her side. The music from the banquet bled faintly through the terrace doors, muffled and irrelevant.

“Just this once,” she repeated, as if she needed to convince herself it was true.