Formula 101

Maybe this is where the story really starts. Months earlier, in a sterile NASA board room, where Lando sits among men and women twice his age. Some intern drafted up the specifics of Project Orbiter on a free Canva template. Lando can only stare at the GIF of a rocket going back and forth, back and forth, as they try to orient him about the long-shot mission they want him to go on. 

Him. Lando, who once accidentally dyed his suit a blushing shade of pink after forgetting a red sock in the laundry. Lando, who is a mechanical engineer solely because his hands can never stay still. Lando, who only took a shot at NASA because you wouldn’t shut up about the stars and he wanted to see what all the fuss was about. 

“Norris,” Zak, Lando’s direct superior, says firmly. “You still with us?” 

Lando plasters on the fakest smile known to man. “Yeah,” he croaks. “Still with you.” 

They dismiss him two hours later with a sealed manila envelope, a new training schedule, and strict instructions on non-disclosure. Only immediate family. Anyone else was a security risk. To break that particular rule involved jail, so, as badly as Lando itches to tell you or even Fewtrell, he’d rather that neither of you serve time because of him. 

That gives him four months. Four months before he’s jettisoned to outer space, which should be any astronaut’s dream, really. But Lando always thought he’d be sent on one of those smaller missions. A week on the moon. A spacewalk to the International Space Station. Not a nearly-decade long journey to go and see if the icy oceans of Juptier can be harvested to solve Earth’s water shortage. 

Andrea Stella, the Chief of NASA’s Astronaut Office, had pitched for Lando like his life depended on it. “Norris has the mental resilience required for this mission,” Stella had said. 

Whatever the fuck that meant. 

Lando had a great deal of things, but he never thought courage to be one of them. It was not a particularly self-deprecating thought. It was just a living, breathing fact. He didn’t like scary movies. He slept with a night light on. He hasn’t told you how he feels about you. All that jazz. 

That night—when he finds himself in your apartment for your once-a-week hangout—he thinks about it. For just a teeny, tiny moment, he considers it. How hard can it be? 

He’ll tell you he loves you. He’ll tell you he’s been in love with you since he first met you in university, where he’d been an obnoxious fratboy with a backwards cap and you were his project partner constantly annoyed at his incompetence. You had straightened him out. Got him to land in NASA, of all places. The same guy who did jello shots on a Tuesday night was now supposed to be the saving grace of the Earth’s watersheds, and it was because you whipped him into shape.

Lando loved you then, in the clubs with the sticky floors and the library with its rattling AC. He loves you now in your too-small kitchen where you flit around as if you’re cooking something gourmet instead of a Kraft Dinner. He’s pretty sure he’ll love you in space, when he’s lightyears away and all he’ll have are the constellations to keep him company.

If he’s as courageous as they claim he is, he’ll tell you. He’ll say it out loud. He’ll close the distance, kiss you, lift you off your feet—

“Bon appétit!”

You lay down his bowl in front of him. The macaroni pasta glares up at him, sad and orange. He must have made a face because you smack him upside on the head. 

“Ow!” Lando howls, rubbing the sore spot. “What the hell, woman?!” 

“What did I say about saying woman,” you retort as you settle into the seat across from him. 

He levels you with a glare. “Really? We’re going to tackle the intricacies of misogyny now?” 

“You started it.” 

“You hit me!”

“You deserved it.” 

Lando takes a deep breath. You spear your mac’n’cheese. There’s a moment of silence before he shovels a forkful of the ‘meal’ into his mouth, ignoring the way it burns the roof of his mouth. He makes a show of swallowing before gritting out, “I’m sorry for calling you ‘woman’.”

You only stare at him, wholly unimpressed. 

“What?” he huffs. “Do you want me to grovel?” 

“I’m not opposed,” you answer without missing a beat. 

“You—” He breaks off into a laugh, his forehead landing with a light thunk against your kitchen counter. He has had a day you can’t even imagine, a day he can’t even tell you about, and here you are, pushing every single one of his buttons. 

He loves you. He loves you so much it makes him want to be brave. 

But to want to be something is not the same as being, so Lando doesn’t tell you that night. Instead, he listens as you bitch about work. He lets you pick the movie. He doesn’t complain when you fall asleep midway, drooling on his shoulder. 

When he comes back from Project Orbiter—if he does at all—ten years will have passed. Ten whole years without your little weekly traditions, your annual road trips. He’ll miss your birthday, he realizes. He’ll miss so many of them. Forrest Gump plays idly on as Lando spirals on your couch. Who’s going to remember to buy your birthday cupcake? That had always been his job. 

You stir in your sleep, burying your face into his sleeve. You mumble something that suspiciously sounds like his name. He pulls you in gently, gently, careful not to wake you. When he falls asleep himself, he dreams of birthday sprinkles, of solar systems, of shooting stars the same color as your eyes. 

“There’s something you’re not telling me.” 

Full stop. Record scratch. 

Lando is t-minus three months, eight days, and one hour to D-Day. He has been good. Maybe a little too good. Constantly asking you to hang out, insisting on more sleepovers than usual. He’s always been clingy by nature, but recent events have turned him into cling wrap. 

Your accusation comes on a Saturday. You’d begrudgingly accepted his invite to an observatory two hours away from your city, getting into his passenger seat at the bumfuck hour of five in the afternoon. Lando made several pitstops. A gas station convenience store, a diner with overpriced pancakes. 

The two of you are back on the road, making your slow, steady way to the planetarium. Your This Is: Chase Atlantic playlist filters through the tinny speakers of his car. Lando’s fingers flex against the wheel as he cowers under the heavy weight of your all-knowing glare. 

“What? Me?” he says with a weak laugh. “Hiding something from you?” 

Historically, Lando has never been good at hiding from you. You’re smart like that. You read him like one of those worn books you keep on your bedside table; annotated, dog-eared, marketed as ‘well-loved’.

You fall quiet. He hates when you do that, when you weaponize your silence. It makes his palms sweat. He changes strategies. “Is it a crime to want to spend more time with you?” he insists. 

“Sure, Jan,” you grumble as you go stare out the window instead. 

Guilt simmers in the pit of Lando’s stomach. He tastes iron as he bites the inside of his cheek from trying his very best to keep the truth from spilling out. Please, he wants to beg, and he’s never been the type to get on his knees—but he’ll do it right now if he has to. Please, the number of hours we have left together is not so large. I don’t want to waste time fighting you when I could be loving you instead. 

Thankfully, you are the forgiving and forgetful type. By the time he’s paying for the entrance to Palomar and ushering you towards the five-point-one meter Hale Telescope, you seem to have effectively forgotten you’re supposed to be upset with him. 

“Did you know,” you say, voice pitched with excitement as you cling to Lando’s arm, “that the Hale corrected what we originally thought about the Andromeda Galaxy?” 

Lando did know, actually. It was on the brochure. Still, he wants to hear you talk about it, so he says, “Really?” 

“Really!” Your laugh, so full of life, echoes around the otherwise empty telescope dome. “Walter Baade wanted to look at variable stars. He didn’t find any; instead, he realized that previous distance estimates were wrong. Andromeda was twice as far as we previously thought.” 

“Twice as far,” he repeats, trying to wrap his mind around that. About something once assumed to be so close being much further than expected. (He tries not to make a metaphor out of it.) 

You have a different take on it. “Just like that,” you hum, gaze roaming around the observatory, “the size of the universe doubled.” 

That’s what Lando remembers the most from that day. Not the look on your face when he got you access to try the Hale out yourself. Not the drive home where you two argued over America’s lack of a metric system. No, he thinks of that brief chat about the astronomer who didn’t know better and the world that was much bigger than expected.

Time marches steadily on afterwards. Lando gets busier with preparations for the mission, with keeping his secret from you and the rest of his friends. He tries valiantly to not make it look like he’s dying, because giving away his belongings and all that would surely have the alarm bells ringing. Instead, he writes letters despite his shitty cursive. He meets a NASA-mandated attorney over Zoom to draft a last will and testament, just in case. 

He buys some six hundred dollars worth of Polaroid film. 

“Be honest,” you say warily as he tears open the package, “are you going through a midlife crisis?” 

“Bingo,” he deadpans. 

It’s not that out of the ordinary. Lando has blown a significant amount of his salary on this hobby. Digital cameras, film rolls. Your expression is only slightly exasperated as you watch him tear into the Polaroid Go Color Film Double Packs he’d bought off Amazon. 

“In my defense,” he grumbles, “they were on sale.” 

“You have the moral backbone of a chocolate éclair,” you shoot back. 

There’s a reason why, obviously. Not only is Lando heading someplace where money won’t matter, but he also won’t really have 24/7 access to Instagram while he’s trying to navigate the Milky Way. He imagines doomscrolling will be the least of his worries up in space. 

He imagines it must be lonely. 

There will be options for phone calls—signal routing, video chats, amateur radios. It won’t be the same, though, and so Lando reaches for what he knows. 

“Hey!” you yelp. 

The flash of his Polaroid is blinding. A mini-galaxy exploding in on itself. The device whirrs before spitting out the photo he’d just taken. You, mid-snort while watching TikToks, chewing distractedly on the aglet of your ratty hoodie. 

The image fades into all of its unflattering glory. You try to snatch it, but Lando’s already holding it over his head. 

“I wasn’t ready!” you whine. 

Neither am I, Lando almost says. Instead, he sticks out his tongue and says, as if it’s the world’s biggest inconvenience, “Let’s take another one, then.” 

You two run through an entire pack. You tease him about being trigger-happy, about wasting his money on some mundane day, but he would argue otherwise. Everything from the too-close selfie to the accidental snap of your socked feet makes Lando feel like the universe isn’t too big after all. 

It can fit, right here, in the palm of his hand. In the sound of your laugh. In the stretch of his room and a sun-lit afternoon with you.

Nobody blinks an eye when Lando goes on to take a bajillion photos. 

Hangouts with Fewtrell and the rest of the boys. Strategy meetings where Oscar shoots him pitying looks. Weekends and evenings and errands with you. 

Lando buys a dozen more boxes of film because all of it suddenly seems so photo-worthy. The flowering weed cracking peeking through the cracked concrete. The dust of flour over his mother’s kitchen counter. Your nail polish, your elbow, your back as you walk ahead of him. 

“Are you planning some sort of exhibit?” you finally ask one evening. 

It’s a lot. It’s two shoe boxes worth of Polaroids with another box already being cleared to make way for a new batch. Lando sits in the middle of all the mess, holding two of the more recent ones—Flo posing with her horse and Oliver flipping the camera off. 

Lando’s shoulders raise in a shrug. “New hobby,” he says, and that’s that. 

He knows he’ll have to do some serious sorting. NASA was clear about his personal preference kit being limited to a maximum of 20 items. A kilogram of material for a decade away. He’s done his complaining, and he’s bought the photo album, and— 

Click. 

Lando blinks away the flash. You stand at the edge of his collection, camera up to one eye. You catch the photo of him before it can flutter down onto the floor. 

“You need to see how insane you look,” you say with a giggle that makes his heart do something funny in his chest. 

He does look insane, certifiably so. He looks dead serious as he stares into the abyss, surrounded by a month’s worth of photographs. “That’s kinda meta,” he says amusedly, reaching for the photo. 

You hold it out of reach. “This one’s mine,” you say. “You already have so many.” 

“Excuse you! Film is expensive.” 

“You can spare me one.” 

“Why should I?” 

“Because you looove me.” 

Oh, the way you say it. Even with the teasing tone, even with that cocky smirk on your face—you say it like it’s a cardinal truth. Astronomers get coordinates wrong; NASA is not infallible in their own predictions. 

But Lando Norris loves you and you know it well. More than that, you trust it. 

It’s cruel, and unfair, and Lando would have it no other way. 

You tuck away the Polaroid with an aha-I-won air. You raise the viewfinder to your eye a second time. “C’mon,” you say. “Say ‘cheese’!”

Lando had been so busy collecting photos of all of you that he’d neglected that you, too, might need some documentation of him. Some proof that he was once twenty-something with his feet to the ground, with his heart in your back pocket. When—if—he comes back, he can only imagine the differences. Wrinkles and laugh lines and silver hair. And so he smiles, says “Cheese,” lets you nick that photo, too. 

For every dozen he takes of the world around him, you’ll steal one or two of him. Lando, toeing off his rubber shoes in your entryway. Lando, struggling to open an umbrella as a storm rages on. Lando, his chin in your palm as he stares at you through the camera lens. He pretend-fights you for each one, just so it feels sweeter when he ‘lets’ you keep it. 

Everything he has is yours to begin with, anyway. 

NASA doesn’t tell him. 

Among the many shitty things the Administration has and is about to put him through, that happens to take the cake. There is no warning on the day they seed the press release. 

NASA to Launch Jupiter Mission with Astronaut Lando Norris. A four-minute read with a quote from Washington’s NASA Headquarters. The accompanying photo features Lando in his suit, with his helmet on his knee, the standard patches over his chest. He’d been smiling so wide his eyes were crescents. 

The news hits while Lando’s in the shower. He emerges to his phone blowing up—seven missed calls from Fewtrell, and several frantic voicemails from Carlos. Lando feels a lump in his throat as he stares down at the deluge of activity on his lockscreen’s Notification Center. 

And then. 

Two texts from you. A link to the article, then a single question mark.

Lando doesn’t waste any time. Doesn’t even bother to get in his car. His shirt’s probably inside out and he doesn’t remember if he locked his front door, but it doesn’t matter, not when he’s running. Down the street. Around the corner. An absolute madman, racing down sidewalks and pedestrian lanes until he’s at your apartment. Even then, he opts for the stairs—taking two at a time, sweating buckets despite his fresh shower. 

He’s nursing a stitch in his side as he rings the doorbell, jamming his thumb into the damn thing enough times that it might even break. 

When you open the door, he beats you to it. “I wanted to tell you,” he blurts out, “but they told—they told me you’d go to jail if I did. And I, ah—” (He’s still trying to catch his breath from all the running. He’s practically doubled over, holding himself up with one hand on the doorframe.) “You would do so badly in prison. Like, so badly. You don’t—you wouldn’t like the food.” 

You try to slam the door in his face.

He jams his foot just in time, wincing as his shoes barely do anything to protect him from the impact. It doesn’t matter. NASA would still send him to space with a broken pinky toe. 

“Please,” he wheezes. “Please don’t be mad.” 

“I’m not mad!” you screech, sounding rather mad. 

But you’re right. When you pull open the door, and Lando straightens enough to look at you properly, he sees that you’re right. You’re glaring daggers at him; your eyes are crossed over your chest. 

And you’re crying.

Your eyes are rimmed with red. There are tears streaming down your cheeks and wet spots around the collar of your shirt, like you tried to wipe them off just a few minutes ago. You’re furious—rightfully so—but you’re also something else. Something that makes Lando want to cry a bit himself. 

“Oh, baby,” he breathes. 

He closes the distance, reaching for you. You try to resist, shoving his chest, his shoulder, but his arms are bands as they wrap around you. His face instinctively buries in the top of your head as you thrash in his grip. 

“Let me go,” you wail, balled fists slamming against his chest. Somehow, it hurts less than the sound of your sobbing. “You—fuck you—don’t touch me!”

Lando’s seen you through your different moods across the years. He should know better. Should know to take a step back, to let you feel what you need to feel, to give you the cursory day or two before processing it all. 

But he doesn’t have the luxury of time today. It’s t-minus a month and two days. If Lando has to spend even thirty minutes of that with you hating him, he’s not sure if he’ll survive. So he holds you as you cry and flail and curse him out; he lets you beat him up, lets you sob through his shirt, lets you feel the fear he’s been doing his best to hide. 

Through it all, he says only two words, over and over and over again. 

“I’m sorry,” he mumbles into your hair. “I’m sorry, baby. I’m sorry.” 

What does sorry sound like in space? Did extraterrestrials know what it felt like to feel betrayed? Lando’s thoughts are everywhere and nowhere all at once as he waits you out, as he holds you for what feels like forever. 

You calm down eventually. He invites himself in, making a beeline for your kitchen. He pours you a glass of water—his fingers shaking against the pitcher—before going into Defcon 1 preparations. Your favorite blanket, your comfort show as background noise. It’s a routine that he’s perfected over time. 

You linger exactly where he left you. Lando looks up nervously. “Come on,” he says, his voice cracking. 

When he says your name, it’s a quiet thing. You should know by now that your name is safe with him. Still, you look at him as if he’s someone you don’t recognize. As if a part of you is already grieving the decade ahead. 

You don’t ask Why didn’t you tell me?, because you know why. You don’t ask Are you scared?, because you know he is. 

The question you end up asking is, “Are you going to come back?” 

Lando could talk about the odds. The math and the science behind it all. How there’s a small team at NASA dedicated to making sure everything goes smoothly for him, led by the best engineers in the world. 

He could talk about the unfathomable as well. Mechanical failures and rogue comets. How tomorrow is not promised for anybody, especially those cruising at altitudes that very few will ever get to reach. 

But the look on your face leaves no room for logic. This is not the moment for Lando to spew numbers, to show you his dossier, to reassure you of NASA’s track record. 

Instead, he takes a deep, deep breath. 

He whispers back, “You know I always come back to you.” 

The public sees the pre-launch press conference, the mission briefing. On the week of his departure, they see Lando exactly as how NASA wants him to be seen. A charming, plucky astronaut with carefully gelled curls and a tight-lipped smile. Lando calls the mission an ‘honor’, says it’s a ‘privilege’ to do this for humankind.

They try to pry into his more personal feelings, his innermost thoughts, but he has been media trained to hell and back. He laughs politely. He deflects. He slips in a joke or two, chirping, “There’s no place I’d rather be.” 

The public does not see the weekend at the lakehouse. 

Family, friends, coworkers who can keep a secret. Anybody who says ‘Jupiter’ has to take a shot. The dollar-star decorations feature cartoon planets and clip art astronauts. The menu’s themed, too—rocket fruit skewers, sandwiches shaped like stars, Moon Pies. 

You’re at the center of the organized chaos. You’re in the kitchen, making planetary cupcakes with Cisca. You’re handing out towels to people hurtling themself into the lake. You’re running the weekend like the military, and everybody looks away. Nobody says a thing. This is just how you cope, how you make sense of it all.

You’re undoubtedly still mad. Lando’s not naive enough to believe he’s completely forgiven. But work is work, and you know that your days, your hours, your minutes are limited, and so you’ve spent every night at Lando’s apartment. You’ve judged his personal preference kit. You suspend the worst of your emotions in favor of soaking up what little of Lando you have left. 

This Lando, who is crass, whose curls are a mess, who smiles with all his teeth bared. This Lando, who follows you around like a lost puppy. Hooking his chin over your shoulder. Pressing his palm to the small of your back. Whispering some dumb joke in the crook of your neck, then pulling back to see if you’re laughing. (He is soaking up what he can, too.) 

The highlight for everyone else is Saturday afternoon. You, organizing the cooler on the dock. Lando, his footsteps quiet as he sneaks up on you. Conversations pause as you screech, “Norris, don’t you dare—!” 

It’s too late. Lando has thrown you over his shoulder with ease, has booked it down the dock, has sent you two hurtling into the cold water. Some shake their heads. Some snap photos. Everyone laughs. 

You and Lando surface. Your arms tangle around his shoulders, holding on for dear life. “I’m going to kill you,” you sputter as he gasps out breathless, watery laughs. “I’m going to drown you right now, I swear!” 

“I’d like to see you try,” Lando shoots back. 

You try to dunk his head. He gets a mouthful of water before dragging you down with him, the two of you kicking and flailing.

Underwater, above ground, or in space, it doesn’t matter; Lando’s love for you is glaringly obvious. 

What everyone else thinks to be Lando’s favorite part happens that same evening. At dinner, where Lando is dreading the thought of being asked to make some sort of toast—he rehearsed in front of the bathroom mirror, just in case—you turn the tables on him. 

“We have some gifts for you,” you announce, and everybody starts pulling stuff from under their chairs as if that were their cue. 

Lando blinks, thrown off, his speech now moot. “I can’t—,” he starts, because he’s already filled out the NASA-mandated 5-by-8-by-2-inch bag for his personal preference kit. 

Oscar, the head engineer of Lando’s team, shakes his head. “We got you another one,” he says. “It was hell to file for, but you’re clear.” 

Oh. Oh. “I could kiss you right now, mate,” Lando blurts out. 

“Let’s not go that far,” Oscar says drily. 

The extra PPK is something Lando had no say in. There’s a beaded friendship bracelet from Flo; one of those nifty Kodak Charmeras from Fewtrell. Cisca packs him an embroidered hanky from his childhood, and Lando traces his initials with his thumb while trying very, very hard not to burst into tears. Nobody would judge him if he did. There isn’t a dry eye left in the room, even as the table attempts to keep it light. Laughter and jokes and jabs. 

Your gift is a ten-pack of birthday candles. One for every year that he’ll be gone. 

“I don’t think they have cake in space,” you say. “So you’re going to have to improvise.” 

Your smile is so sad. Lando knows what you look like when you’re holding back tears, and he imagines you two must look like a pair of fools—stuttering on your words, speaking around the lumps in your throats. 

“Thank you,” Lando chokes out once everyone has shown off their parting gift.

This is probably the time for his grand soliloquy. The part where he waxes poetics about doing the right thing, delivers some zingers about meeting aliens.

None of that. Lando ducks his head instead, rubs his teary eyes with the back of his fists like a kid. “Thanks, guys,” he repeats, his voice cracking, and that’s that. 

They think that’s Lando’s highlight of the weekend. And while it was certainly a memory that Lando holds close, there is one more. 

Once all the plates have been cleared, once the music has been turned down. Once everybody has dozed off and left Lando to his own devices. He knows. 

He knows you’ll be on the dock. He knows you’ll be at the edge of it, legs hanging underneath you, palms flat on the wood still drying from earlier that day. He finds you there and sits down next to you, reaching for the words that have been on the tip of his tongue. 

You speak first. “We’re all being pretty dramatic, aren’t we?” You glance sideways at him. “Video chat is a thing.” 

Coping, Lando thinks, but he goes along with it. “They’re setting me up for weekly Zoom calls.” 

“And we can’t text all the time, but you can do emails.” 

“Right. Modern technology, baby.” 

“And you’ll come back.” 

You say it with so much certainty. You say it like a fact. Lando doesn’t respond immediately. He’s still dancing that thin line of trusting the numbers and fearing the unknown. His hands clench into fists, but his eyes stays fixed on you. He doesn’t look away. He can’t. 

“You’ll come back,” you double down. 

He nods, and something inside him cracks open. 

“I—I don’t want you to wait on me or anything,” he starts, which is a terrible start, but a start nonetheless. “I’m not selfish enough to ask that of you. I just—I—”

Your hand rests against his elbow. “Don’t.” 

You meet Lando’s gaze—half-agony, half-hope—with a resoluteness of your own. Here it comes, Lando thinks miserably. You’re going to let him down gently. You’re going to give him that look of pity. You’re going to—

“Tell me later.” 

He’s not sure he heard right. 

“When you get back,” you say slowly. “You can tell me what you want to say.” 

Lando’s not sure if he wants to laugh or cry. He stares at you, then, drinking you in. How your hair falls into your face. The soft line of your jaw. The way you’re looking right back at him. 

“Okay,” he says, voice barely above a murmur. “I’ll tell you then.” 

“I’ll wait,” you say. 

His chest seizes. “Okay.” 

“Don’t keep me waiting too long.” 

He presses his face into your shoulder, laughing just a little bit. It might be a sob. You don’t point it out. “Wouldn’t dream of it,” he breathes. 

Your hand finds his. He clings to it like a lifeline. The world spins madly on. 

Lando lied in his press briefing. There is a place he’d rather be than on a rocket to space. Here—in this moment with just you.

By Friday, all eyes will be on him. He will be launched into the solar system with two PPKs and a Polaroid photo pressed in the inside of his suit—a picture of that lakeshore weekend, where everyone he loves is smiling up at the camera. He will spend 10 years, three months, and 22 days on Mission Orbiter. 

For now, he raises your linked hands and presses a shaky kiss to your knuckles, one at a time. One for every year he’s loved you. One for every year he’ll be gone. A dozen, in total, and then a couple more just because he can. 

Would you look at that?