Table of Contents
So, confusingly I know, this has nothing to do with the official annual S&H Advent Calendar. Every year over on AO3 I write my own multi-fandom advent calendar of ficlets; last year’s involved a lot of S&H, so I figured I’d excerpt those chapters for over here.
Inosculation
A/N: They’re being queer and in love in the greenhouse
(got called queer and in love in the greenhouse today
what were you doing?
being queer and in love
in the greenhouse?
yeah it was in the greenhouse)
“You just gotta let go of Ken, just a little,” Starsky told the plant in front of him, attempting to gently coax a particularly strangley looking branch away from where it was trying to reach past the intertwined web of branches and wrap around Ken’s trunk. “C’mon. He ain’t gonna leave.”
“Did you name my ficuses?” the prospective stranglee’s namesake asked from – Starsky glanced over his shoulder – the doorway of the greenhouse. He would’ve kept looking over his shoulder, because Hutch was a whole beautiful picture in a plain t-shirt and his letterman jacket, his hair grown out just enough in the past few weeks to have been mussed up by the wind outside, and his expression just slipping from worry – he’d clearly come home from grocery shopping, heard Starsky talking, and immediately started considering absolute worst-case scenarios – to amusement – which wasn’t really fair, because Hutch talked to his plants way more than Starsky did and had definitely named some of them himself, but Starsky would also happily take anything that put a smile on Hutch’s face, so he’d let it slide. The still-healing bullet scars over Starsky’s shoulderblade chose that moment to issue a sharp protest at the twisting movement, though, so he turned back around to the branch he was still holding.
“Yes,” he told Hutch, listening to his soft-footed approach. For all he was six foot of solid muscle, he really did start moving like a stealth-trained mouse any time Starsky was hurt. It alternated between being sweet and infuriating, but Starsky’s shoulder was just sore enough and his mood good enough to go with sweet right now. “That’s Ken, and that’s Dave,” he said, indicating the respective plants.
“You named my ficuses after us.”
“Yep,” Starsky agreed, waiting out the question.
“…Why?”
Starsky grinned down at the pots. “Look at them. They just got put next to each other, and they immediately reached out for each other. Kept reaching until they were all… intertwined. Caught up with each other. They’re still different plants – Dave’s definitely got an attitude, so maybe I named ‘em the wrong way around – but you couldn’t separate them, not without cutting bits of them off to do it.”
When there was no response, Starsky risked his shoulder enough to look up and back at Hutch, now standing more or less directly behind where Starsky was sitting on the greenhouse floor. The faint smile gracing his lips had the note of indulgence in it that he always pulled on to disguise the fact that he was feeling soft and mushy things he didn’t want to let on about, but all he said was, “Inosculation.”
“What?”
“That’s what it’s called when trees naturally grow together like that.”
“Thought that was what they call it when they jab you as a kid.”
“That’s inoculation. No ‘s’.”
Starsky nodded. “Okay. Well, I named them after us ‘cause they’re… inosculated.” He gave up on the attempts to dissuade Dave’s branch, and absently rubbed his left hand up and down his arm instead. It wasn’t all that cold in the greenhouse, actually – couldn’t be for the plants – but he had enough injuries behind him to know that this particular stage of the recovery process always tended to come with an internal thermostat that didn’t seem to know which way was up and which was down. He should’ve brought a jacket with him to Hutch’s when he insisted on the change of scenery this morning, but he’d been too warm then.
A quiet murmur of cloth shifting came from behind him, then a moment later something settled warm around his shoulders. Looking down revealed it as Hutch’s letterman jacket, and, smiling, Starsky carefully pulled it all the way on. “I always kinda wanted to be a cheerleader,” he said.
“You were on the football team, you must’ve dated them.”
“Yeah, but-” He reached behind him with his healthily free arm, and Hutch stepped forward and dropped down to crouch beside him. “I wanted to be them. What they did looked like a lot of fun, they got way better outfits than we did, and, you see, they got to date the football players. Always got envious seeing them wearing their boyfriend’s letterman jackets. Including when Caity wore my letter sweater when we were dating, that was weird.”
“Got it. Did you have the hots for any particular player, or was it just a generalised kink?”
Rolling his eyes, Starsky answered, “It wasn’t a kink. But yeah, the captain, Buzz.”
“Buzz? You had a crush on someone named Buzz?”
“Hey, Hutches shouldn’t throw stones.”
“But Buzz?”
“You keep being mean about Buzz, I’m not gonna tell you about the other letterman I got the hots for.”
“Yeah? You had the decency not to restrict yourself to just Captain Buzz?”
“Yeah,” Starsky agreed, shifting around to face Hutch properly and holding his hand out again. Hutch took it this time, loosely twining their fingers together. “Wrong tense, though. I have the decency. The other guy’s big, blonde, kind of a dork but he’s got the most amazing pale blue eyes and a heart too soft for his own good. Looks like he could easily throw you over his shoulder and looks at you ways that make you want him to.”
“Starsk…”
“Yeah, looks at you other ways that make you want to take him to bed and kiss every inch of him until he starts believing you about how much you want to keep doing it the rest of your life. Exactly like that, babe, you got it.”
Hutch swallowed with what looked like an effort, then raised their joined hands to his lips, dropping a kiss onto the back of Starsky’s. “If this is how wearing a letterman jacket gets you, I might never let you out of it.”
“This is how you get me,” Starsky corrected. “The jacket’s just a bonus, my big tough marshmallow.”
Hutch snorted. “You better not start calling me ‘marshmallow’ in public.”
“Private only,” Starsky vowed.
“I misspoke. You better not start calling me ‘marshmallow’, full stop.”
“Too late now, marshie.”
“That’s worse,” Hutch protested, but he was laughing, easy grin spreading across his face. The laughter unsteadied his crouch enough that it was quick work for Starsky to tug slightly, knock him off-balance and pull him down onto his knees just in front of Starsky.
Starsky leant in to brush his mouth quickly across that grin, then asked, “What was that word again?”
“Hm? Oh, inosculation.”
“Yeah. I’m glad we’re inosculated,” Starsky told him, and captured any response under a long, determined, and terminally sappy kiss.
Oy Vey He’s Gay
A/N: named after the episode of The Nanny, because why would I not name something after a Nanny ep given the chance. so I WAS going to say this was Hanukkah 1976, because that’s the mid-70s year that it overlapped with Christmas and they therefore would have stood a higher likelihood of getting leave, but then I realised that’s when Little Girl Lost is and thus the only Christmas period we actually know they were in Bay City. So instead it’s either ’77 (Dec 4-12) or ’73, when it also overlapped with Christmas, but that conflicts with my timeline based off the one comment in The Velvet Jungle about Starsky going to New York. yes i overthought this
As Starsky turned away, called by yet another cousin, Hutch shut his eyes and sighed. Opening them again a moment later, he jumped slightly. Mrs. Starsky – Rachel, she’d been telling him to call her Rachel since the first time they’d talked – was standing in front of him, watching him. How a woman who seemed to travel by silent teleportation had raised his Starsky, who under any normal circumstance couldn’t move two paces without loudly announcing his presence, was a complete mystery. Then again, when he wanted to he was sometimes capable of the most complete stealth Hutch had ever seen, so maybe that had come from her.
“Sorry to startle you, dear,” she said. “You just looked like it all might be getting a little much for you.”
Hutch opened his mouth to deny it, then remembered one of Starsky’s warnings as they’d walked out of the airport. ‘Never lie to Ma. Ever. She will be able to tell, and she will sit you down and invent various personalized tortures specifically for you until you tell her the truth and let her help. Or get revenge for you. I think Billy Joe still trembles at her name.’ Which was, as standard for a Starsky warning, more information than Hutch had actually needed, but the point had come across. And her gaze was sharp enough for him to believe it. So instead of whatever equivocation he would normally have made, he slouched slightly back against the wall, attempting to underplay the many inches of height between the two of them, and admitted, “I don’t want him to know, but I feel… out of place. But it’s okay, it’s not- you’ve all been so nice, I’m just not used to this.”
Rachel blinked owlishly at him for a moment, which he took to be evaluation of his honesty, before she asked, “Has Dave met your family? He hasn’t, has he? Would he feel out of place with them?”
Hutch couldn’t quite stop the bitter-edged laugh that burst out of him. “I feel out of place with them.”
Her eyes went from owlish to soft, kind, a look whose familiarity it took him a moment to place before he realised it was the same way her son looked at Sweet Alice and Eddie and all the people they talked to who’d found themselves in terrible situations through no fault of their own, and who kept on determinedly making the best of their lives anyway. He didn’t know how to feel about being looked at like that.
“I’m sorry,” she said, and he realised he did have a response to that. An entirely sincere one.
“Don’t be. If I hadn’t felt like that, I wouldn’t have moved halfway across the country from them. I never would have met Starsky – Dave. So it was worth it.”
She did her blinking little evaluation of him again, then nodded slowly. “Well, you’re family here.”
He opened his mouth, gaze darting away from her, but she raised a hand before he could speak. “You make my boy happy, that means you’re family.”
“I-” Before he could even come up with an appropriate response to the confusion of emotion that statement had produced in his chest, he was stopped by the expression on Rachel’s face.
Leaning forward slightly, she placed a warm hand on his arm and continued, “Anything that makes him happy, I’m for. Anything.”
“He, uh-” Hutch shook his head slightly. That had been pretty unambiguous. “He told me it was no use trying to hide anything from you.”
She chuckled and dropped her hand. “Well, as I’m sure you know, sometimes what he really needs to do is slow down and listen to himself.” She paused, then added, “And, if you’ll forgive me, neither of you are terribly good at hiding it.”
“We- we do pretty well. Back home.”
She arched an eyebrow at him. “I suppose everyone there is used to the two of you. And the people close to you?”
“Know,” Hutch admitted. “Star- Dave wanted to tell you. He’d been planning to, this trip, he just hadn’t got the nerve up yet. And he wanted to wait until it was… just us.” He waved a hand at the room, indicating the assortment of cousins, aunts, uncles, and other relatives who’d gathered for what Starsky had slightly self-deprecatingly called ‘the prodigal son’s return,’ which Hutch had protested was probably inappropriate for a Jewish holiday and also biblically inaccurate, because it had been four years since Starsky had been back for more than a weekend. Speaking of, the prodigal son himself had apparently been released from the disagreement he’d been purloined to mediate, and was moving back over to the corner Hutch and Rachel were in.
“Well, we’ll keep it between us for now, shall we?” Rachel said, and Hutch just had time to nod before Starsky appeared behind Rachel’s shoulder.
“Ma, I thought you were done interrogating Hutch,” he said, tone half-joking but not entirely, and Rachel jumped slightly before shaking her head.
“David! Don’t go sneaking up on me like that. And don’t be silly, I got done interrogating him years ago, over the phone.”
Starsky stepped up next to her, slipping an arm around her shoulders. “See, if I’d known you two had already been having regular old lady gossip sessions without me, I wouldn’t have brought him. Aunt Ava was very charmed by me bringing a friend, and for some reason it’s led her to decide I can be trusted to corral all the kids at dinner tonight.”
“All the kids?” Hutch questioned, looking over the room. Everyone under eighteen was still at school currently, but given the number of adults in the house, mere imagination produced a truly daunting number of children.
“Hey, I tried to convince her otherwise. Apparently you make me look reliable and trustworthy.”
“No-one told me I have magic powers.”
“Magic childcaring powers. You’re doing this with me, blintz.”
“Don’t put that on his head,” Rachel reprimanded.
“But me, your own child, you’re willing to throw under the bus,” Starsky replied, mock-offended.
Hutch hadn’t entirely realised he’d tensed up hearing that until all Rachel did was huff out a breath and say, “Yes,” and he relaxed again.
“It’s the least he can do,” she addressed conspicuously to Hutch. “Especially since he never makes it over to talk with the kids for Pesach. Always an empty seat at the Seder table.”
Starsky cast Hutch a despairing glance. “I’m sorry, okay, Ma, but it’s a lot harder to get leave that time of year.”
“And do you try?” She turned to Hutch and repeated, “Does he try?”
Luckily, before Hutch had to come up with any reply, Starsky cut in, “I’ll try next year, okay? Not promising anything, especially with it only being a few months away, but I’ll try.”
Rachel instantly dropped the disappointed sternness, cheerily responding, “Good! Bring Ken back with you, he’s a good boy.”
“Oh, ma’am- Rachel, no, I shouldn’t be-” Hutch said before he could stop himself. It was one thing being actively dragged to Hanukkah celebrations where he could just quietly sit in the corner, but he knew enough to know Passover was more important and a lot more tradition. Starsky never talked a lot about his holidays, but Hutch was used to tracking the days somewhere in March or April where Starsky would be unavailable for dinner one night, tired the day after, and in a state of unusually solemn optimism for the next week, just like he was used to tracking the ten-day stretch in September where he’d suddenly get extra shifty about justifying everything they did, culminating in the day where he stared hungrily at every food item in his general vicinity for the entire day before he disappeared to, Hutch presumed, the synagogue he almost never attended. He’d done a little of his own research.
Instead of actually responding to Hutch, Rachel slapped Starsky lightly on the arm. “You’ve never invited Ken to Seder?”
“Ma!” Starsky protested, making a face at her that Hutch would’ve been sent to his room without dinner for even thinking of making in his mother’s vicinity. “He don’t need it! I take Eddie, Lijah, some others. Sweet Alice comes, if she’s not working.”
“You do?” Hutch asked.
Rachel was watching Starsky with a fond, proud expression as he tilted his head and answered, “Yeah. You’re supposed to invite those in need. Eddie likes the stories, Lijah likes the ritual of it all. I think Sweet Alice just likes havin’ all those people around doing something she’s part of.”
“Huh.” Really, nothing Starsky did should surprise him by now. He was mostly surprised he hadn’t learnt about this from Sweet Alice.
Reading his mind, Starsky added, “I didn’t mean to be secretive about it. Sweet Alice probably assumed you knew.”
“The point,” Rachel reminded them, “was…”
“Yes, if I manage to come, I’ll bring Hutch.”
“Do I get a say?” Hutch asked.
“Not really,” Starsky told him. “If you refuse, you’ll be mortally offending the entire family. And probably irreparably damaging relations between Judaism and Christianity.”
“Right. Well, I wouldn’t want to be responsible for that.”
“See, you’re getting the hang of it,” Starsky said fondly. “Keep agreeing with everything Ma tells you to do and you’ll get through the week in one piece.”
Rachel tutted. “You do whatever you want, Ken.”
“She’s a benevolent ruler.”
“If what she tells me to do is whatever I want, I can probably manage that.” Not entirely, since what he really wanted to do right now was kiss Starsky’s cheerful smile, but close enough. And again, Starsky was reading Hutch’s mind from the way Hutch was – unintentionally – looking at him, because a very faint blush dusted across his cheeks and he raised his eyes slightly heavenwards before glancing sideways at Rachel. For her part, Rachel glanced between them, then looked back at Hutch and winked. Which just made Hutch blush himself, even as he had to bite down on a grin.
Starsky raised his eyebrows. “What? What was that?”
Rachel patted his arm. “Just something from our old lady gossip sessions, dear. Don’t worry about it.”
“Well, now I’m worrying.”
Hutch pointed over Starsky’s shoulder before he could continue the line of questioning. “I think that guy’s trying to get your attention.”
Starsky glanced behind him. “Oh, Uncle Ishmael! Come on, Hutch, you have to meet Ish. He’s the fun uncle.”
With a put-upon sigh that fooled neither himself nor Starsky, Hutch let himself be dragged off to another introduction to another newly gained family member.
Nine Down, Rabbit Cage (Necklace)
A/N: *idly whistles Dolly Parton’s Tie Our Love In A Double Knot*
I sometimes forget that the moon and star necklace isn’t canonically for Starsky, but also if you say it isn’t canonically for Starsky you’re wrong and delusional, so.
“Well, that’s just unfair. Where am I supposed to find a necklace with a rabbit cage on it?”
Hutch stared over the top of his book for a moment, ignoring Starsky draped against his side fiddling with his collar, and attempted to figure that one out. It was even more incomprehensible than the usual things Starsky produced unprompted. “What?” he eventually asked, giving up.
Starsky’s fingers moved over to Hutch’s new necklace, slightly lifting the star and moon charms before dropping them back onto Hutch’s chest and running his thumb over the star. “I don’t know when we got married, but you got me round your neck. Seems like I should reciprocate, y’know.”
“Wedding jewellery’s generally worn on the hand,” Hutch replied automatically, still trying to grind through the original comment. “Necklace’d be more like you widowed me. And I’d rather not associate it with that, thanks.” Star and moon to star-sky hadn’t been far from his mind when he’d bought it, and he’d half been waiting for Starsky to notice it.
Starsky pressed a hand against his shoulder soothingly and said, “I’m right here.”
“Rabbit cage-” he started, intending to form another question, then finally made the connection. “Oh, hutch.”
“You got there.”
“I swear, every day with you is like living inside a Times crossword.”
“You love it, Mr. Thesaurus.”
Hutch didn’t bother to deny that, just lowered his book and let his free hand fall onto Starsky’s thigh. “A hitch is a type of knot,” he offered.
A grin flashed onto Starsky’s face. “For my Minnesotan sea scout. I like it. You know how to tie one?”
Hutch scoffed. “‘Do I know how to tie one.’ Of course I can tie a hitch knot.”
Starsky’s grin shifted towards the kind of fond amusement that included a vague acknowledgement that if he didn’t love Hutch so much he’d be mildly irritated right now. Hutch didn’t really need the reminder to feel lucky about being loved by Starsky, but he supposed it couldn’t hurt. Starsky dipped his head anyway, lifting his own necklace over his head and holding it out to Hutch.
Hutch laid his book down beside him and took it, undoing the loose loop-and-button clasp at the back, and explained, “There’s a few different types of hitch knots. They’re usually used for attaching rope to objects.”
“Oh, that’s nice too. Knots, attachment. Symbolism.”
Hutch ducked his head, smiling down at his own lap, and grabbed Starsky’s hand. Starsky hummed amenably and turned his hand over in Hutch’s, intertwining their fingers. “No,” Hutch said, laughing quietly, and returned to the original grip, his hand sliding over the back of Starsky’s, broad fingers resting gently over Starsky’s smaller ones. “C’mon, we’re going to do an anchor hitch.”
“Okay,” Starsky said, and straightened slightly against Hutch.
“Okay. Take the end and make one loop,” Hutch said, gently guiding their joined hands. “Low down, just a circle, then another one. Yeah, now hold that there, and you take the end…” Still holding his hand over Starsky’s at the join of the loops, he used his left hand to pull the end around. “Through under the loops like that. Then back around… and through again, just a normal knot. And normally there’d be an anchor inside the loops here, and you’d be tightening it around that, but since we just have the knot itself here, we can tighten it here…” Folding his hand tighter over Starsky’s, they pulled just under the loops. “And here.” Further down, at the second half-hitch. “There you go.”
A neat anchor hitch sat an inch or two above the coins. Hutch hadn’t removed his hand from Starsky’s yet, and Starsky showed no signs of initiating that movement. Instead, he spread his thumb out to rub it over the outside of Hutch’s, then used that minor grip to pull them back up to the knot, curling their hands around it. Hutch’s sensory memories of tying these hitches over and over as a kid, holding them to precisely memorise the loops and curves, remained strong enough to tell him exactly the bumps and ridges Starsky would be feeling pressed into his hand, but all he could feel himself was warm skin, the faint scratch of Starsky’s hair under his palm, and the soft leather of the cord where his fingers had slipped in between Starsky’s.
Starsky tilted his head back against Hutch’s shoulder, looking up at him, and Hutch turned his own enough to look into deep ocean blue. The kind of ocean that would wash you away as soon as look at you, that housed things no-one but doomed sailors had yet discovered. Hutch raised his free hand to the nape of Starsky’s neck, lifting his head enough to lean down ever so slightly and kiss him, closing his eyes at the last moment and choosing to drown in soft lips and sandalwood scent instead.
When Hutch drew back, Starsky halted the movement with his own hand lifted to thread through the back of Hutch’s hair, keeping them inches apart. “I feel like we’re christening it,” he said, and Hutch laughed.
“I don’t think any priest would approve of this type of christening.”
Pulling Hutch down again, Starsky murmured, “Well, that’s their loss,” before halting any further discussion of the topic the best way Hutch knew how.
~
“Got it?” Dobey asked, looking sternly at his best and most troublesome detectives.
“Got it,” Hutch answered for both of them as they turned to go.
“Oh, and you two?”
Starsky stopped with his hand on the door, turning back to look at Dobey. Hutch did the same thing from just behind him, meaning Starsky was now looking directly over Hutch’s shoulder as Dobey waved at Starsky and continued, “If you’re gonna insist on wearing those necklaces on duty, will you at least make sure they’re not tangled?”
Starsky raised a hand, running it over the triple-looped knot resting just next to the hollow at the base of his throat. “Stylistic choice, Cap,” he said, and Hutch swayed back slightly, bumping shoulders with him.
Dobey sighed. “Of course it is. Go on, then.”
Hutch ran a hand down Starsky’s shoulder as they walked out, and Starsky grinned. Might be a stylistic choice that didn’t make sense to anyone else, but it was the best one he’d made in a long time.
You Don’t Like My Hair, You Don’t Like My Car, You Don’t Like My Friends You Met At The Bar (You Must Be Crazy For Me)
A/N: This one actually has plot, which is outrageous, scandalous. someone should sue me over it. For the privilege of having plot, it also gets a lyric title – from Melissa Etheridge’s Must Be Crazy For Me, a deeply ironic song whose lyrics I am using in an almost entirely unironic way. and re nicknames: in The Deadly Impostor, while pretending to be drunk John says a few different variations on malaproprised ‘Starsky and Hutch’ before telling Huggy he was the first one to call them that – given that none of the other versions he says are actually things people call them, I took that to mean he was the first one to call them by those particular (nick)names, and together. Technically, this is then challenged in The Las Vegas Strangler by Hutch’s high school friend calling him ‘Hutch’ rather than Ken, but for the purposes of this ficlet, in my status as God Of The Canon Usage, i decided to stick with the first one.
“Don’t you ever get tired of third-wheelin’ these two?” Len asked John jokingly, jerking a thumb at Starsky and Hutch. Starsky grinned and threw an arm around Hutch’s shoulders, ignoring Hutch’s glare in Len’s direction – it had taken him long enough to warm up to John, Starsky knew better than to expect him to be more than a decent level of polite to anyone else Starsky invited to the bar with them, even if Starsky had immediately taken a liking to Len and his easy humour.
John shrugged. “I mean, every cast has to have its couple, y’know. Its Lucy and Ricky, Samantha and Darrin, its…”
“Agents 86 and 99,” Starsky supplied helpfully. Not that they were technically a couple yet, but Get Smart had been on TV last night, and they were clearly going to be.
“Exactly,” John agreed. “And then it has its cool characters. Me, I’m your Uncle Arthur, you see. Your-”
“Hymie?” Starsky suggested.
“Ha ha. They’re the couple, but they’d be nothing without me.”
Without warning, Hutch shrugged Starsky’s arm off and slid out of the booth the four of them were jammed into. When Starsky made a questioning noise at his back, he paused long enough to shortly say, “Bathroom,” before walking off in that direction.
Before he could decide whether Hutch was just in a mood, or whether that had been odd enough to investigate, Huggy Bear appeared at the table holding a tray of drinks aloft. Starsky had spent a good few years before joining the Academy, and a while after, following Huggy to every new bar, pub, or restaurant somehow linked to some relative who wanted to employ his hustling abilities – partially because he was fond enough of Hug to take the chances to see him regular, and partially because it always promised an interesting variety of, well, interesting businesses. He’d been working at this one – a fairly cosy and only moderately seedy bar associated with a great-uncle of some description – for a while now, long enough for John and Hutch to have accepted it as their regular too.
Resting the tray on the edge of their table and unloading drinks with one hand, Huggy used the other to broadly gesture in the direction Hutch had fled. “Your boy looked like he was in a huff there,” he commented to Starsky, who hummed in response.
“Yeah.”
Huggy raised one thin eyebrow at him, but left it alone, nodding to John and Len and disappearing back into the kitchen.
Len was saying something about the Cone of Silence and a girl he’d met last week. John was laughing, so Starsky tuned in enough to laugh and nod and react in the right places as he stared towards the bathroom for a long minute. Then another, and another, and another. When close on ten minutes had passed without a sign of Hutch, Starsky abruptly stood, drawing questioning glances from John and Len. Grinning apologetically, he nodded in the direction of the bathroom, and left that to explain itself as he followed Hutch’s footsteps.
Starsky wasn’t sure what he’d been expecting when he pushed past the bathroom door, but the sight of Hutch’s back, hunched over the sinks with a white-knuckle grip on the marble edge, hadn’t been it. “Hutch? You okay?”
When there was no reply, or movement, he repeated, “Hutch!”
“You know,” Hutch said, back still turned, cold and blank enough that Starsky almost took a step back. But he was made of tougher stuff than that. “I’ve only ever been called that with your name. I’m Ken, or Hutchinson, till John starts calling us Starsky-and-Hutch. Always at the end of ‘Starsky and’.”
“You got a problem with that?” Starsky asked, the monotone making him honestly uncertain.
“I think I do,” Hutch said, and Starsky did flinch at that.
“Okay, Ken,” he replied, aware his own voice had dropped the mercury a fair few places. “You didn’t have to come tonight, you know. No one was forcing you outta your lonely little study nook.”
“The problem,” Hutch – Ken – continued, like Starsky hadn’t even spoken, “is that I like it.”
A couple minutes too late, Starsky remembered to scan the few stalls to their right. Confirming that unless someone was making a real effort to hide, they were alone, he responded, “Don’t see why that’s a problem.”
“No, you wouldn’t.”
What that was supposed to mean, Starsky didn’t even want to ask. Instead, he said, “Hutch, will you turn around?”
The bruising grip on the sink loosened with what looked like great reluctance, but Starsky wasn’t afforded a view of anything but green flannel and regulation-short blond hair. Giving up on the cautious, respectful approach, which clearly wasn’t getting him anywhere, Starsky crossed the distance between them in two long strides and leaned sideways over the sink, forcing Hutch’s fixed gaze onto his face. Hutch’s expression was as blank as his voice had been, except for the tension setting his jaw and shadowing his eyes.
“What is this about, huh? If it was Len and John being stupid, you know they were just – well, being stupid.”
“Were they?”
Starsky raised his eyebrows. “We’re not a sitcom married couple, so yeah, they were. John can’t make his head appear in serving dishes, although I’m sure he’s tried.”
“Maybe we’re not in a sitcom,” Hutch said, short and staticky, apparently ignoring Starsky’s joking. Which wasn’t a good sign. “But we’re always together, always in each other’s space. You’ve started finishing my sentences, predicting my moves before I make them. You followed me in here. Look where you’re standing, for christ’s sake.”
Starsky obediently looked down at himself – clean blue sneakers on mostly-clean white tile, jeans meeting butter-yellow shirt where his hip was propped against the side of the sink a couple inches from where Hutch’s hands still rested, open collar threatening to brush Hutch’s jacket as he leant towards him. “And the problem is?” he asked, with some kinda idea on that, unwilling to be the one to say it.
The silence following was long enough that Starsky considered taking the words out of Hutch’s mouth anyway. Eventually Hutch dropped his gaze to the sink, the first real sign of life from him since Starsky had entered. “The problem is-” he repeated quietly, “-is, I like it.” On the last words, his voice cracked, as if those three words were a weight it couldn’t hold up under.
Starsky stayed silent, unsure what to say and equally unsure that Hutch was done – not that he was done speaking, but that he was done communicating. He turned out to be right on that front, as Hutch dragged his gaze up again, treacherously slow, until he was looking not just at Starsky, as he had been before, but into his eyes. He looked almost pleading, except that implied some note of hope absent from the desperate anticipation on his face. He’d just run off a cliff and was in the moment of being suspended in the air, waiting for gravity to notice and drop him to the ground. Starsky had a suspicion he was gravity in this situation, except he had no intention of dropping Hutch. He brushed a hand softly over the back of Hutch’s, sending a minute tremor up Hutch’s arm, and told him, “Good. I like it too.”
He should have left it there – meant to leave it there, a quiet confession to something neither of them needed to pursue yet, not in this space. But Hutch’s lips parted slightly, disbelief dropping onto his face only to be washed away in the wave of something- something else, something more like awe and the feeling of things sliding into place, and Starsky was lurching across what little gap there was between them before he could stop himself.
It was a stupid, reckless move, the kind of thing that was liable to get them both kicked out of the Academy if anyone came in, even if they broke apart in time. But Starsky didn’t think of that until twenty seconds after his mouth was on Hutch’s, and with the way Hutch was opening under him, there was no way he was going to stop. He grabbed Hutch’s waist and stumbled them both backwards, turning them around, until Starsky’s back was against the door, then he pulled Hutch further in until he took the hint and pressed into Starsky, pinning him against the wood. Their combined weight was enough to keep anyone from getting through easy, and the way the blood had rushed outta his head and his jeans had started feeling about three sizes too small around the crotch as soon as all that long, hard muscle had hit him, well, call that a side benefit.
Hutch’s hands finally landed on him, and then couldn’t seem to settle in one place. They ran down his side, around his hips until Hutch realised he couldn’t go any further without leaving the door – and oh, that was a situation they were going to have to remedy some other time, because Starsky was struck with the sudden realisation that Hutch was strong enough to support his weight, and simultaneously with the urge to wrap his legs around Hutch’s waist and let himself be carried, preferably to bed. Or any other convenient vaguely horizontal surface. He’d never actually fucked – or been fucked by – another guy before, but he was a quick learner. And the rapidly increasing corduroy-clad pressure against his groin outstripped any other incentive he’d ever had to learn. Then Hutch’s hands moved back up, slipping under a gap in between shirt and jeans to run firm over bare skin, up to trace over what he could reach of Starsky’s ribs like he was trying to construct a map by touch, and Starsky forgot entirely about future plans in favour of current ones. Which involved giving as good as he got, going for the direct approach of pushing his hands under flannel and pulling Hutch’s t-shirt free so he could flatten his palms against smooth, warm muscle – he couldn’t reach for the chest he’d spent an indecent amount of training longing to chart the planes of, because it was still plastered against his own, but just running his hands down Hutch’s back without the layers of cloth between them and feeling him shudder and press even harder into Starsky was enough to send Starsky’s heartbeat thumping in his chest. He could hear it in his ears, feel it where their lips were joined, threatening to rob them both entirely of breath, feel the thud of it through his body.
Wait. No. That wasn’t just his pulse. With more self-control than he knew he possessed, Starsky broke the kiss, and almost lost said control all over again when Hutch responded with an open-mouthed gasping moan, following Starsky’s lips.
“Hu-” Starsky managed, then had to stop and suck in breath himself, steadying as much as filling his lungs. “Hutch,” he whispered, and Hutch made a noise low in the back of his throat that Starsky instantly vowed he was going to learn to reproduce at will. “Hutch,” he repeated, slightly stronger but just as quiet. “Someone’s at the door.”
Hutch blinked, and his gaze cleared as he processed what Starsky was saying. He swallowed hard, and in one deliberate movement lifted his hands off Starsky and stepped back.
The thumping at Starsky’s back of some poor guy just trying to get to the toilet stopped, and Starsky clamped down on the temptation to take that as his cue to pull Hutch back again. But someone else would be along soon enough, and what Starsky wanted to do could be far more effectively accomplished in their dorm room, so as Hutch tucked his t-shirt back in and rearranged his flannel, smoothing a hand over his hair, Starsky pulled his own shirt back into place and tried to think about baseball stats and his mother. He was only partially successful, because Hutch’s eyes were still dark and his lips reddened, but he straightened off the door anyway.
A moment later, before either of them could say anything, the door pushed open and Starsky jumped back to avoid getting hit by it. The lanky, brightly dressed figure who walked through glanced between them, raised one eyebrow, and commented blandly, “The Bear was told the door to the men’s bathroom was jammed and to come fix it.”
“No jamming here, Hug!” Starsky said cheerfully.
“Are you sure he wasn’t trying to pull it open the wrong way?” Hutch suggested, voice almost steady.
Huggy nodded slowly. “Maybe so, maybe so. I’ll go tell him to try pushing. I’ve heard that works sometimes.”
Starsky bit the inside of his lip, and Huggy nodded again before opening the door and walking back out.
“We should, uh, go,” Starsky said. “Before John and Len think we’ve been abducted.”
“Going sounds good,” Hutch agreed huskily.
With one hand on the door handle, Starsky couldn’t resist asking, “What was the problem you had with me being in your space again?”
“No problems. Ignore me. My space is your space.”
Starsky nodded. “Sounds like marriage vows. Maybe John wasn’t that far off.”
“If you don’t take me home soon, Starsky, this isn’t going to stay family-friendly.”
Starsky lifted one shoulder in a half-shrug and opened the door. “I always thought Bewitched could do with some more spice. She can do magic, and you’re telling me that never made it into the bedroom?”
“Starsky…”
Shooting a grin over his shoulder, Starsky replied decisively, “Hutch,” and delighted in watching the man in question blink and skip over a breath. That was a power he was definitely going to use for nefarious purposes. Endora would be proud, he was sure.
‘Shoot’-‘Out’
A/N: Rewatched Shootout last night and (after being driven out of my mind all over again by the way Starsky doesn’t just reach but grabs for Hutch every time he comes near) I realised they are in fact not at Starsky’s place in the tag scene, as I had first assumed, but at Hutch’s, just filmed from a weird angle. which a) places a high probability on Starsky having been staying there while he was recovering and b) makes it even more obvious that Hutch did not in fact leave with the others at the end because. that’s his place. where would he have gone.
“…that nobody loves ya?” Starsky finished.
“Idiot,” said an affectionate voice behind him.
Starsky spun around and flung one arm out wide, since the other was still slinged- slung? against his side. “Hutch, baby, ya came back!”
“I didn’t leave,” Hutch countered contrarily, then deigned to explain, “Huggy’s taking everyone over to the bar. Invited us as long as we promised not to bring the jokes or the outfits.”
“And?”
“And I declined,” Hutch said, pointedly shutting the door behind him.
“You said no, huh?” Starsky swaggered slowly towards him, said swagger only slightly impeded by the lack of one arm, and smirked. “And why would you do a thing like that?”
“Because,” Hutch replied, reaching out to grasp Starsky’s lapels with both hands, which only added an extra layer of disappointment to his next words. “You’re still recovering, and you need to rest.” He leaned in enough to brush a light kiss across his lips, then used his grip on Starsky’s shirt to spin him around and push him gently towards the couch. And then not follow him. Which was beyond all realms of acceptability.
Starsky followed the movement anyway, for the purposes of slumping dramatically onto the couch and complaining, “I’m tired of resting. And I’m tired of ‘resting’.” Raised eyebrows and a conspicuous glance below his partner’s belt line made that meaning clear enough, he figured.
“Which is why I’m here to make sure you don’t go pulling all your stitches out,” Hutch said.
“Got something else you could be pulling out.”
“If your devious plan here is to drive me out of my mind with passion until I let you contravene recovery procedures, you’re going to need to do better than terrible innuendo.”
Starsky dropped his head onto the back of the couch, straining his eyes upward to watch Hutch move around behind him picking up things to put in the bin. “But I’m bo-oored. You try doing everything with one arm, it’s no fun.”
Hutch shook his head, walking into the kitchen, which at least let Starsky roll his head to the side to track him. “You’re whining like a kid at the doctor’s office,” he said.
“Yeah, and I want my lollipop.”
Hutch groaned, half resigned despair and half the noise he always made when he wanted to cover up a laugh. “I cannot believe your come-on lines ever actually work. On anyone.”
“Hey, they worked on you alright.”
“No, you’re just lucky I stuck with you long enough to see past them.”
Starsky rolled his head slightly back and forth, considering that. “Was that sappy? I’m pretty sure that was sappy, Hutchster.”
Hutch didn’t answer the accusation, which was a clear admission of guilt in this case. Instead, he raised his eyebrows and countered, “‘Hutchster’?”
“I’m on painkillers,” Starsky excused himself. “Can’t be blamed for my actions.”
“You’re on ibuprofen. If that’s affecting your sanity, I might need to take you back to the hospital.”
“Only if you’re going to play doctor. Actually, if you’re going to play nurse. Sexy nurse. In one of those tiny skirts.”
“Anyone ever tell you you’ve got a one-track mind? Anyway, I don’t have the legs for it.”
“Well, that’s just not true,” Starsky objected.
“The one-track mind?”
“No, the legs.”
“At least you’re not denying the clear truth.”
“So you admit you could pull off a miniskirt?”
“If you were the one wearing it.”
“Oh-ho!” Starsky crowed. “Beaten at my own game. I see how it is.”
Hutch was half-turned away from Starsky, inspecting the contents of the fridge, but Starsky could tell he was grinning anyway, that stupid goofy one he got when he thought he’d won something inconsequential. “Starsky, why is there sour cream in my fridge?” he said before Starsky could do anything to challenge the assumption.
“No idea,” Starsky said innocently.
“Given that I didn’t put it there, and you’re the only other person currently staying here – are you suggesting pixies did my shopping for me?”
“Pixies with good taste,” Starsky offered. “They left taco shells in the cupboard as well.”
Hutch’s head appeared over the fridge door to glare at Starsky. “I am not making us tacos for dinner.”
“Ah, c’mon, you’ve had kitchen control for a week now. There’s only so much soy sprout stirfry a guy can take.”
Hutch shut the fridge and walked back over as he said, “I know you’ve been having hamburgers and hot dogs for lunch every day I’m at work, you realise. I can taste it on your mouth, like snuck cigarettes.”
He immediately softened the words by leaning over the back of the couch and brushing Starsky’s curls back off his forehead to kiss the skin underneath. Before he could pull his hand away, Starsky grabbed it and made use of the leverage of the situation to pull him further down. Which Hutch couldn’t complain about, because it was just blatant misuse of wrestling moves Hutch had taught him in the first place. Unfortunately, with only one hand in play he didn’t quite have enough strength to pull Hutch all the way over the back of the couch and into his lap, and he wasn’t entirely certain that would have worked anyway, but he did get him close enough to lean up and capture his lips in a searing kiss.
When he pulled back, Hutch wagged a finger and reminded him sternly, “Recovering.”
Starsky took some comfort in the flushed pink tinge left high on his cheeks anyway. At least he wasn’t the only one suffering here, with Hutch retaining enough sense of justice and fairness not to be picking up girls without Starsky. Not that he’d have had the time, between being back on duty and needlessly worrying over Starsky. “There’s lettuce too,” Starsky told him, feeling generous now. “And avocado.”
“What?”
Starsky tilted his head towards the kitchen.
“Oh, right. Will you eat the lettuce?”
“If it’s on tacos, I will.”
“It’s like feeding a toddler, I swear. ‘Six tricks to get your kid to eat his peas!’”
Smirking, Starsky replied, “I know some tricks you could use to make me be good.”
“Aaaand we’re back on the one track.”
“Only track to be on, baby!”
Getting Back On The Bear
A/N: I think this is the only one you could technically read as gen. if for some reason you wanted to do that.
“You know the last time we tried to do this we almost got killed by Satanists, right?”
Hutch sighed long-sufferingly. “I remember, Starsk.”
“I’m just saying,” Starsky said, pausing to loudly rip open one of the candy bars he’d demanded they stop at ‘the last bastion of civilization,’ better known as the gas station a few miles back, to pick up. “We don’t have a great track record with the whole vacation thing. Or any kinda track record that doesn’t involve murder. Going back into the woods seems like tempting fate.”
“It’s going to be fine.”
“And why’d we have to do this anyway? There’s plenty of beaches we could have gone to. All over the place. Warm sand, cute girls in bikinis, cute lifeguards with their shirts off…”
“Swimming?”
“That too. What is the point of living in California if you go in the opposite direction of the beaches for your vacation time, huh?”
“I won that coin toss fair and square,” Hutch reminded him. “Anyway, you enjoyed fishing last time.”
“Yeah, but you can fish on the coast too. Where there aren’t as many insects worming their way under your clothes and biting you. Or, may I remind you, bears, who think your clothes are just a tasty garnish when they bite you.”
“I’ll protect you from the bears, baby.”
“Excuse me, I seem to remember you running in the opposite direction just as fast as me.”
“Well, escape is the logical first step. If it really came down to it, though, I’d protect you.”
Starsky briefly squinted at him, then returned his attention to the candy bar that had been getting more use as a dramatic gesture enhancer than as a food source. “You know, worst part is that I believe you. You really would throw yourself between me and a rampaging bear, and the only outcome of that would be the bear getting a nice tasty 2-for-the-price-of-1 meal.”
Hutch didn’t bother to point out that if it really came down to it, Starsky would just as likely be trying to throw himself between Hutch and the bear at the same time. Which would probably be a confusing enough sight that the bear might just give up in bafflement. Instead, he said, “Anyway, you can’t let one little incident scare you off forever. Got to get back on the horse.”
“Would the horse be the Satanists or the bears in this metaphor?”
“The horse would be the woods. I wouldn’t recommend getting on the Satanists or the bears.”
“Not willing to take the nature fetish that far, huh?”
Hutch resisted the urge to roll his eyes, which took a non-trivial amount of effort, primarily because that was almost certainly the reaction Starsky wanted. “It’s a healthy appreciation of the wonders that the world contains when it’s untouched by human hands. Not a fetish.”
“Right, so you want to go out and touch it with your human hands.”
As usual, Starsky had aimed a sharp arrow directly at the contradiction in Hutch’s internal logic. Luckily, Hutch didn’t have to respond to this one, because Starsky kept talking.
“Me, I’m happy with wonders that have been touched all over. By lotsa human hands.”
“Well, that makes sense,” Hutch said drily. “You’re a wonder that’s been touched all over by a lot of human hands.”
“Calling me easy or just a whore?”
“Just a whore.”
“You know what, blintz, I’m not even gonna take offence. I’m choosing to focus on the part where you said I was a wonder.”
“Mmm, you constantly make me wonder. Wonder what the hell you’re doing, usually.”
“This isn’t the way to make me cheerful about this whole trip,” Starsky told Hutch, more cheerfully than anything else he’d said since getting in the car.
“I don’t have to make you cheerful about it now,” Hutch replied. “I got you past the point where you could walk home almost two hours ago, and I’ve got the car keys.”
Starsky puffed out his cheeks and leant back, stretching his long legs out in front of him. “I could always steal them off of you tonight and drive back.”
“You wouldn’t abandon me out here,” Hutch said confidently.
“No, of course not. I’d come back in a few days, pick you up.”
“You’d miss me in an hour.”
“You’d miss me in an hour.”
“But I’d get to enjoy the peaceful quiet of nature,” Hutch countered, not failing to notice that neither of them had actually denied the allegation. “No, you’re the one who’s trapped out here with me.”
“See, that’s how you make me cheerful.”
Hutch glanced away from the empty road and over at him for a moment, trying to figure out whether that had been sarcastic or not. It hadn’t sounded sarcastic, but it had sounded like it should be. Starsky was no help in answering that problem, stuffing the now empty candy bar wrapper into his jeans and looking out at the trees moving past them.
“Next time, though, I’m trapping you on a beach with me,” Starsky said. “No-one’s tried to kill us on a beach yet. Exactly. That Playboy house was only beach-adjacent, and we weren’t actually on vacation anyway. Unlike the horror movie location with a personal grudge against us that you’re so fond of.”
“It does not have a personal grudge-” Hutch broke off and peered out the windshield. “Starsk, that guy looks like he needs help.”
Starsky followed his gaze to the man standing by the side of the road up ahead, leaning back against a tree and weakly holding one arm out. “You might wanna ask him how he feels about the Lord of Darkness before you stop.”
“Don’t be silly,” Hutch said, slowing the car and stopping just past the man. Not even attempting to roll down the window on this car – it had a habit of getting stuck a quarter inch down and then refusing to move either way – he opened the door and leant out. “Hey, pal, do you need some help? A lift somewhere?”
“I’m sorry,” the man muttered, pulling his arm back and cradling it against his chest.
“Sorry for wh-”
“Get outta the car!” demanded the man stepping out from behind the tree, holding the kind of gun that made anything he said terribly persuasive. The clearly actually injured and unwilling bait was flanked by another man, with an equally persuasive revolver, appearing on his other side.
Hutch looked at Starsky. Starsky looked at Hutch. With a sigh, Hutch got out of the car, ignoring the told-you-so glare Starsky was directing at his shoulderblades.
Make A Bad One Good / Make A Wrong One Right
A/N: So after multiple days of about the unsappiest my fic writing gets, we are heading into the DEPTHS of the maple forest today. this is just tooth-rotting, heart-attack-inducing, goes-excellently-with-pancakes kinda sappiness.
As I bemoaned to Faor last time I went completely insane over S&H and the power of love trope (that’s a lie, I’ve gone completely insane over it at least twice between then and now), the fact that their anthem wasn’t released until six years after the show ended is criminial. which is to say, title is from The Power Of Love by Huey Lewis & The News.
Starsky needlessly messed with a corner of the blanket draped over Hutch, who was lying on the couch in front of where Starsky was sitting on the coffee table, Cupid and Psyche statue having been confined to a dresser in favour of the water, thermometer, and painkillers laid out next to Starsky. Judith and Doctor Meredith had released Hutch from the hospital yesterday, on the strict understanding that he was under Starsky’s 24/7 watch and would be brought straight back at the slightest downturn. They didn’t have to worry about that – Starsky had spent enough time in the last couple of weeks scared to death of losing Hutch to this that he was perfectly willing to carry him all the way to the hospital at the first sign of any change that wasn’t fully positive.
Hutch, still bone-crushingly fatigued, had closed his eyes momentarily as Starsky tried to tuck in an already tucked-in blanket, but he opened them again when Starsky dropped it, and looked over at him. The bright blue of his eyes was clouded and muted, an achingly drained version of Starsky’s favourite colour in the universe. One he’d already seen far too recently when Matwick had drugged him in the asylum.
Starsky sighed. “You ever wonder if we’re bad for each other?”
“What?” Hutch’s eyes widened. He struggled to sit up, ignoring the cautioning hand Starsky placed on his shoulder. “No!”
“Hutch, it’s okay,” Starsky said, attempting to short-circuit a reaction way more vehement than he’d been expecting. “I don’t really mean it, just…”
“Just what, huh? You’re the best thing that ever happened to me. I’ve- I’ve known bad for me, and you’re not it.”
That pause made Starsky once again want to punch the living daylights out of Hutch’s parents and Vanessa and anyone else who might’ve put it there, then wrap Hutch in a blanket and bar the door until he’d wiped them all out of Hutch’s memory. Given that the former wasn’t really a possibility, and Hutch was already wrapped in a blanket, he instead reiterated, “I didn’t mean it like that. Just that we seem to end up in a lotta situations like- like this,” -he waved at Hutch, pale and gaunt- “and I wonder if we would if the other weren’t around.”
Hutch shook his head, then shut his eyes and took a steadying breath. “I don’t know. But it- it-”
“Hutch, you don’t gotta-”
Hutch lifted his hand from the couch, just slightly, but it was enough to make Starsky stop and wait for whatever it was he needed to say.
“I-” He took another deep breath, and started again, each word slow and deliberate. “If I was given the choice between living a- a completely fine life where I’d never met you, and one where I had to walk through Hell six days a week just so I could be with you on the seventh, I- it wouldn’t even be a choice.”
“Hutch…” Starsky murmured, and reached for his hand, struck almost mute by the rippling sincerity in his voice. Hutch took his hand, folded still-weak fingers around Starsky’s, and continued, “So I don’t know if I would’ve gotten sick if you weren’t around, but it’s a small- it’s no price to pay at all. And I do know I wouldn’t have gotten through it without you.”
After a moment’s pause, still processing those words, Starsky said softly, “Not that I believe in Hell, but I wouldn’t let you stay in it six of seven days. I’d come get you out.”
“I know you would.” The words were quiet as Hutch collapsed back against the arm of the couch, as if his short speech had drained the last of his energy reserves. He was still actively holding Starsky’s hand, though, so Starsky let it pass without more than a worried look. Hutch took a slow, deep breath and asked, “What brought that on?”
Starsky shook his head. “I don’t know. Nothing, really. I just don’t like seeing you like this.”
“So you started thinking about leaving?”
“No!” Starsky exclaimed, before he’d processed that Hutch’s tone was half joking and half dismissive, with almost no trace of the slightly bitter fear that tinged Hutch’s rare serious comments about things like this. “God, no,” he repeated anyway. “No, I was just… musing.”
“Good.” Hutch looked like he was about to say something else, but he cut himself off, closing his eyes and dropping Starsky’s hand to rub his own chest. The corners of his mouth tugged tight with pain, and Starsky leant forward.
“Let me help.”
Without opening his eyes, Hutch lifted his hand from his chest, and Starsky replaced it, rubbing small circles over the worn cotton of one of their shared t-shirts, acquired far too long ago for either of them to remember who it had originally belonged to. Slowly, Hutch’s face relaxed, and his breathing eased. When his jaw unclenched, losing its tightly held rigidity, Starsky leant over and kissed his chest, just above where Starsky’s hand rested. Looking back up, Starsky saw Hutch watching him softly. “That’s it. You did it,” he said, echoing his words from the hospital room.
“Well, Ma could always kiss it better when I was hurt. Said it was the power of love.”
“I don’t think we need kisses to make that work for us.”
“That’s true,” Starsky acknowledged. “But isn’t it more fun this way?”
Hutch smiled wryly at him. “Maybe.” As he blinked, his face contracted slightly, a slight frown dropping into place before he cleared it.
“What is it?” Starsky asked, and he shook his head slightly.
“Just the headache.”
Deliberately, Starsky raised both hands to Hutch’s face, cupping his head with thumbs brushing across his jawline, and pulled him closer, pressing his lips gently against Hutch’s forehead.
When he pulled back, Hutch scanned his face with a soft smile resting on the edges of his lips, then said, “My hands hurt too.”
Starsky took both Hutch’s hands into his own, raising first one then the other and peppering light kisses over the backs, like an overenthusiastic Victorian gentleman greeting his lady. “And?” he asked when he was done, resisting the urge to shift from Victorian gentleman to Gomez Addams and just keep going up Hutch’s arms.
Hutch gently removed one of his hands and pointed to his left shoulder, pressed against the back of the couch. Starsky scooted to the edge of the table and rested a steadying hand against Hutch’s waist, slipping underneath the t-shirt just for the warm, firm, familiar contact. Leaning all the way over, he tugged the loose collar of the t-shirt to the side enough to press a chain of open-mouthed kisses down from the crook of his neck to the curve of his shoulder, laving gently across the skin and tasting salt and Hutch-ness, untaintable by the slightly sour edge of sickness.
As he reached the end of where the cotton would stretch to bare, Hutch shivered slightly. Starsky rested his cheek against the skin he’d just made love to and looked up at Hutch’s face. A slight crease had appeared between his eyes as he stared at Starsky with the kind of blackout intensity and devotion that always made Starsky go weak at the knees. Starsky lifted his hand and rubbed his thumb over the tiny lines, making Hutch’s eyes flutter closed.
Without opening them, Hutch, almost hesitantly, raised the arm that wasn’t curled underneath Starsky and gently tapped his own mouth.
Obediently, Starsky ran his fingers down Hutch’s nose to trace, feather-light, across his lips, waiting for Hutch’s breath to stutter and his lips to part under Starsky’s fingers on a plead of, “Starsk…” before he straightened and caught his own name in Hutch’s mouth, slipping his hand around to catch in silken hair and sealing the word as a needless, long-known promise between them.
Pink And Fluffy
“You ever used those cuffs for, uh, extracurricular activities?”
Hutch glanced down at the metal cuffs he hadn’t yet bothered to remove from his belt, and raised his eyebrows. “Not these ones. Too hard, too easy to hurt your wrists.”
‘Your’ was already edging a little close to saying things they probably shouldn’t be saying out loud in the precinct, no matter how many of the other inhabitants regularly put concerted effort into turning a blind eye. (A lotta them liked the both of them enough to not see some things, or at least respected them enough to doubt seeing them, and the ones that didn’t- well, Starsky had seen a couple of them come out of Dobey’s office the day after some too-close-to-threatening comment, and they did not look like life was goin’ their way).
But Starsky was bored, and couldn’t help himself, so he kept talking as Hutch pulled the report he’d been working on out of the typewriter. “I mean, it ain’t like they’re not designed for safety, at least relative. I played around with them enough in the Academy, innocent-like, you know that. Well, and not-innocent-like. Bit cold at first, maybe, but they’re okay.”
He craned his neck back slightly to address that last part quiet enough to Hutch, who’d walked around to stand behind him. Which meant he was entirely unprepared when Hutch leant over his other shoulder and calmly whispered, breath ghosting over his skin,
“Not when I have you twisting against them by the second hour, begging me to touch you.”
Starsky’s sharp intake of breath was almost hidden under the dull thwap of Hutch dropping the report onto the desk in front of him. That was an image and a goddamn half.
“Sign this,” Hutch said normally, like he hadn’t just left Starsky with a problem that was gonna keep him trapped under the desk for the foreseeable future.
“What?”
“Case report. Sign it.”
“Oh,” Starsky muttered, and picked up the pen. If his signature was even messier than usual, Dobey wasn’t gonna guess at the actual reason.
~
The downside of finishing cases – apart from having to write reports, which Hutch was usually happy enough to have palmed off on him – was that you were then left in the kind of inter-case state that was liable to get you assigned to the world’s most boring stakeouts. The downside of that, tonight, was that they’d already eaten the burgers they’d picked up on the way to this generic mobster’s house, the mobster in question was almost certainly curled up nice and comfy cosy in his bed with no intentions of moving till morning, and it usually took Hutch at least three or four hours before he got bored enough to admit that nothing was going to happen and allow even mild fooling around. Also, when Hutch had settled himself in to relax ten minutes ago, he’d opened his collar enough to just bare the slowly fading bruise above his collarbone every time he shifted, which was afflicting Starsky with a very explicit – in multiple senses – memory of the circumstance of its creation.
“So, handcuffs,” he said, the next time Hutch looked from the windshield to the window and Starsky was hit with a damn audio-visual surround sound hallucination of a naked Hutch arching into him, digging fingers into Starsky’s hips, and moaning like he’d been trained into it by high-class phone sex operators and low-class whores. He didn’t think he’d entirely meant to, but he had to say something.
“Hm?”
Starsky shook himself and attempted to come up with an actual train of thought to follow that up with. “Yesterday. You said you’d never used those specific handcuffs – ‘less you were just lying to wind me up – but you didn’t say if you’d ever used any.”
Hutch glanced over at Starsky, looking amused. “What’s the obsession with handcuffs? You’d think you’d get enough of them on the job.”
“It’s not an obsession,” Starsky defended. “I’m curious. And bored.” And hot, but he was choosing to keep that to himself right now. “Talk to me.”
Hutch shrugged slightly, which just made the hickey shift provocatively under the dim glare of the streetlights. Starsky tore his gaze away as Hutch said, “Yeah, sure. I had a girlfriend in the Academy who was really into playing cops and robbers – Amy, you remember Amy – and she had her own set. They were pink and fluffy, but that didn’t seem to detract from it for her. Threw me off a bit.”
Starsky did remember Amy, a short, curvy blonde girl that he was entirely unsurprised to learn this about. She’d always been a bit too into Hutch being a cadet, not that it had been any of his business back then.
“I’ve never initiated it, though,” Hutch continued.
“So saying that to me in the middle of the precinct was just for kicks, huh?”
“Essentially,” Hutch agreed, smirking.
“Bastard,” Starsky replied, not bothering to pretend he wasn’t grinning as he said it.
“Not that I won’t follow through on it, if you want. You’d look pretty, stretched out on my sheets and messed up like that, flushed and panting and wrecked. Waiting for me to let you finish, to let you touch me.” His voice had dropped into a deliberately low rumble. He turned further towards Starsky, and his shirt gaped obscenely as he continued, “I know you’ve been staring at me since we got in the car, babe.” He laid a hand on Starsky’s thigh, rubbing slightly up and down. “You just have to ask, and I’ll happily make you beg for it.”
Starsky hurriedly shut his eyes, clenching his hands into fists and pressing them against the car seat to stop himself from reaching for Hutch – as much because he was following the unspoken rule of this as because he didn’t think he’d be able to stop himself from going further if he did. “Bastard,” he repeated, a lot shakier.
“All you have to do is ask,” Hutch repeated, then patted Starsky’s thigh once, hard, and leant back. “But not now,” he said briskly. “We’ve got a job to do here.”
Starsky kept his eyes closed as he exhaled slowly, willing either his dick to lose interest or his jeans to magically grow a few sizes. Either one seemed as unlikely as the other, if this was what Hutch was gonna be like tonight.
~
The stakeout, predictably, produced nothing except many hours’ worth of sexual frustration and an extremely strong urge to pin Hutch, who continued to randomly come out with strings of words straight out of the kind of porn oversexed teenage Starsky had only vaguely dreamt of existing, against the seat and have his way with him. An urge mostly resisted only because what he really wanted off the back of everything Hutch was saying was to have him pin Starsky against the seat. Which he was very determinedly not doing, not even touching Starsky again until they’d handed over to the next poor suckers on the stakeout shift. Hutch didn’t even comment on Starsky driving them both straight to Starsky’s place, which Starsky got a lot less surprised by when Hutch was on him the moment the door shut behind them, and he realised he’d gotten himself almost as desperate with all his talking as he’d gotten Starsky. Or, at least, that’s what Starsky assumed until he panted, in between messy kisses, “Starsk, you have-” kiss- “no idea what-” kiss- “you look like-” kiss- “so turned on by me. By me.” Hard kiss, against Starsky’s gasped response of, “You,” and that was about as much talking as they did for the rest of the night.
~
Which also meant Starsky entirely forgot about the handcuffs question that night. And the next day. And the morning after that, when they finally caught a proper, if small-time, case. In fact, he forgot about it right up until the moment early that afternoon that they finally chased down one of the mid-level dealers in their case, when Hutch pinned him against the wall of the dark little alley he’d decided was an ideal escape location and patted his own belt, coming up empty. He held a hand out to Starsky, who handed his own cuffs over automatically, only to have his fingers brush Hutch’s as he took them and Hutch turn his head to Starsky and, with a mischievous smirk, wink at him. Starsky briefly lost his breath, immediately thrown back into a series of images painstakingly constructed by Hutch, and barely heard it as Hutch Mirandized the dealer and loaded him into the Torino. He didn’t entirely break out of it until Hutch wrapped a hand around his wrist and said, jokingly, “Hey, you gonna drive? Or should I cuff you to the wheel? It might freak our guy out if he saw you stretching out for me in the front seat, though. Guess that’d be a new type of interrogation tactic.”
Starsky recovered enough from the new image added to the collection to laugh slightly and say, “Probably the most fun type of interrogation. You should write a manual,” as he opened the driver side door and slid in.
~
It wasn’t until that evening, past time most everyone else had gone home, that they cleared up all the loose ends left by everything that guy had scrambled to tell them upon being offered a deal. When they’d handed him over to the booking agent, Hutch had been the one to take the cuffs back and keep them, meaning Starsky had to put up with them glinting in his peripheral vision all day. Finally, they handed the last arrest of the day over from the interrogation room to Minnie, who’d graciously agreed to book him immediately before knocking off. As her footsteps faded down the hallway, Hutch collapsed back against the wall of the interrogation room and sighed. “Long day, huh-”
He was cut off by Starsky, with a well-placed hand over his waist, pulling him off the wall and directly into a kiss. He did have the presence of mind to push the door closed behind him at the same time, then curled his fingers through the cuffs on Hutch’s belt and used that to pull him closer in.
Hutch laughed against Starsky’s mouth. “I was serious a couple days ago, Starsk,” he said, not bothering to pull back, so that Starsky could feel the words as much as hear them. “I’m not going to use these cuffs on you. I don’t want to hurt you.”
“Then you better have some fluffy pink ones tucked away in a drawer somewhere I don’t know about, Hutchinson. You can’t say things like that to someone and expect him to just move on.”
Hutch did pull back slightly at that, watching Starsky with a smug twinkle in those baby blues. “It really did get to you, huh, baby?”
“Depends if being ‘got to’ involves spending all afternoon wondering how much action your headboard could sustain, picturing you kneeling over me like some kinda angel of mercy, and hearing you say ‘twisting against them by the second hour’ over and over again.”
Hutch looked entirely too pleased with himself, not that Starsky was in any position to complain, as he hummed and said, “What was it I said in the car?”
It took a minute for Starsky to connect those dots, but when he did, he dropped his forehead to Hutch’s shoulder for a moment before he looked back up and said clearly, “Hutch, this is me asking.”
Hutch raised his eyebrows. “Asking for what?”
Starsky wet his lips and briefly considered being a brat for no reason but to get Hutch to slip into sternness, then decided against it. “Asking you to cuff me.”
“And?”
“And-” Starsky dug back through his memories of that night, making sure he had the exact phrase Hutch had used. “And to make me beg for it.”
Nodding, Hutch ran a hand down Starsky’s back, then leant forward and rested a gentle kiss on the soft skin just under Starsky’s jawline. “Good,” he murmured. “Of course I will.”
Starsky gripped Hutch’s lower arm, repressing a shiver, and was just about to kiss Hutch again when a noise came from behind him. Hutch straightened up first, as Starsky processed that it was the sound of the door opening. He turned around, doing a mental check and realising that unless the heat he was feeling was visible as a blush, he probably actually looked entirely respectable. Luckily, since Dobey was the one revealed to be standing behind the door.
“Starsky, Hutchinson,” he said, sounding as tired as Hutch had before Starsky jumped on him. “There you are. I have to talk to you.”
Starsky and Hutch cast despairing looks at each other. “Cap, it’s the end of the day,” Starsky protested. “Can’t it wait until tomorrow?”
“No. And I wouldn’t count on any of us getting home until dawn tonight. The DA just rang. Your small case isn’t looking so small anymore.”
Starsky sighed deeply. Hutch gave his shoulder a comforting pat, then said, “Hey, Captain. Long as this gets resolved, is it alright if I check out early tomorrow?”
Dobey raised a questioning eyebrow, and Hutch shot a loaded glance at Starsky, lips quirking, as he explained, “There’s something pink and fluffy I gotta pick up.”
Stages of Recovery: ‘Making Eggs’
A/N: Pretzels is the same ‘verse scrambled eggs if you know you know. Post-Sweet Revenge.
“Starsky, what are you doing?”
Starsky spun around – inasmuch as he could ‘spin’, which still wasn’t terribly much – and raised his spatula menacingly at the rapidly approaching panicked blond cannonball. “Kenneth Hutchinson, I swear to god, if you try to tell me I can’t lift a spatula, I’m going to call Ma and she’s going to tell you you’re being paranoid.”
Hutch had the grace to look marginally chastised and slow his step slightly. He still ended up right next to Starsky as he turned back to the pan, pushing the eggs around before they solidified any further. He still said, “Starsk, I would’ve made breakfast as soon as I got back. You didn’t have to-”
“You got the presents for the kids?” Starsky interrupted.
“Yeah. I’ve got the cookbooks that Kiko wanted, and Pete’s bat is with Huggy’s friend to be personalised.”
“Good,” Starsky said. “Then sit down.”
Hutch hesitated, one arm raised slightly away from his side like he’d been about to put it around Starsky and now wasn’t sure if it would be rejected. “You okay, Starsk? Can I help?”
Starsky sighed. “I’m fine. And no, I’m not mad at you, and I’m not trying to sit you down and have a Serious Talk with you. Relax.”
“Okay, but…”
Starsky turned the heat off under the eggs, and turned enough to grasp both Hutch’s arms just above the elbow. “I’m alright,” he told him, shaking slightly to emphasise his point. “I’m not going to fall over from making us breakfast, and darlin’, I love you, but if you don’t stop treating me like I’m gonna be sent right back into the hospital bed by a light breeze, I’m going to explode. Now, will you get yourself a plate?”
When Starsky dropped Hutch’s arms, he silently held his hands up in surrender, then turned to the cupboard, pulling out plates for both of them. He kept his silence all the way through Starsky distributing the pile of toast (sourdough, in deference to Hutch’s sensibilities, but not full of grains and seeds and whatever else, because Starsky had a strict line in the sand about what one could lawfully do to bread) between their plates and piling the scrambled eggs onto them; kept it until they’d both sat down at Hutch’s little kitchen table. Starsky knew he’d winced as he lowered himself into the seat, one hand braced against the table and the barely-recovering muscles along his side protesting the movement with a sharp twinge overlaying the constant dull ache. Normally, Hutch would’ve been reaching for him, but after Starsky’s little outburst he just watched him with a worried look, and waited until he was sitting to say, “I’m sorry. I just- I’d rather help too much than too little.”
“I know,” Starsky said, cautiously reaching for his fork. When his body didn’t have anything to say about that, he started shovelling eggs onto toast with a vengeance. “You gotta trust me to ask when I need it. I don’t have your middle-class midwestern Protestantism in my veins, babe, I’ve got pure Brooklyn Jew. I ain’t gonna suffer in silence.” Taking a huge bite, he grinned at Hutch, and was rewarded with an affectionate eye-roll.
“I’m still adjusting, I guess,” Hutch said. “It was so long where you couldn’t do anything.”
Swallowing, Starsky pointed out, “We’re both adjusting. We’re all adjusting, actually, did you see Huggy’s face when I walked into the Pits the other week? He came this close to dropping all those glasses.”
“Mm,” Hutch hummed around his conservative forkful of eggs, even though he was the one who’d been out early-morning Christmas shopping and should have been the hungrier one. Then again, Starsky’s body was still in the process of essentially building himself a new torso, and that required fuel. “In his defence, it was the first time he’d seen you out of the wheelchair and he wasn’t exactly expecting us to turn up in the middle of the lunch rush.”
“Oh, no shame on him, I shocked myself getting all the way to the booth without falling on you.”
“See?” Hutch said, spreading the hand not holding a fork. “And now you’re cooking without me here. I don’t know when to stop holding you.”
“Never stop holding me, blintz.”
“You- you know what I mean,” Hutch replied, clearly trying to ignore the faint pink tinge spread across his cheeks. Starsky leant across, resting his elbows on the table to ease the stretch, and brushed his fingers over it, grinning when that only made it redden further.
“I know what you mean,” he confirmed. “But you’re cute when you blush.”
“You’re awful,” Hutch muttered.
“And you’re cute,” Starsky repeated, sitting back. “We’ll figure it out.”
“Yeah, just in time for the next shift in recovery to happen.”
“Probably,” Starsky agreed. “But then we’ll be one step closer to it. And eventually, I’ll be stable, and we’ll have all the time in the world to figure it out.” He knew better than to say ‘fully recovered’ – he was never going to get to the same as he had been, not from these injuries – but stable, and figuring it out together, and able to make Hutch breakfast, was good enough for him.
“All the time in the world, huh?” Hutch asked softly, pausing with toast lifted halfway to his mouth.
“Yup. Rest of our lives. Long lives, now, Hutchinson. You’re going to bring this conversation up when we’re old and doddering and I can’t get up from the couch without leaning on you again, and I’m going to ask you what the fuck you’re talking about, because I’ve completely forgotten it.” Starsky punctuated that statement by decisively wiping the last of his toast across his plate and biting into it.
“I can’t wait,” Hutch replied, a little too sincere to be deadpan, and laid his fork across his plate with a slight clinking noise. Standing up, he collected both his and Starsky’s plates and took them to the sink, then came back and held a hand out to Starsky before hesitating and looking down at it. “Should I…?”
Starsky answered by taking his hand and using it to lever himself out of the chair before he verbally answered, “Yeah, you should. See? Figuring it out.”
“Okay,” Hutch agreed, and pulled Starsky into a hug. Leaning into it, Starsky felt the contracted muscles running down his spine loosen slightly as he let himself once again be supported by Hutch’s strength. “Figuring it out,” Hutch repeated, and Starsky dropped a kiss onto his shoulder and sighed.
Doing Things That Lovers Always Do
A/N: This was supposed to be about compersion and endearments, and instead it ended up being about queerness and hiding. Which I guess is a traceable link, but it wasn’t what I was expecting.
Title is from 1927 Kansas City by David Soul (not actually by him, but his might be the best known and was the one i was listening to), which is also the song referenced at the end.
“Yeah, but if Dobey had really wanted us to follow IA’s advice, he wouldn’t have let us walk out of there with the case file.”
“What, you think he just reamed us out after for fun?” Hutch asked sarcastically, taking his beer from Anita with a nod.
“Well, yeah,” Starsky said. “It’s one of his favourite hobbies, how I reckon it. Why else would he spend so much time doing it? Thanks, Anita.”
Anita ran an assessing glance up and down as much of Starsky was visible over the bar. “At least one of you’s learnt manners.”
Hutch made a noise of protest as Starsky unleashed his best Charming Grin (trademark, copyright) on her and leant further over the bar. “For you, sweetheart, I’d learn anything you wanted me to.”
“Yeah, well, right now you gotta learn to get your ass into the kitchen,” she replied, the briskness of her words belied by the way she was leaning on the counter and grinning back at Starsky. “Huggy wants you to taste something. Says not to bother with your worser half here, he’s got no palate for good clean comfort food.”
Starsky shook his head sadly. “It’s true. Last time I was sick, he tried to feed me lettuce and yoghurt, like those aren’t designed to make a sick patient sicker.”
“Horrific,” Anita agreed, nodding.
“Maybe I should call you to play nurse next time.”
The usual amused pleasure Hutch took in watching Starsky turn on his full charm to flirt with other people was being seriously dented here by how much he was being insulted in the process. He nudged Starsky in the side. “Are you gonna go talk to Huggy, or are you just gonna leave him to languish with his newest heart-attack-inducing dish while you flirt with his waitress?”
“Aw, don’t worry, baby blue,” Starsky said, grin dialling down from laser-directed ten-watt beam to something more shared and slightly more honest as he turned it on Hutch and patted his thigh. “You’re still my favourite source of heart attacks. Lettuce or no lettuce.”
Hutch rolled his eyes. “Yeah, I know, but that doesn’t do anything to help Huggy.”
“Alright, I’m going,” Starsky said, holding his hands up in surrender and standing up.
“You start saying thank you, I might flirt with you too,” Anita told Hutch before sweeping to the end of the bar and moving back into the main area. As Starsky reached the other end, a girl sitting with her friend on a barstool there looked up and said something to him as he passed. Starsky came to a stop to reply, then laughed and winked broadly at her, looking like he was fully capable of settling in for an entire conversation.
Hutch clicked his tongue despairingly. “Hey, lover boy!” he called after Starsky’s back.
Starsky half-turned back to Hutch, which he’d expected. What he hadn’t expected was the sudden blinding grin on his face, lighting up dark eyes with what looked for all the world like sheer unadulterated joy.
“What?” Hutch asked, thoroughly distracted from whatever it was he’d been going to say.
Starsky shook his head slightly, curls bouncing. “Tell you later,” he called, patted the bar next to the girls, and slipped off to bother Huggy.
~
Hutch looked over at Starsky, his profile backlit by streetlights through the window of the Torino. “Is it later now?” he asked.
“Hmm?”
“At the Pits. You said you were going to ‘tell me later,’ but then you came back bickering with Huggy about the relative merits of butter and lard.” Hutch pulled a mild disgusted face, even though Starsky was watching the road and not looking at him.
“Oh! The girls I was talking to, they were a couple. She was asking me about you. They knew Huggy, and… And then you called me that. It was very opportunious, that’s all.”
“Just opportune,” Hutch said. “That was it?” He got the background happiness of meeting another queer couple – probably more than Starsky himself, who half the time seemed to regard the entire affair with a laissez-faire obliviousness that had led to Hutch having to hastily censor him more than once – and he understood Starsky’s joy in coincidence, but the way he’d lit up had seemed like more than either of those.
Starsky shrugged without moving his hands from the wheel. “Well, and…”
When he left that hanging, Hutch prompted, “And what?”
“Tryna find the words. It was- I liked that they saw that we were together, and I liked you calling me that – ‘lover’ – and that you did it across the bar, where everyone could hear, even if it wasn’t actually saying it like that. It felt…”
“Normal,” Hutch supplied, seeing the whole exchange from Starsky’s perspective with the new information. Maybe he had to revise his view of the laissez-faireness.
“I guess. Free, for a minute.”
Hutch hummed, and stared out the window. He’d just been thinking, but after a few moments Starsky moved to fill the silence anyway, saying, “I want to buy you flowers.” Which was a little out of the blue, but Hutch could trace enough lines of connection not to be totally surprised by it.
“I’m not going to turn them down,” he said.
“Yeah, I know, I could, but I want to walk into a flower shop and tell them I’m buying them for my partner and he likes the flowers with double-layers of petals, like marigolds, and to make sure there’s lots of greenery in the bouquet, because otherwise he looks at it like the flowers are lonely. Y’know?”
Hutch paused for a moment before objecting, without heat, “I don’t think the flowers are lonely.”
Starsky laughed quietly. “Wasn’t the point, blintz.”
“…Technically, you could. It’s not illegal.”
“Yeah, and never mind the risk of me being booted out of the shop, what are the risks of it somehow getting back to higher-ups in the department? As you’ve reminded me, multiple times.”
“I’m sorry,” Hutch offered, laying a hand on Starsky’s right arm. Starsky glanced down at it, then dropped that hand from the wheel, letting Hutch slide his grip down until they were holding hands on the seat between them. “Sometimes it seems like you… forget. Or don’t take it seriously. I should have known.”
Starsky squeezed his hand. “No, it’s okay. Sometimes I do get carried away.” He shrugged again. “I just wish I didn’t have to worry about that.”
Hutch blinked, then said tentatively, “You know, Huggy could probably give us the names of places that wouldn’t care. That might be more our scene than The Green Parrot.”
Starsky glanced quickly over at him, smiling. “Not that I’d ever say I minded dancing with girls, but it would be nice to dance with you without having to worry about keeping enough of a ratio going for appearances. At least, as long as you manage not to step on my feet.”
Hutch huffed out an offended laugh. “And here I was going to offer to walk you home after and tell you you were pretty, if you wanted.”
Starsky frowned for a moment, then clicked his tongue, lighting up. “That’s your song.”
“Mm. We’re not in Kansas City, but in forty years I’d still like you to bring you flowers in the morning too.”
Starsky’s expression softened, and he glanced down slightly before he said, “Yeah. Let’s ask Huggy for those names.”
“Okay,” Hutch agreed. “In the meantime, there’s flowers in my greenhouse.”
“Well, as long as you’re there too, I guess that’s a pretty good compromise.”
~
(When Starsky’s in unusually early the next morning, and a glass vase full of marigolds and greenery appears on Hutch’s side of the desk before Hutch is in, no-one thinks to question it. Those cut flowers get more care than half the plants in Hutch’s greenhouse.)
Reindeer Grudge Match
The sun glinted obnoxiously off the active traffic hazard Starsky had lining the dash of the Torino; loud red-and-green tinsel with little foil reindeer hanging off it. Hutch was sure the one closest to the window was giving him a dirty look.
“Aw, c’mon, Hutch,” Starsky was saying as Hutch attempted not to make it too obvious that he was engaged in a staring match with a piece of foil. “There must be at least one thing you like about this time of year. Come on, hit me, quick, without thinking about it.”
“Do I have to, Starsky?” Hutch grumbled. “Can’t you just let me be a grinch in peace?”
“Nope. I haven’t you heard you say ‘euphoric sentimentalism’ even once this year. Either you need to get into the spirit, or you need to start bitching at me about it so I have something to respond to. If you keep being silent I’m gonna start thinking something’s actually wrong with you other than just being a grump.”
“Nothing’s wrong with me. I just don’t like being told I have to be happy because of an arbitrary date.” Starsky turned a corner with his usual verve, and the grudge-bearing reindeer fluttered with the motion. When it came to a rest again, it was looking out the window. Hutch definitely did not feel absurdly smug about winning that round.
“Hey, out of the two of us, aren’t you supposed to be the one invested in Little Baby Jesus?”
Hutch shot one last look at the neutralised reindeer and leant back into the seat. “It isn’t even the actual date he was born. That was probably sometime in the middle of the year.”
“Huh. How do they know that?”
Hutch glanced over at Starsky, who of course looked genuinely interested. “Scripture says the shepherds were working the fields, which obviously they wouldn’t be doing in the middle of winter. And the census was being taken, which also wouldn’t be happening in the middle of winter. There’s a bunch of calculations you can do about John’s birth – John the Apostle – that place Jesus’s probably in August or September, but it definitely wasn’t December.”
Starsky darted a curious look at him. “How do you know this?”
Rubbing his hands down his thighs, Hutch replied, “I figured out the shepherd thing in church one Christmas when I was a kid, and started trying to work out the rest of it. The minister was just happy I was finally taking an interest.”
“Aww,” Starsky said, grinning, and reached one hand out to pat Hutch on the cheek. Hutch ducked it a second too late in a mostly subconscious compromise between maintaining his image of grumpiness and letting Starsky touch him. The brush of his fingers left a lingering ghost in its wake, the same way Starsky’s touches always did. “Baby detective Hutch.”
Hutch jerked his head dismissively. “It gave me something to do that wasn’t just walking around the house waiting for one of my parents to snap under the holiday pressure.”
“So,” said Starsky, in the tone of voice that meant he was firmly redirecting from talk of Hutch’s parents. “One thing you like about Christmas, here, now.”
When Hutch stayed silent, Starsky added, “I’ll tell you one thing I don’t like.”
Hutch sighed. “At least in California, you can step outside without freezing your limbs off on Christmas day, I suppose.”
“Ha. That’s funny.”
“Why, what is it you dislike?”
Starsky waved a hand at the window as he replied, “No snow. I miss it. There’s nothing quite like waking up on Christmas morning, looking out the window and seeing those big, pretty flakes falling down. And then hitting the pavement and immediately turning into slush, of course, but…” He shrugged.
“It didn’t turn into slush in Minnesota,” Hutch said. “Not at first, anyway. First it piled up, and shut down services, and trapped you in the house and stopped you from going anywhere.”
“That wasn’t really about Christmas, though,” Starsky said, in another smart redirection. “It was kinda about the opposite of Christmas. There must be one thing you can think of that you actually like about Christmas.”
The real answer, of course, was ‘watching Starsky get excited about Christmas,’ but he wasn’t giving that one under pain of death right now, when they were in the middle of an act that would be sharply broken by Hutch being that kind of genuine. “It was about Christmas,” he objected instead. “You want me to rephrase it? I like that it’s still warm on Christmas, and I can spend it outside.”
“Well, that was better, I guess. You’re wrong, but. Next year, I’m gonna take you home for Christmas, and I’ll convince you about the snow.”
Oh, to hell with the act. “Yeah. I’d like that.”
Starsky blinked in surprise. “You would?”
“Yeah,” Hutch repeated. “It’s a different kind of snow, right? As long as it doesn’t get me stuck in a house with all your relatives, I can’t think of anything that’s more likely to redeem sub-zero temperatures for me.”
Starsky tilted his head slightly, hesitating for a moment before he asked, “More likely than New York, or than me taking you home for Christmas, or than me convincing you?”
“You can be very persuasive when you set your mind to it,” Hutch replied, circumventing an actual answer to that, which would have required more self-psychoanalysis and more honesty than was appropriate at 10:30 on a Thursday morning. “I don’t know how you’re going to ensure it snows when we’re there, though.”
“Are you kidding me? Of course it will,” Starsky said, with the supremely assured certainty of a child who had not yet learnt the world didn’t revolve around them. It always seemed to work for the children, too. “I’m in New York at Christmas for the first time in years and I’ve brought you specifically to see the snow? It wouldn’t dare not.”
“I don’t think that’s how weather patterns work,” Hutch pointed out mildly. “But I’ll take your word for it.”
“Mm,” Starsky hummed. “You’ll see.”
There was a moment’s silence, and Hutch was just about to scan the tinsel for more reindeer enemies when Starsky said, “That still didn’t answer the original, though. One thing you like about Christmas. Just one.”
“Oh, good god,” Hutch groaned.
“C’mon. Just one. You can do it.”
“You take me to New York, and I’ll tell you then.”
“High price to pay for one piece of information.”
“Yeah, well,” Hutch said, smiling sideways at Starsky’s lively, happy, Christmas-cheer-infused profile. “This piece of info’s worth it.”
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