For reccea: JC/Lance. "Nothing I feel pulls me at all / Again I wait for this to pull apart / To break my time in two / Another night with her / But I'm always wanting you."

Lance knew that JC wasn't dating Tara the minute that he heard him call her "honey". That was one of JC's endearments, but he saved it for the people who didn't matter, the random fans and friends-of-friends and people whose names he couldn't remember, the circles of friends who were his friends but never anything more than that. He could tell that Tara knew it, too, by the way that she put a hand lightly on JC's arm and smiled at him, the way that she turned her head away when his eyes lit up for someone who wasn't her and trained her conversation on anyone who happened to be available.

"You know," Lance said at some party thrown by one of JC's friends that they dragged him to, thinking that he needed to get out of the house, thinking that he had to leave Russia behind him. "They taught us something in training that always made me think of us."

JC had spent a good two hours dragging Lance around and introducing him, always with a smile and a touch and a hug for the people he came across, on one of his rare life-of-the-party nights. Lance had put up with it with good graces, or as best as he could, until JC seemed to see that Lance was getting ready to want to leave. Tara had stood on her toes and kissed JC's cheek and turned to make her way to the kitchen. He and JC found a couch in one of the quiet sections of the house, but they could hear the music through the walls, and as JC looked up and frowned in consideration, someone stumbled in, mumbled an apology, and stumbled out again. "What's that?" JC asked. Lance could almost see him wondering if he was supposed to be the supportive friend by pretending that it hadn't happened, or talking over whatever Lance wanted to talk.

"Local vertical." Lance looked down at the highball of gin and tonic he was carrying around with him; he'd gotten out of the habit of drinking while he'd been in training, but Justin had gotten him right back into it. "There's this thing, you see? Humans aren't meant to live without an up and a down. Nine-tenths of people who've been up in zero G can't adapt to the thought of not having that, right? One mission brought a few goldfish with them. You get up there, you're in zero G, water forms a perfect sphere -- and the goldfish flipped out. It didn't know which way was up. Put a flat surface against the sphere, make it a hemisphere, and the goldfish is swimming around, all fine and happy. Two flat surfaces, parallel or perpindicular or any combination in between, and the fish died of mortal confusion."

JC's eyebrows furrowed. "That's not really nice to the fish."

Lance closed his eyes. "That's not the point. Every single human space construction has taken absolute care to establish a local vertical, you know? Mir's got a few, depending on what room you're in. But there's always one per room, and only one. One up; one down. We go nuts without it." It hurt, a little, to say "we" and mean "humans" instead of "station personnel", but it was the kind of hurt that said that it would fade, someday. "They taught us all kinds of spatial perception tricks to help us work without local vertical if we could, and ignore it if we couldn't, but they warned us that it just drives most people totally batshit. We're adapted to living in gravity."

"That's kind of cool." JC turned the thought over in his head a few times. "It's like, what? Your brain automatically adjusts to the "up" and "down" that each room has?"

"Yeah," Lance said. Tara clicked into the room on her high heels and headed straight to stand behind the couch, one hand on JC's hair. JC looked up at her and smiled, the same quick and shining smile that he gave to everyone. Lance wondered whether or not she recognized that she was a satellite.

"Why'd it make you think of us?" JC twined his fingers with Tara's.

"Nevermind," Lance said. "It's not important."

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