Beer and Butterfly Bones

Signs of recovery often vary.

Thanks to Izzie and Kaye for the beta and suggestions. And to Rae for the opening line.

Hutch thought it was interesting that a sign of returning health in his partner was his ability to consume crap once again. Hutch had seen many smiles cross Starsky’s face and never thought twice about any of them. His partner was a goofy loon at times, and that was it. Days of bedside sitting in the hospital taught him otherwise. He’d had little to do except watch and pay attention to every nuance, every flicker. So he had studied and memorized every ghost of that goofy grin until he’d wondered if his heart might break. The one that meant that helped, thank you. The one that meant I’m alive and trying to be grateful, and the one that meant it’s either this or cry and don’t you dare fucking call me on it.

So the day Starsky licked a burrito off his fingers and made a crack about pureéd peas my ass, was the day Hutch got caught with wet eyes and a goofy grin of his own.

-o-o-o-o-o-o

Starsky thought it was interesting that a sign of returning health in his partner was his ability to once again eat the kind of unholy crap a hamster would refuse. Starsky was the one freshly out of hospital, but it seemed they were each doing their own recovery. The blender got dug out, dusted off, and he started waking to the whirr of it as `butterfly bones and seaweed scrapings’ made their way back in to Hutch’s mornings. And at an earlier hour too, because another thing his partner had taken up again was running before work. The distance was half what it had been and took the same time, but Starsky did the math and figured that was about right. Hutch’s fridge door also rattled shut with a lot less vigor and noise, because suspicious looking packets stamped `Sam’s Health Yard’ began lining up where the beers had been.

Which was fine while Starsky was staying there and recuperating, since his meds were still a heady cocktail all their own, and this new and improved Hutch caved in a lot easier than the old Hutch when it came to what Starsky wanted to eat anyway.

But unholy crap aside, the sign that flashed pure neon to Starsky was Hutch cutting his hair and shaving off the mustache. It was the same day Starsky was officially weaned off his cocktail, and staring at Hutch he had the weirdest idea that each was a present to the other.

That evening he let Hutch make him vegetable soup, and then he ordered and they split a pepperoni pizza. The split was seventy/thirty, because that was just the way Starsky’s stomach was now, and he knew his days of eating the leftover slices cold for breakfast were long gone. But as Starsky clinked bottles with Hutch and lifted his first beer in nearly four months, he caught his partner wearing that same look he’d worn when Huggy’d snuck a burrito into the hospital that time. He closed his eyes and made himself wait a second. Then he tilted the bottle to his lips, swallowed, and with every sharp, blessed mouthful of cold beer the dots of his life began joining up and making sense again.

He opened his eyes, found Hutch still grinning like a loon, and all he knew for sure was that there were going to be a lot more evenings over a lot more pizza boxes, leftovers be damned.