Chapter Text
Snow came to the lake in the last week of December, and with it the thing Sebastian looked forward to most all year: Silence.
Not the silence of an empty garage at midnight, which was really just noise waiting to happen. This was the other kind, the deep, the quiet of the house above Léman with the season packed away and nowhere in the entire woeld the two of them had to be. No catching flights, no sponsor, no two-cars-two-arrival-times choreography through the same gate. For a few shorts of weeks every winter the enormous machine of their lives simply switced off, and the came here, to the low wooden house half-burried in pines, and were allowed to be norhing but two men who loved each other (SO MUCH).
It was the only place they never had to hide. That was the true luxury of it. More than the lake, more than the view, here there were no adjoining hotel rooms, no colleague in corridor, no long lens on a far hillside. Here sebastian could across a room and put his hands on his alpha without checking the exists, and the novelty of that never once, in years, got old.
He stood at the tall window with his coffee and watched the snow come down over the black water and felt something in him unclench that only ever and unclenched here. It was the wet, heavy snow of early winter, the kind that stuck pilling soft on the deck railing, weighing down the arms of the pines, blurring the far shore into a smudge of white. Steam drifted up off the lake, the water was still warmer than the air, somehow and down by the dock, where it was shallow, a thin skin of ice had started to form overnight. The glass under his fingertips was cold enough to ache. Six inches the other side of it, the room was gold, close, and warm. The fire Kimi was building throwing its first heat against his back, the smell of coffee and woodsmoke, everything soft edge. Cold enough outside to kill you, if you were foolish and alone in it. In here it was so warm he could have wept and for a moment, watching his own breath not quite fog a window heated from within, he understood that most of that warmth had nothing to do with the fire at all.
“You are doing the thing,” Kimi said, from the sofa without looking up from the fire he was building. “Standing at windows. Thinking loudly.”
Sebastian rolled his eyes and pulled a face at the bak of Kimi’s head. “I’m allowed. It’s the off-season.”
“Mm.” A pause. “Think a little quiter. It is seven in the morning.”
Somewhere in the wardrobe upstairs, still in its garment bag, unworn, was ared race suit eith his name and number on it.
He hadn’t put it on yet. He’d tried, once, alone, the week the contract was finally, properly, signed-and-sealed real had unzipped the bag and looked at the prancing horse over the heart and felt his throat go tight and then he’d zipped it back up, because it hadn’t felt like his to wear yet, not until February, nor until the first test. He’d chased this colour fot a decade. Now that he had it, it sat in the dark of a Swiss wardrobe like a promise he was almost afraid to cash.
In a few weeks the machine would switch back on. Testing in Barcelona. The first time he and Kimi would ever share a garage instead of glaring each other across a pit lane, teammates at last. After all the years of team walls and sponsor walls and the whole architecture of a sport built to keep to them pointed at each other’s throats. He thought about it constanly. He was so excited he felt sick with it.
But that weeks away. Right now there was only the snow, the fire, and the enormous quiet. Sebastian was beginning to understand, the thing he had carrying around unsaid for the bettet part of a year, grown so heavy over the winter that he could no longer quite hold it in.
He said that night, in front of the fire, because off-season was the only time in the entire calendar when a thing this size had room to be said.
“I want us to have a pup, a kid.”
The words sat in the warm dark room.
Kimi didn’t move for a moment. Then, carefully, he set his beer down on the table, which from Kimi was the equivalent of another man leaping to his feet.
‘’Okay,” he said.
Sebastian turned and look at him with confussion. “Okay? Just okay?”
“You have been thinking about it for a year.” Kimi’s voice was even, unhurried, but his eyes were on Sebastian now, fully, the fire forgotten. “You do the thing with the pillows, when you sleep.” A pause. “Pulling them in, you did not used to do that. I noticed. I did not say anything because I did not want to say it for you.”
Sebastian felt his face go hot. He hadn’t known Kimi noticed. He should have. Kimi noticed everything and said thing in a hundred.
“I didn’t want to want it,” he admitted. “It’s the timing is insane, first year at Ferrari, forty weekends, the world watching everything I do, and we can’t even,” He let a heavy breath out. “We’re not even out yet, how do two people who can’t tell anyone they’re together raise a child?”
“badly probably,” Kimi said. “At first. Everyone is bad at it at first.” He picked the beer back up, turned it in his hands, set it down again, the closest Sebastian had ever seen hin on fidgeting. “I have thought about it too. Of course I did not say it, I am thirthy five, I have won th things, the cars, the trophies, all of it. And some morning I wake up and think, is this it, then and I do not like the answer.” He was quiet a moment. “A pup is the one thing I have never done that I think I would not be able to un-want once I let myself.”
Sebatian stared ar him. In four years he was not sure he had ever heard Kimi Räikkönen say that many true things in a row.
And then, because they were here, in the place they never hid anything, he made himself say the harder part, the part he’d been circling for months and never let out loud.
“I could carry it,” he said. “You know I could.”
The fire popped. Kimi went very still, not tense, just wholly attentive, the way he went still for the things that mattered.
“You could,” the alphay agreed, evenly. He did not reach for it, he did not lean toward it or away. He just set it down beetwen them, gently, and waited. “But do you want to?”
And sebastian was surprised, genuinely surprised by how clean the ansswer came.
“No.”
He heard himself say it and braced, some old reflex, for the guilt that was supposed to come with an omega saying that. It didn’t comr. What came instead was relief, so sharp it was almost dizzying, as if he’d finally set down a bag he hadn’t known he was carrying.
“No,” he said again, steadier. “And I’ve felt like I’m supposed to be sad about that, and im not, and I need you to hear all of why, because I’ve never said any of it.” He turned on the sofa to face him. “ I drive a car at three hundred kilometres an hour for a living, I need to trust my body completely, every single weekend, and I can’t spend a year or maybe more than a year not trusting it. I’d have the disappear for a whole season, maybe two. And the second I fif, everyone would know, because you can not hide that, it’s the one thing in my entire life I could never keep private. A pregnat omega in Formula One.” He laughed, not quite steadily. “They already speculate about who I’m with. That would be, it would out us or it would make them tear the two uf ous apart looking. I’ve spent four years keeping the most important thing I have behind a locked door. I’m not putting it on the front of evert paper on earth.”
“Seb, honey.”
“And under all of that,” he pushed on, because it was finally coming and he wasn’t going to stop it now, “there’s the part I actually feel guilty about. Which is that I just, don’t need to have my eyes or stubbornness or my mother’s frown. I’ve never once loved anything because it came out of me. I don’t thing that’s how it works, for me. I don’t want to be pregnant, I want to be a father, those aren’t the same wisj, and I’m done pretending the first one is the proce of the seconf.”
The room was quiet except for the fire and the snow thicking at the glass.
Kimi looked at him for a lon moment. Then he reached over and took Sebastian’s hand, turned it, pressed his thumb once into the palm, a small private gesture, older than either of them could remember.
“Good,” he said. “Because I never wanted a copy of us anyway.” He said plainly, no performancein it, and Sebastian understood at once that this too was a thing Kimi had already turned over privately, months ago, alone, and simpy never said. “Not surrogate, not an arrangement, not a lawyer to get our genes into the world. I grew up plenty I do not a small version of me walking around, God, one is too many.” The ghost of dry humour, and then, under it, the real thing. “There are children who already exists who have no one. I want to be the person who shows up for one of them. Not because we couldn’t make our own. Because that is one I actually want to be.”
“Adoption.” The word came out shaky.
“Mm.” kimi’s hind tightened around his. “We do not get to choose who needs us. I think that is the whole point of it.”
Sebastian’s eyes were burning. “You’ve really thought about this.”
“I think about everything.” Kimi said. “I just do not tell you most of it.”
They did it that same night, because Sebastian was Sebastian and once a thing was decided he could not bear to leave it un-begun.
They sat together at the kitchen table with a laptop and the bad overhead light and the snow still coming down outside, and they found the agency, and they opened the registration for prospective orster and adoptive parents, and they filled it in slowy, seriously, an alpha and an omega bent over a glowing screen near midnight, two men who drove cars for aliving carefully typing their names into a form that asked questions no trophy had ever asked them.
Occupation. Sebastian laughed, a little wildly, and typed the truth, and they both looked at it.
Do you travel for work? Kimi read aloud, deadpan. "Yes." A pause. "Understatement of my life."
Please describe your home environment and the support network available to you. That one they sat with for a while. We travel a great deal, Sebastian wrote, at last, but we have family who love us, and the means to bring people to us rather than always leaving. A child of ours would never be short of hands to hold them. He read it back and hoped, fiercely, that it was true, that they could make it true.
They did not tick the box that would have let them specify. Age. Gender. Health. Sebastian's cursor hovered over it, and Kimi, watching, said quietly: "Leave it. We do not get to choose who needs us."
So they left it blank and that blank space, Sebastian would understand only much later, only in drivers room in Melbourne with a phone pressed hard to his ear, was the exact shape of a five month old boy they had not met yet. (a spoiler to te next chapter)
When it was done, Kimi hit submit, and the screen thanked them, blandly, for their application, and warned them the waitcould be long. Months. Possibly longer. Most applications, it noted gently, did not result in a placement quickly, if it all.
“Long wait,” Sebastian said.
“We are good at waiting,” Kimi said. “We waited years just to be allowed to sit in the same garage.” He closed the laptop. In the sudden dark his hand found Sebastian’s on the table, rough and certain, and held on. “What is a few months more.”
The form was in, and with it went the last of Sebastian's ability to keep his eyes open. The enormity of the whole day landed at once, the way it always did after a thing was finally decided, the good kind of exhaustion, heavy as a wet coat.
Kimi watched him wilt over the closed laptop for a moment. Then he stood, and held out a hand, and said the thing he offered maybe twice in an entire winter and never once made sound like it cost him anything.
"Come to bed. Do you want me to make you a nest?"
Sebastian looked up at him. Four years, and it still caught him behind the ribs every single time.
"...Yes," he said, small. "Please."
Because Kimi did not offer it lightly, and did not offer it often, and when he did it meant I see you. I know what you need before you ask. Let me. An omega could build his own nest, Sebastian did, constantly, helplessly, a pillow dragged here and a blanket bunched there all season long. But your alpha building it for you was a different thing entirely: a devotion that needed no words, which was exactly why it was Kimi's favourite kind.
So Sebastian sat cross-legged in the middle of the big bed and let himself be taken care of.
Kimi built it the way he did everything, unhurried, precise, not a motion wasted. He layered their own blanket over the sheets first, the soft grey one that already smelled of both of them. Then the pillows: all of them, every pillow in the house, it felt like, banked up into a deep soft wall until Sebastian was sitting in a bowl of the things. Then the specific treasures, the battered plush that had ridden in Sebastian's kit bag to more countries than most people see in a lifetime, and a second, smaller one that Kimi tucked in without comment and pretended not to know the origin of. And last, the thing that made it a true nest and not just a pile: Kimi peeled off the soft old jumper he'd worn all evening and worked it down into the heart of it, sleeves and all, then added a worn t-shirt from the chair for good measure, his clothes, his scent, threaded all the way through, so that whichever way Sebastian turned his face he would find alpha, mine, safe.
Then Kimi bent over the nest and scented it properly. Deliberately. He dragged his wrist slow along the top edge of the blanket, pressed the side of his throat to the highest pillow where the gland ran warmest, and breathed out low over all of it the way an alpha did when he wanted a den to say this one is looked after. This one is loved.
And the room filled up with him.
Sebastian shut his eyes and just breathed it in. Kimi's scent was the thing that had meant home to him for longer than either of them would ever say out loud, soft and low and unmistakably masculine, cedar and clean woodsmoke and warm skin, with something cold and bright running underneath it like pine and the air off a snowfield, and under that, deepest down, a worn warmth like old leather and sun-heated stone. It was never loud. Kimi's scent never announced itself; it simply arrived, and steadied everything, and stayed.
His own did the opposite, and he knew it, it went sweet when he was happy, and he was helplessly, dangerously happy tonight: warm vanilla and something like ripe pears, a honeyed softness that Kimi had once described, in his entire yearly allowance of poetry, as "like a bakery. But annoying." The two scents met over the nest and folded into one another, sweet into soft into warm, until you could not have said where one man stopped and the other began.
"There," Kimi said, satisfied, and climbed in after him.
Sebastian went into his arms without being asked, burrowing down through the pillows and the plushies and the jumper that smelled of his alpha, fitting his back into Kimi's chest, and let out a long, unsteady breath he felt like he'd been holding since October.
"I love it when you do this," he mumbled. "I can do it myself. I never want you to stop."
"I know." Kimi's arm came heavy and certain across his middle. "That is why I do it."
Outside, the wind came up off the lake and threw snow at the window in soft handfuls, and the old house ticked and settled, and the cold pressed at the glass like something that wanted in. None of it reached the nest. They lay buried in scent and warmth, the fire dying red through the doorway, and Sebastian could not remember the last time he had been this warm anywhere in the world.
"You know what I keep thinking?" he said, drowsy, tracing idle circles on the back of Kimi's hand. "We've got weeks. Weeks here, just us, before testing. And the whole time no blockers. Not one." He pressed back closer, greedy for it. "I'm so grateful we don't have to wear them for a few weeks. I don't have to flatten myself down to nothing every morning so nobody in a paddock catches a scent and does the maths. I get to just smell like myself. Smell like us, all day, and have it be nobody's business at all." A soft, contented sound. "That's the thing I miss most in the season. Not the sleep. This. Being allowed to smell happy."
Kimi was quiet a moment. Then, into the nape of his neck, low and warm. "Then be happy. Loudly. For a few weeks, nobody is doing any maths."
Sebastian laughed, wet and helpless and completely content, and turned his face into a pillow that smelled of the man he had just built an entire future with, and felt the slow even rhythm of his alpha's breathing settle against his back like a tide coming in.
"Kimi," he murmured, mostly asleep.
"Mm."
"Whatever it is. Whoever they send us. Whenever they finally call. The answer's yes."
He felt, rather than heard, the alpha go still behind him and then the arm around him tightened, and Kimi pressed a kiss to the back of his neck, over the scent gland, slow and sure, a promise in a language that needed no words at all.
"Yes," Kimi agreed, into the dark. "The answer is yes."