Chapter Text
Kimi hears the car before he sees it; a shitbox '94 convertible Civic Ollie had been a little too proud getting for practically a pile of lint and rusted bolts. When Ollie had snuck him round the back of his house to his garage at the start of summer, he had been all cheer and no reason, too caught up in the idea of them owning their very own car than anything else.
"She's got a long road ahead for us.” He taps the roof of the car. “We can finally go on that road trip you were talking about!"
Ollie's smile was infectious, a glint in his eyes that made Kimi almost forget entirely about the fact his parents wouldn't let him outside of their view for longer than ten minutes, except only for school or Ollie's place. (Although even that had taken a while to manoeuvre.)
"You know my parents would freak, mate. We'll have to raincheck on that one."
Ollie had groaned and leant against the side of the car, flakes of rust-orange paint shedding onto his sweater as he picked at his sleeves. Kimi was more preoccupied with the fact that Ollie had stupidly worn the same washed-out red sweater as his new beloved car. (And he made sure to never let him forget it.)
Now it's rolling its way down Kimi's street as he clambers out of his bedroom window. His sister Maggie is none too pleased about the scuff marks on the sill. (She'd stood there with her arms folded, already in her private school uniform, angrily huffing at his excuse of being late to school.)
He drops into the overgrown bushes below, and straightens up just in time to catch Ollie through the windscreen, head down, lazily typing on the new flip phone Kimi saw him get for Christmas.
Kimi had shown up to the car in his navy bomber jacket, the one he'd had since forever, the thing practically melded onto him at this point. Ollie was in a white t-shirt and jeans. He was, if nothing else, consistent.
"Mate." Kimi laughs, rapping his knuckles on the roof.
Ollie looks up. His eyes soften around the edges in that way they do.
"Half the block knows you've arrived, no need to text."
Ollie rolls his eyes in good Ollie fashion, but doesn't let it deter him. Kimi pulls the passenger door open (the handle always sticking a little) and flings his bag to the back seat, getting comfortable for the long haul.
"Can't believe you're talking to la mia stella like that," Ollie says, a little too casual for his broken-accented Italian. “She's practically yours too."
Kimi lets a grin slip, filing the dual ownership comment away for another day as something better surfaces.
"Fuck did you just call it?" He turns in his seat. "There's no way you've already named it." He blinks slowly. “And there's no way you actually know what that means."
"I've done my research." Ollie puts the car into first and starts rolling.
Kimi groans as he leans his knees up against the dash. “Don’t start talking to me about research and study before 10am, Bearman.”
The tape Ollie keeps forgetting to take out clicks on low somewhere under their conversation. (He really shouldn't be driving Kimi around on his learners. But then again…)
The two of them fill the silence in every manner of way possible. Most people meet one and don't realise they're getting a package deal; Ollie always trailing behind Kimi, Kimi never a step behind Ollie. They've been this way since the earth collided in on itself and the stars aligned and finally fell into place, just like how Kimi fell perfectly into place into Ollie's life. (Although who met who first has been the topic of debate for many years.)
Ollie couldn't remember sharing a moment without the other, except for the trip back home Kimi and his family took to live in Bologna for a year, where the days bled into each other in a monotonous rhythm: wake up, school, come home, eat a Lunchable he was absolutely not too old for, a Pop-Tart cold and straight from the wrapper, and a bowl of cereal at 4pm because nothing else was in the house; then throwing his bag on his unmade bed while Kimi and him talked through their parents' accounts on online forums. Ending his night playing something moody on the guitar that had since ended up gathering dust in the back of his wardrobe. (He was 11, alright.) Then to do the whole thing over again the next day.
The day before Kimi left had them hunched up in Ollie's room. Kimi's parents had allowed him to spend their final night together, (it had taken a little more than just some enthusiastic begging), which led them buried under a pile of blankets, convincing themselves it was just the dust mites which were making their eyes water. Three plushies from their usual place on his windowsill now sat next to them. He'd never gotten around to putting them away (he wasn't embarrassed about them exactly, even though he was turning 12 soon and everyone seemed to think they were stupid.)
He tears his eyes from the teddy bear Kimi had gotten him for his birthday as a joke he now ended up spending most of his nights with. “I know you used to live in Italy," Ollie said, hugging his knees to his chest, almost afraid to look at Kimi through his messy, static hair. (Kimi had been laughing at it not ten minutes prior.) "You and your family always bring it up at dinner. But will you miss this place in the same way?"
Kimi looked up like he was turning the question over, his brain computing in ways Ollies mind tried to comprehend but couldn't, always the more serious and absentminded one of the two. Kimi always had stars in his eyes, growing brighter the more the cogs in his brain worked to make them shine.
Then in one sudden movement, Kimi clasped their hands together. The heat of his palms cut straight through the wool and cotton and the general disaster of being eleven and overheating under too many blankets.
"I'll miss it even more because you're here, bear." He grinned. "Italy doesn't have my very own grizzly."
Ollie informed him, very seriously, that Italy actually did have brown bears, he had learnt that in biology, and that he had yet to determine whether you could legally adopt one as your best friend.
Kimi held the silence for less than a second before he laughed so hard Ollie could feel the breath of it filling the air between them.
He started laughing too. It was hard not to, when he was around Kimi.
So when they jump out the car laughing about nothing, red shining under the relatively warm first day of the school year, nothing is out of the ordinary. Not in the way Kimi flashes his ever too sharp fangs at Ollie as he heaves his bag up on his shoulder, normal in the way that it makes Ollie experience something his quiet brain has reserved for Kimi and Kimi alone; the ability to make it run a million miles an hour, consumed entirely with the two of them.
They make it to homeroom just a tad late. (Because why would they ever be early?) The crisp September air fades away to the familiar smell of linoleum floors and metal lockers that catches at the back of Ollie's throat. They are the same dented green they've always been. Their school is a great old thing (something they should feel pride for, or whatever.) Ollie reckons the modern classes are ruining the history of the building, but what does he know. What he does know is their ongoing joke that Principal Alonso was present at the opening ceremony. The only ancient part about the interior (aside from Alonso) are the desks with the little shelf underneath where gum has been collecting since 1987.
"Bearman!" Someone from the back row – Lando, already tilted back in his chair at an angle that suggested he'd perfected the art of looking like he wasn't about to tilt a bit too far and have his heart drop to his stomach. He points finger guns at Ollie, then at Kimi. "Antonelli. Looking sharp, mate."
Kimi tips his chin up in acknowledgement, dropping into his seat and shrugging the bomber jacket off one shoulder. Ollie pulls out the chair next to him, scraping it loud enough that George glances up from the attendance sheet.
"Sorry, sorry." Ollie holds up a hand, not sorry at all.
Kimi spends the beginning of attendance making hushed jokes that the school is too scared to put them in a homeroom without each other, more terrified of the two of them separated than together. Ollie laughs a bit too loud and doesn't care for the glances, not when Kimi's got those stars in his eyes and is hunched over trying to hide his expression.
They eventually get told to quieten down. Ollie folds his arms over his chest and counts the stray hairs on the back of Kimi's head.
Kimi keeps poking at him while their homeroom reps, George and Max, run through the notes for the week. Yes, spirit week is coming up. Yes, assignments count from the first week. Ollie couldn't care less about spirit week, but Kimi is excited, so he's excited too.
Then the timetables come out, and a pit forms in Ollie's stomach the further down the page he reads.
"Seriously? Nothing? We took all the same electives..."
Kimi snatches the paper out of his hand and Ollie doesn't even think about the crumpling.
It doesn't really matter when he's staring down the barrel of hour-long blocks without his best mate. They've managed it before, a chemistry-physics clash last year, but never half a day's worth. Never a Kimi-shaped void running from first period to lunch.
He stares blankly at his hands while Kimi's eyes dart back and forth between the two timetables, then shoves them both onto the desk.
"Whatever. Fine. Alonso is out to get us —" he holds up a finger, "— but that doesn't change the fact we have homeroom and lunch together."
Kimi. Ever the optimist.
Ollie runs a hand through his hair. Already a few knots. "Yeah... yeah, we'll be alright." He tries to convince himself more than anything.
"Although physics was utterly brain-numbing last year," Kimi mumbles, letting his head fall onto the table.
Ollie doesn't really know what to say. He knows it's not the end of the world. It just feels a bit like it. He doesn't want to think too much on how it already feels like they spend too much time apart. All the hours when Kimi has football and he's out cycling, the afternoons they aren't getting cheap takeaways and are instead holed up in their separate rooms, texting each other on flip phones from two streets away. He knows his other mates don't have this sort of thing, and that's fine. They just don't get it. If he was more poetic, he'd find better words for it than just how life is — Kimi and Ollie, Ollie and Kimi. Instead he leans his jaw on his palm until he can feel his elbow digging into the desk.
Kimi turns to look at him through a curtain of dark curls. (Ollie remembers when it was so long. So straight. A completely different era.) and their eyes meet.
The bell goes.
The '94 Civic (or la mia stella, as Ollie insists on calling it, with which Kimi swears he’ll only start speaking Italian until Ollie learns it fluently) smells like old takeaway and the pine air freshener Ollie's mum had hung on the mirror that he'd left past its expiry (How it was already expired was beyond him.) The sun is still doing its thing in the sky by the time they pull into the carpark, bags abandoned on the back seat with food balanced between them. Burgers wrapped in paper that had gone soft at the edges from their endless fidgeting as they drove, accompanied by a shared box of fries already going lukewarm.
Theres a faint murmur of music playing in the background. If he wasn’t playing his own tapes, Ollie ventured to the radio. He fixed it up over summer, taken him three weekends and expert help from Kimi (who had spent most of the time talking about the local football matches) and a YouTube tutorial he'd printed off at the library. Now it crackled to life every time he turned the key, whatever station it had last been on filling the car before either of them said a word.
The Civic's metal is still warm from the day when Ollie pulls himself up, the bodywork giving a soft groan of protest under his weight. He makes it look easier than it is.
Kimi stands at the bumper with his arms folded, looking at the car the way someone looks at a swimming pool in October.
"She won't collapse."
"You don't know that."
"I rebuilt half her engine, I think I know—"
Kimi climbs up and the car dips only slightly. He settles next to Ollie with his legs stretched out in front of him, the soles of his trainers catching the last of the afternoon sun, burger balanced on his knee and the paper bag between them already going translucent with grease.
The carpark is mostly empty by now, a few stragglers cutting across to the bus stop, someone's forgotten bike still chained to the rack by the gate. The radio blasting obnoxious rock music from a passing car drifts in and then out again. The standard particular nothing-sound of a Tuesday afternoon in September that Ollie usually doesn’t notice but Kimi will point out for him.
“I’m so annoyed we have two homeroom reps this year, it’s as if they don’t think we’re able to handle our own.”
Before Ollie can actually comment on anything (he wasn’t going to. Theres a burger that needs to be finished.) Kimi continues on;
“We’re seventeen! Practically entering adulthood.” He tussles his curly hair, it all falling back into the same place it always does, naturally over his eyes. His parents seem enamoured with it, Ollie thinks his own parents would’ve told him to cut it ages ago. It suits him perfectly, so Ollie wouldn’t have it any other way.
“Yeah, just sucks we have to spend most of it apart.”
Kimi goes silent at that. Ollie immediately feels stupid. He doesn’t know why he dampened the mood. That aching feeling pooling at the bottom of his stomach is back again, the feeling he gets whenever he doesn’t know what Kimi’s thinking (a rare occurrence, but something he usually ends up figuring out anyways.)
“Weird isn't it? That this is our last year."
Midway through what is technically Ollies third handful of fries, Kimi stretches his legs out even further and stares up at nothing in particular.
"I feel like we should actually do something this year."
Ollie pauses mid-bite. "...Do something.” He’s confused. “We’re always doing something.”
“—Like really get do something. Parties. Staying out. All of it." Kimi gestures vaguely at the sky, like the sky is the general concept of teenage freedom. "Don't you feel restless? Like everything's just right there in the air?”
Ollie tilts his head, considering. Takes another bite. (He is not slowing down for this.) "I cant see anything in the air right now, dude.”
Kimi shoves him so hard he nearly goes off the side of the car.
"Fuck off. You know what I mean." He's laughing though, and Ollie is too, steadying himself with one hand on the warm metal of the roof. He does know what he means.
“Surely we can make some more memories."
Ollie looks at him for a second, the late sun catching the edges of his hair turning his strands golden, still grinning even while trying to be serious.
"Yeah," he says. "Alright."
He means it. Any memory with Kimi is one worth having.
Days bleed on like they always do at the start of term. Kimi gets picked up by Ollie every morning and settles into the plush red seats with ease. They head to their respective classes, and when they yell each other's names across the hall at the start of lunch period, nobody gets surprised anymore. Not really. They've taken to hanging out more after school since football season isn't taking up all of Kimi's free time just yet. He's already talking about tryouts, though.
"I've got to start practising, mate. I can't be eating all this junk with you all the time." He motions to the spread around them (a shared bag of Doritos going slightly stale in the open air accompanied by Snapple) leaning up against the metal fence at the edge of the park near their houses. They'd spent the past couple of summers finding their spot, and they're definitely not biassed, but they've got the best view out of any corner of it. (Ollie had been particularly pleased once he sat down and got a bite into his burrito.)
Kimi's got his arms hooked onto the wire; it's starting to dig into his shoulder blades as he animatedly talks Ollie's ear off. The air around them has turned slightly cooler with the setting sun. Its final rays are in his eyes now, and he tries to block it out with his forearm.
Ollie kicks at his jittering foot with feigned distaste. "This is the highlight of your day. You liar."
It really is. Nothing gets Kimi through double maths like knowing Ollie's leaning against the Civic at the end of it, waiting to go for a drive or spend the afternoon throwing darts or playing video games in his garage. (Which Kimi is convinced has a colony of mice living in it, but ignorance is bliss.)
"Yeah, well. It helps that you've got an insane metabolism." He taps his foot against the grass, fingers twisting around the wire.
Really, Ollie could eat anything. Kimi had once dared him to down thirty hot dogs in a row and the only thing that stopped them was their wallets.
Ollie scrunches up his expression, the one he makes when he's finding the words for something. "You know, I wish I could be a football player. I wish I could kick a ball like you. That sounds incredible." He sits up straighter, big toothy grin that reaches his eyes.
Kimi picks at the skin around his thumbnail.
Ollie is so bright in the afternoon sun. It reminds him of last year, Ollie essentially mortifying him in front of Dino and Lorenzo at lunch, going on unprompted about Kimis best qualities as he typically does. "The lips, I think. No, hard to beat how much affection he has," while Kimi refused to remove his head from the cafeteria table for the remainder of the period. But it's moments like these where he's forever appreciative of him.
"You're pretty good, bear.”
"Yeah, me hitting the goalposts every time is just a show of skill, surely."
"It really is miraculous."
Ollie lightly punches the muscle of his arm and they both crack up.
Eventually Ollie is standing up, dusting his palms off on his jeans and white polo, and reaching a hand down that Kimi takes. The grass beneath him had gone cold and damp without him noticing, and he lets himself get hauled up.
Kimi has had a good run at befriending people in his classes. He's found it's easier to talk to people when the teacher has a voice that goes in one ear and out the other. He's usually fiddling with something on his desk, the paint chips already flaking off from where someone had dug their initials into the wood. (L + O) the fibres caking under his nails when he felt a nudge at his side from a boy named Isack, although he's one of those guys everyone only refers to by his last name.
"Any idea what he's saying?" Hadjar asks in heavily accented English.
"Gonna be honest, dude, I haven't been listening for the past twenty minutes." He looks up at the teacher, still in practically the exact same spot from when Kimi had started drifting off after the word 'polynomial'. Hadjar laughs under his breath and they keep the joke running until the end of the period.
Lunch has the traditional enthusiastic, long awaited, dramatic reunion with Ollie and on occasion their friends from last year – Dino, Lorenzo, Paul and Arthur (with his notebook open like he'd not taken a single break the whole holidays, which Kimi and Ollie discreetly commented on with just their eyes.)
"I just wish I could hand all the maths homework over to someone and stick to English." Kimi sighs.
Dino chips in before Ollie can say anything. "Isn't there a maths test this week?"
"Oh, fuck off." Kimi had completely forgotten about that. Whatever. Hhe'll suffer through it, force Ollie to sit with him while he studies, where they'll mostly get distracted talking, but hey, it's better than nothing.
Ollie is mid-conversation with Paul about cycling when he seems to remember something and refocuses all his attention back on Kimi.
"So.” He grins at Kimi’s startled expression. “Party this weekend."
He tries recalling everything as Kimi excitedly stutters out questions, looking momentarily puzzled trying to retrace it. Ollie had met Franco through Arvid, which was how most things happened with Arvid. You didn't really seek him out, you just ended up seeing him everywhere. He'd been outside the sports hall after practice, still pulling his jacket on, when Arvid had jogged over with someone in tow.
"Bearman! Good to see you man.” He clapped him on his back harshly. Ollie winced and instinctively rolled his shoulders with a smile. “This is Franco."
Franco gave a cheery grin and waved, glancing between Arvid and Ollies casual conversation about cycling and whether the vending machine by the gym had been restocked yet. Normal stuff.
“—but yeah dude, Haven’t seen you around all summer!”
“Just had so much going on!” He mused, Arvid nodded his head like he understood exactly the feeling. He probably did, so Ollie clarified; “Nah, Mainly worked on my new ride with Kimi.”
“Oh?” Franco piped up, and gave Ollie the excuse to talk about the 94, (He wasn’t going to mention her real name to people just yet.)
Then Franco had mentioned Liam's party and Ollie had said yeah without really thinking about it.
It wasn't until he was back at the Civic that he'd thought, 'Kimi's going to love this.'
After explaining the events step by step before brushing it off with a “whatever,” and a wave of his hands, He looks back to his plate of food and continues eating. “Arvid hadn't even asked if you were coming. Said it was a given, the two of us being inseparable and all.”
Kimi laughs. But as Ollie moves on to the next thing, he spends a moment thinking about it. Ollie is really damn popular, could be as popular as Arvid if he wanted to. People are always trying to make friends with him, always pulling him aside before the two of them head into homeroom. And yet he only ever ends up back here, back in the Civic.
Only ever ends up back with Kimi.
He shovels the thought down and reaches for the last of his lunch.
First party. Things are looking up.