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1.
They close a case, they go to Huggy’s, they have a few drinks. It’s a well-worn routine, but for once Hutch is driving, and Starsky takes the opportunity to gleefully indulge a little. By the end of the night he’s not completely out of it by any means, but just well enough this side of tipsy that Hutch feels better delivering him to his actual doorstep, rather than the stairs that lead up to the door.
They make it up there a little slower than usual, but Starsky is not in denial of his own unsteady feet, so Hutch doesn’t have to catch him and nobody breaks their neck. Once they’re faced with the lock, Starsky starts patting himself down, hitting every spot that could possibly contain a pocket and seemingly a few that definitely can’t. Hutch watches the show for a moment and then takes pity on him, tapping Starsky’s left front jeans pocket.
Starsky giggles, even as he follows the hint and worms his hand inside. He wears his pants too tight. “That’s a little forward.”
Hutch leans against the railing. “I bought you more than one drink.”
“Hey!” Starsky produces the key right as he says it, leaving in the middle whether it’s a cheer or part of the protest that follows. He wields his key like a wand, and Hutch has frightful visions of it sailing down to the ground and having to search a gray street for a little silver object in the dark. “I’m not cheap.”
“No, you’re not,” Hutch assures him, keeping any further thoughts on the subject to himself. Starsky is extremely valuable, but he doesn’t cost much.
Starsky, placated, turns to the door to finally attempt to open it. It takes a good long while, to the point where Hutch draws closer to look over his shoulder.
Starsky’s door lock is a finicky little thing, but the way Starsky is fumbling doesn’t help. “I think I had it upside down first,” he admits, a tad sheepish.
Hutch reaches around and wrangles the key from his hands. Once Starsky realizes what he’s doing, he lets Hutch take over and swaps places with him willingly.
“You take such good care of me,” Starsky says, affection warm in his voice, and then he’s gripping one side of Hutch’s neck and smacking a kiss to the other. It’s sloppy and wet and he is done before Hutch can think about pushing him away, Starsky instead patting his arm in an effort to squeeze past him into the apartment. It works, just none too elegantly. “Bye, Blintz.”
“Drink water,” Hutch reminds him, and he just manages to hand over the key before the door swings shut between them. He wipes at his neck and makes his way back to his car, still chuckling a little.
*
2.
Hutch is in the process of adding a nail to the wall when Starsky walks in. He’s not even paying attention as he kicks Hutch’s front door shut, too busy reading something that looks like the gardening magazine Hutch subscribes to. Him having it in his hands before Hutch has even had a chance to lay eyes on it means he must’ve taken it from the mailbox downstairs again.
“You know obstruction of correspondence is a felony, right?”
That makes Starsky look up, which in turn causes him to do a double take. “Why are you on a chair? Not feeling tall enough today?”
Hutch sighs and goes back to darkening his tiny pencil dot so he won’t lose it. He used a tape measure to place it, because winging this would have been an option, but if he does precision work now he knows he’ll get it right in one try and thank himself for it later. “It’s for my new plant.”
“Ah,” Starsky says, still from somewhere to the right of Hutch, but closer now. “Anyway, I’m not obstructing. If anything I’m lubricating, bringing these exciting pictures of plants right into your apartment full of them.”
“You keep showing up on the days that thing arrives, so there must be something about it you like.”
“I like that you like it, honey,” Starsky says, sweet and fake like spun sugar, and as if the real answer isn’t even simpler. He’s just over here all the time, snooping in places he shouldn’t be.
So Hutch laughs at him, and slips his pencil and tape measure into his shirt pocket, exchanging it for the nail that was already in there. “That’s a good try. Very cute.” He reaches out while still judging his little dot on the wall, expecting Starsky to know to give him the hammer that’s down there somewhere.
Instead a hand slips into his and someone - Starsky, it’s always Starsky - pecks a kiss to the back of it. “Thank you. I am.”
When Hutch whips his head around, he can see that maybe he miscalculated the height advantage the chair gives him - didn’t apply a tape measure to that one - and he did almost bump Starsky’s nose with his original gesture. But still. “What are you doing?”
“I don’t know,” Starsky says, standing there unabashedly holding his hand. “What are you trying to get me to do?”
“Nothing,” Hutch says, because a question like that skirts dangerously close to things best left unsaid for fear of having to finally examine them. Then he realizes that’s a lie, anyway. “Get me the hammer, would you?”
Starsky looks around and then goes, “Ah!” He finally lets go of Hutch when he jumps over to the table to get it, and while his back is turned Hutch just barely has the time to shake out his hand, a movement aborted when Starsky returns.
“Thanks.”
“Of course, my liege,” Starsky says, seeing the humor in everything. He does a fake little bow just for shits and giggles. “I’m gonna go perform a raid on your food supplies now, if you don’t mind.” He shakes the magazine he’s still carrying like he’s charging ahead with a sword, and Hutch would shake his head at him, but that’s not a great idea while also trying to avoid hitting his own thumb with a hammer.
*
3.
He doesn’t remember too much of that morning.
He just knows that he gets the call, his dad’s voice even more of a clipped monotone than usual, and then his entire day, week- The rest of his life has shifted, just slightly to the left. What follows is more calls, bleeding into each other: arranging for the time off, booking the flight, letting Starsky know he’ll be gone. He’s sitting on his bed, struggling with the sticky zipper of his duffel, when he hears the front door.
He’s pretty sure he calls out - that’s what you do, when you have to let friends who come over know where you are - and then Starsky is standing there, wide-eyed, giving the impression that he might have run the entire distance. “Oh, Hutch,” he says, and he sounds heartbroken, and maybe that’s what kickstarts it, or maybe it’s just seeing him, or maybe something else entirely.
Either way, the next thing Hutch remembers is Starsky on the bed with him, holding him as he shakes from crying, doubled over into Starsky’s chest. Starsky rubs his back and kisses his hair and squeezes him tight, holding him together by allowing him to fall apart, and when the tears dry out and Hutch starts to feel foolish and empty, he prods Hutch to eat something and drives him to the airport, like a matter of course. He doesn’t try to pretend it will all be okay. “She loved you,” he says instead. “Your mother loved you, Hutch.”
*
4.
Some cases go south faster than Butch and Sundance. One moment Hutch is safely embedded as an out-of-towner looking to close some not strictly legal business deals, the next a girl he arrested once walks in and his cover is blown. He manages to duck fast enough to avoid getting cracked over the head by the lead goon’s loyal sidekick wielding a paper weight, but that still leaves him on his own in a room with three people that don’t want to be put behind bars, so he ends up getting wrestled to the floor anyway.
When it’s all over, it could have been worse: he’s unhurt, tied snugly to a chair with his hands behind his back, but not even gagged or blindfolded. Of course, if Starsky had been with him-
But he’s not, because their targets got a little nervous dealing with the two of them together, so they convinced Hutch to drive off with them alone. Goes to show they’re not idiots, Hutch has to reluctantly give them that. This streak of intelligence seem to extend into deciding to gather up what profits they’ve made in Bay City and make a break for it, rather than risk the murder of a cop.
The upshot of it is that Hutch is left to sit in one relieved piece in the little walled-off office corner of a warehouse on a lot that’s good as abandoned, while none of the good guys know exactly where he is. He tries yelling for a bit, but it’s not like he can reasonably expect anyone except a few rats to hear him, so he gives up on that fast. He considers trying to break the chair in hopes of shaking off the ropes, but it’s an annoyingly sturdy thing. The knots have traces of Boy Scout and he’d be risking injury or having to wait in a far more precarious position than sitting down if all he manages to accomplish is to topple the chair.
So he waits. After the first fifteen minutes, the adrenaline of getting caught wears off, and he’s mostly bored. There’s a clock above the door he’s staring right at, but the hands on it crawl like it’s powered by snails.
It takes an hour and a half for the monotony of slow, slow ticking to be broken by a crash out in the warehouse - a kicked-in door, it sounds like - which is no time at all under the right circumstances but can feel like an eternity under the wrong ones. These are somewhere in between, which means Hutch hasn’t made any desperate promises to a higher power when through the office window he can see Starsky finally storm over, but he’s still very glad for the rescue.
Starsky is more than that. “Hutch?” he demands, the moment he bursts into the office space. The force of his entrance makes the door bang against the wall in a way that rocks that goddamn clock. There’s the tiniest hint of a tremble in his voice, a trace of that soul-shaking fear Hutch knows very well.
“It’s alright,” Hutch tells him. It would be funny, the guy tied to a chair reassuring the one with the gun and free use of all his limbs, if it weren’t dead serious. As bad as these past couple of hours were for Hutch, once he’d been found missing they must have been ten times worse for Starsky, who couldn’t even be sure he’d still be alive. “I’m okay. They got me in the scuffle, and then they just left.”
Starsky is on him before he can finish talking. Starsky, on an energy high that leaves him a little frantic, grips his shoulders and brushes his chest and cards through his hair against the grain, as if to check everything all at once, and then he takes in an audible whoosh of breath and slumps. But good, too: he sinks all the way to his knees on the concrete floor, propped up only by Hutch’s lap.
“Shit, Hutch. Somehow I really thought, maybe this time-”
That might be Hutch’s fault. Death’s been on his mind, even as he’s working to place the grief. “Nothing happened,” he repeats, because he still can, and Starsky closes his eyes and rests his cheek on Hutch’s thigh. He looks wrecked.
If Hutch could, he’d... But his hands are tied.
“Starsky.” He hears his own voice, but he figures being kidnapped is a good enough reason to sound out of breath. He clears his throat as discreetly as he can. “Starsk, could you-”
Starsky nods without lifting his head, just rubbing his face all over the inseam of Hutch’s pants leg, and then with no warning he plants both hands on Hutch’s thighs to heave himself up and in the process, smooth but lightning quick, he turns his head and presses a kiss right where his mouth is, just-
Hutch jumps so badly he almost gives Starsky a broken nose by way of knee to the face. That’d be a great one to explain to Dobey. “Patience,” Starsky says, who seems mildly amused and wildly oblivious, somehow having turned the movement into Hutch rallying against his chains.
He gives Hutch’s knee a last pat and then moves around to set him free, and Hutch is left staring at nothing with a racing heart and a need that grows every time Starsky’s fingers brush his wrist while teasing open the knots.
Damn.
*
5.
Hutch is a man who prides himself on his discipline. All the same, he couldn’t recount any of what is said during debrief in Dobey’s office. Dobey talks, Starsky talks, he’s pretty sure that he talks - there’s a buzzing in his ears, like a thousand crickets hidden in high grass on a warm summer evening, and every single one of them is singing he keeps kissing you, asshole, what more are you waiting for?
Starsky asks him if he’s okay twice while driving him home. Both times Hutch says yes, but when they reach the little landing at the top of the stairs in front of his apartment door and he doesn’t immediately get his keys, Starsky slips a hand into Hutch’s pocket instead of just nudging him. Hutch freezes, and it makes Starsky frown, keys already dangling from his finger. “Sure you don’t want to see a doctor?”
“Yes, I’m sure. Let’s just go in.” There’s nothing wrong with him that any doctor could cure. He has a small bump on his head, but the only affliction he’s really suffering from is part of his brain still being guiltily stuck on the image of Starsky’s face in his lap.
After they pass through the door he falls down on the couch. Starsky doesn’t. Starsky keeps crisscrossing the room, coming up with new little things to chase: he opens several windows, gets Hutch painkillers, brings him a glass of water, hands him an unasked for banana that’s already half peeled, darkens the room a little by closing the blinds just in case, closes one of the windows he just opened as if afraid of a draft, and then stops, while coming over with a whole can of water to refill Hutch’s glass that’s not even empty yet, and asks, as if Hutch actually has the capacity to care right now, “Do the plants need watering?”
“They’re fine.” Hutch offers his glass to Starsky, because he didn’t bring one for himself. “Would you sit down already?”
Starsky does. Their fingers brush for the briefest of moments when Starsky takes the glass. He finishes off the other half, which feels significant in ways that aren’t, so Hutch takes the glass back empty, and takes the heavy can resting on Starsky’s knee, and puts both to the side. The only thing driving him to actually look to make sure he doesn’t clean drop them on the floor is that it would be a distraction, and he’s distracted enough as is.
Everything is about Starsky, and Starsky’s mouth, and Starsky’s heart.
“Not thirsty?” Starsky asks, the way he asked about the plants, the way he keeps asking if Hutch feels okay. The way he keeps kissing Hutch: serious but with ease, like it’s meaningfully meaningless, in a way that makes love an action that expresses a resting state of being.
Hutch is a little tired of resting.
So he thinks about drunken nights and stolen gardening magazines and strong arms and things he always considered best left unsaid, and then he drops the fear associated with that final part. He lets it slip from his mind the way he knew he could when he was tied to a chair and left to rot because he was never as alone as he seemed, and then he gives in to the laws of nature: an equal and opposite reaction to all of Starsky’s action.
Kissing Starsky right on the mouth is an expected pleasant shock, like diving off a cliff into cool water. He tastes fresh, and he parts for Hutch easily, and he soothes Hutch’s overheated skin in a way that nothing else ever could.
“Oh,” Starsky says after, in a tone so honestly surprised that it knocks the wind right out of Hutch. He backs off enough to see and is met with wide eyes, which makes him back off further immediately, trying to draw his arms back from Starsky’s shoulders.
He’s an idiot. Oh, God. All those signals he thought he was picking up, all those motivations he was ascribing to silly little gestures, all those feelings he kept projecting-
But then Starsky is grabbing his hands before they can really go anywhere, and he looks surprised all over again. “No, hey, where are you going? Don’t stop.”
“Don’t stop?” Hutch asks, suspended in mid-air - or maybe underwater, in that split second of a moment after jumping in where you’re caught, your own weight pressing you down while the wetness closes in all around you. He can’t breathe, he’s only just stopped sinking, and it remains to be seen if he will ever float back up.
“Don’t stop,” Starsky confirms, like the stupidity of that question is on par with thinking Hutch can’t water his own plants because he had to sit in a chair for ninety minutes. “I just don’t know how we’ve never done that before.”
Hutch takes a deep breath. Surfacing, after the dive. “You kept on missing.”
“I did?”
Not at all, but in a fundamental way- “Yeah.”
“I did,” Starsky echoes, like he sees it now, like all he needed for it to click into place was Hutch to say barely anything. “Huh,” he says, surprised all over again. He’s the one that leans in first this time, and when he does he’s right on target, and it doesn’t taste like surprise at all. It’s a stroke of genius - something deeply obvious finally discovered, like looking up one day and finding that the sky is blue.
And it is: blue like the ocean, blue like Starsky’s eyes, blue like a bruise waiting to be kissed better.
It doesn’t have to wait long.
*
+1.
Hutch stirs awake from his comfortable doze when Starsky does. Starsky’s head lifts from the crook of Hutch’s arm, hair tickling skin, and he shifts the covers down so his palm can slide a path over Hutch’s belly, somewhere between a caress and a tease. He’s slow about it, lazy.
“Oops,” Starsky murmurs, when he kisses the jut of Hutch’s shoulder.
+2.
“Damn.” Hutch’s clavicle, gently.
+3.
“Hey.” His breastbone, softly.
+4.
“Hutch.” His ribs, which tickles.
+5.
“Tell me.” Right over his heart, lingering, so that Starsky’s lips still brush skin on, “Am I getting warmer?”
Hutch lifts his head to find Starsky watching him, warm as can be.
+?
“Keep trying,” he suggests, so Starsky does - over and over, and then a few more.